Nervous Acid

Owen Duff “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:51:00 -0500

Owen Duff “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)”
Unreleased, 2010

It is an unspoken truth that many of us work hard to manipulate memory and rewrite ourselves with the hope that, someday, we’ll be remembered for that one “good” thing and not that one “bad” thing, because as much as we’re told that identity is layered and complex and certainly never all one thing or the other, we still bury our dead with the distinction of being Those Who Did No Wrong or Those Who Did No Right. But try as we might, the outcome is consistently leveled by chance: when the music stops, you just hope there’s a chair underneath you.

I’ll remember Whitney Houston for everything that she was, the good things and the bad things, and I won’t love her any less for falling than I did for her soaring. I’ll also remember her for writing songs that sounded jovial when the music played, but elicited pain a cappella. Like the way she exposed her midriff and simpered for the picture sleeve in spite of the fact that “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” seethes with the desperation of feeling unlovable, I too know how it feels when your packaging betrays the product. I’ll remember Whitney Houston most for showing me how to smile when you’ve never felt more alone.

This is, perhaps more than any other, an extra-gratuitous GPOY...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:08:00 -0500

This is, perhaps more than any other, an extra-gratuitous GPOY that Mike Dubin took last month. It is Wednesday after all.

The Jealous Sound are not the type of band that get Best New...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:40:00 -0500

The Jealous Sound are not the type of band that get Best New Musics or ubiquitous thinkpiece subjectification, which is to say that when their new album, A Gentle Reminder, comes out today, chances are you will not have heard about it unless you’ve already been paying careful attention. These are the records that are hardest to write about because they’re not instantly polarizing — like that other record that’s coming out today — or even particularly heady; it’s music with the potential to make you feel inarticulate. But thinking about this record makes me think about this thing Joan Didion wrote about lifting the unfussy title to George Orwell’s “Why I Write” for an essay of her own: “I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you.”

There’s a modest refrain in this song where Blair Shehan sings, “I can’t do this on my own,” and it’s just inexplicably affecting. Like so many of the songs on this record, “Change You” sums up in a no-nonsense way all he has to tell us. Shehan thrives in such unembellished sentiment — he, virtuoso of the downstroke pick and palm-muted guitar riff — but not without leaving behind the dismal premonition that so many of the records that will quite possibly go on to eclipse this one are teeming with the kind of nonsense this album plainly rejects. This is the kind of record that changes lives, unbeknownst to everyone.

"No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always going..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:43:00 -0500

“No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were 75. There would still be new ideas. There would still be things that you wished you would have accomplished … Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time, and it is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.”

- Keith Haring, Rolling Stone (August 10, 1989). The clarity with which Haring closes this interview is both inspiring and tragic. I do think we’re a death-fixated culture — ours is an obsession that fuels rigid religiosities, notions of “legacy” and monolithic identities, and the rush to supplement and enhance our physical natures in an attempt to convince us that we’re that much closer to living forever, among other things — so Haring’s introspection seems pointed. What he’s trying to say, I think, is this: An active resistance to death, which is inevitable, can actually become an active resistance to living if we let it. Haring died eight months after giving this interview, at the age of 31.

Mark Owen “Makin’ Out” How the Mighty Fall,...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:51:00 -0500

Mark Owen “Makin’ Out” How the Mighty Fall, 2005

I’ve written about Take That before, so I’ve already made the case for their astonishing transformation from manufactured boy-band to middle-aged singer-songwriters. But if you want to get all specific about it, I’ve always been particularly awed by Mark Owen — the guy in the middle doomed to be perpetually overshadowed by Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams — whose solo albums introduced a surprisingly sophisticated pop songwriter with a deep intuitive sense about the canon of British music, from the Beatles to the Kinks to Blur, that has never really been acknowledged by anyone. Blame the boy-band albatross around his neck.

Pomplamoose covered “Makin’ Out” once, which indicates that I’m not the only person who sees this connection, but I imagine Owen’s solo records will continue to languish in the bins until Jon Brion or Elvis Costello start covering his music or something. But it’s the guy’s fortieth birthday today, so I just figured I’d put this out there again. I’ve never rooted for a millionaire underdog so hard.

Abner and Harper Willis are a pair of brothers who front...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:00:00 -0500

Abner and Harper Willis are a pair of brothers who front “the New York City-based indie rock band” Two Lights. Their idea of success includes scoring a worthless “VIP pass” for an unnamed British pop star and then being surprised when the backstage room didn’t look like a P. Diddy White Party, a review in a third-tier NYC free magazine that meaninglessly describes their music as having “the magical power to obliterate wintery thoughts,” and hiring “a manager who’s helped break artists like Blur and the Smashing Pumpkins” — which is code that anyone familiar with the music industry can easily decipher as: “Our manager did some shit at Virgin Records in the ’90s.”

Time Magazine recently gave the floor to the Willis brothers for a slot in their “Entrepreneurial Insights” special, and the thesis came together almost instantly. Abner and Harper want you to know something: Being in an “indie rock” band is hard!

It’s also expensive. By their estimation, a handful of blog reviews and the privilege to work with someone who sent Lenny Kravitz posters to record stores in 1995 has already cost the band upwards of $109,000. I want to write that number again because it’s so absurd, and then pick up a sandwich board and write it again — next to the words YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG — so that I can boycott Two Lights shows around the country with a small, but angry cult called The Church of Rational People. I want to take them into a bank and show them what $109,000 looks like, and then slap them over the head with a fistful of hundreds. I want to drive their equipment into the most dire, economically oppressed neighborhood, sell it all to the local pawn shop, and then donate the proceeds to any number of families that could use a hundred extra dollars to make rent this month. Two Lights are like the Mitt Romney of sad boys with guitars, ambitious and chiseled white men who weren’t asked to release their financials under duress, but did so anyway because their utter lack of self-awareness never tipped them off to the fact that spending $109,000 to play Wednesday nights at the Mercury Lounge is on the same level of crazy as donating $4 million to the Mormon church in one year. Maybe even crazier.

Of course, I would be remiss to simply yell YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG and not explain myself. I played in financially viable bands for years without the money of major labels — or sometimes, for that matter, anyone — and while it certainly wasn’t always a P. Diddy White Party, I made a living in New York City without going bankrupt. Let’s crunch some numbers:

Training: Our folks shelled out for 15 years of piano and guitar lessons (times two of us!). These days, we’re spending $250 to $500 a month on voice lessons. Cost to date: $30,000.

OK, stop. First of all, it’s completely unfair to include your parents’ investment in music lessons into this equation — unless we also plan on adding the grocery receipts, too. (All that basement jamming makes you hungry!) But even if you take that out, there is no reason why these guys should be spending $250 to $500 a month on vocal lessons. (I listened to your single: they’re not working, you guys!) Learn how to breathe, learn how to warm-up your voice, and then treat yourself with an extra session when you’ve got the extra money. Otherwise, just lock yourself in the bathroom for the acoustics and fire up YouTube. Seriously.

As for me, I have a few books about guitar and took a music theory course in college once, but that’s about as much as I’ve ever spent on training. Cost to date since 1991: Maybe $50.

Rehearsal: We rent a space in Brooklyn for $50 per three-hour session. Cost to date: $3,000.

Oh hey, I think I know that practice space! $50 for three hours is great, but it sounds like these guys practice a lot, which means they could (and should) be sharing a monthly space with at least one other band. At the current going rates, you should be able to find a room in Brooklyn that costs the same as a few hourly-rate practices. That their ever-so-useful manager hasn’t filled them in on this point says something about the value of their services.

Technically, I’ve spent a good amount of money on rehearsals, but it’s always been strategic: Hourly practices are saved for upcoming shows or running through a set-list, but writing always takes place somewhere less expensive — like your drummer’s mom’s house in New Jersey, which also comes with free soda and chips. In that sense, I’d probably say I’ve also spent at least $3,000 on rehearsal space — but that’s including every rehearsal I’ve ever booked since 1990, which is, incidentally, the year young Abner was born. Pro-tip: Going on tour is like practice that pays you.

Gear: Our family has invested in dozens of musical instruments and other gear (pianos, guitars, drum sets, keyboards, mandolins, PA systems, amplifiers…). And, oh yeah, it cost more than $500 to move a piano down three flights of stairs and then up to Maine (a story for another time). Cost to date: $25,000.

Again, your family’s investment is not your own. But even if it were, you’re paying too much. I owned just one guitar throughout most of the ’90s — a Gibson SG that I paid $300 for — and a Marshall half-stack that I found at a pawn shop for $500. I spent another $150 on pedals. The only time I’ve ever spent real money on a guitar was after Texas is the Reason sold out two nights at Irving Plaza in 2006. I celebrated by buying a Gibson Les Paul that I’ve always wanted for $2,000. The only other guitar I’ve ever owned is a Fender Telecaster my brother gave me in 1991, and that’s it for my entire career in band gear.

Total cost: $2,950. You do with what you have, and it’s amazing how the creativity will come.

Performing: For gigs here in New York, we hire taxis to lug our keyboards, stands, guitars,basses, amplifiers and drums to and from the venue. Whatever cash we earn beyond that usually goes to our current drummer. And expenses soar when we hit the road. Cost to date: $1,000.

Here’s the thing: You pay for taxis in New York anyway, whether or not you’re carrying a guitar. One time, when I lived on the corner of First Avenue and E. 10th Street, I actually walked my gear around the block to play at (the now-defunct) Brownies. It happens.

Interestingly, a thousand bucks isn’t a lot to spend here, and that’s surprising considering that neither of these guys work day jobs. If they spent as much money going out on tour — and sleeping on floors and eating at gas stations like normal people — as they did on voice lessons, we might actually know who Two Lights is. We probably still won’t like them, but that’s not the point.

My bands have spent lots of money on performance and production, but except for the very first tour I ever went on in 1992, I’ve always recouped. For real. Even when we were playing to a hundred kids on a good night. I’m not even particularly good at math, but I know how to make it work on tour, and a lot of it is about making friends with sofabeds, asking the promoter to make some cheap veggie stew, or making smart merchandise at fair prices. As a result, total cost: $0.

Promotion: Once you have music out, you need to promote it. We pay a guy to send email blasts to databases of hip music blogs. Postcards, demo CDs and other materials are also essential. Cost to date: $1,000.

Actually, none of this is “essential” for a band no one has ever heard of. None of it. Abner and Harper Willis ostensibly have the Internet and access to the Hype Machine; they should be sending out their (tasteful and infrequent) “email blasts.” (Although as a former music writer, I can tell you that there is a very special place in my trash for “email blasts.”) Also, postcards? That’s just fucking gauche.

None of my bands used a publicist of any sort until we were signed to a record label, and truthfully, there is really no reason to have one until you’ve got an honest-to-goodness album to support. The same goes for management. It seems insane to have to explain this to anyone in their early 20s — who should probably be playing music because they have something to say and not because they want to “earn a lot more money than even doctors and lawyers” — but play shows, be nice to people, make friends with other bands, and send free music to anyone who will listen to it. Also, don’t write about how much money you have in Time Magazine. My well-tested strategy will cost you $0.

Lost wages: The two of us each put about 20 hours a week into band-related work. Abner (still in school) could easily make $10 an hour working at a bar on weekends. Harper (a freelance writer) has to turn down writing assignments worth around $400 a week. Cost to date: $25,000.

I’ve been trying hard to refrain from using the word “privileged” here, but come on. I always worked when I played in bands — even when I didn’t technically have to work. I was a freelance writer, a record label owner, a data entry clerk, a record store guy, an executive assistant at a publishing company, whatever. I did it because having a job made the band feel less like a job, and that’s a good thing. (Also, I don’t think it’s particularly noble to be a poor musician.)

So if the Willis brothers have “lost” wages, it’s simply because their privilege allows it and their pride demands it. But since I cannot relate to such nonsense, my “lost wages” to date come to $0.

Living in New York City: Our cousin Abby lives in Atlanta in a house — a house! — with a couple of friends. They pay a third of what we pay for our combined living spaces. New York is absurdly expensive — but the band’s future demands that we live here rather than, say, our hometown in Maine. All told, we estimate that decision costs us an extra $1000 a month. Cost to date: $18,000.

“The band’s future demands that we live here.”

No it doesn’t. Being a band in New York City is prohibitive for a million reasons, and the imagined big-city promise simply does not warrant the sacrifice unless, as it was in my case, this is where you grew up and it’s just home to you. If Two Lights were really good — spoiler: they’re mediocre — then A&R guys would fly out to meet them. Labels would fly them into New York for a showcase. The Internet would discover them immediately. There is no such causal connection between living in New York and “making it,” so if I were these guys, I’d call my cousin Abby and move to Atlanta. Fact: Once you’re in a van, on tour, it really doesn’t matter where you live.

Which brings us to our final tally. Two Lights: $109,000. Me: $6,000 over 20 years.

If I were a name-caller, I’d even call the Beatles fucking stupid if they’d spent that much money before having recorded Please Please Me. But hey, Abner and Harper Willis, I’ll spare you. I just hope we all learned something here.

If his tweets were any indication, Michelangelo Signorile...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:14:34 -0500

If his tweets were any indication, Michelangelo Signorile dedicated his entire radio show yesterday to the question of Cynthia Nixon’s sexuality.

That’s weird.

It’s true that the public loves a good riff on some variation of the is-she-or-isn’t-she question, but in this case, we know. Cynthia Nixon is gay. She has a girlfriend. She isn’t hiding anything or campaigning against gay rights or donating millions of dollars to the Mormon church to help defeat same-sex marriage. The how or why is better left to the scientists, but the what — that she is an out lesbian woman — is well established.

Amateur biologists that we are, however, many of us just couldn’t resist taking the bait when Nixon gave an interview in which she asserted that “for me, [my sexuality] is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” Of course, that didn’t stop Signorile’s followers on Twitter (and others) from doing just that, dismissing the comment as a byproduct of misguided bisexuality, using it to illustrate “another example of the difference between gay men and lesbians,” or just chalking it up to the very male perception that “women are allowed to be more sexually open in our culture.” (Really?) Incredibly, only a few people — all women, it seems — actually gave unconditional credence to the notion that Cynthia Nixon has a right to define her own experience, even when it appears to threaten everything we believe about ourselves.

First, the obvious. Cynthia Nixon “knows” that her being gay is a choice in the same way that I “know” my being gay is an inborn trait. We just feel it. Of course, sheer introspection is not a sound epistemological method by any stretch — for either of us! — but in lieu of a credible and falsifiable explanation, it’s all we have. So in this case, it’s not even a situation of respectful disagreement, but personal truth: Nixon is not telling me that I chose to be gay, but that she did. I can’t possibly know whether or not that is true because I do not inhabit Cynthia Nixon’s body and mind.

I can, however, think about choice and freewill and the fact that we are a species famous for claiming categorical agency when we have none. For example, most of us don’t ever question the moment we “chose” to be right-handed or left-handed, but this predicament was actually one of my childhood’s most pressing questions. I practiced writing left-handed for years, I mimicked certain left-handed affectations that I’d see on television or elsewhere, I even started wearing a watch on my right hand. I heard about this thing called ambidextrousness — supposedly my grandmother had it — and I thought maybe that was me, too. At one point, I realized that my handwriting as a lefty actually got pretty good! But in the end, I “decided” that it felt more natural for me to be a righty. Just like Nixon, who said, “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” I tried righty and I tried lefty, and righty is better. As far as I was concerned, I made that choice, and there was nothing you could have told the 14-year-old me to convince him otherwise. It was as obvious to me as the fact that Knightwatch was going to become legendary television. (It didn’t.)

I realize now that it’s more complicated than that. That even if there is a “choice” involved, it’s not one of unmitigated freewill, and that — as with most of, if not all of the major markers that we use to construct identity — there is also some sort of genetic influence or predisposition. But what if there isn’t?

It seems obvious that the row over Nixon’s comments go way beyond personal truth and more into the thorny territory between social perception and civil rights: If “they” think we choose our sexuality, some argue, gay people will never be free from discrimination and oppression. But considering that the lack of choice that went into my identity as a person of color failed to provide any such immunity from the discrimination and oppression of being Hispanic or nonwhite in America, I struggle to see the logic (or dignity) in such a fear. At its worst, this argument proposes that a pure biological basis for homosexuality is the only escape-hatch from the moral argument against LGBT people, and in turn, submits that without this basis, there may be something to that moral argument in the first place. But there isn’t. Let’s not forget that the rhetoric of an “innate nature” is historically fraught with ideological self-interest, and that this point is not exclusive to a queer context: Late nineteenth-century theorists, for example, “presented the nonwhite person — ‘the savage’ — as lower down the evolutionary scale than the white” in an attempt to perpetuate a myth about the sexual insatiability of non-Europeans and to curb “the threat they consequently pose for the purity of the white race.” (If this sounds familiar, consider Pat Robertson’s recent warning that “there isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality,” and that “if history is any guide, the same thing is going to happen to us.”) Still, at its core, this fear also enforces the wrongful assertion that nature operates in clean divisions of inborn and acquired traits, and totally disregards those evolutionary certainties that factually exist in-between the binaries — such as the way many “plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual” or how “bees and flowers coevolve through mutually beneficial ‘deviations.’” (Timothy Morton can speak more about this point.) In other words, by placing a caveat-free premium on innate sexuality, gay people are actually making the same argument they are being oppressed with — that there are certain immutable “natural” binaries that exist for human beings in a way that defies the reality of pretty much every other plant and animal species on the planet. By yielding to such exceptionalism, we are clamoring to squeeze human sexuality and gender expression into a rigid box that we invented, which as such, enjoys no right to an existence in perpetuity.

The other thing, then, is this: Without any sort of real epistemic evidence for nature or nurture or neither, gay people ask straight people for the right to define our own experience every single day — even when it appears to threaten everything heterosexuals believe about themselves. Straight people certainly can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up gay, and many of the less sophisticated in their ranks can’t even imagine the possibility that two men or two women can love each other with the same kind of affection, desire, and commitment that they enjoy with their opposite-sex partners. Similarly, I have no idea what it must feel like to grow up with common, uncomplicated worries — such as whether or not a girl I like thinks I’m cute — and without attaching the fears of sin, morality, impending antigay violence, mental illness, and total ruin to every basic boyhood crush. Until we figure out how to inhabit the bodies and minds of other people, we might never know these things of each other.

Which is to say that, as improbable as Cynthia Nixon’s claim plays out in my own experience, I have no choice but to afford her the same benefit of the doubt that I demand for my own personal truth, which persists, unaffected. I mean, I believe I was born this way. But there is nothing about my personhood that would change if I weren’t.

“I must confess that over the last few years I have been...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:45:00 -0500

“I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

I’ve been reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” today, and this excerpt stood out as still particularly relevant — especially in a country where political expediency is often more valued (or at least more practiced) than the unmediated justice our so-called principles demand.

These are the ideas we should consider when conservative Republicans and Libertarians try to shore up MLK as a member of their side, even when they belittle the civil disobedience of Occupy Wall Street as “socialism” or “class warfare,” and not the inevitable pushback of economic oppression. This is the argument we should present when Democrats try to shore up MLK as a member of their side, even as they regularly inform millions of gay Americans that the heterosexists are not yet ready to cede power, and that 2012 is still too inconvenient a time for full equality under the law.

What King says here is clear: Dismantling the ideology of the oppressor is an active pursuit, not a passive one, and the right time will always be now. There are no exceptions. Let’s not get it twisted.

CHARLI XCX “Stay Away” Live at the Blind Club at...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:16:00 -0500

CHARLI XCX “Stay Away” Live at the Blind Club at Dalston Heights, 2012

This song was, hands down, my favorite single of 2011. Easily. And yet Charli XCX is still something of a spectre to me. I mean, she only has two songs and I’ve never seen her live. Still, watching this almost-acoustic performance of “Stay Away” proves a lot of the things for which I only had hunches for up until now: Like how she really has a tremendous voice. Like how when she’s ready to move out of the ’80s-tinged gothic pop she currently revels in, there will still be a wealth of possibility for her career. Like how if she’s this good at 19, Charli XCX could very well be a total fucking game-changer in even five years time.

I often criticize the Internet for making us more of a NOW! culture, and for obstructing the opportunity for new ideas to develop before they are immediately disclosed, consumed, and discarded. But in this case, it’s felt like a real privilege to be able to watch this young woman, whom I love and barely know anything about, just grow.

"When I was a young piano student I got so caught up in the seriousness of sitting grade exams, I..."

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:37:00 -0500

“When I was a young piano student I got so caught up in the seriousness of sitting grade exams, I forgot what I was doing it for. On finishing ten years of learning, my piano teacher gave me a card, which read: “Good luck with everything and remember Eve, MUSIC IS FOR FUN.” So Rihanna’s voice has little depth, her music is a non-stop glucose shot to the brain. In your review you ask what the point of a record like this is. As a young writer eagerly awaiting its release, I’ll tell you; the point of a Rihanna record is to rave your face off to it.”

- Eve Barlow’s The Problem With Music Critics is the most salient piece of music writing that you missed in 2011.

I can only imagine that most people look to their parents for a...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:42:00 -0500

I can only imagine that most people look to their parents for a relationship model, but that was never an option for me. It’s not that my mother and father were willfully antagonistic towards one another — apathetic is, perhaps, a better word — but that their marriage reeked more of obligation than love. In fact, my mother openly confessed that there were only two things that stood in the way of a divorce: a religious prohibition and me. But being a more devoted Christian than mother, she wasn’t about to blame God.

“If it weren’t for you,” she often told me, pointing the finger, “your father and I wouldn’t even be together.”

Without a blueprint to follow, I did what most of the kids from my generation did whenever reality failed to deliver a healthy archetype: I used movies and television to mediate my impression of how “normal” people did things. I waited for boys with boomboxes to woo me from the sidewalk. I figured true love would rush to my side at an airport gate, begging me not to leave. I imagined a 25th anniversary party for my partner and me in which both of us somehow still look 30. Obviously, I was single for a long time.

Before I met John, I celebrated anniversaries by the month. Two months was a big deal, three months a lifetime. The transient nature of my relationships reflected both my cynicism about romance and my idealization of it. Even the best romantic comedy can only sustain itself for two hours before the suspense of disbelief feels like holding your breath; a good breakup — romantic in its own right — was, in my mind, the way a heart exhales. I craved that breakup as much as the chase.

But the chase is sweet, and as my relationship with John developed in those first six months of 2006, I found myself wondering how this plot might play out if we resisted the impulse to rush to the credits. I thought about my favorite romantic comedy of all time — 1999’s Never Been Kissed, starring Drew Barrymore — and how unsatisfying it actually was to end a movie like that with just a kiss. I wanted to see Never Been Loved in the First Place or Never Been Forgiven For Being Such a Terrible Person. For the first time ever, I wanted to know how a movie called Never Been In a Real Relationship might end, and be perfectly happy if it never did.

I told John about my thing for Drew Barrymore very early on. I told him about Never Been Kissed, and about that time I watched Boys on the Side at 2 a.m. in a Los Angeles hotel room and went to sleep totally wrecked. I even told him about Home Fries. Fucking Home Fries! He politely humored me, as any good boyfriend should, but I insisted, somewhat jokingly, that Drew Barrymore had something to do with our relationship. I liked the idea of having some sort of fairy godmother that was technically younger than me.

So here’s the thing: I’m not superstitious or anything, but if you were to ask me when I knew this relationship was going to work out, I’d tell you it happened at a Starbucks in Chelsea, around the time of our four-month anniversary — a diamond anniversary in the relative history of my love life! I was sitting at a table, head down in my laptop, when I instantly recognized the voice ordering coffee. Without even looking up to confirm, I frantically approached strangers to borrow a pen or paper or anything but a napkin, and when I finally had what I needed, I sprinted to the milk-and-sugar station, where she was fixing her latte.

“I’m about to ask you for something stupid,” I said.

Drew Barrymore laughed as if that were the most wonderful thing she’d ever heard. If you know anything about the scientific correlation between oxytocin levels and looking at a cute puppy, it kind of felt like that.

I told her about my new boyfriend and how great I felt about our relationship. I also mentioned that she’s become something of a silent figure attached to all of it. I told her that John hates romantic comedies, but that if she could just write him a quick note, it would really crystallize the connection and maybe soften him up a bit.

It looked as if she were about to explode.

“Oh my God, yes!” she said, as she grabbed the pen and paper out of my hands and began to scribble the words “John,” “Love,” and “Drew Barrymore” across the sheet. Drew Barrymore hugged me and thanked me and wished us luck. It couldn’t have felt less feigned.

Later, when I went home, I hastily added a postscript: “Two hearts? Clearly, Drew loves you.” I framed the page and wrapped it up, still euphoric and eager to present this gift to John. Neither of us seemed to realize at the time that she actually drew three hearts on the sheet, not two. But it doesn’t matter. Somewhere, Olympia Dukakis — in the role of somebody’s wise mother — is waiting to interpret this as a plot-making metaphor in which love is neither quantifiable nor perfect.

The frame in this photo sits on our bedroom dresser today, on January 4, 2012, the sixth anniversary of our first date. Despite his aversion to the genre, John actually took me to see Music and Lyrics in 2007. I think he kind of liked it.

folkinz: momsdrunk: Mom’s Drunk Presents: How The Grinch Stole...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:11:00 -0500

folkinz:

momsdrunk:

Mom’s Drunk Presents: How The Grinch Stole Christmas

As read by 29 Tumblrs.

Thank you to the other 28 Tumblrs, including my 7 year old son Jasper (who does have a secret tumblr) for participating in this.

I participated in this, as did a number of other fine Tumblrs whose names I would hyperlink if I weren’t posting from a phone. Mostly though, I’m just pretty thrilled to share the stage with Folkinz’ awesome kid.

As far as writing goes, I did a lot of it in 2011. More of it...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:25:00 -0500

As far as writing goes, I did a lot of it in 2011. More of it than I might have ever thought possible. Enough of it to make me a little crazy at times. But not enough of it to make me feel like I never want to write again.

The other week, in a conversation with Matthew and B. Michael, I got kind of flustered trying to explain my frustration with not using Tumblr the “traditional” way. I want to publish these short and pithy posts, I said, but every time I set up a draft for one, it just feels wrong. I delete it and tell myself that it’s better to wait until I’m inspired to say something. But I also feel bad about it. I told them how I’ve been anticipating a grand exodus of followers for some time now, but that their number is steady — if not increasing. Nervous Acid has kept me humble in that regard: It turns out that despite the conventional Internet wisdom of the 24-hour news cycle, people will wait for you to think things through.

So while I may not post every hour — or every week, for that matter — your support in the past year has encouraged me to write and publish some really meaningful work on this site, and for that, I am grateful. To acknowledge it, I compiled a list of Nervous Acid’s Greatest Hits of 2011. These are, in chronological order, the ten short essays that I feel best represent (and map out) my year in thinking:

• “Take That (Or, Why I Am Not an Indie Rocker)” (January 3)

“The fact is that credibility has been institutionalized by scene ideologies and critical tropes. And because we don’t own it, we are unwillingly controlled by it. We consume, evaluate, and in many cases, simply dismiss media based on outdated historicism and meaningless signifiers of taste — and this is precisely why I am not an indie rocker. Much less an over-idealistic punk. Because, by my estimation, a group of 40-year-old men who, only twenty years ago, appeared in a music video naked while smearing jelly over themselves just made the album of the year.”

• “The Nervous Acid Guide to Responsible Speaking for Dummies” (January 12)

“The conventional wisdom is, of course, that if one yells ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, the showgoers will panic and begin a riotous move towards the exits — ostensibly causing stampeding, injuries, and even death. So let’s change the context: What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed ‘Fire!’ in a room full of firefighters? What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed ‘Fire!’ in a room full of burn victims? What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed ‘Fire!’ in a room full of pyromaniacs? For each person listening, that same one-syllable word is populated with completely different meaning — it is imbued with duty to the firefighter, anguish to the burn victim, and pleasure to the pyromaniac. Anyone who isn’t completely deluded can understand this.”

• “How to Graduate College When You’re Pushing 40” (May 31)

“Going to college in your mid-30s is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing when professors assume that you’re too young to remember Ronald Reagan or The Great Space Coaster. It’s embarrassing when you’re ten years older than your instructor. It’s embarrassing to have to explain to a 19-year-old young woman, who is objectively cute, that you are almost as old as her father and, either way, a happily gay man.”

• “Beyond Gay?” (June 10)

“The idea of the single monolithic gay culture that these young people think they are rebelling against is, in fact, a myth. If this writer had actually cared to cultivate some meaningful relationships with a few older gay men before dismissing them outright, if he actually connected with personal and cultural gay histories from even before Stonewall, he might know that the only way to go ‘beyond gay’ is, quite frankly, to be straight.”

• “Father’s Day” (June 19)

“When you don’t know who you are, everyone looks different to you. These people are not strangers anymore, but possibilities. Everyone you meet becomes a potential conduit to a sense of history and heritage that you don’t have, that you may never get. It’s a void you’ll fill with other things, but it’s never quite satisfied and always quite hungry. That void is the only thing my father ever gave me, besides the way I look.”

• “The Lesson” (July 21)

“’Wait a second!’ Grazíela said. ‘Are you gay?’

“Believe it or not, I’d never considered the possibility that I might be asked this question in a classroom. I’d never weighed the pros and cons of my sexuality as related to my position as an educator. But in this particular case, I wasn’t sure that coming out at this exact moment would be the best possible thing. Sometimes, when you’re a teacher, you have to put personal politics aside and reach for the ever-elusive ‘teaching moment’ — if only to give students an opportunity to be objective critical thinkers about the facts.”

• “Persons on the Internet” (September 21)

“If you are a Person On The Internet, chances are you have either overheard or engaged in such a conversation in the last fifteen years, and hopefully by now you have realized that the Internet is not any better or worse than the world offline, but merely a reflection: In one corner, you have Nigerian e-mail scams; in the other, Bernie Madoff. In one corner, you have people with fake or outdated pictures on their OKCupid profiles; in the other, you meet a hipster girl at a Girl Talk show who steals your cell phone and turns out to be a wanted criminal. There are freaks on the Internet, but have you actually left your house lately?”

• “The Doughnut Rant” (October 7)

“Mark’s initiative was inspiring and he always seemed to make the impossible possible. Like the time he actually convinced his Lower East Side tenement landlord to let him convert the basement of his apartment building into a commercial kitchen: That’s the kind of old-time New York City DIY fairytale you’ll likely never hear again. I’d already done indie publishing and indie rock; I wanted to be an indie doughnut guy.”

• “Doing Time on Croyden Drive: The Ballad of National Coming Out Day” (October 11)

“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.”

• “The Death of a Music Writer: A 20-Year Exit Strategy” (December 9)

“The first thing I thought when I looked over Stereogum’s Top 50 albums of 2011 this year was that, truthfully, I don’t believe that there has ever been 50 must-hear albums to be released in any one given year. You might as well make a Top 400; it would be just as useful. But the other thing was this: I don’t care about at least 46 of the records on their list. At all. Like, you could put them on at a party and I’d probably take them off. That’s how far I’ve jumped off this train.”

Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading, new and old. It’s been a tremendous year.

I took this photo last night, outside of what I’ll call...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:26:00 -0500

I took this photo last night, outside of what I’ll call the Crazy Christmas House in Canarsie, Brooklyn. The wooden Nutcracker guy actually marches — he’s not just stationary — and that green duck near the front door streams an endless carol of “Feliz Navidad.” (I mean, of course the green duck is Latino!) Nearby is a merry-go-round, a carousel, a gigantic display of Santa’s Workshop, a nativity scene that takes up an entire garage, and Santa Claus, in the front window, reading Christmas stories. It’s one of the most excessive things I’ve ever seen.

But I get it. My boyfriend and I drove thirty minutes to see it, so we’re complicit in the excess. Because if this isn’t the “real” America — like, you know, the whole Go-Big-or-Go-Home and Holy-Shit-Do-We-Like-Shiny-Things! America — then, really, I don’t know what is. That’s the America we craned our necks to see.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn presents: The Greatest 3-Minute Stories About The 90s.

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:08:00 -0500

Vol. 1 Brooklyn presents: The Greatest 3-Minute Stories About The 90s.:

perpetua:

I will be participating in this event tonight at Brooklyn Based in Greenpoint along with luminaries such as Maura Johnston, Norman Brannon, Jessica Suarez, Daphne Carr and Mark Yarm! Please come out if you can.

I’m going on early, so I have plenty of time to ruin anyone’s Internet perceptions of me!

Also, while I’m still working on the actual substance, I decided that my three minute story is going on a working title of “The ’90s and Our Race to Perfect the Pretense of Austerity.” I’d tell you the subtitle, but I think I’ll get a laugh out of the real people who come to hear me tell it. If you’re one of them, introduce yourself! Guaranteed: I am more afraid of you than you are of me.

DOWNLOAD | The Nervous Acid 2011 Year In Music Just because I...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:43:00 -0500

DOWNLOAD | The Nervous Acid 2011 Year In Music

Just because I quit writing about music for money doesn’t mean I quit loving music. In fact, just the opposite! This year I get to make a year-end mixtape that is zero percent critical consideration and 100 percent this-is-what-I-actually-love.

Here’s my list by the numbers:

Number of British Artists: 13
Number of Non-British Artists: 2 (1 from America, 1 from Denmark)
Number of Unsigned Artists: 1 (Whoever signs Owen Duff first is a guaranteed future millionaire member of the 1%!)
Number of Artists Without Full-Length Albums Out: 5
Number of Out Gay Artists (That I Know Of): 3
Number of Times I’ve Listened to “Stay Away” in 2011: Approximately 7,652
Number of Artists Featured in SPIN’s Top 50 of 2011: 0
Number of Artists Featured in Stereogum’s Top 50 of 2011: 0
Number of Artists Featured in Rolling Stone’s Top 50 of 2011: 0
Number of Artists Featured in New York Magazine’s Top 10 of 2011: 0
Number of Artists Featured in NME’s Top 50 of 2011: 1

So basically, we’ve learned that I still love the import section at the record store, that I still love discovering new artists, and that — except for that dude at NME who added the Bombay Bicycle Club record to their Best-Of list — pretty much no one else writing about music shares my taste. But that’s cool. Because these, my friends, are the songs and artists that made me excited to be alive in 2011.

COMPLETE TRACKLISTING:

1. Bombay Bicycle Club — “How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep”
2. The Joy Formidable — “Whirring”
3. Charli XCX — “Stay Away”
4. Will Young — “Come On”
5. Death Cab for Cutie — “Doors Unlocked and Open”
6. Emeli Sandé — “Heaven”
7. Clock Opera — “Belongings”
8. Bright Light Bright Light — “Disco Moment”
9. Cher Lloyd — “With Ur Love” (feat. Mike Posner)
10. The Wombats — “Anti-D”
11. Owen Duff — “Realitycide”
12. When Saints Go Machine — “Parix”
13. Butcher the Bar — “Bobby”
14. CocknBullKid — “Asthma Attack”
15. Mr Fogg — “Answerphone”

The Death of a Music Writer: A 20-Year Exit Strategy

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:37:00 -0500

This essay is longer than most, but it was important for me to write.

I. 1991–1993

Three weeks ago I handed in my final music column for Towleroad. In the weeks before that, I contacted anyone who still paid me to write about music and told them I wasn’t accepting any more work. As of today, I have one more invoice to file — for about $800 — and as soon as that check is cut and cashed, this part of my life will be over. It’s the end of an accidental career.

Unlike a lot of the younger writers I’ve met in the past few years, I never had any aspirations to become a so-called “music critic.” If anything, I started writing about music as a response to how I perceived the criticism of the time. Conventional journalistic sacred-cows like objectivity and author-invisibility were valued (if not demanded) by commercial publications, while the mainstream music writer’s occasional divergences into the underground scenes with which I was most familiar revealed an almost boastful sciolism. The metaphoric representation of the-critic-as-“gatekeeper” went literal, and nonfiction writers had begun producing work in the voice of an omniscient narrator. So when Kurt Cobain showed up on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992 wearing a shirt that read CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK, it was certainly an ironic gesture. But it also expressed how many of us felt.

In spite of this suspicion and even animus towards the medium, I decided in 1993 that my career as a health food store manager had probably peaked, and that if I had to do something for money, I should be my own boss. So I saved $3,000 and then poured it all into the launch of my own magazine. Almost overnight, I was a “professional” music writer.

II. 1994–1999

When I first started writing about music, I only had two role models. One of them was a guy who interviewed his friends and wrote his magazine by hand, and the other was someone who only seemed to care about interviewing musicians for as much as he could steer the conversation into identity politics. Neither of them ever wrote about music in a traditional manner, but rather, with a deeply ingrained personal — and perhaps even fleeting — embrace of subjectivity. Still, these writers published work that was infinitely more interesting than the subjects they wrote about — in which the music itself was no longer a central focus (or in some cases, a focus at all), but a byproduct of ideologies, experience, and complex human interactions — largely because they weren’t fettered to convention. The marked presence of the writer was not an intrusion to the form, but a refreshing narrative intervention that did its own creative work. I wanted to be like them.

Anti-Matter got off to a clumsy start, but it got better. I found my own voice quickly, and the effect I was having really set in by 1995, when all of the sudden, a new generation of fanzines emerged that started to look and sound like mine. (This isn’t my ego speaking; editors often sent me their work through the mail, along with thank-you letters.) Reading these zines, I began to reflect on what I was doing: my strategy was, at turns, both empathetic and narcissistic, universal and obscure, prideworthy and cringeworthy. But more than that, these zines also somehow validated my ideas about music writing, and accelerated the process in which, for the first time ever, I began to self-identify as a “writer” at all. It was a life-changing realization. At roughly the same time, my phone rang.

“This is Rob Cherry from Alternative Press magazine,” said the guy on the other line. “I know you do your own thing, but would you consider writing a story for us?”

Even after two years of making a living by publishing my own output, the idea that someone else might want to pay me to write for them had never occurred to me.

III. 2000-2004

Music writing in the 1990s experienced the same kind of upheaval we witnessed with the music itself. A new batch of writers had been culled from the underground because the commercial publishing world needed new experts, and all of the sudden, experience like mine — in the pre-Nirvana alternative and punk culture — became marketable capital. I could have milked it, but I didn’t. In fact, in almost 20 years of writing, I’ve never pitched an unsolicited story or sent clips to an editor or did anything to further my career, really. If my phone didn’t ring for a while, I just busied myself with something else — a band, a record label, a movie — until it did. My feelings weren’t hurt, I didn’t feel empty inside, it never felt like there was something missing when I wasn’t writing about music.

Maybe that’s how you know something isn’t your passion anymore. But it used to be.

By the time I moved back to New York from San Francisco in 2004, the new wave of music writers seemed to be calling themselves “critics” now. This amused me, if only because it seemed like calling yourself a “journalist” was a dirty word in 1997 and “critic” actually made “journalist” sound less pretentious. Before, we just reviewed records; now, we were expected to apply poststructuralism to the snare drum sound on Radiohead’s Kid A. Interestingly, something else happened: The magazine writer — who, in the new wave of post-punk criticism had finally become a marked presence in his or her own work — began to disappear again. It was almost as if the emergence (and short-lived dominance) of the narcissistic blogger was inevitable.

I started Nervous Acid in 2003, anonymously, and began writing about music with my self as the center again. Blogging felt more satisfying than anything I’d published in years — in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that no one paid me to do it.

IV. 2005-2011

For the record, I hated Brent DiCrescenzo’s writing for Pitchfork in the early 2000s. It was hyperbolic, esoteric, and borderline incomprehensible at times. I often finished reading one of his album reviews by scrolling back to the top of the page to remember what the hell he was talking about. Even Pitchfork itself seems to be embarrassed by DiCrescenzo’s review of Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity; it’s not on their site anymore, so I had to dig up the original through the Wayback Machine just to show you how ridiculous he could be. At the same time, I always felt that guy got to experience a really unique moment as a writer. For a short time, his work was instantly recognizable, entertaining in a car-crash kind of way, and totally fucking memorable. DiCrescenzo was a lot of things, but he wasn’t elevator music.

The other day I looked him up on the Internet and found an interview with him that Rob Harvilla used as part of a story he wrote on Pitchfork in 2004. It was the announcement of DiCrescenzo’s retirement.

“Writing about music is not very interesting to me,” he explained. “You find yourself having to write the same things over and over and over again. When a record’s really good, it’s easy to find things to say. When it’s really bad, it’s easy to find things to say. But when it’s just right there in the middle, that’s when you sort of have to amuse yourself.”

It’s hard to admit that I’ve been involved in something that I no longer find interesting, but it’s true. I get you, Brent.

Because the amount of thinking that I’ve done about this in the last several months is way too all-over-the-place to formulate any sort of cohesive narrative for what I mean when I say I no longer want to get paid to regularly write about music, I’ll simply list a few of the things that have weighed the most heavily on my mind before settling on my own decision to “retire.” These have been the most recurrent issues that I’ve been struggling with:

In spite of my good reputation for doing interviews — which I do still actually love to do — you can’t really squeeze blood from a stone. The interviews I did for Anti-Matter or for Alternative Press or for the Thursday documentary were memorable, in part, because both sides of the tape recorder agreed to let go and trust each other. But when the other side holds on — to their image, to their myth, to their ego, as so many modern bands are determined to do — the result is a form of Music Journalist Mad Libs. There are, in fact, few things that make me more despondent than when I know I’m about to write a story that’s already been told.
In the last five years especially, my personal taste in music has diverged so far from the critical consensus of my peers that I can no longer actually find myself in the discourse. The first thing I thought when I looked over Stereogum’s Top 50 albums of 2011 this year was that, truthfully, I don’t believe that there has ever been 50 must-hear albums to be released in any one given year. You might as well make a Top 400; it would be just as useful. But the other thing was this: I don’t care about at least 46 of the records on their list. At all. Like, you could put them on at a party and I’d probably take them off. That’s how far I’ve jumped off this train.
A few people have asked me why I didn’t care to throw my hat directly into the Odd Future Critical Meltdown of 2011, and I responded with what I believe to be the truth: I do plan to write about it, but not until enough time has elapsed that I can approach it from all angles in a meaningful way. Because there is more than one angle to it. In my eyes, this story became less about a group of teenage kids who will (I hope) eventually grow up, and more about a group of grown-up music writers who all seemed loathe to give up their precious “objective critical lens” and actually acknowledge that there are real people whose lives are at stake by the assumption that one can dissociate himself from words that describe physical and psychological violence towards women and gay people, and that the pretense of dissociating oneself from such violence in the first place is a result of denial or privilege or both. It’s about a new generation of music writers who were given the opportunity — but declined — to write about misogyny and homophobia in music culture with the same kind of FUCK-NO ferociousness of Lester Bangs’ brilliant (and subjective) 1979 takedown on racism in rock. Basically, I wanted someone with a powerful voice — someone at one of the major outlets, perhaps — to just say, “Fuck you. This is bullshit.” It all became very personal to me, and I’m sad to say I lost a lot of faith. But it also shook me up and took me back to the person I was before I started writing professionally: I am a first-person writer, with genuine experiences and corporeal realities that inform how I think and what I write. If you can listen to the word “faggot” hundreds of times and enjoy it via dissociation, then have at it, Impenetrable Music Critic. Someday, I’ll let you know how it feels to be a closeted sixteen-year-old kid who just found out that some friends of a friend killed a gay man while shouting that word.

As is the case with most things you do for a long time, the rose-color always gives way to blurriness.

V. THE FUTURE

To some extent, parts of this essay had to be negative. People who quit their jobs generally have problems with their job — that’s a given.

But that’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of incredible moments: I was probably the first person to write about the New York hardcore scene for a national music magazine. I got to be one of the first writers for EgoTrip, whose legend has now spawned books and reality TV shows and great success for its founders, who I respect so much. I’m pretty sure I’m still the only person who ever had the chance to write about punk rock in VIBE magazine. Matt Freeman introduced me to his father as “the person who wrote the best story ever written about Rancid,” and his father told me that this story was framed and hanging on his wall. I even published a book.

The fact is, I like writing about music. I enjoy reading about music. I adore my music-writing friends, and I always happily read their work. It’s just that it’s important for me to get back to doing it my way, to get back to doing it in a way that most people won’t pay you to write, and to get back to that place where you get to actually listen to records that you like as a rule and not as a treat for having had to slog through a stack of promo CDs you’ll most likely toss in the trash. In that sense, making a formal decision to quit writing about music isn’t just about my relationship with “criticism,” but about my relationship with music itself.

This is also to create a marker, to say that beginning in 2012, I need to establish myself as a different kind of writer. I have a short essay called “Five Reasons Why Hardcore is More Homoerotic Than Emo” set to be published in an upcoming collection for Soft Skull Press in June, and that’s a good example of the kind of music writing I still hope to engage in. But I’m also working on a book of nonfiction personal essays that engage with music only on a very peripheral level. It’s vague, I know, but when people ask, I generally tell them that This is a book about personal voids and the invisible things we use to fill them. My concerns in writing are changing.

Or they’re just going back to the start.

I didn’t become a writer to talk about records. I became a writer because I wanted to connect with people, to feel less alone, to investigate the idea that, maybe, we all keep the same secrets. For a long time I used music as a cover for that investigation. But the jig is up. I don’t have to work undercover anymore, so this is my way of saying I won’t.

"Imagine you’re in a band, and when you played shows, people were permanently disfigured or..."

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:55:00 -0500

“Imagine you’re in a band, and when you played shows, people were permanently disfigured or injured. That there was a number of times when people lost the ability to walk because they came to see your fucking show! These were people who got jumped on. How does that feel? It fucking sucks! Do you like to walk? I like to walk. [The criticism of our banter] shows this deeply fucked up, cynical attitude. Like, “He’s trying to cut back on our freedoms.” Freedom to what? To injure people? Fuck you. You’re not free to do that. If I’m having a dinner party, you’re not welcome to fucking cut my other guests.”

- I could listen to Ian MacKaye all day, forever.

An unexpected surprise: Da Capo’s annual Best Music...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:37:00 -0500

An unexpected surprise: Da Capo’s annual Best Music Writing collection for 2011 is out, and that very well-liked open letter that I wrote to Nicki Minaj for this site — which I scrawled at two in the morning with a serious axe to grind — was shortlisted in the appendixes. That is meaningful to me!

It’s also somewhat coincidental, because I’ve been working on a longer piece about my “career” as a music writer, and this particular nod actually seems to validate one of the key precepts that I’ve been working with. I hope to post that soon so you’ll know what I’m talking about, but in the meantime, thanks to Daphne Carr and the BMW crew for the acknowledgment, and congratulations to everyone else who made it in the book.

Also, one my personal favorite writers, Michaelangelo Matos, painstakingly compiled a list of links to most of these pieces. Many of them are on Tumblr. Be sure to show them your love.

A few years ago, on this day, some friends had an idea: The best...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:25:00 -0500

A few years ago, on this day, some friends had an idea: The best part of Thanksgiving, they said, was the pie. So what if, in lieu of a traditional dinner, everyone came over with their dish baked in the form of a pie instead? There would be turkey pies and vegetable pies and cranberry pies and pumpkin pies and potato pies and — I actually made this — a pie full of macaroni and cheese. What could go wrong!

Each individual plate at serving time was essentially a Franken-pie. It was like having a full pie on your plate, except that inside every slice, there was a totally different flavor profile. At first, the table was joyful, boisterous, convinced that we had actually pulled off the greatest Thanksgiving idea ever. But what happened after that is still kind of fuzzy. I woke up on a hard wood floor surrounded by everyone who was there. It looked like a Thanksgiving Day Jonestown massacre.

Spoiler alert: pie hangovers are not cute.

This year, I’m thankful to have friends with ideas, to know people who always want to find the more creative angle, to be surrounded by instigators who don’t accept that everything we know has to be one way only. I’m also thankful for the people who make it possible for a vegetarian without a family to enjoy a holiday that is basically about eating meat with your parents. Somewhere along the way, this tradition broke for me. But it’s cool now. We fixed it.