Hi, friends! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and, as with this episode, memories of mail delivery. Thanks for subscribing and setting up a tent in our Ringo camp.
First of all, I'd like to celebrate that, this morning, I finally grabbed 8sided.com. I noticed the previous owner let the domain expire in June and, thanks to a repeating a.m. reminder, I’ve been monitoring its purchase availability daily. Finally, after two months of persistence, this morning 'Make an Offer' was replaced by an affordable price. Huzzah! I want this to accompany my 8sided.blog domain, mainly to use for my blog email address. I figured people emailing me would accidentally type '.com' in a michael@8sided.blog email address, making the .com domain a necessity. And now I've got it. Anyway, I'm excited and wanted to tell you about it.
Each episode of this newsletter has a theme song. This week I present "Begunan," a song that starts pretty and becomes intense but remains kinda pretty. The roots of this are from an unfinished sketch from a couple of years ago, fleshed out a little into a longer piece. Have a listen to "Begunan":
I have a lot of unfinished sketches, and I think most of them have some promise. I just need the motivation — and a method — to revisit them with completion in mind. There was something I read from Brian Eno about how he handles all the sketches in his hard drive. Here's the paragraph where he describes his process:
What I do is that I put it all into my iTunes' archive. I have a great big, many-terabyte hard disc hard drive, and I store everything on that. I have it all backed up as well. So the pieces stay in two forms. One is the working form which is usually in Logic. I work in Logic much of the time. Whenever I'm working on anything, even if I spent five minutes on it, if I am putting it away, I always do a quick rough mix of it. Just so that I can remember that the piece exists and what it is; otherwise, if I don't do that, it just gets lost in the computer forever. I always bring everything to a little conclusion when I am working on it. That's a good practice because when you think that something isn't finished, and you do a quick mix of it, you listen to that mix a few months later, and you think, "Hey, that's really got something. That is kind of finished, actually." The big tendency with computers is to, as you say, is to tinker far too much.
I may adopt something similar. I like the idea that this provides a mindset to casually 'finish' the sketches to mix them down but without the pressure of public scrutiny. And then you might later realize they're finished after all.
That whole two-years-old interview with Eno is pretty good, despite being on a site called 'Celebrity Access.' You can read it here.
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For all the writing I'm suddenly doing about nostalgia and memories, my memory is terrible. I'm amazed by people who instantly recall faces or specific events from their teenage years as I can barely remember any of that. It's frustrating. This frustration popped up again as my friend Jeff, who drove us the five hours to see the Butthole Surfers, wonders why I didn't mention the pre-dawn speeding ticket. Simply, I don't remember it. I mean — I know it happened, especially now that he brings it up. But it's not a part of my brain cargo. That slot is empty.
That makes writing about events from my past a little tricky. I guess that's the case for all of us, as, often unintentionally, we tailor our memories to fit a present story. It's Kris Kelvin's dilemma and his downfall (you should watch Solaris, either one will do). I suggest starting a journal to document your days if you haven't already. I'm bummed I didn't start until a couple of years ago.
The present story is the post office. I have many memories of the post office. They're bubbling to the top as I read with frustration about what that institution is going through. Much of the world's happenings have caused me (and probably you) incredible sadness and distress over the past months. But I have a strong and personal connection with the post office. It's responsible for much of who I am and how I cultivated that identity. So, yeah, I'm pretty bummed out right now.
I opened my first post office box when I was sixteen. All you needed to get a PO Box was a driver's license, so, in my world, one quickly followed the other. Living in Central Louisiana in the late '80s, my internet was Factsheet Five and the classifieds in Maximumrocknroll. That's where I found punk rock pen-pals, weirdos with photocopied zines, mail art deviants defacing postcards, and experimenting artists encoding noise signals on cassette tapes. I needed a place to receive these subversive materials without alarming disapproving parents. The post office came to my rescue. I'll go as far as to say that the post office saved my life.
I've had a PO Box ever since. Every time I move, one of the first things I do is visit the post office and fill out that application. It's like I have a timeline of my life marked by each of those boxes. I still remember the numbers for some old ones (not bad for someone with a shitty memory). Each box had a primary purpose, different from the one before. That PO Box timeline becomes a signifier of what was important to me at that point in my personal history.
The first box was about connecting and 'finding the others.' Discovering who I was and if there were people in the world sharing these strange interests. It turns out there were.
I opened my second box at the beginning of college, where I was still connecting and figuring things out. But I also remember The Village Voice appearing in the box weekly. I'd pour over the ads for the live music coming through the NYC area and dreaming about being in a place where I could see all of that. To me, that box was about the future and its dreams.
Things got complicated with the third PO Box. I moved to Florida, grabbed a box, and got involved with the college radio station. It's a long story I'll write about someday, but I helped lead a protest movement against the corrupt faculty managing the station. As they employed me (I was the music director), I had to do my activism in secret, distributing leaflets and petitions to be returned to an anonymous mailing address. This unidentifiable PO Box drove the faculty crazy — I know they suspected I was behind it, but they couldn't prove it.
One day, in the heat of the radio station scandal, I checked my mail at the post office. There was a slip for a certified letter. I took this to the counter, and the postman told me I had to print my name and sign to receive this mail. Of course, the sender would receive this form with my name as a receipt. This was obviously sent by the suspecting station management. No thanks, and nice try!
(By the way, only a handful of people ever knew I was behind this activism campaign and the owner of the PO Box. Now you know, too.)
My fourth PO Box was in downtown Orlando. I opened a record store — Bad Mood Records — and the post office was directly across the street. Incredibly convenient. That was also when I co-founded the Eighth Dimension label and started DJ'ing professionally. So this box was all about receiving vinyl — tasty 12" promos from across the globe. Every couple of weeks, I faxed out a short store newsletter to all my favorite record labels with my Q-BAM top 10 chart. My phone bill was out of control, but it was worth it. Most days, there were at least a couple of records arriving at my PO Box.
In the early 2000s, I moved across town, which meant a new post office and PO Box. I started my music publishing business, so I was using my PO Box to receive contracts, notices, and other legal papers for the first time. Grown-up stuff. This post office also makes me think about the Great Recession, as I helped support myself by selling off my vinyl collection through Discogs. Ten years before, I went to the post office every day to see what records got sent to me. Now my daily visits were about sending records off.
These days I have a PO Box that's only used for business. You'll find it listed at the bottom of this newsletter. I visit it maybe once a week (and even less now due to lockdown). I don't necessarily think that's entirely due to the internet and online communication. Yes, this newsletter might be a mailed zine at a different time. But all these trappings of adulthood — the permanent home address, the decreased need to seek new connections, the DJ'ing career that's now in the past — have made my post office visits infrequent. But I still get a thrill when I open the PO Box's tiny door and there's something surprising waiting for me.
So, that's my little love letter to the US Postal Service. I know a lot of people that could write their own. And many of those people also love music.
The chaotic state of our postal system comes at an especially bad time for the music community. Without in-person visits or merch tables on tours, record stores and artists rely on the USPS to get records and other physical paraphernalia to fans. Media Mail is a godsend here — one can send a record anywhere in the USA at a slower pace for a reduced price. Media Mail was how I mailed the vinyl I sold through Discogs, and it was remarkably dependable — I rarely ran into problems with delays or damaged goods. I'm betting Media Mail is a nightmare right now.
The demand for physical music formats — vinyl, CDs, cassettes — has increased alongside growing dissatisfaction with streaming platforms. Artists make more of a profit, and fans feel supportive of their favorite artists. There's also a desire for something tangible to hold — representing membership in a cultural movement — that's absent from digital music. The resurgence of 'legacy formats' is a compelling narrative in the modern music industry, an unexpected trend that's welcomed a lot of analysis. In a new interview with Damon Krukowski, Bandcamp's Ethan Diamond says, "half of the sales on Bandcamp at this point are for physical goods." That even surprised me.
What happens to this aspect of fandom with a crippled postal service? Without Media Mail? What happens to record stores and Discogs sellers and vinyl labels? Book stores and other indie sellers are in the same boat, too.
It's essential to consider the impact the US Postal Service has on maintaining small businesses and independent endeavors. I don't want to live in a world where only corporations can afford to ship using expensive privatized services or, in the case of Amazon, their own shipping infrastructure. That's one of my fears about what happens when we come out of the pandemic: a lot of the framework that supports independent business will be gone.
Here's a good Twitter thread on what we can do to help the USPS. Some of the top posts' info is a little dated as this is a quickly developing situation. Scroll down a little for some concrete things you can do. And here’s a useful page for ‘How You Can Help Save the US Postal Service’ from the fantastic art site Hyperallergic.
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EDGING →
• I wrote about This Heat in an early episode of this newsletter. I mentioned their influential releases were only available on Bandcamp. They're still there, but as of Friday, the This Heat catalog is sitting on all the streaming places. As I noted on Twitter, if you're gonna stream, stream This Heat. If you're not familiar with the band or don't know why you should listen, here's an excellent beginner's guide from Grayson Haver Currin. [LINK]
• Australian experimental musician and Room40 label person Lawrence English updated his 2011 broadside A Young Person's Guide To Hustling (In Music and The Arts). He gives great advice for staying sane and staying 'real' as a practitioner of non-commercial art. There are lots of nuggets and takeaways, and I recommend it highly to readers of this newsletter. Headphone Commute published the update in three parts. You can also download the PDF at 'name your price' via Bandcamp. BTW - that's a cool alternative way to use Bandcamp, even though Lawrence has to include a sound file to make it work. [LINK]
• 🎧 Here's some great music I listened to this week → [LINK]
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I feel like I'm forgetting something, but let's stop here so I can get this in your inboxes before we get too deep into the afternoon. I've got a (socially distanced) cook-out to attend, too. However, one more thing related to the post office: I'm repeating my offer to send you a vintage postcard from Florida. Just reply to this email with your mailing address. Let's see how long it takes to get to you. Unfortunately, I can only send to US addresses right now. (And I apologize to my international readers for the primarily US-centric nature of this newsletter episode.)
Stay safe. Hang tight. As Bukowski wrote, "There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness." And if you're having a cook-out, make sure there are vegetarian options (my friends have me covered). I'll see you again next week.
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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.
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This one really got to me. It took me awhile to respond because I am feeling a bit emotional about the post office segment you wrote. If your newsletter is an analog to Futurama then this edition was the Jurassic Bark episode, a change in tone that is profoundly sad and yet empathetic. I grew up with a post office box as well and home ownership has reduced my current box to business only in another town that I pass through once a week. The post office is a part of my identity. I had the very same clandestine po box in college, in this case to scoop up promos for the station that the governing board would never approve. The BS us MDs had to go thru just to play some music on the air. I never worked in a record store, my domain was mail order. I knew everything about the post office, the personalities who worked there, and just how many famous musicians worked for the post office as their day gig. I visited the post office in Burbank everyday for almost 7 years of my life, sometimes twice a day. Me and the PO were homies. After that, I had a promo po box of my own for nearly 20 yrs. Closing that signified the days of receiving promos by mail were over. Now it's all business these days, but I know all my postal workers by name, just like every place I've lived. I still spend a lot of time there. I am depressed by the state of our mail since June, it's decimating all kinds of businesses and people's lives. It's a bitter pill to swallow and feels personal sometimes, like a favorite uncle is dying of painful cancer. I really appreciating you for writing about the post office capturing feelings I have been struggling to express and in such an eloquent and engaging way.