The Obelisk is 15 Years Old Today
Posted in Features on January 29th, 2024 by JJ KoczanI must feel ways about The Obelisk turning 15, because I’m having a hard time starting this post. Of course, it’s also five in the morning, so falling asleep is a factor. I’ve spent years at this point nodding off in front of the laptop. You wake up and there’s a string of 10,000 spaces since your last quarter-of-a-sentence. Laying out images and links for news posts. Trying and generally failing to slate a review by the release date, screwing up lineups, release years, cropping press shots, on and on. You’ll know it’s not my favorite part of the experience when I tell you it’s a snoozefest.
The actual writing — what I consider the ‘work’ to which all the other labor is building toward — is why and how you wake up, though you be exhausted of spirit and middle-aged of body. I have said for years now that the simple fact of The Obelisk is I need it, and especially after this recent winter break, I think that’s still the case. I took a couple actual days off around Xmas, including the 26th, which I’ll admit felt brazen, and had a taste of what life would be without this site, but it turns out this site is a lot of my connection to the outside world.
The Obelisk has become a huge piece of my life. Not just dividing 42 by 15 and realizing I’ve spent more than a third of my time on earth doing this by now, and there are times when I don’t know where I end and it starts. I probably feel ways about that too, I guess. But I do need it. I don’t know where to put myself otherwise.
Thank you for your time, your attention at any single and all points in the last decade and a half. Thank you for reading, for being here and for making doing this at all worthwhile. I promise you this site wouldn’t still be going without your support. You are why it exists as it does, so if you like it, good work. And thank you.
Thank you to The Patient Mrs. for respecting what I do here even though it’s ridiculous. Also for staying married to me even though every two weeks I’m asking how much it would be to fly to some other festival. Thanks for driving me into the city to see Elder last week or whatever day that was.
Thank you to Slevin for helping me 15 years ago launch this site, for the year-end poll and for pretending to be impressed with my recent Zelda accomplishments. Thank you to Behrang Alavi for hosting the site. It is a load off my mind to know I can send a message 24 hours a day and any issue that arises as they inevitably do will be addressed quickly and professionally, and most important of all, by someone I trust. I do not take that lightly at all.
Thank you to Dave and crew at Made in Brooklyn Silkscreeners, and because I feel like maybe he’d (rightly) roll his eyes if I didn’t share it, here’s the link to Obelisk merch: https://mibk.bigcartel.com/
You should be aware that I don’t do crap for that. In almost all instances, Dave chases down the art (Steven Yoyoda!), does the printing, the shipping. I get half of the money; the only difference is he earns it. I won’t say I’ve never embezzled to pay a late fee or buy weed, but proceeds from merch for The Obelisk are specifically allocated in my mind as buy-music money. That goes back to the bands because it’s the bands that bring it in. Ain’t nobody sticking around here to see how long I’m gonna make the next sentence. They’re here for music. That’s as it should be, and MiBK Dave makes it easier/possible for me to have merchandise to sell in the first place, and I am eternally grateful for that. He makes the site real, and my mom wears the shirts. That alone. Thanks to my mom (and entire family) for wearing the shirts.
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“He peaked a decade ago.” — Me, on me. Probably said a decade ago.
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I don’t know yet what this year will bring. I have a couple festivals lined up — Freak Valley, Bear Stone — but I’m doing other traveling with my wife and daughter this year as well, to see national parks with my wife’s mother, and to spend a month in Budapest, Hungary, over the summer, so there will be more beyond the normal routine happening around here and I’m curious to see how it goes and how I handle that. Hopefully by then I have a new laptop to replace my recently busted one that was the best ever. I should put “replace” in quotes there.
So that’s it. 15 years and back to work. I had big plans. I wanted to do an all-dayer on the West Coast. I was going to ask Sandrider to headline, see if I could get Grayceon, Snail (yes, again), Brume, and a few others, but it didn’t happen and I only have so much capacity and that’s pretty low in general. So no, no anniversary party except in my head. I couldn’t even manage to get to Vegas this past weekend, and Spaceslug were there.
I know nobody reads blogs anymore. This is an outdated medium. I should be running a substack and begging everyone for a dollar. And you know what? Maybe if I did that, I’d have enough dollars to have booked that flight, or some other one, or maybe I’d have some kind of capitalism-bred feeling of validation that I don’t have now bringing in some kind of salary from this work. Or maybe I’d resent it as a job and stop and have ruined this thing that I’ve apparently now worked for 15 years to build.
Okay. So here’s my last chance to say something about The Obelisk turning 15. I’m glad people get something from this site. If that’s you, please know you have my entire heart’s appreciation. Every now and then, somebody on the internet says something very nice either to me or about me or about what I do here and it’s incredible. For a sphere that can be so incredibly terrible (i.e. the internet/social media), that I should feel so much a part of anything and so supported in this is astonishing and a better outcome than I could have hoped for in that 33-plus percent of my to-date lifetime.
Thank you. The Obelisk will not last forever. Nothing does. I might decide it’s too much or it’s been too long, drop the whole thing and never write another word, or I might get hit by a bus. One of these years I’m gonna pull the plug on this whole thing and go write like three reviews a year for Lee at The Sleeping Shaman. I tell him sometimes he’s my retirement plan. Honestly I’d be lucky if he’d have me.
Lucky if anyone would, which is kind of the hazard when you get as dug into a thing as I seemingly am here. But I’ve seen outlets come and go in the time that I’ve been writing The Obelisk, and I’m still here and I still stand by everything I write in this space — notwithstanding the plentiful typos, lineup screwups, etc. — and if I died tomorrow, I would just want you to know that to my very, very core, I value your support to a degree I can only call existential. Thank you.
15 more years? That would be absolutely insane. So maybe.
Thanks for reading,
JJ Koczan
…And yeah, it’s Monday, but here’s FRM anyhow:
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