People and Blogs: James A. Reeves

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Left-handed. Six feet tall. Becoming aggressively middle-aged and doing my best not to lapse into nostalgia even though being alive in the twenty-first century feels like an increasingly undignified experience.

Work-wise, I’m lucky. I’ve managed to stitch together a living that lets me do things I care about: designing things for constructive clients, teaching a class about the history of visual culture, and working with my partner Candy Chang on art installations about the future of ritual. I’m trying to do as much of this as I can before the robots and recessions get here.

What's the story behind your blog?

It started as Kinosport in 2000, back when I was heavy into film and Constructivism. Then came a ten-year run as Big American Night during the Bush and Obama years when I crisscrossed the country listening to late-night AM radio, where America’s paranoid style was curdling into extreme tribalism. But looking in the rearview mirror now, it all seems rather quaint.

After some time overseas, I decided to nix the American focus, so I renamed it Atlas Minor, after one of the last maps to feature sea monsters. I thought this was a clever name until, several years later, someone took it for their design company. Rather than argue about it, I decided the name was a little pretentious anyway.

I’ve spent so much time chopping myself into pieces over the years: a blog for writing, a separate website for design work, another for music, and yet another for artwork. But last year, I woke up one morning with a rare revelation: I should just be James. So here we are.

I’m perpetually redesigning my website, hoping to achieve a Platonic blend of legibility and calm while also evoking the inside of my head, which is very much neither of those things. Fiddling with my website feels like rearranging the furniture: a cleansing, sometimes a humbling, when I’m forced to accept how I actually live.

One night I asked myself: what do I like to do when nobody’s paying attention? Well, I tend to make heavily reverberated mixtapes of slow-motion songs while ruminating about spiritual matters. So last year, I turned this tendency into a ritual: Midnight Radio—a short mix and an essay that I send out ‘round midnight on the first and fifteenth of every month.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Ugly and splintered. For years I romanticized the act of writing to a destabilizing degree. I was convinced I should be producing lovely personal essays about themes, maybe even some punchy think-pieces about current events. But in reality, I had notebooks filled with tangled sentences about mythology, techno, death, petty grievances, highways, favorite songs, and neon lights.

I often think about Douglas Coupland’s confession that “around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired.” This idea horrifies me on a spiritual level because sometimes it feels like an ultimatum: embrace a pixellated future without complaint or grieve for the textures of the past.

The only solution might be a cognitive leap, like how the Modernists plunged into the future a century ago, determined to fuse with the machine. Embrace speed. Groove on distraction and fragments. Let my thoughts get garbled and strange.

But to be concrete about process: I always start with pen and paper. I think better when the writing doesn’t resemble the final product. For a recent piece, I wrote a few sentences about a terrible visit to the dentist, which for some reason left me thinking about a fire ceremony I had the opportunity to see in Japan—how those taiko drums rattled my ribcage. I sensed a connection between these events, but I had to let it cook for a week before I saw the connective tissue: acceptance as liberation.

For this interview, I jotted “rearview mirrors” and “rearranging furniture” into my notebook and put it away for two weeks before typing it out in IA Writer, which is the only writing software I use these days.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I used to believe my physical situation was very important. The perfect desk or café. A mystical belief that the right notebook would solve all my problems. I wasted years in absurd feedback loops in which, facing the blank page in the morning, I would decide I was a night owl who did his best writing at midnight, and when midnight rolled around, I would discover I was an early bird after all. And so on.

Maybe those calisthenics were necessary for me to finally—and truly—understand it’s very simple: Write or don’t write. So now I write whatever whenever. But I make sure to write every day or else I’ll need to go through a day or two of sighing and self-loathing before I get the muscles and momentum again.

Can you run us through your tech stack?

After twenty years on WordPress and a few on Substack, I switched to Ghost last year because it’s lighter and easier, and I wanted to start my Midnight Radio newsletter on a platform that feels secure and sane and not tinted by some tech guru’s tantrums. After so many years of thrashing around in the muck of bloated plugins and baroque template structures, working with a light combo of handlebars and static HTML is a pleasure.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I would have started Midnight Radio sooner. But the teacher appears when the student is ready, etc. Putting together some text and sound before midnight on the 1st and 15th of every month has become a reassuring ritual that has helped me etch deeper memories and find unexpected connections between my favorite things. And it’s led to some delightful conversations with people I may not have otherwise met.

How much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? What's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The most important skill for surviving the 21st century is managing one’s attention, so the idea that someone is spending their time online with my writing feels like a gift, and I’m not about to charge money to receive that.

To my mind, “monetize your content” is one of the most bleak phrases in the English language. I wouldn’t want to meet the psychopath who would pay to receive more email. I prefer when people sell concrete things. This summer I’d like to make a little book that compiles the first year of Midnight Radio, and I might offer a few handsome prints of melancholy gas stations.

Anyway, between hosting and domain names, my current setup probably shakes out to $25 per month, but the spiritual cost is priceless.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Candy Chang because I want her to blog more often. David Leo Rice because this essay captures our current gestalt like nothing else, and his Wake Island dispatches with Paul K have become required reading. And although Marty Essig’s website is often inscrutable, I know he’d be fascinating to interview, especially if you’re interested in talking about demons.

Is there anything you want to share with us?

Fall of Civilizations, which might seem a bit on the nose nowadays, but I’ve learned so much: the wild technolgies of the Khmer Empire, how the Sumerians invented time, and the eerie Sea People who wiped out the Bronze Age. I fall asleep to an episode every night at 75% speed. It’s absolutely worth $3 a month to support Paul Cooper’s brilliant work—start with Carthage, but be warned: it’s a heartbreak.

And lately my late-night writing has been heavily soundtracked by Midwife’s heaven metal and hour-long reverb sessions from the Deepchord camp.