Are you gregnant? (Pregnant by sexual a partner named Greg.) Please visit www.gregnant.mom. My gregnant new friend Alana is trying to find you.

Oh but re: the subject of this email: this past weekend from Thursday to Sunday was the long-awaited residency of the modern low-volume funk band Vulfpeck at Avant Gardener. Two shows every night, Thursday through Sunday. I was at the last one. A breath of fresh air: started on time, no opening act, no one-more-song ❝encore❞ fakeout. Just fans who love a band all hanging out listening to a rock-tight set. If you saw a bunch of weird Turkish red bath hats on the L train, that's why.

¶. Tonight 8pm: bird jazz

free, Bushwick Public House, Bushwick, NYC

Hello, Jacob Ford here, from Geistlist. You signed up for this semi-occasionally newsletter about Things for People, so now you are receiving it. Unsubscribe below.

A few issues ago I hinted at an event about which I could not say much, on November 9. Now, I can say everything, and you are the first to hear. But first:

¶. Tonight 7–10pm: Open VCR Night

free, Wonderville, Bushwick, NYC

I am back from the national, state, and local forests of Oregon where I shot the overcast eclipse (clouds only enhanced it!—no glasses or lens filters needed) from the central tubercle of the outer lip of a double volcano, and appreciated well-engineered websites designed for the Good Old Internet: not unreliable, just 10kbps. Zoom engineers: insanely great work. Fireflies engineers: you don’t need 2.3MB of JS to load a meeting transcript.

I needed the escape, and I was with good friends.

And despite being off-grid and a thousand miles from anyone I knew that I knew, managed to run into my sister’s nursing school classmate’s best friend’s parents, at the only bar for 30 miles where I also won $20.22 in a 2-bet game of lupine video slots.

¶. Friday 8pm: a folk horror chamber music suite with underwater shadow ghost dance

This is Geistlist: Things for People by Jacob.

Some of you know my mom died at 9:55am last Thursday, in the living room. I was sleeping in at the Lansdale Holiday Inn by the new turnpike entrance, 20 minutes away, after a long week talking to her and deciding if she was conscious, waiting for death to happen. She was with Dad and a sister or two (later confirmed to be two of three). Within an hour, we were all there.

She had had cancer in her brain a long time, and it finally found the stem. We put her body in her favorite red shorts and strawberry top and waited for the laboratory to which she donated herself, who sent men with a minivan. I helped lift, while we laughed and played September and danced and cried. An advantage of donating your body to science is plenty of time for your loved ones to grieve and the potential for them to see you in the same Houghton Mifflin biology textbooks you taught from one day at Souderton Area High School, if you taught at your son’s alma mater.

A memorial service will be 3pm Saturday November 18 at Zion Mennonite Church in Souderton, PA. If any of you want to organize or join a carpool or need pickup from Trenton, reply and I’ll get you all in touch. Please do not feel awkward attending. If you are reading this, you have some sense of me, and she created that. Her name was Valerie, and you are invited to celebrate her.

I am finally and at last back in NYC until the annular solar eclipse, after Woodstock → Cleveland → Gettysburg → Milano → Torino → Parma → Venice → Cornuda → Portland for Swimming Hole → Chocolate Cities CLE launch → DFW Conference → Paul → Shaw’s → Legacy → of → Letters → TypeCon. I’ll write something thoughtful later, I’m late. This is Geistlist.

¶. Now until 10pm: Open VCR Night

tune in / come by

Got a new stack of tapes from many of the above locations, though I’m waiting on a PAL/NTSC converter for the ones I found at the Turin fleamarket.

I didn’t like museums during the early post-COVID reopenings because instead of relaxing me they reminded me of the sisyphean battle of trying to run one in the era. But even once reservations/mask/vaccine signage was finally over the art was largely boring. Grant-offwritten 2020 protest schmuck and Blendermade blockchain bait. Instagram post as gallery mount.

Then last week I stopped by New Museum and I think Good Weird might be back.

In the lobby gallery behind the nonextant coffeeshop is Wynnie Mynerva with what New Museum claims is the largest painting they’ve ever displayed. Odd claim. It’s in two parts and I don’t really get it. But behind the painting (through the split between the two parts) is a slender polished pedestal displaying about 1cm of their surgically-removed lower rib.

Those who have visited my apartment late to hang out after certain St. Marks Comedy shows or catsat for me may have discovered in the bookshelves I Am The Strength of Art, a rare photo and interview book by Shannon Larratt documenting ModCon 1999: the extreme body modification convention. Tucked in the endpaper is a VCD (not DVD, VideoCD: the format karaoke machines run on, with 240p video) of live surgeries performed during the event. I have not yet watched the full thing.

Very well may be the first time since Summer 2015 that I have not been in NYC for more than 5 consecutive days for over a month. Last night I returned from the David Foster Wallace Conference in Gettysburg, and tomorrow I depart to Italy for a fortnight of setting type on an ancient prosecco farm.

Got to screen a forthcoming trailer for a nonexistant Infinite Jest film, a topic of great debate when I took a DFW class 7 years ago with Greg Erickson, as Micahel Schur’s pseudo-film-cum-Decemberists-music-video had just been released. Then it turns out my Open VCR Night creative partner Matthew Hawkins was on the crew, and the filmmaker Justin lives blocks from me and it will soon debut, plus there is a book about it which I am early in possession of.

¶. Eminently–10pm: Open VCR Night

Brooklyn: Wonderville, Bushwick
Internet: twitch.tv/wondervillenyc

This is Geistlist.

It’s been kind of a bucket list entry to be part of an artist residency, and two weeks ago I went on one: a week Swimming Hole Foundation, an old house and new barn built and orchestrated by Debera Johnson nestled between various mountains Catskill, with a group of 6 artists taking apart cassette tape players put together by humans, jamming microphones¹ into the planet to listen to plants and water, and learning how to talk back maybe with machines. I’ll likely be publishing some words/photos/art about that later which will be in here but I haven’t yet because I’m busy:

¶. Tonight 7pm sharp: Mmuseumm Opening Ceremonies

4 Cortlandt Alley, TriBeCa, NYC

The year is February 2023. Instagram is now the exclusively old Millenials hawking their standup shows in flyers ironically designed in MS Paint. You just found a good song on an abandoned deezer.com S3 bucket to add to your Malaisesque Songs About February collection. Gen Z has given rise to the plaintext revolution and is responsible for the return of pagers. This is Geistlist, about Things for People by Jacob.

∞. Colophon

Undersigned continues apace and Sam Kriss wrote the retort and synthesis to and of that Vibe Shift piece, and the followup to all of us talking seriously about hipsters in 2009. I’m thinking of starting a private forum just for people who go to that one brewery in Queens that I like.

¶. Tonight 7pm: Open VCR Night

This is Geistlist. Words about corporeal things.

My friend Jason Stauffer called me yesterday to talk about and induct me into a newsletter/blog that is open to anyone but you have to have a 1-hour phone call with Jason to read it, because the next post is about your call. More to come on that probably later. He writes those blog posts that show up in Google.

¶.Tonight 7pm: Open VCR Night comes to The Grassy Noll

I was invited to tour Open VCR Night to the JFK assassination-themed Bushwick weed shop & bar. Saunter by 7 to 10pm tonight, I found Knockoff Snow White and Knockoff Beauty and the Beast (also featuring Don Quixote + Noah’s Ark) when I swung by Blue Door DVD last week.

It’s your semi-regular somewhat-monthly installment of Geistlist, the decreasingly secret newsletter of Jacob Ford, and kind of a corrupted 4-way merge between nonsensenyc, Garbage Day, shareholder letters, and a church bulletin.

Most of you I know in real life but a growing number I do not, which makes me feel honored and strange. Please don’t feel weird introducing yourself sometime if you’d like, via a reply to this very email or one of the Things below.

The unsubscribe button is always at the bottom—use it if you ever need—and there’s an RSS version too.

¶. The newest podcast

I'm working on a list of where to find VHS in NYC. Suggestions welcome, forgive the naked Markdown (working on it, forever).

Oh and last week it was my turn on the DFW reading group.

¶. Currently: FORT90 Desert Film Collection

twitch dot tv slash wondervillenyc, send an @unitof in the chat and I'll make you feel less weird, or more.

¶. Right now: Open VCR Night

One hour later.
One week earlier.
Roles swapped (Jacob¹ on Twitch chat, FORT90 in the booth)

Get to Wonderville or twitch.tv/wondervillenyc this instant. Goes til 11.

¶. 8pm Wednesday: Come Dy

Did you know DFW wrote a Christmas thing? Just found out. Anyway, I’m leading a discussion group of something else February 13. If anyone understands tennis or will by Feb 13, hit me up.

All times Eastern Standard.

¶. Until 5am: the FORT90 Christmas ______

My pal & lost film collector Matt is currently streaming his annual Christmas S___________ at twitch.tv/wondervillenyc. Say hi in the chat. I’m @unitof.

Welcome to Geistlist, a newsletter about Things for People in Places. Inspired by nonsensenyc, shareholder letters, and church bulletins.

¶. Now: Opening of the Beringia land bridge

There's a land bridge open right now from Twitter to Mastodon and a lot of us are having a lot of fun dancing on it. Feels like Twitter in 2010, or blogs in 2005, or borrowing my crush & bus seat partner's iPod Classic in 2005.

Anyone whimpering about how Twitter somehow die overnight is giving Elon Musk the lowest possible bar for success. The most devastated seem the least likely to remember when Twitter was weird and difficult and crashed all the time; when we invented hashtags and retweets and when you couldn't tweet a photo from Twitter.com.

Last week I spent a long night playing Wingspan with old friends who recently became new neighbors¹. It ended in the modern mixtape tradition of starting a communal Spotify playlist, to be fostered over time with our most thoughtful and annoying submissions and played on shuffle when we meet.

I am devastated to find that Spotify does not have about half of the best songs (notably the bonus track Terminals from Relient K’s Forget and Not Slow Down), defending my position that rare media will never die. As distribution approaches the limit of zero friction, there will always be one notch of effort above the default, and that is where obscure media will live, lost media will disembody, and collectors will reanimate.

To this end: a live-action 1995 Halloween special of The Magic School Bus was vaguely remembered by some, but only in 2016 found on a garage sale VHS. Sadly I don’t have the tape, but if you do please bring it tonight to

¶. Tonight 7pm: Open VCR Night of the Living Dead Media

Good morning, this is Geistlist: the aperiodical about time & spaces to be, compiled without schedule by Jacob Ford, for you.

I write from a suitcase-propped iPad on an uptown E train slouching toward JFK, where an AirBus 5 years and a week from its first flight is currently being refueled. It’s taking me most of the way to a former church where the organ pipes have been replaced by server racks: the Internet Archive. They run WayBackMachine, patron saint of deleted tweets.

The Archive is hosting the Library Leaders Forum, where through a butterfly’s flap of chaotic coincidences, I am presenting a little prototype of something I helped build called BRIET, named after Suzanne. Named by Paul Ford.

Led fearlessly by Maria Bustillos, David Moore, aforementioned Paul, and Brewster Kahle, BRIET’s mission is to convince authors they can sell and libraries they can buy—not license à la OverDrive or Kindle but actually good old-fashioned for-keeps sell and buy—digital books. You can borrow a one I designed now, which the Internet Archive bought from us for a $30 check, just as your library buys printed books. If someone else is reading it, wait an hour and it’s yours.

On August 26, 2012 I drove to Manhattan for the first time without a planned ride home. In my new backyard (Washington Square Park) I introduced myself to Colin Huggins at 8:53am, and at 11:36pm came back to find a cellist playing by moonlight in the middle of the park fountain platform six inches above the waterline, the jetstream for the night turned off.

August 27, 2012 was rainy. I skipped some NYU orientation events to watch a filmshoot, walked to Madison Square Park, and bought my first groceries at the Union Square Whole Foods and carried them home. It (the Whole Foods) is (last I checked) still the midst of an oddly ever-coming-soon renovation and now a miniature Amazon Fulfillment Center, but¹ still has an escalator exclusively for shopping carts and will not be truly dead to me until that’s gone. However the smoke which used to bellow from the hole in Metronome has stopped bellowing, and Metronome‘s periodicity has changed from 48 hours to 1 geological era. It’s the second time it’s been reprogrammed, the first being to New York’s successful bid to not host the Olympics.

I have it on the advice of my mentor and at least three other strangers I’ve asked at bars in the intervening decade that I may call myself a New Yorker with no reasonable objection starting tomorrow.

¶. Every Last Monday: Open VCR Night

Mmuseumm is an unnatural history museum in a former freight elevator shaft. There is a small screen embedded in one of the gallery shelves which plays a loop of videos related to the current exhibitions. Sometimes we add additional footage which acts as artifact itself: video proof of the world’s casual strangeness. The familiar doing the unfamiliar, the unfamiliar doing the familiar.

You are reading Geistlist,
a chronoillogical newsletter
about Things for People by Jacob.

In an early Mmuseumm season around 2014 or ’15—before my involvement—one of the videos was a comedian breaking down on stage. I remember trying for months to identify the footage but never could muster the right search terms. This year, for whatever indexing/language processing/algorithmic reason, it was easy.

When I first saw & met Nathan Repasz a year ago in a friend’s dog’s backyard the memory of the video of Andy came instantly back to me. We have become high-ranking close friends (Nathan and I): he later played my mythical-status 27th birthday, I am designing him a very strange website, and together we are trying to coin linguo-percussive situationism. Hopefully I know what it means once I finally finish The Order of the Third Bird and figure out what’s real.

Been thinking about Scenes¹: the kind you read of your dead art heroes being part of. What sound like casual encounters, fights, hookups, arguments, lectures, and readings in basements and lofts, now imbued with historical weight and teleological surety.

¹ Synonymous to/newly christened vibe shifts?

Friday: in New Canaan I saw a photo of Philip Johnson and David Whitney jumping in their bed (though David did tend to sleep in the Brick House while Philip took the Glass House—they mirror each other, if the mirror had a ⅔ reduction lens), and Andy Warhol was just…there, if you look carefully by a nightstand, being background not foreground.

Sunday: finally got to catch up with my local historian hero and neighbor Ada Calhoun at a book launch event for Also A Poet, which is all about Scenes: documenting them, missing them, growing up with/in them, and confronting your dad for being more invested in them than he seemed interested in you.