Mark Richardson
Month
There’s a guy who wanders around my neighborhood, I’ve seen him for years, and he’s recognizable from a good distance because he’s tall and he walks very quickly and with an oblong gait. He always looks like he’s in a tremendous hurry to get somewhere and I’m pretty sure he sleeps in the street, at least a lot of the time. His pants are often torn and his clothes are generally dirty and he wears a lot of layers. His hair and beard are long. And if I walk by this guy he always says, without fail, “Do you have a quarter?” And he never says anything else. The first few times I saw him I was a little nervous because he appears very agitated and his eyes dart around furiously, like he’s really upset or angry about something. But after seeing him a few times I realized that this is just his state, and if I said “No” to the quarter, he just moved on, walking at his usual double-speed clip.
A few weeks ago I was walking back home in the early evening and it was very cold, the coldest day in New York that I could remember in a long time. I happened to be listening to Harry Belefonte’s version of “Danny Boy,” which I like very much. It had been a while since I’d heard it–I’m finally getting used to Spotify and slowly adding old favorites to playlists. I’m attracted to a certain kind of maudlin music for some reason, music that floods with broad sadness in a way that for some people makes it trite. And Belefonte’s version of this ballad is a good example–when his voice jumps up to falsetto in the chorus, it just kills me.
And then walking down the sidewalk toward me was the guy. It was dark, but I knew his shape. As he got closer I could see he had a winter jacket on but it was unzipped and open, and his shoes didn’t look warm or insulated or even water-tight. I thought man, he must be freezing, and I took off my headphones, and he reached me and asked for the quarter. I said “Sure,” even though I knew I had only a $10 bill. This time I felt like I wanted to say something. I dug for my wallet and said “Man, it’s cold. What’s your name? I’m Mark,” and he said “Danny.“
It wasn’t a lot. Generally speaking, I write during my “free time,” and this year, spending nights and weekends in front of the same computer that I spend my weekdays in front of didn’t happen as much. I had a lot of non-work stuff going on this year, family things, health things, spent entirely too much time reading about politics. Very proud of the work we did at Pitchfork in 2016, our first full year being owned by Conde Nast.
I enjoyed the writing I did manage to finish, and I have a few pieces coming up that I’m excited about.
My favorite thing I wrote was the piece about Albert Ayler in New York.
I still love ya, Tumblr!
Reviews
Feature:
New York Is Killing Me: Albert Ayler’s Life and Death in the Jazz Capital
Tumblr Posts:
Thanks. This was my ballot:
The one record I regret not making it is the Philip Jeck/Alter Ego version of The Sinking of the Titanic. There was some question as to whether it counted as ambient at the time, and I was leaning toward no, but I listened to it again after the list ran and I think you could make a good argument for it. And it’s just a fantastic record.
Tonight I watched Lo and Behold, the new Werner Herzog movie. It’s about the internet, and robots, and artificial intelligence, and where technology might be taking us. I really enjoyed it, as I do most Herzog’s films. I watched it via the internet, paid $6 on Amazon thru my Roku,which seemed appropriate.
There was one sequence in the movie where Herzog is interviewing a guy who works in a robot laboratory and this engineer is working on a robot that looks vaguely human and he’s trying to get it to think and do things. There is a monitor that shows what is happening in the robot’s “mind” as it scans its surroundings and runs little simulations that show what actions it might take with its limbs and what outcome might be expected. And as the robot learns, it will understand what it takes to do something like, say, ambulate through a door and into a room and shut off a valve on the opposite wall. Herzog and the engineer discuss when this kind of thing could be useful—something like the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, when it is too dangerous to send people inside to shut the systems down but a robot could potentially accomplish such a task.
Later, about an hour after Julie went to bed, I was getting ready for bed myself and I realized I needed to charge my computer, but I forgot to bring my charger home from work. Our other charger was on the coffee table, but I have a Mac Air, and this charger is for the Mac Powerbook—it doesn’t fit. But I have an adaptor, a little $10 part that is rectangular and about the size of a small coin. I remembered that I had opened the drawer in the bedroom yesterday while looking for something else and that I saw the adaptor with a bunch of other small junk in the corner of the drawer. Now Julie was sleeping in there and I didn’t want to wake her. But I knew, just knew, that I could now find that small part in the crowded drawer based on my memory of its position, without needing to see it. So I walked into the dark bedroom, walked over to the desk, felt around until I found the knob for the drawer, opened it, put my hand inside, and there it was: the adaptor, the first thing I touched.
I am typing this on my computer as it charges, and now I am going to sleep.
Of course I know of it; I’ve only watched a couple of videos, because in general I much prefer reading over watching videos of people talking (which will probably spell my doom, eventually).
Something in this quote resonated, the essential suggestion that early on he didn’t know that he shouldn’t be doing this kind of writing. There is, sometimes, a power in being ignorant of the right way to go about things. I would say the structure for writing in the social media era is very good at telling you when you’re wrong, when something is a bad idea, which is a positive thing 95% of the time. But there is that 5% where you might go someplace different b/c you’re insulated from the people who will tell you you shouldn’t and you could find something interesting there.
ah no, it was just what I had on my phone at the time, I had a free account through work. and now its gone!
not the worst idea I’ve ever heard
No. Ultimately I like Callahan/Smog much better, though David Berman is one of my favorite writers who has ever lived. Callahan is much more musical in every way. He’s a good guitarist and an absolutely brilliant singer, like at this point I feel like his singing is at an unbelievably high level, gets better every year. Berman’s Actual Air book is about 20x better than Letter to Emma Bowlcut though!
I am supremely unqualified to answer this. The only one I know well and love is Dig Me Out. I refer you to Jenn Pelly’s review of their discography.
I never got into them at all, have literally never listened to them for pleasure, not quite sure why.
I like them a fair amount, but I’m def. a novice. Every 80s thing I hear I love. Palace of Swords Reversed I know very well and love.
This is like a flat 9, I love it an listen to it regularly.
this was asked during one of those “ask me records and I’ll rate them” things, and I later wound up reviewing this one.
Uh, American Water is one of my favorite albums of all time, and American Football I listened to a few times when it was reissued, and thought it sounded pretty good.
I like him a fair amount, though honestly Excitable Boy and the best-of are really all I need. He was very funny and wrote beautiful melodies, just a very unusual character in pop music. The oral history of his life that came out about 10 years ago was good.
I’d say like an 8, I like it a lot, but haven’t listened to it in a long time. It’s not EQ’d very well though, the bass dominates the mix in a way that doesn’t suit the music.
I’d say Confield. It took me a long time to get into it. When it finally clicked I honestly thought of Miles Davis On the Corner, feels like that kind of mix of way-out texture and disorienting rhythm.
Definitely TNT. Honestly I’d say TNT and “DJed” are the only things I need. Not a huge fan, but I do love those records.
I loved it. Really gave me a lot to chew on. I think it’s probably the most important new book about music in the last 5 years (Ellen Wills Out of the Vinyl Deeps is the most important overall). The book endured a lot of criticism but to me that was a sign of how much it made people think. To a degree I think it was written to start conversations, and it did that and then some.
I don’t know Blur well. Pitchfork has a fantastic piece coming this Sunday about Pulp’s Different Class, and I was saying to someone (and I’ve said this in a few places) that I completely missed Britpop. I was living out of a duffel bag for the years in which it became a thing. I barely bought a CD for 3 years b/c they cost $16 and I was lucky if I was getting paid $5 an hour. So Britpop passed me by completely. I’m still catching up with it.
Pieces that make me think about music in a new way, where I read and I can tell that what’s being written is going to affect how I hear this music forever. Writing that makes me hear what you are hearing.
That is actually another writer named Mark Richardson; I wrote a Tumblr post about getting the two of us confused once.
With negative reviews especially I think you have to think hard about what the artist is trying to do, think about other artists who have done something similar and succeeded, and then articulate why this record falls short. You have to put your cards on the table a bit more, pointing out what you look for in this kind of music that this music does not have. You also have to avoid thinking about what you want the album to be, versus what it is. Negative reviews are very hard, more difficult than positive reviews by a factor of like 5.
Maybe I’m running out of ideas.
I definitely agree with you, but I think I end up focusing more on the what is being communicated than the life of the person communicating, if that makes sense. They choose to share this thing with me, and I engage with that thing, and don’t necessarily try and see it in terms of what else might be going on in this person’s life. Obviously with a lot of musicians their lives are part of the “work” though.
I think it’s a million reasons, really, the most common happening at two poles: 1) they get a job writing somewhere else, and can’t write for Pitchfork anymore; and 2) they stop writing about music altogether. The latter is much more common. Generally speaking music writing is a younger person’s game, and people move on to other things as they grow up and build lives.
You must think more of your writing during that time than I think of mine if “sounds like something I would’ve written back in college” is a compliment, but I thank you just the same!
Today I was walking my dog Stanley and I heard a mourning dove. It’s a very familiar sound from my childhood.
Between the ages of 11 and 13, I delivered the Lansing State Journal in my neighborhood. In those days paper carriers were contractors and ran their own business. You had to buy the papers from the State Journal, and then you had to collect from the customers. If your collections were bad you could actually lose money. I opened my first checking account at this age so I could use it for buying papers for my route.
As a kid I thought they birds were called “morning doves” because I always heard their call in the morning. Often when I would be delivering papers, it would be right around dawn and I would be the only person on the streets, everything was dead quiet but I could hear the birds and that lonely sound. The sound suggests “An empty street at dawn” to me, and even now whenever I hear it, it takes me back to that place. I think of a bag of papers on my back and the sun is just coming up and I feel like the only person in the world.
I would usually walk on my route or ride my bike, but on Sundays, and some holidays, like New Year’s Day, the papers would be too thick and heavy for me to carry, so my mother or father would drive me. They would insist on getting up extra early to drive to Dunkin’ Donuts to get coffee and donuts to drink and eat while i did my deliveries. If it was New Year’s Day, they might be hungover.
In the winter in Michigan, it would be impossibly cold, and I can remember mornings where my face would feel like it was cracking it and it was dark and the world seemed like it was covered in ice. And I’d grab a stack of papers from the car and go down a street and back and then I’d return to see my father sitting in the front seat, the dome light of the car on, coffee in his hand, donut on the seat, and he would be reading the sports section carefully so that he could re-assemble the paper for my last customer. The heat would be blasting in the car and I’d warm up for a second and I was thinking I’d do anything just to be able to stay in there and go to sleep. But instead I grabbed a stack for the next street and stepped back out into the black and freezing morning.
Right now you are woodshedding. This is a great place to be. You are figuring out what you think and the best way to express it. My advice right now is to enjoy being in this place where you are writing things but not many people are watching—this allows you to practice. Make some dumb mistakes, at this time when you can delete them later and no one notices, and look at these mistakes and figure out how you can do better.
Well, I’m not sure they would. I think he’d rate well below: Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Dave Brubeck, Joe Zawinul, Art Tatum, Ahmad Jamal. He’s probably the 3rd or 4th most famous keyboardist to play w/ Miles Davis. However, it is very much a relative thing, he’s by no means obscure, and your point is well taken.
The songs of Nevermind are caught between two soundscapes: quiet and loud. The quiet is home to the rolling bass, garbled whispers, and thumping pedal drum. The loud is the land of every door you’ve ever slammed and every scream you’ve caught in your throat before it got out. But despite the sheer raw force of the loud, I’ve always been partial to the quiet.
I love finding power in quiet. No one ever expects strength to come from silence, but it does. My voice never shakes in whispers. To be quiet deliberately is to believe in the power of your words without embellishment or affectation. Silence is so often thought of as something imposed upon people (especially women), and while that is certainly true, there’s a special power in taking ownership of an attribute forced on you. Silence, closed doors, and whispers have been used by women for millennia out of necessity, so there’s something revolutionary about a woman shouting and yelling her truth, and something else equally revolutionary about a man choosing to whisper.
Nirvana’s use of dynamics are important, even crucial, to understanding their identity as a band. They were so often defined by their anger, which means it would have been easy, maybe even logical, to yell all the time. Grunge and rock music have always been about making the most of noise, right? Pissing off the masses by shouting in their faces. But Nirvana didn’t do that. They chose instead to present to their audiences their vulnerability and duality. I guess you could argue that their quiet was only there to make their loudness louder, but I choose to see it the other way round. While it’s always shocking when the quiet one starts to scream, there’s no denying that the scariest kind of anger is a soft one. Nirvana’s quiet is a menacing whisper, equal parts pain and fury. It’s not the preamble to the bigger, better thing; it’s the main event in and of itself.
Kurt Cobain’s voice never seems to stop cracking when he screams. It rasps and rumbles and always sounds like the act of singing is a physically and emotionally painful one. But not when he whispers. When he whispers, he’s strong. When he whispers, he’s untouchable .
I think this was my favorite thing I wrote for owob this past week. I’m very rarely (if ever) proud of anything I write but I’m proud of this.
Quite enjoyed this and a couple of other pieces in this Nirvana OWOB, look fwd to reading the rest.
I haven’t left a note on a post since they changed it, since it seems like I have to direct them to a specific person?? What am I missing?
I’ll answer this too but now I’m asking you:
1) what are your greatest strengths as a writer?
2) what about writing makes you feel best?
3) what is your favorite thing you’ve written this year?
4) what’s the hardest thing about writing?
5) what are your weaknesses as a writer?
6) what about writing makes you feel bad?
7) what do you hope to change about your writing in the next year?
Didn’t mean to take a month for this but here we go:
1) The thing I feel most comfortable with is my tone. I have a voice in writing that feels very “me” and (I hope) also communicates. My writing has grown simpler over time but I like that.
2) Finishing things. I never really know how good something is at that point, but I love that I completed something and I’m passing it on to someone else.
3) This is last year now, but probably the one column I wrote. It took a long time to get it done but it pulled together a lot of things I’d been thinking about. I have to give Pitchfork editor Ryan Dombal a lot of credit for it, the original draft was twice as long and half as good and he helped me figure out what was essential.
4) A tie between starting and finishing.
5) I don’t think I’m much of a stylist, which works two ways I guess. I mentioned that I enjoy writing simply, but I can also feel my limitations, and there are times when I wish I had more tools at my disposal. My comfort w/ my tone probably also makes my writing a little “safe” too.
6) Putting things off and not finishing them. Wishing i had better discipline.
7) I want to write slower, maybe do fewer things but work on them more and make them better.
In July I went back to Michigan to visit my parents. They are having a hard time with aging. My father has a severe neurological disease that makes movement difficult and often makes it hard for him to sleep. Because he sleeps so badly my mother also sleeps very badly. My dad can’t really move on his own at night so he needs a lot of help. So when I go home I usually sleep on the couch near my parents bedroom so my mom can go to another room and get a decent night’s rest. One night this past July when I was home my dad woke me up every 10 or 15 minutes for 6 or 7 hours. It was a particularly bad one for him. Sometimes he would need help getting out of bed and sometimes he was hallucinating, which can happen with a medication he takes, and he would be talking to me from another world. A night like that feels like it’s never going to end. At first I’m cheerful and glad to help, but by 4 a.m., after being awakened 25 times, my patience is gone and I’m so tired and I’m getting short with him and then I feel bad about that. Finally my mom wakes up, she slept great and feels amazing, which makes me feel a little better. She takes over and I drive to the local Starbucks and order a venti coffee with no room for cream and I start writing a review of the final three Led Zeppelin reissues, which I finish two hours and three coffees later.
Thank you.
Mark and I were talking about how the “golden age of Tumblr” was, for us, somewhere between 2009 and 2012, when music writers amateur and professional traded ideas and interactions across literally hundreds of thousands of words on this micro-blogging website, flattening the divide between amateur and professional in a way that was honestly thrilling. If you had something to say of value, you’d reblog it onto someone else’s post, and maybe win yourself a follow or a like, and then in a few months you could e-mail that person about becoming their intern. (I did, and it almost worked!)
Today, that network doesn’t really exist. There are lots of younger writers, yes, and they’re chopping it up in ways that are obviously exciting if you take an interest in younger writers and “the future of discourse,” whatever that is. But there’s much less contribution from established writers, for a few reasons:
1. Twitter: This is where the majority of all “public discourse” takes place, inasmuch as “the public discourse that shapes the narratives and opinions of any contained media ecosystem.” If you’re a music, sports, movies, games writer, whatever, you’re probably on Twitter, and using it too much. If you’re not: Congrats!
2. Money: In 2015, you can probably get paid writing something that, a few years ago, would have been a free Tumblr post. That’s fine, I guess, even as—IMO—a lot of writers could do a better job recognizing what ideas are worth legitimizing in a public venue, for cash. (But maybe I’m just being petty.)
3. Time: Who has time to use Tumblr?
All of these are fine reasons for older people to stop using Tumblr. We did spend a lot of time on here! We were also not getting paid for it, at all. But in terms of serving as a medium for public conversation amongst peers, there’s no doubt in my mind that Tumblr was better than Twitter. No doubt! You could respond to each other at length, in real time, in a format that showed where the conversation had begun and where it was. You could do it with writing, instead of 140-character wannabe-koan bursts of limited logic.
I mean, I love Twitter at times, it’s great for memes and Weird Twitter and the spread of (accurately sourced) news and finding out what people are reading. But I refuse to accept that anyone but the most basic contrarian could insist a medium that intentionally limits the expression of writing could be the best medium for writing. And yet Twitter is what all the writers use! It’s awful. I think it just stinks. Everyone’s just bickering and posturing over there, and no discussions get had but the angriest, least nuanced ones, because you can’t be nuanced in 140 characters without tweeting a bunch of times in a row, and then God, you’re just tweeting a bunch of times in a row, and if you don’t do it now—if you wait to collect your thoughts—then you’re the guy tweeting about something hours after it happened.
Anyways, this is the way it works now. I’m complaining, and maybe it’s just that. It’s out of my hands, and any attempt to prescribe a solution or alternative would make me look like a Luddite. Besides, there are enough very smart and good people who use Twitter without really using Twitter that make it obvious this is not the solely dominant mode of communication amongst the so-called “media professional” class. (People do still communicate through… writing.) I do think that if more people were on here instead of on there, then better conversations would take place… but just because I see the value in opting out doesn’t mean everyone else does, or would.
All of which is to say opting out remains a valuable strategy across all walks of life, not just Tumblr and Twitter (ha ha). 2015 was an up and down year for me, mostly up, only down in the places when I wasn’t sure what to do and didn’t figure it out until a few months too late. A lot of that divining process involved stepping back and thinking hard about what I really wanted to do, instead of sitting and bitching about what wasn’t going right. So, if I can delete my entire Twitter history, you can too (or its metaphorical equivalent). That I’m finding my way to a “life lesson” by talking about Tumblr and Twitter is not lost on me, but uh, I already knew my brain was diseased with online. I’m just trying to deal with it. Happy New Year’s!
I remember thinking circa 2011 or so, “If everything goes south for some reason, I could happily just get a straight job and write about music on Tumblr.” However many followers I had on here then, that was all the audience I needed. The process of writing things, the knowledge that your writing was being read, the feedback, and the conversation surrounding it all were there. Maybe it was in my head I dunno, and maybe something else in the future will be like that.
Five years ago I started a tumblr called Invisible Music, in which I posted tracks of (mostly) experimental electronic music and wrote about them without naming them. It was a lot of fun and I loved doing it but, alas, as happens with most online writing projects, I stopped doing it, and it’s time to put it to bed. Here are the tracks I posted, and there are a few pieces of writing here I still like. If you followed it, I hope you enjoyed it.
Track 19: Benjamin Franklin - “La Pente”
Track 18: Red Red Meat - “Paul Pachel”
Track 17: The Orkustra “Bombay Calling”
Track 16: Unknown Artist: “Degung instrumental no. 2" (from this)
Track 15: Folk Implosion: “Raise the Bells”
Track 14: Neina: “Transluscent Metal”
Track 12: Experimental Audio Research - Space Themes Part 1 & 2
Track 11: Child’s View - “Cradle of Light”
Track 10: Ursula Bogner - “De Planetarum Influx”
Track 9: Alog: “Song Sung Inwardly”
Track 8: Ekkehard Ehlers & Stephan Mathieu - “Rose”
Track 7: Mice Parade — “Mystery Brethren Vironment (Child’s View Remix)”
Track 5: Nuno Canavarro “Bruma”