Good morning. Hello. How are you? #917
Mini-sagas, flooring, texting old friends, deer destruction, a new word, RIP James B Goodenough,
Good morning! Hello! How’s it going? #917. NYC Area code. Not the OG one of course, but still.
I’m very into flooring this week. Gonna replace the carpet in the office at the new house with hardwood floors. Gonna do it myself. Figure I should practice on a small room, one that I can hide from the guests if I mess it up. Anyone ever replace a hardwood floor? Any tips? I’ve been watching endless videos and it doesn’t seem to be that bad. Make sure the floor is actually flat. Measure measure measure. Plan. I’m feeling it. And then if I succeed there I’m gonna do the floor in the attic when it’s finally time. And then maybe the floors in the living room of the new house. Flooring. I’m all about flooring. Gonna get one of those Bosch whack-the-button-with-a-hammer flooring staplers my god how satisfying do those things look. Anyway, if you’ve done this, hit me up. Give me some pointers.
During the Cure — did I mention this on Tuesday? — a deer got inside my deer fence at the new house because I was stupid and I left a gate open. So we were sitting there at Merriweather Post and could see the deer on the Ring doorbell cam eating all of my tomato plants and grape leaves. It sucked. I used the microphone feature to scream into the doorbell like a monster and it sort of worked, and the deer trotted off, but not before massive damage was done. Went over there Tuesday to survey it and it was… not pretty. Things will recover but, off. Quite the setback. I am sad. Gates. Gates matter. Also, screaming monster sounds into a phone in front of a bunch of people at a show is kinda funny.
In other new house news, the plumber is coming tomorrow to get rid of the two hot water heaters in the attic and replace them with a single tankless one in the crawlspace, and the electrician is coming tomorrow to add a bunch of outlets to the garage and two to the outside of the house. I am very excited. Progress progress. Also I think the last of the frames are arriving today and I can get the last of the art hung. Out of 30 or so pieces, only one is going to require a professional frame. I feel bad for professional framers but I don’t have a spare $4,000 right now to frame things.
Oh, and a funny story on that front. Starts with me farting around on Instagram a few months ago, where the algorithms put up for me a limited edition Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral LP with special art by Richard Prince. I bought it. I didn’t really realize it yet but it was part of a series of Interscope albums, limited editions, with special covers made by different artists. And, man, once you buy one, the Interscope and algorithms really go all in on trying to convince you to buy another one. Which I was successfully avoiding for quite some time, until this mini-saga collided with the mini-saga of my recent love-hate-horror-fascination with Blackpink, and me accepting that I was going to need to buy the latest Blackpink album because the slower album cuts were really not bad. And then I see an ad for one of these limited edition Interscope albums with special covers made by different artists, and it’s for the Blackpink album. So I am already intrigued, but then I realize the Blackpink cover is done by an old college friend of mine Jen Guidi, who is now a big shot artist out in LA. Which is awesome. I had only sort of realized this about Jen a couple months ago, as we lost touch decades ago.
But then these two mini-sagas collided with the new house stuff, because among the art Emma and I picked out for the new house was this art-school figure study of a black skeleton on a grey background that I’ve had forever that I am 90% sure Jen gave to me in college. And so I was hanging it yesterday in the new house, something that I’ve been carrying around for thirty years and it gets a new home on the wall above the tub.
So I instagram messaged Jen asking if my memory was correct and it was hers. Which is a thing I’ve been doing lately: messaging old friends out of the blue after not having talked to them for 20+ years. Messaging them about some pedantic piece of history that is in my brain, that I still think about from back then. I cannot say the habit is yielding results. Alas.
(Also: The Blackpink album has arrived but the NIN one, which I ordered about a month earlier, has not. They charged me for it too. Hrm.)
Made up a new word yesterday: “Exctinctifying.” Something that is/will cause a species (implicitly human in my first use of the word) to go extinct. Seems like it’s a word we would need a lot but don’t have. Probably have some academia word that plebes don’t know what it means like “dialectic.”
Two days ago Jane and I were doing breakfast and we she was asking me who invented things. This is a pretty fun game because most of them are pre-history, like bowls or juice. But then once in a while she does one I know, or sort of know the 1980’s fake answer, like Thomas Edison and the light bulb. And sometimes I know the more complex answer like the Tesla/Marconi thing for the radio (man, now I think about it, it’s really weird she asked about radio. I cannot remember the circumstances. Strange). And then there are a ton she asks where there is an inventor, or at least the myth of a single inventor that is probably a marketing lie, like the Ziplock bag, invented by Steve Ausnit though of course one cannot ignore the earlier contributions of Borge Madsen. These are fun because I Google “who invented the Ziplock bag” and then you can go down a rabbit hole of simultaneous inventions, corporate intrigue and whatnot. I keep trying to get her to grasp the concept of simultaneous invention, and she does understand it, but she seems compelled to the hero myth of solo invention, which is somewhat disconcerting how did we accidentally put that into her brain. Alas.
Anyway, she then asked me about the lithium ion battery, who invented it, because we were talking about batteries, who invented them, and she was boring of my long discourse into how a bottle of water or a dam can be a battery and she shut that down and said the kind in your phone. So I looked it up and it was 2019 Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough, of UT Austin. Nice clean provenance of a more or less solo inventor, but not really, he shared the Nobel with two other people, etc. etc. He also seems to have been deeply involved in the invention of RAM. Then Jane asked what RAM was and I went into a long story of her having to pee while she’s playing an iPad game and them coming back to the game and it remembering what level she was on so she didn’t start over.
But also it had turned out that John Goodenough had died maybe 24 hours earlier, at the age of 100. He was the oldest living Nobel Laureate, and, having been awarded the Nobel at the age of 96, the oldest person to ever receive a Nobel.
So, RIP John B Goodenough. Sounds like you had a great life. And a great last name. I had a friend with that last name once. I wonder if they were related. Man, I never asked anyone where they were from back when I was younger. It was all about the here and now. I don’t even know if many of my friends have siblings. Weird. Hi were you from? Got any siblings?
Daddy Jane Dance Party last night. Diet Cig again, but mostly new live clips from this year’s Glastonbury: Lana Del Rey, Caroline Polacheck. Jane made up a great dance where we both squat on the floor, facing each other, and then scoot toward each other. Then once we reach each other, I flop over and pretend I’m a pillow and she lays on me and pretends to sleep, complete with “zzz” sounds. It’s called the pillow dance and I am here for it. We’ll do it at Man Ray once we can finally go.
Just a mix today, old and new. The Crow soundtrack has been on my mind since the Cure show, so here’s another track from it. So great the Cure are playing “Burn.” I’ve now seen five songs from The Crow soundtrack live. I’ve also seen Helmet, Rage, Rollins Band and Machines of Loving Grace but couldn’t tell you what songs they played. I’m 90% sure the Femmes and TKK never played their Crow songs when I saw them. Maybe Thrill Kill Kult is playing “After the Flesh” on this tour. Everyone should bring back their Crow soundtrack song to their live set. New Blonde Redhead single. New Algiers album is intense but good. Not a giant fan of the new Wedding Present, alas.
Until tomorrow!
Oliver is into Blackpink at the moment and it's all because of... 'Boombayah' on Just Dance for the Nintendo Switch (which he plays when he's upstairs hanging with his cousins)
i was born in boston, but grew up in weston, ma. i’m the third of four kids: two older sisters and a younger brother. (you must have gotten middle child vibes from lol)