Good morning. Hello. How are you? #804
A re-evaluation of Faith and Carnage. Tax software. Sound Museum RIP. Pyrex's brand destruction. Drunk Uncle Elon.
Good morning! Hello there! How are you? All well? Californians holding up? Man. I made that comment about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower yesterday, but then last night I got to a part in the book where biblical rains pour down on LA in the first giant rain in six years and it sure felt… prescient. Kinda like William Gibson and the Jackpot. Unnerving, to say the least.
Okay so some of you remember back when I read Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s Faith and Carnage and, more generally, my slow disillusionment with Nick Cave as he gets older and starts going on about cancel culture and whatnot. But I still have immense respect for a lot that he’s done in the past. But more specifically, when Faith and Carnage came out, I criticized it for its inconsistency. And I pointed to one episode specifically, where at one point in the book Nick says the cliche’d bit about having no regrets, and then later in the book he delves deeply into the regrets he has in his life and it irked me that he could just put forth these two incongruous opinions and hold them up as equally true, important and profound.
But last night Nick posted a video on his Youtube channel. He has been posted these 2-3 minute videos of him and O’Hagan having a discussion on stage about book, presumably as part of the promotion for the book. They’ve generally been… fine. But yesterday’s spoke to exactly this contradiction. He acknowledged it. And he talked about something I knew academically, but hadn’t really considered: that the nature of the project changed over time. He acknowledged that at the beginning of the project he was giving sort of pat, clichéed rock-and-roll answers, whereas later in the project it at had evolved into something more serious. It made me realize I had been judging the book as a singular work, when it was, in fact, a series of snapshots in time.
I hereby rescing my critique of the book. Also, his answer on stage delved into some of his regrets, and the nature of regret, and it was one of the more moving things I’ve seen him talk about in a while and it got to me:
(I am hyphenating rock-and-roll these days it’s an immensely satisfying thing to do I strongly recommend it. Plus it really fits in with rock’s boomer status)
The famed rock-and-roll rehearsal compex The Sound Museum in Allston, MA is closing. The place has been around forever. I spent maybe… mmm… gonna say six years of my life across a few different practice spaces in that place. Felt like I lived there. There was a brief news item on TikTok about it from WZBC yesterday and it was so surreal to see the interior of the sound museum in 2023 and how it is exactly unchanged from the mid 90’s. Nothing is different. The walls haven’t been painted. The bathrooms haven’t been fixed. The carpet is the same. The interior of each practice space looks the same. Amazing.
Des, the owner at the time, was a wiley one. I was a broke-ass kid when we rented there and one time I didn’t pay the rent on time. So he took my deposit check from a few years earlier, which he had never cashed, and deposited it on the same day of the year that was on the date column. The bank did not notice that the year was three years earlier. I never realized he hadn’t deposited the check in some escrow account back in the day. He just… kept the checks on file for a later date. And he knew that would work. It was kind of brilliant. And I remember thinking “wow. That guy got me.” Like I deserved it and he had outsmarted me and I had been gotten. And I remember being briefly outraged and upset and trying to muster up a feeling of victimization but then having this young adult epiphany: no. You deserve this. You are in the wrong here. Suck it up. It was one of those moments where you learn a basic adult function. And it is inextricably tied to the Sound Museum.
I also remember when we brought Cindytalk to America and Annie and I setting them up in our practice space at the sound museum on a mix of our gear and gear I’d bought for the tour. A bunch of gear they’d never used before. And for their very first song, they just banged out a near-perfect version of “Muster” (available now on Dais records!) This band that both of us had been obsessed with high school, in our practice space. Annie and I just looked at each other with complete awe. Really seared into my memory.
Farewell, Sound Museum. You were an institution.
So I already started on my taxes, cuz I am so on it. I have a LLP with a couple friends in which we did an investment, a single angel investment, and last year it went to zero. So it’s a very easy set of K1s for the LLP because all I have to do is transfer the original capital contribution amounts from each partner to a loss on this year’s K1. So I write to my accountant and tell him all this and he’s like “yep no problem I will prepare the K1s” and I write him back and say “ha we will be the fastest partnership ever to issue their K1s and the only one to ever do it in January” because partnerships, I have found, are absolutely fucking terrible about sending out their K1s and they views their legal deadline for sending them out to you, which is March 15th, as more of a suggestion about when to get started. Out of the hundred or so K1s I have received in my life, aside from the ones from this specific LLP, which I control, I can’t think of a single one I’ve received before April let alone March.
But then my accountant wrote me back and said something very interesting which I had never thought about. He said “yep we’ll get ‘em out ASAP but I will have to wait a couple weeks because my tax software hasn’t yet updated to the 2022 tax code.” I mean, I guess this makes sense! But I had never thought about it. Even if the IRS has its act together and issues all of its advisories, etc., before January 1st, every state would have to as well, and then the software company has to code that in. Huh. I wonder what the earliest you could actually file is. Anyone here ever successfully file their taxes in January?
Ole drunk uncle Elon is at it again ruining Twitter and he has made it so every time you open the app you have to go to the shitty-ass algorithmic timeline instead of the only-way-twitter-is-tolerable chronological timeline of only people you follow. My god, the algorithmic timeline is such a hellscape of lunacy and sadness. It absolutely boggles the mind why he thinks this would be a good idea other than using it as a honeypot redpill into his poisoned mindset. It’s just the worst. I haven’t “quit” Twitter yet, and I am still looking at it a few times a day, but it is undeniably still decaying, getting worse. It shows the same shit over and over, even in the chronological timeline. So many key voices are just.. gone. Mastadon is good but it’s still not there. Whole communities I read and followed have just… disappeared. He killed them off. It really is awful. There’s still some stuff there but it’s nothing like it was. I doubt it ever will be again. Tumblr, Livejournal, they’re still around, there’s still some utility and good stuff, but even with Tumblr’s renaissance, it’s nothing like the old days. Maybe it will be some day, but that’s because it’s under competent, caring, patient leadership. And even when it was owned by someone “bad” they still cared, they still tried. Twitter has further to fall and a much, much harder (theoretical) climb in the future. And it can’t even start healing until this jackass gives up.
I was thinking about Pyrex the other day. Was making waffles with Jane, melting butter in the microwave in my Pyrex measuring cup, and she was in one of her questioning moods and she asked me what Pyrex was for and I told her the basics: that it was like glass but that it could get hot and cold without breaking because glass can break when it changes temperatures very quickly. But even as I was saying it, I kind of knew it was bullshit because, like we all know, modern Pyrex is bullshit. You l know this right? I feel like this universally known: that new Pyrex sucks because it no longer has some ingredient in it. I can’t remember what the ingredient is (lime maybe?) and I can’t remember when it started sucking (the 80’s maybe?). But the knowledge that new Pyrex sucks is modern folk wisdom I feel like. And then I thought: “Wow, you know, maybe it’s not even true anymore. Maybe Pyrex got so tired of this criticism and it was hurting sales or something that they went and fixed the problem.” And it occurred to me I actually had no, real, concrete knowledge about Pyrex and its current composition since I read a Wikipedia page about the topic, like, ten years ago. And I thought how hilarious it would be if they fixed the problem, but no one knew. It really does seem, to me, like Pyrex is one of the great brand destruction stories of the 20th century. A universally beloved brand, indespensible, absolutely considered something you had to have, and now the first thing everyone thinks about it is “it’s kind of garbage now and not as good as it used to be.”
But I absolutely have no idea if any of that is true.
Okay an industrial mix for you. The “legacy” stuff in this genre suffers from profound mastering issues on Spotify, the levels are all over the place and I do not like it. It’s also a genre where a ton of the good stuff isn’t on Spotify at all, so you tend to find yourself sticking to the same 5-10 “stars” of the genre, which I do not enjoy. But it’s been a while, and there are a few good new interesting pieces. Of course this just serves to make the levels issue even more problematic, loudness wars and all that, but we’re gonna go with it today cuz, well, it’s the playlist that was closest to done.
Until tomorrow!
Yeah Glacier and Black Helicopter both practice there now and I don't know where they will end up.
On a positive note, did you see this?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/11/arts/mayor-wu-announces-interim-plan-displaced-tenants-brightons-sound-museum/
I never thought we'd have a Mayor get so involved in something like this. I didn't see this sort of commitment from Marty Walsh, even when he had Joyce Linehan in his year.
Sadly, in addition to the Sound Museum, the other Boston practice spaces in Charlestown are also closing and turning into self-storage in a few months. I used to enjoy listening to this one amazing grindcore band while taking my dog for walks near that building. I'll never know who they were but I so appreciated the noise they were sharing with their neighbors during the open windows summer months.