Memo From Corporate

The angst will continue until morale improves

Portrait of Thurston Moore, pencil on paper by Phong Bui

The Work is Slow

Here’s a minor clearinghouse to some of my other, more recent writing:

• The February Brooklyn Rail features my 5,000 word conversation with Thurston Moore. It was a great personal pleasure to talk with him in the moment, and then reading and editing the transcript showed that this is really an excellent interview, with Moore talking about the 20th century avant-garde, politeness in improvising, how to make a scene, and much more.

• A lot of people like my January jazz column for the Star-Revue, you may too. The February one is just as political.

• My latest at Bandcamp Daily is a guide to John Lurie’s recordings. These have run through my life for decades, and they reveal more beauty and humanity each time I listen to them. Part of writing this was catching up with Painting With John, which seems to be Lurie at his most honest and sincere.

If you don’t have a copy of The Legendary Marvin Pontiac, Greatest Hits, I urge you to put it on your shopping list, it’s one of the finest records you can have in your music library.

Infrastructure Week

This may have been forgotten, but yearly subscribers will be getting a quarterly ‘zine-style print packet, and I’m currently fiddling around with the format. You'll all know it’s coming before it goes out, so stay tuned.

I’m also currently looking into transferring this newsletter from Substack to another platform. As a project this will move incrementally because the challenge is money and how it limits possibilities. I currently have only double-digit paid subscribers and the income from this newsletter is, to be honest, not enough for the effort that goes into it. But it probably keeps my head from exploding, and I think keeps me sharp, and I hope offers you readers some worthwhile ideas.

The one advantage Substack has is it’s free for writers. The disadvantages are that it’s Nazi-friendly in a way that violates the Terms of Service, but that’s part of the neo-Nazi eugenicist tech vibe that goes back to George Gilder, and that has been troubling for quite a while. Substack as a company has also now partnered with Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which is an amoral, intellectually dishonest publication centered around the grievances of mediocre establishment white people who think they are unfree because if they write or say slurs in public they’ll be criticized. This makes Substack’s recent free speech propaganda look like so much bullshit.

I am a critic because I have values, and I do not want to be in the company of narcissistic nihilists. In an aesthetic way, but just as personal, Substack trying to be a social media network via Notes is just unbelievably dreary to me, and erodes my confidence in what I’m doing. It’s nothing but the same culturally illiterate takes, designed to respond to what happened five minutes ago and to keep the writer at the top of the feed. It seems to erode people’s brains, including that of a music critic who has written several important books and now comes off as a cranky old man, and more than a few musicians who present themselves as thinkers and yet are enraptured by the most middling, obvious takes. For every Hamilton Nolan still here, an Ed Zitron has moved on.

(And by the way, the newsletters I subscribe to no longer arrive via email, and I didn’t change settings, so this platform is not working well.)

So I’m researching alternatives and choices are limited by how low my revenue is. Platforms like Ghost aren’t free, and others that start free, like Beehiv, can quickly become far more expensive than I could absorb at the level I’m at. Obviously, if I had more subscribers this wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s becoming clearer to me every day that I’m going to be obstreperous and against-the-grain in a way that, when it gets down it it, isn’t all that popular!

I’m committed to moving someplace else, without losing any contact with all of you, but it is a project that’s full of friction. So bear with me, please, as I work through that.

For immediate plans, another newsletter will be heading to you Friday for Bandcamp’s benefit day. And there’s more to come.

Hang in there, everyone. Cultivate endurance and good taste.