NEW DOINGS

Your front-row ticket to my statistically inevitable public humiliation

My archives hold a little over 900,000 words. From this trove, I’ve found 52 pieces that still hold up—lost bloggings, zine bits, offline reviews, unpublished articles. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting one of these pieces every Friday. I’m prescheduling a year’s worth. These posts will be available for subscribers only. The regular articles will remain free. I should probably have done this from the beginning, but it’s hard to predict how a large project will function until one has been inside it for a while. Every book and band I’ve been part of has worked like this. Manuscripts can languish for years. Born Against only played five shows before hibernating for seven months. To quote the musician Henry Barnes, things that are bitchin’ take time.

I don’t understand Substack any more than I understood Twitter or MySpace or the BBS posts strangers used to relay to me in physical letters 30+ years ago. I appreciate the (relative) civility on this platform, but nothing about this place makes me think it has any permanence. So, I’m going to do the one year and see where things stand. The goal is still four free posts a month, a benchmark I actually met in April. You now ask: Does this post count? To which I reply: What did I just say about me not understanding Substack?

Lotta unused art on my hard drive as well.

In 2010, while searching for a reliable app to help me post tweets at scheduled times, I stumbled into a wide-ranging message board debate over whether or not tweet scheduling was “evil.” I use the quotation marks because the original posters used the quotation marks. It was as if they couldn’t quite decide if asynchronous public tweets could rise to the level of human evil. Because I will now be posting asynchronously in a time of mass calamity, I’m pretty much guaranteed that at least one of these 52 posts will look tremendously inappropriate on the day it goes up. A subscription is your front-row ticket to my statistically inevitable public humiliation. Sign up now.