Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1618
MIchigan senate race, The The's web store, Boston kids goth dance night this Christmas, teeth success, Walmart, Annie playlist
Good morning good morning. Sun is streaming in the window, fog over the pond, really quite beautiful. Looks like a cover of a GMHHAY volume. Really gotta finish up vol 2. Everything is done except I owe Emma a couple comments on the cover. For some reason that has taken me six weeks to get to. That task has fallen into that mental trap where you wage battle with yourself and procrastinate on something you want to do to spite yourself super healthy and normal.
Hey if you are in Boston this December, I have some events for you:
First, consider coming to our 20th, ish, annual Christmas Eve Commemorative Gathering of Curmudgeons, Orphans, Atheists and Jews if you are in town on Christmas Eve with nothing to do. Which would be weird. I mean, it’s not weird at all, that is us, every year. But it would be weird because a) you live there, in which case you probably already know about it, or b) you’re visiting for Christmas eve, so you mightcould have something to do already. But if not, come!
And, of course, if you’re in the Boston area on Dec 20th, come to our kid’s goth new wave dance party:
There will be Santa. There will be photos. There will be snacks. There will be MANIC PANIC I am VERY excited about that. It is gonna be a good time.
Annie and I used to have a Christmas tradition. We would go to the Kells. At least for the years that the Model wasn’t open. Some years the Model was open for Christmas and we would go there. But usually the Kells. My once-a-year foray into that drunken Irish bar on Brighton Ave in Allston. It was so great on Christmas. Just a lot of happy drunk Irish ex-pats listening to “Fairy Tale of New York.”
Then we would go to Dunkin Donuts and then we would watch Sting’s Bring on the Night. We watched that for maybe four, five Christmases running. Great film.
/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 our Release Radar on Spotify this morning but don’t worry I have a plan to get off of Spotify soon, or at least try again. We will be talking about that extensively in December so let’s just put that aside for a moment. Currently it is a new collaboration between Ethel Cain and someone named Anna von Hausswolff, of whom I’ve never heard but it sounds promising. Only the second track so far out of eight on this playlist that is actually new, but hey whaddya gonna do. Damn.
It is very pretty, though.
Update on the Michigan senate race for you. Sort of. The Bulwark published a pretty comprehensive overview of the Democratic primary, it is very interesting. Three candidates, a centrist workhorse legislator terrible on TV, a charismatic, Bernie-approved leftist, and a kinda-leftist celebrity state senator. All of them up against a known-quantity Republican dude who has run before, barely lost last time. Super tight race. But he’s a Trump sycophant, and the most opportunistic kind, the kind that used to criticize him. And the winds of the mid-terms in general should favor us. So, you know, there’s a chance, but a slim one.
The three Dem candidates seem exactly engineered to rip apart the base complaining about strategy vs purity. The polling (which is what got me interested in this race) sort of bears that out, with the centrist and left-of-center celebrity lady doing somewhat better than the Bernie approved charismatic leftist. But the problem is they all lose in the polling right now, and they all lose by a fairly big margin, so you could concoct a defensible strategy for voting for any of them. My gut tells me that I would rather win the seat than insist on purity, but I can certainly see an angle where sticking to our most popular leftist platforms would ultimately carry the seat. It is gonna be tough. Luckily I don’t have to vote.
I asked my media-savvy friends about The Bulwark, by the way. Because I keep coming up on articles there like this one that i want to read, political strategery articles. And it is heavily paywalled. So I was considering subscribing. But it is on Substack and fuck those guys. So it is a dilemma and I was hoping someone would say “naw dawg, they’re good people go for it.” But all anyone would say was Rex, who didn’t really answer the question but did raise a good point:
Not quite answering your question, but I’ll say it surprises me how accepted into the #resitstance media fold it has come given that it was started by a bunch of former Republicans. (edited)
Innnnteresting. Todd posted a podcast about them, but I do not listen to podcasts. You gotta draw the line somewhere, man.
No podcasts, no Tiktok, no AI. Those are my boundaries.
(Not that podcasts are bad I just prefer to listen to music).
I know you guys love media criticism and politics. Everyone’s favorite topics.
Emma and I went to Walmart yesterday. They were playing Weezer. And not “Say it Ain’t So” or “Buddy Holly” or whatever. I imagined Luke O’Neil, that lovable curmudgeon of a lefty political memoirist, old friend of mine from the Boston Music Scene, and lover of Weezer, stepping foot in a Walmart and hearing “Island in the Sun” and picturing exactly what it would do to him and what brilliant writing it would spawn. It made me giggle.
I have been half hoping they would carry one of the recent re-issues of the Sabrina Carpenter Christmas album but no such luck. They have a nice 180g colored vinyl reissue of The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance that I have been tempted to purchase for two weeks now but… even though I do not consider myself too old for Sabrina Carpenter, I consider myself too old for MCR. That whole chunk of Emo really separates X from Millennials if you ask me. I mean, they’re good and all, and were fun live, but… cmon man.
There was an entire wall of damaged gallon jugs of distilled water, every one of them crushed. Except a single bottle, not crushed, lid intact. Except somehow that single jug was half full and the rest of its water was spilled on the floor. How did it get out. No idea.
We went at a different time than usual — Thursday during the lunch hour instead of my usual Friday morning. Place was crawling with old people. Not, like, a senior hour or anything just… packed with old people. They drive their carts very slow but they are mostly polite and pay attention to other cart drivers. A metaphor.
For the second week in a row they are out of my posh organic butter and on the one hand, this is what we prepared for, this is why we keep 2-3 pounds of butter in the house at any time. But on the other hand, I am worried they are going to stop carrying it. They are currently the only grocery store around me that has organic butter. Well, the Teet has salted organic butter but we are not heathens around here. Emma questions the necessity of one’s butter being organic — especially at literally twice the cost I wish she hadn’t peeked at that price tag — but I mean, you gotta stand for something, man, and I stick with the organic. Visions of Michael Pollan and that regenerative farm in Omnivores Dilemma that farm ruled.
How long does butter keep? Maybe I’ll bring a cooler to Boston this Christmas and buy, like, a six month supply of unsalted organic butter like I do edibles I did not say that what?
Hey this new The The track does have Matt Johnson singing on it. When the The The (omg so many thes) newsletter told me about this single a week ago, it strongly implied he was not singing on it, that it was from his soundtrack work. It is from his soundtrack work, and there is someone else signing on it, but he sings too. Fantastic. Glad I spent something like $20 to get that puppy shipped over from the UK.
The The’s webstore ships fast by the way. No months-in-advance preorders, no custom delays. That newsletter went out early last week, new The The 7” get it here, and it arrived yesterday. Legit. It was the only record yesterday.
“Oh whew” I said to Emma. “I was worried I wasn’t gonna get any records in the mail today. But I got one.”
“One little record” she said.
“One little baby record” Jane said. One teeny tiny little baby record.
Jane had her art displayed at the nearby credit union. Second time her art has been chosen by her art teacher for public display. I am a very proud parent. Oh that reminds me I gotta put a pic of the scribble parent portrait in here today for Suzy. Oh that reminds me I gotta take a screenshot of the Buttondown text editing interface for Ben in the WITI slack. I am very excited she is back on doing sketches in the morning instead of playing fake-tetris.
Emma and I want so badly to be able to join the credit union, the second largest in the country. But it is only for state employees. Emma read through all the people who can use it and we thought maybe I could join the National Guard for a month or something. Except then I might get deployed to help ICE.
Also I cannot believe how well this streak/reward teeth brushing thing has worked. Tonight will be her 15th teeth brushing in a row without arguing, eagerly doing it. She is so excited. And we talked this morning about it and she expressed joy and excitement at how much she loves streaks and rewards and how well it worked and we talked about how it was partially her idea from when she played teacher at dinner one night and she was so proud and oh dear my heart just burst and oh also last night while watching her Real Civil Engineer (very into a leaf blowing game at the moment, one of those ASMR-esque relaxation games) she snuggled with me the whole time and it was just the best oh my god. Just the best.
Got an Annie playlist for you today. Mostly from “back in the day” but a few bands she has taught me about in the last few years. Annie’s post-rock knowledge has vastly surpassed mine these last few years it really was prodigious. She even wrote an issue of Why Is This Interesting about it.
I have seen nine of the bands on this playlist live with her. Rockets opened for Breathless on their (only?) American tour and it was absolutely one of the highlights of our brief career.
Three of the songs on here are songs that Rockets covered. Three of the bands on here are bands that Annie got to know the people in. There is a postcard on my wall from Low to Annie. Well. A color copy of it. Framed. I was so jealous.
Annie dragged me to so, so many Elliot Smith and Death Cab shows back at the beginning. Saw both at the Middle East etc so, so many times with her.
Mineral and the Gloria Record are two phenomenal bands that Annie and I used to see live. She had tickets to go see the last Mineral show ever. Couldn’t make it because of the illness. Both of us caught (different) shows on the last reunion. She loved those bands so much.
She got to see Crime and the City Solution and And Also the Trees, both of them at The Rat, before I moved to Boston. I was always so jealous. Eventually I got to see Crime and the City Solution a few times, but I never did get to see And Also the Trees.
Bill someone (Craig I think) sent me this picture of the two of you and it’s the best one I’ve seen. Not sure if you have it:
Bye guys have a lovely weekend.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.