choose your own adventure

There’s something sort of feline about the weird ways in which we humans balk at change.

I don’t know if it’s fear of death, lack of imagination, or straight-up laziness. Maybe it's habit. Whatever it is, it’s the force that compels people to buy houses and maintain the same haircuts for years after they are no longer flattering. At some point, change starts to feel more like a threat than an opportunity. It seems sinister and difficult instead of fun and exciting, and so you become this impotent docent in your own life, guarding something that never really existed.

If you’re lucky, you’ll meet a handful of people in life where your meeting is followed by this glorious time when you’re almost blinded by their brilliance. They’re faceted creatures that cast their light on the tired old world. Something opens up.

Then maybe as you get older, you learn more about the ways in which facets turn to fissures and you grow leery of that opening—its fragility, its implied threat.

I think one of the hardest things about being a writer is the tendency—the necessity—of working towards The End. The End is always the goal, and it weighs on you. You learn to think about stories in terms of teleology. Possibilities are uncomfortable problems to be worked out.

Let’s just get this out of the way: what I’m about to say might sound stupid.

Some years back, I had an out-of-town fling during the death throes of a toxic thing I had going on back home. It was the type of experience that was more symbolic than significant in itself, if that makes sense. It helped me see that my life was wide open in a way that I had forgotten about after years of what I now recognize was unhappiness.

I have this vivid memory of being very hungover in a taxi on the way to the airport, trying not to barf. It was an impossibly bright morning, and I had the kind of headache where it seemed like the whole world was throbbing in time with my pulse.

Half asleep, I leaned my head against the window. And I was thinking about this fling with some fondness, considering how the rest of the story might unfold. Maybe he’d call and we’d talk like old friends. Maybe I’d given him the wrong number. And so on. Who knew?

We’d have an adventure. We’d let it lie.

And there was this moment as I was drifting off when each of these possibilities—just because it existed—seemed as bright and open as the stretch of road that streaked past my window.

And through that bear of a hangover, I experienced what I can only describe as this Walt Whitman-style feeling of oneness with the universe—like everything within and without was lit with these possibilities. They buzzed through my chest like fireflies. They were the sun that warmed my cheeks. Then they were the bright spots morning burned behind my closing lids.

And then I spent an hour or so throwing up at the airport.

My point is, I’m a writer. I overanalyze my own narrative. Sometimes I worry about The End before I’ve worked through the beginning. Sometimes possibilities feel like uncomfortable problems that need solving.

I’m trying to find the fucking fortitude to hold them in my hand before I bury them in my heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day, you guys.
KO

you have got to be fucking kidding me

Sasha Frere-Jones, pop-music critic for The New Yorker, I have long wished you ill.

I have wished you ill as you have referred to yourself as a "musician," as though appearing on your own mixed tape in the early 1990s counts.

I have looked down on you because you are an inflammatory "intellectual" that throws around words like "miscegenation" in your article about the Arcade Fire. As though race had anything to do with that band.

I have looked down on you as you insulted Stephin Merritt, who is my king. And, with interest, I watched you take it all back when you were interviewed for the Strange Powers documentary. No defense, eh? I was only surprised that you admitted you were wrong.

I have looked down on you as you compared Pavement and Nirvana. As though those two bands made sense together in a single sentence.

Sasha Frere-Jones, I have long thought you were a cunt and a fraud. You have never once made sense to me, a casual fan of music. For a long while, I gave you the benefit of the doubt because I know far less about your "expertise" than many of the other departments in the magazine you write for. Such is the power of a respectable title.

Is that what you're counting on, S F/J? So much so that you feel like it's okay to write these blatantly misogynistic (and also RETARDED) things about PJ Harvey?

First, he writes off Harvey's album White Chalk, which actual humans know is really rather good:
"[It] was strictly an eyes-closed affair. At some point, she stopped singing from her viscera and brazenly swinging her guitar, and turned into a a wispy poet with little more than a piano, a falsetto whine, and a story from everywhere and nowhere--mostly the latter."
God, I hate it when she sings in her girl voice without swinging her guitar-dick.

Then there's this remarkably tone-deaf take on female sensuality in S F/J's analysis of Harvey's album Dry:

"You're not doing it for me, mister--and we haven't even met"
Seriously, New Yorker, are you kidding me? These are black-and-white words printed in a magazine that I myself pay money to receive in my mailbox.

S F/J goes on to explain that Harvey's

"stripped-down tour" of "her favorite topic: desire" was the "highlight of [his] concert-going experience" because of her "tiny red dress, enormous red lips, and a voice that sounded like an ambassador for the libido itself."
And just wait for Frere-Jones's insightful analysis of Harvey's performance with Bjork, whose career choices are "no more predictable than her hair."

BJORK, mind you. That last quote was about Bjork. Is that the least predictable thing? HER HAIR?

Well, at least Bjork is "thrilling." Harvey, on the other hand,

"has less luck reinventing herself, possibly because she got it so convincingly, punishingly right the first time: she does blunt force and sex like nobody else."
I am sick and tired of Sasha Frere-Jones. I am sick and tired of his (generously) FIVE-YEARS LATE reviews of relevant musicians and his MISINFORMED and MISOGYNISTIC reactions to "current" music.

O Sasha. My eyes are closed. My hair is unpredictable. I'm touching myself with my guitar from 1992. I am thrusting it in your direction as I whisper: Fuck you, Sasha Frere-Jones. I hate you and I HATE YOUR ASS FACE.