Today felt like it was in slow-motion. Every time I looked at the clock I thought it was later than it actually was. Probably the gray skies were a big factor. Calling it good enough, for both the post and the day.
NaBloPoMo
Expert in a Dying Field
The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field
This past February I was supposed to go see The Beths up in Boston. I’d bought the ticket as soon as I heard they were coming to the US because it’s not every day a band will make the trek from New Zealand. The show sold out and I hatched a plan to make a weekend out of it. Three or so weeks before the show, The Beths added a show at one of my usual venues, closer to home, but as I’d spent the money on the Boston show and had this whole plan, I stuck with my original Boston ticket.
My daughter had a concert she had bought tickets for, also in Boston on the night before the Beths show. The friend she was going to go with wound up having a conflict so I said I would go with her. She had been having a rough start to the semester and I was trying to give her a fun break, get a hotel room and have a girls weekend. But then a big snow storm pushed the Dodie concert my daughter had been waiting and waiting for to the same night as my Beths show. The two venues were probably a distance that you could have walked in the summer but in the snowy, below freezing streets of Boston in February, there wasn’t a viable way to do both. Dodie is my daughter’s favorite so I had to forego The Beths.
I could have probably made it to the closer to me Beths show that happened a couple of days later but by that point I’d already driven well over 500 miles in just two days and I was wiped.
So when I saw The Beths were already coming back, almost exactly a year later, I was torn. Again, just Boston or New York for the options and again, there is actually a perfectly timed hole in the tour dates when they could swing through and play that same venue. But I knew it would sell out! Risk it and end up missing it again or buy the ticket and possibly go twice if they add the date? Argh! Not to mention it will again be February in New England. The whole thing could be upended just like last year.
My Music League friend texted me and said, hey, did you see The Beths are coming back to Boston? She’d gone to that show at our regular place and encouraged me to get a ticket for the upcoming Boston show, she and two other people I know would also be going. So I bit the bullet and got a ticket. Here’s hoping my third chance to see them will be the charm.
Misinformation Age
Unlike most of the last several election nights, yesterday I didn’t spend much time following the race results. I actually went to bed a bit earlier than usual, which accounts for the lack of a post for the day. I woke up at 4 in the morning and checked the results, no panic inducing news so I tried to go back to sleep and wait for more news in the morning.
Good things: I still live in a completely blue bubble, Fetterman and Shapiro won in PA, MA and MD flipped their governor’s seat (why those two were ever led by Republicans I don’t know), Tony Evers, Janet Mills, Gretchen Whitmer, and Kathy Hochul all held their spots. There were actually a lot of pretty good outcomes. If Frisch manages to beat Boebert in CO that will be glorious and Mary Peltola looks to be on track to snuff out Sarah Palin’s dream of getting back into government.
Bad things: Beto. Stacey Abrams. What do those two do now? If you lose state-wide races twice, it seems like you should probably figure out some other way to keep pushing for progressive causes because you just don’t have the turn out you need. Georgia’s senate race will have to go to a run-off, we lost four NY House seats when we really couldn’t afford to lose any. If we should find ourselves back in familiar territory with Turtleface as majority leader and a Trump sychophant as speaker of the house, lord help me.
I saw so many headlines to the effect of red wave didn’t materialize or Democrats surprise with victories in x, y, and z. Hey, news media, how about you do a little soul searching and realize that your penchant for sensationalizing and engaging in harmful misinformation, or at least not coming right out and stating when Republicans are lying, is actually the reason for your surprise. You ginned up a tale that wasn’t a true reflection of the situation in the insatiable pursuit of click bait ad revenue, and you’re still doing it with these headlines. You actively undermine our ability to make progress with shitty writing that tries to present the GOP lies as valid points. Stop. You need to stop.
To Hell With Poverty
Last week, a bit reluctantly, my son and I attended a FAFSA night at the high school. They promoted it by saying there would be people from colleges there to help you fill out the financial aid form. I kind of figured I already knew what to do since this is not our first rodeo, but the prospect of having someone from a college, rather than the clueless high school counselor, on hand to answer questions made me think it might be worth it.
Now I’m not so sure. I kind of think we may have entered something incorrectly but when I tired to go in to verify it, the stupid form kept timing out after we logged in so I gave up on that for tonight. Instead I thought I’d get started on the CSS Profile. Oh happy day! We are broke enough to not have to pay any fees for filing that one!
It still amazes me that people can be so easily misled into believing that their problems are caused by whichever minority group the far-right would like to blame today. I mean, we all know how it has happened, but I can’t imagine being so willfully ignorant, so incapable of following basic logic, so completely incurious about the world, that you would look at the two ghouls pictured in this video and think yeah, I’ll trust them instead of my neighbors. I’m avoiding mentioning any of the current crop of fascists on election eve but Ronnie and Maggie really got that party started. Here we are, 40 years later, and I think they would be thrilled to see the state of things today.
After the Earthquake
On the fence about going to see Alvvays in about a week. Lots going on, not lots of spare cash, a show the night before, but we’ll see how things look when it gets closer.
Fallout
Yo La Tengo – Fallout
Nothing wrong with a new YLT song.
Following Her Around
The Sprites – Following Her Around
Another band/song from the Music League (the theme was a song that name checks another band), though it was new to me I loved this one right away. If you give it a listen, you will understand why.
World of Pots and Pans
Horsegirl – World of Pots and Pans
A friend invited me to take part in her Music League back in the spring. It’s an app/website where you and some number of other people are given a theme and have a few days to anonymously submit a song that fits the theme, then a playlist is generated (this all syncs up through Spotify) and you have a few days to listen to it before voting on the songs. You can leave a comment on all of the songs but at least in this league, you are required to up vote six songs and down vote one. Then the votes are tallied and there are weekly first, second, and third place finishers, as well as a cumulative total for the overall winner.
I can’t remember if I ever wrote about Turntable.fm but most of the people in this league are people I know from that app/website. Turntable was forced to shut down when it ran into problems with streaming and copyright issues, but it reemerged two years ago or so using YouTube as its streaming source. I loved the first iteration of Turntable. I have met up with several of those people in real life at concerts; they’re good people who listen to great music. But I don’t really have the time? energy? something, to keep up with it now. So when this friend (one of the original Turntable crew) texted and asked if I wanted to be in the Music League, she said up front that it wasn’t a huge time commitment, you have several days to submit and vote, I figured I could give it a try.
The themes have been things like post a song by a band with siblings, or a song with strings, a song released in 1989, a song in French, a song released since June 2022, etc. Someone in the league is the admin and sets up the weekly themes so you can see what’s coming up and plan ahead. If two people try to submit songs by the same band it will warn you that there has already been a song by that band submitted so try something else. There have been a bunch of times when my first, second, and even third choice bands were already used. But you can’t see what other people have submitted until the cutoff time (or all submissions have been made).
Anyway, it is a lot of fun, easy to keep up with, and I have heard a lot of new music that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have discovered. Like Horsegirl. They appeared a couple of times in the line up and were talked about in the accompanying chat in the app. Plus, it has been good to “see” these friends again, even in this very minimal way. I highly recommend it!
Night and Day
When the alarm went off this morning, I was in the middle of a weird dream. My husband and I were sitting at a kitchen table with Johnny Marr, all eating sandwiches. I guess we’d been talking about how things were going for him financially and my husband said, “Well, as long as you can take care of your aging parents, that’s good enough.”
Friends, we were Johnny Marr’s parents. He had just taken a bite of his sandwich and froze with this look on his face of total disbelief, as you might expect. I tried to soften things by making a light-hearted remark to the effect of, don’t worry, dear, he’s only joking. Sort of. Johnny Marr continued to stare, still not chewing that bite he’d taken. Then the alarm clock saved him from more of this awkward encounter.
I can easily see the combination of factors that contributed to this dream; I’d just talked to my mom last night and talked about our finances (hers and ours), a recent dinner time joke my husband made to our son, and Johnny Marr’s Instagram. Recently, he was out on tour with the Killers and would post stories where he’d turned up at some guitar shop or studio somewhere and play some classic riffs from a Smiths song. I just watched one yesterday.
I checked Instagram this morning and he posted a new picture, probably at just about the same time I was having that dream, and the look on his face is almost exactly like the stare he was giving us. The title of his most recent album is Fever Dreams Pts 1-4, so really, I think it’s his fault my subconscious has him funding my retirement.
We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
The Smile – We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
It has been a day. And a year. I don’t know if I am going to do NaBloPoMo this time but I thought if I didn’t post something today, some of you might have worried that I dropped off the face of the planet. Especially since the last post I made was at the end of last year’s run and was titled “Say Goodbye.”
What can be said about these last eleven months? And why would anyone want to read it anyway? I feel like everyone has just been going through it. Getting by. We’re still here but, eesh, the less said the better.
So, I hope you’re hanging in there, and maybe there will be posts but maybe not. We don’t know what tomorrow brings.
Noisy Cats 