Well this is a surprise. Not least of all to me.
If you’re reading this blog at the start of 2021, you probably have some inkling of who I am and what I do. But any future internet wanderers who stumble across another post months from now deserve some sort of introduction, lest they mistake me for Just Another Middle-Aged White Man Who Says Stuff Online, when I am in fact A Very Specific Kind of Middle-Aged White Man Who Says Stuff Online.
I’ve been alive for about half a century and I’ve been writing professionally, mostly about music, for half of that. My career to date has been roughly bookended by two stints as music editor of the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages, from 2000-2001 and again from 2017-2020. (That work is sadly [temporarily?] offline. Lots of it’s really good though.) In the interim, I’ve edited and written, on staff and freelance, for a whole mess of alt-weeklies and magazines and websites, some of which still exist even. (There was also a little matter of law school that I chose to discuss solely with the loan agencies who control my financial destiny.)
After City Pages was snuffed out last October, I felt no immediate impulse to weigh in at length on matters of the day, be they cultural, political, or whatever you call that stuff we talk about on Twitter. Instead I tinkered with some larger projects and slept voraciously. Slowly though, the urge returned to sort through accumulated half-thoughts and see if they looked reasonably lucid when spelled out in words.
And hey, so, here’s this newsletter, as we now call blogs. At least until the world outside returns, expect freeform discussion of whatever art I’m consuming here in solitary, filtered through my predilections and preoccupations. Nothing flashy, I know, but what are you expecting, the reinvention of the internet or something?
Judging by my previous blogging projects, my prediction is a flurry of overambitious posts in the early weeks, a desktop folder clogged with unfinished drafts stressing me out after that, then a long gap in publishing followed by an apologetic reboot some time in the fall. But maybe, as they say, “this time will be different.”