Good morning. Hello. How are you? #940
4AD poster reissues, Reputation, Mountain Goats, Instagram ads, Mike Pence, remember graphene?, SCRUB TYPHYS, etc. etc.
Good morning, friend. Salutations and Felicity. I never watched that show was it any good? Probably unwatchable now.
Got a lot of notes in the ‘ole GMHHAY topic list and I’m just gonna burn through them all here. Maybe one will click or maybe this will be phenomenally disjointed. Let’s see!
Amazon sent me a ten pound bag of dog food so I suppose they must love me.
4AD records is reprinting the 13 Year Itch poster and boy I sure am glad I kept that thing in mint condition for thirty years only to have them reprint it again and devalue it. Super. At least it’s $90 and only on sale for 24 hours. Guess that puts a floor on its value. Maybe all press is good press. Or something.
I had a revelation yesterday as I was scrolling through Instagram, jealous of people out there in the world doing things (except the ones who got COVID which seems to be on the rise again) that “normal” people tend to post more on instagram and social media when they are out in the world doing fun things. But I actually seem to do the opposite — I post less when I’m out there in the world doing things and a lot more when I’m sitting around at home not on glamorous trips. Is that as interesting written down in black and white as it was in my head? Mmmm maybe not. Maybe. I do kinda think it’s GMHHAY’s super power though: I am not a particularly great writer, even after all these words, but the power of habit and the circumstances of mundanity make for an oddly compelling mixture that people can relate to and I am still sort of wrestling with this understanding. Really is a weird-ass thing going on here. It’s kind of exciting to have managed to carve out something new and different on the internet so hey, thank you for that.
Speaking of Instagram I need to go shopping for some guitar pedals or a mixer or something because all my ads have reverted to lingerie ads and boner pills and weight loss scams which, sure, on the one hand, good job, well-targeted instagram, but also my god there are so many boner pills and lingerie companies and weight scams in this world it really is something. I miss my ads for high-end, unaffordable guitar pedals. Can’t a man have more than one hobby in life? I swear.
Speaking of social media I checked in on my recent TikTok, the third in a series about Taylor Swift’s mail order operation, and it has sixteen thousand views now, 10x what it had last time I looked, 10x what the other two Taylor-Swift-related videos have. In related Taylor Swift news I finally listened to my vinyl copy of Reputation and I gotta say a few things here. One, it is probably the best-sounding picture disc I own, so that is kinda cool. Two, it’s still a pretty bad album but a few songs are growing on me after repeated listens. I just don’t understand Reputation. I don’t understand its art direction, I don’t understand how you can have a song that sounds like Godflesh meets Nitzer Ebb that has the lyrics “island breeze” in it.
Hrm actually writing that down makes it sound a lot cooler.
Speaking of vinyl I got my copy of The Jordan Lake Sessions Vol 1 and 2 by the Mountain Goats yesterday which is exciting because, you know, I live near Jordan lake and all. But weirdly this was build as one 4LP vinyl set, and is listed in Discogs as such, but it is actually two completely separate albums: Jordan Lake Sessions 1 and Jordan Lake Sessions 2, with no connectivity and I do not see how this can be considered a single album, Jordan Lake Sessions Vol 1 and 2 and yet it is listed that was in Discogs and on the Mountain Goats site.
I don’t even understand the world anymore. Throw in a slipcase or something amirite? Jesus.
Also my god I own a lot of Mountain Goats records I don’t even love them that much (I mean I love them) but I realized what I love is that the Mountain Goats exist, that John Darnielle and his merry band of pranksters have been cranking out 1-2 albums every year for twenty years and living off of it and I feel like my purchase of these albums is a tithe to the artistic life properly lived. He is living it and inspiring.
Is it just me or is fake news getting even more pernicious and out of control. It used to be this academic thing for me, that fake news was a problem. But it didn’t really affect me or my life or those smart people I know. But those walls are crumbling left and right and it is getting worse and worse. Normal people I know just out of the blue say completely bonkers things sometimes. And I sit there sort of stunned and I don’t know what to do, I don’t know whether I should bother trying to correct (help? guide?) them, but.. What am I going to do? Google this very obvious thing and send them a link from the New York Times? They can already do that and they don’t. I swear to god it happened like four time yesterday. And we all probably believe some profoundly mistaken thing now, it feels like a cancer. Shit… do I? I probably do too! It all takes so much work now.
(I’m gonna go ahead and stick to my lazy assumption that there are not, in fact, crack vending machines dotting Manhattan now but shit maybe things have changed in the couple months since I was last there. Maybe *I* am the one swallowing the fake news).
Look at this room temperature superconductor thing. I see on Twitter Threads billionaires and genius friends delving into weird Chinese usenet forums and Korean newspapers and shit like that, spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure out if the experiment was real, if it worked, if it can be, has been replicated. You could literally spend more time in a day trying to figure out if the room-temperature superconductor experiment has been replicated yet than you spend at your job. And it’s just one issue! And you have to do this for every issue! It’s fucking insane. It’s too much.
I mean I don’t know, on the one hand it’s easy, I can just magically tell what’s real and what’s fake because I have common sense, or am brilliant, or am deluded, who the fuck knows. But then someone says something completely bonkers to me and I’m like “fuck what do I do now? Now I gotta spend like sixteen hours researching a topic I do not fucking care about just to make sure I’m not being duped.” But if they had never said this bonkers thing to me I could have just lived my life.
So maybe that’s the answer let’s just stop saying things to each other.
I think part of it is speed. People are impatient. People need the exact answer right now, and there are these reporters out there trying to figure it out, or the answer just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it’s not actually possible to know, just yet, if the room-temperature superconductor is real or not. Maybe we should just chill out for a few weeks, months, and worry about it then. We used to just wait and see what Time or the New Yorker said about it. And shit, man, graphene was real, it’s been twenty fuckin years and it still hasn’t made a difference. Has it? maybe that’s fake news. What do I know about graphene.
And this seems to be an unpopular opinion, probably made out of naivety and idiocy, which I seem to be accumulating in my apparently Andy-Rooney-inspired aging, but a 15% reduction in power transmission loss, better batteries and faster computers do not strike me as world changing. Are they gonna solve global warming? Are they gonna eliminate wealth inequality? Am I getting too pessimistic? Fuck I am aren't I. Choose hope!
Okay here’s some hope and a thing I never thought I’d say but: Bravo, Mike Pence. I mean, took you fuckin long enough but if you are finally going to tell the truth to someone, telling the truth to the people with the power to prosecute trump for this bullshit are the correct people to tell the truth to. Was Mike Pence playing the long game? Does he feel unmitigated glee and satisfaction as he sat there on Fox News yesterday telling Fox viewers explicitly, in no uncertain terms, that Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government and that he is guilty of the crimes of which he is now being accused? Does anyone care at this point? I mean, you know who will care? A DC Jury.
Emma sent me some information about SCRUB TYPHUS. Apparently a) native to Southeast Asia, Indonesia, China, Japan, India, and northern Australia, but b) now currently in the area in which I live, or at least found in the Jordan Lake area which is, as we co-incidentally mentioned a moment ago, right near me, c) not impacted yh the typhus vaccine, which I got ages ago when I went to Tunisia (hi Nick) but has worn off anyway but I guess whatever, and d) transmitted through chiggers. And as you may well remember, faithful reader of GMHHAY, I get fucking chigger bites on the regular. I have about fifteen on my body as we speak.
So what I am trying to tell you is that I am going to get SCRUB TYPHUS, probably by next week or so.
Jane is sick, Emma is sick, they do not seem quite sick with the same thing, this is Jane’s second sickness in a month or two after years of never getting sick and man it is not helping with this whole sending her to kindergarten in 20 days thing.
She did (mostly) keep her promise that she was done being unkind to me yesterday though. Had a little bit of trailing unkindness yesterday morning but by the time of daddy bedtime she was quite kind to me.
She even let me play a live version of “Jackie” by Sinéad during dance party, though.
She seemed very unimpressed.
Here have a post rock mix. New Explosions in the Sky coming that is exciting. Wait is there a new single? I gotta check that out.
Until tomorrow!
you knew this was coming: I LOVE REPUTATION. i watched the stadium tour for the thousandth time on netflix last night. i love how out of nowhere the styling of it all is. the font! it feels like playing dress-up but instead of being a princess, taylor gets to be the evil queen in gold and leather with dark lipstick and snakes. lastly, the acoustic version of dancing with our hands tied is so so good. that is all 😘