• DOWNLOAD | FREELANCE WHALES “Hannah” Weathervanes, 2009

I decided to become a teacher roughly two years ago. At that point, in 2007, I had been volunteering every week at a Brooklyn public school for almost four months, tutoring high school juniors in the fundamentals of journalism — the process of researching, interviewing, and writing for a feature article. (The students’ work would be eventually compiled into a small book, published by McSweeney’s.) On the final day of the unit, as I reached for my jacket, one of the students approached me.

“Hey, Mr. Brannon?” I looked up to see a girl that I particularly recognized for her amazing potential as a writer. “I just wanted to say thanks,” she said. “You really helped me out, and I learned a lot from you.”

My face was flush. I mean, I was just having fun with this. It never occurred to me that any of it was going to actually mean something. But I thanked her sincerely, and went on my way.

It was snowing outside that day, but I decided to walk home. My face hurt from smiling irrepressibly against the cold wind; I felt almost disoriented by the rush of activity inside my head. Taking advantage of a deserted two-block stretch, I began skipping to the music in my headphones. Let’s be clear about this: I was a 33-year-old man, skipping home from school.

“There must be a way to get paid to do this!” I thought to myself — although I’ll write that inside of quotation marks because I could have very well said it out loud. These kinds of moments, in my experience, are often recorded into memory with vaseline on the lens. But one thing is clear: I’d barely finished the sentence when I realized what I wanted to do.

I’ll probably never see that student again, but I want her to know that she really helped me out, and I learned a lot from her. I can’t say how these last two years might have played out had she simply walked out of the classroom that day. I am well aware of the fact that she didn’t have to say anything at all, and lately, I’ve been thinking about how it’s almost cruel that she’ll never know the impact of that insignificant twenty-second window — that fleeting moment when she kind of changed my life.

Photo: Dean Terry

• DOWNLOAD | THE DECEMBERISTS “Ask Me” Live, 2008

Earlier this week, Chris Conroy broke down the silent wall of Tumblr:

All too often we find ourselves following Tumblogs with minimal context. Most of the time we start with our friends’ blogs, then we follow their friends that we met at a party once, then we follow their friends that we’ve never met, then we follow the people who provide a lot of dinosaur content, and pretty soon there are lots of complete strangers in our dashboards.

Let’s not be strangers!

The phenomenon that Chris is referring to is, in my opinion, seemingly exclusive to this platform, and it’s probably the one thing that has always bothered me about how we use this thing: Tumblr, more than any other blogging platform, has created all these built-in possibilities for social interaction that did not exist with Blogger or WordPress or TypePad — and I’ve actually published this site, at one point or another, with all of them — but it has somehow paradoxically facilitated the least amount of social interaction in the entirety of my seven years of blogging. The new generation of bloggers, it might seem, is scared of something.

Another Tumblr post this week, from Tyler Coates, gets at the heart of it. A reader asks: “Why do you blog on Tumblr? You tend to post more long-ish essay posts instead of what the platform is more commonly used for (reblogs, pics, videos, and quotations without comment; no extended thought on anything), so I was just wondering what keeps you around these parts.” Coates replies, in part:

I try my best to keep things short here, but I generally fail. Usually I write a lot about myself when I’m sad or frustrated; if you were following me last year you’d know exactly what I mean. And, of course, I sort of regret doing that. I regret putting a vulnerable part of myself out for everyone to see.

For the record, Tyler’s blog is at its most interesting when he explores — what he calls, in all caps — HIS FEELINGS. This is largely because those “feelings” are what makes him an idiosyncratic human being in this world. Thousands of weblogs knee-jerkingly republished Conan O’Brien’s heartfelt open letter to Earthlings, but only one website exposed something unique about Tyler Coates. For whatever reason, I prefer to read that one.

I don’t find it surprising that this conversation is beginning, on the ground level, with gay men. (Both Conroy and Coates are, like myself, gay.) My first real connection to blogging didn’t come from reading Kottke or Evhead; I was inspired by Ultrasparky, Dogpoet, and the former Young Bradford. Whenever I think about why I do this, I think about them and some of the other gay bloggers I met in the early 2000s. Back then, the idea of building a community seemed viable — and, in fact, almost inevitable — because we shared something about our lives every single day. I was motivated to get to know these people, because we wrote with our guards down — vulnerability was almost a prerequisite — and with that susceptibility came trust. (Even Tyler seems amazed to admit “that no one has reblogged me to make fun of me,” and this is probably because most of us realize that personal bloggers are privileging us into their all-caps FEELINGS.) In the last ten years, I have met, hung out with, or become close friends with virtually every gay blogger I followed in the early- to mid-2000s, and I have yet to be disappointed by the quality of friends this fake-world platform has given me real-world access to. If Tumblr bums me out, it’s because I have a hard time believing that we’re all so precious about our personal lives that the only thing we feel compelled to say to the world is “LOL” at a YouTube internet meme.

It doesn’t seem coincidental to me that much of this type of reflective “tumbling” began a few days after Tumblr introduced a Formspring-like “Ask” feature in which readers could finally interact with Tumblr users directly. My repulsion for Formspring in general was cynical because it almost immediately clogged up my Tumblr dashboard with a series of sarcastic answers to sarcastic questions; its prospects for authentic communication kinda failed hard. However, I’ve been surprised by the change in tone that followed the launch of Tumblr Ask. (Frank Chimero’s use of the feature has been especially classy.) And it’s made me slightly nostalgic for a since-deleted entry from December 25, 2003 — I kept the archives, natch — in which I asked readers to send in questions for a Q&A post. That was, admittedly, kind of overwhelming — I only answered seven of them — but the simple exchange helped me feel like I wasn’t writing at the wall. The first thing I learned about publishing, the day I sold my first fanzine in 1989, was that writing is not actually the antisocial art I thought it was. It is, in fact, a recurring and complex, yet satisfying dialogue with a reader. You are a part of this.

So, for better or worse, I’ve enabled the Ask feature for Nervous Acid. I’ve also posted a whimsical picture of myself here — demonstrating the Chinese folding method — so that you know two more details about me: First, I am actually quite approachable. And second, I’m kind of OCD. These things can be a blessing and a curse.

Photo: Steven Wade

• DOWNLOAD | ELBOW “Scattered Black and Whites” Asleep In The Back, 2001

I have to believe that Lisa Taddeo was conscious, on some level, of the rhetoric she was using to advance her thesis about Jay-Z in a profile for Esquire, which hit the Internet this afternoon. The ham-fisted point she tried to convey: Jay-Z has become more than a pop culture icon in his career, but an ambassador for urban America. He is, Taddeo argues, the only world-renown entity who can seamlessly move from a Marcy Projects house party to a dinner gala with Bill Clinton without drastically altering his demeanor. These are fair assertions. But in her overzealous attempt to christen Jay-Z as a cultural bridge, she firmly establishes her vantage point on the opposite side of the water:

There is a deeper significance — a racial philanthropy — that perhaps neither man intended. Jay-Z is black black. He is old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black. He is black the way Labatt is blue. He is not white black, Barack black, like our president. Or the kind of black that doesn’t curse and deplores the n-word, the genteel black, like Oprah. He is, arguably, the first black-black guy to cross over into Oprah-land and Bill Clintonworld without making the Oprah-sized no-look-back forward flip that means you’re selling not necessarily your soul but perhaps something fleshier, a little more external.

I’ll be honest. I tried to read this paragraph in a hundred different ways, and I really tried to be charitable about it. Maybe “old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black” is just a clumsy way of saying Jay-Z is not light-skinned. Perhaps calling Barack Obama “white black” is more of a factual reference to his mixed-race heritage. It could be that Oprah is “genteel” in the way that Rachael Ray is genteel — although you’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who might call Rachael Ray “genteel white.” This is where things get tenuous. There are, in fact, two distinct concepts of race that Taddeo is playing with here — that of factual ancestry and that of perceived cultural attributes — and one of them is steeped in historical notions of white superiority. In other words, she is assuming that we judge Jay-Z and Obama and Oprah not based on what they are, but rather, on what they’re not: Jay-Z is “black black,” a whimsical way of saying that he is, make no mistake, neither ethnically nor characteristically white. Oprah is, on the other hand, “genteel black” — a subtle adjectival insinuation which implies that blacks are not inherently genteel. These are, quite frankly, textbook examples of “Othering.”

I’ve been told, more times than I care to admit, that I “talk white.” But what does this mean, really? Does my ethnicity, as a Hispanic-American, require that I use some form of Spanglish? Would I be more culturally authentic if I listened to Big Pun records? Is my insistence on using the so-called “standard” English a sign that I am, perhaps, “white brown?” The answers to these questions all depend on some sort of racially normative standard. But who gets to decide what’s normal?

If you read Taddeo’s feature through the eyes of this, her closing argument, you will be pressed to believe that Jay’s story is not simply remarkable in terms of his achievement and perseverance or talent, but because he is “old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black.” You’ll be tempted to believe that Barack Obama’s “white” is somehow stronger than his “black” — meaning what, I’m not sure — and that, therefore, his achievement — as President of the United Fucking States — is, therefore, somehow less incredible. You might even want to believe that African Americans who choose to refrain from using “the n-word” lack the ethnic authenticity of, say, Ice Cube. But these ideas are all reinforcements of the very same skewed racial perceptions Taddeo thinks she’s critiquing. As if being othered from white people isn’t enough, she writes as if we should be othered from ourselves.

• DOWNLOAD | THE SPINANES “Winter On Ice” Strand, 1996

This is a picture of my boyfriend sitting on a toboggan in Québec City last weekend. Right after snapping this photo, I sat down behind him and held on for my dear life. I imagined a pleasant ride down for some reason; it did not occur to me that we would be literally flying down a sheet of ice, unprotected from the elements and untethered to any kind of safety gear. It was terrifying — especially halfway down, as it dawned on me that I couldn’t jump off this thing without really getting hurt — but once you’re in motion, you just have to hold on to your partner and have faith.

I learned something this Christmas, and it wasn’t about tobogganing.

Photo: Nervous Acid

1 | ELLIOTT SMITH From A Basement on the Hill
Anti-, 2004

DOWNLOAD| “King’s Crossing”

Elliott Smith only ever made me uncomfortable once. It was in 1998, and we were sitting in a small group over coffee at the Pink Pony on Ludlow Street. In the way that coffee-shop conversations inevitably do, this one evolved into a roundtable dynamic: we began trading childhood war stories. Where are you from? was the first question. What was that like? was the next.

“I grew up in Texas,” Elliott answered.

And what was that like?

His expression turned blank, his body tense. “I don’t wanna talk about that today.”

From A Basement on the Hill was released almost exactly one year after Elliott Smith was found dead in his Los Angeles home, having allegedly stabbed himself in the chest on October 21, 2003. Courtney Love callously called it “the best suicide I ever heard of,” which was probably the most banal thing Kurt Cobain’s widow could have said, while most of the music blogs of the era played some version of the we-saw-it-coming card — an indicator that, on some level, many believed that Elliott was a hopeless depressive, a junkie, an inexorable tragedy. People wanted to believe that he had been living out his metaphors all along.

We all experience that disconnect at one point or another — the scuffle between the person we are and the person people believe we are — and the majority of that conflict gets played out through a third component: the person we project into the world. That third person is the most complex and also the least authentic; it is neither the true self nor the perceived self, but a calculated and reactionary self. For his part, Elliott was conscious of this trichotomy, and he spent the better part of his career trying to integrate these pieces into one cohesive whole: His songs were dark, but his personal demeanor was relatively upbeat — and he often used the media to split the difference. “I’m just as happy as all the other people I know,” he told me in an interview for Alternative Press in 1998. And over the next couple of years, as we became regular acquaintances in New York City, it occurred to me that he was right. Everyone I knew in the city back then was eating ramen and losing faith while Elliott was singing lines like, “I’m doing just fine hour to hour, note to note.” He was writing these lyrics inside of a bar — in the middle of the day — but still.

The last time I saw Elliott Smith, at the Metro in Chicago in 2000, he seemed as happy as all the other people I knew.

We never talked about it, but that day at the Pink Pony, when Elliott shut down, I recognized that wounded look. He made vague references to his childhood all the time, and in the only interview I ever did with him, he made it clear that this was something he didn’t find relevant to discuss. “I don’t want to draw people in with my sad story of this or that,” he said. “It doesn’t make it a better or worse song if someone had a really bad time growing up.” This is, of course, true. But in Elliott’s case, it wasn’t the “sad story” itself that had become germane to his work, but the coded expression of unresolved heartache. The projected person and the authentic self were colliding, perhaps inevitably. This happened to me, too.

On November 1, 2003, about a week after Elliott died, I crossed the street. I woke up three days later — just in time, they said, to avoid an emergency surgical procedure in which a hole would have been drilled into my skull. This is what we talk about when we talk about traumatic brain injuries.

Most people don’t live to talk about what it feels like to get hit by a tow truck, and those of us who do are not likely to remember much. There are so many immediate concerns to deal with when you regain consciousness — a six-month headache, multiple rib fractures, a broken pelvis that makes your right leg feel as if it were disconnected from the rest of your body — that the actual event becomes insignificant; it is, for many of us, the first time we realize that our entire lives could be spent trying to repair the outcome of past events. Having the next two months confined to a hospital bed, I had a lot of time to think about what I’d spent the first thirty years of my life trying to fix. All roads led back to my childhood.

And what was that like?

Up until the point where my mother finally decided to stop speaking to me altogether rather than confront her violent past, I usually wouldn’t bring this up over coffee, either.

DOWNLOAD| “Abused” (Demo)

I left San Francisco in the summer of 2004, six months after being discharged from the hospital. I had decided to move back to New York City, to fold my record label, to quit playing music, and to start over completely. At the heart of this resolve was a somewhat simple truism: If you want something you’ve never had, you need to do something you’ve never done. Some people figure this out on their own, but some of us need a tow truck to help push us along.

A review copy of From A Basement on the Hill was delivered to me on the morning I set out for my cross-country move. My friend Trevor and I listened silently as we pulled out onto the highway. “Coast to Coast” felt like an appropriate song to begin this trip, but the longer I listened, the more I realized that this song was not so much the suggestion of a departure, but the announcement of an arrival — the “last stop for a resolution.” It was neither pretty nor ugly, neither harsh nor tender; its flaws were not only to be exposed but celebrated. The projected self was merging with the authentic self in a way that Elliott had never before chosen to display. But if it grew difficult to listen to, it was only because we knew the end of this story.

It might seem bizarre that I’d choose this as my album of the decade — an album in which the original artist never approved the final mixes or tracklisting or artwork. But I’d argue that these circumstances only sustain the idea that Elliott’s vision for this album was so strong that it was almost impossible to fuck up. Indeed, the only blemish on its execution is not on what became the final product, but what had been dubiously omitted: Three songs were removed from the final version of From a Basement on the Hill at the behest of Elliott’s family. Among them was a song called “Abused,” in which Elliott finally gave a name to that thing he didn’t want to talk about. It demanded that he abandon all metaphor and just say it. We are only as sick as our secrets.

We didn’t know that at the time he was addicted to heroin and crack, smoking up to $1,500 worth a day. We didn’t know that he had actually tried to OD but failed, on more than one occasion. We didn’t know that he believed he was sexually abused by his stepfather as a child. We didn’t know that three months later, he’d check himself into rehab, get clean, and finally face the pain he’d spent years trying to numb. We didn’t know any of this.

This is the album of the decade because the gloves — and the masks — all finally came off.