Good morning. Hello. How are you? #682
A bunch of TV talk, James E Webb not being related, Pigs in Zen spoken word, Mazzy Star posters, Katy Tur, Apple car and the dream job of pedestrian, child care challenges
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well I hope? All well, I hope.
Bear with me I am going to talk about TV a smidge, which I try not to do in GMHHAY, but sometimes you just gotta.
I feel I should come right out and tell you that I am enjoying the new season of Westworld. I feel like everyone is completely over that poor show, and no one is giving it a chance, and I suppose not a whole lot has actually happened yet in these first two episodes, but I am into it. I like cool weird sci-fi why does it need to have cowboys in it.
The Bear, though, is deeply uncomfortable, exactly the kind of show that sends me deep into my pillows. I will say, though, that I have been watching so much TV lately where bad people don’t get cliched story arcs where they are redeemed or we are forced to empathize with them because they have problems too. Like WTF was with that jock bully in Stranger Things. I kept thinking he was going to be given some complexity, or a tragic back story or something, like he was beaten as a kid. And it would have been so tedious and clichéd to suddenly be expected to feel some sympathy for this awful person. But no! They didn’t even bother. He just stayed one-dimensional the entire time, a pure robotic maguffin that we had to endure for hours of screen time just so he could, like, bug Lucas at a very specific moment in the finale so that a very specific thing could happen to Max.
SO, I guess I was actually relieved when, in The Bear, they took the intolerable asshole and gave him a tragic backstory, as clichéd as it was, since latetely writers haven’t even been bothering with that.
But. God. I really cannot stand mean people in television. Especially in real-world settings. It just gets my hackles up. I’m just not cut out for it. The Bear is very good, it is short enough that I will finish it, but, god, it’s so unconfortable. Rex tried to warn me when he compared it to Uncut Gems, but I didn’t listen.
Also I double-checked and it is absolutely labeled as a comedy in the Hulu app. WTF. So, you know, I like to end my night with a half-hour comedy as a balm for the nightmare that is the modern world so I can make it to bed and curl up with my book without feeling existential dread. This show is absolutely not cutting it.
So we added the second season of Only Murders in the Building into the mix and it very much is cutting it. Though I have to say I am deeply, profoundly disappointed that Sting is not in this season, his story arc in Only Murders in the Building was absolutely the best thing he’s done since Bring on the Night.
Man I might have to watch Bring on the Night again soon.
The second season is going to suffer a bit because, you know, veering somewhat into unreality but that’s okay it’s fun and absurd enough that it seems to still work.
Okay I am done talking about TV now. Check out this awesome image from the Webb Telescope:
Real team effort from all of us Webbs. You are welcome.
N.B. To my knowldge I am not related to James E Webb, though he was from NC and did go to UNC Chapel Hill, so now that I am a Chapel Hill Webb I can pretend I am related. Also he was a freemason and my Grandpa Webb was a Freemason so maybe there was some secret underground Webb Freemason group, though, you know, they wre on opposite coasts.
Lotta Webbs in NC, none of them related. Hell, there are five Richard Webbs in the state.
I have been thinking a lot about the spoken word segment in the song “Pigs in Zen” by Jane’s Addiction. There are two well-known versions. The first version appeared on the self-titled live album on XXX records. The second version appeared on Nothing’s Shocking. The songs are very similar apart from the spoken word passage, which has been completely re-written between the two versions.
The original live version is:
Oh, I know about war
But I just wanna fuck
I know about pain and suffering and being cold
But I just wanna fuck
Which, you know, really speaks to you when you’re seventeen.
The Nothing’s Shocking version goes:
Yes, so roses are red I made up the rest
If you got some big fucking secret
Then why don't you sing me somethin'I've really messed up the trauma
Leave a message, I'll call you back
Leave it by the bedSome people should die
That's just unconscious knowledge
Because, because the bigger you get
The wider you spread
That is a pretty profound change! And, like… not corporatized? I mean, there’s that whole parable of the two different lines that Helena Bonham Carter’s character says after she and Ed Norton bone in Fight Club, and how the studio didn’t like the first line and made them replace it and they came up with a second line that was even more uncomfortable. Maybe that’s what’s going on here? Warner Bros didn’t like Perry talking about fuckin’, so they made him re-write it, so he just comes up with “Some people should die,” which is just… a very uncomfortable line! I mean I get there’s a whole world (gawd, especially in the early 90s) of spoken word slam poetry all that stuff and maybe Perry was a denizen of said world and these are just the two versions that have been recorded to posterity, but there were actually maybe hundreds and it’s just a quirk of history that these two are etched in stone, maybe? What’s weird is I have seen them so many times and I must have seen them do “Pigs in Zen” but I have no recollection of which version he did live, or if he made up even more lyrics crap I’m going to have to go listen to, like, five versions of “Pigs in Zen” live man I have better things to do.
Here is a picture of my autographed Mazzy Star So Tonight That I May See poster wherein Hope signed it with a big heart on her chest that says “I love you” on it when I asked her to sign it at a record signing at the Harvard Square Strawberries in 1993 and is one of my prize posessions and last night I was standing on the stairs talking to Emma and looking at it and thinking “damn, man, I am so glad I managed to hang on to that thing.”
There is a very good long article in The Information about Apple’s, gawd, 10+ year effort to make a car. It gives an overview of all the different people who have run the project, all the major players who have worked on it, it is kind of a clown-car rundown. The Information is paywalled, though, so, you know, hard read. If you ask me, though, the best part of the whole article is that at some point apple spent $100MM+ through a shell company to buy an old Chrysler testing track and grounds in Arizona where they could test their cars. And Apple is obsessed with doing that self-driving car BS, and to a greater extent than everyone else, where they don’t seem to even be planning on launching the car unless it posesses fully autonomous self driving which is so dumb and they are going to never get around to launching a car at this rate. But anyway the best part is that when they do their testing of their (crappy) self-driving technology at this track in Arizona, they use shipping containers to stand in for buildings andthey hire contracters to act as pedestrians.
And oh my god that sounds like the greatest freaking job in the world. Like when I was in bands and running a low budget independent record label and trying to make a go of “the arts” and just holding down jobs because I needed cash to fund my arts career: do you know great a job would have been where you just walk around a bunch? I mean admittedly with my hangovers and sleep deprivation it probably would have been a bit difficult, and, like, now that I think about it I bet it started really early in the morning, but still. Fantastic job for a starving artist. Plus so what if you’re hung over, stumbling a bit, or even outright drunk. These are pedestrians! It only adds to the realism.
Finished Katy Tur’s autobiography last night at the request of my wife, whos is a bit of a Katy Tur stan. We had previously watched the documentary Whirlybird about her parents and their helicopter-powered LA News Service, so I had some idea of her batshit upbringing. Pleasant read. The chief insights I took away were: she and her husband both had crazy-ass fathers. His was one of the largest drug dealers on the east coast. Sharing that experience meant they felt more comfortable around each other and I understand that. Also her crazy-ass abusive father made her uniquely qualified to cover Trump on the campaign trail. I was aware of both her abusive father and her Trump coverage but I had never put two and two together on that. Makes a lot of sense.
Also like lots of people Emma and I watch waaaaay less MSNBC than we did at the height of the Trump administration. But reading this book made me kind of miss Katy. I dont’ even know if she’s still on MSNBC or if she’s jumped ship. Hrm I just Googled it. She is still there. Well good for her I admire job stability. Sometimes.
Jane was a pill yesterday, at dinner time mainly, and it was exhausting and I feel bad because I keep having to put her in timeouts, but man. It can be a lot. She’s just so bossy. She just starts saying “I want X” over and over, won’t listen to a word you say, nothing will stop her, there’s no conversing, there’s no explaining. You sit there trying to explain to her that we need to ask for things, that, like Mick says, you can’t always get what you want, whatever, anything, trying to talk to her and she just keeps repeating it. So you gotta either give in and feel like a schmuck and terrible about reinforcing bad behavior, or you gotta just set her down somewhere until she’s willing to say any other words, which usually takes about fifteen minutes. I want so badly to have a nice conversation about it, but it’s impossible. And then I try later, and it goes a bit better, but at that point she’s back to “I’m being kind now why you bringing up this past unpleasantness” and doesn’t especially want to hear it either. I have all these images of the wise parent kneeling and having an important talk with his child and them listening but hahaha nope. It is rough.
She did get to a better place by bedtime, though, thanks to a walk through the neighborhood and a very long chat with one of our neighbors where Jane complimented her outfit, her shoes, her nails, it was pretty great.
I am gonna do a second bedtime tonight, because I’m feeling terrible about leaving Jane with Emma for three days while I do this quick New York run. If all goes well, I’ll be back Friday evening in time for bedtime, so Emma will only have to do two in a row, but of course that’s on top of doing three whole days which is just… a lot. I would do it for her and I encourage her to take a break too, and in September she’s going to see a friend in Atlanta, but that is ways off. Huh actually only six weeks. Not too bad. But still. Thank you, wife. You are the best.
OK W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist today. In honor of me being in an actual hotel lobby tomorrow. But it will not be a W Hotel. Though now that I am thinking about it, I kinda miss the W. Eh. Next year. Lotta good new stuff on here, talked about WhoMadeWho on the podcast. Had this one day at Emo’s in Austin back like eight years ago where I got to see WhoMadeWho and then Retribution Gospel Choir, both in the small room inside, and it was so great what a day. More Julee Cruise, RIP, new track from my old friend Rosey who saved my life and took me in Venice once when I was going through a rough patch. She is good people.
Okay off to New York tomorrow. Not sure if I will be writing tomorrow as I have to get up early and hit the road at the crack of dawn and all that to make the drive work with the various rush hours of the North Atlantic states. To be frank, it’s entirely possible I don’t write again until next Monday, but who knows maybe I’ll pull through. My schedule is booked up in NY but if you are in town Thursday, drop a line and maybe come to my friend’s book party with me!
That Mazzy Star signing was so crazy... she looked so bored for so long, and then she looked up at you really nicely and wrote that and drew the wings on her... such a fun memory!