I don’t normally do memes! But I like this one! So fuck it!

1. “Für Immer (Forever)” — Neu!
2. “Changes” — The Zombies
3. “Cop Shoot Cop” — Spiritualized
4. “Simple Peal” — Underworld
5. “Sense of Danger” — Presence
6. “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” — Leonard Cohen
7. “The String Thing” — Soul Ascendants
8. “The Flood” — Take That
9. “Bled White” — Elliott Smith
10. “I Can’t Stay” — The Killers
11. “Music is the Answer” (Futureshock Remix) — Danny Tenaglia
12. “Already Dead” — Beck
13. “Rock Of Ages” — Gillian Welch
14. “I Never Wanted Sunshine” — James Dean Bradfield
15. “Twin Cities” — Richie Hawtin
16. “Is This Thing On?” — The Promise Ring
17. “Rock N Roll” — Ryan Adams
18. “Best Places to Be a Mom” — Taking Back Sunday
19. “The Weight” — Ida
20. “Around and Around” — Mark Kozelek

Clearly, there was no cheating involved. I’m not sure that’s the kind of list one can make up.

My boyfriend ran the New York City Marathon yesterday — 26.2 miles in 3 hours and 48 minutes — and I’m insanely proud of him for all the hard work he put into training for it. The whole thing is still kind of inconceivable to me, especially when you consider that I was taking subways all over the city trying to catch up with him. Consider that again: I was on a train and he was beating me.

I saw this guy at Mile 7 in Brooklyn and then again at Mile 23 on the east side of Central Park, and he really came off like the most joyful person on the marathon trail. There were a few signs in his cheerleading arsenal, but the one with the cute dinosaur cartoon clearly generated the greatest response. It came with a warning: ”Be careful!” he screamed. ”T. Rex is waiting at the next mile!” For every runner that wasn’t completely high on adrenaline, this man provided some comic relief — a laugh, a thumbs-up, a smile. It was a gentle gesture, then. Perhaps the sweet and necessary antidote to that other guy’s sign that read: NO ONE FORCED YOU TO DO THIS.

brianmaryansky:

Norman Brannon. Chicago. on Flickr.

I’ve been indisposed to blogging for the last week as I tie up a few professional loose ends and get focused on something I’ve been meaning to do (and haven’t had the time to do) for too long. I’ll write about that soon.

In the meantime, Brian Maryansky posted this photo of me from a long time ago, and I thought I’d write some freestyle notes about it. So here’s Everything I Remember About This Picture:

• I know this photo was taken at some point between 1998 and 2000 because, at the time, Brian played in Jets To Brazil and I lived in Chicago. He was on tour.
• I remember this house having something to do with someone in or associated with Alkaline Trio because Matt Skiba was sitting on the other side of this table. The house was in Chicago’s Ukranian Village, which was the place to be if you needed an even cheaper place to live than the apartments just north in nearby Wicker Park. This was before the movie of that name and before High Fidelity moved in and before MTV shot the The Real World in Chicago and that Starbucks got its window smashed in, so it was still possible for me to have a two-bedroom apartment in Wicker Park for only $675 a month. But also, people used to get beat up in that neighborhood a lot so, you know, you get what you pay for.
• Those cargo pants are now cargo shorts and that messenger bag is still in my closet. I also still have that Swatch watch, but unfortunately, I lost the glow-in-the-dark face guard.
• My hair looks kind of good in this photo. I used to go to this expensive salon in Chicago because I worked, like, three jobs (at an Internet start-up, at a record store, and as a DJ at night) and I didn’t really need any of them. I had so much money and my rent was so cheap that I really should have been on some Watch The Throne shit. Paying for this stylist was my one real indulgence, which is funny because it’s not even like anyone actually noticed. But it’s like my man Aziz once said: TREAT YO SELF. My self-esteem and my haircut are sometimes interdependent.
• Jets to Brazil played the Empty Bottle the night before this photo was taken and OK Go — who didn’t have a record deal yet — opened up. By this point, I’d actually seen OK Go over a billion times (rounding up, anyway). They were famous in Chicago not so much for their music but for the artfully silkscreened posters they’d plaster all over town for every single show they played. Like seriously, if OK Go were graffiti artists, they would have been all city kings. Thinking about this, I realize that things haven’t changed much: It’s kind of like now, but instead of wheatpaste art, they’re more famous for music videos.
• I should probably mention that one of the members of OK Go wore a Jawbreaker shirt while on stage that night. I’ve always had rules about playing shows — like no shorts, or no wearing your own band’s t-shirt, or no taking your shirt off unless you’re the drummer and you have a part-time job as a personal trainer — but I’d never before considered the possibility of wearing a t-shirt from the singer of the headlining band’s super-revered old band. As I see it, this is problematic for two reasons: Either a.) you wore that shirt because you didn’t know that the singer of the headlining band was in Jawbreaker or b.) you wore that shirt specifically because the singer of the headlining band was in Jawbreaker — and neither option seems particularly awesome. So in case of emergency, break that other rule and just take your shirt off.

One last thing: When did Saucony stop being the official shoe of indie rock?

Even though I knew Elliott Smith outside of the industry, I feel lucky to have recorded one of our conversations for a feature that ran in the October 1998 issue of Alternative Press and later appeared in my book. It’s a day that’s been etched into record, whose words I don’t need to paraphrase. There are pictures from that day for when my memory fails me, so I can actually tell you what Elliott was wearing: a black t-shirt, blue jeans, black socks, and a thick-soled brown shoe. (It was a humid day in Brooklyn, so no, he was not wearing a stocking cap.) There are even notes: He lived five flights up in a Park Slope tenement building, back when Fourth Avenue was where you went to change your tires, not change your life. It was considerably warm outside, so we sat in his living room — away from the windows — and drank from ice cold Coke cans. When the interview was over, we talked about Ry Cooder and Poison Idea and that time people started yelling for Elliott’s solo songs at a Heatmiser show I saw at the Mercury Lounge. He was mortified by that.

I don’t have anything like this for any of my other friends who have died. The memories of them, sooner or later, begin to fragment, blur, and blend into each other; a holistic picture emerges, but the singularity comes at the cost of specificity. I’ve written about some of my memories of Elliott before — see here, here, and especially here — but today, on the eighth anniversary of Elliott’s death, I choose to think about the one day we spent together that’s been preserved and the words we recorded.

“I just don’t want to fuck up and get confused to the point where I’m not so close to the thing that made me play music in the first place,” he told me. “The less I think about this stuff, the happier I am.”

I remember that day the most because we both seemed genuinely happy.

Oh hey, Drizzy. Typography lyric videos are all the rage, so what you did last night on Saturday Night Live was right on trend! But there was a problem.

I mean, I’m not trying to send you back into those sad hangout times with your golden owl and shit, but someone should have told you to hire a proofreader for your set production. Because while it’s true that I’m not as street as I used to be, it seems more likely to me that you meant to write you were “mobbin’ like that.” Unless “mobin’” is a thing now — which, if so, my bad! But I’m pretty sure it’s not so I marked up your artwork anyway. Either way, send my love to the owl, dude.

Today is National Coming Out Day. I’m not sure that I had what you’d call a “traditional” coming out in the way that they did on Doing Time on Maple Drive — which I cried like hell for, admittedly! — but rather, a series of unconnected moments that I associate with the process. For most of the people in my life, it was like one morning everyone in the world seemed to know I was gay without making any announcements, and hey, life went on. But there were three brief moments of disclosure that I still render as more crucial than the others.

I.

By 1997 I had managed to be as openly gay as you can be without actually saying the words, “I’m gay.” I mean, people knew. I talked about hot guys. Everyone was careful not to use gendered pronouns around me. I was 23 years old, and looking back, I was still a little scared. Being gay and saying you’re gay are like two different things. It’s a life-changing moment of identity formation.

The first time I said it, then, I was on a plane. Shelter had asked me to do a run of tours around America, Europe, and Japan in 1998, and at that time, playing guitar for a living is what I did. There were several flights on that tour — Los Angeles to Hawaii, Hawaii to Osaka, Osaka to New York, New York to Frankfurt, and so on — so it’s unclear to me exactly when it happened. All I remember was sitting next to Porcell and talking about the hardcore scene. A friend of ours from going to shows at the Anthrax club in Norwalk had come out a few years before, and his name came up in conversation.

“I mean, besides Adam,” Porcell said, “I really don’t think I know any gay people in the scene.”

I looked at him curiously, and asked, “Are you sure?”

He said yes, and I realized that this was a very literal moment of truth for me.

Slowly and clearly, I articulated a point that I had yet to make: “I’m gay, Porcell.”

“No way!” he said, rhetorically speaking anyway. He knew I was telling the truth, but he was just as taken aback to hear it as I was to say it. We talked about it for five minutes before I excused myself to use the restroom.

At that point, in an airplane lavatory, I realized the significance of what I had just done: When you say it, it makes it real.

II.

I moved to Chicago later in 1998, and one of the first things I did was visit my friend Jason in Milwaukee. Jason and I had just come off tour together the previous year — me with Texas is the Reason, and him with The Promise Ring — and I felt as strong a bond with him as I did with anyone I’ve ever toured with. Within a year, Jason moved into my apartment in Wicker Park, and on one of those first nights, we took a walk to the Empty Bottle for a show.

It was dark, and we were talking. I have no idea how it came up, but with my best sense of passive-aggressiveness, I mustered up the nerve to mention that I’d seen an Advocate magazine in his old apartment.

“Was that yours?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“So you’re gay?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh good!” I replied. “Me too.”

We laughed about how the guitar players for two of the more popular “emo” bands of the moment turned out to be gay, and how critics of our bands would have a field day with that fact. We also didn’t care: Coming out with Jason was a shared experience, and I still feel like, on some level, we went through a specific part of that process together. We both live in Brooklyn now, and he’s still one of my best friends.

III.

It gets better. How many times have you heard that one?

Unfortunately, it’s somewhat disingenuous to insinuate that everything will work out if you just come out. Because while it’s true that everything will work out eventually, it may not work out in the way you wanted, the way you hoped for, the way you envisioned it. You may come out to a loyal assembly of family and friends, whose love for you is unconditional and to whom your sexuality is a nonissue. But you may also lose some friends. And in some of the most extreme cases, you may even lose some family. There’s no sense in making that palatable for the sake of a made-up holiday.

I was almost 30 years old when I finally came out to my mother. She responded to this news by willfully cutting off all contact with me, and shortly after that, I found myself severed from everyone in my immediate family. I have not spoken with any of them in over seven years. This was wholly their decision.

I grew up in a family of fundamentalist Christians, who seem to hold on to that whole “vengeful God” thing tighter that whole “merciful Jesus” thing. I grew up believing that gay people were sick, perverted, sinful, and completely lacking of any hope for redemption. The way my mother talked about it, you’d think that the worst thing I could do was kill someone, and that the next thing down on the list would be to love another man. So while I knew she wouldn’t congratulate me for coming out, I’m not sure I expected to be so easily discarded. Like an inanimate object that had worn out its usefulness. I didn’t think I’d have to begin a new life — without blood relatives, without a mother and father, as flawed as they were.

But I don’t regret telling the truth. There isn’t a day I’ve ever regretted it.

Coming out means being free to live an honest life, not a perfect one, and every meaningful truth comes with its fair share of wreckage. But today, I have hundreds of brilliant friends, an unrelated “brother” and two godsons, and an inconceivably valuable long-term relationship with an incredible man — none of which could have ever been sustained in a closet.

It didn’t turn out the way I wanted, the way I hoped for, the way I envisioned it. Even though it may not look this way, it’s better than that.