Hall of Notes has been a long time coming, but in a sense, it’s been around for years.
I’ve owned the domain name for a long time, used it as my Letterboxd handle, and parked the YouTube channel name. It’s been something that I’m very passionate about, but until now, it’s produced virtually nothing.
The mission statement, on a broad scale, is to produce content about culture. I’m a popular music lecturer, and I’d like to share my knowledge and thoughts to wider audience, but I’m also passionate about culture on a wider scale. I imagined it firstly as a blog, a place to host writing, and that remains my goal, but I’ve had to rethink my approach quite significantly.
For a long time, I played around with layouts and categories, making small tweaks to the backend of the platform to try and get everything to line up just how I had envisioned. I tried to put every small piece of writing I did in there - basic things like Letterboxd reviews. Ultimately, it went absolutely nowhere. I was fixated on the presentation, the navigation, whether it aligned with some elusive sense of branding that aligns with the values of the output which never existed.
There’s an element of this which is linked to the way that we do things on the internet. Everything comes under a handle, a name, a brand, and that’s something that I’ve found a real challenge. I’ve spent more time working out which areas of my interests that my various aliases and projects cover that I’ve become stationary. Rather than simply writing or creating, I’ve put hours into alignment and sectioning off my imagined activities into various pots.
As a musician, I’ve been through a variety of guises, and whether or not a track ‘fits’ a particular persona or not has held me back significantly. I would sit down and plot out a campaign for multiple artist names, consider whether the fact that they’re linked should be made public or not, and wonder how I was going to indulge in all of the approaches to music that I wanted to. The same choices have halted my writing. Yes, I want to talk about culture, but am I doing it in a fairly academic sense, or am I taking a more relaxed approach? Are these pieces going to be long form or not? What about if I want to write about something that’s important to me, but not easily compartmentalised as ‘culture’?
There’s more to it than being overly ambitious, and there are some complications surrounding public persona and mental health that I’ll get into with future posts, but for now, what I need to do is relatively clear. I simply need to create, and to put it out into the world. The writing here won’t be heavily edited, and that’s largely because if I allow a piece to gestate for too long, it will simply never be released. I’ll just publish my writing, in general, on whichever topic, on Hall of Notes.
I’m trying to stop thinking about how that writing reaches the world. Is Substack perfect? I don’t know, but in a world of myraid software solutions for any issue you might have, it’s easy to get bogged down in that too. So, we’re going to go with it.