A Memoriam to Pitchfork

 The process of media consolidation has been such a grim march since before I was born that I normally hardly pay attention. Oh, Publication X is ceasing. Well I guess that’s rough.

But today’s announcement that Pitchfork was being folded into GQ was a stab to the heart.

Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Pitchfork regularly – as I’ve discussed previously, it’s been circling the drain for a while. The site has over the past few years veered in an obnoxiously poptimist direction, favoring rhapsodic nonsense about a perfectly forgettable Ice Spice song rather than anything even remotely countercultural or in-depth, with even most of the indie they championed being remarkably inoffensive – I like Big Thief as much as the next guy, but they’re hardly leading a musical revolution. And yet it was still a devoted music website (i.e. not an app), a place where actual journalists were paid to actually write about music, without a video autoplay coming up every five seconds, without much-touted Spotify exclusives, without the morass of branded content.

This is where I should also point that it’s a bit suss, to say the least, that this happened a month after Pitchfork’s union successfully negotiated zero layoffs.

But once upon a time Pitchfork was vital. OK, sure, it was easy to make fun of. The painfully earnest reviews of indie music were often silly and overwrought, but it was, for those of us who grew up far from urban centers, a way to learn about the wider, weirder world of music beyond the top 40 at a time when radio airplay was still functioning as a cultural arbiter in piggly-eyed Middle America (hard to imagine in the era of Spotify I know) Along with the much-missed Tiny Mix Tapes, the website that single-handedly turned me onto so much incredible noise rock, it was an open invitation, with its year-end lists and decade retrospectives and its annual music festival that I attended every year for their first few years. Their long-form journalism was often brilliant, frequently heartbreaking, and always thought-provoking, and these articles introduced me to ‘90s Chicago post-rock, afrobeat from Fela Kuti forwards, and countless other veins of music I would have never known. Shoegaze seemed less a genre than an ideology. And in the same way I read and read so as to know the world, I listened and listened so as to know the world.

I’ll just leave this forgotten beauty here: https://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/6411-resonant-frequency-39

And in my dorm room I would restlessly search for Mediafire and Megadownload .zip copies of these albums. I would pore through the mildewy reek of the music library of our little college radio station where I was paid a pitiful stipend as station librarian. I would find Youtube clips consisting of scratchy transfers of old 7” Cherry Red singles paired with highly pixelated album art. I listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F#A# (infinity) on my Discman in winter fields. I would see shows in dank and grimy venues with only a handful of other weirdos present. The Robot Ate Me tackled me to the ground and may have dry-humped me as he sang on top of my pinned-down body.

Right now, I’m sitting at home, marinating pork shoulder in papaya and spices, to sear and then deglaze with Viognier. I long ago traded in my band t-shirts bought at sweaty shows and beat-up Chuck Taylors and Chrome seatbelt bag for linen shirts and Clark’s suede and a nice leather satchel bought at a Budapest haberdasher, and I’ve gone from couch stays in scrofulous shared houses to bitching about the Keurig selection in boutique hotels.

But I’m listening to those albums that meant so much to me at one time. The self-titled Beach House album, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Asobi Seksu’s Citrus, Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Albums that once seemed to hold the key to something, in the lingering waft of Nag Champa and shitty Iowa schwag at 17 years old, when some part of me fully believed that the only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes, and then they buried her alive one evening in 1945.

And so the final burial of Pitchfork is another reminder of the general enshittification processes. All those feisty independent journalistic outlets and blogs that shaped my perspective have been outmoded by the algorithm, the treasure hunt has been replaced by the hopeless scroll.

This sucks. I hate it here.

At best, the better of those articles will remain floating in the floating world, ghosts to be found by people much younger than myself – a bit like the odd old issues of magazines from other eras you’d find lying around. Because ghosts are often so much more reassuring than the present.

On Music and Writing

In December, I began a standard ritual. It's a ritual I've been doing for over a decade – going through Pitchfork's year-end top 100 songs and listening to them, in order, from number 100 to number 1.

I'm not going to comment on the music itself. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Much of it is in-between. Some of it might be good, but it is not for me, or for people of my general inclination, but there are still reasons to qualify it as by and large good. These are not the issues I care to write about. After all, is there anything more tedious than an aging hipster bitching about contemporary music? (Answer: yes, there is, and it's an aging hipster glomming onto contemporary music in a pathetic attempt at youthful enthusiasm).

What I wish to write about, rather, is the writing about the music.

Consider their commentary on their number 1 for 2020, Cardi B's “WAP” (and Ben Shapiro's song-that-must-not-be-named, a fact which will forever be hilarious):

“...a Cardi verse somehow tributes the unsung uvula amid an imposing tour de force of lecherous metaphors.”

Really?

To a certain degree, I have a sympathy for the writers. If they want to say that a song is a banger, there are only so many ways they can. There are only so many descriptors, so many adjectives, especially when it comes to pop music that has its appeal in groove and hook more than anything else (credit where credit's due, Cardi has had some very clever lyrics in her day, albeit in other songs). When a music critic tries to review a DaBaby song, say, there's only so much you can milk out of the repeated phrase “I'm a young CEO, suge” before getting to the point where there's more analysis in your review than in the song itself. There's a reason that the absolute most common album review I hear referenced in conversation is a Pitchfork review of a Jet album that was just a link to a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

Furthermore, lyrical complexity doesn't really make the critic's task any easier, because the lyrics are inextricably embedded within the music. It's hard to think of a dumber Nobel literature prize than that given to Bob Dylan, because no matter how much 16 year old boys in Middle America (spotlight casually falling at my feet) would like to claim that Dylan's lyrics are poetry, they would be absolutely godawful if they were actually written down as poems. Consider Desolation Row:

“Ophelia she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She is already an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness.”

See? Just awful, high-school creative writing class shit. But in Dylan's voice with his spare guitar, it's heaven.

And when you think about those songs that form the soundtrack to your life, it's rarely the song in and of itself that you think of – it's the context. It's where you were, both geographically and in your life, it's the nostalgia of old friendships, first loves, long drives.

Yet in another era – not too long ago – poetry was itself a form of music. It was meant to be remembered and recited, with a rhythm akin to that of what we have formalized as music, and in oral cultures, there is very little distinction between poetry and music. A time before those of us in the industrialized world didn't have to deal with the shattered remnants of a dead God. When the stained-glass windows of Chartres were the most radiant thing one would see, when the emperors were still descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

And while such things are but distant memories, their residue is all around us.

We still seek the transcendent, and it is so often that that transcendence cannot be reduced to words.

It hits you as see the afternoon light moving across the corners of your room.

In America, Part 3: To Write About New York

What is there, really, to write about New York anymore? Can anyone write anything that hasn't been said by Alfred Kazin, Walt Whitman, Jane Jacobs, E.B. White, Joan Didion, Paul Auster, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Marshall Berman, Langston Hughes, Don DeLillo, John Dos Passos, and the rest?

Writing anything essayistic bears the requirement that you can only approach your subject in bursts, flashes, the occasional extended close-up shot. If a writer holds a mirror to reality, it's probably a rear-view that they only look at when they need to. And how true is that when you're dealing with a space so vast, so worked-over as New York.

The worst of the Midwest followed me as far as JFK. I was seated next to a gin-blossomed couple from the North Dakota oil country, on their way to a tropical holiday. The husband's material was a book accusing Bill Clinton of organizing the murder of Vince Foster, a favorite paranoiac fixation of the extreme right, and the wife's was a collection of sayings from noted motherfucker Pope Benedict XVI, both of which they felt compelled to summarize to one another next to me while I tried to catch up on sleep I'd lost the night before. And so I arrived in New York City exhausted, my bags on my shoulders as I tried to find my way to my host's apartment. Yet when I came up from the subway at 110th Street, to a slightly chill late afternoon, to books being sold on the street, to the sun setting over the Hudson, it was like I'd drank a sudden double-espresso. I was suddenly in a place that crackles in the nerve endings.

I spent the next few days wandering. I haunted the Museum of Modern Art, snarling at the tourists taking selfies with Starry Night, yet delighted that they left me alone to sigh with the Ensors and the De Chiricos. I skulked through Greenwich Village, where poised, beautiful NYU students had no compunction about pushing me to the curb. I went for long evening walks along Riverside as it passes by Grant's Tomb, up and down Broadway, Amsterdam, Lexington, form Harlem down to Midtown and back, every block having something you've heard about your whole life.

But more so than that, I loved the forgotten things, the accumulated addenda of a couple centuries lingering in the corners.

There were beaux-arts quoins and column and statues, monuments left to rot in odd corners of parks, self-consciously aping Greece and Rome, marble ruins of a haughty, newly mighty American state.

And there were still things like plumbing supply warehouses, wig shops, dirty fried chicken places all named after states and presidents even in the middle of toweringly vertical neighborhoods. Here was a sign in a jaunty '50s font for Barney Greengrass, who proclaimed himself the “sturgeon king” in an era when there were still men named Barney, and they still ate sturgeon.

And I fell in love with the deli food, a remnant of a very singular point in the history of food technology, from maybe around 1920, a time when pastrami, mayo, pickles, seltzer, and sugar cookies were first standardized, a comfortable industrialization of what had once been the luxuries of the shtetl. What was once modern-- the simulated-wood paneling replacing the rough-hewn timber of the taiga, exotically named jam-filled tarts that were once the privilege of the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now being sold for two dollars apiece-- now relegated to nostalgia.

It's easy to feel regret at the loss of an “old New York,” the New York that I felt was promised to me by all those Velvet Underground and Miles Davis albums. Any number of professional New Yorkers have made it their mission to bitch about the Chipotlization of the city.

Great Jones Street, which contributed a verb to the English language, still had its strung-out derelicts, but they were far outnumbered by the condos. There were definitely still bums on the Bowery, but they stood outside a Whole Foods. I had to wonder, were they still being held on for the sake of pastiche? I hate admitting it, but when a lantern-jawed middle-aged man came out of a doorway saying “Ima get a gun and shoot all these motherfuckers,” my first thought wasn't fear, but authenticity.

And the longer I stayed, the more annoyed I became by all the conspicuous wealth, the multimillion dollar apartments in maximum-security buildings. I picked up the New York Times magazine, and found an article espousing the “simple luxury” of condos in the Hamptons. And of course the photo of a pile of salmon roe artfully balanced in a sea urchin shell stood opposite an article on the revelation that there might actually be income inequality in America! Overindulge on one side, feel guilty on the other, like a schoolboy going to confession after a Pornhub marathon.

Yet this is how it is, isn't it? Your dreams of the place are so often at odds with the realities, like the poor deluded Japanese who can't handle the piss smell and bad attitudes of the real Paris, and lapse into psychosis and delusion. Or the pious souls on two-week holidays in Jerusalem who find altogether too much to connect to, and suddenly see themselves as prophets and messiahs.

My flight back was through JFK again, this time from the international terminal. Hasidim lined up for El Al, men in dishdasha for Qatar Airways, women in saris for Air India, each of them yet more narratives of New York.

I got on an eastbound flight across the northernmost parts of the world, crossing Greenland, Svalbard, Siberia. At this time of the year, the flight-path is an arc of eternal daylight, the sun rising and dipping, but never completing its passage. The time zones whir by at these latitudes, like colors on a roulette wheel.

Unable to sleep, too tired to read or write, I can only jot down one thing in my notebook, the one all-encompassing thing I can say about New York. How perfect it is to end my trip back to the country I'm from than to experience everything I love and hate about at once.

Sudelbücher

A woman comes into my apartment, and before we sit down and have a drink, she picks up a notebook sitting on my bookshelf. She gives me a glance, grabs it, and opens it up. I think about telling her not to open it, but what could be weirder than coming over to someone's apartment and for them to have stacks of mystery books? Suddenly, I can feel myself sinking, an overwhelming wave of dread and anxiety coursing through my body as I fall.

I should admit that I've never written diaries or journals. I suppose that when I travel, I keep travel journals, notes on what I've seen, how I felt about X, that I ate Y. But these really just seem like extensions of what I write normally, which is something far less categorizable.

There is a terror is that if I write a more conventional journal, I'll feel the need to write everything down in a more linear fashion, to shape the subjectivity of my experiences into something more diaristic and descriptive. Looking back, I will simply be annoyed at my dishonesty.

And there is a second terror that what I write will be nauseatingly immediate, lacking in perspective and analysis, embarrassing for its lack of context. I have had enough trouble beating myself up over my past, and I don't feel the need to nurture that tendency.

What both cases have in common is that they make me conscious of the fact of reading what I wrote at some point in the future. And so, as a result, I'll quite likely self-censor, and write for the person I will be in the future, not the person I am.

The German physicist and writer Georg Lichtenberg kept what he called the sudelbücher, and this is the term I prefer to use for what I do. The notebooks I keep are made up of false starts, failures, disjoints, flights into fiction of a thousand varieties, stray observations, philosophical pensées, witticisms, all the crap that forms a record of my life.

And, by virtue of their ephemerality, and also by the fact that I move around a lot, they don't need to be kept. They can be discarded, ripped apart, forgotten, left around. Because, with a lot of this writing, I often quite simply don't want to know what I was thinking.

It becomes too intimate, and when another person looks into the raw material, my memories suddenly become their territory, or worse, their entertainment.

This is perhaps unfashionable. We're expected to flog our mental states on the public market, neatly packaged on Twitter and Tumblr. To have glittering, personal interior worlds becomes doubly unusual and somewhat suspicious.

Yet I don't know what I'd do without them, and without the ability to engage the world via the material act of putting a shitty ballpoint pen to a piece of paper. I let the world see the fragments that seem to be worth sharing. The rest, no matter what a failure it is, is therapy.

10 Stories I'll Never Write

I keep a file on my computer called "Miscellaneous Writings." Initially, I envisioned this as a seedbed for ideas I would have later on. But it increasingly developed into a repository for ideas that would never come to fruition-- an infinitely expandable library of half-conceived thoughts, interesting ideas that could never lend themselves to a compelling narrative, brief sketches, quips and bons mots, short reviews of books by Tanizaki Junichiro, Cesare Pavese, Susan Sontag.

A significant numbers of the ideas contained here came to me in dreams. Typically, they seem utterly lucid and brilliant in the early morning haze. By the time I'm on the train to work, I realize just how shit they are. These are interspersed throughout the list, but don't expect me to reveal which stories they actually are.

Other stories were inspired by very specific experiences-- listening to one song, or reading one short story, or watching one movie. These sorts of experiences yield a great creative outflow within a few hours of the actual experience, but fail to have any real staying power-- they are mere images, fragments of dialogue, and settings.

Like all junk drawers, it grows in complexity and mystery while rarely yielding anything of value. So consider the following to be the steel washers, gummy electrical tape (bought for a home improvement project 5 years ago), expired coupons, and wheat pennies of my literary pretensions.

1. The story of the unspoken feelings between two old friends, told entirely through emoticons.

2. A day in the life of a professor of animal languages at a major American research university, rooted in the parlor-game absurdity of so much contemporary analytical philosophy.

3. A variation of the Canterbury Tales retold in the bar of a seedy budget motel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (called, of course, the Canterbury), with the pardoner as a gay antique dealer, the wife of Bath as a soccer mom, the clerk as a broke grad student, etc.

4. Close biographies and micro-level stories from one single Seattle neighborhood over the course of 100 years, using a fake (but potentially real) coffee table book of oral histories of said neighborhood. This coffee table book will be attractively priced at $29.99, and available at the Made in Washington Store in Pike Place Market.

5. The story of the last two weeks of someone's life as told through items in his or her garbage bin. This person has just committed suicide, or been hit by a car, or something equally dramatic.

6. A documentation of the presence of the map of a city that may or may not exist as it occurs, seemingly at random, through sketches in the margins of notebooks, frost crystals on icy windows, and other meeting points of intention, causality, and stochasticity.

7. Story opening: "Amy and Liz were at a bar in Pioneer Square drinking Diet Cuba Libres after work on Thursday." Where it goes from here, I don't know.

8. An observation: when I look at black and white photos from the early 20th Century, everything looks like it should be depicted in black and white. When I look at color photos taken in the same years, everything looks like a BBC costume drama. The story will be the analysis of color (one color, or maybe a class of colors, or maybe the entire spectrum) as it wanes and waxes over the course of centuries.

9. A postal worker begins reading other people's letters. He develops whole mythologies about who they are, what they do, but is ultimately overwhelmed by the stupidity and the venality of the people around him. He documents his own failures in a book he calls The Book of Disappointments, consisting of letters, bills, and other ephemera, followed by his commentary on them. The story follows the postal worker as he writes the book, including some of the letters and some of the commentary.

10. Two young men watch the Beijing Olympics in a house in some anonymous part of the West Coast, eating nachos. It's one of those houses with sheets for curtains that has the aura of a permanent hangover. An argument over something unknown and unknowable begins between the host and his girlfriend. The other is left alone in the livingroom, watching North Korean gymnasts.

By committing these ideas to the never-to-be-written, I am fully consigning them to their fate. Even if I am struck, for some reason, to continue writing one of these stories, my own stubbornness will almost doubtless preclude the urge to write them.

Italo Calvino wrote, in the introduction to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, the story of all the books we'll never read that stare down at us, glumly, from their shelves at the bookstore. As more and more books are published year in and year out, this list expands indefinitely. My own to-read list expands at an exponential rate, and I am quite comfortable with the fact that I will die before ever reading a great many of these books.

Likewise, it is useful to take account of the things we'll never write. I won't call them books-- they are the ideas that must be disposed of before we can compose the things we want the world to see. Consider this short piece to be my salute to all the dross that we dispose of as we write, all the half-formed ideas that must be tossed aside in the creation of something greater.