Good morning. Hello. How are you? #383
Genesis, fantastic plotless Sci-Fi, yearbook ads and sponsoring soccer teams, HD remasters of television shows,
Good morning! What’s up? How you feeling? Doing okay? I am in a pretty good mood. Genesis have announced US dates for December. I was planning to go to Europe to see Genesis with my friend Rina, which I’m sure would have been lovely, but it is somewhat more realistic and actually doable to go to New York, or Boston or even, god help me, Charlotte. Hard to excuse spending thousands of dollars to see a band you can see two hours down the road. Emma and I have a very baroque set of agreements surrounding travel to see rock shows, but most of generally involves not having seen the band before, and the band not playing somewhere closer to the house. New York or Boston may still be on the table, though, depending on other circumstances and whether Emma wants to hoof it to Charlotte to see them with me, since who wants to see a band alone. I’ll go to Cat’s Cradle alone, sure, it’s just up the road. But an arena in Charlotte? Nope.
Also I will have trouble using the plural tense with bands until the day I die. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Say the Cure “are,” not “is,” right? Or am I getting it backwards again. Very hard to apply that rule consistently to every band. Very hard.
Jane is over at Janet’s this morning, which is nice. It’s not as nice as when I am not working — I’d be outside puttering or something right now. But it turns out it’s still pretty nice. I can sort of schedule my own time, get things done without these looming deadlines of getting her out of bed and stress of getting her to finish her breakfast before 10 AM. I snuck out and went to McDonald’s for breakfast, which is glorious and terrible and oh my god I’ve put on so much pandemic weight it really is ridiculous. I took this really good picture of her at dinner, though, check this out:
I am reading this sci-fo book and it is the best thing ever. I officially hit fifty percent of the book done last night and still, nothing has happened. It is so gloriously “plotless,” I love it so, so much. To be clear, something very bad happened in the prologue, but, you know, very bad things have happened in the past in reality too. That’s just setting, and some aspects of setting in a book you have to write out instead of just writing down that they happened. And people’s lives do happen in the book — a kid got in trouble at school, a woman has a visitor at work, another woman is vaguely unhappy in her job — but nothing that could be conventionally described as plot has actually happened. Right now it’s turning out a guy made have made a mistake in choosing his new job and that seems to be the craziest thing that’s happened so far. It is fantastic. I would pay so much money to see these books turned into a TV series, and honestly, you need to make me the showrunner, or one of you would be fine too, but any actual showrunner would go “wow nothing happens in these books we need to spice them up with action maybe we’ll do it through flashbacks” and… just no. Just present them as-is, please.
Now, this is the third book in the series, and in the first book some actual plot happened in the second-to-last chapter, and in the second book… I think there was one or maybe two chapters out of 40 or so that had some plot. But by and large, it’s the most gloriously plot-free fiction I have ever read. It makes the slower of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series books look action packed. They are just fantastic.
I might have to actually buy these books as physical copies and leave them lying around the house as part of my long-term plan to leave a lot of good books laying around the house so Jane gets bored and picks them up and reads them, like I did when I was a kid. This plan, of course, willfully ignores the invention of smart phones, but hey. I dad can dream.
My friends in Marfa took out a yearbook ad for their restaurant and I am so envious. What an amazing thing to do in the twenty-first century. My god. Now I want them to sponsor a soccer team. When I was a kid I played on the Air Freight Services team. We were sponsored by an air frieght company that was called… Air Freight Services. I never really grasped the weirdness of name-sponsoring kids soccer teams when I was a kid, but not it seems really great and weird. I suppose I should just do this now. Back before the pandemic, I would walk in this park near my house, and on spring and fall weekend mornings, there would be soccer games. I don’t remember if the teams had business sponsors, but this is America, I bet they do. I should just get one sponsored by Timehop, put a picture of Abe playing soccer on their jerseys. I bet Matt would go for that.
Oh also, when that year of soccer finished, one of the soccer moms for the team made us all little porcelin figurines of us playing soccer. I still have mine because who would throw a thing like that away. I’m going to go take a picture of it for you RIGHT NOW:
Also the back has our name and number painted on it:
You really needed both of those photos in your life today.
If you’re in my Plex I added a bunch of movies: most of the Aardman Animation films, Brewster’s Millions, Stir Crazy, The Shape of Water, BUtterfield 8. All of Mythbusters. I think we’re gonna re-watch all of those, they seem useful to have seen all of them. They started airing at a time I barely watched TV and was super busy, but I was always impressed with it, and Emma loves it, so why not re-watch it. Maybe it’ll get her off my back to watch Breaking Bad for a while. I know. I KNOW. Don’t say it. I don’t want to, you can’t make me.
One interesting thing about Mythbusters is that the first, like, four seasons are only available in 576i. They don’t go to 720 until season 5, and they don’t go to 1080p until, like, the second-to-last season. I wonder what they actually shot it on. I wonder what they edited on. The transition from shooting television to film to video was a messy one. It is phenomenally expensive to re-convert these old shows to HD, even if they have the source footage, because they didn’t edit at full resolution, and then export low res. Their computers weren’t powerful enough, especially when compositing special effects, so they have to completely re-composite things. There was an amazing little mini-doc about this when they finally spent the shit-tons of money to do this to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The guy who oversaw this at Paramount Video was an old client of mine, Ken Ross. We worked on Twin Peaks stuff together. Anyway, when they finally finished these, he held this little event at a NYC theater to premiere a couple of the new HD episodes. Emma and I went. It was awesome. But the expense of it is also why they hadn’t gotten around to doing DS9 et al yet. Maybe they have now? I haven’t actually checked in a while. Anyway, I’m not even sure if they could do it on Mythbusters. Low budget, reality show airing on Discovery? Quite possible they shot that whole show on, like, Mini DV TRV-900’s or something. Who knows. I wonder.
Huh. You know, this would be almost worth it to join Adam Savage’s Tested membership level that lets you ask questions just so I could ask him this. Though I suppose you could just tweet the question at him and see if he answers first. Hrm. Yeah, maybe.
Huh. Well. You know, when I started writing today I had absolutely no notes, no little jotted-down ideas of things to talk about. Usually I have one or two to help me out and keep me on track, but today? Nope. Nary a one. Does it show? Is this any more or less discursive and pointless than a regular edition of GMHHAY? You be the judge!
OMG I just saw an ad for the best thing in the Chatham Chatlist and emailed the guy and he said it’s mine if I want to come get it, so I am totally going to do that today and if all goes well I will have the BEST surprise for you tomorrow. Fingers crossed!
Today’s mix is a mix of “world” music. By this I simply mean music inspired by the musics of other cultures, or perhaps just music not sung in English. There’s a lot of controversy these days about “world” music. Can white Englishmen (ahem Peter Gabriel) make the music of indigenous cultures? I don’t think anyone (well, not many people) argues that they can’t enjoy it, or be inspired by it, or attempt to make it in their own home. But can they profit off of it? What if in doing so they popularize it, and lift up other artists? Peter Gabriel did a whole lot to bring Youssou Ndour to worldwide attention and fame, I would posit. But he also probably made a lot more money off of Youssou Ndour than Youssou Ndour did? I don’t know. Who knows. Then we have Dead Can Dance — an Australian and a New Zealander — doing songs heavily inspired by many other ethnicities. They seem to sort of fall into a category of their own, fusing all of these things into something new and unique. Maybe. None of this, however, would mean one can’t enjoy the music, of course, so that’s what we’re doing today.
Okay well I gotta go water the garden now, then get on with my actual work day and, you know, check in with the account team and stuff. I hope your Friday is spiffing, George Emerson is spiffing. Ta!