Best Music Writing 2012

http://funboring.com/bestmusicwriting

anybody know where things are with this?

@musicwriting is the official twitter, can check the feed and see if there've been any updates there

thanks.

i looked and it looks like everything else BUT is being discussed

hmmmm. Anything new?

DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2013

Did anyone talk to Daphne at EMP NY and ask her what's up?

you could always email http://www.feedbackpress.org/about-feedback-press/contact-us/

direct tweet didn't work, so may as well email

No response so far

Still nothing

wow bro

I give up. I thought my attempts to contact her were written politely.

I gave up a long time ago

Ann Power and M. Matos are listed on the Feedback board. I guess someone could ask them, if they know. Or anyone who gave $ to their kickstarter campaign.

i just emailed someone i know on the editorial board last week and she's as mystified as everyone else (apparently they got paid though)

x-post--Ann Powers I mean

I thought some folks here might know Daphne Carr from EMP conferences and such. But no one is saying anything.

I know her! she's great. so are ann and matos.

Not denying anyone's "greatness", we just want to know the status of this book. Maybe they'll tell you?

she hasn't posted on facebook in a long time. she seems really occupied with occupy. I dunno? when do these books usually come out?

fall of the following year (this should have been out in Oct/Nov 2012).

So, what happened here?

Did the series die?

It's a year later and Kickstarter backers haven't received any thing.

I wish someone would have asked Daphne at the New York EMP

as far as i know it's dead and gone but i don't know that from a direct source

there were two $500 backers and one $1000 backer, yikes

*Da Capo Best Music Writing 2007 Book*

I want to give the benefit of the doubt, but >1 year without updates is concerning.

Daphne is in danger of being reported as violating the Kickstarter policies...

I gave money to this, but I've never actually read up on their policies. I'm assuming its written in there somewhere that if the project isn't produced within a certain amount of time, they have to refund the donors?

Can Kickstarter refund the money if a project is unable to fulfill?

No. Kickstarter doesn't issue refunds as transactions are between backers and creators, and creators receive all funds (after fees) soon after their campaign ends. Creators have the ability to refund backers through Amazon Payments (for US projects) and Kickstarter (for UK projects).

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter+basics#Acco

I'm assuming its written in there somewhere that if the project isn't produced within a certain amount of time, they have to refund the donors?

lol

Someone should get a comment from Kickstarter about this project. Kickstarter has a "report this project" link where one can file a complaint.

if you read that vice article though it seems that kickstarter has a written: "we got our cut lol it sucks to be you" clause that people agree to.

what could kickstarter even do about it, aside from banning her from doing additional projects on their site in the future

I guess.

Weird that no other NY music crit writers have seen her around. Or maybe they have and don't want to write about it

well whiney was rantily defending her on twitter last night so maybe they're even on-side with her pitiful behaviour here

btw contributors got an email last night saying the book was cancelled (duh) so obviously the vice story galvanised her into getting it together to type the couple of paragraphs that had been beyond her for a year

dunno whether people who actually shelled out cash got an email or what it said w/r/t where their money is

interviewed here for an occupy site:

http://attheheartofanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/07/daphne-carr.html

i love michael gonzales (today on facebook. hopefully he won't mind):

"After having my work cited by the Best Music Writing series three years in a row, I finally made the final cut with my Complex.com piece "Why Heavy D Matters." Over the last year I've inquired about the book, but none of the judges seemed to know what happened to the project or the editor. Of course, this isn't a race issue, but I'm sure if my Black ass had disappeared with $17,000, a whole lot of somebodies would've come looking for me a long time ago. I'm just sayin'..."

Pretty reprehensible behaviour - the no-contact/drop-off-the-earth thing, not fucking up the Kickstarter plan.

but hey she's nice and smart! so it's ok!

lol whiney's argument is such pisspoor wagon-circling

the sooner content farming wipes out pathetically delusional fucktards like him the better

The problem with failing at your Kickstarter is that it should resolved privately, a message from Kickstarter saying "you didn't fulfill your obligations, return the money now thank you" instead of this stupid public tar-and-feathering

Kickstarter doesn't give a shit - they're a for-profit company that's busy making millions off a sagging creative economy.

What was the band that Yancey S. and his buds wanted to support that started the whole company anyway?

xp So is Factor, tho

Kickstarter doesn't pretend to be anything other than a conduit. Idk if you raise the money and fail to fulfil your obligations, you takes yr consequences

seeing some stuff on twitter indicating she's just sent a note to donors saying they'll be refunded?

Yeah I was just noticing that.

email sent to backers ten minutes ago

I'd like it if the consequences were a quiet "return the money pls" instead of Twitter rants, whispers of "drug problem?" (Deakin), fucking VICE magazine. Anyway

she intends to pay back all backers out of her own pocket

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/222036/daphne-carr-says-shell-repay-backers-of-fizzled-book/

matos alone could have slapped that thing together in a week. dude is a madman.

plus, nerds totally would have bought it for 10 bucks on amazon or whatever. they love their kindles and tablets and shit.

sure, sounds like the literal nature of investment

^tbf crowd-funding isn't the same as investing because you will not share in any eventual profits (if there were profits which obv i very much doubt in this case)

ppl who keep bumping this thread are pathological vultures ime

thread got revived because some folks were wondering if she could even get it together to send an email list of articles that would've appeared in this thing. I doubt anyone expects to get a cent back from this boondoggle by this point. but, it would be nice to see what the articles were, so if there was something you didn't know, you could check it out? Wasn't that the whole point of this venture: to highlight good writing?

If Daphne couldn't handle the admittedly hard job of putting the book together on the budget she had, she should have said so much sooner and returned people's money. Calling her on that and on her failure to simply post or email the list of highlighted articles after saying she would do so, does not make one a vulture.

curmudgeon, just link to the piece you wrote and stop

at least Amanda Palmer came through on her kickstarter promises

whiney otm

If Daphne couldn't handle the admittedly hard job of putting the book together on the budget she had, she should have said so much sooner and returned people's money. Calling her on that and on her failure to simply post or email the list of highlighted articles after saying she would do so, does not make one a vulture.

― curmudgeon, Saturday, November 9, 2013 3:05 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

does make one pathological tho

i have a strong feeling about how weird it is that people have strong feelings over whether others should feel aggrieved or not for losing money

that sounds a bit pathological of you, J0rdan

hmm

getting up the hopes of a bunch of critics with the prospect that it may now be THEIR turn to receive praise and then not following through is like a perfect recipe for internet furor

i would have been really really sad. i sent something to them. so, in retrospect, kinda glad they didn't need it. though they should have needed it. it was wonderful.

^tbf crowd-funding isn't the same as investing because you will not share in any eventual profits (if there were profits which obv i very much doubt in this case)

true. anyway sorry i got mad everyone!

Crowd funding is kinda weird, seems to work best with music because it's pretty much like doing a preorder and if you like a band's songs it's pretty easy to expect that they can record them decently if they raise a modest amount

Stuff like this or video games is still kind of crazy to me. Literally a million things can go wrong with a game, even people that have shipped product before, and half these kick starters are really green developers

yeah books and albums seem so much more simple to develop and produce than video games on every single level

the thing about kickstarter is that at the low contribution levels it doesn't really make sense for the producer(s) to have to make a whole bunch of things (stickers, shirts etc etc) aside from whatever the product is that's being sold

it's a good idea in theory and obv it works enough to not be a total disaster but in the wrong hands that model is a clear path to super delayed timelines and/or going underwater on the main project

i think it makes sense to offer something above and beyond the original product for a three or four figure donation (depending on what's being sold)

but like... if you're donating <50 or whatever for something, you should basically just be happy with getting whatever it is and throwing in some extra cash just to make sure the plan comes to fruition

While I understand caring more about the person behind this project than the project (lord knows I do), let alone the bucks you gave to both, I don't get mocking people who cared enough about that long-running project to voice their frustration on the internet when the person behind it (who worked on it for years) lets it die in such an ignominious, protracted and embarrassing way. Like, did you really care that little about the thing she spent years working on? Were you just pretending to like it? Is it so hard to grasp that not everyone who knew about it was a personal acquaintance of hers and therefore they might be less than sympathetic about multiple missed deadlines and extreme lengths of radio silence? Is dismissing those people as "folks who can't shut up about their $20" really the way to go here? This is a sad situation, and sneering at people openly let down by it only makes it sadder.

this isn't all at jordan, just a general disappointment with the "let's support daphne by not giving two fucks about the thing she worked on for years and mocking those who do" line of thinking

the idea that she hasn't apologized enough or experienced enough public embarrassment or promised recompensation enough yet is a little hard to get behind at this point.

sd, the last two revives are people voicing annoyance that a list promised to arrive in September is nowhere to be seen. No one is asking for another apology, more public embarrassment and more promises of recompensation. When people open a thread to say "this album sucks!" we don't say "omg, do you want blood you vulture!?"

really disingenuous interpretation of my position there but cool. basically one dude bumping this thread every once in a while to update us all on whether or not daphne emailed him back = gross and terrible behavior imo. anyway

the outrage was over-the-top to begin with -- if it looks like people are starting to poke the cooling embers with a stick to start a new fire over her mea culpa peace offering also being tardy and insufficient, i dunno, i think it's fair to tell those people to calm the fuck down.

i was speaking to the broader wagon-circle than any specific defense, but naturally that leads to "are you talking about me/are you talking about a strawman" complaints, which are fair, and i apologize. But as much as I like Daphne there's no denying this continues to be ugly and sad, and the kind of thing people would normally get raked over the coals for on ILX, and I don't like when the defense basically becomes "if you care about Best Music Writing you are sad, get over it."

not to mention the issues with "if you care about the money you gave you are sad, get over it"

is anyone saying that

if someone repeatedly calling out Daphne for her repeated false promises bothers folks so much they could not read or comment on the thread. But telling someone they should not be aggrieved is a worse look than their repeated posting on the status (or non-status) of her latest failure to deliver.

is anyone saying that

yes. scroll up, read twitter.

BMW is a nice idea and it was laudable for her to attempt to bring it back to life after the original company already declared it not a viable business. but at the end of the day it was just republishing things that have already been published with a bit of curatorial prestige for the benefit of the writers and readers alike. the nature of the project leads me to a "woulda been nice, ah well" conclusion quicker than if it was, say, something a bunch of people had already written a bunch of new stuff for that was now not going to ever be published or paid for.

Sorry I used repeated;y/repeated/repeated so much in that post. My thesaurus must be broken.

The glass-half-full side of me thinks that if we let this thread die, then maybe without so much pressure, she'll deliver a statement that's fully cognizant of what she's capable of delivering and maybe even that list and those refunds.

The glass-half-empty side thinks, looking back at all this, ehh, probably not.

quick question and honestly not looking to add fire to this: does anyone care enough about this project to want to take the baton and run with it?

Forks

WhineyForks E-Pub Limited

Maybe dude from Animal Collective has some free time

amanda palmer seems to have a grasp of this kickstarter thing

M@tt for thread MVP

silly question I know but has anyone seen the list of selections that she promised for last September?

aaaaaahahahahahha

In the meantime, another writer compiled this list for RBMA: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/best-music-journalism-2013-jason-gross

I don't agree with more than a few of the picks, but if you really want an aggregated list of music writing from last year...

it is now 2014. is it even remotely possible anyone will care about the best music writing in 2012 anymore?

in 2022 the anniversary-driven internet content economy will probably be primed for it

Bear in mind that the 2012 edition actually collects writing from 2011.

Damn, I made Jason's list!

congrats

Thanks

I'd have liked to be singled out for something less experimental and more analytic/journalistic, but still, cool

I didn't believe it when she promised the list of selected writing would appear in first week of September - because I don't believe it ever will be delivered.

who the fuck cares

2012 was like a decade ago it doesn't matter.