Good morning. Hello. How are you? #777
Hard butter hard life. SF legitimizes killer robots. Mimi's last performance. A startup idea for 2009 NYC Techstars. HBC disappoints. China protests. Jame tumbling.
Good morning! Hello there, how’s tricks? All’s well? I hope so. Wow, issue #777. Crazy. A Boeing issue, too. I like the 777. Delta only has 18 of them, but they’re nice planes, good first class interior. Delta OneSuite is a nice thing to kick it in on a flight to Seoul, says Rick from his former life. Also we got lucky 7s all the way through. That’s fun. And we’re gonna hit issue number 800 in January or so. That is just nuts.
Okay. My topics list has been building up for a week now, what with the holiday and my single-topic issue yesterday (thank you for your kind words about that). Let’s do some rapid-fire topics. Disjointed, but a nice compendium of the things that have been running through my head.
But first a reminder that if you would like a holiday card, and have moved since last year, or didn’t receive one in the past, update and/or add your address to this form. Thank you so much.
I did that festival meme thing. I struggled with whether to do the 4 weeks, 6 months or all time one. I went for the 6 months. 4 weeks was comically obscurist, all time was comically predicable. This one is a good balance.
Important news on the butter front, I moved the butter dish from against the wall adjacent to the exterior of the house and set it on the kitchen island for a few days, to see if the butter was still hard or if it returned to its, erm, buttery softness of the summer. It did not. The butter is not hard because our walls are poorly insulated, which is good for, you know, our home. The butter stayed hard because it is colder in the house. And I guess it’s just going to stay that was cuz I’m not gonna pay a hundred bucks a month to heat the house up a couple of degrees when I can’t even tell the difference. So now I’m just going to have to suffer with cold butter for four months and man this world is just so unfair.
Speaking of unfair, the city of San Francisco decided to make a market for Killer Robots yesterday. They prettified the thing up with a bunch of “rules” that the cops have to “follow” that will do little more than lead to a bunch of lawsuits that the city will quickly settle. So now if you were a company itching to make killer robots but unable to find anyone willing to buy them, you’re in luck. If you’re going to San Francisco you’ll find the robots are aware, If you’re going to San Francisco, you’ll meet some killer robots there.
(as an aside, man, Genius.com is a great lyrics site now. Remember when they were “bad boys of the internet” working out of that weird mysterious building on Kent Ave in the middle of the Bushwick Inlet Park? All those celebrity investors and being so cool. Now it is a humdrum lyrics site. But it’s a good one! I love how boring Genius.com is. I suspect all those internet bad boys are gone now but I bet it’s super fun to run now. Just a boring-ass, money-making, no-muss-no-fuss internet site of yesteryear. Lovely.)
I was going about my DIY and Chateau Renovation YouTube the other evening and Youtube was like “hey you should watch this,” and served up a performance of “Days Like These” by Low. I noticed the date — Sept 4, 2022. I was confused. Was that the date it was posted? Because Alan posted on Sept 6, 2022 that Mimi had passed. But no. In fact, Mimi and Low performed a benefit show two days before she died. Two days! Before she died of cancer! How much pain must have she been in? How dedicated? Mimi parker was such a fucking badass.
It seems the last song Low — in this incarnation, anyway, he says hopefully — played was “Canada,” which is just such a brilliant Low song, sort of the beginning of them leaving slow-core behind, and one of the greatest music videos ever made, and the spawn of Alan’s much-heralded Twitter service, “rate my band van packing.”
Was talking to my friend Sam about it the other day and he said: “I have only recently started to realize we may never see the likes of some of these folks again.” And I replied: “It’s true. And at 50 not sure how many more 30+ year relationships I’m gonna develop with new artists.”
Two days before she died. Two days. My god.
Okay anyway. In other “watching live video news,” (YouTube has really been on its algorithmic reccomendatiog game lately) I was watching some Metric performances from Brooklyn Bowl last week, since this is the first Metric tour in a decade or so Emma and I are missing. And also some great live videos my friend Jon Whitney shot at a recent ESG show in NYC (although that one wasn’t a recommendation I subscribe to Jon’s Youtube), and it’s so great how people can film concerts for me, in HD with great sound, now that I’m in NC and only like 40% of the bands decide to come play here. BUT you really can’t help but notice that there are too many camera phones up, even in the videos I’m watching — from a camera phone — it is obvious that there are too many people filming concerts. Usually these days, I just don’t bother taking photos at a show, because I can just go to Instagram and YouTube after the show and grab some photos from someone further up in the audience, cuz I hang out in the back, and with a better camera. That suits me just fine.
And yet there was a mental bit of trickery, acrobatics, I had to do to get there. I had to decide that it was valid for me to use other people’s photos as my mementos. And this is a very difficult bit of mental gymnastics for most people, because the very act of taking the photo is the memento, is the ritual.
What is needed is some sort of service that helps everyone let go. So here’s my vision: it is part tech startup and part confessional or therapist. When you got o a show, everyone who wants to participate opts-in to a pool of people. Within that pool of people, the service analyzes their past photos, the gear they have, and their location in the club, and it nominates one and only one of them to be the photographer for the evening. They then go ahead and shoot the show like normal, but everyone else in the pool gets their photos too.
The trick, then, is to encourage the opted-in pool to be as large as possible. You could do this by stick — the club says no photos except the one designated photographer — but I think it’d be better by carrot. The photos are exclusive to the pool. Or the entire pool shares in the royalties. Or they get some cool points, gamified Foursquare style. Something like that.
And then everyone gets to enjoy a show without ten billion cameras in the air.
Man this thing woulda killed at TechStars NYC 2009 or so. Half mil seed round, easy.
I regret to inform you that Helena Bonham Carter has been redpilled, RIP, and she thinks Johnny Depp has been completely vindicated and did nothing wrong, and that JK Rowling is unjustly pilloried for her beliefs that trans people are not deserving of trust and or those pesky “rights.” But, you know, “she’s not meaning it aggressively. Johnny Depp was “completely vindicated.”
Never mind, of course, that even if Depp were innocent of any domestic abuse, his profound abuse of the legal system, his demolishing of a centuries-old legal standard of protection from liability, and his irresponsibility has opened up avenues of abuse for countless other women. By making them liable to speak to their own personal experience even without using their accusers name. I mean, that happened, that is a thing that Johnny Depp changed about the world in a way that is manifestly for the worse.
Oh Helena, oh Helena. Why did you have to use concrete examples. I mean, look. Saying that cancel culture has gone to far is, in my opinion, mostly incorrect, but it’s also a completely popular point of view and almost non-controversial these days. Here’s some advice. Just leave it at that. I’m pretty disappointed in Nick Cave for repeatedly going off about how bad cancel culture is, but despite that, the dude has very cleverly avoided using actual real-world examples, he just sort of goes off about it in theory, and look! No one (except me) is really that upset about it.
Also you can still be friends with people who have done bad things without defending them! Just say “I am disappointed in them, and it makes me sad, but sometimes our friends make mistakes, and I will continue to be here for them if they need me.” Or something.
Anyway, Helena, I understand. Johnny’s the godfather to your children (god, was there ever a time that was a good idea?) But boy, am I disappointed. But I’ll still watch Wings of the Dove and Margaret’s Museum.
Been thinking that these China protests, these Iranian protests, these are good. China and Iran! I mean, aside from North Korea, name two more countries you thought something like this was less likely to happen. Crazy. Maybe, speaking globally, speaking from a high level, maybe the bloom is coming off of the rose of fascism and despotic leaders and democracy is… becoming cool again? Maybe? Fingers crossed. The blank sheets of paper are so great. The social media posts that just say benign words over and over so aren’t ostensibly censorable. It’s all so… exciting. Innovative. Hopeful. Will it work? I don’t know, but it will help. It will help even if how it helped isn’t obvious for a few years or even decades. It has expanded what’s possible to a new generation.
Jane and I worked on some tumbling yesterday. She wants to learn how to cartwheel. I suggested it, but also apparently some girls on the playground asked her if she could do one. And she’s so into flips and Parkour she’s almost re-invented it. So we are watching all these kids gymnastics tutorials, and she’s rapidly picking it up. We learned monkey jumps and frog jumps and the crab walk and a bunch of other stuff and she’s so close to a cartwheel, but she doesn’t understand momentum, and she doesn’t understand that she needs to keep her arms extended. It’s fascinating watching her learn, and realizing that she needs to learn really basic stuff. Like “sit in front of the TV facing it when you’re learning from an instructor on the TV.” But she’s getting there. It’s so frustrating for her when she can’t do something, and she gets so excited when she finally pulls it off. It’s an exercise in teaching the payoff of perseverence for me. She knows these things academically, but like all humans, she struggles to rally to try again when she has just failed. But I gotta say! She is pretty good at it! Better than some adults I know.
Oh man I am like one third through this list of topics. But that is enough for today.
Got a drone playlist for you today. Lotta drone on here from not ostensibly drone bands, which either means I am pushing the limit of drone or more bands are throwing a drone track onto their album. Fine by me. One riff forever. Is “Canada” by Low drone? I think so. When they did their famous “Drone not Drones” show, wherein they played a single song for 30 minutes at a state fair performance to a bunch of normies as a protest, they chose “Do you know how to waltz,” which I do think is sort of drone but also has so many of those pesky chord changes, whereas Canada does not. I wish I could put the 20 minute version of Canada that only appears on the extended version of the music video, available only on, god, I think the Low in Europe DVD, but maybe it’s on the You May Need a Murderer DVD. I am not sure. Oh wait. I looked it up. It’s on the Lifetime of Temporary Relief bonus DVD. Here is a copy for you. Why not. enjoy.
Until tomorrow. Sincerely, L. Cohen.
I regret to inform you Delta retired all of their 777s during pandemic!