sovay: (Sydney Carton)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2024-01-26 07:35 pm

I hold hands with the business plan for the guillotine man

I have slept about six hours total in the last two nights. My recently prescribed inhaler may not be doing the job it's supposed to. It is my opinion that nothing about this month needed to be as difficult as it has been.

I don't think I have once in my life in the Boston area rented an apartment that resembled the configuration in which it was originally built, meaning my prosaic first reaction to this post is a solid bet on stairs to a former mother-in-law apartment or Philadelphia-style shared second floor that was walled off during a previous renovation; the ominous scratches around the deadbolt look entirely consistent with socketing it into the door well after the fact with about the level of competence I have personally experienced in property-managed repairs. The only part that strikes me as unusual is the accessibility of the stairs. The ones in our bedroom closet are blocked off.

Earlier this week I was stuck listening to a rather terrible cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989), but it made me realize how much the original song impresses me for creating a narrative with nothing more than a list of cultural references and almost no verbs; it's the way it accelerates. The first verse spans events from 1949 to 1952, the second from 1953 to 1956, the third from 1957 to 1960, the fourth from 1961 to 1963, and then suddenly as if the Kennedy assassination broke time—what else do I have to say—the final verse hurtles from 1965 into 1989, leapfrogging pop culture and atrocity into an overwhelming pileup of history that will keep on coming as it always has whether the narrator can take it or not. Among other faults, the cover threw its post-Cold War references together without regard for chronology, which seemed to kill the entire point.

In my intermittent way of colliding with music videos, Spoon Benders' "Dichotomatic" (2023) strikes me as one of the better variations on the vampires of capitalism since Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), less fetishistically sexual and more working perhaps literally stiff. I also just like their lo-fi sludge-wall of sound.

I miss my little cat.
ethelmay: (Default)

[personal profile] ethelmay 2024-01-28 02:38 am (UTC)(link)
We built the extension, which took a 1.5-story three-bedroom house (two plus converted attic) to a two-story four-bedroom house. The original outside stairs (which were covered, with locking doors at top and bottom) had been a sort of garden shed substitute for the previous owners (who were much more dedicated gardeners than we are), full of pots and old seed packets and cobwebbed windows, rather charming. Now the area where the stairs used to come out is a crawl space under what we grandly call the breakfast room (an eating area adjacent to the kitchen) and the new back porch. The stairs are unfortunately now filled with stuff that we probably should have either thrown away or been using properly. Something else to deal with a la Swedish Death Cleaning.