tchotchke #41: onward unto the feed

GOOD RIDDANCE 2024

I’ve never been big on year-end lists and roundups as it is — I’m always too busy hibernating or sewing or completely checked out of social media, as is my holiday-season tendency — but this year, the idea of looking back on purpose is more or less nauseating, given the staggering personal loss casting a shadow over literally everything else that happened to me.

However. One of my 2025 resolutions is to lose some of my shame about self-promotion. One important element of my father’s life and legacy is that he was, surprisingly for such a brilliant showman, selfless verging on shy when it came to his own work. He vastly preferred to facilitate and guide the performances, recordings, and celebrations of others rather than release work under his own name for his own personal benefit. An exception may have been the popular WBEZ radio shows that made his name in Chicago, but even then he went on the air in service of sharing brilliant and often obscure music from around the world, and cultivating a community of appreciators of that music, rather than furthering his career. Despite the wishes of his friends and fans, during the decades after his show’s untimely end he never went back on the air, never started a blog or wrote a book, and never released an album of his own original music. He was strongly principled, and believed that a life of making music every day for himself and his community was far preferable to any other kind of life, even a highly lucrative one. These principles are certainly why he was so beloved in that community, but also why he sometimes struggled—missing out on opportunities, and perhaps never getting the recognition he deserved. With his radio prowess and conversational brilliance he could have been an Ira Glass or a Studs Terkel (both of whom he knew and worked with); with his musical and studio talent he could have been a nationally famous songwriter and producer.

But he didn’t want to be, and more to the point he didn’t really have to be. He came of age in a different time, when it was far more possible to make a living as a jobbing artist in a local scene. But these days, for my generation, the cycle of endless self-promotion for creatives is virtually unavoidable. Rebecca Jennings, in one of my favorite articles of the year, pointed out that if you’re an aspiring artist, musician or writer today, you’ve “got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are.”

Maybe if he wasn’t gone I would be finding it a little easier to figure out what I want to do next with my life. It has never been this hard before. As the first draft of my book manuscript nears completion, and a year of (uncompensated, natch) revisions and rewrites rises up before me, I can’t avoid the fact that I need to double down on building a critical mass of people who will preorder the damn thing when it’s done. Hopefully I can trust all 600-something of YOU to do that, but that won’t be nearly enough! I have to push past my inherited shyness, my love of being a modest facilitator behind the scenes, and be willing to do the laborious but necessary work of tuning up my personal brand, no matter how much it goes against my sensitive, principled grain.

What will that mean? I’m not really sure yet.

I’ve been spending a lot of time knitting lately, and as consequence I’ve been scrolling on social media less (good) and watching more longform content, mainly Star Trek and UK quiz shows, but also increasingly, YouTube vloggers, crafters, and video essayists. Some of my favorites include Rajiv Surendra, edgyalbert, and Simone Giertz.

I’ve never been much for video essays (or podcasts), but as a big-time yapper I wonder if it might be a good format for me. I haven’t done much in the way of YouTubing since my high school ukulele career, but it seems a little more my speed than TikTok (which I deleted months ago) and I could always edit longform stuff down into reels — it’s harder to go the other way.

The important thing is that people watch YouTube videos and they don’t really read articles—as way too much discourse this year has agonized over. With all of my heart I adore writing articles and ideally would just do that and nothing else forever, but because I’m not a great writer or a controversial one, merely a competent one with some very specific interests, I don’t really stand a chance in the NYC media rat race as it currently is played.

Social media, the great democratizer. I’ve done it before (see also, ukulele) and surely I could do it again. Aforementioned specific interests (polar, fandom, fashion, music, tech) have decent-sized audiences. All it would take is time and effort… although I would really rather spend that on knitting. If there’s something specific content-wise you want to see from me, or you have a cunning plan as to how to amp up my public profile with the least effort and most reward ahead of my book’s release, I am ALL EARS. Also please have me on your podcast this year! Also I started a public Instagram where I want to start posting more about my research!

Bangers of the year

My 50 favorite songs of the year (not necessarily all released in 2024) were packaged into playlists for the breaks of Terror Camp, the virtual conference I’ve run since 2021.

You can listen to them all here:

Speaking of self-promotion…

My amazing friend Simone de Rochefort reported on this year’s Terror Camp for Polygon:

“I think that’s one of the cool things about Terror Camp, is that there are various structures in academia and traditional academic conferences that can be gatekeeping mechanisms,” Pickman tells me. “This one is just like, if you’re interested, just show up. [...] You don’t have to wait to try to break down the doors, to be part of a more traditional academic conversation.”

That sentiment is echoed by Goz. “This year, there were a number of sessions that highlighted marginalized voices in particular, like presentations on Inuit and female perspectives in polar exploration, on queerness in the context of the historical era or transness in the context of present-day fandom,” she says. “It shows that you don’t have to be an armchair dad obsessed with naval warfare to enjoy The Terror and its related subjects. You can be into fashion or food or gender, or just really curious about a single working-class historical figure who might otherwise have been remembered mostly as just another name on a muster roll.”

Terror Camp has expanded its focus in the four years it’s been running, but the TV show remains at the heart of many of the panels — and demonstrates why it’s such a powerful entry point into polar obsession.