2022-02-14

Happy V-day, lovers.

Podcasts

• Season Two, Episode Two of What had happened was has a gem of a section that could easily be turned into a 5,000 word think piece on art, ephemerality and the responsibility we have (or don’t) when it comes to preserving art that may just fade into nonexistence under current legal and economic conditions. It’s this section where I realized that El-P is seeing the whole chessboard. It’s no surprise he’s found a way to be as successful as he has while being flagrantly independent. The section starts at about 46:20.
• Season Two, Episode four of the same has El-P reflecting on his first solo album, Fantastic Damage. The scenes of him living and lurking in different parts of NYC brings to mind Joseph Mitchell’s documentation of the people inhabiting a New York that no longer exists. It’s a similar vibe here, of worlds disintegrating under the force of time, just three or four cycles down the line.
• When you get caught up in the nostalgia of this flavor of narrative, is easy to sleep into NIMBY mode. If instead you take the long view and see each epoch as the natural course of history, seeing the individual lives of people sleeping back into the river of time, getting these glimpses into particular moments in particular places is a beautiful blessing. A prayer on paper or tape¹

People

• Bruce Haack. Perhaps best known for his children’s music, the man was prolific and eccentric. I saw a tweet singing the praises of his album Lucifer, a cartoonish psychedelic tour of the underworld. Here is a bit from the Wikipedia page on Haack:

  Haack began performing in local venues with a then-popular local band called The Swing Tones. While the band played primarily modern and old-time music, they also performed Ukrainian Folk music, which introduced Haack to Eastern musical motifs and themes. This exposure would prove to have a significant influence on Haack’s work later in life. […] Haack was also invited by Aboriginal peoples in Canada to participate in their pow-wows, experimenting with peyote, which influenced his music for years to come. His upbringing in the isolated town of Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, Canada, gave him plenty of time to develop his musical talents. […] Juilliard School offered Haack the opportunity to study with composer Vincent Persichetti; thanks to a scholarship from the Canadian government, he headed to New York upon graduating from Edmonton in 1954. At Juilliard, Haack met a like-minded student, Ted “Praxiteles” Pandel, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. However, his studies proved less sympathetic, and he dropped out of Juilliard just eight months later, rejecting the school’s restrictive approach.

  Super interesting, strange, creative and ultimately too weird to have much commercial success, it seems he became best known for making children’s music.

Blog posts / articles

• The software might not be garbage. Dovetails nicely with the idea that there is probably a good reason that someone believes something in spite of our tendency to dismiss folks that disagree with us. I think Devon Zuegel gave this a name in a tweet once that I just cant’ remember or find. Suspension of disagreement? Suspension of Judgement? Much catchier than those, but something along those lines. In any case, an incredibly valuable principle and very high on my list of values.
• The Dangers of high status, low wage jobs. Offers an interesting theory of journalistic decline via internet era technological forces.

  The problem isn’t that writing generates status, but rather that this status is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the market. Amongst other problems, this selects for people who value status over wages (often because they are independently financially secure).

• The bulk (entirety?) of this website is built on Structured Procrastination.
• Parenting as a public good. We still have so much work to do as a society to support women and mothers. I like the idea of strong cash incentives and generous parental leave for both parents. Having children is probably way underfunded as a social good.

Other stuff

• Over the past couple of weeks, some people who listen to KUOW in their Mazdas say their car radio is permanently stuck on 94.9 FM. It’s only affecting KUOW, Mazdas from 2016, and we have no idea why. I like to imagine some merry prankster hacking the Mazda infotainment system and forcing people to listen to public radio.
• The answers to this Latif Nasser tweet on what happens in threes in the body is pretty fun. The comprehensive answer is here.