Good morning. Hello. How are you? #406
Maybe hose reels aren't so bad, but my hair is, but Anton Corbijn has a new book and Liziqi has a new video and the guy in Swell has a new band. Well, six years ago.
Good morning! Hello! What is UP. How ARE you? It’s Friday, that’s pretty cool. And Memorial day weekend. Amurca. Fun. It’s gonna rain for most of it here, though. But I think I am 100% okay with that. I’m just going to garden in the rain. Because why not. Because who cares if you get wet. I got some potting up to do, I’m gonna do it. I am so excited to do some serious gardening this weekend, I can’t even tell you. Tomorrow’s gonna RULE.
Programming note: Old friend Mike Gatti tells me that Eley Corporation hose reels are awesome and he recommends them over hose pots, especially if you have long, heavy duty hoses such as his. Mine are short and flimsy, so hose pots work much better than they would with a 100-foot stiff hose. If you are amongst the hose management contingent of GMHHAY readers, please check out the Eley Corporation.
Programming note 2: I promised (or threatened) to post a picture of my absurd hair on Instagram yesterday and I did it, so here it is for your viewing pleasure:
I just had a sweet dream where I could color grade the world. I had color graded it into that 2010’s sci-fi color scheme of blue and orange, and was next in the process of color grading it into something a bit more interesting, sort of a faded gark aqua with a bit of bright lime green. It was pretty nice. It reminded me of this long-standing dream invention I’ve had, that actually I think would be pretty easy to make now? Except no one’s made it yet, which is a set of sunglasses that when you put them on, the entire world is just grainy, high contrast black and white, so it would feel like you’re living in a Helmut Newton photo or an Anton Corbijn video. I really want those.
And speaking of Anton Corbijn he has a new book out of his work with Depeche Mode. It looks pretty sweet. I did not buy the giant “art edition” version, shown here, but I did order the $100 normal-sized edition. It will make a very nice complement to the other Anton Corbijn book I have, Anton Corbijn / Tom Waits '77-'11, which is just gorgeous. Not a Taschen book, but gorgeous nonetheless.
When I ordered DM AC 81-18, I had to update my address on Taschen.com from my SoHo address, not even my Williamsburg address, so it’s been… nine years? I am pretty happy I got that Taschen book habit under control. That shit is expensive.
There is also a new Liziqi video jam out today. She makes tea. It only has 1.5MM views so far, so you know, you can get in on the ground floor of the new Liziqi video today. And there are guests in it, besides her and her grandma. Not sure if they’re relatives or what. Jane just loves Liziqi videos. They really are… I mean, they’re so well done, and that…farm, or estate or… ranch or whatever it is is just stunning. Is that place normal for rural China? No, right? It can’t be. It’s just too insane. I would read a whole book about Liziqi and that farm.
Yesterday I was doing a bit of vinyl organizing. There’s this whole process when I get a new piece of vinyl. Gotta listen to it, of course, that’s the most important thing. And then I gotta catalog it in Discogs. This might mean I also have to grade it if it isn’t new. If I ordered it from Discogs, it was graded when I ordered it, and those grades are a good place to start, but they’re not always 100% reliable, so I check them and re-grade them, and add them to my Discogs collection, so that when I die, Emma can just send the link out to a bunch of record stores and solicit bids on the whole collection at once and be rid of the burden as easily as possible (a good husband minimizes the impact of their death on their spouse). And then I add it to my podcast topic list so that I can mention it in the “newly acquired vinyl” section of the podcast, and then if it’s colored vinyl, I take a picture and add the photo to my colored vinyl photo library, which really is coming along and looking pretty awesome now. So I was doing all that, and I finally got a copy of Swell’s first album, self titled. And I was adding it to my collection on Discogs, thinking, “man, I miss Swell, they were such a great band. I wonder what happened to those guys” and sure enough, the lead singer guy had a post-Swell band, Be My Weapon, and they’re really good, and sound like Swell and I am very excited. It’s really amazing how many times this happens, where you think the band just broke up and that’s the end of it, but it turns out that some of them — and in the case of Swell it was two of the four of them, I think — are still making music just as good. I love it when that happens.
I feel like this newsletter could use one more topic today. Do my notes have any additional topics for the day? It appears not. Should I rant and rail about the Republicans being opposed to a bipartisan January 6 investigation? Hahaha I mean, are we surprised? I kinda love the modern Republican party. It will always, always do the absolute craziest, most despicable thing. MTG called the Democrats Nazis yesterday. Matt Gaetz said we need our guns to overthrow the government. Mitch McConnell is blocking the commission because it’ll hurt their chances in the mid-terms. Trump’s team is out there saying criminal charges might be a good thing for them. A new Quinnipiac poll says sixty-six percent of all Americans don’t want Trump to run again. Thus, the higher that number, the more certain it is he will run. Every elected Republican in America could want him to not run, and he will run, and they will pretend they love it and support him. It’s just… majestic. So gloriously batshit. How do you hold your head up in that party? How do you pretend in any way you are an individual? Shit maybe collectivism still does exist in the US. 🤯
Yeah, that’s not really worth it. That wasn’t worth it. If I were a real writer I would just delete that paragraph. It is crazy how much my mood ebbs and flows based on politics and days of the week. It’s Friday, and while I have already read a couple email briefings on the state of the political nation, I can handle it a bit better today, because we’re looking down the barrel of a weekend. Nothing else changed, just me. It’s really quite a rollercoaster.
Eh, I got nothing it seems. I got a bunch of stuff to do today and it is distracting me. I will move on. I hope you have a lovely Memorial Day weekend. And I had to Google that to double-check it was Memorial day and not Labor day. Even though I just Googled it at the beginning of this post.
Here have a picture of Roy. He is getting VERY cuddly and it is quite cute. Even though he probably shit in the bathroom sink the other day. It’s very hard to take a picture of a black cat against a bright background.
Let’s do a club mix today. I JUST put that new Underworld song on there it is pretty bangin’. And it’s probably not new, those guys are insanely prolific and I can’t keep up. Oh shit I start and end this mix with Underworld I just realized. Well, that’s okay. It’s an Underworld sandwich. I think that’s just fine. This is a pretty solid mix, man. Real greatest-hits type thing. I would dance to these in a club. Even though clubs don’t play good club music anymore.
Have a lovely holiday weekend! You probably won’t hear from me till Monday. Maybe even Tuesday. Even self-indulgent over-writers need vacations. Miss you!
not really related, but your politics paragraph brought up this for me: i'm so tired of every single political fundraising e-mail and text i get being all "WORST NEWS EVER!" "THIS IS HORRIFIC!" "DEMOCRACY IS BEING MURDERED!" and "ONLY YOU CAN HELP US AS THE WORLD BURNS!" it freaks me the fuck out, plus then i delete them without reading them. i am anxious enough, assholes.