Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1216
Jane's current death obsession. Interview with the Vampire is a great show. A rundown of night one of the Merge 35 festival.
Hello everyone what is up. Just sitting here with my daughter talking about death and looking at the Wikipedia page for weird ways to die. She is very into it. She said she likes talking about death because it is interesting and everyone dies. She learned about assassination today (ahem) and a woman in india who was trampled by an elephant, and then the elephant came to her funeral and trampled on her corpse. And a man in Italy who died by being buried under a bunch of cheese. Just the other day a woman in Italy died the way I most fear of dying, by not being able to hang long enough from the edge of a cliff like they do in the movies. Jesus.
Hey wow political posts do numbers, my Substack (boo) analytics tell me I had a 50% boost in readership while talking about politics. Of course, more than once Substack analytics have just broken, and for a few days just given you totally made up numbers, so who knows. I will not interpret this as a mandate to write about politics all the time. You ar ewelcome.
Before I move on to today’s main topic I would like to give a plug for the AMC adaptation of Interview With the Vampire which continues to grow on you and may be some of the finest vampire content ever made. What is the best vampire content ever made, anyway? Let the Right One In? I feel like I am missing something obvious. Probably still The Hunger. Rewatched it recently. Holds up. Beautiful film. Anyway, Interview With The Vampire is not a reboot, exactly, more of a sequel, deals with all of that in very clever ways. It rides the line of so many different emotions, the dialogue is great, it does not tread in trite lines and platitudes, it makes me think, and when there are times I think “c’mon man why you doing that,” they are — get this — answered later! It’s amazing. Characters do not suddenly act completely unlike themselves. The show has consistancy. Nuance. Moving dialogue. Recommend.
Last night I went to Night 1 of the Merge Records 35th anniversary festival at Cat’s Cradle in nearby Carrboro. Merge is the legendary record label and Cat’s Cradle is the legendary live venue and I basically live where I do because when we agreed to move to the Triangle I decided I needed to be close to Cats Cradle, and I have Merge Records shirts from before I even moved here. Excellent move.
I wrote thoughts down in my little digital notebook. There is something about concerts. My fourth space: the time alone I have to pay attention to a thing and not use my phone. Walks. Movies. Driving. Daddy school. Showers. Concerts. They are pretty few and far between. And, boy, whenever I am in one of these spots, my mind just races. This is good — I come up with all my best ideas in these times — but also terrible because I am not using my phone and I cannot write them down. Thirty-five years into this honing of the craft of getting fleeting thoughts to paper and I am still a novice. It is a life-long pursuit.
So here I am at the show, just stars and galaxies of thoughts racing through my mind while watching Mary Timony, and I am freaking out because I’m gonna forget them all. Halfway into the set I give up, get out my note app, and start writing things down. Maybe I need to bring a pen and one of those little notebooks. I mean, it’s an affectation but also I am not browsing facebook during this show, people, I am present, I am trying to capture the moment. It’s a thing. it is weird.
So, anyway, here are my edited and slightly expanded thoughts from Mary Timony’s set, mainly. By the time Red Kross came on I found my friends and I did not take as many notes:
Mary Timony
There’s a video going around that I saw on a friend’s Facebook page about how the game is up for musicians and they’re all going to lose their job because of AI and I really do need to do an essay about it, my comments on that friend’s FB page felt half-assed and self-absorbed and I did not mean it that way because social media sucks for conversation but anyway imagine AI making the music of Mary Timony. It is just so weird. AI could never pull it off. Mary Timony is not going to lose her job because of AI.
I have been watching Mary Timony live for 33 years now that is fucking insane.
Memories of veggie, the BU vegetarian dining facility at the GSU, where I would go, even though I wasn’t a vegetarian, because back then I thought it was, like, a cult you had to be born into or something and I did not know enough about it. But I would go to veggie to see Mary. But I was shy so I never talked to her.
Wow it never occurred to me till tonight that if I had gone to college for more than five semesters I could have kept going to Veggie and hanging out
withnear Mary. Shit. I am 52 and this is the first moment I have ever had a feeling of regret for graduating early. I could have joined Helium or something! Oh wait, I could not play guitar yet.I love stoner rock these days and Mary kind of makes stoner rock these days and I like her stoner rock but a) not as much as other stoner rock and b) not near as much as her witchy phase or her indie rock phase.
Oh wait these more rocking songs later in the set I like a lot more.
Man I own every album this woman has ever been on and I know every one of these songs, but aside from being 100% confident none of them are Helium songs, I could not even tell you what decade they were written in. I wonder if any of the trainspotters up front will put this set up on Setlist.fm by tomorrow (reader, they have not though two nights ago she played two songs from Magic City and now suddenly I am not so sure).
It is so awesome Mary made a career of this really makes me question my own career choices kinda feels like I made a terrible mistake dedicating my life to advertising my god what have I done.
Why do I keep setting impossible goals for myself and mostly hitting them only to find it brings no additional happiness in life.
Except my life is better for those goals and I am happier for them. If I think about where my life was before I started goal-setting, well, I am happy for the journey.
Except its still hollow
Except I love my family
WTF Mary
Maybe I don’t love janglign indie rock without a discernible POV as much as I used to.
After ten years of living in this town I still know more people from Boston at this Festival than I do from Chapel Hill. That is weird. But also fine? maybe? Probably?
Mary is still an Enigma after all these years there is no one like her.
She is much perkier in her banter, though. Though there is still almost no banter and she really does not say much. But she says the little she does say with more enthusiasm.
I can’t believe there is a drum solo in this set.
I do not approve of this Merge 35 photo booth.
Red Kross
Jesus it has been 33 years since I saw this band. Is that true? Let’s look it up. yes. October of 1990, opening for Sonic Youth on the Goo tour.
What was that movie they were in, the one where they play their brilliant stoner selves and have to go to a Guitar Center and that is a terrible bummer (later a friend of Susanne’s told me it was Spirit of ‘76 and I am 80% confident this is true). I loved that movie, I watched it all the time but I have not thought about it in 30 years I need to see that movie again right now.
Only one member of this band still has the Red Kross hair but they all look great given it has been 30 years. I think the reason some musicians still look fit and trim is because touring and gigging constantly is work.
[Former Boston band] Quickfix was very Red Kross.
[Related:] Never thought about how Superchinky Red Kross are. Or vice versa. Suddenly, them being on Merge makes sense [Merge records is owned and run by Mac of Superchunk]
I’ve missed festival-length sets. Ten songs, max, boom, 45 mins tops and your done. Freakin love it.
They do not seem to have the stoner humor of yesteryear but, rather, the stoner humor of today. This is impressive.
I just wanna feel something different every once in a while and this band just made me do it so kudos to them.
“We are getting uglier every day” is a great chorus for aging rockers.
Oh shit I forgot they had a hit [they started playing “Annie’s Gone.”]
I want to put on a goth-of-a-certain-era festival that would include Big Hat, Love Spirals Downwards, Johanna’s House of Glamour, Area and/or The Moon Seven Times, Mistle Thrush (of course), etc. I wonder how many people would be in to this.
Does Susanne [my friend standing next to me at this point] think it is weird I keep pulling out my phone and writing things down I wonder?
Oh shit they had two hits [I think. They played a very familiar song about witches but it odes not seem to be in their Spotify top hits]
There are so many lanyards at the show I wonder how many of us actually paid. So many lanyards.
This is a great big rock set finish. It would be fun to do an entire set of a single, long, big rock ending.
Mountain goats
John is solo but he said “Hi we’re them Mountain Goats” so I consider this a Mountain Goats set not a John solo set even though the band is not here.
Also isn’t Jon on tour with someone else right now? I would check his Instagram but it is bonkers. But I feel like I read that somewhere god that guy is in so many bands.
John just did a spoken intro for ten minutes to “Golden Boy Peanuts” that is not something you see every day.
Megan got me into the Mountain Goats. Oh man what if he plays “International Small Arms Trafficking Blues” or “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” I will lose it, I will bawl right here in this club.
Susanne had to go eat before all the restaurants closed.
I could leave right now and avoid the risk of them playing a Megan song.
Also I have to get up and feed Jane in the morning.
Oh god I am going to need four days of cool band t-shirts this is an insane amount of pressure this crowd’s t-shirt game is on fire.
And then I went home.
The end.
I have an allergist appointment now, so I bid you farewell until tomorrow, friend.
Here is a picture of Jane from bed this morning. Sometimes you wanna leave the golden glow in your photos and not white balance.
Did some To Investigate (dear style manuals: titles of playlist should be italiciaed get on it) and here is a playlist of the 18 songs that had been lingering at the top of the playlist for months. I have loved them all and listened to them all dozens of times, some are on other playlists, but this is their end with my current zeitgeist. And now their watch has ended.
There are two chickens outside my window.
lots of things to say but the most important is: i love Jane’s glasses!