Good morning. Hello. How are you? #482
So much good new music, how do ceiling fans work, Fallon punching down, 650k covid deaths, Anne Applebaum's article.
Good morning there! Hello! How are you? It is Friday, that is nice. I do not have Friday off. I couldn’t remember if I did or not, since I took a day off every week for the rest of the year, but it looks like I figured one day off this week was enough, so no Friday off for me and no three-day weekend this weekend, boo. Alas.
That’s okay, though, because today there is a new Low album and there is a new Kacey Musgraves album. I am very excited. It’s 7:22 and I’ve already listened to the new Low album and it is magnificent. Man. What a band. What a career. I’ve been listening to this band for twenty-seven years, going to see this band live for twenty-seven years. My gig list says I’ve seen Low 37 times. I am probably forgetting a few. I never missed a single Low tour from their first tour (TT The Bears, Cambridge) through Ones and Sixes. I missed the Double Negative tour through a cascading set of unfortunate circumstances and obligations and I am very, very upset about it still. I reeeeally hope I don’t miss the Hey What tour, whenever it is, wherever it is. Both the Kacey and Low vinyl has shipped, but neither album made it to me by release day, which is unfortunate. Well, that’s probably not entirely true, judging by the tracking numbers I think the Kacey one might arrive today. Maybe I can hold out till it arrives. But the Low album only shipped yesterday from Eau Claire, WI which is, weirdly, where their merch company, Chairkickers, ships out of these days. Wonder if it has something to do with that little mini empire Bon Iver is building up there.
Here’s a photo of Low from 1999 at Mama Kin. I was not a very good photographer, or, rather, it was very hard to take photos in clubs in 1999 with actual film and no flash.
I did get a really good one of Dirty Three that night, but that is a story for another day.
Oh my god Spotify tells me there’s a new Saint Etienne album today too. This is insane. Insane. And an Andrew WK album. My god. What a release day.
Hey question for you. How do ceiling fans work. I mean, like, they have three speeds and switches on them for, like, direction, right? And you’re supposed to, like, change the direction of the thing with the seasons or something? Blowing down in the summer, up in the winter? Or is that backwards? Does anyone actually do this? Do you have ceiling fans? Do you, like, program them or whatever? It is occurring to me this is a gap in my knowledge base that is pointless and embarrassing and I bet the whole thing is pretty simple. Also why do they stick the little switch on the top of the fan what’s up with that? Shouldn’t it be somewhere I can reach it??
So Jimmy Fallon has a segment he does on his show called “do not play,” where he makes fun of musicians and albums and says not to play them. This is, of course, mean and petty and somewhat problematic from the getgo. But this week he decided to inlcude on the segment a legendary Peter Brotzmann album. Now, as you know, I am not a jazz lover, but I do like it when Jazz gets freaky and experimental, and Peter Brotzmann fits that bill. Fallon mocked Brotzmann’s 1969 album Nipples, which is by the Peter Brotzmann Sextet/Quartet, because one side was done with a sextet and the other with a quartet, so, you know. Apparently that’s problematic.
But the thing that really got me was that Peter Brotzmann, in 2014, did an album with Sonny Sharrock. As you may recall, I just learned about Sonny Sharrock a couple weeks ago. And the reason I learned about Sonny Sharrock is because of Questlove’s recent film The Summer of Love. And in the Summer of Love, Questlove doesn’t just, you know, show a couple seconds of Sharrock as part of a larger thing, he gets on screen, in his own documentary, to talk about Sonny Sharrock.
And there Questlove is, sitting next to Fallon, gamely making fun of Sharrock’s colleague, and the same music Sharrock makes. Like c’mon man! Not cool! Stick up for ole eighty-year old Peter, Questlove!
Spent a good chunk of yesterday listening to the first three Jane’s Addiction albums and, hey, you know what, those guys were a really good band. I love suddenly remembering how awesome Jane’s Addiction was. I love realizing, anew and again, that “Been Caught Stealing” isn’t even that bad of a song, you love the proselike nature of the lyrics, and in any case there’s absolutely no reason to tar and feather the band’s entire output because of that one song.
Emma and I saw a secret Jane’s Addiction show in an abandoned grocery store once, original lineup. My god, it was so, so good.
Ha that’s a funny idea I should just paste setlists into these emails more often. Don’t worry, I won’t do that. I’m just hurting for visuals today. We did go for a walk yesterday, though, my first full walk down the street to the cul de sac and home again since the injury two weeks ago today. I was definitely a little sore by the end, had to go slow, but nothing unmanageable. Progress. I just wish this bruise would fade it is so, so disconcerting.
And I guess this is just New Media Friday or some shit because also the new Matrix trailer dropped and I am very, very excited about it. I’m also very excited WB is releasing it on HBO now simultaneously. I like to think by December Jane will be vaccinated and I can go to a theater again but hahahah yeah right. Anyway, thank you WB for letting Dune and Matrix Resurrections have simultaneous release unlike Marvel, those bastards.
Whoops excuse me gotta go try and get a PS5 from Target.
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Yeah that didn’t work. Screwed up because I had an old credit card associated with my Target account, and by the time I updated it to Paypal, they were out. Oh well. Another day, another PS5 failure. Awesome.
SO we passed 650,000 deaths in the US from the Coronavirus. Fifty thousand since Biden took over. That is obviously a lot less than in 2020, but the number is creeping up. We are pushing 2,000 a day now. Seems safe to say we’ll pass 700,000 before the end of the year at this rate. And there’s still no word from the FDA or anyone on where we’re at with the vaccine for children. They said September for the results and here we are in September and we’ve heard nothing. It really is amazing, how little the government, the FDA, anyone, is telling parents of children under 12. Yes there’s vaccine hesitancy in the US but there are also a shit-ton of parents just sitting around waiting for news and it is maddening. Where’s ole Uncle Joe and his down home sympathy telling us how he knows we’re hurting and help is on the way?
Waah waaah woe is me all cooped up in my mansion.
I did have a hilarious thought this morning that once we do get Jane potty trained (god she’s taking forever), and once we finally can leave the house, Jane will probably confused and intimidated by those big institutional bathrooms with, like, stalls and stuff. She’ll just be used to our little ‘ole bathrooms. We will have to help. Won’t that be fun.
Anne Applebaum wrote a pretty compelling new article in the Atlantic, The New Puritans, about cancel culture. I say it was compelling because it was interesting to hear from all of these people who got “cancelled,” to hear their perspective, not because I’m convinced we have an epidemic of cancel culture. There are definitely a few people depicted in the article who have been “cancelled” that didn’t deserve it. But in the end, I found the article interesting, but not illuminating. It gets very weak in its explanations when it posits that this is some new thing in American history, I have a hard time believing that. I think of McCarthyism, I think of how it was a dirty word and a tar to be a “liberal” during the Reagan era, I think of all of the homosexuals who couldn’t say a god damn thing about it for decades, centuries. I think of the methodical “cancelling,” of thousands of people, with actual legal risk, systematic with lists, of the McCarthy era. And, she says this could happen to anyone, but all of her examples are academics, journalists, politicians. It would have behooved her to prove it could, like, actually happen to anyone? Show me a dishwasher or car salesman? Because I’m sure it’s happened to them, I’m sure one of them has been in the cancel spotlight for a second, and I can’t help but think she doesn’t show them because they are more or less fine now, back selling cars or washing dishes? Or maybe I’m wrong? I don’t know! Tell me!
Also it seems really weird, to me, that so many people “lost all their friends” over these incidents. Like, I know a couple people who have been cancelled and not a single one of them lost all of their friends? It seems like the people saying this literally had no friends except for their professional colleagues? I know that is probably kind of normal in the US, though, so.. yeah, I guess? But maybe, like, have some friends! Eh, whatever, that is probably speaking from privilege, I suppose some people just can’t have friends.
Finally, I think Applebaum did a good job explaining alternate things going on in these situations; that people are jealous, that people are careerists, and they’re taking out the competition. I think there’s probably some of that going on. But there’s another thing probably going on that she doesn’t touch, even though it’s obvious — a lot of these people are just assholes, and people took them down because they’re sick of working with assholes. Is this right? Maybe not. But it is an oversight to not wrestle with it in your comprehensive article about the phenomenon.
All right. Let’s do a playlist. Covers! Lots of covers! Weird covers! Boring covers! Straight-ahead covers! Destructive covers!
All right I am off to make some Jane-free breakfast. My breakfast will contain no Jane. We are out of Jane we have to go to the grocery store and get more Jane. Or she’s just at Grammy’s, learning about Tennis and the US Open, which I literally thought was over and happened like a month ago but what do I know about tennis. Everything I learned about tennis I learned from Agassi’s phenomenal autobiography Open. Strong recommend.