Wind us up and let us go
Notes on partnership.
Friend of the Newsletter Justin Bishop texted me from a layover in Detroit last month that late-aughts indie sweethearts Passion Pit’s tunes were playing in the halls of DTW. “Very strong time and place feels with that one!” he told me.
Justin and I worked together at Vanity Fair at a very weird time for the publishing industry. Condé Nast’s business model was getting blown to pieces, yet leadership at the corporate level and at the magazine still treated website staffers—all five of us!—like pariahs. The web team was a nuisance and simultaneously somewhere print editors could conveniently send their old friends with bad albums or boring books unworthy of magazine space to get a Vanity Fair blurb.
There was some upside to working at the website of a legacy magazine that didn’t want to acknowledge its website, though: If you worked hard, you could make your own way. So I answered phones during the day and wrote about music at night. Justin fact checked during the day and took photographs at night. Which is how we found ourselves in May of 2009 on a boat in the Hudson River packed with sweaty hipsters for a Passion Pit concert slash booze cruise. The result was an incredible, now fossilized, portrait of a time and place. (While I have you: Can we please bring back party reporting?)
This isn’t another installment of “Billy gratuitously waxes poetic about his time working at a glossy magazine nearly two decades ago.” It’s about the idea of partnership and trust—and the good work that comes with it. Justin and I worked together for years. We took a helicopter to the top of an Alaskan mountain with Travis Rice. We convinced The National to recreate The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet shoot. I once stood in the middle of a Jane’s Addiction concert holding a flash, which their publicist was not happy about (until they saw the photos). Justin even became an accidental paparazzi when he snapped a picture of Drew Barrymore making out with Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick after I pointed out the celebrities while I was ordering drinks at a Kings of Leon show at Webster Hall.
We couldn’t have done any of this if the VF.com staff didn’t trust us to do good work on deadline. There was a level of blind faith from the web team—for whatever reason—that allowed us to go out and do our thing. We could just run with ideas, and come back with the goods.
This is also how Three Point Four Media is at its best. Take, for example, our long-time client Acumen America. It’s a true partnership. We do comms, we do marketing, we oversee LinkedIn, we pick up the phone when they need to gut check something. We do long-lead stuff and last-minute requests. We do it all, babe. Noah and I have been discussing the type of clients we’d like to take on and the work we’re best at. And it’s this type of structure where we thrive: bring us in to be your brain trust. We’ll take care of things, so you don’t have to think about it. Wind us up and let us go.
Onto the links.
A concert
I was in New York last week to tend to Three Point Four business and see my friend Erik Hall play his reimagining of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens’ Summer Solstice Celebration. Erik, along with a host of musicians (unsure if it was actually 18), took the stage at sunset and put the crowd in a trance with their mix of guitars, vocals, keyboards, and synthesizers. It was the ideal way to take in a show: sprawled across blankets completely mesmerized watching planes fly overhead.
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A project
Speaking of partnerships, Acumen America was at Cannes Lion to announce their new partnership with Serena Williams and Reckitt. We worked with Acumen America’s managing director Catherine Casey Nanda on her remarks ahead of the panel and the good folks at Raven PR on media training, as well as all of Acumen America’s comms and messaging for the launch. The event was a huge success, and there is a BTS video coming shortly. You can read more about the partnership in this Q&A with Catherine here.
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An article
We love a good takedown here at TPF and Pitchfork’s Benson Boone review, written by Friend of the Newsletter Jeremy Larson, does NOT disappoint. I want to quote the entire piece, but I’ll just give you my favorite line and let you enjoy the rest: “Boone’s music is an invasive species in the garden of good taste…”
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Some art
MoMa’s Jack Whitten exhibition is the best thing I’ve seen at a museum in a long time. Didn’t know his work before I saw it and left a huge fan. They played some of his favorite jazz songs throughout the exhibit (more museums need playlists).
So what, exactly, do you have here? Astral vistas and Atlantic crossings. Jazz and Jackson Pollock. A painting that’s built, not brushed. An art whose messages are historical, mystical, personal, by a radically inventive artist who ranks right at the top of abstraction’s pantheon…
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A run
After a pretty bad calf strain, these weary legs are back on the roads. It coincided with my New York trip and damn if I don’t love running in the city. All my running and cross country skiing friends in Michigan are endlessly fascinated by how endurance athletes live and train in New York. They don’t believe me when I tell them it is actually an incredible running city. Then they visit for work and run a route I sent them on and text me “wow you weren’t lying, man.” Whatta town!! Anyway, Noah and I ran in the middle of the heat wave at 11:15am and survived to tell the tale.
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