Good morning. Hello. How are you? #461
Whoops I overslept. Godflesh. Dandys and BJM. Cuomo. AirTrain. Port Authority. Mary Millington. FedEx guy and Baby Got Back. My hair. What is Ronald Pelton's life like these days.
Good morning. Hello! How are you? I am muddled! Confused! I was supposed to go to the Walmart this morning but did not. Last night, Emma and I talked about how I really didn’t need to go, and if I felt like skipping it, I should just skip it, and she would take the recycling to the recycling center (my other Wednesday morning errand) later in the day. When I went to bed, I was fully planning on going. I even went to sleep an hour earlier than normal, at 11PM.
Programming note: Good talks about the pandemic yesterday, and an unusually large number of people emailing me directly, replying to the email directly. I’m glad I got that out. Thank you for your kind words. We are all going through some serious shit still.
When the alarm went off at 6:30, I had a splitting headache and was having a fascinating dream where I was back in Alaska and Carrie and I were going to do a road trip from Fairbanks to Tok to transport a cadaver in the back of a van. But before that I had to man the booth for a labor union at an employment fair. Anyway, the headache sucked, so I decided to skip the stores this morning, took a bunch of Advil, set my alarm for 40 minutes later and went back to sleep.
Alarm went off 40 minutes later and I hit snooze, except I didn’t hit snooze because I hadn’t locked my phone and it was still open to the alarm page, so I just accidentally hit the alarm off button and then slept for another hour. Eventually I was in the middle of a dream were Katherine, the head of Comms at Tumblr back in the day, was handing me a check for $24,000 for “unpaid vacation time,” and I thought “hrm well this is very unrealistic in a lot of ways I seem to be asleep,” woke up, looked at the clock and I’d overslept an hour. So, that plus the extra hour on the other end and I got two extra hours of sleep. Nine full hours. Can’t remember the last time that ever happened.
Still have a headache though. And I sadly do not have a check for $24,000.
So I only have… 53 minutes till I gotta wake Jane up. Let’s see if we can do this. And sorry plants, no morning watering for you. No morning Quicken balance updated. All that can wait. Forgive me. This is going to be a bit disjointed this morning.
New Godflesh album: NEW FLESH IN DUB VOL 1, which seems to be a dub remix album, but Godflesh dub remix albums are, in general, awesome (witness: Dubstate) and so far this one is delivering. Relatedly, there’s a new Jesu remix of Julien Baker but I haven’t listened to that yet. God, is there anyone more prolific than Justin Broderick?
Maybe Anton Newcombe Jr of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I am rewatching the 2005 documentary DiG! about BJM and the Dandy Warhols because I am all about feature length documentaries these days. It’s as good as I remember it, Anton is insufferable as I remember, but there’s some stuff I had forgotten. It is flabbergasting to me how few records the Dandy’s sold, I swear to god every single one of them must have been in Boston we all loved those guys. And i was mixing up which member of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club was in BJM. It was not Robert Levon Been, it was Peter Hayes, so I had to clear up that headcanon.
Also, I forgot Genesis P-Orridge — subject of an autobiography I just read — is, coincidentally, briefly in the film, telling the world that the only good bands in America in 1995 were BJM and the Dandys. And, I mean, he’s not wrong?
Also, the whole movie is on Youtube.
Much later, back in 2016, the Dandys came through Chapel Hill and played Cat’s Cradle (aside: I’m wearing a Cat’s Cradle shirt today) and I wrote a long essay about the show and the thoughts running through my head and my memories of the Dandy’s BJM heyday. And a friend sent it to the Dandys and that almost lead to some stuff, so that was cool. I sure do like the Dandy Warhols.
So. Cuomo resigned. So exciting, no? Just fantastic. Of course, he’s going to run again, which is going to be such a glorious shitshow, but I think we’re probably decently safe there. The other thing I immediately thought was:
If you know me, of course, that’s not a surprised. I’m obsessed with Laguardia, the Port Authority and the complete boondoggle that is the Laguardia Air Train, and it’s useless backtracking to Willets Point.
Well what to my wondering eyes did appear this morning than this glorious headline:
Cuomo’s departure leads Port Authority staffers to demand agency halt his LaGuardia AirTrain plan
This article is kind of amazing. The Port Authority has been playing along, pretending that they wanted this thing for years. But, nope:
Gov. Cuomo’s resignation led to an outcry among Port Authority staffers who want the agency’s top officials to halt his controversial proposal to build an AirTrain to LaGuardia Airport.
“For too long, Gov. Cuomo and his staff have repeatedly pushed the agency to make non-transparent, politically motivated decisions, including decisions that squander the trust and money of our bondholders, customers, and the general public,” said a letter sent to Port Authority executive director Rick Cotton on Tuesday by dozens of staffers.
“The time has come to speak out and stand up for what is right.”The letter was sent less than six hours after Cuomo announced he would leave office in two weeks amid a sexual harassment scandal.
It calls for the Port Authority Inspector General to look into whether Cuomo exerted “undue influence” that prompted agency officials to “manipulate the federally-mandated Environmental Impact Statement process” to approve the LaGuardia AirTrain over proposed alternatives like a subway extension or dedicated bus lanes to the airport.
Less than six hours! Marvelous. These people were ready.
You guys have my full support.
So, we had just finished dinner last night, and the family was scattered to the winds, different parts of the house. The door to the garage was open because I was gathering the recycling, and then I heard a woman’s voice — that sounded a lot like Emma’s — from the garage that sounded like it was coming out of a baby monitor that was saying:
I like big butts and I cannot lie
You other brothers can't deny
That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung,
And I’m a bit confused, because I didn’t know Emma left a baby monitor in the garage, and I didn’t know they had gone up to Jane’s bedroom. So I go to the garage and there’s a FedEx guy standing there with his phone on speaker. And he sees me and immediately starts laughing, and I start laughing, and then we both stop and then the phone goes: “Am I on speaker phone?”
“Yes you are,” I say. “I was thinking that 3 is a little young for my wife to teach our kid the lyrics to Baby Got Back.”
“You asshole,” she says. “Wait, not you, but Larry.” I am making up the name Larry to protect the innocent.
It was great.
We then had a nice discussion about gardening since my seedlings were right there.
What else what else.
Yesterday I re-watched the thirteen-minute time lapse video I made about six months ago that chronicled a day in our pandemic life. It is really good! I am so glad I made it. It is still probably un-showable to the public, given how absolutely god awful my hair looked in it and how much pandemic weight I gained, but I’m still really glad I made it. Emma says my hair looks better now. She clarifies it does not look good but it looks better than it did earlier this year. It is long now. Down to my shoulders. But I pretty much constantly wear it in a man bun because it’s too hot. So I can’t actually cut it till after this winter, when I get to wear it down. Here let’s snap a quick picture for you:
Emma’s always saying she wished I hurried up and turned grey, and I have been vehemently disagreeing, but I’m starting to come round to her point of view. My hair’s so thin, the grey hair would probably be a little more wiry and stiff. But it might be a while. My dad didn’t grey till his 70’s. I know you’re supposed to look at your maternal grandfather, but he balded in his 30’s so that’s no guide. Apparently he did this because of a year’s manual labor under the sun without a hat on the Panama Canal. His brothers kept their hair.
Anyway, the video is really good. I’m thinking I might at least throw it up on YouTube under a private link or something. Debating. Will let you know.
Ha! Maybe I’ll make it premium subscriber content and charge for a month of GMHHAY premium content, just so I can send it out without it going to the web.
In other media consumption news, night before last I finished Respectable: The Mary Millington Story. I learned about Mary from Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography, from when Cosey was working as a porn model and stripper, she would do a lot of work with Mary, they were sort of friends. And you know how when you’re reading an autobiography you can just tell that they’re talking about someone famous, even if you’ve never heard of them? That’s how it was with Mary, so I decided to look her up.
Mary Millington was a porn actress who turned semi-respectable in 1970’s and 1980’s London. So, you know, not the swinging 60’s, the more repressed 70’s and 80’s. She started in the normal page 3 UK nudie modeling, moved to the continent, did a bunch of hard core porn, came back to the UK and then became huge with her return to softcore porn mags in England under the major pornographer David Sullivan, then starred in a series of sexy nudie caper comedies, most notably Come Play With Me, which is the second-longest running film in English history (the movie keeps claiming the longest, but the IMDB page helpfully corrects this). She also founded and ran her own chain of hugely successful sex shops. Well, successful if it weren’t for the authorities constantly raiding them and stealing all her stock. Her fame was astronomical. She had more than a million members of her paying fan club in England. She eventually commits suicide at 33, in a haze of drug abuse, mental illness, several arrest warrants from kleptomania and indecency from the shops. But of course there’s a theory she was killed. She was in the process of a divorce from the husband she married as a kid and who (apparently) lived as a kept man his whole life. He seems to still be alive, and seems to have gotten everything. I wonder how he felt when the movie came out. I wonder if anyone, ever, anywhere, ever recognizes him about this.
I was also thinking about this when I reading about a spy, like a real one not one of those “journalists are the enemy of the state” types or a whistleblower type, an actual spy who worked at the NSA and walked into the Soviet Embassy and gave up a bunch of secrets because he was broke. I remember reading about Ronald Pelton when I was a kid, it was a big deal. One of the operations he gave up was Operation Ivy Bells, an operation where the US had successfully bugged an undersea communications like between two Russian naval bases for years. I mean, this was all over the papers when it happened. Big deal. He was caught when a Russian spy, who also made the news, told us about him. Dude went to jail for three consecutive life sentences.
Ronald Pelton was released from prison in 2015. He is out there somewhere, at least according to his Wikipedia page, still living his life. What does he do, I wonder. How does he get by? What work does he do? Does he still have the name Ronald Pelton? I think about this sort of thing all the time. People who now have to just… live in infamy, quietly, with no real means of making a living.
I swear to god I would read a whole book about these people. I want to spend my life researching them and writing that book.
Crap I was gonna tell you guys a really crazy story from our local chatlist, but not enough time due to oversleeping. Oh well, tomorrow! It’s worth the wait, I promise. Let’s do a mix. Raaaawk! Man this is a great mix. If you’re ready to rock out, I highly recommend it. Mostly new, but kicks it off with two old ones and then has an old Buffalo Tom song from when they still rocked. Not to slight later Buffalo Tom, “Mineral” and “Tailights Fade” are my two favorites. And not to slight 21st century Buffalo Tom “All Be Gone” is a great song and I love their Paul Simon cover. Man I am expending a lot of energy here covering my ass in case a member of Buffalo Tom reads this. But you never know! Remember the Dandys!
Okay! I made it! Twelve minutes to go through this thing, bold some passages, figure out the subhead verbige (I still don’t have an MO here it gives me agita every morning), cross-post to FB and copy the whole thing into my Scrivener file. We can do it! Have a lovely Thursday!