Field Notes From The Substack Media Conference and New York City

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold...

This week, I emerged from self-imposed exile, dusted myself off and had the great pleasure of travelling to The Once and Future Media Forum, an all day event looking at the changing face of creator-driven media, that sounded exciting enough that I cast aside my cardinal rule of existence, which is, '‘NO F-ING CONFERENCES, SUMMITS OR IDEAS FESTIVALS, EVER, NO MATTER WHAT!"

That rule has served me well through a long and happy career in the industry. I think I can honestly say, if it hadn’t been for that rule, I would have jumped off a hotel roof many, many years ago.

But this one sounded actually fun and interesting enough, filled with people I was actually eager to hear from and meet. And so I went, and I’m glad I did. It was all promised and more. More on that below.

As a venue, the Substackers sought out a place away from the hurlyburly of racing events, an idyllic setting where attendees could focus without the distraction of anything of importance happening in their vicinity. So they chose New York, where nothing of any cultural interest has occurred since the first two years of CBGB’s in the mid-70’s.

For me, it was a chance to return to a city I once spent a great deal of time in, first as one of the most promising students at Merry Hour Preschool on the Upper Westside for the first five years of my life; eventually as a vasal of the Magazine State in the Roman Orgy stage of magazinedom during the 1990’s, where I was granted a seat at the kid’s table; finally as an outer ring dweller of the corporate blogosphere, managing to work for both Gawker and Buzzfeed in one lifetime. While I’m still alive today after all that is a question only the gods can answer.

In any event, having been away from El Apple Grande for years now and having heard nothing about it in the interim, I was happy to have this opportunity to return and do some fact-finding about how the natives are making do out there since the world moved on.

To set the table for the many readers who probably have never heard of New York or met anyone from there. It’s easy to caricature and stereotype New Yorkers. When we hear the word, most think of the people shuffling around in the background of an episode of Just Shoot Me! or Suddenly Susan. But there’s really much more to them than that – in this rich and bustling metropolis.

They say Los Angeles, my home, is where the best-looking person from every neighborhood on Earth came to take their shot at stardom. This is actually true, and it has resulted in a city that is culturally vital and also easy on the eyes – the formula for the future.

New York by contrast, is where every town’s most annoying know-it-all came in the hopes that they would be allowed to tell other people what’s wrong with them. That has its charm, of course, but it goes a long way to explain why the rest of the world stays as far away from Manhattan as is humanly possible.

(It also draws everyone with a business or law degree whose goal is to make as much money as possible, and doesn’t particularly care how they do it, but about them, there’s not much to be said, so we’ll set them to one side.)

It also explains why the city seems to have a bit of a chip on its shoulder - why they approach the world with an attitude of “We’re New York, so you shut up!”

You can see it in the way they name all their publications after their favorite city. It’s not enough to be written from New York, it has to proclaim, NEW YORK! - in it’s very name. You have of course, the newspapers, which are always named after the city, but of these, The New York Times is not just a newspaper but a religous movement. Add to that you have The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and – most succinctly - New York.

In Los Angeles, we have written two songs about our city, the late-late Sinatra shot at an anthemdom, LA Is My Lady, which was instantly ignored. Then Randy Newman wrote a tounge in cheek, not entirely affectionate portrait of the city, I Love LA, which features the lyric, “Look at that bum over there. He’s down on his knees.” And we said - good enough! We’ll use that one. Because we’re too busy actually being a city to spend our time writing songs about what an amazing city we are.

(There’s also X’s Los Angeles, which is a better song than any other city’s anthem and has the advantage of not really being about Los Angeles.)

The New York list of self-adulating anthems, by contrast: Autumn in New York, Manhattan, On Broadway, New York New York, The Sidewalks of New York, Take Me Back to Manhattan and also these:

All wonderful heartfelt peons I’m sure, but at some point, the “doth protest too much” vibes become too strong to ignore.

In preparation for my trip, I listened the song that New Yorkers consider their city’s anthem, “New York New York, A Helluva Town” written by the city’s favorite artist in residence, Leonard Bernstein. The lyrics go:

New York, New York, a helluva town
The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down
The people ride in a hole in the groun'
New York, New York, it's a helluva town!

And that about sums it up I think. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down and people ride in a hole in the ground.

And at the end of the day, what more could you want from a city?

My visit to the city was brief – only two and a half days – and entirely spent between my hotel in Tribeca and the Substack event in Soho. Two and a half days in a tiny corridor of the city might be a limited perspective to render great judgements, but as the pundits say now, “I’ve seen enough!” New York is not that complicated. With a place as parochial and self-involved as Manhattan, you can safely say that to see one storefront is to know the city, and I can’t imagine that even its partisans would quarrel.

Upon arriving in the evening, I left my hotel in search of food. I wondered how long it would be before I encountered one of the famed New York City rat. It took a block. A very well fed and plucky fellow who didnt seem to object to my appearance on his street. I informed him, however, that I wasn’t from here, and while I understood it was the local custom to incorporate rodents into every facet of your life, I come from a place where we are far less open-minded and asked that he inform his brethren to please allow me a bit of breathing room during my visit. At least while I’m sleeping, if they please. The rodent who was roughly the size of a late-career Marlon Brando, grumbled and agreed, his civic-mindness overcoming any desire to eat my face off. Or maybe my face didn’t look very appetitzing. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that.

I have heard a lot about how they elected a communist mayor, the fearsome Momdani, so I expected to see bands of Chekists roaming the streets, seizing the means of production. In my two days on site, I didn’t spot any Chekists, or even Chekists light. But I didn’t spot many means of production either.

When you meet people in New York, they will immediately demand your opinion about something called Bariweiss, who is Mediaville’s combination of Darth Vader and Freddy Kruger. No fence sitting is allowed either. If you tell them you haven’t looked into Bariweiss matters, you’ll be immediately branded a turncoat and escorted back to the airport or Ellis Island for expulsion.

I rode on a train in the famed “Hole in the ground.” The subway train was like some medieval beast unleashed beneath the city’s surface, roaring into fetid, overheated terminals where the people cling to each other on tiny platforms, knowing that before each train arrives, several of them will be pushed onto the tracks to meet their doom. The atmosphere inside was, briefly, disgusting. I believe there was a rotting corpse somewhere on my car. Possibly it was the young man in headphones sitting next to me with his eyes closed.

New Yorkers pride themselves on being walkers. When they visit Los Angeles, their first complaint is lack of walking. We try to gently explain the invention of modern conveyance vehicles, like the car. In Los Angeles, we say, we are fond of walking too and often will take to the hills and beaches for a hike or a stroll to celebrate the ancient practice. We use walking for recreation however, not transportation. It falls on deaf ears. New York apparently was built before the invention of the wheel and exists frozen in time.

Which makes sense for a city that hasn’t produced anything new since before the invention of the push button phone and today considers The View to be the height of cultural attainment. Fittingly, the city is a vast living museum to past glories – Here! Commadore Vanderbilt at his breakfast steak with over-easy eggs while plotting the enslavement of the continent! Here! Within two blocks of where you’re standing most of the greatest artists of the 20th Century from Dylan Thomas to Sid Vicious drank themselves to death! On this spot Nick Denton fired 16 editors without taking a breath!

In Los Angeles, we also know there is no hell like being forced interact with someone before you’ve had your morning coffee. And so we designed a city for as much distance between yourself and everyone else, until you’re emotionally prepared to face humankind, with all its foibles.

In New York, the design seems to spring from the Frankfurst School’s sense that existence in capitalist society is unceasing horror, and it is the job of culture to rub people’s noses in that at every moment and never let them anasthesize themselves to the abomination of our civilization. Thusly, they designed a city that will force horror into the consciousness from the moment you get out of bed.

Interesting concept, but trying in practice when you are shoved into a box with literally hundreds of people inches from your face while you wait for your coffee.

It should be said, however, the picturesque museum to past misery and destruction isn’t what it once was. Walking to the Substack Conference through the Lower East Side I stroll past what I remember as the apartment my friends held, or perhaps squatted in, during my college years where I’d stay on my visits to the city.

You had to enter the apartment via an open lot filled with cast off syringes and unexploded ordinance; land mines, decapitated limbs and unreturned VHS tapes.

Today the street is a Sephora. If I have the street right. Hard to say for sure because every street in Manhattan now seems to be Sephora, more or less.

You can’t totally knock the change. Forced to choose, Id rather go to Sephora than have my arm gnawed off by a tribe of cannibal junkies.

But its a close call. If you’ve ever spent a hour waiting for your daughter to make her mind in Sephora, you know that gentrification also can inflict real horrors upon us and safety is not guaranteed. And no one’s going to walk in and tell you that Richard Hell is playing in the abandoned building next door.

The Summit!

Having eaten up most of my pixels on my travel to Substack’s Once and Future Media Forum, I want to pause to note that the Forum itself was a delight. Like the platform itself, it was so far from the stuffiness of …every other media conference to be of a different species.

The event was held in a five story townhouse in Soho, the bottom floors of which were turned into a museum of media past.

There was a swimming pool adorned with videos of Substack creators. Sadly we were informed swimming was not allowed during The Summit, even though, as an Angeleno, I am of course, always wearing my swimsuit under my work clothes.

Co-founder Chris Best kicked off the event with a speech about Substack’s decision to “invest in cultural infranstructure” which of a platform still largely built around long form writing (Or in the case of this post, very longform writing) I think is very true. It’s occured to me for all the fears of Nazi incursions into Substack, the barrier of entry to this community is you have to be able and willing to read entire paragraphs of text – a bar that I think excludes 99 percent of the worst people in the world right now.

Chris closes his remarks with the blessing to all writers and creators that, “You deserve to get rich and you deserve to have fun.” – which the horror of modern society notwithstanding, is as uplifting a motto as I can imagine and one I’d wish for all my creator friends.

In what was the best note I’ve ever received about a Conference, we were informed that we were free to listen to any of the presenters and panels, or to sit any of them out in the lounge on the top floor.

As the day had it, I was delighted to watch as many of them as I could, featuring contributors familar and new to me.

Emily Sundberg spoke of AI and Acquistion, The Bulwark’s breakout resistence phenom Tim Miller talked politics with Pablo Torre. Ben Sinclair told of his own unique path to storytelling. A group of creators including our own brilliant Agents vs. Assistants founder Warner talked of starting up a media company in these times. Suzy Weiss led a panel on the truth about Gen Z. Priya Parker talked about one of my favorite topics - the need for more fights in these times! (Offstage, I harranged Chris and Hamish McKenzie about the need for a really stupendous intra-Substack feud.) Caroline Chambers and Amanda Hesser talked lifestyle writing during the newsletter age. And more!

And that’s not to mention all the folks I got to meet and chat with at my power-table upstairs

The day flew by much too fast and left a great glow, feeling like we might actually be part of the first smart, non-toxic platform in the history of the internet. And the vast array of topics and types of creators working here at this point is really dazling. Long may it wave!

Finally at night’s end it was time to leave the Substack womb and return to the cold realities of the sidewalks of New York.

Or as the case may be, the much too warm realities, as the 6 hour window when the New York weather is nice every year apparently passed while I was at the event.

That said, you’ve got to give it to them, it is very pleasant walking home at night, people are out, streets are lively. Where those bonny breezes blow, to and fro, as the song goes. (Although the next couplet: “We’ll go to Coney, and eat baloney on a roll” will make you scream - Who the hell is running this place!")

The restaurants are full because people in New York are forced to live in matchbox sized, roach infested, un air conditioned closets, so they subsequently seek to spend as much time as possible away from their homes. Sitting in restaurants that charge them hundreds of dollars just to occupy a table to avoid returning to their lives

That said, it’s very nice.

Look, New York may be a parochial self-involved backwater, a museum to a fallen empire, but it has its charms. Particularly after you’ve had your coffee. As I drove away through the Brooklyn Bridge, like Tony Manero in reverse, plus 500 lbs, minus an ocean of hair, I was sad the stay had been so brief and hoped that I’d have a chance to visit this quaint little village again soon.

Climbing aboard my plane, I was brought back to reality by the vision of Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt in first class. It is, I suppose. good to be back, living here in the future, wherever that may take us.