Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1415
A story about going to David Lynch's house. Walmart run. Masnick Zuck article. Jane looks like Mario. Sick of the cold.
All right all right all right. Good morning, kind people. Happy Friday. We are listening to a punkish band called The Pink Slips. I kinda like them, even though, you know, they are not moody and depressed. Someone’s gotta do it, right?
Hello this is a blurb I am going to copy and paste and put in a call-out for the next month you can just skip it if you already know:
Attention Facebook readers: GMHHAY is leaving Facebook, migrating to Slack. This will be over a few months, and we’ll be completely off by April. I love you all. Please come join us in Slack. The invite link is in the comments below.
(Things are going well over there. Still some UX tweaks need to be done, but conversations are starting to happen. The #introductions channel was a good idea, thank you Florian. Join us!)
This cold is getting to me. I am tired of it. And I’m in North Carolina. How was I ever an Alaskan, how did I ever put up with this? The answer is, of course, I didn’t go outside, and I do now, and I just. Seriously. Fuck this. Even like four years ago I thought it was weird people could get SAD down here in the Carolinas, but nope, not anymore. This cold spell has at least another ten days and I am fucking sick of it.
SO: RIP David Lynch. I worshipped that man, though he obviously should have quit smoking.
I met him once. Visited him at his house, had a 1:1 meeting for about 2 hours. Well, he had a couple assistants with him, and they are three houses, connected, on Mulholland drive. Or maybe were three houses – I heard his part of Mulholland had been evacuated last week, and thought of him and his houses. Fuck.
The meeting was real weird. He has a photo of his yogi framed in front of him in his conference room. He has a specific seat, you can’t sit in it, the assistants made sure I did not do that before he came in.
He smoked the same cigarettes I (then) smoked, American Spirits Yellow. Halfway through the conversation, he picked one out of the pack and started smoking it. I assumed this meant we could smoke together, so I pulled one out too. He stared at me, turned away, and waited for an assistant to inform me I could not smoke.
Buuuuut there was a lot amazing about the meeting. It was specifically about Twin Peaks, so, you know. That was nice. He worked in a little bit about his coffee and a little bit about meditation but mostly we stuck to the topic at hand.
Among the ideas we were pitching was a re-launch on YouTube of Invitation to Love, and apparently that was a Mark Frost joint so he was not too keen on that idea, but mostly he liked our ideas and could tell we were passionate about it.
This was 2007, years before the Season 3, but you could tell he had not given up on the show. He took me to his screening room and we watched a ton of extras, outtakes, etc. We made the plan for filming the bonus footage that is now on the DVD and BluRay Gold Box sets.
I made a long journal entry the next day about the whole surreal day. I just re-read it. It was April 11, 2007. I had forgotten about this gem:
He was picking stills that we could all use, and he saw one of the old mill. He launched into this ridiculously long, detailed, impassioned story about the mill and the people that worked there. It lasted - I kid you not - twenty minutes. He kept going, more and more. So into it. He kept saying "it was so REAL" and it made me think the dude needs to leave Hollywood a bit more. He actually got pretty intense and wild eyed toward the end of the speech, intently describing the man who operates the crane bandsaw that chops up the tree. He got like weirdly wild eyed in the manner of a fiery sermon or something. It was definitely a bit of an oration, a performance, but I'm not 100% sure why. I think he just felt it. I certainly don't think he was doing it for my sake. It's a mystery, but I suppose that's no surprise.
We also toured the bar he had picked out to use as a location for filming the DVD extras. My god he loved that bar. I don’t sadly, remember its name.
And, of course, he spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use this Twin Peaks revival to sell coffee.
A week later he sent me a signed Twin Peaks postcard that hangs on my wall to this day.
Also saw him present Inland Empire at the Brattle in Cambridge and my main memory of that is that he insisted his films had correct interpretations: he absolutely rejected the notion of “you choose the explanation.” Explicitly said that Lost Highway had a “correct” interpretation. That has stuck with me.
Episode 7, was it? Of season 3 of Twin Peaks? The finest hour of television ever made.
I love (almost) all his films, but I hold a soft spot for The Straight Story. Think I will start my re-watch run with that one tonight.
RIP.
Just back from Walmart. When I got there, Walmart radio was playing, which as you know I love, but also… did this signal the end of the “reduced distractions’ hour or whatever they call it? Was it a harbinger of Walmart, now a beacon of woke, going the way of Facebook and obeying-in-advance the Trump administration and killing off DEI initiatives? What a depressing world that hearing “Safety Dance” in a parking lot leads you to such thoughts.
But no, it turns out it was about 7:45 when I got there, and right on the button at 8AM, Walmart radio silenced, like the guns on the western front at the start of the ceasefire in All Quiet on the Western Front.
(Not apropos of anything, but ceasefires are so weird and the way, ahem, certain parties just keep right on killing people and children till the exact magic minute is real inhuman if you ask me.)
Also can I just say that Walmart’s shallot situation is a god damned crime? Three extra small shallots in a hard plastic clam shell case? What the fuck?
OH and they took the aisle/shelf numbers out of the Walmart app which is a giant pain in the ass and I hope this is only temporary. I am pretty verklempt about it, literally considering speaking to the manager like a karen.
In the pharmacy area, I was buying more rewetting drops — because it’s winter or because I’m a nighttime stoner now who can say — and there was a woman there going through, if you will recall, exactly what I went through in the drops aisle a month or two ago?
(Wait did I write about this? Anyway there are like five different “active ingredients” in assorted re-wetting eyedrops these days, and the price ranges from, like, $5 to $24. And last time I bought like five different kinds, across all price ranges to see if it was worth it.)
I think I told you that part before, but here is the exciting news from someone who has put the work in and uses a lot of drops for his special eyes (shout-out to the greatest television advertisement ever made). The findings:
None of it makes any difference, just buy the cheap stuff.
So imagine my thrill when I saw a woman standing in front of the rewetting drops shelf looking confused.
“None of it makes any difference,” I said. “I bought like five different ones of these and tried them all and they all work the same.”
I figured I was being helpful, but, you know, it’s 8:10 AM and I have a verrry low, kinda scary voice in the best of time, and no one is their most chipper, unassuming, friendly self at that hour. I sort of grunted this like those cop dudes who are scared to speak out loud.
She mumbled a “thank you” and scurried off and I suppose I am a bad person or something alas.
Not generational, either. She was my age.
And I had just had a lovely chipper conversation with two stockkeeping women who were standing in front of my facewash. They were great.
Read a long article yesterday explaining Zuck’s actions and it is, of course, basically a case of complying in advance. He used some benign Biden messaging about Facebook being too light on moderation, and pretended that that was the reason behind all of this, but did that in a very showy way because he is capitulation to Trump after threats from Trump and his cronies, Trump literally threatened to throw him in Jail, an FCC board member threatened to remove their section 230. Anyway, he is obviously a chicken chump. We knew all of this, but if you are looking for the receipts and documentation (a lot of it comes from actual court transcripts), this Mike Masnik article is for you.
And here is a charming story that my Anaïs Nin Google Alert brought to my attention, a woman outlining the books she is taking with her as she evacuates her house in LA, and one of them is a copy of Henry and June given to her by Rupert Pole, after she knocked on the door of his house in Silver Lake as a canvasser. It.. I dunno, man. It got to me. Choked up a little.
Good news everyone, I killed off the AI Boom buy buying $10,000 of Nvidia stock a week or two ago. It is down 11% since I bought it. We have hit the top. Our lives will be back to normal soon enough. You are welcome.
Jane dressed like Mario today, out of the blue, on her own, and it is the fucking best. Also we almost didn’t win our morning car Wordle because it was one of those hands that could have like ten answers (is that a spoiler? I guess only if you use the exact same Wordle tactics as me?) and she was getting SO STRESSED. But we got it on the last guess, so, as they say in Wordle: whew.
Post-rock playlist for you today. All new except more Idaho. Shit I feel like I posted this one already have my record-keeping habits let me down? Oh well, nothing to be done but post through it. I am very into Circus Trees I believe my friend Annie alerted me to them. Just a phenomenal woman-lead post-rock band, A+.
All right have a lovely weekend I will be back on Monday to regale you with tales of chores and home improvement.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.