Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
This is some good fucking news.
“Today is going to be a joyful moment. For all the pain, for all the criticisms, a joyful moment for the Black women who led a movement to get one of their sisters home. This was a grassroots movement. They had to push to get male athletes, to get us to take it seriously, but they have triumphed.”
CNN political commentator Van Jones
When your band or your art gets that TV mini series like The Beatles: Get Back, will you have any archival video footage from the studio? From writing your songs? Talking about the inspiration of your lyrics, of the pedals you use, of the shows you’ve played?
Or will all that footage and text and audio be lost to a social media platform that you don’t own?
I’ve covered and worked a handful of albums over the years, from my music blog days in 2001 to now working with indie music publicists and labels, and I’m still blown away at how little reverence there is for the archival process for so many acts.
Sure, there’s concert photos on Twitter, and maybe some 200 word captions on an Instagram post, but there was a lot we uploaded to MySpace, too.
What about all the features you gave to media outlets that don’t even exist anymore?
Just a decade later a handful of outlets don’t exist anymore, and no one really remembers the video interview you did (maybe it’s on YouTube), or the print review in a magazine, or all the photos from your tour in 2003.
They’re… pretty much gone.
And even if they’re out there in Google images or YouTube, they ain’t on your site.
Looking for a sign to document more of your work, your magic, your art? This is it.
I got talking about Carlisle, PA with a friend recently. We read about the city on Wikipedia (here) and learned of this boarding school called the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, “an experiment in educating Native Americans and teaching them to reject tribal culture and to adapt to white society.” Horrific.
I’ve lived in PA most of my life and never heard of this place. This atrocity.
“Carlisle became the model for 26 off-reservation Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools in 15 states and territories. Some private boarding schools were sponsored by religious denominations.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Industrial_School
Oh, religious denominations, falling right in line with American imperialism!
And this from the “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the fiscal year ending 1882“:
All our students attend Sabbath-school, the girls in our own chapel, the boys at the different churches in Carlisle. Sabbath afternoon services havo been conducted by Rev. Dr. Lijpincott, of Dickinson College, to whom I am greatly indebted for faithful and zealous services as chaplain. These influences have produced gratifying results.
I mean, how does the church justify this? How do they remedy this? They played a part in the genocide of a people.
These are children from just 120 years ago. Sickening.
Some links from today’s browser history.
Been messing around with some music production using Abelton Live, and finding some interesting characters on YouTube to learn from. One of them is Sarah2ill, and she’s great.
From Tilt #67 I learned of photographer Drew Kerr who was going to have an exhibition at the Queens Library, but it got cancelled, and raises all sorts of questions about censorship and art.
My first mentor taught me that it is OK to not know how to do something as long as I am willing to learn how to do it. Another taught me the value of “Dance like nobody’s watching; email like it’s being read into a deposition.”
Sarah Wefald
I met Sarah Wefald back around 2008 I think, a time that’s a little hazy because holy crap that was over 10 years ago. We rode bikes with some other music biz pals down to the beach and stuff. She has a nice interview over at Laserfiche, ‘Women in Tech: Championing Innovation as a Technical Product Manager,‘ and continues to be a bad ass.
When I go downstairs in our apartment and all of my recording gear is set up, it’s rare that I don’t at least come up with one idea. If I come back from a show and leave my guitar and pedals packed away, it takes longer for me to get back in a groove of practicing and making demos.
Jeffrey Silverstein at The Creative Independent
