Good morning. Hello. How are you? #531
Sad Girl Autumn, Trudeau conspiracies, Butthurt Elon, sad Toyota, Y2K Time Capsules, PANYNJ committees.
Good morning, there, fellow traveller. How are you? Everything going okay? Hello Thursday. I have a zit on my nose. I’m listening to the new Endless Boogie album. I learned about these guys when Aug, Ben Hass and I went to Camber Sands for the Slint ATP and Endless Boogie played. They’re great. The first song on this new album is 22 minutes long and, as someone pointed out to me yesterday, ends with a fade out. Come on that’s just marvelous.
Today’s my last real day of work for, like, ten days? That is exciting. Also I gotta get my grocery situation in order. I have a hunch the world is going to run out of certain thanksgiving necessities this year. And by “the world” I mean “the three grocery stores I go to.”
Programming note: Please fill out this form if you would like a holiday card from us! That’s a thing I gotta work on tomorrow: getting this list in order, personally bugging a few people from last year’s list that we know moved.
Oh hey I just sold a Friends of Dean Martinez CD on Discogs. Gonna be a great day. Discogs sales as superstitious harbingers of pleasant days I am into it. This is my 989th order since I started selling on Discogs. My first order was in August of 2015. It was New Order’s Technique, on DAT, which I have regretted since and recently rebought. Alas. But the second order was Echo and the Bunnymen’s Crystal Days, three Bauhaus CDs and an A Certain Ratio CD. I’m okay with those still. Scanning the first 50 orders, I only feel regret at the Coil Hellraiser themes, the Happy Flowers’ Oof and His Name is Alive’s Brown Sugar. Not too bad. I probably should not have looked at this.
Tried to buy Tears for Fears tickets yesterday in the presale, but I couldn’t find a presale code, you had to buy a copy of the album to get a code, but I had already ordered a copy of the album, and in any case, Twitter was filled with people saying they weren’t getting their codes. Presales used to be Amex or Chase but now they’re CITI and I can’t keep up with this nonsense, and in any case, it’s not like presales really matter much at amphitheater shows. Still, I would like to get that squared away. I think we’re gonna go to Boston for it. Harborlights, that’ll take me back. I hope they still have champagne. I also got tickets for Snail Mail at Cat’s Cradle on my birthday, so I guess I have forgiven her for her disparaging remarks about musicians not being artists.
Moving on. Let’s do a news round up day!
Sad girl autumn! Taylor Swift, not content with releasing two new versions of “All Too Well” this week, has released a third new version, “All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version) - Recorded at Long Pond Studios”. That is the name of the song. Anyway Bryce from The National recorded it his very, very nice studio with Jon Low. But apparently “Sad Girl Autumn” is a thing and there are more than one compilations called Sad Girl Autumn that Taylor and Lorde and Billie Eilish and all these other people are on and I am not sure what’s up with that. Anyway, it is a moody, sad re-recording of the ten minute version, so hey, that’s fun. Feels like maybe she could have waited a week. But hey when your ten minute song gets 31 million streams on Spotify in five days, why not release a second version I guess.
Elon Musk is butthurt that the Dems are passing a bill that gives a larger EV credit to electric vehicles that were made with union labor. The dude literally told Bernie he thought he was dead last week, has made a habit of pissing on Dems for taxes and is all upset that they aren’t going to just lay there and let him keep pissing on them without doing anything. Call the waaaaaambulance, Elon. The bill isn’t passed yet, so Elon, along with very cool and logical partners in environmental activism, Republican governors, are waging a PR campaign saying that the Union-focused tax credit is bad for the environment, because if there’s one thing that Republican governors are known for is their deep, passionate concern about climate change.
I’m so ridiculously happy about the union requirement. First off, unions are awesome, I love unions. A union is basically responsible for me going to college. Secondly, it’s exactly the sort of aggro decisiveness that we always profoundly wish the Dems would do and they never do. It’s just fantastic. It’s real money, too. My god the F-150 lightning is going to sell so many trucks.
Toyota is in on it too, because even though Toyota uses union labor in Japan they don’t here. Toyota has pretty much shit the bed, huh? Used to be a leader in this field but just sort of gave up. I saw a tweet yesterday that was like “if you ever wondered what happened to Nokia with how they ended up losing the cell phone industry that they once dominated, just look at Toyota, it’s happening in real time right now” and that seems about right.
Ha I was just trying to find that Tweet from last night to link to it, but turns out a lot of people on Twitter are equating Nokia and Toyota.
In somewhat more positive news, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has formed a new committee to explore alternative options for mass transit to Laguardia. Ding dong the Airtrain is dead. Of course, this committee is going to run into all of the problems every other committee and exploration into the problem is going to run into, which is that the obvious solution is to extend the NM from Astoria Ditmars or the RN from Steinway street, like literally no other possibilities make even the slightest bit of sense, and both of these solutions are going to be monstrously expensive and done in the face of massive, rampant NIMBYism. Where Cuomo failed is he should have used is scary bully tactics to say he was going to plow another 3 lanes through their neighborhoods, get them all pissed off, and then retreat to a subway as a “compromise.” But yeah, it’s good that we’re starting this process again, but it will now be at least three years and then we will learn that there are no good options and we will still be without any mass transit to LGA. I suspect it’ll be at least a decade. But at least we did not get the stupid useless Airtrain.
Kacey Musgraves has released a cover version of Coldplay’s “Fix You” (and not, sadly, “Clocks” or “Trouble”) for Chipotle, which is actually kind of a weird and horrifying sentence to write, but its a pretty good cover and I guess I will let the whole thing slide.
My friend Doug alerted me to the existence of a conspiracy theory that Justin Trudeau is, in fact, the son of Fidel Castro and I am super into it. I started the article for a good laugh and by the end I was like “hrm, yeah, you know, insofar as I do not care about this topic and my personal belief of it will cause no one else harm and it’s not like I’m going to testify in court to it, I am willing to believe this nonsense. Checks out.”
Finally, James Ivory, of Merchant-Ivory fame, creators of some of the greatest movies of all time (ahem Room With a View) has a new autobiography out, Solid Ivory, and I think one of you should read it and text to me all of the good bits because I am very interested in this, but not quite, just not quite, interested enough to read it, and in any case, I am stuck reading the new David Graeber/David Wengrow book for, like, the next three months of my life because I am a very low reader these days.
Talked to my mom last night, apparently someone gifted her a “Y2K time capsule” for some reason — the reasons weren’t exactly clear, as Jane kept saying “what does mute mean? What does Add Call mean?” But the gist is it’s some wacky Y2K time capsule that they made back then and, I guess have since decided that Y2K wasn’t really that interesting and they don’t want it anymore. It is not an unopened time capsule – like I guess they have opened it and decided “yeah this is boring,” but instead of throwing it away have somehow foisted it off on my mom, who is now foisting it off on me, which seems absurd except yes, yes, mom, I actually do want some stranger’s un-capsuled Y2K time capsule, that is exactly something I would want, thank you very much for thinking of me. Also it seems that she is organizing a giant thanksgiving dinner at her elderly community home for all of the thanksgiving orphans and there are, like, 30 people coming now, so that is very nice. I’m gonna have to go up there next summer, I think. Bring Jane. Four and a half is old enough that Jane should remember it, right? I want her to remember it.
Okay let’s do a mix. Got a post rock mix for you today. It’s only seven songs. It has two songs nearing twenty minutes. But it is awesome. Today’s a good day to rock out freak out right?
One week till Thanksgiving! Are you excited? I am excited. I love Thanksgiving.
Endless Boogie! Yeah!
That Castro/Trudeau theory is... plausible!