Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good! The sun is shining. It’s still pretty cold out, but the shining sun means that I will be able to go out and do some work on the compost bins today. That is very exciting. I’ve put this task off too long. Hopefully I can get them done in one day.
Some programming notes:
It’s cedille, not cedée. Whoops. Thank you, Keith et al, for that correction. Jane’s pun was still really good though.
I don’t think I’ll be making much use of the footnotes feature. This is very surprising since I love footnotes, but it just didn’t feel write. They didn’t translate well to Facebook, and footnotes just aren’t as satisfying on the web as they are on the page. And I don’t really like the way the work on Substack, though of course this is mostly an email so it’s not like they could do some cool modal pop-up like Wikipedia or the Kindle does. So, for now, we’ll keep em to a minimum.
Spent way too much of yesterday at this dreary 1970’s brown clinic in a waiting room. First truly unpleasant medical experience of this whole affair. We got there like 30 minutes early because it’s still not 100% clear yet how long it’ll take us to get places, especially the first time we go and I don’t know the lay of the land with the handicap parking and whatnot. Then there’s this whole thing happening with every fucking clinic right now where they’ll text you a ton and do their best to get you to pre-register, which is great because who likes behind barraged with a million sheets of paper when you get to a clinic. But then they still insist on you getting there 15 minutes early for your first appointment. For no reason as it turns out. So, we were 30 minutes early, they were 30 minutes late, so we waited in an hour. The building was old and dreary. There was no handicap accessible bathroom in the lobby. That was kind of fun because the seats were socially distanced. Some lobbies realize not everyone comes alone and have 2 seats close to each other, some don’t, and when that’s the case, mom and I basically have to shout across the lobby at each other for me to hear her. It’s usually embarrassing but this time I felt they needed to hear about how lame it was their clinic didn’t have an accessible bathroom.
I will say, though, that the clinic was playing “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves, so that was nice.
So an hour’s wait, and then another hour’s wait for me while my mom got her test done. I didn’t go in for the test again. But then at the end the doctor was mumbling to my mom “okay so remember everything I told you,” and my mom is like “yeah yeah,” so I had to go back and be, like, “please tell me everything you told her she probably didn’t hear it and may not remember it,” so… maybe I should go into tests as well as appointments. Will consider that.
I’d been burned enough by last week to know better than to have actual optimism I could get something else done yesterday, so while the latter half of the day was a wash, I was mentally prepared and didn’t mind too much. I did get my podcast done in the morning, though, before heading to the clinic. I wanted to get that off the decks so I could dedicate the two weekend days to gardening. So. Here’s this episode of the podcast.
Topics include: Day 378, Mom, Spring, Kitties, Weight, Jane, Apple ATT, Need an in-house counsel, Gardening, compost bins, writing on Substack, studio reorg, Wesley Willis doc, Trouble Every Day, Jesus and Mary Chain, Fleetwood Mac, Bee Gees matrix runout issues on Discogs, Nine Inch Nails, Wolfgang Press, Skinny Puppy, Tron Legacy Soundtrack, C Cat Trance, Top Gun Soundtrack. Tindersticks, Arms of Someone New, Bedazzled Records Kindred Spirits comp, Drekka, Wedding Present, Dawes, Quick Fix, Underground Lovers, Alex Mass, Black Wing, Amulets, Planning for Burial, History, Marmaleek, Grouplove, Kalbells, Saåada Bonaire, WandaVision, Umbrella Academy, Nomadland Minari, Depeche Mode Spirits of the Forest, I Care A Lot, Alan Garganus, A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Then Emma did the kind thing and handled Jane bedtime (always a bit of a rigmarole deciding who does it after a night with Grammy), leaving me with four free hours and, thus, the ability to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
What is there to say. It had two Nick Cave songs in it and some Icelandic singing. Okay, you know what? I will say it. It is manifestly, much better than the Joss Whedon version. Is it a fair comparison? No. Is it a good movie… eh… not really. I mean, yeah, you know what? If you liked, like, 300 and dark, moody comic book movies, yeah, it’s a decent movie now. But it’s not like you should go jump into it if you don’t care or know about comic book movies. The plot is much more coherent. There are several completely absurd plot problems with the original cut, and those are mostly sorted out. There is still a surprising amount of humanity and humor in it - Whedon did not add all of that. There fewer shots of Gal Godot’s ass - Whedon did seem to add most of those. The movie is heavily stylized, and far, far too reliant on CGI, but at least in this cut that artistic choice is consistent and unified, thus making it feel more like a coherent whole than a mess all around. Someone said I will take a single auteur’s turd over a work done by a committee any day and I’m perhaps not quite so adamant about that, my sentiments certainly lay with that sentiment. In my review to Emma last night, I said the new cut took the film from a D- to a D, but I am thinking today I’s more like a D- to a C. It’s not good, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was before.
The problem, Emma points out, is that if you ever expected to get that much plot into a single movie, you were setting yourself up to fail from the outset. It is not a film it’s a miniseries. It was never going to make sense without all that plot, and it was going to take four hours to get it all in. Almost all of the new footage is plot. They extend each of the major action/fight scenes a couple minutes and add one (kinda ridiculous) underwater fight scene, but of the 120 minutes of extra footage I’d say only maybe 20 are more action or fighting.
Then Emma came down and we watched the first episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which… was fine? I mean it definitely looked more to my tastes than Zack Snyder’s Justice League in the sense that isn’t basically an animated film. And there were some mildly interesting bits. I kinda like the 70’s/80’s cinema international intrigue angle, though it’s pretty diluted (committees). I don’t care about a lot of the subplots. Not enough actually happened. It won’t be a cultural phenomenon in the way WandaVision was, but I’ll stick with it.
And two nights ago we watched Minari, which, my god. What a beautiful, perfect film. Watching that the night after Nomadland was such a breath of fresh air. Stories and characters, not plot. Beautiful, moving, and not a single explosion anywhere. No one gets shot. Just lovely. Emma and I were both crying during the “climax” of Minari, if you can call it that. That film makes you feel alive.
I have been thinking that films are the answer to my current problems, that maybe I just need a different narrative format, pull back the mix a bit. Emma’s been obliging since the Oscar noms came out, and there’s a lot we have to see. So it’s working for now. Nomadland and Minari both really restored my faith in narrative fiction told through the moving image.
I think I’ve adjusted to my mother’s presence enough to tentatively start asking her some clarifying questions about various aspects of my past that I still think about. It’s a hit or miss affair, but even the misses are slightly instructive. Like I remember vividly this long saga my mother went through in my youth, when she was a Vice Principal. She had received an anonymous tip that this one kid was a stoner and there was pot in his locker. They went and searched the locker (this was in tandem to a long legal drama about whether schools could search lockers and I remember it being a whole thing in her job and her being not especially into it, but that was the way the court rulings shook out? Details are murky there I’m gonna have to ask her about that too.) There was some pot sprinkled in the bottom of the locker. They strongly suspected this was a setup. My mother said something pretty wise yesterday: in middle school, if a kid is caught with booze or drugs, it’s his. In high school, if a kid is caught with booze or drugs, especially if another kid snitched on him, at least half the time it was a setup. So in this case they knew it was a setup, but they couldn’t figure out how it was done. But then they eventually figured out that someone must have slipped the pot into the locker by sliding it into the vents at the top of the locker. I was very impressed by this whole story. Really made me feel like my mom was like an Agatha Christie character or something. It’s rattling around in my subconscious and I think about it often. So on a lark I asked my mom about it yesterday.
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, that sort of thing happened all the time. I don’t remember that specific one, but that sounds about right.”
Even that answer is sort of interesting. It was probably one episode of many. She probably just got home from work and told her husband about her day. I heard it, it sounded kind of extraordinary and exciting to me, it was imprinted in my brain, but for her it was just another day of work.
Two people can spend eighteen years together in a house and decades later they’ll have a constellation of memories: some overlap and are exactly the same. Some conflict. Some are completely different. You were together in that time, but you were also two ships in the night.
Here’s a picture of Socks at the podium because this doesn’t have enough imagery today:
Just got an email from my friend Taylor Swift saying that the evermore vinyl is delayed until late May. It’s okay, Taylor. I love you anyway. Congrats on your Grammy.
Oh crap I just remembered I was supposed to make an emergency run to the grocery store this morning before Jane gets up. Okay I’m gonna go do that. Here’s a mix.
Bye!
Ahhh
I actually screenshotted that last paragraph about constellation of memories. This is what I’m experiencing with erik and my parents right now as we have so much quiet time together to talk. Beautifully described, thank you Rick 💕