Good morning. Hello. How are you? #520
Elections, Cop26, Spiritualized, Bookshop.org and ebooks, some crypto stuff, god help me, the Caro collection and my eternal dreams for Caro's age son Jacobs to be published someday.
Good morning! Hi there. I’m on my way I’m making it… Big Time. I always liked that “hi there” at the beginning of Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time.”
The groceries came and they are out of 92% dark chocolate everywhere in the area. It is sad. I miss my extra-bitter chocolate. They’ve been out for months now.
The former CEO of the Carlyle Group beat the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and yeah, that sure does seem like America for you. Apparently the lesson we’re supposed to take away from this is that it’s a “real” issue that lots of Americans object to their children being taught actual facts in school. We’re also supposed to take away from this that the Dems should have passed a bill in the US Congress, but also that the progressives are to blame for not passing the bill, but also a bill won’t get passed now, because Joe Manchin is suddenly going to decide that being obstructionist is going to pay off. The thing that continually boggles my mind about American politics is all of that is probably, somehow, true, because every time I think “yeah that doesn’t make any sense,” it goes ahead and happens anyway. It really is amazing. I never know what to think. Though I could have told you that Minneapolis’ defund-the-police ballot initiative was going to fail.
The crazy thing about this whole CRT thing is that it doesn’t really, effectively matter. It doesn’t matter because Republicans have so effectively gutted our schools. But suddenly they care about the thing they gutted. That gives away the game, right there. But in any case, it doesn’t really matter. Kids learn history from TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr and historical dramas like American Crime Story, so the joke’s on you, Republicans.
I should be depressed about these election results, but I’m not, really. I don’t think any of this helps Trump, which is my main concern. Youngkin outperformed Trump by a ridiculous amount, and while he sucked it up and let Trump waltz in and pretend to help (god it’s just like when Jane tries to help and Emma and I both say helping!), he just proved he doesn’t need him. Trump will claim to be kingmaker, but so what? The evidence from both VA and NJ is that non-Trump republicans do better than Trump.
COP26 is going on and I suppose I should talk about that, too, but so far they haven’t really given us much to talk about, have they? I sorta feel ambivalent about COP26 like I feel like the elections last night. Like yeah, no, I don’t expect much from COP26 but also I have sort of, occasionally, been feeling glimmers of hope about the climate crisis now and again of late. We haven’t reduced emissions enough as a species, but we have reduced emissions. That is impressive. And yeah, some of that is because of the pandemic, but it’s still the first time in human history this has been done. And while the main story about the COPs in general, about climate summits and accords in general, is that countries don’t hit their targets, occasionally they do hit their targets, and occasionally they miss but not by a lot. I will be super happy if all these countries come out of COP26 and announce some big agreement, but I’m not holding my breath. Fundamentally the most important thing right now is for the US to pass this freakin bill, and I think last night made passing that bill more likely, not less.
Also as I wrote that paragraph, Kornacki just tweeted that Murphy just pulled ahead in NJ. That’s something, I suppose.
Also something is the fantastic new Spiritualized single that came out yesterday, “Always Together With You.” This has all the makings of being one of those kinda samey-love songs Jason does like “I’m your Man” that’s on every album, but it seems like something clicked with Jason in the pandemic, and this one is a different beast. Fantastic. Huge. Plays with dynamics in a way he hasn’t done since “Let it Flow.” I was telling my friend Gareth yesterday that it makes me decry the quality of every stereo in my house, I want to listen to it so loudly. But I figured out how to listen to it as perfectly as possible, buying the lossless version, pumping it through out via Thunderbolt into my Clarett and listening on headphones and it was so, so fantastic. Also might be my favorite cover art yet.
There are US tour dates, but none in LA, SF or the entire east coast yet. There IS a stop at the Scoot Inn (!!!) in Austin on April 1st. Might need to buy a ticket to that one to be safe. What a crazy-ass venue to see Spiritualized in. It would be my twenty-ninth Spiritualized show. I still think of them as my all-time favorite band. I feel like the albums have been spottier the last decade or so, but every one has a couple of gems on them, and occasionally whole albums, like Songs in A&E, are fantastic. This new song is better than anything on And Nothing Hurt, though, so that makes me very, very excited.
PSA: There is a limited edition box version of the album that only seems available on the Spiritualized official site. Also, a coffee cup. Jason loves coffee cups. I have so many Spiritualized coffee cups.
Some productive things I did yesterday:
I finally took the plunge and set up a MyMustReads account at Bookshop.org, downloaded the MyMustReads e-reader app, and bought an ebook from Bookshop.org/MyMustReads. That branding is confusing, that flow is confusing, eBooks still seem to be, like, a red-headed stepchild on Bookshop.org, but that makes sense since, you know, the platform exists to support bookstores, and I suppose bookstores are not the biggest fans of eBooks. But I am a big fan of eBooks, and the Kindle App has been Amazon’s killer app, keeping me in their ecosystem, and I resent it. And I’m sure as shit not switching to the Apple app, and I guess I could have gone with Barnes and Noble, but I know and like Andy from Bookshop.org, though I guess I don’t know anything about this MyMustReads company. Will investigate. In any case, I’m sure they’re better than Amazon. It’s a beta test. Hopefully it will work, out.
I also set up a CoinBase account yesterday because why not I guess. I wanted to see the UX flow. Actually what happened is this cam girl I follow on Twitter for some reason, who knows why, I mean why would you ever follow a cam girl on Twitter, anyway, this cam girl made a joke about how you should be buying these weird, obscure cryptocoins right now, and I figured fuck it, this whole thing is so loathesome and absurd it makes perfect sense that some random Cam Girl be giving investment advice (even though she said “I am not giving investment advice!”) So I set up the account, but apparently CoinBase is not the place you go to buy and sell weird obscure cryptocoins, you gotta stick to the popular ones, so that was a bummer. I dig around a bit and found the three exchanges that sell these weirdo coins, checked the first one, and it did not offer 2FA of any kind so, thus ended my fun wacky time in the crypo world trying to buy FLOKI. Also spent about 30 minutes looking at OpenSea to make sure I wasn’t missing anything with NFTs and, wow, that is some boring-ass art. I mean, WTF! I am completely stumped. It is like sticker collecting in the 3rd grade. Someone mentioned Nifty Gateway as an artier alternative, so I’m checking that out, and it does seem better, but. Yeah. I remain unimpressed.
Someone ought to NFT those cherubic baby angels the whole country got obsessed with in the 80’s remember those? Rafael or something? They were everywhere. We really have not progressed artistically as a society I guess. Except now it burns a bunch of carbon and breaks the world on top of it.
Jonathan, co-founder of Timehop, suggested we oughta NFT our collection of Abe drawings and now I am kinda tempted. They really are fantastic drawings, and exactly adaptable to NFTs. But.. groan. But also what if they make millions hahaha. HAHAHA.
Also just FYI I am clearly the last sucker in so you should probably sell now.
I also fixed my printer, which had been offline for, god, I don’t know, a week? Maybe two?
And I paid the registration on our Mazda. This is not the one I was talking about a few months ago, this is the other one. It would be so cool if a state, any state, let you pay all your car registrations at once. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just, like, pro-rate on one car to have it match the deadline of the other car and then go from there? That would be so cool.
The Robert Caro collection is now permanently on display at the New York Historical Society. I want to go so badly. Also I am hopeful that this is a first step to finding the lost hundred-plus thousand words cut from The Power Broker about Moses’ battles with Jane Jacobs regarding the Lower Manhattan Expressway he wanted to plow throuh SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown. Caro claims they are lost, but also that he saved carbon copies of every page he typed and just donated them to the New York Historical Society. He’s never really given any indication he’s put serious effort into finding them, and doesn’t seem especially concerned about it. But of course those pages seem insanely interesting: a battle of titans. Shit they have made operas about it. Documentaries. And here we have one of the most renowned authors in America, who took history’s first pass about it, and he can’t be arsed to dig through the archives and make sure he really doesn’t still have a copy. I mean, I don’t blame him, dude is 83 and has a book to wrote, but having the collection safely in the hands of professionals gives me hope that someday, maybe by 2040, we will see these pages.
And after work and dinner I played a bunch of No Man’s Sky. We skipped our walk because Emma was feeling a bit rough from the Booster. Plus it was her night with Jane and then she wanted to do work during our sacred TV time so she could go to sleep early. So I got a nice, long run in there. Really perfecting my supply lines to manufacture Stasis Chambers at high quality. Made about a hundred million units yesterday in two hours, which is about how much I’d made playing the game for a month, so, yeah. On to something.
I tried to take a photo of Jane’s eye in the sunlight yesterday. They really are the most extraordinary color. Mostly like her mother’s amazing pale blue eyes, but she got a little bit of my grey. This is a terrible photo, but it catches the eye in the sunlight. She was not a cooperative subject. She wanted to press the button. But man. Look at that color.
Mix time. Depressing mix. I don’t know why, I’m not feeling depressive this week. But it was almost done, it’s a good mix, it is topical because it has Spiritualized on it, and I don’t have a lot of time here. Enjoy! Or, you know, try to. Maybe don’t listen to this one if you are feeling a bit raw right now. Trigger warning, most definitely.
Please accept this formal expression of thanks and farewell for reading today’s missive. I shall return tomorrow.