I’ve been working for and with a little company that I’m insanely passionate about — everything is designed in house by Rony Joseph, a former engineer turned designer.

zojila.com for the best homewares being designed anywhere right now. More to come.

Been thinking a lot about the 2020’s ubiquity of western wear and country music and the fabulous 1978 Aaron Latham essay for Esquire “Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s search for true grit” you can read the full thing [here](https://online.fliphtml5.com/jtwyg/bckg/#p=1), it has aged immaculately

2024 concept

CD sales were the optimal form of music distro because it was extremely easy to fence off stuff for kids and teens or send it to box stores versus stuff for adults, there used to be entire adult contemporary sections of stores. It was easier for artists to age into an adult sound if they grew out of their audience. Throwing everything online where there’s no barriers is just bad, it makes concerts bad, it makes artists unhappy with their own fans, it forces artists adults are supposed to care about to cater to 18 year olds forever, it’s just all wrong. Like I like Mitski, she seems to be an artist who has earned a real sense of maturity. Am I ever going to go to a Mitski show again? Probably not.

The vinyl resurgence sucks, we had a medium that was easy, cheap, profitable, and less damn wasteful than vinyl and we ruined it then took all the players out of cars so they’re obsolete to everyone but k-pop fans and parents who get music from Amazon algos. I’ll yell about the death of CDs forever because it exasperated a real death of adult culture and hope for a contemporary modernism. We’re never going to get another Norah Jones — Come Away With Me or Arthur Russell with this model and it doesn’t actually make anyone more money or even happier and it actively erodes the mechanisms of culture that are meaningful for distinctions between youth and adulthood. 

The streaming era is cool because it’s a library of Alexandria, in literally no other medium of art would you expect to have access to almost every meaningful work in the western canon and far outside it too for $10 a month. It’s summarily terrible for actual music. 

Someday soon they’ll wisen up and you won’t have access to complete catalogs or the search UI will stop working and you just won’t be able to digitally crate dig anymore. There will be some shitty “basic” streaming tier that’s for chart hits, contemporary, madonna, the Beatles, whatever else— and they’ll make you buy access to the good stuff ala cart via a “curator” tier. Or they’ll hide full access to the catalogs from everyone but employees who make payola playlists. 

If you really like something you find online you have to start buying it or bugging labels for reissues. We’re just not going to have this forever, it doesn’t make anyone enough money. People used to make a living having shitty jobs in the record industry, not a great living but a real one, playing sessions for albums no one ever listened to or remembers but they still made more money than even popular records now because you had to buy them. When was the last time you heard a song on the radio that required a brass section of a live band? 

We have to accept or go BACK to the acceptance that music is a medium that requires a pay-to-play component to make any sense for maintaining forward momentum or literally start like a New Deal era type of artists fund. Because this all sucks, it’s a joke, it’s insanely unsustainable unless the next 40 years is just going to be us talking about all the cool stuff that happened 40 years ago and music as a huge pillar of culture just falling off. I don’t want that.

Goddamn. Just give me back CDs. Give me newspapers. These things all worked 20 years ago. People could go to school and learn to play the saxophone or learn how to be a journalist and you didn’t have to be in the top 1% of your industry to make a halfway decent living. Music journalism only meant anything when it was an actual sales pitch, critics only had to be good when the risk was you wasting $15. I used to get so pissed when I picked up a CD with a cool cover and there was only one good song on it, now you only need one good song. 

It’s all a pencil pushing scam. Like a cultural Ponzi scheme. 

v drunk drawing makeup girls

Christmas 2002

every year since Covid I make a big Halloween mix and it gets more fun every year. Next year I want to throw a big warehouse party and DJ it. Here are the last 4 in order and this years:

2020: https://spotify.link/TDfkgHJ6ODb

2021: https://spotify.link/qxGfUAO6ODb

2022: https://spotify.link/tbColbQ6ODb

2023: https://spotify.link/WCa6uyw5ODb

Enjoy if you’re into that :)

wayback machine coming for my ass

It’s interesting to live in a moment where the idea of the archival decades is really mainstream, 5-10 year old songs on the charts, more people listening to old music than new, cinema & literature coming out but at a slower pace and more in the margins of relevance, movies banking on 20+ y/o IP, fashion experiences shorter and shorter trend cycles, bands like duster or sweet trip enjoying more relevance now than when those records were released, a retrospective “video essay” culture. That was the core of the idea ten/ fifteen years ago that sort of defined the mediafire age, that there was this big opportunity to re-evaluate the “canon” now that it was so hyper-accessible. History was so malleable anyone could throw their favorite thing in the ring and say “this is what was important!” which has kind of lead to this Numero Group type of hell where the most irrelevant basement obscurities are given undo importance because we can’t help but seek out the newness we’re missing in the past.

Gen x nerds who spent years cultivating and manicuring information and collectibles and fanzines irl suddenly saw the next generation inherit the same wisdom in the time frame of an afternoon and a YouTube playlist. Altogether just a feeling of stasis, like we ran too fast and are all catching our breath.

Well thank you for keeping me in mind and willing me back to life. It’s nice to post a little bit again even if it’s off the cuff. I had a strange two years, was heartbroken almost the entire time and have only recently felt normal again (wild how that works but when you’re in the thick of it you have no idea what is going on) except better maybe, softened and more self aware. Everyone should lose a job they really love and get their heart profoundly broken in their twenties, like crystallizing your dog dying when you were a kid.

rip 8tracks 💔 truly a moment in time

I just threw it up on Spotify hope you enjoy 🙂

Lol, sometimes I think that too but I have no idea how much of it is self-aggrandizing. We got so much shit for being pretentious at the time (and a lot of it was though in a fairly benign, sincere way) but now it feels like this sort of “canon” that was championed by a niche group of girls 2012-2016ish is very streamlined. Clairo might actually be more of the catalyst there though.

It’s hard for me to come back to or look at this blog and think about having an internet presence because I feel so disconnected from who I was in my early twenties. I’m 28, the last time I used this platform I was maybe 22, insecure, dealing with a lot of pain and looking for sources to externalize and project that onto, “reasons for being”, preoccupied with identifying with concepts, virtues, pursuits rather than enacting behavior, which are all a natural part of growing up and coming into yourself though less than fortunate to have relayed publicly. Just something on my mind recently as I think about wanting to share or publish recent work.

This footprint is largely an amalgamation of adolescent “stories we tell ourselves to live,” spending a long time away from it while being judged in earnest rather than reinforcing a self-concept, becoming enmeshed with earnest unrewarded curiosity (I study soil biology), building things to lose and losing them, has left me far removed from the “I am this, I am that, you are this, you are that” tendency I spent formative years cultivating. It can leave you with some bright, catchy things to say and even string together if you’re halfway witty and observational but lacking in true meaning and actualization. Quippy, defensive, ad-copy writing that falls apart at the seams because as long as we know everyone else better than ourselves no one can hurt us.

That’s what’s on my mind right now, I hope you’re well.