Good morning. Hello. How are you? #479
Leg recovery unending, too many movies not enough productivity, Instagram FOMO, GMHHAY book progress, Apple backing down on CSAM, memories of popcorn science experiments
Good morning! Hello! How are you? It’s Tuesday! Wooo! So exciting. It is day 26 without nicotine, yay me, and day eleven of this horrid injury, boo. My bruise has expanded, it is slowly drifting down my leg, and creeping around back. I got these giant ice packs, 11”x14”, and you strap ‘em on your leg, and they still don’t cover the whole bruise. I also got two new extra large ace bandages — six inches wide, and am using those for compression again. Except they’re the old school kind with the little hooks to close them and they’re digging into my skin. Fun. And arnica gel. I can walk, it’s definitely getting better, but we have a loooong way to go. I just want to be able to go on walks in the neighborhood again. It sucks not being able to get any exercise. I actually wrote myself a note last night before bed: take a shower. So, you know. That’s how that’s going.
As you can see, I did not write to you guys yesterday. I lied Friday. It felt good, the lying. The deceit.
What did I do instead, you ask? I tried to get stuff done this weekend, but it was not terribly easy or doable. On Saturday my nice wife helped me out with the gardening. She did all my heavy lifting as we re-did a hose system, stirred the chicken droppings and scratch into the compost, and she hauled ten bags of potting soil from the driveway down to the gardening area. She is a true trooper. It made it so all I really had to do was stand around to garden, which was still a terrible idea, it was the first day I spent on my feet, and that was the day my bruise migrated down to my knee. Man that is so gross. Bruises seem tolerable when you’re thinking “oh that’s where I got hit but now those muscles are healing.” They seem a lot more gross when it’s like “oh that is a rogue pool of blood just hanging out beneath the skin and really has nowhere to go and will just roam around your body.” Yuck.
Anyway, I took advantage of Saturday’s lovely weather and got most of the fall crops planted — broccoli, cauliflower, beats, radishes, spinach. I didn’t plant the snow peas yet because I’m not sure where to trellis them because I always mess up snow peas, and I still have a couple weeks, and this week looks like it’s supposed to be in the low 90’s again, come ON. I also need to get some seed garlic. I should really go to the garden center one of these days.
Anyway, here’s this week’s gardening video, which features a lot of Jane being very cute:
Man my peppers are doing really well.
Other than that, I got a few organizational tasks done. My record crates finally came in — took like three months, I was becoming increasingly convinced I got ripped off, had to use Etsy’s arbitration service, etc. But they showed up and they are perfect, exact match of my old, discontinued Diskkeeper crates. And they fit perfectly, and now all my records are filed and I have plenty of room for new ones. I figure this new system will last me about a year, and then… well, I don’t know what’s going to happen then. I am dreading it. Maybe I will start selling them.
Also fixed up one of my wi-fi nodes and IP cameras that was on the fritz. Turned out it was a bad CAT-6 cable. God. Those things. Does any cable go bad as often as ethernet? USB maybe. Anyway, the camera and node both seem to be doing a lot better, even though I only had a shorter cable handy so the node is in a more crammed place and one would think that it had less good reception there. But all seems well.
I did actually leave the house, twice even. Had to get a Waxahatchee record I sold to the post-office-slash-bodega-slash-gas-station-taco-stand, and I even got gas. This was the first gas I got all year in my car. Pretty proud of that.
Really, I have mostly spent the last ten days watching films. I have watched a lot of films in the last ten days, good and bad. Yesterday I finished up Mortal Kombat (2021) which was… not good, though, you know, I can’t say I am super well-versed in the Mortal Kombat universe. I also watched Zabriskie Point which was just great. The day before I watched Johann Johannsson’s Last and First Men which was pretty great as well, though both of these films would have been better either in a theater or being played at 1.5X. God, I wish Plex had a high-speed option. Also re-watched Hal Hartley’s short Opera No. 1 this weekend, since he re-mastered the soundtrack and put it up on Spotify. Great little film. Adrienne Shelly was so amazing, RIP.
Rounding out this batch were Come Play With Me and Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasuredome, which was boring, but interesting. Too slow. Movies are too slow. Pick up the pace, man. We get it. I watched it because Anaïs Nin stars in it. She looked exactly like Anaïs Nin.
Finally, I’ve had waaaaay too much Instagram FOMO. Man you guys are all having so much fun. I’m so jealous. I need to stop looking at instagram. Part of it is being a parent of an unvaccinated kid, and part of it is being so remote from so many of our friends. Like sure I could do something here, but I don’t want to do something here, I want to do something with you guys. But you guys are far away and that means airports and airplanes and a lot more risks to go to, like, a show or a dinner than it is if we lived near our friends, who just have to walk there. It’s a bummer. I love our house but, god. Living far away from your friends in this day and age… It’s hard. Our whole decision to live here was based on the great airport and how easy it was to go see everyone and that is just… gone.
Lisa’s been working on the GMHHAY book again this last week, and it’s been kind of interesting, thinking about the decisions we have to make to turn these daily posts into a book. Like, last year, you guys were all sort-of a captive audience, you know? We were all stuck at home, and everyone was kind of freaking out, and there wasn’t much to do, and there weren’t even that many new TV shows or movies. It was great! You were all stuck reading me. And of course we all found deep comfort in really boring, domestic things like gardening. And then, on top of that, I had this implicit word goal each day. I mean, nothing explicit, but we could all kind of tell I needed to write each day, that was the project. So it could be kind of funny to watch me babble on about some completely boring topic for an entire issue.
But basically, none of that is relevant to a book. They need to be tighter, actually interesting. But it’s a dilemma what to cut. Like a very long passage about stupid old me learning to compost might have been hilarious in the moment, for all of the reasons described above. But the fact that I got so into gardening — and so did you guys — is obviously relevant. But is any of this particularly interesting two years later when and if any of us bother to sit down to read it?
Even though we won’t, let’s face it, we all just want this book so it can sit on our shelves and remind us of one of the few good moments of 2020. By the time this thing comes out (god willing) we’ll all be sort-of busy again, and, of course, all of 2020 was hella traumatic, so, like, are we ever going to want to re-read this stuff? No, of course not. I’m committing to the project because a bunch of you said throughout last year that “you should really turn this into a book,” and that was nice. And I’m committing to this project because 2020 will seem a lot less of a waste if, for the rest of my life, I can say “I got a book out of it,” but none of that makes for scintillating reading. But of course with all that material, there are definitely a few good bits.
And finally, the news. Like I’ve noticed this when I read older journals and diaries, like Anaïs Nin’s diary. I noticed it in a book I read just a few weeks ago. Major news stories — things that we’re all talking about — fade away far, far more quickly than we realize. Like sometimes within months, usually within a year or two. So looking back on GMHHAY, I might be going on and on about some current event that all of us were aware of at the time, but now, just a year later, the context might be completely gone. Not sure what to do about that. We’re keeping it for now, but something will have to be done. My instinct is to footnote, but maybe it’s time I broke free of my early 90’s Eggersian predilections.
Still, though, I would like it to be as good as possible, and representative of the year. This is why Lisa is such a brilliant collaborator, it’s exactly the sort of thing she’s so good at doing. An amazing editor and an uncanny boredom filter.
Apple has backed down on their CSAM Orwellian nightmare. Good news! Sort of. I mean, I’m glad they backed down, but they did this with Apple ATT, they’re “privacy” initiative. They said “oh yeah we didn’t think this through, hold please” and put it on hold just a few days before it was going to launch, after all of us freaked out and did all this work trying to figure out what they wanted. Then they left us in limbo for seven months, didn’t actually think things through any better, and launched it anyway, without bothering to enforce their arbitrary rules and making the entire ecosystem tilted to the benefit of the rule-breakers. So, yeah, not sooooper confident in Apple’s “pause” while they figure things out. Still, though, credit where credit is due.
The new Low album is coming out this week, and Alan from Low has an interview in Pitchfork about it. Two things I would like to say about this:
First, Alan’s pandemic hair is a lot better than mine.
Second, this is just a fantastic quote (regarding Low’s newfound love of distortion both analog and digital): “Maybe it’s revenge—I want to see technology break as much as it has broken me.”
Okay, final thing for today: Question for you all.
When I was a kid, in elementary school, gonna say, like, fourth or fifth grade, so, like, 1982 or so, my elementary school had this big competition. Basically, every class, or grade, or something (memory is hazy) was supposed to treat in some way a batch of popcorn kernals. And then we had this contest where we took one of those old-style hot-plate popcorn poppers, kept the lid off, and stuck it in the middle of the gym floor, and popped each classes, or grade’s (memory is hazy) popcorn kernels and let them pop out and measured how far they went. So the whole exercise was, theoretically, an exercise in science in the since that each class, or grade (memory is hazy) was treading the kernels in some way, so they might go different distances.
This is, manifestly, a dumb science experiment.
It was also different than a science “fair” in the sense that it was one big project the whole school collaborated on, though now that I think about it, it might have happened on the same day as the normal science fair.
I was telling Emma about this the other evening and as I was telling it I realized how weird it sounded, and she thought so too, so we started Googling it and while there are lots of popcorn experiments on the internet, even a whole website devoted to them, none of them involve distance, of course, why would they, because no one has hotplate poppers anymore (I mean, we do but we are weird). And the experiment seems so dumb.
And we’re wondering… was this a thing? Did other schools did this? Or did some weirdo teacher at Joy Elementary make this up and somehow convince everyone to try it out?
I’d tag the two people on here I went to Joy with — Susan and Raj — but that just seems mean.
Anyone? Any insight?
Joy Elementary was so cool. It was round. Best thing in the world for a kid who liked to stall. Need to go to the bathroom? Go the long way. It has an addition on it now, though. Not a perfect flying saucer like it was back in the day.
The gym had a balcony. I remember The World Eskimo and Indian Olympics being held there when I was a kid and watching a high kicker from the balcony and it was just the most amazing thing.
Joy Elementary, man. Haven’t thought about you in a long time. Except I’m always thinking about you.
Anyway, let’s do a mix. Moody and quiet mix. Mostly new. Except David Foster, hahaha oh god. Yeah. And perhaps the cheesiest Nick Cave song ever but one of my all-time favorites. Henry’s Dream is still the best Nick Cave album, right? Right? Oh the Jane Siberry song is old too, god, the Until the End of the World soundtrack really was a masterpiece. Might have to listen to it again today. I saw her at the Somerville Theater with my old friend Julie that was a great show. Did did not play Calling All Angels. It was a lot of weird covers, IIRC.
Okay. Let’s face this week. A short week, thankfully. I like short weeks. Four hour workweek for the labor class. Labor day, etc. etc. Talk soon!