Good morning. Hello. How are you? #351
Q&A, newsletters, pandemic exhaustion, Scandinavian benefits, video game music, Discogs, my amazing teenage hair, aging rockers and the prodigious memory of sandwich artists.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. I got up VERY EARLY to write this before my mom and I run off at 8:30 or so to her next doctor’s appointment. I am dedicated to my craft. It’s too early to report on sunrise conditions but it looks like it’s another cloudy day, BUT it is supposed to get 78 degrees today, so… exciting.
The big news is that this hospital run this morning is the first time in, like, a year I’m going to go out without putting my hair in a pony tail or man bun, using a barrette to pin back my bangs, and covering the whole thing up with a hat. I am going to go out with actual long hair today. Or try to. Wish me luck.
Programming note: Got some good questions, thank you! Don’t have time today but the Q&A edition is coming. If you have questions, ask em!
Second programming note: I think I’m gonna start using the subtitle section up there for some topics, so I can more easily find past posts here, so I can link back to them when referencing things. And as a further sop to the skimmers. I am sympathetic to the skimmers, these posts are ridiculous. I would rather someone subscribed and skimmed than didn’t subscribe at all, even though these things really are literary masterpieces, you’re missing out. It’s actually kind of fun trying to take these rambling missives and pretending there’s an actual list of topics. A little mini-art form in and of itself.
Speaking of newsletters, I am increasingly into them. For a long time I didn’t like them because they were going to clutter up my inbox. I think I’m okay with that now. Most of my news consumption is coming from newsletters these days. I mean, I still check the Times, Wapo, FT, Bloomberg, WSJ, Politico and some other stuff mostly every day, but. Newsletters are crisp, bulleted, have the info you need, and you can skim em quick. Okay, well, not mine. But I’m not a news source here. They do deep dives into entire topics that mainstream news barely touches. They’re like a nice, detailed B2B publication about any topic. They remind me of when I used to subscribe to Siggraph when I ran a pre-press shop with an actual imagesetter. At this point, I am actively looking for more. I think I got finance down, the music industry, and maybe politics, but there are other news subjects where I think I’d like more newsletters. Just subscribed to a recycling newsletter for good measure.
Feeling pretty sick of this pandemic this week. It’s a paradox because I can’t say exactly what I want to change day-to-day. Oh wait yes I can. I want to go back to eating out like three nights a week. I am so sick of cleaning the kitchen. I am so sick of cleaning the kitchen. Wednesday night I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner and I said to my mother and wife: I am so sick of cleaning the kitchen. But what are they supposed to do about it? My wife is sick of doing laundry three days a week and cleaning litterboxes and arguing about naps and my mother is sick of being sick. The thing about the kitchen, though: it is directly tied to the pandemic. We used to eat out so much more, there was so much less kitchen cleaning. I actually liked it back then. Most of the time, even now, I still don’t mind it, but some days. JESUS. So much sink cleaning.
Also a year-plus into the pandemic and we still haven’t recognized that even on those rare days where the dishwasher is half-full, just fucking run it, because the next day, no matter what, there will be too many dishes to fit in it. Just run the thing every day.
Emma misses Target. I don’t miss too much retail, but i do wish we could go check out this awesome new store on Franklin Street that a friend-of-friends started.
I was chatting on Wednesday with an old friend who lives in Scandinavia and she was telling me that the Pandemic’s been kind of nice for her. She’s been out of work for 50+ weeks, but the country has been, of course, paying unemployment the whole time, and she’s a bit of a homebody and it gave her a chance to get a home business off the ground and she’s really enjoying it and, like all things pandemic-related, it reminded me how much of this bullshit is self-inflicted by our own government. Eh, whatever. Nothing new here. But talking to her really drove it home.
Emma gave me a hug yesterday from one of our friends, because the friend found the 8-CD set of video game music I had ripped for her years ago. I had forgotten about that. And I was suddenly panicked that I had sold it on Discogs and realized I didn’t want to ever sell that amazing box, Legend of Game Music Premium Box, 8-CD set plus a single DVD that I bought in an awesome basement comic store in Shibuya. The thing is amazing and I never want to let it go. One disc for each Japanese game publisher. It’s beautiful.
I do love my Discogs store, though. It occurred to me yesterday that the Discogs store is an extension of my plastic recycling interest. It’s been a little more than five years since I’ve started. I’ve sold about 1,500 CDs, and have about 750 left to sell. I didn’t want to dump them off with some app like Decluttr where it wasn’t clear where they were going. I wanted each and every CD to find a good home. I really want that shelving back - I am going to do amazing things with that shelving once I get it back. It’s going to take forever. But it’s fun. Every few days, someone orders something, I rip it lossless to iTunes, consider whether I want to own it on vinyl, if so add it to my Discogs wishlist. I don’t actually need to buy it, usually, just add it to the wishlist. I check to see if the CD is on Spotify, if it’s not, I throw a copy into my Plex server. I pack it up, do the label, thank them and send it off with the mail. It reminds me of back when I had a record label and people would mail me actual cash in the mail to send them CDs. These CDs aren’t my band or my friends’ bands, but I still like doing the mail order.
Recently my high school best friend Frank sent me this photo:
Can I have that hair back please?
Please?
No?
Ahh well. I’ll just keep wearing barrettes then. I accidentally wore one on a Zoom call with some research analysts yesteday. Oops. I HAVE let the black nail polish chip off now that I’m the “responsible adult” accompanying my mother to doctor’s appointments. I think it was distracting them.
God. I can’t even fathom I ever looked that way.
Which reminds me of Fang Phung, the sandwich-serving woman at Warren Towers cafeteria when I was in college. She was great. She LOVED my black nail polish. It was my name to her. “Ahh, Black Nail Polish. How are you today?” She had my regular sandwich memorized. That’s a really impressive skill. Actually, one time… well, when I worked at Arnold Worldwide I had a standard morning breakfast order for years. This one worker at Au Bon Pain had it down. Then I quit that job and started Barbarian Group and, like, two years later I was back in the Pru for some morning meeting or conference or something — I don’t remember what — and I went back to that Au Bon Pain. And the same woman was there, and she made my morning sandwich exactly right, exactly the same, without even acknowledging the gap in time. I’m not even sure she realized there was a gap in time. A prodigious memory, but only about one very specific thing. I never had that ability in any of my serving jobs. It was amazing. Someone could write a doctoral thesis about that woman I swear to god.
Watched a bunch of YouTube livestreams of some people playing the new Civ VI civilization, Portugal, which looks super fun. I am very excited about Portugal. I will miss Lisbon as a city state. But I’ve always been a sucker for a naval game, and I love trade routes. It’s just going to be the best. If I ever find a spare minute or two to actually play.
And who has that kind of time when there is gardening to be done. I’m hoping to stop by the big gardening store in Carrboro today, and then hopefully pot up a bunch of peppers and tomatoes this weekend, and get the GreenStalk loaded up with soil. Oh and the casters onto the gardening shelf so I can wheel it out and get those seedlings hardened off. Actually yeah I definitely need to do that today. Gonna be some hot gardening content for you guys in the next couple of days, let me tell you.
Two musical programming notes before we do a mix:
1) Mark Kozelek is a very bad person. We knew this from the previous reports in August, but Pitchfork has found seven more women to come forward. This is, it should go without saying, abysmally bad and our first thoughts should be, of course, with the women. There was a time Mark and his music meant a lot to me, and I kept giving him a second chance (musically) for, like, a decade, thanks to the paradox of that one good late-period album, Benji. But I don’t think I’ve listened to him at all since August when the news originally came out. Mark’s musical self-implosion over the last 5-10 years has saved me from any sort of conflict over personally cancelling him, but I’m not gonna lie. I will still occasionally miss listening to Evil or Grace Cathedral Park. There is much more to be written here about the sexism in 90’s indie rock, the increasing tarnish that’s collecting around gen-X, toxic masculinity and American men’s sad, pathetic clinging to teenage sexuality as they age into their 50’s. But like I said, I gotta get to the hospital this morning.
2) There is a new Jay Jay Johanson album. As far as I know, Jay Jay Johansen is not a bad person, he is a very good Swedish pop singer whose albums I have loved for fifteen years or so, thanks to a very astute recommendation from Jon Whitney. I almost got to see him live, once, at Mercury Lounge, but I had a personal emergency and I couldn’t make it and I am sad about it to this day. His new album is called Rorschasch Test and it is very good. I will be adding songs from it to mixes soon, but if you feel like checking it out yourself, here it is:
Today’s mix is a mellow one, since it’s so early it’s hard to imagine rocking today. Now, I’m not saying today couldn’t turn out to be a day of rock, but it’s too early. This reminds me of the best opening line of a concert ever, in 1994 or so the Dandy Warhols came out on stage at the Axis Nightclub in Boston, Ma at around 11PM and said “Hi We’re the Dandy Warhols, it’s good to be rocking first thing in the morning.” So, you know, 90’s era Dandy Warhols may not agree with my assessment that it’s too early to rock. But, I ask you, where are they now? Where are they now?
In any case, some good stuff on here. I wanted to put Lemonhope’s Song on here, but across two very thorough volumes of Adventure Time soundtracks being released, that one hasn’t been released. So here it is on YouTube as bonus content:
It’s occurring to me that just the other day I wrote a spirited defense of Jakob Dylan’s early solo albums and, hrm, here he is again. Seems I was really in a Jakob Dylan mood a week or so ago. OH and the Bonnie Prince Billy Marquis De Tren thing. God. Those two opened for… Swans or Low, I can’t remember. Swans I think? At Somerville Theater when that album came out and… they were just so weird and intense and sparse and mellow it was phenomenal. I still don’t think Will Oldham has put anything else out like that. Love that record so much. And Space Needle - they were such a big part of my life in the early 90’s they’d come through and play so often, I loved them so much then they just disappeared that was sad. Varnalane was good too, but… god, I loved Space Needle. And Black Hearted Brother is the last non-Slowdive thing that Neil Halstead did before the reunion and it is very Slowdive. It’s funny. When that album came out I was so excited that Neil was getting back into Shoegaze. Little did I know what was about to come: perhaps the single greatest reunion ever.
Okay wow. It’s not even eight yet and here we are, at the bottom of today’s edition. Reminder to send any questions you have for the Q&A edition. Have a lovely Friday.
Man, I had forgotten all about Space Needle. I love them but haven't thought about them in years. Your talk of Will Oldham reminded me of one of the most hauntingly beautiful shows I ever saw. After the first Palace Brothers album, they played only one area show in Providence at The Last Call Saloon. It was one of those Providence shows where at least half of the crowd were people I knew from Boston. And, it was wonderful. Bands seem to always better in Providence than in Boston for some reason.
QUESTION: You have spoken about your desire for coffee grounds to balance out the compost, but you don't drink coffee. Can you not simply buy a large can of coffee (say, Folger's), wet it, and add it to the bin? Is it not economically feasible to use coffee *just* for compost if you're not also drinking it?