MEG Zine: The Not Not Jazz Philosophy

 Hello!

If you’re holding this, you’re definitely interested in the not-not jazz band, Meg. They’re a beautiful group of three guys named Matt, Eddie, and Grant. If you haven’t noticed, their initials spell out the groups name. Clever, right? The name is in honor of the great 2018 Jason Statham vehicle, The Meg. All members of the band thoroughly enjoy the movie as well as the roll sharks have in the lives of humans. Jaws is another shark movie. 

 

Now that we have met the band and have learned a little history about vicious sea creatures, I feel like I need to tell a little bit about me, the author. My name is Jon Foster. At my behest, Meg came together when I ordered them to. I forced Eddie to contact Matt to make a band. I have no idea what Grant was doing or how they found him. Some say he wonders the streets looking for keyboard jobs, others think he’s Rick Wakeman reincarnated without the cape.

The reason I wanted them to come together was because Winston-Salem needs a not-not jazz band. For years Winston (as the locals call it) has been inundated with cover bands, bland indie rock, and a smattering of hardcore and metal groups. If you look at the town’s musical history, most Winston bands can be traced back to Chris Stamey’s graduating class at Reynolds High School. Who else do we have, Ben Folds…George Hamilton? He’s not even that George Hamilton, the lizard-skinned guy from Zorro, The Gay Blade. No, our George Hamilton is the singer of the 1963 country hit, “Abilene.” 

 

In essence, it was my vision to bring a not-not jazz band to Winston, much like that person who decided to bring all of those mattress stores and $20.00 burger restaurants to Winston. Me, the mattress people, the burger boys…all had a vision. More than anything, I needed something good to go and see the once a month I’m allowed out of the house. Of course that’s only on weekends, no way can I get out during a weekday.

Soon after I put them together, they started practicing. I think of myself as the modern day Don Kirshner, Malcolm McLaren, or Lou Pearlman. Wait, not the last guy…I’m hoping to get some money out of this arrangement, the fair way. There’s money in not-not jazz, right?

 

The gestation of the band didn’t happen overnight. The time from when they started practicing until their first show on October 17^th, 2025 was about a year. During that time, I made sure that the band rehearsed every Wednesday and if they didn’t, they were fined forty dollars. For musicians, especially not-not jazz musicians, this sum is incredibly high. “Normal” musicians could easily incur this debt. At the end of every practice, I made sure to give them insight into their songs. I had to be sure that my Saturday out, six months from that time, was going to be worth. Strong IPAs are expensive. Ubers are expensive.

At first the band was somewhat reluctant to take my advice. Although they knew me as someone with painfully good taste in music, film, and books, I didn’t have the musical vocabulary. Not knowing musical terms or even how to play basic guitar, limited me…at first. I’d mouth something to Grant and he’d try it. Obviously, Matt was the most difficult. I had to push him to work a little harder. No one needed simple drum parts. If you can’t play in weird time signatures by the time you’re forty, you’re going to be stuck copying Abe Cunningham for the rest of your life. Eventually he learned my musical language and the songs improved. Eddie was somewhat more receptive to my immediate musical direction. He has multiple Sonny Sharrock t-shirts, so he gets it. Ask him about meeting Nels Cline that time, I’m sure he’ll tell you about it. 

 

After about six months of practices, they had two or three songs they could work with. Since this is not-not jazz, three is more than enough considering there’s no real plan for ending a song in the not-not jazz philosophy. Write a good part, vamp on that part for three or for minutes, come back to the opening melody / riff etc., and then you’re done. Doing things in this way, allows showgoers to get all of the information they need in the first three minutes of the song so they can go to the bathroom in the last eight minutes of the song. It’s a considerate approach. Also, if a song is quite long, people think it’s more complex than it really is. Mozart had those long symphonies so people just assumed they were good, that’s why middle school symphonies play them to this day. 

 

Not only am I the executive producer (my given title) but I’m also the art director. For this band, image is everything. Although the band was playing with big scary shark imagery, the brand identity was considered for everything. T-shirt designs, the most important part of any band’s identity (it’s annoying to play the music out loud on the street, but you can wear the shirt, get it?) was painfully scrutinized. Shark images were ruled out based on their level of ferociousness. No way could I put a nurse shark on the cover of a shirt since they pose no threat to humans. Only great whites, tiger sharks, and bull sharks could be depicted. These animals tend to bite humans (at least Australians in great numbers) in two. Shirt designs have to mirror the music. The music is based in sexual violent so a cotton poly blend t-shirt should mirror that.

The future is bright for Meg, as long as their willing to heed my advice. In the coming months, I will expect the songs to get more complicated as they push themselves at my behest. In not-not jazz circles, the top is attainable. Get a show or a couple shows with Tortoise and you’ve reached the top of the not-not jazz mountain. It’s a rarely visited mountain, most people don’t find it a pleasant stay. It’s not a tall mountain. You might call it a “butte.” Honestly, who wants to climb the Mount Everest of music with all of those frozen bodies littering the trail? 

https://www.instagram.com/megisaband/ 

Intergenerational Paper Aquirement

Paper leads to googling old addresses in Philadelphia PA. 

 

Over the past few months I’ve been helping my mom clean out stuff from her house. Since she’s lived in that house for almost fifty years, things are stuck in every corner of the place. I bring in empty boxes and take out full boxes. I bring in plastic totes and then stack them over there. It feels like a process that’s going to continue forever. While it seems we’ve accomplished a lot in this process, piles tend to pop up in other rooms after disappearing in the first one. There’s less in the house. I know we’ve made progress…I think.

My main job is to do something with my dad’s books. Most of books I bought for him. He wasn’t great at telling me exactly what he wanted to read, but I chose things that might work. Mostly I bought books about war and men in war…and war and guts and blood and stuff. No novels! Anything painfully specific about World War II would normally work. That could be able some mission in North African or Japanese prison camps in Southeast Asia. If I found those at a thrift store then I bought them. Maybe he’d read them, and maybe they’d get stacked up in the back room. I did this for years and the stacks got bigger and bigger.

Then there were the books that he had acquired on his own. Some of them were random books he told me he bought in New Orleans at one of those books by the pound places. He had a whole set of encyclopedias from 1915 as well as a set about American authors. They looked nice but they weren’t of much interest to him. You didn’t actually read them you looked at them. When I was a kid and playing in that back room, I remember incorporating them into my play. They were great for making buildings for my GI Joe’s.

Lastly there were the books that were handed down to him. These were clearly older than the rest, some of them going back to the middle part of the 19^th century. Flipping through one of them, I noticed my grandmother’s maiden name written in one. It was a children’s book from what I assume is the 1920’s or early 1930’s. Clearly, she hadn’t written her name in the book. It was a fancy calligraphy type of printing. No child could have wielded a pen in this fashion, no way. It was odd seeing her name in the book in the exact way I’d seen names printed in anonymous books for years. So much of my time has been spent going through mold ravaged tomes, and none of those people have been related to me. When I saw her name in the book I paused, and put that one off to the side. I’ll keep that one.

While I love books and spend most of my time moving them around the world, they’re not always unique. Looking through old things, especially old things from my parents’ house, I’ve looked for personal items. My dad wasn’t one to have a dream journal or a notebook full of random notes, but I’ve found scribblings on pieces of paper. He had terrible handwriting.

Out of all the piles I took to my car and then “processed,” (donate, moved upstairs, kept or ripped up) I came across something from my dad’s uncle, my great-uncle, Ken. Ken was a unique, fidgety guy that came from the exotic land of Cape May New Jersey. He lived most of his life with my great-aunt (my grandmother’s sister) in a house in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. When the two of them retired they moved into my great grandparents’ house (the one my great aunt grew up in) in Lexington North Carolina.

Ken collected stamps and things related to mail. When someone was born, he made a book of stamps for them, or at least he did for me as well as my father. I have mine at my house. My great aunt sent postcards. Before I got involved in mail art, I sent postcards a lot of unadorned postcards, many of which went to her at the ancestral manse in Lexington.

Obviously, I ended up with my dad’s book of stamps and other postal ephemera. I didn’t ask my mom if I could take it, but I didn’t figure she’d mind. It was one less thing she had to account for, something I doubt she had ever looked at. The book ended up in the back of my car and then made its way upstairs where I got a closer look.

There were two books. One book was just “First Day of Issue” stamps. I came across a bunch of these many years ago, some that were at least eighty years old. Worried I was cutting up something of value I did a little sleuthing and found no one really collected them anymore. At best they were going for a dollar. I cut those up. Outside of the first day of issues were some un-cancelled postcards, maybe twenty or thirty. Although these can be redeemed for the value on the front, someone would still have to put extra postage on them to get to today’s rates. All of those will go to Richard in Illinois. He uses those all the time. I even found a postcard sent to my great-grandparents from the 1970’s.

The most intriguing part of the collection were the un-cancelled stamps with the years they were issued in chronological order. They started in 1969. The book I was given started in the year of my birth, 1981. While I like the look of these books, I’m more interested in the practical use of the stamps. Shit’s expensive! In other words, what I saw was “free postage.” After all, I had a stack of things that needed to go out but didn’t have any stamps. All I had to do was transfer the stamps over and then drop them in one of those blue boxes. I sat there and thought. I flipped to the next page, more stamps. The collection went for about twenty years. Dozens of dollars of stamps right there for the taking.

I was looking at these books on my desk. The stamp books were surrounded by reminders of the thousands of hours I’d spent making my weird things. After peering around the room, I looked a little closer at his creation. This was his passion, a passion that somehow ended up on my desk almost sixty years later. In no way could I break that up. No way could I toss out or use up such a creation, such a beautiful collection. Unfortunately, this is a conundrum that someone will have to work through for all of my bullshit. I have thousands of pages of written things, collages, handmade books…not counting all of the non-personal items. Books, DVD’s, and weird pieces of paper with faces of rock starts on them. What do they toss out and what do they keep? How do I tell someone decades from now what is important and what they can quickly toss in the trash or drop off at Goodwill? Intergenerational paper acquirement keeps running downhill. I feel sorry for that next poor-bastard to deal with my shit. Sorry Miles.

My response to all of this was to investigate and then make more stuff (paper) from my inquisitiveness. One of the cards in the book of mail ephemera sent to my dad, had my great aunt and uncle’s address in Philadelphia on it. Strangely, I’ve retained the street name, it’s never left me although I haven’t been there in thirty years. When I was 12 or 13 I went to visit them in Philadelphia one summer. The three of us ran around the city for a week. They were great hosts, we went to museums and even to a minor league baseball game in Redding. It seems the Phillies were out of town the whole week.  I distinctly remember the kitchen that overlooked the street out front. At the time it felt like I was in the busiest city in the world. When I looked out the front window at my parents’ house, all I saw were a couple semi-manicured fields. In my 12 year old brain, looking out that kitchen window in Philly I saw an urban metropolis. In my 44 year old brain, I was in a post-war suburb of Northeastern row-houses. While it was exponentially more urban than what I came from, this was not really the city. This was the place where middle class people went to to avoid the city. It was a place they could have cars and a small yard. I loved looking out that kitchen window. Caroline often had the window open in the morning, the traffic screeching down the street. Periodically the sound of a city bus would come rumbling by. Who knows, I might have even been treated to a gunshot while trying to go to sleep: a sound that connected both the city and the country for me. One night, while I was sleeping in the back TV room, I thought someone was in the house. I remember staying very still on that fold out mattress. I don’t know how long I was frozen for, but I realized the sound was coming from the nearby neighbors, something I had never experienced before.

There’s gold in them thar paper. Pieces lead to pieces, story to story, and then…more paper. Add the postage and move along. I hope this story fits nicely in a pile in an unused part of your house.  

 

Mail Art Futility...and Tacos

Go ahead and send them mail, they make great food.

 

There’s a consistent feeling of futility in mail art.

Often mail artists create projects that no one is interested in. That includes other mail artists. The more excited I am about a project, the less interest I receive. Proud of something you’ve made, want to share it with the world, collective shrugs all around. Mail artists send out four or five times the amount of mail than what we receive. (At least the super active ones). What’s sent back to you consists mostly of pictures cut out from ten year old magazines. Although mail artists relish the correspondents that imbue their work with personality and creativity, these are few and far between. I still send to the magazine cutters with regularity, though, it’s what I was taught to do.

While I never feel like I’m going to quit making things, I often have the feeling of quitting mail art. Not sure what that means, not sure who I turn in my resignation letter to, but I have that feeling at least once a year. I do nothing about it. Since 2009 I’ve never stopped creating and then sending more and more stuff. Each year I mail at least 300 things to mail artists, not including random mailings to weird addresses or to friends and family. In a given year I send at least 500-600 individual pieces that cost me hundreds of dollars, most of which are just pissed into the wind. Spending hundreds on stamps is still a lot more respectable than engaging in some midlife crisis activity. Golf...for example.

It’s the mail artist’s paradox. When you send things out you cannot expect much of a response. You cannot expect anyone to engage with the thing in any public way. If someone finds joy or excitement in your creation, you rarely know about it. This is fine 90% of the time for me. I know the game. I know how things work. I know what to expect but that 10% will always creep back in.

And then you walk into a Mexican restaurant in Mocksville North Carolina and that feeling of mail art futility is completely erased.

Let me back up. I teach at a community college. We have a main campus in Lexington North Carolina, where I spend most of my time, and then a campus at a smaller town called Mocksville North Carolina. The latter is most famous for being the final resting place for Daniel Boone’s parents, Squire and Sarah, and also the birthplace of my paternal grandfather, James. It’s a town of 6,000 people. In Mocksville, I like going to a couple thrift stores and this one Mexican restaurant. No idea how I found it, but I did and started going every time I was teaching in town. It was a surprise gem. During one semester, I went through most of their menu, thinking their verdes enchiladas were the best thing on the menu. I told anyone about the place that I could. I made my wife go. I made friends make a special trip. It was that good. One day, while sitting at in my office, I made a quick broadside. I printed off a ton of these and then mailed them over the course of a few months.

When I walked in the Taco Shop this week, they had taped one of the broadsides I made to the wall directly behind the cash register. Some delightful mail artist, a solid human, sent them that broadside through the mail. It could have come from anywhere. It might have been mailed from Kansas or Japan, I don’t know and I never will.

At first I didn’t notice that it was there, I was too focused on the electronic menu to the right. When I saw it I smiled. I tried to take a picture of it on the wall but I didn’t want to get caught. Getting caught would have taken away some of the fun. I can only imagine what they thought about it when they received it. The mail artist might not have put it any context to their mail. If it showed up without a note, without a reason for it being sent, the people at the shop might have shook their head in confusion. All of those questions, all of those thoughts immediately evaporated the futility I felt that exact moment in making and then sending piece after piece.