How Do Ya Like Them Apples?

Tom Brown sounds like the name of a guy in the witness protection program, but he's a 79-year-old retired chemical engineer who loves apples.  More specifically, he spends his retirement researching and hunting for obscure apple varieties in Appalachia.  I know this because I read this article.

So far Mr. Brown found over 1,200 different varieties of apples, some that were thought lost for over 100 years, and he grows them on his orchard, Heritage Apples.  Oddball names include Greasy Ball, Bug Horn, Curtis Cheese, Cow's Snout, Smutty, and None Better Seek No Further.  

I never knew there were so many different kinds of apples.  This is a pretty wholesome way to spend one's retirement.

This Is Not An Album Review

There's a school of thought that music, and any form of artistic expression like it, should be unencumbered from linear measurement. It is simply one person's or one group of persons' creative output.  As I have said here and elsewhere for years, art is art, and as such there can be no universal good or bad; there's just shit you like and shit you don't.

Singer extraordinaire Neko Case feels a bit like this when it comes to the categorization of music:

There's a contrary school of thought -- the Econ class, if you will -- that would insist that the moment said art is placed for sale into the capitalist economy, valuation becomes necessary, and with that categorization, rankings, and good/bad assessments follow.

As much as I do stand by my take above, I also look at it simply like this: Most people lack the time, interest, and requisite years of comparative exposure to dig in on any piece of art (I mean rock and/or roll music for the purposes of this post) and do better to refer to someone else's recommendations.  Reviews, rankings, and lists -- including the Les Coole year-end playlists, can be viewed as having someone else do the legwork for you busy, hard-working folks.  It's the way a novice listener will learn that even though Exile on Main Street and Black and Blue are separated by just four years, there's a vast difference in lasting quality between the two records, so they should proceed directly to the former.

It's an inherently fallible concept, leaving it to some other person to gauge how much you'll like a song or an album. Read reviews of Sandinista! in 1980 or Paul's Boutique in 1989. (Or Exile in 1972, amazingly enough. Lester Bangs called it "the worst studio album the Stones have ever made.") People get it wrong, especially critics with bloated egos. 

But music reviews with numerical scoring designations have their place. Always have.

I myself gravitate to amalgams like metacritic.com, aggregates of prominent reviews from around the world.  That way a one-off pan from some cranky critic only affects the overall score a tiny bit (mean, median, and mode, but not range), whereas if that one critic wrote for your go-to ragsheet, you might miss Social Distortion and go after 12 Inches of Snow.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that I haven't -- if ever, it hasn't been often -- seen such unanimity on that site for any album.

Wow. 

• The New York Times (100) - a bold, cathartic, challenging masterpiece.
• Pitchfork (100) - Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it. 
• Paste (97) - Fiona Apple is Mesmerizing Beyond Belief on Fetch the Bolt Cutters; the singer’s brilliant fifth album is eerily clairvoyant and brash in the most extraordinary way
• Variety (96) - It may be way early to say it’s the most satisfying album of the year, but if there are any more to come along this good, 2020 is not going to feel like such a waste of time after all.
• Boston Globe (90) - sense of awe giving it a defiant energy. ... A thrill ride.
• The AV Club (100) - a zenith of liberation and experimentation
• Consequence of Sound (100) - an Untethered Masterpiece
• The Guardian (100) - a glorious eruption
• Glide Magazine (100) - triumphant; the album exudes freedom, it exudes breaking constraints, it exudes Fiona Apple, and it might just be the album that we look back on when we think back to this COVID-19 era.
• The Line of Best Fit (100) - Albums like this feel important because they unflinchingly capture the smorgasbord of life.  On the other hand… releases like this don’t happen often, so why squander the moment? Fuck it. Fetch the bolt cutters. This feels special.
• Exclaim (100) - The scope of Fetch the Bolt Cutters' meaning, its infinite feeling, will likely take years to fully absorb. An album like this doesn't come often, and an artist like Apple will never come again

Dig in here for more, and for links to the actual reviews.

Here's my thought on it, after listening to it 4 or 5 times since Friday. Nearly every review says something similar, but in more flowery, SAT (RIP) terms:

Fiona Apple recorded this in her house, and she incorporates some unorthodox instrumentation (whacking kitchen utensils as percussion) and sounds (dogs barking and washing machines washing) into a mix of her enviably pretty vocals, her piano/keyboard, and a few other instruments. The lyrics, issued in lovely song, aggressive chant, or spoken word, are Fiona Apple-style rebellious and resentful, angry and not only not taking your shit any more, but calling you on the carpet.  The poetry is as impressive as her otherworldly voice. The music is decidedly not studio-grade -- in a mostly great, D.I.Y. way, which is what the fuss seems to be mostly about. Tom Waits in the 80's sort of stuff.  Ultimately, I like but don't love it. I am drawn to hookier melodies than she offers. I do appreciate its style and merit; I just don't know how much I'll come back to it in the years to come.

Not a review. Just another Dear Diary moment from Les Coole and/or Whitney.

Fetch the Bottle Opener.

One TRILLION Dollars

Hi folks. Guess what? Turns out I'm homeless until next Wednesday. Sanding and staining of floors is resulting in my eviction. Every single item that was in the first floor of my home is stuffed into a pod on my driveway, in my basement or in any nook available upstairs. The family and I will be kicking it in a Hyatt with a kitchenette for five nights. It's all pretty awful.

Given the frantic last-minute work to make this happen, I am working from "home," which means parking in the local Starbucks and commenting to myself on moms in athleisure pants while halfheartedly tinkering in Excel files. Athleisure pants are a strong look for many women (but a sub-optimal look for many more).

As I type this, everybody's favorite mega-cap tech stock (Apple) is pushing new all-time highs, at about $172.60/share. Shares are up 2.9% today after another strong earnings report and strong demand for their newest overpriced phones. Today's rally means the company's market capitalization (share price * shares outstanding) is now $868 billion. To those of you who are not scoring at home, this is a big number. A ha-yuge number. Rarified air among U.S equities. I remember the end of the last century, when the tech bubble was at its heyday, that Microsoft's market cap reached $500 billion. This was a big deal to a nerd like me at the time. I didn't realize that MSFT at $60/shr was a moment, not a movement.  MSFT shares would fall all the way to $15/shr amid the financial crisis, and they wouldn't break through the $60/shr level again until late 2016.

So here's the rub - my savvy mathematic skills tell me that Apple will be worth $1 trillion if it has another 15% rally. That, my friends, is a shit ton of money. I have a meager investment in AAPL shares that supports my standing as a thousandaire, so I'm here with my pom poms, rooting on the rally.

There are other mega-caps out there for sure: Google ($716 B), Microsoft ($648 B), Amazon ($527 B) and Facebook ($520 B) are in the half-tril posse as well. But Apple is the big dog right now. At least until the Saudi Aramco IPO in 2018.