This is Geistlist.

Welcome to the newcomers. Thank you to the longtimers.

¶. Today 9pm: The 2024 CNN Presidential Debate, moderated by Crackhead Barney & Friends

free, the internet

Yesterday was Allen Ginsberg’s 98th birthday. If you arrived at the Wilson Avenue subway station between 7:15 and 7:45pm and found the lady with a red parasol, a chaperone would lead you northeast to the edge of New York City where veiled dancers and a jazz guitarist perched on the retaining wedge over the approach to the East New York Tunnel, through which the last LIRR trains traveled sometime around 2010. Some mysterious boxcars sit still on the tracks, stuck between derails. A reciter, from memory, read Howl until the sun set, in three parts. The third was punctuated by kerosene twirled fire. We howled each time the poem did.

In the early peak/pit pandemic Fall I hosted Aaron Wolff and a few friends at the City Reliquary to record New York, Alone: a collection of music and poems and poems to music about feeling alone in the United States’ most populous city. Ginsberg’s My Sad Self was there. We debuted the film the following April. You can watch it if you ask.

Allen Ginsberg hasn’t yet clicked for me but clearly has for the people who create and find the types of underground public benefits that click for me.

This is Geistlist. I am Jacob Ford, and it’s nice you’re here.

Welcome to Geistlist, the newsletter about Things for People that arrives when it needs to.

¶. Tonight 7-10pm: Open VCR Night

Open VCR Night is now the last Monday of every even-numbered month. I'm working on stickers.

Tonight: special guest Brian Thompson plans to drop by. Brian is the Pulit Surprise-winning investigative journalist behind Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald’s, and will be accepting any tips you have on whether you tried it, how it tasted, and your favorite VHS tapes from the early to mid-1990s.

As we close the naughty & nice books on 2023 it’s a decent time to remind you where you are, who I am, and why.

If you’re receiving this you

• met me
• found me
• are my best friend
• were found to be interesting by me, and I risked life, limb, and FTC law to add you directly, with vague consent.
• were given The Gift of Geistlist as a last-minute Christmas gift by an anonymous stranger who write your email address on a postcard and sent me $60, and you now have a rare, yearlong, paid subscription to this free newsletter. Thank you, immensely, for your support.

This is Geistlist: the newsletter for you about things by Jacob Ford, increasingly likely to go straight to your spam folder as I fly too close to the spambot sun with my subject lines. Unsubscribe at the bottom. If you’re new here you can read up on past issues and sync future issues to your Palm Pilot.

Salut from Paris, and good morning to you.

Found an Irish pub in the final hour of November with a musician who counted down to December by beatboxing and sleigh belling into what he later informed me is Boss’s hottest new loop pedal called the RC-600.

My Christmas music repository (and this very newsletter, dear readers who make it worth writing) got a shoutout on Mace Griffin’s Independent Study, the last music blog left at the end of the internet.

The scaffolding encasing Notre Dame lights up (and then goes black) overnight on a schedule I cannot determine, and they are painting the Eiffel Tower gold for the Olympics.

Please consider helping me win free money and hang out with good vibes and slow servers on the hot new social network that is definitely going to last: yowza.social. My referral code is FIREY PAGAN CREAM.

¶. Tonight 7:30pm: find an illuminated moonshoe-powered kangaroo in the Philadelphia Zoo

$29, Philadelphia Zoo, Fairmount Park, Philly

I'm back in PA for T'giving, and tonight Catie and I are headed to the Philly Zoo for their annual LumiNature, where they light up all the trees, hide the animals in mysterious back rooms, and hire struggling/thriving actors to become illuminated animal-inspired fursonas, like some kind of child-friendly Burning Man at night.

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.