SCALES #72: mail truck queue
Hello!
One of the best, most soul-nourishing types of activities I’ve done over the past year? Watching different “live” musical performances over the computer.
None of them, of course, really satisfy in the same way as being there in the flesh—for one, “[i]n screen life, a certain means of visuality (straight-ahead looking) has been distorted into a primary means of knowing”, to quote an Anne Boyer line that has only grown in significance for me since first encountering it. Most of the sensory experience of concert-going—the creaky seats or sticky floor, the glances around the room, the soundscape of speaker or musician placement, the crinkling of programs, the obstructed backs-of-heads views, this list can be continued ad nauseum for every type of show, in every type of venue—is stripped away.
But even within the narrow universe of concert video, streaming through the computer, the constraints of the medium have made me hyper-attuned to the finest gradations of what makes something “live-like”. There’s a taxonomy of all the different kinds of ways concerts can be presented online, each format with thinly sliced pieces of what makes live music exciting:
…the long-ago concert film, pulled out of the vault. High production values; a crowd (remember those?!) you can imagine yourself in; an unignorable distance from the present moment which maybe provide welcome escapism, but also claws away the sense of immediacy.
…the variety show, linking together pre-taped performances by different musicians. The excitement of jumping from performer to performer, location to location, but lacking that connective tissue of a shared place or time: no one is going to be hopping back on stage to play along with the next act.
…the performance recorded during pandemic times: seeing an encounter with a shared moment, if not a shared instant. A sense of solidarity: the Northeast Ohio baroque orchestra or the New York string quartet or the Toronto punk band are all trying to figure out how to make music in the moment, masks and all.
…the truly live-streaming show: the stutters and compressions of the video adding texture, feeling the energy of music being created live, even if at a distance.
There are special, interesting affordances from these kinds of performances, to be sure: performers jumping into live chat of a pre-recorded show, the awkward joy of clunkily patching in other artists, the introspective end-to-end album playthrough. Music critic Steve Smith summed it up much better than I could put it:
“As for me, I cannot imagine what it would have been like to endure this year without some opportunity to watch musicians making music, using whatever means and tools were at their disposal. I’ve found deep satisfaction in scrappy single-cam live streams with modest sound and zero production values. I’ve enjoyed watching artists and institutions learn on the fly, in some instances envisioning and pointing the way toward art forms that didn’t exist before. I’ve exulted in the notion that the playing field is open to all, while at the same time grappling with the fact that access and resources still denote privilege.”
But, to land on an utterly predictable note, do I ever look forward to seeing a live-live show again.
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Postscript to last issue: “The American Abyss”, by Timothy Snyder. I find the “breakers” vs. “gamers” nomenclature a little grating, but the historical lens I find very valuable: the past and future of “the big lie” in anti-democratic and fascist politics:
“America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.”
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Perhaps you, like me, would enjoy reading the one and only Sam Anderson writing an paean to the bag of chips: “Please, sit down. I’ve got a whole bag of Cool Ranch Doritos here: electric blue, plump as a winter seed, bursting with imminent joy.” Or a newsletter about Some Dogs.
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A story of the homogenizing effect of local journalism publishing for the web, in two pictures:
First, the print edition headline, charming local patois:
Second, the web edition headline, just not the same:
(For those curious, the URL slug also didn’t sneak in any surprises, though maybe it could prompt a short story: “akron-man-trucks-wolf-ledges-post-office-gone”)
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Newslettering
In terms of the current paid newsletter boom, I subscribe, not uniquely, to the theory that the only possible endgame, other than the whole trend petering out, is a Great Rebundling—the subscription price point is just too high for individual newsletters (well, at least in the Substack model) to financially support very many of them. In a lot of cases I don't necessarily want to read every piece written by someone; there really is something to a publication putting together a curated set of pieces by a rotating selection of staff and contributing writers, alongside Anna Wiener's question of “whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want”. (Counterpoint: “for the hundreds and thousands of us who can no longer have lovely things like a (very) modestly paid, well-edited weekly column, “monetizing individuality” is one of the few options available. […] Whether it’s the future of media we want—well, who cares, really”.) Anyway, this is all to say, I hadn’t realized at least preliminary attempts at bundles are well underway.
A lovely set of events: one Robin (Rendle, of Adventures in Typography fame) makes a handcrafted web essay about how the popularity of newsletters for scrappy self-publishing reflects the web failing to live up it its promise:
It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions).
And then! Another Robin (Sloan, of Society of the Double Dagger fame) takes Robin the First up on his provocation and flips his longstanding newsletter over to be web-based:
I design and program a lot of my own ~media infrastructure~ over here. I’m not bound by any platform’s stingy product roadmap. If I want some weird new feature, I can just make it — for myself, for this particular group of readers. It can be totally bespoke and bizarre. […] Email imposes many of the same constraints [as social media], not by design (because it is barely designed at all) but by… decrepitude, I guess? This feels, to me, increasingly intolerable. I want to embed videos in newsletters — just little scraps of motion, inline, lightweight, like[: Robin does just that.]
Reader, am I sorely tempted…!
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Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam