Good morning. Hello. How are you? #709
Buying a membership to Jane's Addiction's self-titled live album from 1988, more about the Vietnam War, making bagels, streamer slang.
Good morning! Hello. Happy Monday. How are you? All well? Lovely weekend? I hope so, I hope so. I myself had a greast weekend. Three day weekends are lovley. Let the weekend be forever three days.
I had this amazing dream the other night where, back in 1988 or whatever, you could buy a membership to Jane’s Addiction’s self-titled live album released on XXX Records. Like sort of like s Netflix membership or some annoying modern SaaS subscription to a thing that you should really just be able to buy outright but they won’t let you. But in the case of Jane’s Addiction’s self-titled live album released on XXX Records, owning a membership was actually pretty sweet. What it meant is that once a decade (or a year, it switched around in the dream, and I’m town about what would be best in real-life, maybe every five years), the members of Jane’s Addiction would get back together and re-record Jane’s Addiction’s self-titled live album released on XXX Records. No matter what else was going on in their lives, no matter if Jane’s Addiction was actually still a band. There were very complex rules around what members of Jane’s Addiction would participate in the re-recording of Jane’s Addiction’s self-titled live album released on XXX Records. If the band was officially still together, the members of the current lineup would participate in the re-recording process. If the band were not still together, the band would re-record the album either with the last, most recent line-up of Jane’s Addiction, or with the original lineup who appears on the original 1988 XXX Records album. Pracitcally speaking, for Jane’s, this really just means is Eric Avery involved or not: not a lotta lineup changes through the years in Jane’s.
Anyway, I am super into this idea. It’s a live album, so, you know, only a day or two out of their lives every ten (or five) years to fulfill the membership requirements of this project. And you are paying a monthly (or annual) fee, so, you know, they get some money out of the situation. And then you would get to hear all sorts of changes and evolution in the band and the band members through the years. Does Eric’s guitar playing evolve? Does Perry’s voice get more gravelly? Did Stpehen Perkins’ time with Mike Watt in the 90’s push his drumming into a more punkish style? Who knows.
The idea of Jane’s Addiction getting together in 2023 to re-record a live version of “Chip Away” is… interesting to me. The problem, of course, is a band would need to know, upon release of an album, that it was going to be seminal enough to warrant membership. But I guess it is somewhat self-fulfilling. If the memberships sells enough, it’s worth it. So it could be Kickstarter-style, all-or-nothing funding.
Anyway.
Did some gardening, but not tons. It was rainy this weekend. Which is a good thing. The garden and the grass needed it. But I did get some stuff in. I harvested tomatoes and peppers. I worked on my tomato plants trying to resurrect them from the harsh summer where I am realizing I should have used shade cloth on them. I learned that I probably should have used shade cloth on my cucumbers, too, and I shuold have been succession planting, and four months for a cucumber plant, through the hot summer, is actually pretty good. I did not succession plant. I am goign to run out of cucumbers. Kind of thinking about planting more and seeing what happens.
The funnest thing I did in the garden though is I made this ridiculously tall cage over my corn with hardware cloth, squirrel netting, hoops and row cover, to give them plenty of room to grow, allow bugs in and out, and to keep out the squirrels, so they don’t completely screw up my corn like they did in the spring. Will it work? Unclear. But I love how absurd it looks.
I made bagels this weekend. Been craving them for a month or two. Whole family is very excited. Jane helped me make them and she was almost useful. I taught her how to knead bread. That was super fun. And she did the sprinkling of toppings onto them after the boil stage before the bake stage. She is partial to black toppings, specifically poppy seeds and black sunflower seeds. So goth. Emma likes plain bagels so we mainly make plain, just a few with toppings.
Bagels came out good, they are bagel sized and poofy and the holes in the middle are nice and small the way I like them. I switch ed from the hole punching method to the make-a-rod-and-twist method a few batches back and I am happy with it. I made them a smige too dark cuz I always get too excited about adding molasses to the boiling water and I should just be adding a half tablespoon or so instead of the two full tablespoons I like, but I am okay with that.
Jane was actually pretty great this weekend, not too many tantrums, very kind at bedtime, A+ no complaints. Well, one big screaming thing for Emma at a bath time but, you know, not my problem. She had a lot of fun. Man, watching your kid is so much more fun and pleasant when you are not, you know, working. I even played with dolls. For, like, three minutes.
Read some more of my history-of-conservatism books, I am still in Watergate, mixed in with a biography of Reagan’s youth, which is boring. There’s massive inflation during Watergate, people are losing their shit. In April 1973 there was a meat boycott, millions of people didn’t eat meat for a week, protesting high meat prices. I did not know about this! What a great idea the world needs more meat boycotts.
I started, in tandem, Ken Burns’ 2017 documentary about the Vietnam War, titled, logically, The Vietnam War. Reading about Nixon, it was just very hard to imagine the mind of the enemy. On the one hand, Nixon’s internal logic was utterly broken: he wouldn’t leave the war until he could do so “with honor,” which, to him, of course, meant he wouldn’t leave till it was politically advantageous to do so. And in the Nixon Tapes, he’s always going on about how he will just keep escalating the war and pummelling North Vietnam until they give him what he wants. And they don’t. So he escalates, bombing them more and more, bombing the dykes, as we mentioned last week, putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. Mining Haiphong harbor, risking their starvation in a second way.
The question that is never clear in Nixon’s muddled thinking, is what does he even want from them to achieve this “honor.” He talks about the POWs, but the North Vietnamese had always been willing to release the POWs with the cessation of hostilities. He seems to want something else, but he never seems to know what. It is tragic.
But I knew all this what I couldn’t fathom is how a country could endure so many bombs that you could cover the entire country in a half-inch of steel, and not just give up and say “fine we’ll do whatever you want,” which they never do. I mean, maybe they never do because there is no actual thing they can give Nixon that will get him to stop? I just never fully understoodd their mindset. So I am delving a bit.
We haven’t gotten to that part yet but I did learn that a) Ho Chi Minh appealed to Woodrow Wilson, and to Truman, and they both mostly ignored him, but b) the US was the country that first armed Ho Chi Minh when he was fighting against the Japanese during WWII, c) Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first a communist second, and we probably could have worked out a deal saying “so long as you do fair elections we don’t care if you yourself are communist” woah whoops actually that totally happened when the French left and in the north Ngô Đình Diệm violated the agreement and declared the South an independent nation and d) at one point, in his 30 year exile from Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh was a pastry chef at the Parker House in Boston.
Did not see that last one coming.
Been watching more Civ on Youtube lately. I’m not really playing the game anymore, but I find the playthroughs soothing. One thing I’ve noticed, though, now that I am, gosh, three years into watching these Youtube streamers, is the streamer slang. The slang evolves. It’s more noticeable when you spend some time away from them and come back and all of the sudden all the Civ streamers are using new terminology. It is really weird. I was trying to explain this to Emma yesterday and I think you can break down their slang into three buckets and I think this is probably applicable to most YouTube sub-communities, at least the ones that are topic-specific, something educational or in-depth:
There is the slang that they use related to actual new innovations or tactics in the topic at hand. Since I’ve come back to Civ streaming, they’re all way more into tempo and muscle. Tempo, especially, is interesting. It’s been a hard thing to nail down in Civ but sometimes, your game just goes slow and you lose momentum and the whole thing kinda sucks. It’s always been there, but in the last year the community has really nailed down its focus on it as a factor to explore, hence, the rise of a new slang term: tempo.
Memes specific to the community which you are watching. Like everyone in Civ calls Portola Palace “Potato Palace” after a Civ steamer, and they call, like, St Basil’s “Tundra Potato” or the Mausauleum at Hellicarnassis “Ocean Potato.” They call Dark Ages “Darks” which is just creepy and weird. There’s a whole bunch of these memes, and they are, obviously, very specific to Civ.
General new memes that have arisen in the YouTube community at large. Specifically, in the last, imagonnasay nine months or so, all of YouTube suddenly uses the word “boys” for just about everything. Instead of “things.” Like “take these cucumber boys” for “cucumber seedlings” or “cavalry boys” for “calvary units.” It stands to reason that Civ streamers, like all streamers, watch non-Civ YouTube as well, and it is very interesting watching the slang bleed over. Does it all come into Civ via one streamer, who then infects the whole Civ community? Or are there multiple vectors? Who knows! But, man. The Internet loves calling things “boys” these days.
Anyway, I was trying to explain to Emma why it was still interesting to me to watch these streams. This is one of the reasons. Plus the actual strategy of the game, of course, which is infinitely complex.
I’m also very emotionally invested in the mental health and welfare of the streamers. Video game streaming seems a lonely life. None of them seem to have romantic partners. Some of them take long mental health breaks. Over the years, they get more aloof and terse with their audience, or at least his ebbs and flows, as the trolls of the internet get to them. It’s a hard live.
Watched House of the Dragon last night. Not sure if I will continue. It wasn’t bad, it might even be good, but it sure made me realize I have become much more of a sensitve soul since the beginning of Game of Thrones. Do I want to go back into that world? Do I even care? TBD. I did go looking for our old Facebook group and it seems to be gone, alas. Or I left it at some point when GoT ended. I do think I will indulge in a little bit of commentary and critique from the hard core fans before I make my final decision. Someone else can tell me what to think.
We also watched a fairly funny comedy called Spin Me Round that has a phenomenal cast and is made by the guy who did The Little Hours which is one of the weirder films made in recent years. We enjoyed it but all I will say is it had one of the hottest make out scenes in years, like, seriously, if I just made a list of top-ten-dream-makeout-scene-couples this scene would have not been far off, so it had that going for it.
Got a moody and quiet playlist for you today. There is a new album by Breathless, the English goth-shoegaze band whom I have been obsessing over since the late 1980’s, early 1990’s when their lead singer, Dominic Appleton, appeared as one of the heavenly voices on the This Mortal Coil albums: he sings “Jeweler,” “Tarantula,” which we have mentioned before for the Beck cover, and “Strength of Strings.” In the mid-1990s, eh, maybe late 1990’s, Breathless came to America for a tour and my band Rockets got to do a few shows with them and my god it was so great. They are awesome live, and super kind to boot. I also put the sixteen minute Dylan JFK joint on here cuz it came on random when I was showering the other day and I really feel like that song is an underrated work of genius. Ha. Dude won a Nobel prize maybe not that underrated. And I am embarrassed to say I just discovered Connie Converse from the New York Times, thirteen years after her cititcal resurgence. Just missed that one. She is great.
Okay talk soon!