Lately
What is this?
This is my microblog. I enjoy peeking at old websites, reading defunct blogs, but am always left wondering what happened to the people behind the text. Sometimes this motivates an admittedly voyeuristic urge to try and track down so-and-so’s last signs of life. Somehow it seems unbearable not to know if somebody who brought you an afternoon’s worth of reading pleasure is doing well, and whether the intelligence you found so captivating over text survives somewhere in the world of mouths and ears and earth. I want to provide some timestamped updates more frequently than I can write blog posts, the sort that would satisfy me if they came from one of the dead sites I like to stumble across.
I confess to being addicted to Twitter, as I find the habit borderline debilitating and frustratingly difficult to stop. In general I’m addicted to so-called user-generated content and the illusion of sociality, as the above paragraph might suggest, and this is probably due to a disappointing offline life (which the internet addiction conspires to make even more disappointing). This microblog could serve as a kind of offramp. I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with the 280 character format, but I am increasingly skeptical of the incentives and social dynamics of the site. I would prefer to be bound by Twitter format than by Twitter practice, if that makes sense. This microblog will hopefully serve as a release valve for certain thoughts which might be worth dissemination, or just to archive links along with the context in which I found them interesting. I have a lot of my own tweets archived, many of which I find funny or interesting still, and that sort of archived context is valuable to me while also clearly not being something that is intrinsic to the website Twitter itself.
Unreasonably pleased this AM about my choice of quotes on the about page.
I don’t like the last paragraph of the blog post. It’s incongruous. But I do like the last sentence. I’ve felt hopeless lately which is why it insisted upon itself while I was trying to describe something else. Unrelated: I don’t know if I’ll even listen to 20 k-pop songs this year, let alone write a top 20.
This weekend I enjoyed reading stuff by Blink/Ian Jorgenson, a New Zealand-based music promoter and festival planner. Over a decade ago he said
I’ve always tried to refrain from being an “oh, the good ol’ days”. I like that we’re at this massive cultural precipice and everyone’s so concerned about recorded music being devalued and the loss of CD sales, where to me that is not even an issue. People staying at home and not engaging in life is much more of a dangerous trend.
He also wrote The Problem with Music in New Zealand, a book combining many suggestions for improving the touring circuit and music scene more generally with his experience successfully running a venue according to these principles. I was very impressed by somebody who actually has spent decades “just doing things” and basically organizing his entire life towards the logical development of various music- and scene-related goals.
This is a test.