Good morning. Hello. How are you? #892
My sister had a baby, I had a bit of an existential freakout, Emma got sick, chores got done, Jane did art and danced, Martin Amis died.
Good morning, hello, how are you? Did you have a lovely weekend? I do hope so. Greetings from the newest member of the PEARL LEAGUE on Duolingo. I won, number one, in the Amethyst league last week. In your face, Mike L. It was a stunning come from behind victory. I had less than 300 points on Saturday morning and finished the league with over 3,000 points. Also I would like to welcome my wife to the Amethyst league.
Emma was sick yesterday so I put aside my chores and spent the day watching Jane and hanging out at the house in case Emma needed anything. It was actually exactly the sort of merciful release I need, an excuse to be lazy. Hence, the Pearl league promotion.
Congratulations and salutations to my sister Val and her husband Matt, who just gave birth (well, Val did) to a beautiful baby boy, Rocky Timmons Blake, six pounds, three ounces. And congratulations to yours truly, newly minted member of the Pearl league, for not ruining the announcement on Facebook like I did with his brother Lucas. I (more or less) kept the secret for nine months. I definitely kept it off of the internet. Very exciting to have a new Nephew, Lucas gets a brother, Val gets to stop being pregnant and mom gets a new Grandson. Very exciting all around.
And RIP to Martin Amis. Loved that guy’s work. Mostly. Wildly spotty work, wildly wacky life, too soon departed, he was finding humanity and beauty and nuance in his later work, well, Lionel Asbo aside. I partially modeled The Barbarian Group after the absudity of Money. His politics could be dodgy and he was all around too confident about things, but his brilliance cannot be denied. Nor could his hard work at writing. That dude worked hard to write a sentence. That dude worked harder on a sentence than I work on an entire book. Nabokov was inside him.
Before Emma getting sick and my forced laziness, I had a pretty productive weekend. I did not thin the radishes, I really should have. I did trellis the tomatoes a bit more. I got more cardboard on the lawns over at the new house. That was funny, actually. Debbie, the woman from whom we bought the house, came by Friday evening. I was doing some house work so I had all the speakers on, playing music, and it was playing this super loud intense punk album by MSPAINT so that was awkward. And then she mentioned that she had spent $5,000 to re-sod the lawns that I was now in the process of killing. We both had a good laugh. She said “whatever it’s your house now.” But still, I felt a little bad.
What else did I get done this weekend, hrm. I moved a giant rug from the master bedroom over here to the living room over there, it looks better over there, so now we need a new rug in our master bedroom it is so weird not having a rug. I hung a painting I’ve had for 30 years, that I bought from my friend Deanna in, like, 1992 or so. I have worked exceptionally hard to preserve it all these years and it finally gets a home on a wall again and I am so excited. Emma and I had words about my hanging job, because the painting is on unstretched canvas and cannot be hung “straight” per se, and it was really triggering Emma’s obsession with clean lines and it got real awkward but we powered through it and reached a conclusion and in hindsight I bet it was her illneess coming on.
This painting, by the way, is on unstretched canvas and Emma and I are at a loss about what to do to preserve it. Should we… try to sew it onto another canvas? Hang it like a tapestry, as-is? No idea. Maybe Craig knows!
I got the workbench frame power washed, but I did not get to grind it. I was just settling into a lovely afternoon of paint stripping when I was recalled back to the house alas. Next weekend.
I went through my flat file and chose about 20 art pieces for the new house and then ran them by Emma for a final selection and then measured them and bought pre-made frames for all the ones that were standard sizes. There’s gonna be some good art over there. Stuff I haven’t seen in years, stuff I forgot I owned. Very exciting.
I was supposed to go to Cruel World in LA and/or Taylor Swift in Boston this weekend, both got rain. I am sad to have missed both but also I love housework and home improvement and I am generally okay with it. Love and Rockets’s setlist looked solid. “Haunted” and “Yin and Yang” that’ll do it for me right there. And the Siouxsie setlist looks good too. How was Siouxsie I know like forty of you went, I would like a review!
This weekend I experienced a brief moment of clarity and profound unworthiness it was fairly upsetting. I was reading Felix Salmon’s new book, The Phoenix Economy, and he was talking about the pandemic and our response to it, and was giving a fair and balanced overview of how “we” responded to the pandemic, reacted, and things like that. It was quite reasonable but it triggered in me a reminder that all culture is written by extroverts. This is something I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. I have a dream of writing a book about cultural dropouts: People that became famous and then just… disappeared. Of course I suspect a lot of them had some sort of mental illness, but, then, I also suspect that a lot of them… have far less mental illness than the rest of us. I suspect there is a giant cohort of people out there who are introverts, who stay home, who do not participate in society at all, really. And so whenever we talk about culture, or “we,” we are, in effect, negating the lived experience of millions of introverts.
It’s more complex now, of course, because of the internet. Now there is a substantial chunk of those introverts who can use the internet to participate in culture but also to drive it, to break it, to impact it: the archtypical 4Chan kid who lives with his mom SWATting people and arguing on Twitter and driving people to death threats and murder and whatnot. And of course the ones who now use the internet in those positive ways, connecting them back to a world that a disease or injury took from them. That’s nice.
But of course even discounting that group, I believe there’s still a large cohort of people who are introverts by choice, who’ve dropped out from society by choice. We all know this, but we forget when we are talking about culture that we are being exclusionary of such a large group.
So whenever I’m reading something about culture, this is always lurking in the back of my mind: this is only “the culture” for some. Which is usually just fine. But this time, something hit me that I am becoming one of those introverts, and this means I am dropping out of culture, and this is all fine but it also means I’ll never make another cultural impact, and… I never really put those two together before. It made me sadder than I care to admit.
I’m like that cool guy on Seinfeld who was bald who then freaked out that he was going bald.
It was unpleasant.
Lasted maybe thirty seconds.
Jane is making strange scultures and attaching them to walls and tables and things. She’s also making trails on the carpet with Scotch tape, and putting Scotch Tape X’s over things she doesn’t like. It is an interesting art phase.
And Daddy Jane Dance Party has returned with a vengeance. Two days in a row, it’s been lovely. We did some Elle Goulding and Charlie XCX and a lot of MUNA and Zara Larsson and Miley Cyrus she’s very into the Taylor Swift “Delicate” video and we did “Hung up” both nights. For sad old man music we did a live Spiritaulized version of “Lord Let it Rain on Me” and “Sunflower” buy Low. Good times.
A shoegaze playlist for you today, more all new bands, except an all new song by an old band, the Telescopes. There’s so much great new shoegaze out there it is so awesome so many people are in shoegaze bands the world would be a better place if more people were in shoegaze bands. Hrm, although the world seems a much worse place than it did in the 90s and there were fewer shoegaze bands then, but I’m sure the world is actually better now and it’s just my POV, right? Right? Where are those slightly annoying white man authors who specialize in telling us the world is getting better when you need them.
Until tomorrow!
congrats to Val and Matt!
i’m sure more experienced artist friends will chime in on your dilemma but i bet you could simply re-stretch the canvas? get some stretchers, assemble a frame and get to work with a staple gun OR pay a professional to do it.