We finished binge-watching Seasons 1  and 2 of Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  Eighteen hours over five days, a large part of that on last Sunday.  We know that's nowhere near marathon compared to some binge-watch horror stories we've heard about, and we've probably spent more hours on video games over shorter spans of time in the past, but it's sort of a first for us.

We'll say this about the show - it was entertaining and diverting, and Season 1 was much better than Season 2.  The show is set in 1957 and is about a wealthy, Upper West Side young Jewish housewife, Midge Maisel, who unexpectedly discovers she has a talent for stand-up comedy as her "normal" domestic life falls into a tailspin.  No spoiler alerts are needed but in the more-satisfying Season 1, she gives a few spontaneous stand-up performances in various downtown dives, and the season traces her progress from a cliche Jewish princess to a trail-blazing comedian.  In the course of Season 1, she gets bailed out of jail (for profanity) by no less than Lenny Bruce, finds herself outside a nightclub smoking reefers with jazz musicians, meets her first drag queens, and finds herself becoming the darling of the downtown bohemian crowd. It's all very light-hearted and fun, and the script lets the lead actor, Rachel Brosnahan, get off a lot of good jokes and wise-cracks.  Her style is a cross somewhere between Lanny Bruce and Dorothy Parker, with a touch of Jerry Seinfeld thrown into the mix.

After the eight-episode Season 1, the 10 episodes of Season 2 felt like a let down.  After a couple episodes unnecessarily set in Paris for some reason, the eponymous Mrs. Maisel and her parents head upstate to a Catskills resort for their annual summer vacation.  The Catskill episodes felt campy and unrealistic as Midge and her parents unquestioningly relish in cornball activities like singalongs and group calisthenics and beauty contests for married women.  There's no trace of Midge's otherwise cynical rebelliousness nor of her parents' former world-weary aloofness, and suddenly, they're all about tomato juice and boating.  The writers would have us believe that these activities are their cherished rituals and routines from years and years of going to the Catskills, but her father, an intellectually bullying Columbia  University professor well played by Tony Shalhoub, would never otherwise follow a crowd so unquestioningly, and Midge shows no sign of any residual adolescent rebellion against the bourgeois activities.  One would think her year of doing stand-up in downtown hipster clubs and smoking joints outside of the stage door with the hepcat musicians would have changed her, but instead she acts like just another mindless sheep up in the Catskills, and shows no regrets about simply walking out on her fledgling comedy career just as it was starting to really take off.  The disturbing thing is that it seems as if the writers are saying, "Look, going to the Catskills - this is what Jews do, isn't it funny?" and there's something disturbingly anti-semitic about that.

Worse, it seemed like the Catskills episodes would never end.  When Midge is finally convinced by her manager to return to the city for a gig after one whole episode of the Catskills shenanigans, you'd think that storyline had finally run its course, but she's right back up in there in the Catskills again later in the next episode, and even shows up again in a third episode.  What could have otherwise been merely a single off-kilter episode, one dischordent strike of the wrong keyboard note, starts to feel like some sort of whirlpool from which the writers and actors couldn't escape, as scene after scene in episode after episode continues the "Look, she left her career to spend the summer up in the Catskills" story line.  

Season 2 eventually - slowly, painfully - managed to finally get past the Catskills, but just as it was starting to regain its footing once again, instead of doing what was so good about Season 1 - namely, exploring the strange counter-culture world of the 1958 downtown beatnik and stand-up scene - it took another left-hand turn and devolved into a romcom, with Midge pulled between an impossibly too-perfect Jewish surgeon and her former husband.  Granted, a little romance would not have been out of place as a subplot to the story of Mrs. Maisel's climb to fame, but instead it became the main theme and the very thing that differentiated the series from any of the other sitcoms or soap operas on TV instead became a back story. 

Overall though, despite the Catskills and the late-season schmaltz, we enjoyed the series.  We would recommend watching Season 1, and it's probably safe to skip over Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of Season 2 (you'll quickly catch up on the few plot developments that did occur up in the Catskills).  The end of the season is like drinking cheap champagne, a little too sweet and ultimately disappointing, but not anything you won't get over.           

Amazon has announced that Season 3 of Mrs. Maisel will air in December 2019, and all other things being equal, we'll be watching when it does.

From The Real Estate Desk

More fun at the now-under-lease UCV today.  The previous tenants managed to somehow break the thermostat, not so bad that the heat couldn't be turned on and off, but bad enough that you couldn't set the temperature, program the furnace, or read the actual air temp.  We bought a replacement thermostat from Amazon and had a HVAC tech come by and install it today, as well as service the furnace and AC unit while he was at it.  He noted that the ductwork was extremely dirty, clogged with dog hair, and the blower motor and evaporation coil could easily become damaged or cause other issues during AC season.

We'll have to wait that one out until the actual AC season gets here, because the new tenant complained that the toilets wouldn't stop running after they were flushed, and while we told him it would be his responsibility to replace the tank valve and flapper in the future, as long as we had a tech out there, we'd have him replace the fixtures this one time and one time only.  However, the tech reported back that while it was an easy fix, one of the two toilets had somehow become unbolted from the floor, and was just freely riding atop the sanitary line.  He could easily move it around with just two fingers.

How do people break the bolts holding the toilet to the floor?  Have you ever broken those bolts?  We haven't.  We shouldn't be surprised - we're actually more surprised to learn that the sanitary line wasn't clogged with dog hair. 

The cost so far is $768 for the plumbing alone - we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop to learn how much the HVAC work will cost.

For the record, we don't turn a profit renting the UCV - it's at best a break-even enterprise, but with the new carpet (some $2,000) and the housecleaning service, as well as today's expenses and still pending repairs (laundry room doors, kitchen floor), we'll definitely be in the red this year.    

Better Oblivion

The Music Desk discovered the new band Better Oblivion Community Center last Sunday, and today learned that a) they've just released a video for their song Dylan Thomas, and b) they'll be performing at Terminal West, conveniently located just a couple miles from here, on April 6, a Saturday (!).  The Music Desk tried to buy tickets, but either they're not on sale yet or we've forgotten how to purchase tickets from Terminal West.

The Climate Desk had been advised to expect snow and a "wintery mix" today, and followed the advice of almost every media outlet in the State of Georgia and worked from home today to avoid driving on the hazardous streets.  The forecast:  bitter cold, with early morning rain turning to snow by mid-morning.  The reality: a seasonably cool morning, 30s to low 40s, with some early morning rain giving way to sunny skies and mid-40 afternoon temperatures.

Now that the media has cried "wolf" over the weather today, the next time a real storm's a-coming in, everyone's going to laugh off the forecasts and prognostications and take to the roads anyway, and we're going to have another gridlocked "snowpocalypse" like the one that made us a laughing stock a year ago.    

My Office Today

Brush grinder, chewing up all the undergrowth and invasive vines, kudzu, and sticker bushes at a project site outside of Atlanta.

Most of the day was in the office, though.  We let Grindey McGrindface have fun on his own while we were back cranking out reports.

The new tenant's first check cleared (!), so we're off to a good start there.

Now that we've got our new converter box and can stream Amazon and Netflix content on our TV, we're discovering the joys of binge watching.  Between Saturday night and Sunday, we watched 10 hours of Season 1 and 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  The Man In The High Castle is probably next.  Just as we finally had started to burn out on video games (Fallout 76 fatigue), along comes another time-wasting vice to use up all of our free hours.  We tried for a while there to get enthused over comic books, but after a couple weeks of reading from our Marvel Unlimited subscription, we remembered that despite all the hype, oh yeah, they're just comic books.

Big snow storm is forecast to hit Atlanta tomorrow, followed by days of sub-freezing temperatures. We are famously incapable of dealing with this kind of weather here in Georgia, so I stocked up on food at the supermarket (me and about 100 of my closest friends and neighbors) and are hunkered down for a long winter freeze.

Wish us luck.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

The good news just keeps on getting better.  The year opened with a bunch of great new recordings from Sharon van Etten, Panda Bar, Toro y Moi, James Blake, Juliana Hatfield and Deerhunter, together suggesting that 2019 may very well turn out to be a great year for new music, possibly the best since 2015.

Then on top of all that, bam!, out of nowhere Connor Oberst (Bright Eyes) and Phoebe Bridgers (boygenius) drop a surprise album that absolutely no one saw coming called Better Oblivion Community Center.  What's more, it's actually really good, arguably on par with the best music that either musician has released individually.  They really bring out the best in each other, as you can tell from the give and take between the two performing the song Dylan Thomas with their band in the video above.

At the same time and just as unexpectedly, the New York band Vampire Weekend suddenly releases their first new music in over six years, and in it's own way, it's just as unexpected and just as satisfying as Better Oblivion. We've only heard a couple songs so far from the new album, called Father of the Bride, but it's clearly the best Vampire Weekend music yet. Until last week, when the band teased the public with the album's initials FOTB, no one knew that Vampire Weekend were even thinking about new music, much less recording a new album.  Here's the insect-themed YouTube audio for the song Harmony Hall.

What's next for 2019?  The best news of all, our reason to be cheerful, is that no one really knows.

Here at the Real Estate Desk, we're pleased to announce that we now have a signed lease for the UCV.

There's still work to be done on the condo, but with a tenant in place, who does IT work from home during the day, it's going to be a whole lot easier.  Specifically, we no longer need to take time off from work or our weekends to meet contractors and receive deliveries.  Plus, he's getting the gas turned on so we'll have heat right before the big cold snap forecast to hit the Dep South next week.

One less anxiety to have to deal with.  Today, we resolved another worry when the cable guy came over and replaced the old non-functioning converter box with a new one.  Not only does the new one work, but it contains lots and lots of new features that we didn't have before. We can finally access Netflix and Amazon Prime on our television now, plus a lot of other Internet features (KEXP live sessions!) without having to buy a new, so-called smart TV.  Nice.

We're still swamped and behind schedule at work and we still have to get the brakes fixed on our car and get Eliot to the vet for his flea meds, but with the tenant in place, the dentist appointment completed, and the cable fixed, that seems a lot more manageable than it did last time we talked.

That, plus the government's back open!  Watching the way Pelosi so completely dominated and outmaneuvered the GOP reminds me of Father John Misty's lovely 2012 song Nancy From Now On.

New Dreams, New Masters

Aurora Nealand is cooler than us and probably cooler than you.  A saxophonist, clarinetist, singer, composer, provocateur, and bandleader active in the vibrant music scene of New Orleans since arriving there in 2004, she has no use for duality.  "I think separating ‘musical life’ from ‘life’ at this point is a challenge for me,” she says.

After attending the renowned Conservatory at Oberlin College, where she designed her own major in Contemporary Music, Aurora moved to Paris to study at the Ecole du Theatre Physical Jacques Lecoq, taking the opportunity to explore the potential of music/sound for theatre. Since landing in New Orleans, she has been playing traditional New Orleans jazz and diving into the rich musical culture of the city. 

Today, she is a band leader and contributing member to a number of performing groups as a saxophonist, singer, composer, and improvisor.   She formed the band Royal Roses to tackle the oeuvre of Dixieland legend and fellow soprano saxophonist and clarinetist Sidney Bechet at Preservation Hall, a herculean task that earned her accolades in the national jazz community. Her solo project, Monocle, delights at the border of new music and pop, not unlike the work of spiritual predecessor Laurie Anderson.  And through organizations such as the Found Sound Nation and its Dosti initiative, she has advocated for music’s role in cross-cultural exchange. She and her partner Lisa Giordano of Sound Observatory New Orleans have curated all of the performances and social engagements opportunities that will happen during a week-long residency in NOLA.

Aurora is one of the most intriguing young jazz artists at work right now, “a thoroughly modern artist who works in a traditional vein,” according to OffBeat.  At this year's Big Ears festival, Aurora will premiere a new quartet with thee extraordinary musicians Tim Berne, Bill Frisell, and David Torn.  Berne, who helped upend jazz in the ‘80s, met Nealand last year in New Orleans and was struck by her incandescent explorations and the ways she had absorbed the original lingua franca of the city and then pushed beyond it into realms of free playing, experimental composition, and even ecstatic pop.

Dolphin Is The New Panda Bear

Just as the Music Desk was lamenting that modern rock's best years are apparently now past (by three years, not the usual boomers' 30 years), a slew of great new music suddenly appears on the horizon. Some has already been released, some leaked, and some only teased, but if the last few months' product is any indication, 2019 maybe the best year for new music since 2015.

We can start anywhere, and starting with Panda Bear's new album Buoys is both appropriate and arbitrary.  Appropriate in that Animal Collective has been at the vanguard of cutting-edge new music since at least 2001, and Panda Bear's contributions and solo efforts have had a reassuring, humanizing effect on AC's sometimes challenging output. 

Recorded in Panda's adopted home of Portugal, Buoys features Chilean DJ/vocalist Lizz and Portuguese musician Dino D’Santiago.

Buoy's opening cut Dolphins drops the listener in a warm and gentle sea of just slightly psychedelic riffs, as Panda's soothing voice croons along over his somewhat tropical-sounding guitar. Having earned the listener's trust with the first cut, the rest of the album leads the listener through various other sonic landscapes, all full of wonder and curiosity, but also gentle and reassuring.  It's all sugar-coated ear candy, without being too sweet or popish - think Brian Wilson on a really good day. 

We last saw Panda Bear with Animal Collective bandmate Avey Tare performing their seminal LP Sung Tongs at Atlanta's Symphony Hall last July.  Earlier last year, we saw Panda perform solo at Variety Playhouse, with AC's Geologist opening.  We've seen Panda both solo and with Animal Collective plenty of times before that and enjoyed every show, and we're disappointed to see that the tour dates announced so far for Buoys bring him nowhere near the American South.  After kicking off the tour at D.C.'s 9:30 Club, the tour goes to the Paradise in Boston, which, fun fact, is right across the street from an apartment we lived in during college back in the 70s, and where we saw the British band Dire Straits make their first American appearance.  We still have a promotional button from that show to prove it.  We're hoping more Panda Bear tour dates are announced in the future and that he eventually plays Atlanta again. 

Anyway, Buoys drops February 8.  Meanwhile, if you haven't found a leaked copy yet, there's the vid for Dolphin, above, and the adventures of Dean Blunt (Hype Williams) in Token, below. 

Let's Shut Down the Superb Owl

Look, we're not saying the game shouldn't be played - we're looking forward to a New England victory - we're just saying no one should go. The game is at Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and according to the interwebs:

"Beyond the hotel rooms, food, and everything else involved in visiting Atlanta for a day or two, the seats themselves are wildly expensive. On average, Super Bowl ticket prices range between $3,000 and $6,000, according to TickPick.com's co-founder Brett Goldberg. Of course, as the game gets closer, a number of factors go into the whole economics of it all, namely which two teams end up facing off against one another. Also, unless you have an inside connection or get hooked up through work, the bulk of the tickets up for grabs now are only available through the resale market. At the time of publication, the cheapest ticket available on StubHub was $3,650 for a corner spot in the Upper Bowl, while the most expensive was a whopping $475,000 for a suite near the 20 yard line."

So basically, the game isn't for the fans but for the one-percenters, corporations, and expense-account tycoons.  The elite get to enjoy the experience (if watching from "a corner spot in the Upper Bowl" for $3,650 is your idea of enjoyment) while the real fans have to watch from home.  Economic disparity much?

And then there's New Orleans' complaint that they were unfairly eliminated during the NFC Conference Championship.  The Saints' fans are calling for a boycott on the game, and some are even going to court to sue the NFL and demand the game be replayed.

The NFL had the hardest time finding musicians willing to play the Halftime Show.  It was generally assumed that performing for the NFL implied tacit approval on their black-listing of Colin Kaepernick and would weigh in on the wrong side of the kneeling-during-the-anthem controversy. The NFL eventually settled on the dismal pop band Maroon 5, a selection that excites exactly no one, not even Maroon 5's own mom.

So this year's Superb Owl seems doomed from so many angles, a game that's somehow destined not to be played anyway, so here's what we need to do.  This government shutdown has already gone on way too long (one day would have been too long) and something's got to be done to stop it.  We propose that the TSA and the air-traffic controllers all go on strike or stage a sick-out starting a few days before the big game, effectively shutting down all air traffic in the U.S.  Those who've sacrificed their children's inheritances  to pay for tickets won't be able to attend and the media, publicists and various hangers-on will have to ride Amtrak or take a bus to Atlanta (that'll teach 'em!).  Vendors, sponsors, and advertisers will be left out in the cold in their frozen fly-over towns, and the whining and protestations will be deafening.  Congress will have no choice but to reopen the government the next day, but then would still have to eat crow at town-hall meetings for the rest of the year for ruining their constituents' Superb Owl.  

If you want Congress to budge on the shutdown issue you gotta hit them where it hurts, and taking away their Superb Owl is the most high-profile and visible way of hurting them.

It's embarrassing but we'll admit it - we totally fell for the video allegedly showing a Covington Catholic student mocking a Native American protester.  The smirk, the MAGA hat, and smug self-assuredness all led us to conclude that another white Republican frat boy was showing off his sense of entitlement and privilege, ironically to a person whose ancestors were on this land long, long before his had arrived.

You all know the story by now and that subsequent video of the larger chain of events showed a very different narrative.  This whole case is an excellent example of how schema works, how we create a backstory and a explanation for what we see based on our own history and experiences.  We all too often mistake our little fictions for the actual truth, clinging to our little narratives while both attacking other versions and defending our own.  

We've written a lot here in the past about schema and mental models (Sanskrit: samskara) and this isn't another post about all that.  What we're wondering is why no one is asking what seems to be the obvious questions - why were Catholic school students bussed to Washington and provided with MAGA hats to participate in an anti-choice protest?

We thought Catholic schools were church-based, and their tax-free status meant that they didn't participate, at least overtly, in politics.  We get it that the Catholic Church disapproves of abortion, and that many individual Catholics might want to participate in an anti-choice march, but this appeared to be an official outing of a tax-free parochial school.  Further, where did all those MAGA hats come from?  Did all the boys just so happen to have one, or were they provided by the tax-free school?  If the latter, how is that not political activism and why should they be allowed to maintain their exemption?

That's the part we still don't understand, but we have one follow-up question.  Reportedly, this whole incident started because some group calling themselves the Black Hebrew Israelites were insulting the Catholic-schools kids, hurling bizarre epithets at them like "children of incest."  Our follow-up question is what did the Covington kids door were believed to have done that brought that scorn and contempt down upon them?   

We really, truly hate to complain, but . . . .

1. We are absolutely slammed at work.  Several different projects with competing deadlines all need more time that we have to give, and there's precious little support available.  This is not all that unusual for us, we've been here many, many times before, except that in addition to this stressor, we also have to deal with . . . 


2. Getting things completed for the UCV.  As we said the other day, it appears we're over the hump and have a tenant lined up, but there's still a lot more work yet to be done, including but not limited to finding a contractor who knows how to install louvre doors for the laundry, not to mention getting the contractor into the unit and getting the actual work done.  We also have to get the condo painted.  Also, complete all the paperwork and everything else that needs to be done to get the new tenant into his new home, but our time for all that is limited not just because of work but also because. . . 


3. Eliot the cat, who suffered fleas back in June 2017, has somehow managed to pick them back up again. So now we've got to find time not otherwise engaged in Tasks 1 and 2 above to get him to the vet and get him the good flea medicine (the over-the-counter stuff doesn't work).  Find time, that is, when we're not dealing with . . . 


4. New rear brakes for the car.  It's making that horrid squealing sound when we stop, so we need to find time not being spent on Tasks 1, 2, or 3 above to get the car to the shop and have the brakes repaired, which normally could be done on the weekend, except . . . .


5. Our cable service stopped working for some reason, and after a painful 60 minutes on the telephone tonight with tech support from India, it was determined that a technician needs to come over here to look at it  So now we have to make an appointment to wait around home for the cable guy sometime when we're not otherwise tied up with Tasks 1, 2, 3, or 4 above.


6. We'd say that we just need to roll up our sleeves and jump into it all starting first thing tomorrow, but tomorrow morning we have a dentist appointment (more follow-on work to our adventures last year in self dentistry) and won't be able to make it to the office for Task 1 above, or do anything on Tasks 2, 3, 4, and 5 above, until after lunch (the only time the dentist had available for us was between 10:30 and 11:30).

So yeah, we're feeling a little stressed out and overwhelmed.  Somehow, all this will work itself out and in the meantime, we should just relax and let what happens come when it comes.  Perhaps we should just kick back tonight and unwind with a movie on cable and, oh right, Task 5 . . .

The New England Patriots play the Kansas City Chiefs for the AFC Championship later today, and the Sports Desk insists that we not post anything here during the game, and instead focus all our attention on the game and the Sports Desk's Tumblr page.

Ordered new tile flooring today to replace the worn-out linoleum in the kitchen of the UCV.  Also bought a new toilet tank cover on line to replace the broken lid in the unit.  When we were at Home Depot today, they told us they don't carry lids in store and only sell them on line, so we won't know if we bought the right size or not until it arrives. Also, we bought it from Amazon, because what's up with Home Depot not stocking their shelves?

The Music Desk has opined here in the past that with the indie-rock renaissance now over, rock music's peak years were 2005-2015, and the current scene is but a faded remnant of the glory of past years. But 2019 apparently takes exception to those remarks, and new albums released this January include great new LPs by the Atlanta-based Deerhunter, and by James Blake, Toro y Moi, and Juliana Hatfield.  And Sharon Van Etten's triumphant Remind Me Tomorrow may well turn out to be the AOTY.  Maybe intelligent rock music isn't dead after all.

Breakthrough?

Not to count chickens before they hatch, but we think we've got a new tenant in the UCV.

The new carpet installed this week made the place look a whole lot better and although still far from perfect, the place was finally ready to be shown - at least to a highly motivated renter with a little imagination and some patience.  Fortunately, we found just such a person - a young man who manages the restaurant just up the road (walking distance).  He understands that some repairs and upgrades (kitchen linoleum, the laundry room doors, etc.) won't be completed until after he moves in and that he'll have to be the one to let the contractors into the unit, but he's willing and ready to sign a lease (and more importantly, pay the first month's rent and security deposit).

I may look back on these words with rueful irony, but I think this might work out.   

Dreaming of the Masters

Reedman extraordinaire and all-round artist Joseph Jarman passed away on January 9, 2019, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey.  His passing was announced by the New York chapter of the AACM on their website. He was 81.

Jarman was a founding member of the AACM and of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but was also involved in Zen Buddhism and the practice of aikido. He began his study of aikido in the early 1970s and began studying Zen in 1990.  He visited various monasteries in Eastern Asia and a few years later opened Jikishinkan ("Direct Mind Training Hall"), his own dojo/zendo, in Brooklyn. He later became a Shinshu priest and held a fifth degree black belt in aikido.

We only saw Jarman perform once, a late 1970s Art Ensemble gig at Jonathan Swift's in Harvard Square, normally a folk-music club.  Highlights of the set included the members of the band wandering the stage, picking up random instruments from the small arsenal they had up there with them, play only a few notes on each and then put it back down to pick up another.  But experienced improvisors that they were, there were no gaps, no "dead air," between their random sounds.  At another point, they were all playing in unison, but one note, over and over, in 4/4 time, for something like five minutes.  Just a groove they somehow spontaneously fell into.  Wild.  

We saw his Art Ensemble bandmate, Roscoe Mitchell, last year at Big Ears, a 12:00 noon performance that blew the clouds off of a rainy day.  

Did Joseph Jarman have an influence on us?  Consider this:  Jarman composed the song Dreaming of the Master, from which we take the name of this regular Friday feature. 

Iowa

Remember the time we had to go to Iowa to do some early-autumn field work?  That project is still continuing and soil samples are required at 27 locations (over and above the 14 we obtained last year).  The good news (at least for us) is that we didn't actually have to go.  The work progressed this week in the conditions pictured above but I got to send a colleague in my place to do the work under my remote supervision.  I'll do Iowa in September and let others take care of it in January.

The carpet got installed in the UCV today.  I haven't seen it yet - I worked all day on the opposite side of the city and traffic was so bad tonight driving home that I gave up on the idea of over-shooting my home to drive the additional five miles on congested side streets to go see the UCV.  That's what weekends are for . . .

Somehow, Izzy the cat got it into his head that he can't go into the bedroom.  When I'm in there, sleeping, reading on the bed, whatever, he sits patiently outside the door while Eliot, my other cat, snuggles up to me. Izzy's stoic about his ostracism, but I can feel the waves of his resentment right through the walls.  But the barricade is totally in his head, and I have no idea how it got in there.    

I'm at Level 49 now in Fallout 76 but the game is starting to wear on me.  I've been all over the open-world terrain and there are few surprises left any more, only the constant, unrelenting search for food, ammo, and duct tape.  I've set a goal to reach Level 50, after which it's time to start a new game.  I wanted a game that would last me through the long Thanksgiving weekend and into the New Year and 76 did that, but it's starting to feel like it's time to move on.  I probably won't ever get to the point where I can access the nuclear launch codes and frankly don't really care (why nuke an already devastated wasteland, other than it's something that's possible to do in the game?), and once a game's endplay no longer holds an appeal, then what's the point? 

That's it for this week.  Dreaming of the Masters tomorrow, and then whatever weekend blogging comes up Saturday and Sunday.  Take care of yourselves, and we'll talk later.

I'm no secret agent, but the one thing I do know - mostly from watching movies and television - is that both the CIA and the KGB use blackmail to turn a citizen into an informant or even a mole. Once either side has the "goods" on a person - an incriminating videotape, evidence of accepting a bribe, a clandestine affair, what have you - they can then get that person to do their bidding for them by holding the threat to release the information they have to the police, a spouse, the media, or whatever befits the situation.

The Giant Orange Pumpernickel (GOP) met one-on-one several times with former KGB operative and now President of Russia Vladimir Putin.  The GOP refuses to release transcripts of what was discussed, and reportedly even had the transcripts of the conversations destroyed.  Whatever was said, we may not ever know. And the GOP certainly doesn't want us to find out.

But here's the thing - there were two interpreters in the room - one English and working for the U.S., and the other one Russian.  There are two sets of transcripts - one in English and another in Russian.  The GOP had the English one destroyed but there's no reason to believe that the Russian one doesn't still exist.

That's all the KGB should need.  They can use the threat of the transcript somehow getting released to the media to get the GOP to do their bidding.  Classic espionage blackmail.  The GOP may not completely fold over just the transcript, but who knows - there's no telling what's on them. When you add the transcripts to the loans and nefarious financial dealings the GOP has with Russian banks and oligarchs (he still won't release his tax returns, and calls any investigation into his financial affairs a "red line" that shall not be crossed), you start to sense the leverage Russia probably has over the American President.  Not to mention the pee tape . . . .

Time and again, the GOP has sided with Putin and with Russia on issue after issue, discounting the advise and counsel of his own intelligence agencies and advisors.  We wants to lift sanctions. He denies Russian interference in the 2016 election.  He's even speculated the unthinkable - a U.S. withdrawal from NATO.  

Why is he so interested in not only protecting but advancing Russian interests?  What have they got on him and what is he trying to hide?

Since he is tainted by, at the very least, the appearance of being compromised, and since the American public cannot tell if his foreign policy decisions are based on interest in protecting the U.S. or due to fear of being exposed, the honorable thing for him to do, the only thing really, would be to step down.  He's no longer able to defend the country and the constitution.  Dereliction of duty.  He must resign.

I know that's not gonna happen though . . .     

Persona

Part of the problem with the previous tenants was a matter of identity - to me, they were just tenants, two-dimensional, largely unseen characters whose sole purpose in life, as far as I was concerned, was to send me monthly rent checks.  To them, I was just as two-dimensional and just as unseen - I was that demanding landlord whose sole fixation was to get the rent payments as quickly as possible,  

It's no wonder, then, that they felt it was acceptable to leave the place in the state that it was in.  They had little conception that on top of being their landlord, I was also a workaholic full-time career man, a stressed-out urbanite, and a burned-out, exhausted introvert.  In their view of who I was, why wouldn't I have time to haul away all their trash and clean up their filth?  What else was there to my life other than managing their rental unit?

I realize that I also have a myopic vision of who they were and what they thought.

But all this ties into a larger concept I've been thinking about lately.  We're all actually many, many different people to the many others in our life.  We might be a parent as far as children are concerned, or a loving (or not) spouse to our loving (or not) partner.  To the person in the car behind us in traffic, we're the doofus who won't move his car after the light has changed.  To the cashier at the supermarket, we're part of that horde of daily customers, and to our coworkers, we could be any of a limitless number of things.

The truth of it is that they're all right - we're all those things and more.  We don't have a single identity, and we're certainly more than the star of that self-narrated personal history that we tell ourselves.  That narrative is only one more person's opinion, our own, but it's just as unreliable as any of the other identities.  

We are not one single person. In the relativistic sense, we're an infinite number of possible persons, depending on who is asking and where we might happen to fit into that other person's narrative.

So it was with great interest that I read the quote below by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan (my old job).  In an article about her in The New Yorker, Professor Anderson told the reporter,

"At church, I'm one thing.  At work, I'm something else.  I'm something else at home, or with my friends.  The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one's identities in other domains?  That is what it is to be free."       

The brilliance of that quote isn't that it recognizes and acknowledges our multiple identities, but it proposes that instead of insisting we are who we think we are, liberation is found in accepting these multiple identities and freely moving from persona to persona.  

More Winter Housework

As previously mentioned, today we had a professional cleaning company (the word now underlined instead of in quotations) come over and clean the Unsellable Condo in Vinings.  They did a great job, but the problem with a good cleaning is that now one can see the additional damage done by the former tenants.

• There's a level of baked on/burned on grease on the stove top that's almost impossible to scrub off.  I don't know if they ever cleaned it.  We'll have to order a replacement.


• The top to the tank on the toilet bowl is broken - at least three pieces -  and it appears that when it fell/was knocked off, it broke the toilet paper holder off the wall as it descended.  More replacement parts.


• There's a mantle over the fireplace, and it looks like not only did they let candle wax drip all over it, but some things (I can't even guess what) appear to have melted up there and left weird plastic residues.  We're hoping paint could just cover it up.


• Kitchen linoleum floor is shot.  Need to replace (tile?).


• Looks like they somehow managed to break the handle on the dishwasher (new unit I had to buy for them after the old one somehow died).  I didn't have the heart to even try it to see if it still works or not - one can only take so much disappointment in a single day.

I already have a prospective tenant lined up (he hasn't seen the place yet) and may be able to foist off some of the damages without a repair, but despite all the effort I put into the unit before the last tenants moved in (remodeled bathroom, new hardwood floors), the UCV is probably now less ready for the market (should it come to that) than before.

The Great Orange Pumpernickel (GOP) has shut down the government as extortion for funding for a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s all an obvious distraction tactic to divert our attention from his plummeting approval ratings (outside of his base, which will never waver) and imminent sanctions or possible impeachment due to his collusion with Russia and other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The real victims here aren’t the infinitesimally small number of Americans victimized by illegal migrants, but the hundreds of thousands American citizens working for the U.S. government. But the GOP doesn’t care about other people. To him, it’s all about himself.

America needs to wake up and rid itself of this pestilence on our leadership like a junkyard dog shakes off its fleas.

Housework

I've spent 3 to 5 hours each day of the past two weekends cleaning out all the garbage left behind at the Unsellable Condo in Vinings.  I actually called one professional - I probably should put that in quotations - one "professional" cleaning company to finish the job, but after showing up they declared the condo a "biohazard" and refused to work there.  I'll grant you there's a shocking amount of dog hair of the floors, but I think "biohazard" is more than a little bit of an exaggeration.

To put it another way, the cleaning company wouldn't clean because the unit wasn't clean enough.

To add injury to insult, they left the bathroom exhaust fans running and I got a call from the downstairs resident two days later complaining about the noise, and had to drive out there last Friday night to turn off the fans.  Inside, I saw that the "professional" cleaning company left the paper bag, cups, and other trash from their Chick-Fil-A breakfast on the floor of the condo.  I won't say that there wasn't other trash left by the former residents already on the floor, but you'd think the cleaners would be more conscientious than leaving the unit dirtier than when they arrived.   

I finally got everything, or nearly everything, out and into the trash today.  I've got a different cleaning company coming over on Monday to (hopefully) finish the job, and new carpet will be installed the following Monday.  I've ordered a new thermostat from Amazon to replace the busted one left behind and if I can't install it, I'll have to call a contractor to come in and do it.  I still haven't found a painter yet or a handyman/carpenter to repair the wood the former tenant's dogs dug out near the windows.     

The Unsellable Condo In Vinings - the bane of my existence since the year 2000.

Dreaming of the Masters (A Slight Return)

Before continuing with this year's New Masters, New Dreams series, we wanted to remind the gentle readers what was so special about the AACM and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This 1972 cut from their live LP Bap-Tizum should answer that question.  

Separated At Birth?

The trailer for Fallout: Miami -



And Godspeed's They Don't Sleep Anymore on the Beach?

Anna von Hausswolff

This week, Sweden's Anna von Hausswolff released another live video, this one of the album Dead Magic's centerpiece, the epic Ugly and Vengeful.  It's a long song, 19:20 minutes, with slow dirges that build into incredible crescendos and if you give it the time it demands to reveal itself, it's quite a  rewarding experience. This is post-rock at its finest.

Many of von Hausswolff's songs contain two movements and Ugly and Vengeful is no different. Somewhere around the 5:00-minute mark of the atmospheric first half, the forsaken heroine of the song declares "I’m restless, I’m older. I’m heavy like a stone" in a quiet, vulnerable voice. The first-half atmospherics slowly build up to an epic finale that starts at around 9:45 minutes, but that finale then reveals itself to actually be the intro to the driving, rhythmic second half.  Things really start galloping along at 14:20 minutes when she repeats the same lines as earlier between baroque Phantom-of-the-Opera-style organ lines, but this time in an aggressive and, well, vengeful voice over tribal drum beats.  You really have to listen for yourself to experience the catharsis.

We at the Music Desk are mightily impressed with Ms. von Hausswolff and look forward to hearing her perform in the U.S. someday.  How perfect would she be for the Big Ears Festival?

The Angel of Death Returns

The metaphorical angel of death, which last month descended onto our community and took our neighbor, has returned for our neighbor's widow.

It's almost as if she died of a broken heart.  She lost her husband shortly before Christmas, and then, just after New Year's Day, had a stroke and passed away this morning.

She either died of a broken heart, or simply decided at some subconscious level that she wasn't going to be left behind.

Very sad and very strange.  Impermanence is swift; life-and-death is the great matter.  What was here today is gone tomorrow. We do not need philosophical or metaphysical explanations to accept this - the evidence is right before our eyes. 

The way of the world -
Lost in the dead of winter
The last leaves of fall. 
- Tanehiko (d., 1842)

The Politics Desk finds it curious that hopes and prayer is the solution for keeping kids in school safe from gun violence, but only a $5B steel spiked fence can protect us from asylum seekers in Mexico. As General George S. Patton once remarked, "Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity.  If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, anything made by man can be overcome."   

Tomorrow, the Orange Pumpernickel will make his case on national television on why he needs to use Emergency Powers to build the wall.  While on the one hand this should be hilarious, on the other, the fact that the President has shut down the government and is threatening to keep it shut down until he gets what he wants is a hallmark not of a democratically elected president but of an egomaniacal despot.

Meanwhile, the Sports Desk is looking forward to tonight's CFP National Championship Game between Alabama and Clemson.  We hate both of these teams, especially after hearing on NPR this morning that "this is the fourth straight time the two teams will meet in the Championship Game (Georgia played Alabama last year in the Championship Game, but people seem to forget that).  If there were only some way for both teams not only to lose, but to completely disappear off the face of the earth.

That's it! The Geology Desk just reminded us that the game is being played in Santa Clara, California, right next to the Hayward Fault.  An earthquake can open up the ground and swallow up both teams!  We're cheering for plate tectonics in this game!

We Are Legion

No football this weekend.  The Sports Desk is inconsolable.

So how did we fill the time?  When the Real Estate Desk wasn't hauling trash out of the Unsellable Condo in Vinings (Mexicans are helpful, but some things you just have to do yourself), the Automotive Desk was getting maintenance done on the car (oil change, tires, new battery for the key fob). On top of everything else, at one point last Thursday, the worst day so far of 2019, we couldn't open the keyless lock to get into our own car because that battery was almost dead.  Fixed that yesterday.  

When we weren't doing either of those things, the Sci Fi & Fantasy Desk was reading Marvel comic books (our new Marvel Unlimited subscription) or playing Fallout 76. We rounded out the weekend with an old pal watching a few cable movies selected by the Arts & Leisure Desk and spending time trying to organize our music files from 2019 for the Music Desk.

The Meditation Desk has been idle since the beginning of the year.  Once we re-establish some semblance of a routine, hopefully next week, we look forward to continuing their participation.

There's a football game tomorrow between Alabama (three hours west of here) and Clemson (two hours east of here) that will determine not only the champion of the Three-Hour Radius, but of the entire country. At least the Sports Desk can look forward to that.   

Mexicans

The Unsellable Condo in Vinings is a disaster area right now.  The previous tenants, after 10 years living there, left it in a disgusting state of uncleanliness.  There is dog hair over literally everything, even the blades of the ceiling fans.  Don't ask me how you get dog hair on ceiling fans, but they managed to do it.  The first cleaning company I called walked off the job, saying the unit was a "biohazard."

Then I turned to the Mexicans.  Mexicans came in and removed the carpet and replaced it with new clean carpet.  A Mexican cleaning crew is doing what is needed in a filthy condo - actually cleaning it.

Mexicans - doing the jobs Americans won't since 18-whenever.

Don't build a wall - build a superhighway.  These people are a national resource!

New Dreams, New Masters

Since October 2017, Friday nights have been dedicated to posting the music of the great jazz masters we listened to, and occasionally even saw perform, back in the 1970s.  We could go on with this series, we'd be glad to, but it feels like the New Year is as good a time as any to change things up a bit and recognize some of the modern masters playing and recording today. 

The Artifacts Trio of flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Mike Reed seems as good a spot as any to start.  Members (I wonder if they get to carry cards?) of the esteemed and prophetic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the trio's goal is to engage with the legacy of that organization while pulling the music into the present.  Mitchell electrified her flute and Reid and Reed tangle in dense rhythmic thickets, while their debut album includes covers of compositions by AACM luminaries such as Roscoe Mitchell and Jeff Parker, Muhal Richard Abrams and Steve McCall.  The tune above, A Light on the Path, is "an earworm-worthy tune recorded by 8 Bold Souls" (tenor saxophonist Edward Wilkerson Jr.) according to Downbeat Magazine.

Artifacts, as Reed has put it, is “acting on the front of ‘ancient to the future.’” They will be performing at this year's Big Ears Festival in Knoxville.

The Problem With Blogging

I just had an awful day today - not life-threatening awful and probably not even something I won't have forgotten by the end of this weekend, but a 24 hours I wouldn't care to go through again.

But here's the thing - as I was all set to go over it and recount all of the setbacks, frustrations, rudeness, and almost comical sequence of coincidental catastrophes here in this blog, I realized all that would accomplish would be to have me relive it all over once again.  It was bad enough once, why go through it twice?

Trust me, if something truly terrible befalls me you'll be the first to know about it, but while a part of me wants to complain about the technology snafus, the 1-800-number "please select from the following menu" calls from hell, the uncertainties, the unreasonable requests and so on (not to mention getting only about three hours sleep last night), a wiser part of me realizes that complaining about it here would only make it worse. The day sucked, so it's probably best to just get over it and move on.  Don't dwell on the past.  Don't dwell on the perceived insults and injuries you've suffered.  Just call it a day and realize that the next one almost assuredly will be better than today.

New Year, Part II

Despite how incredible it sounds, it's actually 2019.  Congratulation, you've lived into the future.

What do you want to talk about this year?  Music?  Zen buddhism? Potentiality and contemplative Stoicism? Politics? Sports? The boring details of the mundane routine of my daily life?  The details of your daily life? Anything? Anything at all?  Really, we'd like to know.

Perhaps we should open a random Wikipedia article and make whatever appears the topic for the new year.  Okay?  Done.  Uh oh, this blog is apparently now about  the San Bernardino International Airport. 

SBD  is a public airport located less than two miles southeast of the center of San Bernardino in San Bernardino County, California.  The airport covers 1,329 acres and has one runway.  The facility is currently operating as a general aviation and cargo airport on the former site of Norton Air Force Base, which was built as the San Bernardino Air Depot in 1942 and which was decommissioned in March 1994. A non-federal control tower began operation on November 9, 2008, and is operated under contract by SERCO company personnel.

Perhaps we need to rethink our strategy.   

Happy New Year.  It's back to work tomorrow.

We've been off for the better part of two weeks now and frankly, we're ready to go back - we've fallen into a routine centered around sleeping in late and watching football games all day, followed by late-night game-playing. The latter sounds sexy, but we mean it literally, or should we say virtually - the games are video games, mainly Fallout 76.  At this point, the routine has become monotonous and we're ready to return to the more familiar monotony of the routine of everyday work - 9 to 5, five days a week.

We're a little concerned about getting to sleep at a reasonable time tonight, and more concerned about getting  up early tomorrow.  We've made a mess of our circadian rhythm and have become practically nocturnal.  But we'll deal with it when it's time to deal with it.  We deliberately got up "early" (8:30 a.m.) this morning, hoping that we'd be tired later tonight and ready for bed before midnight, and that the fatigue of a normal workday will have us ready for bed even earlier tomorrow night, and so on.

This taste of structureless time off does not bode well for retirement.  While it was tolerable for a couple of weeks over the holidays, without work to eventually return to we're concerned we'd quickly become dissolute and useless, and probably wouldn't live very long. We've got to work on that, and we think a dog might help.

But anyway, "Monday" falls on a Wednesday this week, and the "weekend" was 12 days instead of the usual two.