A Merry Christmas To All!!

Nick’s best Iman impression

rock nyc is the website that truly never stops, we write through weekends, holidays, vacations, weddings, funerals, and anything else the world throws up at us. There was a time around 2012 when the website crashed and it took us around two months to get it steadied, and the year before last we took a week off, but, more or less, we have always been here otherwise. The proof of our diligence in the face of breathtaking indifference is that we have published over 34,500 articles over ten years. That comes to 3,450 a year or, astoundingly enough, ten a day for years on end…

I don’t take much pride in it, one way or another it is a matter of irrelevance, we write because we write, and the value of our writing, or at least my writing, doesn’t matter; if you’re waiting for the world to do much more than troll you, you’re on the wrong website. The truth is, in  a consumer society, money counts and I don’t have any. But, on a personal level, it did what I wanted it to do: it kept me listening and thinking about music and going to concerts. My knowledge of pop in 2018 is much more thorough than it was in 1981, or, for that matter, 2008. The constant searching for sounds keeps my aging brain sharp, and my ears wide open. When my peers say they don’t listen to modern music, I am baffled: it is like a form of self mutilation.

Myself, my West Coast editor Alyson Camus, my partner in the website SohoJohnny Pasquale, our historian Steve Crawford, and our resident rock star Tomas Doncker are the heart of rock nyc in 2018. Gone is Helen Bach, co-editor for maybe four years, and my girlfriend for eight years. We broke up in September and it hasn’t ended all that pretty. Her daughter, the former Mary Magpie, is also gone. From 2010 to 2012 they were mainstays of the website. I certainly miss their input.

Many writers have come and gone and come and gone, my partners Joseph Franklyn McElroy and his wife Donna McElroy left years ago after the tragic passing of Donna. Lots of other names as well, both Mike Nessing and Woody Fuller were here for a while, posting constantly, and now don’t write at all.

Back in the day, Helen and Mary used to do a 12 Days Of Christmas rock nyc style, they were simply easier days. Today, I won’t bother. As a non-Christian I don’t celebrate and as a party of one type (writers don’t do lonely), I am perfectly fine just considering where the next ten years will take me and figuring out my next short story, “The Correct Use Of Soap”: I am a little stuck on two ancillary characters, but I’ll get there in the end. I don’t often write sex scenes but this one will open with a sex scene of a highly explicit nature (though necessary to nail down the lead characters sexuality).

So, Merry Christmas to all, and we will be here tomorrow just as we always are, or, to paraphrase Vladimir Nabokov:

I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on December
The twenty-sixth two thousand eighteen,
And that the day will probably be fine;
so this alarm clock let me set myself,
Yawn, and put back Shade’s “Poems” on their shelf.

I remain the shadow of the waxwing slain, Iman