Welcome to 'Light Up Schmaltz'
The Minor Moon newsletter debut.
Hello, and welcome to the first of what I hope will be many installments of Light Up Schmaltz, the official Minor Moon newsletter.
[TL;DR listen to a live track & check out tour dates at the end of the post. The rest is an introduction to this newsletter, plus a reflection on ‘The Light Up Waltz’ album release show, overcoming shitty situations, the digital panopticon, etc.]
I intend to share some writing here on a monthly basis, along with an unreleased piece of music — whether it’s a live recording (like today), or a demo, a cover, a snippet of an unfinished song, an unhinged late-night voice memo ... we’ll see.
Besides sharing music, the form, length and subject matter will, I expect, vary quite a bit. It might be an essay style reflection (like this post) or something completely different.
Subscribing (free or paid) is surely the best way to encourage this newsletter’s longevity & output. If you’d like to contribute a few dollars by becoming a paid subscriber, consider it a donation to the wider Minor Moon project. Meanwhile, I’m not going to paywall anything until I see how the first few months go. For now, everything is free.
I’m starting this effort up in part because, like everyone I talk to, I think social media in its current form is bad for my brain. I do spend plenty of time there, and still manage to have fun with it. I still depend on it for many things. But clearly the valuable stuff is captured inside a scary, swirling corporate mega-machine, in which attention is the commodity. I personally want to have an outlet around the band stuff that feels more open ended and I don’t want any folks who’d like to take a break or clean exit from the apps to feel like that’s the only place they can stay up to date on Minor Moon. This platform, Substack, seems to be structured in a relatively more open ended and less toxic way, at least for now, so I’m giving it a shot.
And, on a more positive note, I have been really inspired by what people are doing with this newsletter format (like Josh Terry’s No Expectations, Spencer Tweedy’s newsletter, Sam Sodomsky’s Electric Nebraska, Izzy Olive’s Scrap Poetry, Jeff Conklin’s Ambient Audiophile, & Chris Weisman’s Cadential Windfall, to name a few).
So strap in for this inaugural portion of Light Up Schmaltz. If you enjoy any aspect of this effort, or know someone who might, please share and spread the word.
I. April 19th, 2024
As we got onto at the stage, I took a deep breath and looked out at an audience with its back turned, nudging toward the exit . Something weird had happened. Although, that was only vaguely apparent to me as I looked out at the shuffling friends, acquaintances, new faces and backs-of-heads milling about, slowly draining out of the live room. For a moment it was all very misty and surreal.
It had been a big day, and I was primarily just trying to stay in a focused headspace for the set. It wasn’t until my friend Lindsay Weinberg bravely walked up to the stage to let us know that there was water leaking up from the drain in the middle of the floor that what was actually happening came into focus. I was kneeling down and had to look over her shoulder to make sense of what she meant. We were going to have to head backstage and then… I wasn’t sure what we’d do.
It didn’t take long to understand that we would not play a concert on the Lincoln Hall stage that evening. It took a little more time for me to be sufficiently encouraged to start playing in the front bar. Vivian McConnell (aka V.V. Lightbody), my partner and the great hero of that evening, understood before I did that there was a large group of people eager for this music all packed into the front room. We had an opportunity to make something happen, to bring something to them, to salvage a situation that was otherwise very fucked.
I can see this snapshot moment in my mind: I’m standing backstage with Viv and Sam Subar, our drummer. Sam’s body is half-turned down the hall, snare and brushes in hand. He’s leaning toward the door to the front bar, eager to make a move, to break through the sense of defeat that had, to that point, fixed my own two feet in place. We listen to Viv’s encouragement. It’s working. She heads to the bar. Sam looks at me and says “let’s do it” (or something sufficiently confident like that) and turns around to walk towards the crowd behind the door without a trace of hesitancy. While Viv was, I’m told, standing on the bar and addressing the crowd, I walked past the mysterious and defunct Lincoln Hall kitchen, down the hall and to the door and still had no idea what we’d play.
We ended up starting with ‘Cracking Glass,’ the first song we’d always planned to play and the opening track of the record. I didn’t know if we’d do anything else, but as soon as the bar got quiet enough to hear our unamplified acoustic guitar & snare drum setup I did feel something shift. Max and Jason joined in on harmonies. The blanket of chaos was lifting, and something else was taking shape in its place.
By the next song, Blue Timing, more of the band was plugging in. Viv was behind the scenes, pushing things, the Lincoln Hall staff were adapting and supporting, Jason got the bass going, someone had lifted the guitar amp that Chet and I would soon share onto the bar to the right of the beer taps. I’ll never forget that by the time we got to our fourth song, Under Beyond, Viv had located the ever-elusive XLR-to-quarter inch cable (shout out to Sarah Clausen and her very dope saxophone harmonizer rig) to connect a vocal mic to the guitar amp. Max’s pedal steel was plugged in and our special three piece woodwinds section (featuring V.V., Sarah & Dustin Laurenzi) hit their mark. It felt unlike any performance experience I can recall: equal parts surprise and already-knowing, like it had already happened before and yet I couldn’t fathom that it was real. We had all stepped into something unexpected and powerful — and it wasn’t the shit water.
II. Enshitification, etc.
A few months ago I listened to a series of podcasts with the writer and activist Cory Doctorow on WNYC’s ‘On the Media.’ On the show, Doctorow, a clear-eyed & critical thinker who somehow also manages to come across as cheeky and hopeful (I really admire this quality), outlines his concept of the “enshitification” of internet platforms.1
The quick summary is that tech companies first make themselves attractive to users by offering a novel way of connecting people that is actually valuable. People choose to be there and eventually they come to rely on the service. The platform brings everyone in with a combination of carrots and sticks, and then stops being so friendly to its users (both businesses and consumers). The company ravages their particular industry landscape of alternatives, buying out or underselling the competition, becoming the only game in town and putting the squeeze on everyone, accumulating tremendous amounts of wealth and power in the process, and in the most extreme cases, shifting core behaviors and day-to-day expectations of millions, even billions of people and pulling out as much profit as they can, ‘customer satisfaction’ be damned. In other words, it is a grand bait and switch, a trap.
Maybe it’s a tale as old as human-made hierarchical power.2 But, in our day and age, when this rapacious logic is supercharged by the capacity of new technologies (and the corporations that control them) to insert themselves and their surveillance capabilities into so many varied aspects of our public & private lives — what might be dubbed a digital panopticon3 — what should one do?
Zadie Smith, on a recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, talks about social media and the smartphone as “a behavior modification system.” She says that social media “structures debate, the shape of it, what to think about and how to think about it.” Echoing Neil Postman’s declaration that “the medium is the message,”4 Smith continues on:
“it’s not even the content of those thoughts … it’s actually structuring the way you think about thought … in many different directions, but the fundamental modification is the same … Every medium modifies you. But the question becomes what do you want to be modified by, and to what degree. When I look at the people who have designed these things, what they want, what they think a human is and should be, the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them.”5
Concerts are a medium too. The structure of concerts, venues, and the expectations and customs attached to performing and attending shows contain normative claims, implicit or explicit, about what music is. In my case, I’ve internalized a belief that the goal should be aimed at perfection, projecting professionalism, showcasing the power to deliberately move people, orchestrating and executing a powerful and planned collective experience. I don’t think this vision is inherently all wrong, but I’m certain it’s not the whole story about what role live music can or should play in our lives.
The experience of having an album release show destroyed by a flood and reborn within minutes surrounded by so many loved ones and strangers alike — in all its beautiful anarchic messiness — was just the kind of cosmic shake I needed to take a more expansive and honest view of what I want out of a life in and with music.
III. ‘Unshitification’ or “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo…”
Viv and I have been watching The Rings of Power (so flawed, yet I love it), and we recently rewatched the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, and I just keep thinking about Sauron & the tech companies: they share this drive to control and profit from human (or elven or dwarven) behavior, the sheer grandiosity and drive for total domination (“power, not of the flesh, but over it”). The original LOTR series was widely seen as an allegory about industrialization and the war machine of the 20th century, and the current show does, I think, a pretty powerful job at framing the Rings of Power as symbols of the insidious behavior modification systems we hold in our pockets today.
What feels so worthwhile about Cory Doctorow’s analysis in the ‘Enshitification’ series is his suggestion for moving forward. Echoing the dutiful Samwise Gamgee,6 Doctorow’s answer is simple, even if the resulting resistance is multifaceted and complex: we keep going despite the odds, or the lack of a clear solution. In doing so we build many alternative paths towards lives and worlds we want. We create new forms of autonomy, of sharing with each other in less heavily mediated ways, and, depending on who we are, our place and our talents, we advocate for structural change both inside and outside the halls of power. In Doctorow’s words:
“I have hope, which is much better than optimism. Hope is the belief
that if we materially alter our circumstance, even in some small way, that
we might ascend to a new vantage point from which we can see some new course of action that was not visible to us before we took that last step.”7
While this certainly rings true for me in terms of thinking about collective political action in dark and confusing times, I also can’t help but apply this concept of “enshitification” and hopeful resistance to a personal and artistic level. Doctorow is talking about life under the current regime of neoliberalism (or late-capitalism or techno-feudalism or the slide between one and the another), but I think this idea translates all the way down to the more intimate dreams we try to bring to life for ourselves and our communities (as does neoliberalism).
After reflecting on this wild year so far, I’m going to risk sharing some personal advice: if your goals are outcomes, attach yourself to them at your own peril. Instead, I think any attachment should be to a process, an act of movement toward the kinds of world(s), relationships, art and life you want, whether that’s through large-scale collective action, or on a smaller communal or individual level. I think this kind of choice is one of the few places where we really do have freedom, especially where it’s clear that we can’t unilaterally control outcomes. In my experience, orienting myself around process above outcomes allows for a more resilient outlook and the capacity to build more durable connections with people.
All advice aside, I hope that when the unexpected comes, you find yourself surrounded by the kinds of people who are ready to lift the amp onto the bar when the live room floods, maybe because they know you’d do the same for them or maybe because it’s really the only thing to do when shit hits the fan, or bubbles from the floor. That’s magic amid madness, care amid chaos. It’s deshitification, baby! <3
Thanks to Chet, Jason, Max, Sam, Danjuma, Vivian, Macie, Sarah, Dustin, Scott, Andrew and Elizabeth for being a part of the music on that fateful day and beyond. Thanks to my entire family being there at the big show and always showing up. And thank you to Bruce McConnell for having the wherewithal to record the set on his phone, a piece of which you can hear right now:
Here’s Miriam Underwater (live at Lincoln Hall 4/19/24) by Minor Moon.
Sam Cantor - guitar, vocals
Chet Zenor - guitar
Jason Ashworth - bass, percussion
Max Subar - pedal steel
Sam Subar - snare drum
Danjuma Gaskin - percussion
V.V. Lightbody - vocals
Macie Stewart - violin
Scott Daniel - violin
Dustin Laurenzi - tenor saxophone
Sarah Clausen - clarinet
Recorded by Bruce McConnell. Mixed by Sam Cantor.
The cover artwork for this newsletter is by Jordan Martins.
Thank you for listening. See below for some very special shows starting this week.
UPCOMING SHOWS!
Ticket links, etc.
10.10 ~ Minneapolis, MN at Icehouse with Full Catholic & Voulouse
10.11 ~ Duluth, MN at Wussow’s Concert Café with Between Howls & Small Foot
10.12 ~ Sauk County, WI at the Witwen Tabernacle for Wormfarm Institute’s Farm/Art DTour
10.13 ~ Fennville, MI at Virtue Cider for Apple Fest
10.19 ~ Chicago, IL at The Salt Shed for My Sweet Midwest* supporting Fruit Bats, Kevin Morby & Hurray for the Riffraff
11.7 ~ Madison, WI at Der Rathskeller (The Rath at UW Madison)
11.8 ~ Northfield, MN at The Cave (at Carleton College)
11.9 ~ Urbana, IL at Rosebowl Tavern supporting Sweet Megg
11.10 ~ Bloomington, IL at Blockhouse Bar with Kay Krull & Logan Carithers
*ALSO ~ on Friday, 10.18 I am playing in the band for the Fruit Bats & Friends Jam at Empty Bottle. It’s sold out, but it’s going to be awesome … if you are in Chicago and see a ticket become available, I’d get there. I’ll be playing with Andrew Sa’s band too, and Tobacco City is also playing. Holy heck.
Cory Doctorow, from Enshitification Part 1 via WNYC’s On The Media. 5/5/23
I’d like to point anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing to The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, one of my favorite books of all time, and a huge inspiration for the imagined world(s) depicted in The Light Up Waltz.
A term I first heard mentioned by Stephen West in this episode (#186) of his excellent podcast, Philosophize This!
I really do think everyone should read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
The Ezra Klein Show, “Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones,” 9/17/24
“It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer. I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.” One of my favorite Samwise Gamgee quotes from The Two Towers film.
Cory Doctorow, from Enshitification Part 3 via WNYC’s On The Media. 5/19/23