When the catnip kicks in
Pangrams, messages in bottles, and the music of Young Nickels the Great
A few weeks ago in a Discord server I sometimes frequent, we were talking about fonts and I was reminiscing about the days when I would check out books on typography from the library and photocopy pages and pages of fonts exemplified insentences like ‘PACK MY BOX WITH TWELVE DOZEN LARGE JUGS’.1
“I love pangrams,” someone said. “My favorite is Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow".
“Mine too!” I said. “So much so, I named a song after it a bunch of years ago.”
This was the song:
Young Nickels the Great was a musical project that I started in the ‘00s and which has unoffically been on standby since 2017 or so, and I had not so much as even looked at the Youtube page linked above since at least 2017, probably far earlier.
So imagine my surprise as I went to retrieve a link to share the ‘Sphinx of Black Quartz’ video and saw the first (and to this day, only) comments on any of my decade-plus-old videos:
Those last three especially are everything I could ever dream of, “so um.. what the fuck”, “wtf is this”, “what the fuck”, because not only is that a totally licit response to the above video, it is (if I’m being honest) one of the primary reactions2 i seek to elicit not just with Young Nickel the Great but in all my artistic endeavors—even when that reaction comes from some anonymous randos twelve-or-so years after the fact.
I’m reminded of something I read recently in Fernando Sdrigotti’s Substack, where he was talking about
writers who write “just in case”3, as Alejandro Zambra tells us José Santos González Vera would reply when asked the question we’ve all heard many times: “Why do you write?” Just in case is a beautiful answer; I can’t think of a better one. For me that just in case means “just in case someone reads me”.
Writing just in case, making music just in case, sticking a message in a bottle4 and chucking that mfer into the ocean, just in case it rolls ashore and someone opens it up and reads and says “so um.. what the fuck”.
In the first post of this newsletter i mentioned that i would “occasionally plug my own stuff here, whether it’s words or music or whatever” and so here goes, if you want more Young Nickels the Great music here’s the entire discography, folks:
I Was Young, 2012
Still Pretty Great, 2017
Enjoy!
(only later would I learn that my memory of this sentence was a bowlderized, tee-totaler version of the true pangram which is ‘pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs’)
not the only reaction i hope to elicit, of course
I don’t have access to the original quote from González Vera via Zambra (via Sdrigotti), so I can only imagine that the original went something like “—¿Por qué escribes? —Por si acaso”, which thanks to that parellelism of por and por is way more elegant than the English equivalent
(even if that message simply says “TONTO QUIEN LO LEA”)