damn. hoping it at least signifies something

I hope to god that Michael Ironside has, at least once in his life, used the most perfect dad joke where someone asks him, “is that your real name” and he responds, “no, my first name is actually Frederick”

content aside, “Politics is the art of the possible” is 100% something Season 3 Kendall Roy would tweet

one of my anti-conspiratorial beliefs is that searching a phrase and finding a bunch of ideological fellows saying some version of that phrase doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some payola or marching orders, since we’re on a social media site where ideas spread, you know, memetically

dozens_of_us.jpg (although maybe more, idk) who don’t believe the conventional wisdom that Dylan covers are always better

you can safely assume that nobody on here would *actually* pull a trolley lever for “people die -> erode GOP rule” if it was presented to them in real life and that, much like we do every day, every notion posted is from a position of reasonably upset helplessness

biggest possible Fuck Yes to Craig Taborn on his MacArthur Grant — man can play *anything* and his album “Avenging Angel” and his work with Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth is some of my favorite shit

I hope to god that Michael Ironside has, at least once in his life, used the most perfect dad joke where someone asks him, “is that your real name” and he responds, “no, my first name is actually Frederick”

NW (first time — I plan on formulating The Perfect Take that will finally end the discourse):

not exactly the same but very related: I hired a producer for the first time (saxophonist Caleb Curtis) to be creative consultant and day-of captain for my trio recording last week and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made

I listened to “The Fate of Ophelia” out of sheer curiosity while folding some laundry and I couldn’t for the life of me currently tell you how any of it goes

in general, I find the quibbling over numbers to be a wretched exercise; no credible estimate of non-friendly-fire Israeli citizen deaths on 10/7 makes it not a war crime and no credible estimate of post-10/7 Palestinian dead make it not a war crime of an incredibly larger magnitude

Mikhail Gorbachev lived long enough to see Pizza Hut both come to and then leave Russia

I think Trump causes people to believe that any politician, once elected, can just do whatever / piss off whoever they want, eliding the fact that having a trifecta + essentially the judiciary makes that super easy vs. say, being a big city mayor where you continuously have to actually, like, work

every year I’m blown away by the quality of Anderson .Paak’s “Malibu” — it doesn’t seem possible and weirdly, despite his ascendant fame, people don’t seem to talk about it much

iPhone face recognition: “eh it’s nearly pitch black in the room and you’re laying down with your nostrils in the air but I got you, cmon in” Microsoft Authenticator face recognition: “I’m sorry, you have a trace of ennui in your countenance, please try again”

“10/7 was bad and everything that followed in aftermath was worse” is a perfectly moral and popular position. it’s more or less the American consensus on 9/11.

"the AI bubble will collapse because the technology has plateaued and cannot improve" will_smith_spaghetti.mpeg "we are on the verge of superintelligence" seahorse_emoji.txt

I am always saying this

I dig that Zach Bryan wrote an anti-ICE song, that's nice, although I'd caution against drawing any larger cultural conclusions, as there has been Lib Country and Chud Country for pretty much as long as the genre has existed

I’m a certified “be fair to people you don’t like”-er but the rest of the paragraph is *worse*! she’s accusing people who share “facile, external markers” (which is to say, liberal/left gay people) as being de facto enemies of the “fight for the West”. that’s bad!

I think the Zelda Williams story is a bellwether for a much larger, uglier fight between those who believe image generation to be a miracle delight and those who find it profoundly ugly in its purpose and execution

Kareem Rahma, holding a lapel mic towards me: “so what’s your take” me: “I think we should build a glut of housing in NYC so everyone can move and live here comfortably” [a life-size Labubu in jorts bolts across the car and snaps my neck, killing me instantly]

free associating but this kinda reminds me of when folks said Cori Bush definitely lost because of AIPAC and not her bad votes/constituent services when it’s clear that the former targeted her because of the latter. similarly, you can disempower landlord collusion by, you guessed it…

figuring out a way to make it clear that I support putting everyone involved in Don’t Look Up on a terrorist watchlist but for purely artistic reasons

whenever I get antsy about being a trombonist who has a small, public-facing platform where I discuss politics, I remind myself that at least I’m not Coleman Hughes

“Ramble On” is really funny because it references people and places from LOTR but with no resemblance to the actual story — “yeah, the hotties hang out in Mordor, but you have to be careful, Gollum and Sauron might team up to steal your girl”

the one competitive advantage to what makes him frequently annoying and at least somewhat often wrong is that he loves being against the consensus of his peer group, which has remained true when it has started to look more like Noah Smith than 2018 Vox

its a bleak time being a left-YIMBY because the main options on both parts of the ideology are like 1) a left that doesn’t know the difference between mean and median and 2) policy guys who are like “hi, I’m sitting here talking housing with the head of Gamer Hitlers for Lowered Age of Consent”

it’s fucking OCTOBER

I have something of a companion theory to “everyone is twelve now” which I call “everything you do is good”

finally found a guy who’s like “Zohran is bad because he’s the gentrifiers’ candidate” in the wild, which is actually kind of true on a demographic level, it’s just the usual type of wrong about gentrification / displacement

bluesky: a site about words where most of the people can’t read

my wife’s dad is on a solo trip in Central Asia and had an absolutely insane story from Tajikistan

one upshot of being liberal and kinda chauvinistically believing that American might is what single-handedly defeated fascism is that you really, really, actively hate it, like with your whole body

A pig hearing two humans talking about how much slop there is now and getting incandescently jealous

no shit this was me all of September (October is not starting better either)

many of the greatest albums in popular music are even later than #12 (Stevie’s classic period, Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Miles Davis second quintet, etc)

maybe we can use this time to carve out a space between poptimism and rockism (being normal)

I’m an Ezra Klein centrist (many of his recent takes are bad and many of his loudest critics are also wrong about him and other stuff)

a lot of the corporate capitulation in the Trump era is way worse than I ever expected, but tbh, I *for sure* thought we were getting a “Kid Rock (ft. Ted Nugent and Rob Schneider) Super Bowl Halftime Show” — Kendrick I was assume was already locked in but Bad Bunny is a surprise

this is the funniest combination of object and verb I’ve ever read

I like how he’s both clinically insane and like the most rational Republican alive

what album are you an evangelist for — one that not a lot of people know and you feel like it’s your duty to tell as many people as possible about

ironically, Chappelle is actually the one guy involved in this that I think isn’t doing it for the money — he’s felt like he’s been at war with US audiences for a while and places like KSA/UAE have emerged as a kind of haven for the anti-woke rich

hey I don’t usually do this but I’m recording a whole album’s worth of my original trio music tomorrow that I’ve been working on for a while, might I get a “hell yeah” for encouragement

another day volunteering at Particle6. everyone keeps asking if they can fuck the AI actress. buddy,

if the Butlerian Jihad outlawed all thinking machines and you had cousins who didn’t even notice, you might be a Fremen