Good morning. Hello. How are you? #753
Going to Halloween party, gardening, Nick Cave's Faith and Carnage, parenting, it would have been my father's 80th birthday today.
Good morning, there, friend! How are you today, this fine Monday? Oh Monday you’re so fine you’re so fine you blow my mind hey Monday. Toni Basil choreographed the “Once in a Lifetime” video. I knew that, but Wikipedia tells me she choreographed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and was friends with Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring. Wow. Wikipedia holes might be the single best gift the internet has given us, huh?
Anyway how was your weekend? All good? Mine was lovely, thanks. Got a lot done, and went to a party. A halloween party. It is early for a Halloween party, but June, who you will recall from last week’s entries, told her parents she adamantly wanted one, so there was a Halloween party. It was not a kids party, but there were kids there. It was in Raleigh. I was reluctant to go because a) Raleigh is 45 minutes away, b) We weren’t gonna know anyone but the hosts, c) it started at 6 which is pretty late for Jane for a party 45 minutes away, d) I love my alone time on the weekend and it was going to cut into it and e) it was one of those “you gotta gotta wear a costume” things and I had no costume. But Emma really wanted to go. Jane vascillated all day but in the end she wanted to go to. And then I remembered a costume I wore like eight years ago and I still had it and it made me giggle so once I thought of something to wear it all became less stressful, so I guess really out of all those reasons, only E was real. So away we went.
It was fun! Lots of good chats with strangers. Lots of good costumes. The house was beautiful, the grounds were beautiful, Jessie went all out on the decorating and she made a haunted trail. The haunted trail was amazing and I was legitimately scared on it at least once. Jane’s four year-old friend June was a really into “villains” and scaring people, which was not particulrly Jane’s thing. Jane’s never really been “scared” per se, certainly never seen a horror movie, never even really seen a movie, and has no idea what a “villain” is. And June was on her home turf, and had a bunch of other friends there (all the kids were four) so it wasn’t the usual Jane and June show, but she still had a good time. June’s play kitchen is in an old camping trailer in the back “yard,” which is so so fun Jane loved that very much.
Rest of the weekend, I did a lot of organizing and cleaning, and then a lot of gardening. I reorganized and cleaned the garage. Not like a major overhaul, just a deep straightening up. Lotta stuff going to the dump and such, though I’ve not made that trip yet. Truck’s all packed up though.
Did a lot of Plex organizing, added couple campy 70’s porn feature films — Dracula Sucks and Sex World in 4k — along with the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings and Hobbit in HD, Cloak & Dagger in 4k, and Galaxy Quest in HD. It’s crazy to me that Galaxy Quest isn’t out in 4k yet what an amazing film.
Love this Cloak & Dagger packaging looks like the packaging for an old Atari game in the Zork or Ultima series. So good. Well done, Vinegar Syndrome.
On the gardening front, I finally planted the blueberry bush in the ground. I harvested the summer carrots and pulled the bolted summer lettuce, refreshed that bed and planted the winter wheat. Planted some more caulflower and broccoli from seedlings. With those acts, I think all of the fall/winter crops are in the soil now. Some of them are a bit late. What are you gonna do. I’m trying, man. Got another good harvest of tomatoes — the roma and cherry are still giving it really is something. Thusly, didn’t pull them down, nor did I pull the luffa down, giving it another week or two to fatten up the luffa gourds on the vine before I pull them and dry them. I harvested the last of the shishitos and jalepenos and cut those plants back for over wintering, but I’m still giving the Bell Pepper and Johnny’s Red Flame hot peppers another week, hopefully two, to get all the peppers on the plant red. I made and used a lot of shredded cardboard mulch. So much mulch. Everything needs a nice, thick coat for the winter.
I made a garedening video. Youtube says it’s still “processing” so, you know, might not be ready for a few minutes, but I dont’ want to wait until tomorrow, so here it is:
Right after I wrote to you on Friday I learned of the 3AM edition of Taylor Swift’s Midnights, with five more songs. Three of them are co-written and produced by Aaron Dessner of The National. They are so much better. I am now super bummed. It seems like it was a conscious decision to make the entire main album a straight Antonoff jam and this was, to put it bluntly, the wrong move. It’s too samey. I am bummed for Aaron. Well, not bummed, I guess, he’s fine, but it his songs are… better? It’s also… like… okay, when you’re sitting awake at midnight and you’re in the long dark night of the soul, you know what you’re not thinking? “Oh we are so in love being in love with you is so great.” You don’t even really think “we were so in love.” You’re lost in your own head, you’re panicking, you’re freaking out, you’re confused and scared and manic. What I’m saying is that it feels like a lot of the songs on the album don’t even fit thematically with the stated theme of the album. I mean, there’s a lot good about this album, but the intellectual framework seems a muddled mess.
But, then, I always like the bonus tracks of her albums. “New Romantics,” a bonus track on 1989 is easily one of my favorite Taylor tracks.
I’ve been reading Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book of interviews with Nick Cave by Seán O’Hagan, and it’s very good. Reading it in tandem with a new Taylor Swift album is very weird and fascinating. Nick is in a very specific place with lyricism, with the topicality of lyrics. He’s so into it. I personally do not like it at all, his lyrics leave me cold these days. But I do admire his late-in-life creative blossoming, his creative output these days is stunning. It feels like he and Mick do a soundtrack a week it’s really nuts. And he has Red Right Hand files, which, I mean, lol, one whole email post a week at best but still, it’s pretty good. And a whole online boutique of a stunning amount of various gifts and bits and bobs, I mean, really a lot. They seem to be pretty far along in a follow-up album to Ghosteen. It’s just amazing. He said he and his wife Susie made a conscious decision after their son died to choose life, so to speak, to choose to keep going, to do the things they need and wanted to do and not give in to grief. There is a slight manic quality to it. But I deeply respect that. It was the right move.
Prior to this book, I’d been kind of off of Nick lately. He touches on the things that have sat poorly with me in the book, kind of explains and defends them, and he definitely adds understanding and sympathy to these decisions. But in the end, he’s still a guy who expressly views the world in conservative terms and is moving more and more toward organized religion and poetic, non-narrative lyrics and, man, organized religion and poetry are two things high up on my “dislike” list. When he talks about a specific image or couplet in his lyrics, and reads one or two lines, I get really into it and then think “yeah I should give that song another chance,” then I go do and I’m like “this song is nonsense I just don’t care.” But a) lots of people care. His talk about how he’s gained fans and lost fans and the reverence with which some people love his new songs and how that moves him, and b) he’s right when he talks about how you can’t keep making art for your old fans. That you have to keep swimming forward. All of that is exactly right, I agree with him, even if he’s losing me along with way.
He also fills in a lot of gaps in his narrative of the last decade or so that I’ve been wondering about. Like Blixa’s departure from the band. Some of the last words Blixa said to Nick were: “I didn’t get into Rock n Roll to play Rock n Roll.” That’s a great line. And ironic, since Nick and Warren have departed from playing rock as well.
More than anything, though, there are so many little passages in the book that make me think of my friend Andy Shea. He would have found this book very intriguing. I think he would have appreciated it, even as he, too, was struggling with late-period Nick’s lyricism. I sure miss that guy.
The last thing about this weekend: I had a nice transcontinental talk on the phone with my friend Jenna. She was asking about parenting, and I said something along the lines of:
Kids are these little chaos agents: walking time-bombs of potential relationship problems. At any second they will do some new thing and you will suddenly find yourself in uncharted parenting territory, where you and your partner suddenly have completely different opinions about what to do, even though you thought you were in sync before, and now suddenly the whole world has shifted beneath your feet. And then you have to go talk to your partner and figure out this new thing. And of course every parenting decision is wrapped up in your own childhood, your own trauma, so you have to get into that, and all of this just, out of the blue, when you were trying to, like, eat a sandwich or something.
Jenna then brought up that hostage negotiation book that she loves and I read a few years ago. Tactics to get to yes, and asked: is that applicable with kids? I said yes, these are all good tactics to get your kid to do what you want, but don't forget that there's a layer above that, where you are questioning whether you even SHOULD be trying to get your kid to do what you want. Is that even morally correct? Or are you projecting your worldview onto the kid? Are you projecting your neuroses onto them by even trying to get them to do unnecessary things just because you need it.
It really is a trip.
Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 80 today. It’s also UN day. My dad loved UN day, loved internationalism. He was a Republican, but an old dinosaur of an idealistic one, an Eisenhower Republican who heeded the warning of the Military Industrial Complex speech, and intensly dislined despots. Been thinking a lot about him lately. I miss that guy. I had a talk with my mom late last week. She had some friends, the husband just passed. My parents had been together more than fifty years when my father passed, but that was nothing compared to her friends, who had just had their seventieth anniversary. She said she thought her friend would be fine, she probably felt a sense of relief, and my mom said she felt confident she’d blossom without her husband. I told her I had similar hopes for her, but that my mom was not one of those people who suddenly blossomed without her husband and felt giddy freedom. She said no. I said if you could get him back you would, wouldn’t you. And she said yes, no question. She still misses him, I suspect she still grieves. We all do. he was a good man.
Moody and Quiet today, all new. Wait no, Sting is old, Trio is old, Karate is old, other than that, all new. There’s a new Daniel Lanois, there’s a new Brian Eno man what a world. New Tindersticks soundtrack. So much good new music. It’s hard to keep up. Music, man. It really is something. Takes you places. I do think I listen to music differently than I did when I was a kid, but the effort I put into finding new music is still infinitely rewarding, challenging. Keeps me young and helps me grow at the same time. For free! Or… well, lol, it could be free. With no ill side effects. That’s a great deal, a great deal
Thanks for reading, talk to you tomorrow.