Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1539
Quarantine day 5, playlist machinations, obituary round-up, the new Marx translation, a rant about long paragraphs.
Good morning! Hello! Hi! Howdy, boy howdy. What is up. Still have covid. But barely! Took the full fifteen minutes for the line to show up on the test this morning, and it just barely showed up. Maybe one more day? A man can dream. I wonder if we will still make it to Boston on Sunday. Seems extraordinarily unlikely. But we will see.
Sure am getting sick of sitting in this office all day every day. I mean, I have work, and it was taking me a real long time to get any specific work task done, so I pretty much needed to be in this office for most of the day. But it would be nice, to, you know. Go out to dinner. Maybe take my kid to the playground. Maybe sit in a different room while watching Game of Thrones re-runs. Do we call them re-runs anymore? We don’t, huh? That is sad.
Hey guess what wanna know something funny? I have managed to lose a pound this week. Just while sitting around on my ass feeling sorry for myself. Silver lining, I guess. This puts me at my lowest weight in five years, which is pretty swell. I would still have to lose twenty-five more pounds, jesus, to get to the low from the insane, starve-myself-and-only-consume-tom-yum-bone-broth diet of 2018, but you know what? At least I still have solid bowel movements.
Hrm maybe I should save that for the upcoming scatological edition of GMHHAY.
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Listening to the new Turnstile again, third listen. I like it but I do not find myself needing to listen to it over and over again while sitting at my desk. Good album to drive to, I bet, and of course to rock out to live. We somehow managed, again, to get through ten hours of the “To Investigate” playlist yesterday. We’ve managed every day this week, real miracle. I mean, I guess it’s not that much of a miracle considering I am just sitting in this room all day. But I am proud of it. We’re down to 28 hours, 35 minutes left. I will obviously not finish this today but I am happy to have put a big dent in it.
Of course, one thing that is a big challenge when I am “cleaning out” the To Investigate playlist is there are a bunch of non-album, individual songs by bands that I want to check out, or new tunes by bands I like. And then when I am cleaning out the playlist, it’s been, like, 10 weeks since I added that song to the playlist, and now the whole album is out, so of course I want to add that to the To Investigate playlist. And so the playlist ends up getting longer and all my work is erased. I get by this by creating a temporary “NEW To Investigate” playlist that serves as a temp holding area until I have cleaned out the original To Investigate playlist.
It’s all very complicated, I know.
But anyhoo, when I am trying to clear out the To Investigate playlist quickly, this employment of a NEW To Investigate playlist can significantly speed things up. And so I have done this week.
The NEW To Investigate playlist now has nearly thirteen hours of music in it — thirteen hours of new music that I have decided, this week, I need to check out.
It’s all so exhausting. I am insane, I know.
BUT, you know. This is what you gotta do as an old person to keep up. Unless, you know, you have a swell friend who posts an hour-long playlist for you every single day to make it easier. You’re welcome.
Let’s do a death roundup:
Ozzy: You know, I do not have a deep connection to Ozzy. It’s funny. I have been, of late, re-evaluating Ozzy. I watched the final concert and, you know. Everyone was old and slow but it was good, and it made me realize how deeply embedded inside me some of those songs were. I made a resolution that my next Deep Dive where I listen to all of an artist’s albums was going to be Sabbath and Ozzy. But I have not yet gotten around to it. I am also realizing that that whole “bit the head off a bat” thing really got to me when I was a kid. It freaked me out. I did not think it was cool, I thought it was terrifying. I read Ozzy’s Wiki page when he passed. I had assumed, now, in my wise old age, that the whole bat incident was a gimmick, a lie. But no, it transpires that it did, in fact, happen, though it was an accident: a fan threw the bat onstage and Ozzy thought it was a rubber one. Uh huh. Anyway, this happened when I was ten, living in Fairbanks, Alaska. And this even made such a deep impression on the American consciousness that news of that event, sans internet, made it all the way to a ten year-old kid in Fairbanks, Alaska, which is really something.
I had friends with older brothers, exactly the kind of people who would get you into Sabbath, but they got me into Pink Floyd, instead. In high school, the only people who liked Sabbath and Ozzy were the metal heads who were, by and large, my friends (small school. All the weirdos have to stick together) but it was not my music.
I remember being surprised when I got to Boston and so many other kids into punk and goth and synth and shoegaze and the like grew up on Sabbath. That was my first inkling there was more to them.
And, of course, I was way too cool for reality TV in his reality heyday. I was only, barely, ambiently aware of it and it sure did not endear me to thinking he made good music.
Even now I mostly don’t know the songs, couldn’t tell you one from the other.
But I will be doing that retrospective soon. Someone said it was great that when Jerry Falwell died no one cared and there was a national outpouring when Ozzy died, and that alone makes me somewhat more predisposed.
Hulk Hogan: Good riddance. Fuck that guy. I was never a pro wrestling fan (until Glow) so I do not have the halo of youthful nostalgia to burnish his racist, sexist, press-destroying later years.
Malcom-Jamal Warner: I am slightly too old for the Cosby Show but I remember it, I remember him, I am aware of his cool beyond the show, and that one is sad.
William Clay: Co-founder of the black congressional congress. Civil Rights defender, representative of the poor, thorn in the side of Nixon and Ford. Lived to his 90s. RIP.
Kenneth Colley: Actor who played Admiral Piett in Empire and Jedi, admirably survived being in Vader’s presence for years without getting anger-force-choked. A consummate Empire bureaucrat. Great actor. Also played Jesus in The Life of Brian and an evil Colonel in Firefox. I mean, what else do you want from an acting career. Was probably huge on the English stage or something but not my problem.
Chuck Mangione: We lost a great. I have a much deeper connection to “Feels so Good” than anything Sabbath ever did. I cannot say I am proud of this, but it is undeniably true.
Sail on, Chuck.
Started reading the accessible new translation of Marx’s Capital last night, since I have never read it, aside from the assorted assigned chapters in my assorted international relations and economics classes in college. I am excited to read a new “readable” version.
That being said, there is about two hours of reading of two different “introductions” before you even get to the text. The second one, written by the main translator, is interesting enough, but the first was intolerable. It was written by a Princeton professor and it is… fine but boy it absolutely missed the memo on this being the new readible, accessible version of Marx. I don’t understand these people who want to make something popular and insist on using words like “dialectic” and talking about Hegel without any explanation. And, look. I can process this, but I have covid brain and am entering into this exercise not pre-disposed toward Marx. But I am your mark! I’m the guy you’re trying to get into this shit. Make it easy to read!
Also. Pet peeve. People who fucking don’t start new paragraphs. I am over it. Even in “good authors.” I was reading a novel this week, by an author I love, and it was terrible about this. It liked to throw little plot twists at you, at the end of long paragraphs not about the plot twist. So you’d be reading about, for example, a party and it would be this wall of text, a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred words long, all about the party and then just sneak, tack on the end “and then there was an explosion.” Which you totally missed because the paragraph was rambling on about a party and man, I get it. There was a party.
Start a new fucking paragraph for the explosion part!
I know what you’re trying to do here and it just sucks. Just stop.
New paragraphs, every thought.
It is probably the single writing thing I ever learned in school I still agree with.
Fucking paragraph fatteners. Give it up.
If you’re not confident enough in your prose to let people skim it, you’re not confident enough in your prose.
Down with long paragraphs.
I will die on this hill.
Okay bye.
Shoegaze playlist for you today. All new stuff. So many good new shoegaze bands. Is Lucius shoegaze? No, but that song has shoegaze vibes, roots, tentacles. I basically know nothing about any of these bands, but they are my friends now.
Okay have a lovely day, talk to you tomorrow, hopefully I will be NEGATIVE. OH WAIT. I won’t talk to you tomorrow. It is Friday. Well hopefully I am negative when I talk to you on Monday. Assuming we’re not driving Monday. Hrm. Might be a while. Don’t freak out if you don’t hear from me Monday. Bye.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.