It’s your semi-regular somewhat-monthly installment of Geistlist, the decreasingly secret newsletter of Jacob Ford, and kind of a corrupted 4-way merge between nonsensenyc, Garbage Day, shareholder letters, and a church bulletin.
Most of you I know in real life but a growing number I do not, which makes me feel honored and strange. Please don’t feel weird introducing yourself sometime if you’d like, via a reply to this very email or one of the Things below.
The unsubscribe button is always at the bottom—use it if you ever need—and there’s an RSS version too.
¶. The newest podcast
Launched a podcast, and I made it a little website too. It’s about objects, people, and Old New York. It is called Undiscarded, hosted by your curious friend and mine: Tania Mohammed. She’s good at asking people why they love things, and translating their answers into understanding.
¶. Tonight 7-10pm: Open VCR Night
You walk into a divey Bushwich arcade bar on a last Monday night of the month, it’s basically empty and you order some kind of KCBC sour. In the middle of the room is a blue-screen VCR hooked through an ungodly snake of adapters to a projector and a live Twitch stream. A stack of tapes sites beside, but you brought a grody CVS bag of tapes you found on a Ridgewood sidewalk because you read about this VHS nostalgia death cult on Thrillist. Nobody appears to be in charge, nobody is watching but everybody might. You know what you have to do.
eject at will in Brooklyn / watch powerlessly via wires
¶. Every other Wednesday: Leave Your Apartment
Party critic Adlan Jackson has a new fortnightly column in Hell Gate, where he does what this newsletter tries to do but about other people and less about my own stuff. Adlan rocks at describing scenes you never really thought to check out or be part of, and also at calling you personally to the stand. Please help me make him write a piece about sneaking into Brooklyn Steel.
You can also save $50/year on Hell Gate until midnight tonight I think? I just did. They’re good people on the internet: words worth paying for, from folks you can email. If you miss the sale it’s okay, still worth trying for a month.
¶. Accumulate Birds
A couple months ago I had the chance to full-circle my infatuation-turned-collaboration-turned-friendship with Yannick Trapman O’Brian, who has been writing a series on the role of money in art, which some day I want to typeset into a miniature book.
As art begets life, both our freewheeling interview about everything and nothing, to which I am too afraid to listen but do remember vaguely what I said and the Pay Up series are not free, but are behind one of those fun and small Patreons where the traffic is refreshingly light, fans are more like friends of friends, and comments are generally read. Think book club, but you can choose to be invisible. In fact, there are monthly readings.
It’s $2/month, as many or few months as you want. If you want to listen or read but money’s tight, hit me up and we’ll hook you up.
¶. Horror behind proscenium
I wrote my first-ever theater review, on War Dreamer.
∞. Liam’s screenshot garden
My internet art pal Liam tends a garden of funny screenshots. Worth popping into your RSS reader, or visiting every quarter or so.
Bonus: Alvin Lucier’s sound art piece I Am Sitting in a Room, translated into hypertext