Good morning. Hello. How are you? #734
Gardening, touring, Dusty and PSB, Mac Virus Software, Country Flashcards, Metaphor Poisoning
Well hello there. Good morning. How are you this… um… imagonna say Wednesday morning? All well? My settlement in No Man’s Sky got a town crier, which is kind of exciting. Reminds me of the old Barbarian days of yore when we had our office on Newbury Street and Doug would lean his head out the window and yell “two o’clock and all is well” to all of Newbury Street in a helpful town crier-ian fashion. Useful service, town criers.
Thank you for all your help on the butterscotch front. You guys gave me some great ideas and I think I have a plan for butterscotch obtaining. I can taste it already in my mouth. Gonna help just great with the half-assed diet.
I got my gardening video done. It is a good time. Behold Jane learning how to put a nut on a bolt and actually helping me, productively helping me, assemble this Birdies Bed. It is very cute.
Also this new Beth Orton album is great. People still putting out the music they made at home during the pandemic and it is all great. Pandemic music was great. Fertile artistic period, the pandemic.
It was not, however, a fertile commercial period for musicians, and, to put it bluntly, shit’s still fucked. Every tour something goes wrong (except the Magnetic Fields, they pulled it off, nice job guys, except Mike getting Covid but at least that didn’t cancel shows). Witness this incredibly sad letter from Santigold to her fans announcing the cancellation of her US tour:
As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us. After sitting idle (not being able to do shows) for the past couple years, many of us like everyone else, earning no or little income during that time, every musician that could, rushed back out immediately when it was deemed safe to do shows. We were met with the height of inflation—gas, tour buses, hotels, and flight costs skyrocketed—many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive test results constantly halting schedules with devastating financial consequences. All of that on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.
In my case, I have tried and tried, looked at what it would take from every angle, and I simply don’t have it. I can’t make it work. I’m actually going to elaborate on it more later because I think it’s important for people to know the truth of what it’s like out here for artists and I don’t believe enough of us are talking about it publicly. I’ve seen a couple articles start to emerge, literally over the past few days, just as I had started writing this letter to you, about musicians canceling tours, prioritizing themselves over the demands of a relentless industry. But for now, I want to tell you that for me it has taken a toll - through anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, vertigo, chronic pain, and missing crucial time with my children. In the place that I’m in, in the place that the music business is in, it feels like I’ve been hanging on, trying to make it to the ever-distant finish line, but my vehicle’s been falling apart the whole time—the bumper fell off, the wheels one at a time, the steering wheel, and finally the whole bottom fell out. And here I am thinking, ‘Should I just hold the doors up and run?’ And my little heart that has been working way beyond its limits, my whole body in fact and my soul too, are screaming at me “NO muthafucka! Pull.The Fuck. Over!”
Visceral. Real. I love the new Santigold album, by the way, it is awesome. I’m an old man with a kid and a burgeoning hermit complex living in the country so I doubt I would have managed to see the tour anyway, given that Santigold is still too popular (I think?) for Cat’s Cradle, but… Man. I feel this. Imagine how much it costs to pay for fuel in a tour bus, or even a tour van. Imagine how much it costs to even rent one these days. Then someone goes and gets COVID because audiences DGAF and keep getting the bands they love sick. Fun career.
On another musical note ( a pun, a pun), I casually mentioned at the end of my GMHHAY that the 1989 British film Scandal had a soundtrack song by Dusty Springfield. After I wrote those words, I put the song on and low and behold, not only is it a song by Dusty Springfield, it is a song by Dusty Springfield and the Pet Shop Boys, making a second collaboration between the two after “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” How did I not know this? Did you know this? I really felt like I was on top of my Pet Shop Boys trivia but I really dropped the ball on this one. Mea culpa. Also the Pet Shop Boys even make an appearance in the video!
If you are looking for a quick and easy virus protection on your Mac (and you should!), I strongly recommend this little Intego VirusBarrier Scanner. It is free, easy to use, and in the App Store. What more could you want. You are welcome for this little public service interim announcement. I ran it and actually found a few old lingering copies of the Word Macro Virus from, like, ten years ago, which was pretty amazing. Just sitting there in old archives. Old school.
I am still doing my country flashcards every morning, going through all the countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean. I mostly have them down, but I don’t have them mindlessly down. Like I still have to think more to click on Malawi or Moldova than I do France of Brazil. It’s been months, months of daily practice and I’m still just “pretty good” at it. How long do I have to do this before I can do it completely mindlessly? Like still, if I let my mind wander, I will do a mis-click. And sometimes dumb ones! I often accidentally click on Egypt for Kenya when I’m not thinking, and I knew where both of those were before I even started this process! It is absurd. Absurd how long it takes the brain to learn new stuff and learn it well.
I was thinking about this yesterday, actually. There was some new thing I had to learn. I don’t remember what it was, it was something domestic, related to the house or home. Emma knew this fact. Like where we keep the hedge trimmer or something. You know, one of those bajillion little domestic facts you have to keep track of. It struck me that it was kind of dumb that only Emma knew this fact and I should know it too. But then I actually caught myself resisting, and literally thinking: “but it’s so much work to learn a new fact. And then I have to remember it. Forever. And my brain is so full of facts. I’ll probably lose a different fact when I shove this one in there.” Like these thoughts were mostly subconscious, but not quite. They bubbled up just enough that if I was paying careful attention, as I randomly happened to be, I could catch myself thinking these things. I could catch myself thinking these things that I very clearly thought, subconsciously, all the time. Is this what it means to get old? Is this why old people are Republicans? Is this happening to all of us? We just get tired of cramming more shit into our brain? Is this an example of some sort of metaphor poisoning? Where we’ve made a metaphor of our brain being a chest of drawers or something, but it’s not actually true, that’s not actually how the brain works, and our metaphor is causing us unnecessary debilitation? I strongly suspect that is what’s going on.
So I am going to make an effort. My brain is no longer a chest of drawers. It is AWS. It is cloud storage. It is limitless. I can keep cramming things in there forever and it’s fine, they’ll just put more hard drives in the data center at the Columbia River or Osaka (if, you know, I need low-latency access to Asian data).
Been a good while since we had a W Hotel playlist, so here we are. The Maya Hawke song is right on the edge, but it gets a little spunky toward the end so I think it is better suited to this playlist than a Moody and Quiet one. I can definitely imagine this tune being played in a hotel lobby. I suppose that we must soon face up to the fact that I’ve not actually been in a hotel lobby in ages — even when I stayed in a hotel in New York last trip, it was at a hotel without a lobby. I maybe don’t know what I’m talking about anymore. Maybe I’m just dreaming. Of a new hotel with a new lobby. Somewhere in my future, when 500 people aren’t dying every day and we’re all at risk for long Covid.
Talented one, Maya Hawke. Must be nice to grow up rich and Hollywood royalty. I excpect that helps with the record deals and Stranger Things casting. But it’s a good record, not gonna lie. Not bitter nope. No class chips on my shoulder nosiree.
Talk tomorrow! Ciao.