Welcome to Pits and Landings

Here goes nothing.

“Are your subscribers expecting you?” “Yes, I don’t think they are.”

Hello again to everyone here because of last week’s “Pitchfork and Me” post, or Ezra Klein’s link to the post in the NYT. And hello to anyone for whom this post is your first. Thanks for reading this far.

About that first post: some things have clarified a bit with the Pitchfork situation: all those staffers (many of whom I count as friends, some as good friends) still were laid off by Anna Wintour while wearing sunglasses. But reviews are still going up. The last few days in that respect have been a mix of predictable melancholy and surprising sweetness—as I write this, the site’s two most recent features are from a father-son duo. (I have a Sunday Review in the works on a subject that will not be a surprise, but I’m still waiting for the final word on whether or not I should continue writing.)

If you want more informed insight on the whole Pitchfork thing, I recommend Ann Powers’ NPR newsletter, Laura Snapes’ take at The Guardian, Marc Hogan’s Rolling Stone column, and Spencer Kornhaber’s piece at the Atlantic.

Okay. Throat sufficiently cleared, the rest of this post will explain what you can expect from this newsletter going forward.

First: this is a free newsletter, and will remain free until (a longshot) the work gathers a momentum of its own. I’m happy to share my thoughts here without asking for donations. But if it turns into a reliably published, or even researched and edited magazine-type thing or something, that will change.

That said, this will also be a periodic newsletter, lol, one that I will update as I re-develop the blog muscles that have atrophied over the past decade or so. I’m going to try to post once per week, but we’ll see where that goes.

I’m also talking to a talented artist/designer/musician friend about ways to make this dump look a lot nicer.

I’ve also thought a lot about the whole Substack/Nazis thing. I went back and forth on this subject for a bit, and considered porting my original Wordpress blog over into the newsletter world, which I think can happen. But at the moment, Max Read’s take on the subject is where I stand. I understand others’ concerns and support their decision not to support Substack, but at this moment the platform’s affordances far outweigh its downsides.

A quick word from our sponsor:

We’re back! Onto the details. I’m going to do a few kinds of post here:

• Book-related: I’m in the very early process of starting a new book, and I applied for a sabbatical semester during Fall 2024 to get going (I’ll learn if it’s approved…soon, I hope?). The book (which I’ve talked to many of you about, and I’ll talk to many more in the forthcoming months) is going to pick up where my dissertation (filed in 2013, researched and written over the prior four years) left off. Which leaves a lot to pick up! I’m currently in the Picking Up stage, also known as the Devouring All Information From The Last Ten Years stage, Johnny Five-style. I’m going to post a lot about whatever interesting things I come across during research, and provide updates on the book process too. This will really pick up as we inch nearer to summer.

  • To start, here’s an in-progress bibliography that covers a lot of (but not nearly all of) the work I’m catching up on. If you, dear reader, would like to add anything to that (your own work, or others’), please comment or otherwise reach out.

• Thinkpieces/columns: Pits and Landings will also be a home for the kind of stray thoughts that Twitter sucked out of me over the past 14 years, atomized into tiny thoughtlets, and misted through its venal platform. There was a time when I could crank out a few of these a week, but those venues are few and far between now. But I still tend to think in pitches even when I’m not pitching articles, so from time to time I’ll expand on those here.

• Monthly new music listening: I’ve been doing these off and on for several years now—for new + old music and just new music. and I’d like to re-start the new music one but with a bit of writing appended. These will come at the end of each month and they’ll all be culled from this rolling list.

• Deep-dives on artists, genres, sounds, and vibes: Like this one, or this one—but with accompanying essays. Or this one. This, too. And this. Oh, and this one. One more. Okay, last one. Hehe.

  • …one more :)

• Personal stuff: Have you ever read Will Leitch’s newsletter? Something like that format, but about my own life/career, and hopefully half as good. I have one cooking now about my first career as a documentary videographer/editor that ended suddenly while on location at Ft. Benning, shooting snipers-in-training.

• Internet round-ups: Lightly annotated posts and articles and other stuff from around the internet. This is more or less the “Log of my travels through the Web” (“web-log” for short. “Blog” is even shorter) part.

• Perhaps a conversation of some sort with another person: I don’t want to interview artists pegged to album cycles; this isn’t intended as a promotional thing. But I do think there’s some value in talking about things I’m interested in with smart people, or getting a musician on the phone I’ve been listening to for years and ask them a bunch of probing questions about why I find their work so compelling. I assume it'd be best done as a podcast? We’ll see.

I also hope to give each one of these features their own title at some point.

I further hope you will reach out to me personally if there’s anything you want me to write about, a question to address, or maybe you just want to yell at me for something: marathonpacks at Google’s free email service.