Greetings From This Year's Model!
Hello!
In my time as a freelancer, I had hardly any contact with my audience. All the communication was one-directional. I was a quasar beaming out into the void periodically. When I got my first cover story, in the Village Voice (25 years ago), I walked around for two weeks with it under my arm hoping against hope to talk about it. Such a vain young man. But it was also about the communication. An only child who attended more than a handful of schools in my first seven years, I extra-value back-and-forth.
Not that this (waves hands around) has really done that (yet), but at least in concept I am speaking to my handful of readers directly, and sharing my thoughts on the journey to date. This month marks Sew:YKnot?’s sixth month in operation, and it’s been a joy and a trial.
A joy because it’s all my own. When I turned 50, I resolved to stop telling other people’s stories and start telling my own. I sighed right there because I am still telling others’ stories, but it’s not for anyone else. It’s not for money at all at this point. It’s about putting it out there. About filling a void I experience in the world. For all the websites and crap on the ‘net, there’s a paucity of good, clever, well-written longform and broadly-oriented sites that are about their personality. About the curation. I have no interest in being the perfect place for everybody. I just want to be the perfect place for a few who think or feel like I do and maybe a near-perfect place for others a bit off the mark.
It’s been a trial because it’s a lot of work. I front-loaded a lot of work and ran through it all in six weeks. The calendar was far more of a task than I imagined when I bit it off, yet I also felt from my own experiences and conversations with strangers that it could be a real value to the community. As I said in site’s opening piece, the idea here is to “sew” community, and tighten the weave that unites us, in this case by promoting local creatives and activities in the area, alongside articles about our world and culture.
(The YKnot is of course a reference to both the sort of futility of not acting and interacting, and the idea that by engaging and doing you can avoid the pitfall of thinking about doing something but never really getting there, binding yourself in emotional knots. All the neuro-divergents in the audience gimme a “Hell yeah!”)
As a writer first, I had to learn audio production and get good enough at it that I could manage two interviews a month, which was a strain at first, especially as the calendar remains a very involved task.
Then last month I had the idea for a Best Local Release of the Year poll like the Pazz & Jop, which the Village Voice ran for years and which I had the pleasure of taking part in. But the idea of music critics may have made sense for a national poll but for a local poll you want the people knee-deep in the scene. So I spent a week or so this month assembling a list of every local album I could come up with and a voting system and sent my ideas out to a variety of people. One person wrote back.
I realized to sell this idea – which I believe would be a great thing for the local music scene – I needed to go talk to the people whose votes I would be collecting – the bookers, record store clerks, studio owners, vinyl production companies, record labels, etc. – and sell them on the idea one-to-one. Which will be what I will be doing all month, as soon as I fully complete the calendar, in a day or two.
(I only did the first 15 days of blurbs; as always, it’s not the calendar that’s the killer – it’s otherwise chockful, it’s the music blurbs, in large part because while I was covering the Cleveland Cavaliers from 2014-2018, I really dipped out of music and then after the divorce, and I moved and I moved etc etc. To whit: many of the acts to emerge in the last decade are new to me and I have to acquaint myself with a lot of national acts in addition to the local acts I am learning about as a new re-transplant.)
I still haven’t gotten “ahead” again on my writing. Ideally I will have a number of stories already written at the beginning of the month, but I keep adding new aspects to the site, so it gets difficult. This month we’ll be adding a new monthly theatre segment, where I will review a show and run a few blurbs about other shows you should see, with the help of Stages of MN’s Rob Dunkelberger, who has generously allowed us to quote his fine reviews to preview the month’s shows in addition to our own.
(For those that don’t know, I had a peripatetic theatre company in the Twin Cities with co-founder John Reidlinger during the nineties called the New & Improved Theatre Company, and I’ve done my share of theatrical criticism.)
While I am anxious to return to more of the longform writing I was doing at the beginning of the launch, it will probably need to wait until next year, and when I can get some of my nuts (stories in this metaphor) in the ground for winter. Plus the lobbying for the list is gonna eat into time as well. But it will be coming.
In the meantime I am still trying to even out the workflow. I ran out of monthly segments to run, and time to do them last week while I focused on some personal stuff and the calendar. As I couldn’t complete the blurbs last month, finishing half of the month’s blurbs by publish date was good, but also responsible for a dead weak. Still, it felt more important to get the calendar locked down ahead of the Year-End poll push.
Finally, I thought I’d share my tentative title of the Year-End list, in honor the Christgau’s Pazz & Jop, I am thinking I will call it the Razz & Jock list, so it’s something of its own, but with a clear and nodding debt to its inspiration.
With that I will sign-off and thank you for frequenting our establishment. The pleasure has been ours. Well, you know, in absentia.
Enjoy what is looking to be a fine day of clapback for two years of mounting hell. We’ll speak to you again directly like this next year. I'm about to head to Electric Fetus (and then return to finishing the calendar blurbs & adding photos & youtube links).
Weary Tales & Fish bones,
Chris
