Notes for December 12, 2024.

December 12, 2024. Day .

For today's Note, I want to gripe a little bit about The New Yorker. I got a four-week trial subscription, forgot to cancel it, and got signed up for a year's subscription (about $100). It should be done by now but the issues keep on coming, with their urgent pleas to renew. I just want it to stop.

And one reason I want it to stop is the covers. Now that I have about fifty issues stacked up here (it feels like a hundred), I notice how much the covers vary in quality. There are still excellent artists like Carter Goodrich, Kadir Nelson, R. Kikuo Johnson, and Roz Chast, but then there will be some that are, to put it in layman's terms, half-assed. A couple illustrators I've long admired are still there but they're phoning it in a little bit. Also, and maybe this isn't a criticism, even, the subject matter seems to be "poignant stillness". But maybe that's all "nice" paintings. I don't expect The New Yorker cover to be darkly incisive, because they're not good at that, but I'm struck by the thought that these paintings of afternoon-sun-dappled things might actually sell a lot of copies.

But there are a couple of 2024 issues I want to call out, for different reasons.

Remember when we all believed that Trump's candidacy was dead and Harris/Walz were sure to win? Did we believe that because the media tricked us, because we wanted to believe it was true? Or...

I'll get scorned for saying this, but I think it was true. I think America voted for Harris and Walz. I also think Trump and Musk found a way to hack the voting machines or tabulation machines to ensure enough votes for a Trump victory. I'm told that exit polls show I'm wrong. I'm probably wrong. Stupidly wrong.

I don't care. Call me crazy, call me stupid; I'll be fine. I'm following the subreddit /r/somethingiswrong2024/, where me and all the other idiot cranks can talk about how this might have happened. We listen for new missives from one Stephen Spoonamore (silly-sounding name, I know), the guy with the best theories and the most passion about the subject. He wrote an often-linked-to "Duty To Warn" letter to Kamala Harris begging her to demand hand recounts. You might have read it. It doesn't sound crazy. Here it is. And for my friends who say I'm a kook, here's Snopes' debunking of it, in which they say he doesn't have enough concrete evidence for the statements he makes, which is why he's asking Harris to demand a recount, to look at what concrete evidence there is.

I don't think the American people got what they voted for. We're too smart to vote for that fascist pile of garbage again. We voted for Harris/Walz. We kept hearing there was "record turnout", and there's no way Trump, the dotard, could get that many people out, with his dwindling audiences and his frankly terrible performance. But money is a powerful tool, as is access to voting machines. I think Musk had something to do with it.

And I'll probably never know. I'll just have to live with this. But I wonder if a Democrat will ever be elected President again.

O.k., that's enough about that. We were talking about New Yorker covers, not alternate realities that probably exist only in my head. So here's another New Yorker I need to bring to your attention.

My reaction on seeing this cover slide out of my mailbox was one of visceral disgust. What the hell is this? Highlights for Children? Ha ha, the turkeys want to hide their identities with those funny nose-glasses, that don't really look like that, and which you rarely ever see anymore! They were a twentieth-century thing. What a joke. It's on par with those kooky Chik-Fil-A billboards where the semi-literate cows encourage you to kill and eat a chicken instead of them. I hate it. More dappled sunlight, less of this!

Also, what's wrong with the farmer's eyes? And why is she carrying so many turnips like that? She should have a basket. It is funny, however, that he illustrated a silo over the publication's name.

The illustrator's name is Tom Toro, another silly-sounding alliterative name. (Big sale on Os that day?) I'm sure he's done better work. I think I've seen some. Wait, I definitely have! This was great:

So, Tom, you've done some good work. I'm sorry I hated your "turkey" of a cover, but wow.

By the way, I was able to plumb the depths of Condé Nast's website and cancel my New Yorker subscription. They've even promised to refund me $5.22.

If you don't know, I keep my records in unalphabetical order. They're pretty much random, though sometimes I keep track mentally of what region I returned them to. I think I have about one thousand records, so a lot of surprises creep in. Sometimes it's like the thrill of buying the record again! And I've weeded out most of what I don't love, so my success rate on just sticking a hand in there without looking is high.

Today I was putting a record away (Duke Ellington, Jumpin' Punkins), and there among the stacks was The Pretenders Learning To Crawl. I know it's not one of their two utter classic records (OK, maybe just Pretenders is an utter classic, but Pretenders II is an absolute classic), but I grabbed it and put it on.

Learning To Crawl isn't the amazing thing the first two albums were, but half of that band had died. It's sort of astonishing that Chrissy Hynde got such good replacements— they had to know no one could really replace the genius James Honeyman-Scott, but they didn't let it stop them.

Anyway, I only bring it up to remind you that even though it was not the single from the album, "Show Me" could have fit on Pretenders or Pretenders II. Great lyric, great chiming guitars, great bit where the bassline changes and it turns sorta funky. I was listening to it and thought, "this is great, but I wish I could hear how it would sound if Chris Thomas produced it", but then I looked at the cover, and he did produce it. Doesn't sound like him. I guess he had American ears in mind for this one.

That guitar bit by Robbie MacIntosh during the fade out is super, as well. So, here ya go, "Show Me":

Have you seen the Wilco movie? Well, if you haven’t, probably don’t bother. Last night's "Cinema Dave": I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (USA, 2002, dir. Sam Jones).

Not one funny thing happens in it, except they draw a stupid face around Jeff Tweedy’s belly button, stick a cigarette in it, and “make it talk”. So if you find that funny, there you go. It’s the way the movie starts. Kinda wished I’d stopped there.

There’s a little drama, which is that one member of Wilco at the time, Jay Bennett, is acting like a little whiner and bringing musical elements to the band that detract from what made the band good (if you liked them. Maybe it’s possible to prefer the Jay Bennett part of Wilco.) He's obtuse and touchy and the band react to him with patience, but also with increasingly obvious frustration. And then they fire him.

Of course all documentaries are edited to tell a story the director wants, but the movie really takes out its frustrations on Bennett. They cut from a post-firing interview with him where he’s complaining Tweedy wants to keep the band centered around himself (how surprising), to a shot of Bennett alone on stage at a lame acoustic gig, singing with his eyes shut to an unseen audience. That's it for him.

And that’s really most of the movie. After that there's some "on the road again" footage of Tweedy with his wife and small kids doing things like going to Arby's. I don’t know what made me keep watching, I was frustrated with it the whole time. No hearts were broken in the making of this film, except maybe that one guy.

The New Yorker Tom Toro Barry Blitt Pretenders Show Me Wilco I Am Trying To Break Your Heart somethingiswrong2024