Good morning. Hello. How are you? #567
Way too much about TV I don't know why, sorry. Also: solitary confinement and quakers, dreams, Tumblr, and happiness.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Happy Monday. Oh wait it’s Tuesday, LOL. Good news. Forgot it was a four-day week. That is exciting. Spent some time yesterday reading hypocritical Tweets from the like of Mitch McConnell talking about MLK. That was nice. This was a more appropriate thing to read:
Anyway. Yes. Life. Continuing. Week three of this funtimes diet. Lost 15 pounds so far. Progress. I drank on Sunday night — did a lovely Zoom with some friends like the old days, partied like it was April 2021. Wasn’t sure how that was going to go on the diet drug but I didn’t like not knowing, so I figured fuck it. It was fine. Hangover was unpleasant but no more than any other hangover these days. Luckily I didn’t have much to do yesterday, had gotten all of my weekend chores done, etc. So I just laid around and did mostly nothing, which is exactly a great way to spend a holiday.
Oh this is weird, though. In the middle of the night, apparently I got out of bed and decided I would rather sleep in the guest bed. Emma was up still, working. I did this somewhere round, like, four AM, I guess? I don’t remember doing it. I remember going to bed properly, and then I just… woke up in the guest room, with the sunrise, because I didn’t close the curtains. I was very confused I just got up and went back to my bed and back to sleep. And slept till like eleven, which was amazing. Because Jane was at grammys and it was a holiday and for one brief shining moment it was like I was young again, like 45 or something, before I had a kid and I had to wake up early every day. Glorious. Even if I was hung over.
Another productive thing I did this weekend: I also got the podcast done this week, if you are into that sort of thing, you weirdo.
Read the new New York profile of Joss Whedon, which everyone seems to hate. Emma said that it did nothing to redeem his reputation, and I think that’s certainly true. Makes it hard to believe he even wants his reputation redeemed. It read more like the dropping of a pin on a map, halfway along a journey. He wasn’t pitching a new project or anything, and good thing, since, well, it did not go particularly well for him. I wish he’d hurry up and do the work properly, since Disney is imminently going to reboot and probably fuck up Firefly, and I’d like him to at least get to a spot where they could hire him to solo-write the pilot and maybe the series book, alone, without going into the office. But he’s not there yet, I don’t think there was a single sorry in the whole piece.
As an aside, is it just me or should New York drop the Vulture brand? Not a fan.
Finished Succession last night, which was a deeply unpleasant experience and my god I am glad it’s done. I think that the season’s ending was, paradoxically, a bad season ending but would have been a fantastic series ending. But maybe that’s just me because it hurts to much to watch this show. Josh told me back when I was watching Season 2 so just watch it as a comedy, and that helped for a little bit, but it stopped working about halfway through, around the time of the ridiculous birthday party episode. It’s just very hard for me to watch a show where everyone is bad. It is, of course, phenomenally well acted, and a production marvel, so I can’t not watch it, but god, it hurts, it hurts.
I understand other people can watch this show and, like, laugh and enjoy it and not squirm uncomfortably and break out in actual sweats at the level of assholery and malevolence that’s on the screen. I understand this happens. But I can’t fathom it. I am absolutely unable to watch this show without squirming uncontrollably and getting very, very upset.
I will also say that I would have re-written the ending, or rather, added sixty seconds or so to it where Ken just said “god dad, you’re so predictable, we’re already minutes away from court in Delaware, there will be a temporary injunction in place by the end of the day, we’re walking out of this room to do press, and those two things will be enough to kill the deal.” That has the benefit of being the correct move, but also would have shaken Logan a bit, which, yeah, I don’t know, I suppose I want not for, like, structural or good plot reasons, but just because he’s such a huge dick and it’s so tedious watching all of these people pussyfoot around him and you viscerally want him to be punished. So what do I know.
Then to make things worse I spent all night dreaming about Succession, except it was in a sci-fi setting, on a luxury space liner that was flying to Neptune, except Neptune was kind of like Asgard in the MCU, with like a big flat cliff instead of a round planet. But it was still succession, and I was on team Ken and we were, like, stealing resources and building a separate luxury liner while keeping Logan and the bad guys in some sort of holodeck VR tunnel, and we were gonna take the whole crew and passengers in our new luxury space liner. Or something. Also that prismatic art at the exit of Fairbanks International Airport was involved.
You know, I keep saying “don’t put your dreams in GMHHAY, Rick, no one wants to hear about dreams,” but then, when I was editing the GMHHAY book, the parts with the dreams were actually pretty interesting, so I have decided to screw that rule, and talk about dreams, which is, like, breaking the first and prime directive rule of social interaction, but hey we’re 22 months into a pandemic there are no fucking rules, man.
Oh speaking of which, Lisa got me the edit to the GMHHAY book, I have it right here on my desktop. It doesn’t look too too bad, I bet I could get all the edits done in one, maybe two, solid days of editing. Of course, I don’t have two solid days, so it’ll probably take… about a week? But we are close. We are close.
Aubrey Plaza is going to be on the next season of White Lotus and that makes me very sad because I love Aubrey Plaza and I do not want to watch that show because it seems like it’s just a bunch of lothesome people doing awful things for our “enjoyment,” but like I said, I can’t actually enjoy things like that. Please please don’t tell me it’s amazing because then I’ll have to watch it and I’ll just have another Succession on my hands and I much rather watch TV that has, like, a single good person in it.
Oh and I watched the first three episodes of that Peacemaker show. I wasn’t going to, but then I realized that James Gunn was actually writing and directing it, not just showrunning, and on top of that Clint Mansell was doing the soundtrack, so I gave it a go. It was fine. There are multiple characters who are not 100% pure evil, so that is refreshing.
Now Emma and I are gonna watch The Expanse’s last season and then I guess maybe I’ll give that Station Eleven a spin? Emma is dubious. But people say it’s great? Yes? No?
I guess if we’re talking about consumed media, I should also mention I watched Jandek on Corwood, the 2003 documentary about the reclusive outsider artist musician Jandek, who for, like, thirty years released 1-3 albums a year and never did interviews and no one knew anything about him. Then in 2004 all that changed and he suddenly started playing live, and it was real weird and I’m not gonna lie a bit of a disappointment to lose the reclusiveness, but also good for him for playing live. I got to see him once which would have been an incomprehensible thing in the nineties. Actually yeah if I got to go back in time and tell my past self one thing maybe it’ll be “Jandek’s gonna tour. A lot.” That would have blown my mind as much as, like, Trump or a Pandemic and.. you know. Not stressed my past self out as much for twenty years.
Anyway I feel kinda bad for this documentary, it came out the year before Jandek unmasked himself and started playing live, and was a whole documentary about exactly the opposite of that. Unfortunate timing. Which is why I never watched it back then, maybe? But I figured I should, after watching that Daniel Johnston documentary. Never pass up a documentary about a Texan outsider folk musician.
It snowed on Sunday and it has stuck and there is still snow on the ground and it is very pretty, though I’m sure it’s a nightmare to drive on it. I took this lovely picture this morning at sunrise:
Jane and I did all the out-of-house chores on Saturday, before the snow. We did the recycling, then went to the storage unit to drop some boxes off, and the backup copy of the 2021 unexurgated journal, and pick up the box for an old iMac I’m gonna sell on eBay. Jane loved it, she gets out of the house, the neighborhood, so rarely. She got to ride around on the push cart at the storage unit. She is very good at wearing a mask, doesn’t even care.
Oh also Emma got Jane to poop in the potty again so maybe, maybe, we are making some progress on finishing up what is the longest potty training in the history of humanity. Fingers crossed.
There is a nice article in the New Yorker about Tumblr, and how it won’t die, and all of the things that make it uncool are what make it cool, for example how it has a non-algorithmic feed. When I was building the first sales decks for Tumblr, I highlighted this relentlessly: no algorithm, just a raw feed. Advertisers did not especially care, even though I tried to explain to them that people did, or were going to, resent algorithms. They generally just thought I was being pedantic, eventually I dropped it. Maybe we were a bit ahead of our time. I am happy to see them getting their due for their nice, pure, simple, non-algorithmic feed. At least Twitter now has the non-algorithmic feed as an option. One they’re always trying to turn off, but at least it’s there. Really does make things better.
I also learned this weekend that the Quakers dreamed up solitary confinement, thinking it was going to be a more humane form of punishment, so if you are ever looking for the absolute pinnacle of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, there you have it.
Then I told this to Flood and she told me she went to a haunted house at Eastern State Penitentiary and that it was the scariest thing ever and yeah, no, I absolutely would not have been able to handle that, just the concept gives me the shivers.
Lol the grocery delivery person just called to update me on my groceries and they caught me listenign to “Good 4 U” by Olivia Rodrigo.
Emma says this is the happiest January she has ever seen me, and that she’s known me through, like, ten or twelve “health months” now. That kind of struck me. I guess I am doing okay? I like my wife, I like my kid, I like my house. I am happier when I’m losing weight, I’m happy to not be consuming nicotine anymore. When I think about the news, or politics, which I still do all the time, I immediately don’t especially feel happy, but yeah, I guess day-to-day, it’s fine. Academically I very much wish I could, like, see my friends, but I seem to be in a decent mental place despite that, so, hey. That is nice. I instinctively want to pooh-pooh this, but. Man. A lot of people are doing not well, and I should probably be respectful and thankful for being sort-of happy. It’s not nothing.
Time for a covers mix. This was sort of easier because I received in the mail the Jagjaguwar 25th anniversary bundle and one of the pieces of vinyl was an albm called Join the Ritual, which is current Jagjaguwar artists covering songs by artists that have influenced the label through the years. So I’m kind of leaning on that a little bit. Scooter are a band that came out of the 80’s new wave band Celebrate the Nun that I have been listening to of late, and they do a great happy rave version of “Second Skin” by the Chameleons that I have been listening to way too much lately. I’ve also had this Callahan/Oldham/Grubs cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Nights of Santiago” on repeat as well. Just beautiful.
Talk soon! Enjoy the short week! If you had one. I hope you had one.
i have a very similar reaction to shows like Succession. it’s hard for me to accept that i don’t want to root for anyone. great writing and an incredible cast make Succession a joy to watch, but not easier to digest. BUT i also kind of like making myself uncomfortable so it works?