The Friday Article Roundup
No ads or attention-seekers, just the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week you will hear about:
Make some noise and send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail! Post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At Mubi, writers weigh in on marketing intrusions, with Celia Young taking on kiosk screens:
But the problem with baiting viewers with flashing rounds of insipid clickbait is that it trains us to ignore it. We avoid inane decorating tips and useless quizzes, and then miss train times or public health bulletins. And every time a useless chunk of filler content drags our eyes back, we have another reason to look away—or to distrust what we see. Why would you believe a warning about Legionnaires’ Disease from the same screen that nearly poisoned you with a recipe for Monkey Bread? Why would you even bother to look?
Kat Tenbarge outlines the massive increase in people using AI to make fake and offensive videos starring influencers:
“It’s disturbing, because I have no control over it, and I wonder about the intentions behind it. Do they just want people to see it and make fun of me?” [YouTuber Adam] McIntyre said when I spoke to him on the phone. “So then I wonder what prompts are being entered, and I wonder if they’re submitting photos of me and asking AI to alter them or if the AI already has a preset of what my face looks like because I upload so much content of myself.”
At TruthDig, Veronica Phillips finds disturbing connections between a Stephen King dystopia and a famous YouTuber’s popularity:
None of MrBeast’s videos are really about the victory of securing the purse; rather, they turn on the process of getting there. As in “The Long Walk,” the only options are to win or lose. And while no one in MrBeast’s videos is dying, we are meant to believe they are putting themselves in extreme physical or psychological distress. We are kept in our seat not by the outcome so much as morbid curiosity. In the same way I am curious to see what obstacles will weed out the losers in “The Long Walk,” there is a sick fascination in guessing the final straw after months in a bunker with a stranger, or a full day buried alive (both classic and regularly utilized MrBeast premises).
Ryu Spaeth looks at that hippest of artforms, middle-school slang, and its ramifications regarding a hit movie for The Cut:
Shouldn’t we be worried that our children are speaking literal nonsense? Is my 11-year-old daughter going to forget that words are supposed to have meaning? I’d argue the meaning of “Six Seven” lies precisely in its non-meaning — in the bafflement it causes in adults, in the circle it draws separating children from their parents and teachers. “Six Seven” distills slang to its essence, stripping it of any function but to create for a discrete group a world of its own. Most parents on some level understand that this is healthy and normal, yet it rubs against the often unconscious drive to make our children just like ourselves. This may be the real reason “Six Seven” is so irritating.
For the Oakland Review of Books, Elizabeth Freeman considers what her recommendation of a dark novel that spoke to her means to customers at the bookstore:
When a customer asks what I’ve read, I’m not under oath to answer truthfully. Besides, don’t they want to think about themselves, instead of about me? Don’t they want something simpler, something well? Surely not all this jumping and not eating and never wanting to come up for air, all this symbology of bridges. I’m not sure. I tell myself: If anyone even reads the books I recommended, they will probably think about their own lives: their families, their dramas, perhaps their weddings. Perhaps their own bridge sightings. They will project. As they should.
And at his newsletter, Damon Krukowski plugs his new book and the importance of live music:
When I was asked to write a book about why sound matters, I thought of my recent experiences at Passim. The community there is built around music — a carefully, even conservatively defined style of music. But what holds it together isn’t just the music, it’s also something physical. You feel it in the room, and I believe that’s what brings people back there as much as or possibly more than any given artist.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
Krukowski’s piece is particularly lovely: the last line of that guitar story is going to be stuck in my head for a long time. I’m going to have to check out his book.
woooo, live music
Yeah, his book is on my list — he’s long been a great writer/reporter on the reality of the music economy, his blog has made many a FAR.
I’ve taught chapters from his earlier books. He knows his stuff, and knows how to engage readers. And I really like the music he makes in Damon and Naomi. The duo puts on a great live show.
What did we watch?
Live Music – a transatlantic lo-fi powerpop band called Teenage Tom Petties. How do they practice when they are spread across two continents? It blows my mind. They were pretty good though and they released a new 18-minute “album” (?) today that is excellent if anyone (else) likes fuzzy guitars and slightly out of tune harmonies. They were playing with a local band that usually sound like the Fall but opened with a pretty great cover of “Baba O’Riley” and the opening act were a kinda retro blues-rock band which is not normally my thing but they did it pretty damn well. Also they’d come up from the south coast on a coach, arrived right before they played and then went back to get back on an overnight coach back home as soon as they finished. In order to play first on the bill to about 35 people! That’s the DIY music scene, baby.
Woo, live music! And that last bit brings back memories of going to Providence for probably the same amount of people, maybe less.
WOOOOOO LIVE MUSIC! Hell yeah to the traveling openers, seen many of them. Slight side-eye at the band opening with a classic rock cover, but good on them for pulling it off.
Woooooooo intercontinental live music!!
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Ten, “Severed Dreams”
One thing I knew going into this show was that there’d be a lot of pompous speeches – Delenn’s “He is behind me. You are in front of me.” one is both famous and infamous, going on one line longer than it has to. This particular episode finally has Babylon 5 seceding from Earth – something I’ve known was coming and been hinting at for a while – and it owns hard, but it’s also surrounded by character hyping themselves and each other up. I’m particularly annoyed with Sheridan calling home to his dad, a pointless scene that reveals nothing we didn’t already know and feels like it’s both marking time and cheaply hyping up the audience, which is frustrating to me. You don’t really have to work hard to get me on board.
(Conversely, Londo bitching about Narn and then immediately facing a Narn who can let him through is cheap but hilarious, because it’s in-character.)
G’Kar being part of things rules. The thing about 20-odd episodes of shows is that they make the status quo both more important and much more flexible. B5 is very good about letting the status quo mutate naturalistically. I’m usually completely with B5 on a big-picture level and frustrated with it on a day-to-day process, where there’s one really great scene and a few bad ones padding out for time.
That said, the human civil war arc feels like the most successful of all of them; Sheridan works to give humanitarian aid to the people on the other side of the war, and repeatedly reaches out to them to switch sides. Meanwhile, the Shadows are funding wars on both sides (which hilariously makes them the Americans in any metaphor you choose to apply). Clark in particular is one of the great off-screen characters – shades of what Andor would go on to do with Tarkin and the Emperor. He’s always making decisions, always affecting our protagonists.
“The thing about 20-odd episodes of shows is that they make the status quo both more important and much more flexible. B5 is very good about letting the status quo mutate naturalistically” — this is a great way of putting it. I believe the stuff with Sheridan’s dad is here to establish/remind about Sheridan’s dad, which is annoying in the moment and not a bad idea if you are planning to have him around for future stuff in 20-odd episodes. Balance!
The X-Files, “Quagmire”
I spent a while thinking that this was a functional but not too thrilling Jaws homage, but then Scully’s sincere heartbreak at Queequeg’s death–Anderson is unbelievably good in the moment where Scully’s stunned grief is a snag for Mulder’s obsessive theorizing; it’s such a human beat, an ordinary emotion to a familiar pain that’s happening in an extraordinary situation–made it feel more real and specific, and then Mulder and Scully wound up stranded on a rock and talking, and everything gelled. The third act became a sliver of a hangout episode that generates both an honest sense of wonder (I cheered when the real Big Blue emerged) and an interesting, inherently dramatic clash of priorities, even if it’s resolved in a low-key way (Mulder’s desire for meaning and wonder isn’t assuaged by killing the alligator: Scully wants him to take a win from saving lives, but that’s not what he was here for; meanwhile, the frog scientist is initially frustrated with Mulder’s desire to overlook a real, if mundane, mini-apocalypse for a species in favor of chasing a legend). Ultimately a beautiful, surprisingly laid-back episode that still feels very plugged into the core philosophies and strengths at the heart of the show.
Thir13en Ghosts
Rewatched with a friend. My goodness, this is a stupid movie. Parts of it are mildly rescued by Matthew Lillard, who has an actual character to play and commits to it (“I’ve been looking for a reason to like myself for a long time” is a surprisingly good line to be in this piece of shit), but much of it is beyond saving. What’s hilarious is that there’s exactly one (1) clever bit, where an explicit lie comes about forty-five minutes after someone implied the exact opposite, so if you’re paying attention, it perfectly seeds a particular reveal. But then the movie bungles it anyway, twice, so this comes to nothing. Very fun to watch with someone, though.
Small brain: Mulder saying “giggity”
Large brain: Scully saying “giggity”
Galaxy brain: Skinner saying “giggity”
Psycho – Nothing new to say because this is probably the most analyzed horror film of all time, let alone film, and if an alien wanted to understand America, this wouldn’t be the worst movie to show it.* All of our skeletons are right here in the fruit cellar. The unspoken implications – desecration, necrophilia, incest, queerdom (Perkins I believe very deliberately does not walk like the other manly men all about the film) are still what make this movie so powerful, if not exactly shocking these days, sixty-five years on, as does Perkins’ face, and how he allows his eyes to go pure black, like a magic trick (or power).
* My concern is that on hearing the psychiatrist, said aliens might then obliterate our planet.
Haha, your comments reminded me of Will Menaker’s hilarious Letterboxd review:
https://letterboxd.com/codydad420/film/psycho/
Lol that’s great.
The Pub — ooh, a Criterion short about a pub, hell yeah! *watches* uh. Quite good but very grim, this is an animated/rotoscoped look at a bartender serving up pints to nonstop awful people — racists, drunks, hen parties, hooligans — who morph into grotesques and animals depending on their level of vitriol/intoxication. Perhaps exaggerated but perhaps not, it certainly makes Britain look like a nightmare.
Trouble Every Day — ahhh, the French! Surely you will have a nicer country! I knew about this one’s reputation going in and damn is it earned. Claire Denis is apparently about mood over plot coherence, not a bad thing but there is a lot of ominous and unclear happenings in the early going and almost zero dialogue, which is also unbalancing. But then That Scene happens and hooooooo boy, blood and horniness in a way that leaves other vampire flicks (and this is really beyond vampirism, more like cannibalism) in the dust. Denis is a pure sensualist, finding body textures that other people don’t look for, and then going to town on them. Vincent Gallo is very good as the tortured lead, but this is led by Beatrice Dalle, who apparently some years after this movie married (and later divorced) a convicted murderer after spending a day with him, that absolutely tracks with her heedless ferocity and lust here. Absolute must-see for Conor, others proceed with caution.
Oh, trust me, I’ve seen Trouble Every Day! The sound the boy makes in That Scene is unforgettable in the worst/best way, the horniness of the disease is compulsive and doesn’t give a fuck about consent or other people’s pleasure. Great Tindersticks score too though I think it’s just the one song lol.
Ha, I should’ve known! And yeah, that noise and the … fingering … jesus.
Don’t remember if you’ve seen Beau Travail yet but it’s pretty great.
Something Wicked This Way Comes – So hard to find, it’s finally streaming. Ray Bradbury’s screenplay is exquisite, literate and intelligent, and Jack Clayton’s direction, although not as good as The Innocents, is still well done. It’s loaded with great October atmosphere, chills, loss and melancholy. It’s unfortunate Disney execs had to meddle with the creators’ work. This may be the first film I became aware of having studio meddling, it was big news at the time. It contains the most glaring and unnecessary reshoots I’ve ever seen in a film. It’s still dark fun. The early 80’s was a golden age for weird, scary family cinema with this playing into the fears of both young and old alike. There are at least four Stephen King novels here – It, Doctor Sleep, ‘Salem’s Lot and Needful Things. Jonathan Pryce brings malevolence to Mr. Dark. He’s very creepy, and by the final act, he’s downright scary. His delivery is terrifying. It’s the best performance of a Richard Straker/Leland Gaunt/Rose the Hat-type character.
What did we read?
8 Bit Theater, 0180-0210, Brian Clevinger
It amazes me how much comedy depends on the Situation. It doesn’t even have to be much of a situation; this section mostly concerns the characters getting past a creep monster and camping for the night, but it sets up things for the characters to react to. I wonder how much comedy depends on being reactionary; not politically, but in tracking how people respond to things (as opposed to drama, where you’re setting things in motion before reacting to them).
This is also where the comic starts getting self-aware. There are multiple references to the fact that only three days have actually passed in-story (favourite example comes from Garland: “They who have been my eternal foes for almost half a week!”) after about a year’s worth of actual comics, and the characters are already summing up their actions and characters in fast speeches. One of the best bits of this is when White Mage and Black Belt are spying on the group as they fail to fight the creep, and BB can spot when the argument is slowing down.
In terms of new things, White Mage is the one character who is really ‘developing’, as she becomes increasingly frustrated at how unheroic the Light Warriors are and how the universe isn’t bending towards justice. BM is mostly the straight man of the comic, but WM carries much more of its moral weight.
This does an extreme exaggeration of the angel/devil gag in two ways; for one, it’s Black Mage, so he has an evil side and an atrociously evil side (who talks like a cosmic horror villain). For second, in reality, BM stares at his shoes and the others take bets on how long he’ll be spaced out, giving us a fast pace to the comic as it bounces between these two ideas.
RM lectures the group on quantum physics (positing that Fighter’s belief in cartoons changed reality), and uses an image from Quantum Leap to articulate this. There’s an insane gag where Thief manages to claim all of his allies’s shares of the treasure by claiming the bottom halves of them. Really stupid gag that makes me cackle: RM puts the amoire into a hypercube in a really dramatic and showy display, only for it to suck in his hat. This also introduces Bikke – I ended at the very beginning of a new plot – and he gets one of the funniest bits of dialogue I’ve ever seen: “Consider the lives of me crew forfeit.” / “I’m sure it won’t come to that.” / “It will if I says it will.”
Julia, Sandra Newman
A true companion to 1984. One could initially interpret this as a rebuke to that book; Julia practically lists all the obvious criticisms it’s gotten over the years. But the structure and emotional arc are perfect replication of the original, with the ultimate point seeming to be that being able to see through the gaps in Winston Smith’s thinking will not save you.
The distinctions between Julia and Winston’s thinking match the distinctions between Julia and 1984; to oversimplify, most of the ideas aren’t nearly as interesting in this book but the plot is vastly better, right down to multiple cliffhangers to draw the reader into the next chapter. Julia has a wide circle of friends and a basic competence Winston lacks, as well as lacking his depression.
For the most part, this does what I’d hoped and opens up the world outside Winston, showing how women especially live under Big Brother and filling out that world – expressing specific incidents reflecting Orwell’s original ideas. It’s remarkable to see entirely different emotional reactions to the original book – she doesn’t even think about doublethink even though it heavily factors into the climax, and interestingly she is equally as enthralled by O’Brien as Winston was.
Also, the punchline to the whole thing that shows up in the final three pages is absolutely stunning and left me cackling.
Candy Darling’s biography by Cynthia Carr made me cry my eyes out – a beautiful and heartbreaking book.
A Long Day At The End of The World has a great premise – a memoir by a man whose father was part of a mass desecration of corpses at a North Carolina crematorium. Yet the book is an indictment of all poets turned prose writers, pretentious without coming to any real conclusions. Bah.
Krackle’s Last Movie – A really cool, powerful horror/fantasy novella I got as an ARC from Split Lip Press. A documentary filmmaker disappears while finishing her film about a wave of “monsters” that emerged in the 1990s, including werewolves, mermaids, and her winged assistant who now may have to complete the documentary. Reminded me a bit of Stephen Graham Jones with the mix of realism and uncanny detail.
Is James Dickey the best poet-turned-prose-writer, at least after the Victorian era and Thomas Hardy et al? I am willing to hear arguments for Stephen Dobyns, but I’ve only read his poetry and haven’t gotten to any of the books yet. (And to be fair, I’m unclear on the exact trajectories here: they both wrote both, but I don’t know in what order.) Certainly I was unimpressed by a recent-ish noir novel I read by someone who started their career in poetry.
There are dozens of us! DOZENS! But this is also more of a modern problem in my mind, the best of them grasped that prose and poetry are very different mediums.
I realized after I posted this that I’d been exclusively thinking of poets-turned-novelists, which is not even the case re: the actual book you’re talking about. In my defense, I’m tired.
Lol you’re good, this is the kind of creative non-fiction that comes somewhat close to novel – this might have been better if he had more of a investigative journalism background.
Reading a book about Amelia Earhart and her publicist husband, George Putnam. She is fascinating. He is a tool and any time the book talks about him, I want to get back to her.
And reading the latest October Daye book, Silver and Lead. It does three things all of these do by now: follows a similar course of action; has a lot of exposition in case you don’t remember the previous books; engages me totally with its strong cast of regulars and side characters. Word is we are near the end of the series, but I thank Seanan is going to guide us in well.
Killing Time, by Donald E. Westlake
An early and semi-obscure Westlake novel with, unusually, a private eye protagonist whose ostensible independent operator status is hampered by connections to the political machine that keeps his small town humming. Tim thinks he’s one kind of person, living in one kind of place, and the book keeps showing him he’s wrong about that: if there’s an implicit thesis here, it’s that chummy corruption is all well and good until someone threatens to expose it. All the mutual back-scratching in Winston supposedly keeps worse things at bay, but the back-scratchers will do the worse things themselves to keep from being found out; it’s a familiar but always effective story.
Again and again, Tim gets confronted with the cost of his smugness, but he never fully faces up to it or takes much responsibility. It makes him obnoxious–mentally and morally weak–but if that saps this rushed, misshapen novel of some of its verve and force, it makes it a chewier, more psychologically complex text. I’m not sure it’s worth it, but the results are intriguing, at least.
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral, by Robert Westall
Two horror novellas–the title story and “Brangwyn Gardens”–published in one volume. “The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral” is an all-time banger, a bit M.R. Jamesian in how it conceives of its horror, but working class rather than academic. Its protagonist is a steeplejack hired to do some repair work on a cathedral tower–prestigious work he’s initially happy to have snagged. But there’s an unnerving gargoyle on the tower, and the blocks of stone around it seem to be falling apart at an unnatural rate. It’s also a job plagued by accidents, and then there’s the way his son is sleepwalking, trying to get to the tower …. Terrific voice, effective horror (not as quiet as it first seems, either), and an incredible specificity and sense of place. If you want terror, neepery about masonry and steeplejacking, and beautiful prose, this is the story for you.
There’s also some cool, well-handled agnosticism and anger at the Church–if the protagonist is a little too willing to consider direct divine intervention at the end, it’s counterbalanced by the reverend leaving the church, and it doesn’t take away from the force of bits like this: “Any cathedral was built on the deaths of children. Where d’you think the money came from? How could they afford to build, in a country where half the people nigh starved to death every winter? The money came from the workers, and the workers’ children starved. Every stone must be a death, nearly.”
Really highly recommend this for October reading. I’ve read several Westall books and liked them all, so it’s also a general author recommendation. It’s also wild to me that almost all his books were originally published as children’s literature, because nothing I’ve read by him, including the books with children as characters, like The Scarecrows, has felt like that. It would be readable by a (bright) child, but most literature is. Odd. This certainly feels like adult fare to me.
The second novella, “Brangwyn Gardens,” is good but not as transcendent, or as horrifying, as “Muncaster.” It involves a self-absorbed university student in 1955, Harry, who takes a room in a house that cam through the Blitz unscathed while the houses surrounding it were bombed out:
Number eleven itself looked very spruce: the Doric pillars that framed the door were newly painted, and so were the many sash windows; but it just looked like cosmetics on a carefully made-up severed head.
That was the front; the sides of the house hadn’t been touched since 1940. Strips of bleached wallpaper, high up on the long-gone fourth floors of numbers nine and thirteen still stirred in the breeze. Up there, there was still a bathroom mirror screwed to the wall, glinting in the afternoon sun; and the cistern of a long-gone toilet, and a white hand-basin, clinging to the ancient scarred brick like strange white limpets.
Harry becomes obsessed with a diary he finds–a young woman in the Blitz, chronicling her days and her aching, lustful loneliness–and begins to hear bombing sounds and snatches of conversation at night and to smell the ghost of her perfume. I have to say, while I picked up on something Harry was too youthfully arrogant and blinkered to consider, I did not get the whole of it, which is much weirder.
Killing Time is fascinating, an open reworking of Red Harvest from an insider’s point of view instead of an outsider, and as you note that throws everything out of whack. The Op wants to burn everything down, this may not be moral but it is consistent, and Tim wants to be an agent of chaos AND maintain the system. This makes him a dick, as you note, and makes the book messy but I like it a lot and at least Westlake does not cop out on the ending. He’d later rework Red Harvest with a more appropriate lead, the Parker-starring masterpiece Butcher’s Moon.
The brutality of the ending is a bit sudden, but I approve of all Tim’s bills coming due at once: the one time he tries to be a true player rather than a middleman, he hits the consequences hard and fast.
I’m looking forward to doing a full Parker read/reread next year.
The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs – ERB’s take on Moreau and Frankenstein is more pulpy and action packed. It’s no At The Earth’s Core or The Warlord Of Mars but has a lot going for it. A mad scientist attempts to prove to the scientific community that he has conquered the secrets of biology and made strides toward creating the perfect mate for his daughter. A little plodding in the first half but the second really takes off with some exciting set pieces, jungle chases, twists, turns and near death cliffhangers. It’s stacked with pirates, headhunters, malformed men and giant orangutans. All that leads to some Orientalism, cultural insensitivity and racism of the time. If that is a non-starter you may want to try Batman And The Monster Men which owes something to this.
Oh, damn, I read Batman and The Monster Men as a teen! A real hoot with some great Wagner comic book images.
Finished Master and Commander, the first of twenty maritime historical fiction novels by Patrick O’Brian on Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, set during the naval wars of the early 19th century. Both characters are perfectly defined from the start, and they go from nearly killing each other over the most trivial thing to forming an extraordinary bond in wartime.
It’s certainly difficult to understand so much maritime jargon, but it’s worth it thanks to the historical moment it portrays and how it depicts life on the high seas and the power struggles between captains, their allies, and their enemies. And the action, though light, is very well told, and leaves Jack in a very interesting place for the rest of the series. I doubt I’ll read the other 19, but maybe two or three more, I’d be happy to.
Highlights here are the chases with enemy vessels with very flexible timeframes, Stephen’s mercurial personality (which often leaves his fellow crew flabbergasted, and gives O’Brian a window for awkward comedy on one fascinating insect dissection scene), and Jack making his way through the ranks quickly and taking in a big loss just as dramatically, due to some bad luck at sea and his talent with ladies coming back to bite him in the ass.
Next up, time for my annual first-time Shakespeare read: The Merry Wives of Windsor.
I picked a few O’Brians on audio recently and think I might give that a go: Patrick Tull is an excellent reader. It’d be fun to revisit the series that way.
I have a companion book that helps with the maritime jargon, but sometimes I just let it wash over me.
Looking forward to the Shakespeare notes!
“I have a companion book that helps with the maritime jargon, but sometimes I just let it wash over me.”
I see what you did there.
Hey, friends, what’s up?
Feel like the company I work with is on the verge of some kind of hilarious collapse, there was an extremely last-minute “all employees” call set up earlier (that obviously only about half of the people invited managed to attend, because they gave us literally three minutes notice) in which the head of technology – who was already announced to be leaving the company earlier this week – told us that there had been “speculation” that he wanted to address, which he mostly failed to do and then refused to answer questions. As somebody who does not like the job I’m actually finding this quite exciting, if I could swing a redundancy pay-off out of it then I’d be over the moon.
I finally started my new job and it’s really a great situation. It’s hard (well, it’s not exactly hard, but the office is swamped with work so we’re beavering away like mad). Also the joke is that our office is not furloughed, but we have taken on some temporary help from other people in our agency that otherwise would have been furloughed so they get to keep working. So we’re the only program in the entire government that is going to become less productive once the shutdown ends. Anyway, the people are really nice, the work is valuable and important, and I’m very happy to have landed here. (Although I am still getting paid less than I was when I was DOGE’d in February. Well, you can’t have everything.)
Glad you found a good landing place!
They posted my department head’s job. Wow he makes a lot of money.
Away at a filk convention I have not been to since something like 2018. Already saw several people I have not seen since then. My wife is up for a music award this weekend so what to be be excited about. The hotel is a bit weird. Is no clocks in a hotel room starting to be a thing? Why is the bathroom door glass and on a track?
Working remotely, but forgot my mouse so it’s a bit off till we can get one at Target.
Wishing your wife luck!
The last hotel I stayed at didn’t have a clock either. I disapprove of this.
Been blue lately and also have a cold, but (1) I just had some ups and downs with my meds so I know that’s part of it and (2) I think I need to make some big life changes, especially with how I’ve been dating/think about my future. (I usually don’t! I’m used to being in survival mode or not trying to think about it.) First step is probably more therapy.
With a little more than a week to go before my band’s record release show — opening for Tobin Sprout of GBV — my guitar amp is on the fritz. Getting it looked at today.
Good luck! Sounds like a cool show to be a part of.
Cannot believe that it took me until now to realize that “CONVERSATION” in the Department of Conversation heading for the comment section pulses.
A little worried you’ll now all say, “What are you talking about? It doesn’t pulse!”
Ha, I’ve never looked at it long enough to notice in my haste to sprinkle you all with my bons mot.