Good morning. Hello. How are you? #524
Morning sun, artistic gatekeeping, Skinny Girl Senuality for Female Intimacy, Scholastic is up 11% since that sexist article.
Good morning. Hello, it’s me: the only person in America expectantly waiting for another season of Westworld. How are you! I am good. I do really love the morning sun. A wise man once said “I’d see delight in the shade of a morning sun.’ It’s great. I am much happier in the mornings now that daylight savings time has ended. Also, the sun has moved out of Jane’s face in the morning and I don’t have to move her little clamp-on counter chair again. That is nice. BUT it is a huge bummer in the evening. We walked about as early as we could manage it yesterday, and by the end of the walk it was basically dark. And we’ll lose another ten minutes over the next six weeks until solstice. Actually, that is kind of amazing to me. Growing up in Fairbanks, I remember there were days we would lose seven minutes of daylight. But yeah, not a fan of the diminishing daylight in the evening.
Programming Note: Yes, please fill out our form for holiday cards even if we have your address from last year and you didn’t move. I know it’s a pain. But we are trying to solve this issue once and for all, moving to one of those systems that keeps track of it all and lets you change your address only when you need to, instead of me manually making a new Google Sheets doc each year, pasting in the old one in one tab, everyone adding in their addresses via a Google form in the other tab, then me manually going through and trying to figure out who moved and deleting the old ones, then messing with this janky-ass Google Docs plug-in to mail merge the addresses and print out the Avery labels, and then manually stick them all on the cards, and while we’re doing that, feel humiliated because Emma catches like six addresses that I didn’t catch moved, and now we have two addresses for you, and we don’t know which one is the new one and which one is the old one, so I gotta go back and open up the Google sheet and look. And then sometimes even infallible Emma misses one, and you get two cards, and it is embarrassing and looks like we don’t care. And yeah, having the printing company just print the addresses on the cards is going to feel somewhat more impersonal, but I’m pretty sure no one has ever received a card from us and thought “oh wow, they took the time to manually stick on the Avery label, that is so nice.” Once we stopped manually signing the cards, the jig was up and it was all downhill from there, but in our defense, most of you weren’t manually signing the cards by then either, we were one of the last to fall. Except for those of you who are still signing their cards, and my god, we do notice that, you are just saints, it really does mean a lot.
All right let’s see what do we have in our notebook of topics. Here is a comment by Lindsey Jordan, aka Snail Mail:
“With the least shade intended possible,” she continues. “I just take a lot of pride in the fact that I don’t have any help. I feel like it’s part of the genre. It’s not my place to say what people should and shouldn’t do. I just think that, if you’re gonna qualify it as indie, it should almost be a separate category – people that write their songs and people that don’t. I think it’s such a genre-defining difference, because it’s the hardest part.
“It feels crazy to me, to be on an independent label or something if you’re just performing the songs for an indie crowd – what, you’re like a performer, but not a writer, not an artist? I don’t know, it just feels like why even take the job if you don’t want to do half? If you call yourself a singer-songwriter, you might as well be a singer and a songwriter, you know? I take a lot of pride in the songwriting element of it, and that’s why I like to do it.”
I do very much like that she said “with the least shade intended possible,” so I will try to stick with that as well. Soo… Collaboration is now something to decry? I mean, this reads to me like the words of someone who could use some therapy and has some trust issues? Now, I am not deep into the music biz anymore, maybe there is some trend of cool, hip indie artists getting people to write songs for them right now, which would be fine, but also not crediting them, which would be problematic, especially if they are not compensating them properly. But that strikes me as a labor issue, not an artistic issue. Is Jordan saying her bass player is not an artist? Aretha Franklin? Whitney Houston? I mean, yes, she is explicitly saying exactly that. This is a very weird gatekeeping sort of POV. And competitive. What difference does it make to Jordan if a bunch of people want to get together and perform songs they didn’t write? And what business is it of hers if other people find that art, and find that moving? Just so weird. And disappointing.
I dunno. I mean, she tried to not mis-speak. It is hard. That one little comment, challenging whether they were artists. That colored an otherwise pretty benign comment. Plus, of course it’s good to be proud of your accomplishments. I will forget about this now. Not worth getting bent out of shape over.
I need a Twitter reset. Like I want to unfollow everyone and start over. This is partially because I follow waay too many accounts that say the same things. Like fifty tech review accounts that are all telling me that the new Mac is great. Thanks. And fifty accounts that are all telling me that the Republicans are being disingenuous about Critical Race Theory, okay, great. But I follow so many accounts that doing this manually is going to be a giant pain. I wish there was a reset. I’ve been unfollowing willy nilly for a week or so, just unfollowing anyone who says anything mildly annoying, but of course that’s not the way to go about it. That will produce an echo chamber. I don’t really know the solution here. Advice si welcome.
It has been twenty days since The New York Times wrote a condescending, sexist article about the new Chairman of Scholastic, Inc. You will recall I purchased stock in Scholastic on the day that article was published, because it was sexist and it missed me off. Et voila:
That’s me, professional stock picker. Stick with me kid, to the moon.
Smart move, CVS, putting the chocolate right by the vaccine station. Use it like they use it in Harry Potter. Feel better after your depressing interaction with America’s medical system. But really, it’s not as good as this product:
I mean that might be the best brand extension ever.
Holy shit I was just gonna wrap it up early but just saw the news about GE “splitting into three different units, ending conglomerate for good.” Well, fantastic. Jack Welch was a jerk. Burn it down.
OK let’s do a mix. Important news: there is now exactly one Adorable song on Spotify, but luckily it’s one of the best ones, so we are kicking off this mix with it in celebration. God, what a perfect song, what a perfect album. So brief, so bright, Adorable. And I am really enjoying the new War on Drugs, which I guess makes me some old dude who likes Jam Bands now, but it’s really great. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Single Gun Theory lately, they really were a great band I wonder what happened to the people in that band that might be worth exploring today. Hrm, actually, their Discogs page pretty nicely wraps it up: “Since then, Pete and Kath have both started families, and in 2002 Pete moved to Singapore with his wife and two young daughters. At present the band is not actively working together. Pete is involved in various projects unrelated to Single Gun Theory, including production and co-writing with other artists.”
Well I guess I can just add them to my list of dream reunions. Maybe they can come to America and tour with the Underground Lovers. Oh! My Underground Lovers shirt arrived in the mail from Australia. I am very excited.
Talk tomorrow!
Good morning. Hello. How are you? #524
please tell me you read the package on that skinnygirl pill bottle—WHAT DOES IT DO?!
(i'd be so embarrassed to buy that. would rather prep H.)