Good morning. Hello. How are you? #526
Thank you for your kind words, evil insurance companies. Wait, no, those are two separate topics, there were no kind words from the evil insurance companies.
Good morning. Hello. How are you today? I am doing all right, thanks for asking. It turns out I have today off, who knew? That is exciting. Except I sort of planned my time with all of these tasks I need to get done that require me to be in front of a computer, and now that it’s a day off, I don’t want to spend it in front of a computer, but I guess I have to, or at least part of it. Hopefully I can get outside into the garden for a couple hours today. We’re having a lovely indian summer (god is that phrase cancelled, probably huh?) and I want to be out there while I can.
Programming note: Regular reminder to please fill out this form if you would like a holiday card from us.
Thank you all for your kind words about Bill. It all feels fake, of course. I mean, I haven’t talked to Bill in more than a decade. We were never that close. But he had a huge impact on me and I respected him deeply, and the suicides of men like Bill effect me deeply. It is not “my loss,” so much as his family’s loss, but I understand the sentiment and it means a lot to me. I always feel weird about writing about these situations, but I figure that these people meant something to me, they deserve to be remembered, and their loss is something I am feeling viscerally, so what in god’s name are we supposed to write about if not those things? I also feel very weird sending out these vibes into people’s inboxes. Last year when I lost my dad, and Andy passed, and Marc passed, I was only posting these on Facebook. Now I am emailing them to people and… yeah it feels like you’re sending a sadness bomb to someone and that is not super awesome. So, I apologize for that.
It’s also very strange when you’re going through this sort of thing to think about the fun projects in your life. Like I’m working on an absurdist project with one of my best friends and it is deeply rewarding at the moment, even if at its core the project is pretty stupid. And I have an essay coming out about Taylor Swift tomorrow that I need to edit, and that feels somewhat silly too. I wonder how Weird Al handles the deaths of friends. “Shit I am so sad but I really gotta finish the bridge to ‘Amish Paradise’.” That must be some profound cognitive dissonance.
But of course working on the fun projects while sad is more fun than working on the not-fun projects while sad. Yesterday at 12:45 our insurance broker was like “yo all your insurance is ending on November 21st and you need to fill out all of these questionnaires in the next 48 hours in order to renew” and dumped upon me something like 100 pages of questionnaires I needed to fill out in order to renew, like, 10 different insurance policies. I mean, do Costello & Sons know that we take Veteran’s day — and the following Friday — off at Timehop? No, I suppose not. But this was a horrible task even if I were going to be working the next two days. I was very annoyed.
And! We have another insurance broker that we’ve been meaning to switch to, one in our orbit and not inherited, and so I’m like “yeah screw these guys they should have been warning me about these policies ending like a month ago. Time to switch brokers,” but, of course, there’s like barely any time, and I will probably be making even more work for myself by going through this whole application process again with a second broker. And it’s a giant hassle for her, I’m sure, for me to dump all of this in her lap. Emma pointed out this is probably why they gave me no time, and that annoys me even more.
So here I am, on my day off, and I have to work on insurance policies, Taylor Swift essays, and whatnot in front of a computer instead of getting my Birdies Beds filled with more soil so I can finally lay down my cover crops. Grrr.
My sister texted me two days to tell me I owe her one because she was at a meeting at Raven Landing, the elderly community where my mother lives, and management was telling all the residents about how they are losing their cable and going internet-streaming only, and how if they want traditional TV channels, they have to subscribe to YouTube TV or Hulu Live TV Streaming. Except they didn’t recommend Hulu they recommended YouTube and something called Philo what is up with that. Anyway, it must have been hilarious, that meeting. I can’t imagine. That’s gonna be us in twenty years. “No you can’t use a browser on an LCD monitor anymore. You have to connect your crypto wallet to your VR headset, go into the Metabookverse, navigate to the vintage arcade storefront, deposit a coin, and there you can open up Chrome and see Facebook, lol, you’re old.”
Steve Albini gave an interview wherein he said “I'm overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit.” It was pretty good! An old white man doing the work, well done. One thing he said that resonated with me was that back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, we thought these battles had been won. “We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.” He was wrong, he admits it. But, man, that resonates with me. If, when I was a kid, you told me this is where race and gender relations would be thirty years later, well, my god. I would have been shocked and depressed. Progress was being made and it was inherently assumed by many (not all, not all) that that progress would continue.
This, too, I really felt:
I wish that I knew how serious a threat fascism was in this country. At that time [the 1980s under Reagan], there was a phone-in hotline for the America First committee that you could call; they were on the South Side of Chicago, and it would play a racist diatribe as the phone message. Everyone in our circle was dismissive of those as being these ridiculous country bumpkins. There was a joke made about the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers. That’s how we all perceived them — as this insignificant, unimportant little joke. I wish that I knew then that authoritarianism in general and fascism specifically were going to become commonplace as an ideology.
Some fun news: The Republicans were really hoping that John Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, was going to run for Senate. They view New Hampshire as the easiest seat for them to pick up in their by-no-means-guaranteed battle to take the senate. But Sununu said no, and he didn’t just say no, he said it publicly, without warning McConnell first. “Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott found out the same way everyone else did that their top recruit to help secure the Senate majority was a no-go: They saw it on a local television livestream.” Fantastic. Anyway, this is your reminder that the Republicans taking both houses is by no means a given. Their senate candidates, especially, have been garbage so far. Let’s not give up the race without running it.
If you are looking for something to listen to today, let me recommend to you my friend Aaron Perrino’s new album collaboration with Steve Lord, of the Dirty Bangs. The album and group are called Aaron and the Lord. It is a great record, and features Tanya Donelly of Belly and the Throwing Muses and Mike Bethmann of Tugboat Annie. In a bit of Boston rock synchronicity, it is mixed partially by Paul Kolderie, who also mixed the Bullet Lavolta record I posted for you yesterday, on which Bill played Bass. Also this cover is great:
My copy of Soup Club arrived, a cookbook of soup recipes, illustrated by my old Alaskan friend Willow Heath. I don’t know who this Caroline Wright person is, but I will trust Willow that she knows her shit about soup. Plus the illustrations are lovely and don’t they just make you want soup? SOUP.
Mmm soup.
Hrm I think that’s about all I got for today. I’m excited about this four-day weekend. Gonna do a podcast this weekend. Gonna watch Shang Chi and the Bond movie finally. I am super pissed at Disney for their movie releasing approach this year. Oh I re-watched Dune last night. What a… I mean it’s kind of crazy that movie got made. Part of me wants to be, like, “oh whomever didn’t let Denis film two parts at once should be fired this movie was so obviously going to be huge,” but also…. it’s a very impenetrable movie if you don’t know the books! The whole thing with Paul’s visions and the way they don’t actually happen is super confusing! To see all these visions of Jamis and Paul being friends, of Jamis being a mentor to Paul, then we meet the actual Jamis and Paul has to kill him. It is super confusing! What does it mean! And the way there is a weird voice chanting to Paul in a barely comprehensible tone weird words like “Kwisatz Haderach” that you can barely understand and what does it mean! The movie expects a lot from its audience, and it leaves you hanging. The last shot is particularly abrupt. No zoom out, no pan over the vast desert, just a very workman like shot of some people walking up a hill. Weird. I still love it, it draws you in in a weird, compelling way. But it is definitely an odd film and gets more odd. Also there should have been more Shadout Mapes I love Shadout Mapes.
Okay let’s do a mix. W Hotel lobby mix! Man I want to stay at this hotel so bad. I would, like, never leave. What a cool hotel lobby. Mostly old here, some new stuff, including CANNONS which I love and just learned about from Henry, via papa Nick. Thank you, Henry. I am taking music recommendations from children now and I’m here for it. I still can’t remember who told me about BLACKSTARKIDS but thank you thank you thank you they are so good. I actually heard this 1998 song by Chet Faker in a hotel lobby once in the Lower East Side. So, you know, these mixes are plausibly real. If you are a friend of mine opening a hotel please let me program the music in the lobby. Just kidding I don’t know anyone who starts hotels. Oh wait! That’s not true! I know one. I AM COMING FOR YOU.
Okay let’s turn to FUN INSURANCE TIMES NOW YES YES. Talk tomorrow!