Good morning. Hey there. How are you? How’s it going? I am doing okay. It is Friday, weee, and despite my strong desire to never work a Friday again, I am working today. I’m listening to Clairo’s new album Sling. It sounds kind of like Phoebe Bridgers. Whoops. That just ended. Now I am listening to the Dee Gees who, not surprisingly, sound kinda like a rock and roll Bee Gees. Man why is it when people cover the Bee Gees they just cover their disco hits? There was a Bee Gees cover band in Boston, called the Boy Joys, featuring Ad Frank and Paula Kelly and Aaron Tapp and they didn’t just cover the disco hits. They didn’t even just cover the hits. I mean, yeah, we were in Boston of course they sang “Massachussetts” and stuff like that, but they also covered shit like “Every Christian Lion-Hearter Man Will Show You.” They were my proper Bee Gees education. I am deeply indebted.
That said, this is a pretty rockin cover of “You Should be Dancing.”
Got a PS5 alert this morning for Target, had one in my shopping cart at the Chapel Hill location, but it wouldn’t let me check out, said to just keep trying, and I kept trying, and eventually it just took it out of the cart and said “nope.” So now I know I have a local nemesis in this game of PS5s. I will never win. I am not committed enough.
I read a couple interesting articles about video games yesterday, actually. It seems that the kids are not necessarily going to be as obsessed with video games as past generations. There is only some initial data, and things aren’t definite, but it’s kind of interesting. I always think of video games as this massive juggernaut: the largest entertainment category, and far, far bigger than its mainstream cultural discourse applies. One big enemy is cost. Video games and consoles are getting more expensive.
(The Axios gaming newsletter is very good, by the way.)
Of course mobile games, with their ad-supported free levels can offset this, and are remarkably, insanely popular. There is a strong economic argument, advanced, as far as I can tell, only by me, that mobile games are the one true ecosystem that has conclusively defeated Wanamaker’s Dilemma. That is, the dilemma that “half my advertising spend is wasted, the problem is, I don’t know which half.” In our current gaming ecosystem, however, this is 100% not true. They represent a unique closed world of ad spend and products where every dollar can be effectively tracked.
(Also, as an aside, for my still-unpublished magnum opus about advertising economics, I did a verrry long dive into the origins of that phrase, which people often describe as apocryphal, or coming from Ogilvy or someone else, and I came up with some pretty conclusive evidence that it was, in fact, Wanamaker who said it.)
Well, until Apple decided to go and fuck it all up. Which would be fine if they were just fucking up the one and only solution to Wanamaker’s Dilemma ever made — who cares if companies save money. But also, of course, they are fucking up the exact thing that gamers want: less expensive games.
But hey. That is cool. Whatever. It gets the antitrust regulators off their back for a couple days.
By the way, Facebook beat expectations and said they made nine billion dollars profit last quarter. The stock went down because they said that their earnings next quarter will take a hit because of Apple’s antics. But they won’t, just watch. And if they do, their profits will be eight billion or something. Apple’s ATT efforts are not going to hurt Facebook. They’re going to hurt everyone else.
Anyway.
We talked about Martin Donovan yesterday, one of the go-to actors for Hal Hartley, one of my favorite directors. Another one of his go-to actors was the amazing, talented Adrienne Shelly, who went on to direct the remarkable film Waitress. She was murdered by a construction worker in her apartment building in 2006. The guy tried to make it look like a suicide. It was insanely sad. Which is why, I gotta say, I am not super into receiving alerts like this on my phone:
Jane is at Grammy’s this morning, spent the night there, so I got to have something different for breakfast, and do things in a different order this morning and hoo boy is that so exciting. I am drunk with possibility and potential. Except I have a meeting this morning never mind. Forget it. And no PS5 to go pick up in Chapel Hill. Alas.
I did get a giant new workbench yesterday, though. The delivery options were “at the curb” for zero dollars, “at the garage” for fifty dollars and something like “assembled and in place” for like two hundred. I decided to call their bluff and choose “at the curb” because no one, ever, except one evil, since-fired FedEx driver leaves things at the curb around here. Everyone comes and delivers things in the driveway, at the garage door.
But these guys. First off, it was a local delivery. Home Depot gave the item to the delivery company on July 15th and then it just sat in their warehouse for two weeks, with the tracking telling me, every day, that today was the day it was going to come. And in one way, I was right — this guy did not leave it at the curb. But he also didn’t leave it at the garage. You could tell he knew what my game was and he wasn’t going to let me win. He put this, like, hundred-fifty pound item in the middle of the driveway, simultaneously managing to block the walkway to the front door. It was pretty impressive. I gotta tip my hat to that guy. A worthy nemesis.
Also, the item on Home Depot — and the order info — clearly said “this is fully assembled except for the wheels” and this is totally not true! It is not even a little bit assembled! I demand satisfaction!
The Dee Gees are over and now the next album is Patience by Mannequin Pussy, and so far it is a fantastic record. I don’t know much about these people but both albums I’ve listened to so far have been just amazing.
When I was in college, and my journal was handwritten, I used to notate, in the margins, every song that was playing while I was writing the journal entry. I’m trying to think if I have one scanned so that I could quickly throw a photo in here, but while I have those journals transcribed, I haven’t scanned the pages. Oh well, future project. It would be cool to do that these days, maybe with some custom coded site, or something, pulling in what was playing on Spotify, or letting me annotate if I were listening to vinyl. In the Livejournal days, they had a “music” tag that you could add to your posts and I made fairly consistent use of it. I like the idea, even though no one cares, no one, including myself, will ever go back and listen, but it would look cool, wouldn’t it? If there were a bracket to the left of this paragraph, and that bracket was labeled with small letters that said “Drunk II by Mannequin Pussy”? I would like that. But i suppose that takes a Robin Sloan-level dedication to your internet presence that I do not have. Or, more accurately, no longer have the coding chops to pull off.
I was thinking about Bagel Rising last night. Does anyone remember Bagel Rising? That place was so great. I miss it so much. I’ve had many breakfast bagel regular haunts in my life, but that one was just the best. The crispy, thin bacon. The sesame bagels. The awesome employees. Look. There is still a pretty-good photo of the counter on Foursquare:
Years later, one of the regular employees appeared before me when I was sitting at the bar at Schiller’s Liquor bar (RIP), with Danielle, drinking house wine. He had also moved to New York. It was great. He gave us free drinks. We kept going back but I never saw him again. But it was nice to see him in a different sitchooashun.
Bagel rising. Miss that place.
What else, what else.
A friend sent an article from Vulture about Woodstock 99 to a group chat last night and we had a long talk about it. The article is a little long-winded, and expects too much from a single-topic documentary, but it did make some good points. It is simplistic to assign the blame to Nu Metal bands and fans. The documentary made zero effort to get into the brains of those fans, figure out the appeal. It glossed over the exceptions to their thesis, like Rage Against the Machine who appealed to those fans but had “appropriate” politics. And, with Metallica and Mustane sitting right there, did not deviate from its thesis that Nu Metal was some new thing for a new generation, even though there’s not a lot of space between Nu Metal and its thrash predecessors (who were at the festival!) and the speed metal predecessors before that, ad infinitum. I also spend a lot of time at Coachellas, Lollas, etc., thinking about the safety infrastructure, the extra durable fencing, the large center corridor that goes between the stage and the soundbooth, dividing the crowd into quadrants so it can’t turn into a single, seething mass. They didn’t really get into any of that. The article ended on a sort of ominous note, though, about how festivals, right now, are making similar safety mistakes with COVID and yeah, that got me thinking.
Speaking of COVID, yeah. Delta variant. Yeah. Jesus. Did you hear about the Provincetown outbreak?
As of Thursday, 882 people were tied to the Provincetown outbreak. Among those living in Massachusetts, 74% of them were fully immunized, yet officials said the vast majority were also reporting symptoms. Seven people were reported hospitalized.
According to Wapo, NYT, and others, today’s the day the CDC puts out its most recent data, maybe offers some new guidance. Maybe it’s already happened I don’t know, I haven’t looked at the news yet.
Part of me is terrified, of course, but part of me is reassured, because I’ve felt like this was coming, or here, for weeks now and I felt so alone, so very alone, so it’s nice to know I’m not crazy, misery loves company, etc. And there is some room for optimism, I have discovered, as in the UK, and elsewhere, there seems to be some early evidence that perhaps the Delta variant burns twice as bright but twice as fast, and flames out a little quicker? Still a little TBD on that one, but reason for some hope.
But yeah. My paranoia that I’d get Delta on one of my trips, and my viral load would be enough to give it to my unvaccinated daughter is not complete paranoia. It is definitely possible. It is unlikely, but it’s possible. And that’s the rub when you’re a parent. Risk tolerance becomes a whole different thing. And, of course, the reason behind taking the risk. If my mom were sick? Yes, I would fly to Alaska and be there with her and I would probably take the risk. But to go to a show? To just go to a bar and drink? Very hard to justify, even if the risk is so, so low. It’s not zero.
Just speaking for myself here. Make your own risk calculations. Not my business.
Here’s one of my cats.
Roy, our other cat, the black one, has taken to just walking up to me and flopping over on his side and laying there until I scratch his chin and neck and pet him. I have never seem a cat crave human attention as much as Roy. It is insane. I mean, I like petting cats a lot, but I have a job, and a tiny human to take care of, and a merciless, cruel master of a schedule to adhere to. I try and pet you whenever you ask, but it is 8:44 in the morning, and you’ve already flopped in front of me four times, Roy.
Of course, once Emma is awake, it’s as if I don’t exist to these cats.
Are you watching the Olympics? I am not watching the Olympics. Not for any, like, political reason, or making a statement or anything. For starters, I like the Winter Olympics a lot better. I mean, this is weird since I hate winter, but I guess Alaska rubbed off on me a bit. I could get into them if I could watch them live, but I can only really watch them live in the prime time, so, you know, it’d be cool if the Olympics only ever did events at 11PM GMT to 3AM GMT. That’d help a lot. The live thing, everyone watching together, that’s what I loved about the Olympics. Even if I could get up on time, most people wouldn’t, so it wouldn’t be the same. There’s definitely something to be said for the old days of tape delay. It is funny, though, when I wake up. I need to get my brain thinking before I can get out of bed, so I usually pick up my phone, check twitter and shit, just to get the brain moving so I can get up. And usually it’s just Bloomberg.UK and Joe Weisenthal Tweeting. But this week? So much tweeting in the morning. Love it. Even if I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Also I don’t know if you noticed this yesterday, but the debut album from Neptune, Boston’s experimental noise jazz outfit, who made their own instruments (and occasionally Robots), is now on Spotify. We put this album out on Archenemy. I was monstrously irresponsible about it, the timing took forever. Kinda like these days, with vinyl delays. Just months delayed. And Jason would call me every day and I didn’t have any news from the plant, so I just wouldn’t answer my phone. It is still something I am very bad at. So, I mean, I can claim some part in this album, but I can’t really, because I was a slow screw-up about getting it produced. But it’s a great album. The limited-edition vinyl with the sheet metal sleeves is amazing. Archenemy never really owned their releases, the bands did. It makes me happy when those bands get those old Archenemy releases out onto the modern services.
Let’s do a mix! Moody and Quiet, cuz I have a backlog of these. Mostly new stuff. Huh I guess all new stuff, actually, except for Yo La Tengo and Planning for Burial. Oh and the Czars. But Planning for Burial and the Czars are new to me. Well. Covid new. Amiina is a great Icealandic string quartet band that Judi and I and Ashley saw at Iceland Airwaves in… 2007 ish? They got some new stuff, it’s great. And I’m really into this new Matthew Dear lost “country” record. God, imagine just throwing off a record that good and forgetting about it. Insane.
OKAY. I gotta make some waffles this morning. Jane has run out of waffles. We can’t have that. Waffles make this household run. Home runs on Waffles. Doesn’t have the same ring to it as America Runs on Dunkin, does it? ooo. This Home Runs on Waffles. THROW. That works.
Happy Friday! Have a good weekend. Lots of gardening on deck for me. And the podcast. And putting together the workbench. Talk to you guys Monday!
I should be doing a work thing Right Now but first I have to just tell you that I adored Bagel Rising for their jalepeño bagel with vegan cream cheese. Or was it spinach-jalepeño? Anyway, their vegan cream cheese was the best. I believe Pavement Coffeehouse bought them, and they have a few locations (Back Bay, Harvard, elsewhere?) and still have the vegan cream cheese, but I've been too mean to myself over recent years to eat bagels and cream cheese. Perhaps next time I'm near one, I shall.