Le freak.

Back around '99/'00, when I was between jobs and "freelancing" (i.e., staring at the computer for long stretches), I stumbled onto a UK-based music site called Freaky Trigger, which at the time featured longish, extremely well-wrought and enthusiastically argued essays about pop music, with a decidedly British bent. This was good, but ultimately kind of eh. Soonish after, an offshoot called New York Paris London Munich started up on the site, featuring shorter takes on pop music --- now and way back when --- again Britishy but pithy, evocative, fanning the flames of fandom; it was addictive. To the point where I actually emerged from my penumbra of self-conscious gloom long enough to send in an email or two, and ended up contributing to some year end thing or other. The person behind all this was the very great Tom Ewing, and unbeknownst to me (and possibly him), he was making me an initiate to the world of Blog, Jurassic Period. It was an innocent time. But times change, and FT & NYPLM have undergone the inevitable redesign; Ewing this week took time out to pen a brief history of the original site and its many daughter products (including a science blog that bears watching). Now, NYPLM is a team blog, and I find myself scrolling through looking for Ewing's contributions, nostalgic for a time before blogs began to eat themselves.