Pitchfork did a great interview with Turnstile on the eve of their new album release: it’s great to see them repping Baltimore and getting their due. I really hope they are able to keep their feet on the ground and stay connected to their roots—it sounds like it’s working.
Something’s Always Wrong, by Toad the Wet Sprocket. I got this stuck in my head at a rest stop in Pennsylvania on the way home from Ohio. It’s probably the only song by this unfortunately named band that I like; the harmonies in the bridge are beautiful. This was on heavy alternative radio airplay back in the day in a time when “alternative” music was losing steam and leaning towards easy listening. I would have posted the actual music video, but it sucks.
I wrote about the Nationals trip last week over on the Scout site; needless to say it was a great time.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
It’s been a minute since I’ve bought digital music online. Here’s the bullshit I had to go through to buy an album this afternoon:
- Apple’s Music app (the replacement for iTunes) in its normal state, does not have a visible link or menu item for the iTunes Store. It can be made visible in the Preferences. Why is this?
- The only visible way to see new music is to sign up for a subscription plan, which I refuse to do. I have enough subscriptions.
- So I went to Amazon, where the only visible link is a subscription shill as well. I refuse to do this too. Surely there must be a better way.
- A couple of searches later, I found a CNET article on how to buy and download new music. CNET still exists?
- This contained a link to a page on Amazon that was not immediately available from my Prime account. Thanks.
- From here I found my album. I purchased and downloaded it in MP3 format.
- Now, to get it on my iPhone. I imported it into Apple Music, figuring it would sync. It did not.
- Another search told me to AirDrop the files to my phone. I did this, and it only put the files in my iCloud Files folder without importing them. I deleted them. The fuck?
- More searching revealed that I needed to connect my phone via a cable to my computer. How very 2005 of them.
- I did this, the first time I’ve connected this phone to my computer ever. I had to tell each machine to trust the other, and wait for the handshake.
- Then I went through Ye Olde Sync screen to manually select the music and load it on my phone. How can this still be the way?
I am aghast at the state of things. I figured surely these days there would be a quicker, easier way that didn’t involve yet another subscription, but this is The State Of Things, I guess.
Here’s a video from this weekend: I was able to spend a little bit of the day working on the truck on Saturday, with Finn sitting in the back seat working on a project of her own. The gist here was that I got the fuel injection system working after swapping the old carb on, running the engine to temperature, and swapping the new carb back.
Light Design, Turnstile. You’re probably tired of me posting stuff about them, but too bad. This cut off the new album is happily stuck in my head, displacing The Unforgiven by Metallica, which was stuck there for a day (and thus not worth posting about). My only beef with it is that it’s only 2 minutes long, and I feel like it builds up to something without releasing. Other than that, no notes. The rest of the album (released yesterday) is excellent.
Over on Curbside Classic I wrote a Cars of A Lifetime entry/comparison on our two Honda CR-Vs. It took a while (I don’t know why I hadn’t written one back in 2018 when I did the bulk of the series) but it was fun to compare and contrast the two. We love Luna (the new one) so far, and the OG-V has over 170,000 miles on the clock. I hope to get another 50,000 out of it.
Over on the Scout blog I wrote a little bit about getting older and suddenly realizing I’m one of the old hands as younger guys reach out for advice. I spent the balance of the weekend doing truck stuff—surveying a truck hoard with Bennett on Saturday, and meeting a new IH owner on Sunday. The weather was perfect for being outside, and it was great to be with friends old and new.
I was talking with Finley last night about customizing clothing, something she’s really been into in the last couple of years, and mentioned a jean jacket I had in high school that I customized myself. At the time, most of the burnouts in school sewed a section of a concert T-shirt into the back panel of their jean jacket, or had a talented friend paint the scene on the fabric with acrylic paint: lots of Iron Maiden, Slayer, or Metallica. I was really into Frank Miller comics at that point—a series called Lone Wolf and Cub was popular and he was doing cover art for the western manga reprints. His style for these was very woodblock/pen and ink inspired, and I started researching Ukiyo-e art at the library. The usual masters were always represented, but one artist stood out to me: a late-period artist named Yoshitoshi, whose style clearly influenced Miller and who stood out among his predecessors.
I scoured the libraries in the area and found a book of his prints somewhere locally—then kept renewing it until I had to give it back. I studied all of the prints in the book and whatever I could learn from his style—at that point attempting my own crude woodblock prints with no press, basic inks, and no means of registration. One print stood out among the hundreds, and I chose this to paint on the back of my jacket: Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing the Flute, a triptych which depicts a musician and his outlaw brother in a scene from a kabuki play. The linework, color, and use of pattern are phenomenal, and I thought it would look good on blue denim. Over a couple of evenings I painted the jacket, and I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.
As the years passed, I lost track of the jacket; I don’t remember what happened to it, but I’d love to have it back, if nothing more than to give to Finley. I bet she’d like it.
In high school, I was fascinated by the movie Road Warrior when it was shown—heavily edited—on TV. I bought a VHS copy and studied the cars and the stunts and imagined what I would do if I was in an apocalyptic wasteland. I settled on riding a motorcycle and traveling solo as my plan, and wrote my own stories about adventures avoiding gangs of bandits on the open road. The lure of post-apocalyptic scenarios has always been fascinating, even as I got older and learned just how bleak and unrealistic that world would be.
History professor and writer Bret Devereaux examines the real-world logistics and strategy behind Road Warrior-style mobile warfare: how realistic is it to have an army of gas-hungry, excessively customized vehicles manned by soldiers armed with bladed weapons? Because he’s a real-life professor, he goes into the nuts and bolts of the supply chain required to move such an army, and how (quite correctly) armies like this need a base of operations to work from. Refining gas, manufacturing bullets and growing crops doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and in order to raid other settlements at this scale you have to have a giant, vulnerable settlement of your own.
His analysis: huge war rigs are inefficient and vulnerable. Motorcycles are too small and don’t carry enough (I disagree). His answer, not surprisingly: Toyota Hilux. He looks at the various messy regional wars in Africa and the Middle East and points out that the Technical is the economical, dependable, and easily repairable common denominator across all regions. He posted the story five days ago and it generated a long and interesting comment thread, which is just as fascinating as the article.
I miss the old Web for stuff like this—20 years ago, conversations like this were everywhere.
(Via Metafilter)