Welcome to Geistlist, a newsletter about Things for People in Places. Inspired by nonsensenyc, shareholder letters, and church bulletins.
¶. Now: Opening of the Beringia land bridge
There's a land bridge open right now from Twitter to Mastodon and a lot of us are having a lot of fun dancing on it. Feels like Twitter in 2010, or blogs in 2005, or borrowing my crush & bus seat partner's iPod Classic in 2005.
Anyone whimpering about how Twitter somehow die overnight is giving Elon Musk the lowest possible bar for success. The most devastated seem the least likely to remember when Twitter was weird and difficult and crashed all the time; when we invented hashtags and retweets and when you couldn't tweet a photo from Twitter.com.
Communities rarely die sudden deaths, they fizzle. The rare deaths that are sudden are scheduled: building demolitions & server shutdowns. They never have seating but still always attract crowds for the final moments of existence.
Twitter is going nowhere, that's why we are.
We over at the Popula & Brick House built a fun little server called thelife.boats. I kick the database when it gets stuck. Maria moderates the content. It's chill, quiet except when it's not, slants a bit media heavy with hard-hitting journalist-on-journalist engagement, but all are welcome. I encourage even the most normie and Twi-curious among you to [join]: we'll let you in.
We wrote a little guide for regular folk.
¶. Tonight: chill tapes to doomscrool/get laid off to
Tonight is a Last Monday, which means it's also Open VCR Night. Thrillist liked it. You might. 7:00 to 10:00pm, sharp. Followed by a FORT90 screening of a strange film on amnesia, reality TV production, pornstars, and cops.
¶. Thursday: Generate, maybe. Cello, definitely.
Lynn has the 'VID, so we're going to decide Wednesday.
Regardless, come see Hallie Spoor play psychedelic Colorado-flavor sadgirl chamber teardrops on her cello with me beforehand.
Monday, etc.: exclusive access to The Telelibrary
Telelibrary is a friendly, easy to use, professional, and only mostly fictional manually automated literary server, self-care provider, and conspiracy which you can dial into from any telephone.
Thanks to the success of Undersigned, I have a number of exclusive sessions targeted to members of the City Reliquary, which I can also open to you, Geistlisters.
Please do consider a Reliquary membership, but regardless please also consider a visit to the Telelibrary. It's on the house.
It's a year old now as I am behind on 2022, but you can read more on why at celebrate.cityreliquary.org, which I designed.
¶. With money: buy art
My strange life has brought me in contact with some genuinely art-market-valuable art pieces, and boy are many of them not designed to last.
Jeff Kratz's are. I'm somehow his NYC gallerist, which means I am hiding his pieces in coffee shops, bars, and my apartment with business cards next to them with my email address. Two are also currently at Exhibit B Gallery in Souderton, PA if you're near. (There were three, one sold.)
He makes parts for nonexistent spaceships, bible verses printed on pieces of broken churches, emergency floatation artwork, and self-defense paintings. Just email him and he'll be too nice. Very normal to negotiate a price or work out an installment plan. Art is emotional but also for sale.
We got to hang out over Thanksgiving and talk about the Justice vs. Daft Punk live albums, political identities, and sealing wood to last decades longer than it needs to. Very resilient-future type thinking, which the longer I live the more I think is vital. Design for the future you'll never meet.
∞. Recommended reading
Sam Kriss's The Secret History of Wakanda pairs so nicely with the first chapter of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years, which is the only chapter you have to read.¹
I do wonder if in some ¶s they're writing about the same secretive colonies.
¹ One of my back-back-cakewarming-burner projects is to get the rights for (or ask forgiveness after) printing just that chapter as a little pamphlet/zine type thing and dropping it with confusing $0 ISBNs at bookstores.