Good morning. Hello. How are you? #986
Taylor Swift took us hostage in my dreams, Neubauten's unending discography, Fugitive Slave law of 1850, Douglas's break with Garrison, Dred Scott called it, life insurance application
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. Greetings from Chatham County, NC, where I have just awoken from a very long, very detailed dream in which Taylor Swift had a mental break and took a room full of people hostage at a hotel in a hospitality suite in which Emma and I were part of a group at a meet n greet. No one in the hotel room was particularly upset about being taken hostage by Taylor Swift. She was frequently reverting to a six year old and jumping on beds with her gun. She made us all take pictures of her. I was trying to text my Swiftie friends Kelly and Suzy to find out if the Swiftie community was yet aware of the hostage situation. There were only the beginnings of rumors flying on Twitter, but a crowd was beginning to form on the street below the hotel. It was, I believe, Denver but the hotel was, I believe, the Captain Cook hotel in Anchorage but the suite itself was, I believe, a suite in a Los Angeles hotel I do not remember the name of where I once had to have a meeting with Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel’s fathers.
Anyway, if you’re going to get taken hostage I strongly recommend you get it done by Taylor Swift.
Apple’s spell checker does not recognize the word “Swiftie” and never has there been a more searing indictment of Tim Cook’s reign.
And speaking of Taylor, happy 1989 (Taylor’s Version) announcement day to all who celebrate. I have ordered the vinyl and the yellow CD. Hundreds of thousands of this limited edition CD will be sold, it’ll probably be the best-selling CD in a decade, it will never be worth more than a penny, and I am trying to get rid of all my CDs, but such is the magnetic power of Swiftomania I guess.
In other musical news, I got through five more Einsturzende Neubauten albums yesterday — 9-15-2000, Brussels (Live), End Neu (Remixes), Berlin Babylon, Supporters Album Number 1 and Gemini. We are in a very “one step forward two steps back” situation here (a reference to an Olivia Rodrigo song on which Taylor gets a songwriting credit and is the supposed genesis of their bromance and then enemyship). The more Neubauten albums I listen to, the more that exist. It turns out that one of the “albums” in their discography is a sixty-eight CD box set of every show from their 2008 tour. Now I am a masochistic completist as much as the next guy but this is just too too much. We will be skipping that, as well as most of the innumerable only-released-on-USB-stick live albums. The new rule is that it has to have been released on actual, manufactured physical media for it to count in this journey. My god. It’s too much. I really do envy Neubauten, though. What an amazing multi-decade collaboration. What an artistic corpus.
And actually I am now very much wondering if Neubauten’s recommitment to itself and its very effective and earnest Patreon endeavor is part of the reason Blixa decided to leave Nick and the Bad Seeds. I need to go re-watch that portion of that one Nick Cave biopic my god there are so many Nick Cave biopics now I cannae keep them all straight.
Sorry this whole issue was not going to be about music. I was going to go on about how utterly, completely evil the Fugitive Slave law of 1850 was. I mean, I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was that bad. It didn’t just compel the non-slaveholding states to return slaves to the south. That was table stakes. Here let me quote from the book I am reading:
Crammed into the 1850 bargain as a sweetener for Southerners, the Fugitive Slave Act was, for slave owners, a win-win. Either it would convince restless slaves there was no freedom to be found stealing away in the night and so end the slow siphoning off of valuable property, or it would provoke popular resistance in the free states that would render the law unenforceable, giving the south an answer to its latest, and last ultimatum.
Unnecessarily burdensome, gratuitously cruel, the new law seemed designed to fail. With low evidentiary standards, a ban on testimony from the alleged runaways, and a prohibition on jury trials, the law offered no protection against cases of mistaken identity or outright fraud. Payment for the federal commissioner appointed to hear each case was twice as high if he returned the accused to slavery — a bribe to hide kidnapping under the cloak of law [emphasis added].
I knew it was bad, but Jesus. Didn’t know about the bribe part. The compromise of 1850 sucked, Henry Clay can suck it.
Also I read a bit more about Frederick Douglas’ break with William Lloyd Garrison, a man whom I have always admired. It happened not just when Douglas moved west and started his own paper, as I have always heard, but when Douglas made a public proclamation that the constitution wasn’t so bad and that we don’t need to dissolve the union with the south. Garrison found this morally reprehensible and, speaking next at the conference, implied that there was some sort of chicanery in Douglas’ conversion to unionism, a slight for which Douglas never forgave him.
I’m learning all this from the amazing, depressing book I’m reading: Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union buy Richard Kreitner. The book appeared on my Kindle mysteriously and it turned out it was there because Emma heard a review of the book and bought it. It is… damn. It really is something. Strong recommend. It is a bit of a polemic, though, and in this Douglas/Garrison case it’s the one place where I feel like the book lets me down, because it does tell me about Douglas’s conversion from a northern secessionist — like all good abolitionists at the time — to a unionist. Apparently Douglas decided that the constitution wasn’t just a document enshrining slavery, but rather a document with a mysterious, hidden blueprint to freedom for all in it. I don’t see it, I don’t understand it, and it is at direct odds with the thesis of this book, so now I am immensely curious about it. Don’t suppose anyone out there can recommend a really good biography of Frederick Douglas?
Because after reading this book, I cannot imagine a single good explanation for the horror that is the United States constitution prior to the thirteenth amendment.
One more thing on this topic: My whole life I had heard about the horrible Supreme Court decision that was Dred Scott. How it was a blemish on the court. But I now no longer believe this. Dred Scott was 100% exactly correctly decided if you are applying the constitution without activism. Dred Scott is the correct interpretation of what’s in the constitution. The decision wasn’t the problem, the constitution was. Many abolitionists — Garrison, Purvis, Remond — of the time agreed. Purvis called Dred Scott “in perfect keeping with the treatment of colored people but he American government from the beginning to this day,” confirming the constitution’s position that “the colored people are nothing, and can be nothing but an alien, disenfranchised and degraded class.”
I’ll probably write more about this book but man, man. This union. Born in absolute sin, it was. Compromising with evil. Nothing great about it.
Here is a drawing Jane did of a DNA strand and hydrogen atom. Really getting around to making her own version of the plaque on the Voyager probes.
I applied for life insurance cuz I guess my wife thinks I’m gonna die and leave her in the lurch with two houses. I told her she can go ahead and sell the other one even at a loss and she should be fine, but life insurance is on the mind, so hey let’s do it. I no longer drink, no longer smoke, and am in pretty decent health, so it shouldn’t be too too bad, but I’m still an overweight dude with a lot of medical issues, so they are sending someone to do a physical next week. Can’t say I am a fan of this. I told them on the questionnaire that I use edibles for my neck, but I am gonna play it safe and not consume any for the next ten days which is somewhat unpleasant of a proposition I’m not gonna lie. Though the existence of that unpleasantness probably means it is for the best. I’m really gonna spiral if they reject me, though. Ugh.
The actual application part was really easy, by the way. Policygenius. Pretty solid company. Good service by actual humans.
Jane and I had a lovely bedtime last night, did a lot of dancing, the usual hits, oh wait we also watched the original “love story” video by Taylor for the first time, she’s all in a corset n shit and so I taught Jane about corsets, which turns out is a lot easier to teach someone about than evolution. She is excited about Kindergarten. I told her if she ends up not liking it to just let us know and we will pull her — YES PLEASE — but she seems pretty confident she’s gonna like it. You all do too. Still not into this whole thing but I guess it’s the right thing to do. We are at eighteen days. Gulp. GULP.
I know I ended this yesterday the same way but I am very nervous about the whole thing. being a parent, man. It’s a bitch.
I should crop my finger out of this photo but nope.
Here’s a punk playlist for you. Definitely a favored genre amongst my sensitive soul readership. I do not mean that disparagingly. You are good people. I love you.
Talk tomorrow! Stay safe out there.
what a dream! sounded like inspiration for a new TS video ;)