The Monday Media Diet with Matthew Schnipper

Matthew Schnipper (MS) is a writer and editor. He previously served as editor in chief of the Fader and also worked at the Verge, GQ and Pitchfork, among others. We’re happy to have him on the page today, and thanks to SV4 for the introduction. -Colin (CJN) 

Tell us about yourself.

I spend a lot of time on the floor with my eight-month-old daughter, Coco. She just learned to crawl and to pull herself up to stand on chair legs, which is pretty stressful because she doesn’t know how to get down. If I get tired of being her full-time spotter, I usually pick her up and bring her over to the record player, so she can watch a record spin. It’s her favorite thing. So far her favorite band is the Grateful Dead (a semi-scientific comparison based on her level of yipping and arm pumping has proved she is more a Jerry fan than Bob fan, as she is a young woman of taste). 

I got really into the Dead about a decade ago, in my early 30s, relatively late in life for a Deadhead. I was working at the Fader as the editor-in-chief, a dream job, and likely the best one I’ve ever had. But I love being an editor. Since Fader, I spent a brief time at both the Verge and GQ, and longer spins at Pitchfork and Vice, where I still work. I put in my notice, though, and I leave in a few weeks to work full-time on a memoir for Random House. It’ll be based on a few things, but mostly this essay I wrote for New Yorker about sound and grief, after the death of my son Renzo, a few months before his second birthday.

I’ve written about my love of music and of my son, of my daughter, my wife, life, whatever, in a Substack called Deep Voices that’s been up and running for three years and 68 editions. Each one is an hour-long playlist of relatively underground music coupled with commentary. If you are looking for 68 hours of music, check it out. Or you could listen to, like, two Dead songs. 

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Describe your media diet. 

When I wake up in the middle of the night I look at the New York Times on my phone. Then I’ll look at it again in the morning. I scroll through everything on the front page and then I’ll look at the most popular stories and click through to the arts section. Coco gets up pretty early, so we usually listen to the news NPR. If the Wi-Fi is working, I’ll play it on the Sonos and if not, we just listen straight through the phone speaker. We love Ari Shapiro and Korva Coleman. If I’m still watching Coco and NPR One starts playing the same stories over again, I’ll try to listen to Fresh Air or Planet Money. I recently became my father and sent Planet Money a story idea about an auction house that I think is scamming people and/or laundering money by selling non-existent rare Sonic Youth shits but they haven’t written me back yet. I don’t listen to any other podcasts except Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ Las Culturistas, which my wife and I sometimes listen to together. I am not yet a Katie/Reader/Publicist but I aspire to be. 

I read a lot of newsletters. My favorites are: Ty Burr’s Watch List (great film criticism and commentary from a legend), Read Max (tech-adjacent analysis from an intimidatingly smart, galaxy brain perspective), Garbage Day (to help me understand Read Max), Futurism Restated (new music recommendations from the delightful and enthusiastic Philip Sherburne), First Floor (music criticism and essays from a sharp and skeptical perspective), and Snake (a guy who knows more than anyone about furniture tells you what auctions to bid on). I also read Maybe, Baby and think that Hayley Nahman is a great cultural critic, but I really like her Friday list of things she consumed that week. I really like reading about a bunch of random stuff in a row. It’s probably why I also really like thrifting. 

I’d say I’m a regular reader of a few music sites too. Resident Advisor, Stereogum, Bandcamp, and Pitchfork, of course, which I read daily to see the new reviews. 

I currently subscribe to three magazines: New York, New Yorker, and The Wire, the long running experimental music magazine. 

What’s the last great book you read?

I really loved Nell Zink’s Avalon. Every sentence is wild. It’s a beautiful story. 

What are you reading now?

Two books by Henry Rollins, See a Grown Man Cry and Now Watch Him Die. He wrote both of those in the early ’90s, after his friend Joe Cole was murdered in a botched robbery. Rollins was there and managed to escape. The books are pretty raw transcriptions of his feelings in the years after, somewhere between diary and prose poetry. Rollins has always been a big inspiration to me and I’ve been reading the books while working on my own to get inspiration but also confirmation of my own feelings of loss. He’s not exactly a subtle guy, and sudden death causes about the least subtle feelings you can imagine. It’s like constantly falling off a cliff. Most conversation around grief is about how to heal it. But Rollins’ books aren’t about fixing anything, they aren’t about hope. They’re about survival. 

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

For New York, I read the Approval Matrix first. Then I flip through the magazine backwards. For New Yorker, I look at the table of contents to see if any of my favorite writers have a story. For The Wire, I go straight to the Invisible Jukebox, a monthly column where a musician is played a handful of songs without knowing what they are and asked to guess what they’re hearing. It’s very pure.  

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Molly Butterfoss! She writes a funny and fantastic column called What Is the Best? for the site Varyer. It’s a freeform investigation of the best…thing in various categories. The best snack, the best art, the best pet, etc. I recommend starting with What Is the Best Crime as it includes street poop, oral sex, arson, and someone yelling fuck you at Mitch McConnell. 

I also think more people should read Carol Shields. Larry’s Party is a perfect book. 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

I don’t think I have any? My phone is a vessel for baby photos and TikTok. 

Plane or train?

Honestly I don’t really want to go anywhere.

What is one place everyone should visit? 

On the one hand, Menorca. On the other, a therapist’s office.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

In 1991, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed thousands of huge yellow umbrellas into the hillside of Kern County, California. They did the same, with blue umbrellas, in the rice paddies of Ibaraki, Japan. The piece was called “The Umbrellas.” Their art is basically about being big and colorful. They’ve said it’s about freedom, which obviously is a worthy concept, but I think it’s simpler than that. It’s about having a ridiculous idea and seeing it through. It takes a lot of people to install a bunch of umbrellas in the California landscape. It’s about the overlap of people management and fantasy. I guess that’s what art is?

Anyway, a whole bunch of non-profits in the area where the California umbrellas were got together and made Umbrellas merch which they sold to benefit their organizations. There were T-shirts and sweatshirts, hats, watches, mugs, magnets. I’ve been obsessed with getting it all. I stumbled onto an empty six pack of custom Pepsi cans with little yellow umbrellas on them, welcoming Christo to town. I have searched every nook of the internet for this stuff. When you type in “The Umbrellas” on eBay you get literal umbrellas, but also The Umbrellas of Cherbourg DVDs and related ephemera. I’ve sifted through a lot. On eBay right now there’s a photo of a guy visiting the Umbrellas while wearing an Umbrellas shirt. I haven’t bought it yet but I’m thinking about it. 

I have a fantasy on my own, that one day I’ll have a little gallery of all of my Umbrellas goods. I imagine one day I’ll get the opportunity to buy an actual one of the umbrellas. I’ve seen fabric for sale in little frames, signed by Christo, but not an original umbrella. I’m not sure where I’d put it, but I think I’d find a place. 

I feel like I need to mention that The Umbrellas met an early end when a windstorm dislodged one of the umbrellas and it killed a woman. The exhibit was shut down early. Jeanne-Claude and Christo did many other projects after, including the Gates in New York. There’s less merch for that one and it’s a lot more expensive than the Umbrellas. I like it less. The gates were orange. Yellow is more fun.  (MS)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matthew (MS)

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