Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1556
The Buttondown email editor is broken so no photos today no bolding. Brian Jonestown Massacre live. Ronald Peltier. Witches and Zombies.
Good morning. Hello hello. My god my neck hurts. Must have slept on it wrong. Except it always hurts. Maybe I always sleep on it wrong. No matter what position I sleep in. Fun fact: I can fall asleep in almost any position, and do.
We went to see the Brian Jonestown Massacre at Cat’s Cradle last night. Got a babysitter, it was a whole thing. They were… okay. Not the best BJM show I have seen in my life, not the worst. No fights broke out, alas, that habit of theirs really seems to have died off in the 90’s. Anton sits now, off to the right, hommage to Jason Pierce and Spiritualized, I assume. His voice was never the best but it has really gone to hell these last few years. Every song was inexplicably 10-20bpm too slow and the whole set was soooo mellow and lazy. Like Quaalude rock. Which was actually kind of awesome, in its own way. The band had eight members. Five guitar players. Well. Sometimes, when the keyboard player was also playing guitar. Which was most of the time because this was not a set heavy on their late-period Krautrock masterpieces off of 2017’s Don’t Get Lost (an underrated gem in their catalog, in my opinion. And I inexplicably own all 23-ish of their albums.
They played “That Girl Suicide,” the only track they played from their best album, Mellodrone, and it was awesome and they almost woke up for a minute. They played “Anenome” and I love that song but it was sooo slow.
I mean, the five guitarists sound awesome. They have a real wall-of-sound thing going on that sounds great. It would just sound a lot better if it were faster. Or they could just drone one note the whole time that would be okay too. Or they could play some krautrock. Or, you know, they could play a set representative of the wild diversity of their 30+ years of work, and not just one type of song the whole time.
Maybe the last third of the set got better, I dunno. I had to go to bed. It was late. Gotta get up at 6:30, maaaan.
I forgot to take a picture for you. But here, this woman did.
Oh also Anton always always wears the same outfit these days it is kind of weird.
I’ve been going to see this band live for 30+ years. There is more distance between me seeing this band now than seeing the Beatles in the 90s. It’s so weird. Getting older is so weird. You want to ascribe some grand trend to it, but nope. You’re old, you go see old aging bands. And kids go too, so you don’t feel too much like you’re sad and aging because there are some kids that find this band cool. Lot more kids at a BJM show than, say, a Church show, man, no kids go see the Church these days. And aging with the bands is weird because you did not age in the same way. You really felt this stuff back in the day, but now it’s like, I dunno man, I do feel parts of it, but also I am personally glad I did many other things with my life I do not think I would enjoy playing mid-tempo rock every night for, like, 60 days straight around the country in order to pay my rent. That sounds even worse than my job.
We should all be thankful we never got famous for a thing. Then we’d just have to do that thing forever.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening to that last Doves record that came out last year or earlier this year or whatever. Constellations for the Lonely. It is a lot better now, a year later, without all the baggage of being the new Doves album. And they picked the correct tracks as singles. If I were 17 and making a mix tape for a girl I had a crush on, and that mix tape was a “best of Doves” mix tape, I think one or two songs from this album would make it on there, which is about how many would make it from Kingdom of Rust, The Universal Want or Some Cities, so I would not, in hindsight, say that this Doves album represented a decline in quality. It’s just that their first two albums were absolute masterpieces and who could have ever topped them.
Got another 80 pages of GMHHAY vol 2 edited and laid out yesterday. Two updates for the long-term readers of all of this:
I thought crypto was going to be the hill I died on but in the end it was just a dress rehearsal for AI, the hill I am actually going to die on.
I wrote about Ronald Pelton, actual spy for Russia who worked for the NSA and sold out our secrets to Russia, eventually got caught by a turncoat Russian agent, and sent to prison. Served like 20 years and got out. When I wrote vol 2 in 2021, I said something along the lines of “it is absolutely crazy to think that Ronald Pelton is still alive and out there living his life, head down.”
WELL. I had to check up on that. It turned out that, in fact, Ronald Pelton lived until 2022. His obituary is online. Not, like, a New York Times obituary, but the one any family would do, publshed at the local paper. And it has comments from his family, and they are crazy. Behold:
When I was nineteen, he left and didn’t return until I was nearly fifty. During that span of time there was almost no communication. I grew up. Had a family. Went to college and gained a professional career. Had grandchildren. I lived my life without him. When he came back, he was quieter. More mellow. With many regrets. But still, the dry humor. He’d converted to Catholicism and took pride in the fact that he never missed Sunday mass. Not in the entire time he was gone. I embraced him into my family and strived to forgive the past. Not only because it’s a commandment but because not to forgive harms me more. He lived with us for three years while the family helped him get back on his feet. A new, independent life. He told me once that he’d desired for years to have a place of his own and never thought it would be possible. Even though it was short-lived, he was able to live his dream before graduating to Heaven.
And:
Although you were in prison since the day I was born, the family welcomed you home upon your return, with open arms. You never missed a family event, whether it was celebrating grandmas birthday or a family reunion. You always brought everyone candy and always had little tricks up your sleeve for the kids. You could nap anywhere sitting up HAHA and your stories were always great. You were full of jokes with a little smirky smile at the end. I’m happy that we got to celebrate your 80th birthday together, I know you absolutely loved that. RIP Grandpa
That is some intense shit! I did not know how right I was! Fuckin crazy. I feel… I feel like it is a violation to have looked this stuff up on the internet.
So many people who were famous or notorious are, right now, living quietly in obscurity and elderliness, hanging out with grandchildren and going to bridge clubs and church and volunteering in food banks.
Here’s to the drop-outs.
Jane’s been screen-free for a few days now and things are improving and she is slowly, belatedly, starting to acknowledge there is some merit into our concerns and approach. But she is still monomaniacally focused on doing what it takes to get her screens back. It is disturbing.
BUT someone at school clearly mentioned Zombies, so she was talking Zombies this morning and we had a nice talk about Zombies and zombie movies, the classics like the Day of the Dead series, the more modern stuff like Walking Dead and the upcoming 28 Years Later and the funny stuff like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. We discussed what it means to be “undead” and how vampires were undead too and how vampires and zombies are different but both bite people to propagate. Then we talked about witches and magic and the blurring between magic and intent and how people she knows think of themselves as witches and how when you focus all your energy on achieving something and it works it can feel like magic.
I wouldn’t say she was not into it? Maybe I have a new recruit for you, Emily.
Well this sucks, Buttondown is buggy and not letting me add photos today which is a real shame I had some cute ones.This is kind of intolerable today. This is kind of intolerable today. This is intolerable. In addition to not uploading photos, it is bugging out on the actual typing. Or, you know, the actual reason for a text editor.
Here’s a playlist for you. Shoegaze. It concludes with a BJM track that I wish they played.
Okay gotta go I have an allergy appointment in an hour which in hindsight is a dumb time for me to make an appointment considering my morning chores of GMHHAY and 750 Words and checking work finances and recording them in a special spreadsheet and looking at all my tabs, checking my solar systems and friends’ Plexes and my Youtube queue and whatnot might be my absolute favorite part of the day. I should not book things that interfere with my morning rituals.
Especially ENTs. Where you go and say “yeah, my sinuses are still fucked, they’ve been fucked forever, the three daily allergy medications, the custom drops, the septoplasty, the CPAP machine, none of them fix it, you’re not gonna fix it, it’s hopeless, but those drops help a bit so can we get this charade over so you can keep giving me more drops? We both know there’s nothing more you can do.”
Or maybe it’s like blindness and there have, in fact, been huge strides in sinus technology.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I heard Medium has a new email product. Might just try it.
c traith a
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.