Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1490
M83, Fiona Apple's court observing music, attic studio work, shelving work, posh playgrounds, 300% tariff increases as a "win," the best name for a goth mini golf course
Good morning it is Monday what is this BS I would like to speak to the management. Meet the trade deal, same as the old trade deal, only 300% or so higher than tariffs were before he came to office. Oh yeah also it turns out that that UK trade deal was all absolute fiction, so now I am doubly mad at how badly it was reported, and my Friday morning rant is validated. God this timeline sucks I get sick about Gaza oh, once, twice a day, that utter horror, shock, helplessness, guilt just the fucking worst.
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Here is a review of the Dark Goth restaurant at Universal Studios that was the subject of a spoofing on SNL this weekend. Emma found this great review, it makes me laugh. Rice Krispies as maggots, I love it.
Listening to the new M83 single, “A Necessary Epic.” It is eight minutes long. I am excited, though slightly confused because the M83 artist picture on Spotify is just a single dude and every time I’ve seen M83 live, which is, like, three times maybe, it was a whole big band and I thought they were a band and I mean I guess being a solo project is fine, it is totally fine, I am just somewhat disappointed in this specific instance.
Quoth Wikipedia:
Initially the duo of multi-instrumentalists Nicolas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzalez, Fromageau parted ways shortly after touring for their second album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.[9] Gonzalez remains the sole constant member of the project, as the primary songwriter and lead vocalist
Well okay then.
Anyway, the way to stay sane is to focus on what is happening right around you, where you are now, what’s right in front of you, so you’re not, like, you know, thinking about moving to Canada or crying. And I did a pretty excellent job about that this weekend, got a lot of chores done man I fucking love chores.
For a long time Emma has had a problem with her workbench in the garage — it is too deep and she cannot reach the pegboard behind it. And so the bench really just becomes a drop zone and stuff piles up. And she asked me to shorten it and give it a back lip so that things don’t roll off the back. So she cleaned it off, we loaded it in the truck, brought it over to Chore House, and I sanded it down, cut six-and-a-half inches off, took the excess and glued and screwed it on vertically, then added three coats of Total Boat Halcyon Clear epoxy. It is coming along. Still need to re-mount the bench vice and make a hole for electrical cables. And probably one more coat of epoxy. But it looks very pretty.
Bought that piece of plywood like ten years ago. Brought it nome in the Mazda CX-5. You can fit a full sheet of plywood in a Mazda CX-5.
Also did some slight improvements to the recent workshop shelving situation, stabilizing the far right end of the bin shelf, and adding a second shelf where I now keep all my screws. Very excited about this.
But mostly I worked on the attic future recording studio, on the floor. I had hoped to do a bit more of the area where the final eight-layer floor is going in, but I couldn’t. It’s like a giant tetris puzzle, all these layers, because the whole thing is the seams don’t overlap between layers. So you have to do a big area before you can finally add the topmost layer. And I can’t do a big area yet because I have this whole giant complex subdrama going on about under-floor cable management, which I have mostly worked out, but I was awaiting some materials, and also I really need to know, roughly, how thick a cable bundle is in an average studio that goes from the center console to one of the sidecar areas of outboard gear on the left or right. I am considering booking a consultation session with Andrew Masters, a studio wiring consultant, just to have him show me a photo. It’s gotta be a lot of wires, right? Every piece of outboard gear has two separate wires connecting it to your patch bay or audio interface? The conduit I have is about 3” x 1” so I think I could get a few wires in one, but i am thinking I need three, maybe 4 parallel conduits.
I was deeply tempted to ignore the problem, lay floor, and go back and worry about it later but I knew that is the death knell of this project: I can never half-ass a single thing on this project, because the second I do I will be half-assing everywhere and sound absolutely bleeds through half-assedness. Whole key to soundproofing is absolute meticulousness.
So I put that project aside and returned to the tedious project I hate but that I get ever-closer to finishing: tearing up the existing subfloor, where it exists, pulling the old thermal insulation and replacing it with sound insulation and then putting down a new subfloor. I have been working on this for, oh, four, five months now. I probably have another three, four months, what with summer travel plans.
But we are making progress and this weekend we tore down the last unneeded old internal wall, opened up the nice window bay, and got it floored (ignore that pole working on that). So, finally, the attic is now completely open, and we can start to see the shape of things:
This studio is gonna be so awesome. In, like four years.
“Do you wish you were making music now, instead of construction a studio,” my wife not-unreasonably asked. Yes, I do. I miss making music and I want to do more of it. But I also find this whole exercise extraordinarily rewarding, if physically painful. I love learning new things, and I love getting productive exercise. I’d love to do both — some time working on the studio, some time making music — but this is a tall order on top of parenting and two jobs and a neurotic daily newsletter.
So, you know. Someday.
Saturday the fam went out for delicious food then to a posh playground at a posh park in posh Chapel Hill and Jane played and parents helicoptered and they prepared a nighttime outdoor movie. So many helicopter parents the further you go into Chapel Hill.
Emma and I had a long reminiscence about Mini Golf thanks to a Parks and Recreation episode and we both desperately wanted to go again and I spent way too much time thinking about how to get Mini Golf to be economic in the 21st century without attaching it to some larger “entertainment complex.” We looked up mini golf courses here in NC and by our Boston apartment. Some good mini golf options in New England still. Some new ones, including a themed one called, like, Get Putt! or something that is sort of like cosmic bowling meets mini golf.
Unrelated to the SNL skit referenced at the beginning of this edition, since this all happened on Friday, though making for a nice bookend to this edition of GMHHAY, we spent significant time trying to figure out the perfect name for a goth-themed mini golf course, which we desperately want to exist in the world. And we both arrived at the same time simultaneously and this is why we are married:
Putts you Up.
Jane and I had some good times. On Sunday there was early dinner at home and rain so we got two hours of Real Civil Engineer: the nightly time we watch this Youtuber make bridges in bridge games. She loves it so much, goes on about trusses and cantilever and catflaps and it would be kinda awesome if my daughter became an engineer. But also it would be awesome if she just layed around and did nothing. Basically so long as she’s healthy, that will be awesome. I legit do not care what she does for a living. Do people really care what their kids do for a living? That is so weird.
We do a lot of our best teaching in the car. On a drive this weekend we talked about traveling nurses and contact lenses and building codes (she is obsessed with ceilings falling on her in restaurants) so we got those things-you-need-to-know out of the way. She asked what a world without Bojangles would be like so we had to have a tough conversation about “the bad people” who own Chick-Fil-A.
She took it well. She is not the biggest fried chicken fan.
I don’t have a playlist for you today so here is the new Fiona Apple video which made me cry. I have been aware of Apple’s tenure as a court observer, but it’s been going on so long, this calling of hers, that it kind of took me by surprise that she finally worked it into her music. And holy hell. Bawling my eyes out. The postal service “lost” $3.2 billion last year, Republicans want you to know. Because doing a thing for you or me is “lost” money. But you know, the US spends $81 billion on mass incarceration. Was that money lost? How much of that is spent actually housing, the, you know, unredeemable actual murderers as opposed to black women who can’t make bail. A billion? Ten?
Anyway this video is awesome. Fiona’s also recently covered Neil Young and put out a new tune with the Waterboys (!). So all this Fiona action makes me wonder are we imminently gonna see a follow-up to one of the greatest albums ever made, Fetch the Bolt Cutters? My god my god.
Byeeee
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.