Good morning. Hello. How are you? #640
Middling TV, IPO windows, Delta Cheapskating, Young Southpaw collaboration, etc. etc.
Good morning, there, friend, how is your Thursday going? I hope all is swell. I would like to start off by thanking whomever it was that recommended the YouTube channel Justin Hawkins Rides Again, the YouTube channel of Justin Hawkins, singer of the Darkness. I can’t remember who recommended this last week. I searched my email because in my memory it was via email, but no luck. It was probably through one of the 20 or so messaging apps we’re all forced to use because modern life is rubbish. I was skeptical, but you were right. It’s a great channel. It’s very GMHHAY-like. Ramblings about art and life with no set agenda, perhaps a little bit more consistently music-focused than this periodical, but all in all a great life diary. A+ would recommend.
Is TV boring right now? Is it me? I feel like TV’s gotten boring. We finished Moon Knight last night, at least it got better at the end, but still, glad that’s done. Now we don’t really have anything to watch, except for Old Enough and Wellington Paranormal, which are both short and we just throw on at the end of the evening if we need a cheer-up for some reason, because modern life is rubbish and you often need a cheer-up these days. Anyway, it’s been days of us not really having anything new to watch and maybe I’m just getting too picky, but I come up with some reason why I don’t want to watch a show every time. Emma points out that we’ve had some great shows recently, Severance, Morning Show, Russian Doll, Outer Range seems really good (though it is getting a bit too chaotic), and shit, I even like the new Halo. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten more picky? But I definitely feel like the “golden age of television” that we were in is drawing to a close. Is it a coincidence that this is happening in synch with the stock-market decline of Netflix? Mayhaps.
Guys I feel like our window for plotless Sci-fi is closing. Last few years? Those desperate streamers would greenlight anything. All we needed was someone in “the biz” to pitch it and I bet we could have gotten it made. But something’s changing. It feels like studios are getting picky again, which of course means that TV shows will get worse? Probably?
Happy belated May the Fourth, by the way. I am excited for Obi Wan, not gonna lie. I hope it’s better than The Book of Boba Fett. I mean, The Book of Boba Fett had a lot good about it. But it also had those dumb mods. I love Robert Rodriguez on paper. On paper he is so cool and I once went to a dinner at Troublemaker studios in Austin and that place is so cool and I love his independence and his F-U to the Directors’ Guild and all that (still not sure how he got away with directing a Disney property without being a member but whatever), and I like a lot of his films but also… those mods. But anyway, Obi Wan looks great, should be a good time. Fingers crossed.
Also, Rian Johnson posted this picture yesterday which is just great:
And Happy Cinco de Mayo too. Man. Lotta holidays first week of may.
Speaking of windows, what’s up with IPO windows? I mean, it just seems weird, right? That all the companies, regardless of their financial health, just decide “yeah, no, not a good time for an IPO” and then change all their plans, and spend years more as a private company because of, essentially, fashion. I mean, it’s a paradox, innit, in the sense that if all of these people and companies decide it’s a bad time for IPOs, then I guess it is a bad time for IPOs, but it just seems… dumb. It seems like more evidence sitting there, in plain sight, that capitalism is inefficient and dumb and not the perfect machine so many people try to pretend it is. Also today there is an IPO! Only like the second biggie of the year, since everyone decided IPOs are not cool right now. Baush and Lomb. It’ll probably go fine. Hats off to you, Baush and Lomb, you one hundred and sixty-nine year-old contact lens maverick. Show the world how it’s done.
I got an email from Delta yesterday that I had to read like a legal contract but essentially, if you parse the thing really carefully, it says that it is limiting when you can go into the Delta Sky Lounge. From what I can gather, they have sold too many memberships, done too many American Express biz dev deals and the clubs are always too fucking crowded with sad people who are obsessed with free booze and free finger foods, and rather than, you know, limit the number of people who have Sky Lounge memberships, they are going to make weird, complex rules about when you can actually enter the club to which you have a membership. They didn’t used to care about this shit at all, but I know that right before the pandemic, they started caring about certain things. I tried to go to the Sky Club in Seatac in late February 2020, but I was on an Alaska Airlines ticket so they wouln’t let me. That didn’t use to be a thing, but in 2020, at least, it became a thing. This meant I had to wander around all of Seatac like a zombie, for like 10 hours, basically touching every surface in the airport as I walked laps, while Covid was known to be in the airport and then I got mysteriously so sick in a horrible way that I have never felt before a week later, but hey, an antibody test in, hrm, I don’t know, September 2020 told me I didn’t get Covid but to this day I am skeptical and I blame Delta. Anyway, now they are saying you can’t go into the club when you land at an airport, even if you landed on a Delta flight, unless you have a connecting flight.
Now, I’m no frequent flier anymore because flying is an environmental catastrophe and an assult on your humanity, but literally like 50% of the value of a Sky Club membership for me has been so I can go in and pee after a plane lands.
I don’t even know why I keep paying for this membership. I hate flying these days. And now I’ll hate it even worse without the mask mandate. If I never set foot on a plane ever again I would be fine with it. This is a very sad state to be in, for someone who worked at an airport, whose father worked for Pan Am and at an airport for more than 20 years, whose uncle was a fighter pilot and whose grandfather (almost) singlehandedly converted an Alaskan bush charter flight company into an actual, honest-to-god (almost) major US airline.
In other news, Aug Stone is releasing his new Young Southpaw album, Hopscotch to Heaven, which features a collaboration with yours truly, one of the weirder, crazier musical works I’ve done in my sporadic career as a musician, sort of a death metal dirge drone combined with the worst aspects of Squarepusher on too much coke? It is hard to describe. I had been working on it for years and was going to make a weird sort of death metal drone song about liking long songs, and maybe I still will some day, but Aug is more prolific, and I like the weird mashup dada surrealism of this collaboration. Also I get to be on the same record as Pete Wiggs from Saint Etienne, so, you know, I’m a real boy now.
Jane keeps running around telling everyone that I am 49 and that on Saturday I am going to turn 50. It is really cute but it is also harshing on my plan of not thinking about my birthday at all until the last possible minute. One thing that is nice though is on our walk yesterday, Ricardo stopped and we chatted, and Jane told him and he understood perfectly my neurotic need to absolutely not acknowledge my birthday in any way. That was very validating, thank you Ricardo. I will talk about it tomorrow, I suppose. To you guys. Since I won’t be writing on my actual birthday.
Okay I think that’s it today. Someone bought a Third Eye Blind CD from my Discogs store for two dollars and I need to go fulfill that order. I love my Discogs store so much I love Discogs so much it really is a great web propterty, devoid of modern web misery, devoid of VC cash, I bet it mints money. Not a LOT of money, mind you, but just enough. Gotta go check on the garden. The bush beans and corn are really on a tear and we finally got our first baby bok choi seed sprouted. Still no luck on the fennel, though, not sure what’s up with that. But the tomatoes are going gangusters, the cucumbers too. The peppers are struggling, I didn’t do them right at all this year but I think they’ll pull through. OH and my big new garden shed/cabinet thing to store all my supplies outside came in. VERY exciting. Gotta set that up this weekend.
But I’ll tell you all about that on Monday. When I’m fifty.
Some psych rock for you. FREAK OUT! FREAK OUT! We could all use a good freak-out today, yeah? Pleased there’s a good psychy-track or two on the new Spiritualized. Pleased with the new Brian Jonestown Massacre, lots of good stuff happening these days. FREAK OUT.
Happy Thursday. If we hold hands and squeeze real hard, we can get through this together.
What's this "mod" thing you keep saying vis-a-vis TV?