Category: Uncategorized

I have to ask: is everyone else getting as many spam texts as I am pretending to be recruiters that want to talk about getting you a new job? For the past few weeks, I’m getting three or four of them a day, and they’re all pretty much the same: variations on “Hi, I’m [made-up name here], a recruiter for [made-up company here]. I’m really sorry to just text, but we have an opening that I think you’d be perfect for,” and then a description of a job that I am almost certainly not only not a good fit for, but in most cases, not even vaguely in the same line of work as. Day after day after day, they come in, and that’s been the case for awhile now.

There’s probably some kind of study to be done in the format and subject of spam messages and phishing hoxes. What does it say about where we all are now that trying to get you work is the topic that the spammers have decided is most likely to lure people in and get them to reveal information about themselves? (Nothing good, I’m sure; people are so desperate for gigs that they’d fall for this kind of thing?) What made the Nigerian Prince who wanted to share his wealth fall out of favor? It can’t just be that everyone collectively wised up and started making jokes about it — we were doing that when those messages were still coming in.

There was a point where the spam texts used to be far more vague that I was fascinated by. They’d come into your inbox with these entirely meaningless messages like, “Hey, are you still up for that thing Saturday?” and I’d immediately think, I don’t recognize this number and I am never up for anything on Saturday, who could even fall for this? before realizing that the answer was “people with active social lives, not like you, you loser.” But I loved how empty and low-effort those messages were. “Wanna get coffee?” Nope, never. If you know me, you’d know that. “I’m going hiking this weekend, can you recommend some trails?” was one of my favorites.

Now, though, it’s job offers. On the one hand, I appreciate the flattery aspect of the whole thing: Oh, this is a job you think I’d be perfect for? That’s so nice! Thank you! I also just end up worrying about the recruiting industry if these kinds of texts are in anyway representative of what it’s actually like out there, and all the recruiters are actually very apologetic people chosing entirely the wrong people for these positions and then telling them via text. Whatever happened to email? Am I just too old now?

Of course, there’s also the horrifying possibility that I’m the only person receiving these kinds of messages and they’re not spam. What if I really am ideal for all these jobs, and I’m just deleting each and every text thinking it’s fake? What kind of life am I passing up by not agreeing to be the head of an advertising and branding agency that specializes in pet food?!?

I’m (more slowly than I’d want) working my way through Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, with my progress slowed down by a tendency to add songs mentioned to playlists and really try to sit with some of the threads and sounds he’s writing about. (I have a newfound appreciation of Wanda Jackson as a result, if nothing else.)

I’m still stuck on a line from the very start of the book, however, when Stanley makes a stab at defining what makes a pop song — or pop anything, for that matter: “Pop needs an audience that doesn’t know the artist personally,” he argues. “It needs to be transferable.” I read that, and I thought, that’s it.

I love pop, as a concept; I don’t know if that’s something that comes from being British — I always think of “pop” as a concept that’s far more popular for British people than Americans, for some reason — or because I grew up in the 1990s with Britpop and Trip-Hop being all the rage, or even because I went to art school and had that background to deal with. Whatever the reason, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of art created for the masses and the potential it has to shape people’s opinions and change people’s minds; I’ve always been curious about things that shouldn’t have gone mainstream but did, and also things that were purpose-built to sell out and utterly failed as a result. One of the finest joys of pop culture as a whole is the surprise of it all: when the audience en masse doesn’t do what’s expected and what happens afterwards.

Throughout all of this, though, I’ve found myself caught up in how to define “pop” to people who ask for a definition of what, to me, has traditionally been indefinable; “pop” has been something I’ve felt or instinctively understood on a level I struggled to explain. Stanley’s definition comes the closest to something that works for me, even if I think he’s more broad in his thinking than I might be. (I’m a snob in certain ways, I admit.)

It nonetheless touches on the idea that many things can be pop that aren’t immediately obvious; visual artwork or graphic design, for one. Graffiti, for another. Anything that’s a message in a bottle to a world where someone wants to reach a stranger and see what happens.

We’re all pop, deep down, perhaps.

Perhaps it’s my job, or perhaps it’s simply who I am, but I think about ways to communicate a lot. I read more than my fair share of newsletters these days, for example, and spend my day — for my job, I promise! — online scrolling through the internet for information. In years past, I practically lived on social media or listening to podcasts, although my fervor for both has dimmed significantly as both spaces became overwhelmed by right wing voices that were more interested in demonizing everyone that wasn’t like them, and profiting from it. (I know a bunch of people who’d disagree with me about that characterization; they’re wrong.)

I think about the voices we put on for our different spaces, and the ways in which people write for newsletters or personal blogs are different from other spaces. The me I am “here” is more digressive, and less definitive than the one I am while working, for example, and less likely to make a cheap joke to close things out. (Well, I hope so at least; bad jokes are ingrained in who I am no matter where, however.) This is the space where the Elliott Smith line about being “not uncomfortable feeling weird” lives, which is fully not something I can embrace in professional spaces.

Different people flourish in these different spaces, to my eye, finding voice in a way they can’t otherwise. I’m fascinated by that — by the empowerment that different formats and outlets provides to different people, and seeing who finds themselves in each new incarnation. I think back to what it felt like doing Wait, What? with Jeff for more than a decade, and how that felt like a different thing to every other way I presented myself online, and how freeing it was; to this day, I recommend podcasting to people whose minds work certain ways because of the opportunities it presents that writing literally can’t.

I read something recently that suggested that the written word was authoritative, whereas the spoken word was conversational, and that the difference is something that needs to be considered more seriously as we move into a post-literate society; it’s an idea that’s been lodged in my mind ever since, as I play with it and try to work out what to do with it.

I don’t believe it fully, of course — social media is written, and inherently conversational and non-definitive, surely — but there’s definitely something to it that I’m trying to unpack. Am I trying to find a way to make my preference (Writing) do something that is better handled in spoken word form? Am I a square peg, trying to find a way to fit into a round hole? And how am I supposed to deal with the very idea of a post-literate society, anyway…?

The local bar just down the street has started to have bands playing every Friday and Saturday night during the summer. No matter how cold it might be — Portland Spring means that the weather can go anywhere from that’s really nice, actually to why do we need heavy coats again, it’s fucking June at a moment’s notice — around 7 o’clock each of those nights each week, we get the soundcheck starting up, and then somewhere close to 8, the bands start up.

It’s a weirdly nostalgic, pleasant experience hearing it all from inside the house each time. We’re close enough, and the bands are loud enough, that we get more or less the entire show no matter what — I had the weird experience of having to turn up a horror movie one night because I couldn’t hear the blood-curdling screams, the music was so loud — but it’s that kind of distorted version where everything’s kind of bass-heavy, and the vocals are echoing and indistinct. Given the types of bands (and especially vocalists) that are invited, the odds that the night will be soundtracked that resembles nothing so much as a Pearl Jam dub remix are high.

The nostalgic part of it all is very specific; for reasons I can’t completely decipher, every time it happens, I’m reminded of living in Aberdeen when I was a student and walking home after seeing friends, past pubs where bands would be playing and you wouldn’t hear anything properly, just this muddy hum of almost-music and occasional applause that I’d walk past as my teeth were chattering.

The music is nothing alike — there aren’t so many Britpop wannabes in Portland in 2025, unsurprisingly. Although, it’s been 30 years; someone is probably planning on reviving it again momentarily. But the feeling is the same, somehow; the sense of… almost the opposite of FOMO, if that makes sense: taking pleasure in other people’s pleasure of being in that musical moment, even if it’s very much not my particular thing. Knowing that the dull thud of the drums and the meandering bassline is thrilling the audience in question, and smiling everytime the song ends and there’s a breath before an inevitable cheer.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been half-paying attention to the latest generations of AI stories, which have moved past both the obvious (and horrific) practical effects on the environment and the existential “what does this mean for the future of art” questions to a new place that’s part-acceptance that this isn’t going away anytime soon despite what we all want and part-but what the fuck does all this mean?

Specifically, I’m talking about two threads of stories that have been popping up in my various feeds lately. The first has been countless variations of stories about people suddenly deciding that AI is less an algorithm that has learned to basically translate Google into something approximating a conversational voice and more an actual deity in digital form. It sounds like a joke, but apparently, this is happening all over; people are so surprised/impressed that AI doesn’t disagree with them or say things like, “No, that sounds like a half-baked idea and maybe you need to take a break and step back for a second” that they start to think that AI is, in fact, God who’s taking directly to them and gets it in a way no-one else does.

This is, of course, a nightmarish commentary on the loneliness people are feeling and their search for higher purpose and deeper meaning in all the wrong places; alternately, it could be a commentary on how eager people are to have their own opinions parroted back at them and the way in which they receive that. Either way, it’s not a good thing. Especially in light of the second trend of AI stories I’ve started seeing more and more often — that AI is increasingly starting to just… make shit up. Not even in the sense of, it got a small fact wrong when someone asked it a question, but in the sense of, “AI is apparently increasingly just fabricating entire fictions whole cloth when asked a simple question.

(This is not an entire surprise, because, well, the entire way AI works, but it’s apparently a bigger and bigger problem as more schoolkids are apparently relying on AI to do their coursework and the information they’re receiving is entirely incorrect.)

Combine these two things together, and we have a world that is increasingly looking to a nonsense machine as God. It’s either a Star Trek episode or a Douglas Adams plot. Whichever one, we’re probably in for an interesting few years as this develops and things get worse, I guess.

I worked another weekend, recently; there was another convention, and again I found myself in the chair at home while others were at the show itself; editing, traffic-managing, and filling in the gaps where necessary. This isn’t me complaining about this part of the job, because both it’s part of the job and I knew that when I took it and I actually like this part of the job, in a lot of ways; instead, it’s me being amused that, as the days led up to the Saturday and Sunday I was working, my brain steadfastly refused to believe that I would be working.

I can’t think of a way to better describe the experience than to say that, utterly unusually, I’d find myself at multiple points during the weekend fantasizing about what I’d do with the time off at the weekend, only to then suddenly remember, oh, I have no time off, I’m working this weekend. It’s not even as if I was thinking about doing anything particularly interesting or fun; I’d think things like, oh, maybe I could head down to this store and pick up that thing I was just thinking about, no wait, I have to work. It was as if my subconscious was determined to just cue up different reasons to play that trombone wah-waaaaaahhhhh sound.

What was particularly strange about the experience — beyond the fact that it kept happening across the week leading up to my working weekend — is that I generally don’t think about the weekend in that way at all; I’m not someone who finds myself “working for the weekend,” or even particularly planning what to do on time off, traditionally; and yet, on this one weekend I was going to be stuck in a chair for 10 hours or so a day, it was as if all I could think about were the other things I could be doing.

Of course, as soon as I got a day off again, I did none of those things. Instead, I just collapsed, exhausted, my mind blank when I thought of things I could get up to with the time off stretching ahead of me.

I have found myself recently thinking in terms of cliches such as it’s a marathon, not a sprint and slow and steady wins the race when it comes to work. Not that I am in any way sports-adjacent nor even one for the sports metaphor in general (I’ll be honest; almost all such metaphors are lost on me, the boy who never really got into sports enough to even learn the rules or anything), but still: I am trying to learn not to become hyper-reactive, and to better pace myself and my stress, and such sayings prove to be useful, if unfortunately attached to activities I would otherwise reject wholeheartedly.

The problem for me, I’ve discovered, is that my latest tendency to become a workaholic overwhelms almost any more sensible response to any given situation or hiccup. Traffic is down? My first impulse is just to work more to make up the gap. Someone is out sick, or on vacation? I’ll work more so that we’re still publishing as much. We need a story on a particular topic and everyone is busy? What if I just stay an hour or two later to get it done?

This (not good, somewhat unhealthy) mindset is both a hangover from the always-hustling freelance brain that I had for more than a decade before my current position, and also the desire to magically be able to fix problems through effort and force of will, instead of… well, actually trying to address the problems.

What I’ve learned through a couple of months of trying things that way was twofold.

1. It doesn’t work, but it sure is exhausting.
2. It’s infinitely more productive to actually try to think through the situation and see if there really is a problem, or I’m just overreacting to something that will either sort itself out in time or be taken care of by someone else.

So, now, I’m trying something different: teaching myself to not panic react, but to try to sit back and take a beat to work out what the best thing to do will be. The frustrating thing isn’t that it’s seeming to work from my admittedly limited experience so far. (I am less stressed and things appear to generally be working! Who knew?) Nope, the frustrating thing is that all of this is still so unnatural to me that, in order for it to work, I need to constantly think things like it’s a marathon, not a sprint in order to get where I need my head to be.

Surely there’s a less cliched way to do this. Surely.

I am, I’ve discovered, a practitioner of a particular form of procrastination ; one that I didn’t even realize I was doing for the longest time, but also one that is (worryingly) deceptively convincing to fall for. I am someone who doesn’t actually do a thing, but thinks that they have, and so certain things just… don’t get done.

That’s not the full story, of course. What actually happens is this: I have a task that needs done — and this is always “a task that needs done,” as opposed to something that just pops up or happens — and, because I think about it for a second and identify what needs to be done, part of my brain just moves it to the file marked “completed” and moves on. Because I’ve identified the problem, the problem is solved, my head goes, and that’s that. Even though, you know, the actual practical aspect of the whole thing, that whole “really doing it” part, hasn’t actually taken place.

This is a trap that I build for myself over and over again, without knowing it. Why were there uncashed checks lying on my desk for three weeks? Because I had thought, oh, I need to take those to the bank and then assumed it had already been taken care of. What about the library books that were overdue for pick up? Well, I’d remembered that I needed to do it, so it was as if it was already done, right? Right?

I’m not entirely sure what this says about me, beyond the fact that I clearly conceptualize tasks as being primarily problems to be solved in my head and then everything that follows is an unnecessary afterthought, but it’s something I need to work on if I want to, you know, stay financially solvent and avoid late fees on everything in my life on a regular basis.

For now, just know that if I’m late or seemingly absent from an obligation we’ve agreed on, chances are I’ve already given it some thought and then just moved on, unwittingly. That’s got to be worth something, surely.

I’ve been reading The Name of This Band is R.E.M. A Biography lately, and it’s got me nostalgic for the fact that, for a good number of years there, R.E.M. was the band I was unmistakably a fan of. I think everyone’s been there at some point in their life if music has been in any way important to them: having a band that you listen to and identify with a bit too much, and find yourself spending too much time thinking about.

From Out of Time through… New Adventures in Hi-Fi, probably…? that was R.E.M. for me; I bought the albums — Automatic for the People was the first CD I ever owned! — and the singles alike; I even bought the videos and bootlegs and read books about the band, too. (Not much changes there, I guess.) I had feelings about what B-sides should have been on albums, and what songs should have been singles if only someone had listened to me, whose teenage wisdom was obviously very important on such topics. R.E.M. was my band.

These days, I rarely listen to them, unless I’m feeling particularly nostalgic. Now that we’re a quarter-century out from my intense love affair with the band, it strikes me that their longest lasting effect on me wasn’t aural, but visual; the aforementioned videos and the album sleeves (and tour program art, when I saw them in 1995 or 1996 for the Monster tour, whenever that was) all had an unmistakable impact on me was I was developing my visual language at the same time as I was preparing for, and then starting, my art school career.

I wasn’t aware I was doing it at the time, I don’t think; certainly, when I first started getting into the band musically, I didn’t really spend too much time analyzing the album covers of Document and Eponymous and Green as I got them out of the local library over and over again. (That’s not true; I was fascinated by the texture of the black lines on Green‘s cover, for some reason.) By the time Out of Time and certainly Automatic for the People were coming out, though, and my obsession was at its height, I remember being fully aware of looking at the type choices, or considering why that particular photo had been chosen versus any other options. (I can still remember feeling just a little bit disappointed by the obvious Photoshop filter on the Automatic album cover.) Perhaps more than any single other influence, R.E.M. shaped what I thought looked good, and also what I thought I wanted to create for myself.

At this point, I’m not sure if I should thank them for that, or regret that I didn’t latch onto something more immediately commercial, given how my art and design career went. What could have happened had I found myself obsessed with the visual stylings of, I don’t know, whoever designed Heat magazine or something similar…!