Black Birds frying on a wire

It is far from an overstatement to say that the vast majority of writing I do focuses on media - on music and movies and television, books, or celebrities. It is true that since I was 13 years old, I wanted to be a film critic. I was a film critic, in fact, for some time, and hope to find work in that field in the future. It is also true, then, that virtually all of my public writing deals with my personal life only insomuch as it relates to whatever media topic I feel like writing about.

This is my approach, and "approach" would be the word I would use when getting defensive, although I'd most prefer to not defend this decision at all.

At age 24, things get difficult for a person, and although this sense is perhaps well documented by now, I localize my own experience to this age. At age 23, I had just graduated college, worked at a photo lab for some time, spent some more time unemployed, worked briefly in the corporate world, and settled, 9 months later, at a comfortable job working with emotionally disturbed adolescents. I also ended a year-and-a-half long relationship, decided against an impulsive move to New York, took a mind-scrambling vacation to Los Angeles (a place, I find, where mind-scrambling is an endemic sensation) where I thought for a brief week or two I'd fallen in love again, but none of that had the intellectual impact of turning 24.

At 24, things start to feel important because nothing seems to have much weight anymore. Or at the very least, at 24, a veil of order gets lifted, and things seem confusing only when words get put to them. For a while, I was listening to Neko Case's "Things That Scare Me" because the line "Flourescent lights engage/ black birds frying on a wire" seemed an image of actual substance. The song concludes with the line "I am the dying breed who still believes/ hunted by American dreams," which I identified with but less so than an image of man's conventions having a stranglehold of nature, of birds being electrocuted at the flick of a switch.

In this year, all that truly made sense was my confusion. I took a trip to Israel, where I cried at a Holocaust memorial (crying being the rarest of events for me), and where I felt, for the first time ever, linked to a community, which I suppose is the reason young Jews are encouraged to take trips to Israel. I was being groomed for promotion with at my day treatment center, I had my first essay published (on Fiona Apple, of course), and I decided, as if the most natural of whims, to pick up and move to Seattle, a city that, at the time of my decision, I had never been to, and before my move (this coming Tuesday), I'd spent only 3 days in.

I don't truly know how to discuss the thoughts of my move, or, truly, how to represent my thoughts in any particular light because the thoughts are of such a peculiar shape. What I can say is that I feel elation about moving only as much as it can share space with my terror on it - of leaving the kids I worked with, of leaving my amazing cadre of friends, of leaving the comfort and ease of living in a city like Boulder, which is, it seems, about the easiest place on the planet for a confused white liberal to live.

I bring up this subject thinking about a couple of - naturally - some television. This past season of The Sopranos has been derided by many, but it may be my favorite. I'm thinking of an image in the episode "Cold Stones" - Edie Falco's troubled Carmela stands in Paris looking at the turning beacon atop the Eiffel Tower early in the evening. The scene cuts from her position on her sidewalk to returning to the living room of her New Jersey home. Carmela had been brought to tears at a site of millenia-old ruins ("All the things we do, in the end, it just gets washed away," she said).

I know what Carmela is thinking in this scene, and if you believe myself to be projecting life unto a fictional character, I think you are missing the point, and the thing that makes The Sopranos such an accomplishment. I know what Carmela is thinking because it is not representable in a sentence, not in words, simply the notion of confusion, of being allowed to see a distant place and forced, in that space to confront the theme of this Sopranos season: who am I, where am I going. Let me simply say this about The Sopranos, because it is not, directly, my purpose here to talk about it: To know, even approximately, by simple observation the thoughts of another human being is the most important of artistic accomplishments. It requires an understanding of the human experience that is beyond familiarity, because only experience can create it. That it does this is impressive, but that it sometimes flits around the edges of thoughts which cannot be fully elucidated makes it the most triumphant of works.

What I am saying is that confusion about life is sometimes the thing of the most palpability and substance, but it is not often a topic of conversation because its very existence denies understanding what it is. One could say "I am confused," but even that would undersell the actual sense that invades and alters behavior. What I mean is that in human events, sometimes the action and the thought are related, sometimes they are bound even in the absence of any clear connection. I am moving in three days, and I hope sincerely the move pays off for me personally, that I am not defeated by the circumstances I've created for myself. The reason why, although I can't reasonably articulate it, flits around me every day in this incredible year I've had, and it is not because I am unhappy (I am not), bored, or full of malaise. In truth the best explanation I have is just that I am 24 years old, which is for me the age when people are compelled to do this sort of thing, and the "why" of it either manifests itself or does not.

Joe's Daughters

I confess it feels, at times, like the right thing to do to rush to the defense of one pop celebrity or another. Those shows on E! or Vh1 where C-level comedians in need of day jobs trash, say, Shannen Doherty's recent trip to the supermarket or Eva Longoria's choice in car paint, only wind up making me sympathetic with whichever lousy celebrity seems to be the focus of ironic commentary - I may never have been a fan of Longoria or Doherty or Paris Hilton or Winona Ryder, but I start to think, in flipping past Awesomely Badder Girls 4 or whatever Vh1 programs for my wakeup time on Sundays, that at least those celebrities did something, anything, besides whine about people more recognizable than themselves.

I say this because no celebrity at this point should be more ripe for sympathy than either one of the Simpson sisters, Jessica or Ashlee. Either one of them should have me secretly singing their songs to myself, or surrepticiously slipping them onto a party playlist on my iPod. This being the sort of thing I would do - at last count, my iPod of 7062 songs features 10 Britney Spears songs, she, never a kind word said about her in public, happens to make terrific pop music on occasion.

Yet with Jessica turning her divorce into a song of confectionary drivel about dancing or roller skating or whatever "A Public Affair" is supposed to be about, and Ashlee's recent identity -altering plastic surgery, I wonder if these aren't the two celebrities most in need of immediate relocation to a Mediterranean island somewhere, women whose presence and celebrity is maddening only when it's not terrifying.

What is it about Jessica, I wonder - the more I consider her existence, the more ponderous it gets. The woman has never had any singing talent, not really. She doesn't hit notes so much as warble around them, which might be ok (after all, the 90's were full of astonishing female artists who couldn't sing well, exactly, but sang their songs exactly right), except that her music is of such a bland variety, made to be only catchy, hummable, and unnoticed as it skates to familiarity on radio airwaves, that her lack of talent seems to be the music's only mark of uniqueness.

In fact, can you even remember a Jessica Simpson song? Could you sing one to yourself? The truth is, she was a failing pop star before she was a celebrity, and she'll always make a far more interesting celebrity than pop star. She boasts as her biggest hit, I think, "With You," which owes its success to a video trumpeting all of her dumb-blonde catchphrases from her reality show Newlyweds, including stinky farts and mistakes about tuna. That video, if you recall (and likely, you can't), played at the end of every Newlyweds episode for months, and it seemed the aggressive marketing for the single wasn't going to stop until the song cracked Billboard's Top 10 - it did, eventually, which may or may not have been an act of mercy.

I heard "With You" on a 90's music program a few weeks ago, and it took that insecure warble to remind me which generic love ode it was. I'd have no desire to ever hear the song in any context otherwise, and that seems pretty clear with all of her songs. Now, "A Public Affair" has cracked the top 20, and the marketing is just as aggressive - its roller-rink video features Christina Applegate and Eva Longoria skating in perfectly-coifed synchronicity with Simpson, and it is one of those videos that MTV shows in 30-second clips whenever possible.

This must be the work of the Simpsons' father/manager Joe Simpson. I wonder what it's like to be Joe Simpson. Jessica tried out - and failed - for Star Search and The Mickey Mouse Club as a child, her breasts expanded overnight (I do think they're real though, to her credit - and to credit her truly astonishing physical appeal), and he found there was more money in marketing her as a pop star than a Christian music star. Joe Simpson is probably amongst the wealthiest managers in the music business, but what must it be like to force your daughters to strive towards fame before they even hit puberty?

I wonder this mostly because the now-infamous image of a stately Ashlee Simpson that seems to be everywhere - there she is, a blonde now, small-nosed now, big-breasted now. Ashlee had botox, Ashlee had a boob job, Ashlee had a nosejob and lip work. I don't know exactly which rumor is true, nor do I care to.

I do, however, note the irony of a woman who will declare, from every microphone possible, that she is "her own woman," that she "won't change for anybody," that she "cannot be told who she is." I didn't buy that when she said it, of course (who could?), yet I did think that was at least a message of confidence she wanted her fan base to share with her. I have no doubt that message will continue when "the new Ashlee" unveils her third album.

This is where things get harmful, I believe, and it also treads on my own moral beliefs about plastic surgery. I do believe that women of all ages should be "her own woman," should "not change for anybody," and should "not be told who they are." Yet if Ashlee's looks were keeping her from being the sex symbol her sister is, it seems to me the exact wrong message to turn her into one - wasn't the notion from the beginning that Ashlee, with her black hair, would stand as the "edgy" counterpart to her sister's glitz? Perhaps Joe realized his marketing strategy was underperforming when Ashlee's SNL snafu helped I Am Me, her sophomore album, underperform.

If this seems like a lot of energy to go through for middling and forgettable pop stars, it most likely is, however I think Jessica and Ashlee Simpson are the stars most indicative of the cynical, market-driven business of celebrity. They are women who are most successful when commodities, most appealing when reflecting the messages we like to believe in. What makes them harmful, I believe, is the expansion of those messages - independence is great, but that includes the "independent" decision to alter your looks and identity. Art and music are great, but really, they are just means to present best Celeb persona. They are, I think, less musicians than cautionary tales for parenting.

Indefinite hiatus

I actually got to meet Corin Tucker once. Her hair was indeterminately red or brown or blonde, but like any woman these days, it's probably been definitively all of those colors at some point. Her face is still as beautiful as it always was, but it would never qualify as conventionally beautiful - a little pouty and suspicious, always seeming to be angry with you in whatever picture of her is available. At the Sleater-Kinney concer att he Gothic Theather in Denver (or, Englewood) in September of last year, I went to buy a t-shirt (true to their activist ways, their t-shirts are only manufactured by American Apparrel), and I ordered one without looking, trying to find my credit card in my wallet. I looked up and was speechless - there she was, a satisfied smirk on her face, flowing purple top, breasts smaller in actual life than I would have guessed. Me, mumbling, or baffled, or simply trying to determine what method to approach the situation, only mustered saying, "You're Corin Tucker!" I said I was a huge fan, I pointed to a laminated LP of The Woods glued to the merchandise counter and told them the new album was amazing. I mentioned that once I wrote a ten page essay about wandering around Copenhagen and listening to One Beat constantly.

This was all I could really say about my relationship to Sleater-Kinney at the time. I could have also told Corin (one of its two lead-singer/ guitarists, along with Carrie Brownstein) I caught them on tour in 2000 in support of All Hands For The Bad One, that their albums seem to consistently mark changes in my life, but that may simply be my own inability to ever turn them off. I could have said I was once so obsessed with the band that I tracked down old demos of Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 (Tucker and Brownstein's Riot Grrrl bands before forming S-K), but that would not have been particularly original.

Sleater-Kinney announced a couple of weeks back that they were going on "indefinite hiatus." This cannot be too surprising, in any scenario; while making The Woods, the band - Tucker and Brownstein, and also drummer Janet Weiss since 1997 - went into couple's therapy, and came out of those sessions so angry, they made The Woods, an album for which adjectives like "loud" and "angry" were invented. An album that recalled, at any given moment, the most firey moments of Jimi Hendrix or The Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth or Jefferson Airplane or even The Who. An album I was alone in naming the best album of last year.

I will start with, and perhaps only talk about, The Woods. Not 1997's Dig Me Out, a 90's post-punk classic, and an indie icon. Not 1999's The Hot Rock and 2000's Bad One, fine albums, but mostly irrelevant. Not 2002's One Beat, a vituperative political record that is the culmination of all of their efforts as indie superstars, and another album I named the best of its year.

The reason I want to talk about The Woods some 14 months after its release is because I believe it to be not simply the type of album that bands spend their entire career working up to, but the type of album all of rock music seems to have been leading up to. This is only talking about its music, of course - The Woods was not particularly successful and is also not particularly popular. In fact, a friend of mine who worked forever at Albums On The Hill in Boulder told me I'm the only person he knows that even likes the thing (not entirely surprising - most fans of any art do not appreciate their artists abruptly changing their defined style and doing something different. These are the artists I appreciate most). He gave me a poster that's like a more cinematic rendering of its cover - a painted field of trees on a wood floor behind a parted red curtain.

Start with "The Fox." If you hear this song, I can guarantee you what your initial physical response to this song will be: you will turn down the volume on your stereo. A screech of feedback begins it, as though a warning of the ferocity to come. The guitars chug at such a volume you swear you hear planes taking off in the background, but would not be allowed to hear such things. Janet Weiss's drums are rifle-like, fast, and overwhelming. There is more to it of course - a weird morality tale of a duck and fox, spotting each other on the day of the duck's birth, but it is about the biggest jolt to the system a song can provide: Corin Tucker, whose shriek helped define the Riot Grrrls of the early 90's, is louder, more pleasing, and more precise than it's been before (a product, the band says, of forcing Tucker to sing in tones she hadn't tried before, pissing her off and confusing her to no end). In the song's scorching bridge, she's screaming some incomprehensible words at the top of her lungs.

I could say that my response to noisy music is unique, but to an extent, it's the only way to really approach the more ferocious emotions of rock music. That can be said of Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth, bands who trafficked in noise. Noise distances the listeners, but it also speaks to a general sense of feeling askew, of defiance, of working against an instruments' supposed purpose. It also speaks to the eventual indistinguishable nature of guitar riffs or guitar solos - sometimes noise is the only way to make any sort of notice in music.

But that's much too cerebral. I respond to noise. I walk easier when hearing it. I feel better listening to it, because at its core it means that the rules of guitar and of music are as made up as the ones in life. I find the notion of all things being made up about as comforting as any other.

The politics begin in track 2, "Wilderness," an allegory of a couple going nowhere and bickering the entire way - "It's a family feud/ the red and the blue now/ a two-headed brat/ tied to the other for life," Brownstein characterizes a country stagnant and whiny about it as Weiss's drums shoot away. In track 3, "What's Mine Is Yours," the one with a screeching minute-long solo that destroys and rebuilds the song, Tucker's voice has never sounded sexier. And by track 4, "Jumpers," - an eerie and explosive song about the thoughts of those leaping from the Golden Gate bridge - it should be clear that you may have never heard an album of such ferocity, an album of such well-ordered noise and defiance, and it makes sense to feel that way - these girls wear their influences on their sleeve, but the combined passion of these three influence sounds like nothing else.

In fact it occurs to me that there can be no slacking on the part of any of the three women for this type of thing to work - as Tucker wails differently now, Brownstein's typically-deadpan second vocals are now as empassioned as Tuckers, but directand cutting where Tucker's are high and elusive. David Browne in his review said he thought Weiss had spent the 3-year break between albums, "listening to nothing but Keith Moon recordings." Her drums are about as loud and fast and invigorating as anyone's since Moon died.

There are three songs on the second half of the record that are about as exciting as any I've heard. "Let's Call It Love," the 11-minute opus that defines the record, a song of exploding sexuality, and perhaps the only song on the record whose noise dominates the song structure, one that doesn't wind up coming back to a central refrain. It takes the gimmick of its noise and allows it to run free, experience all of the "love" emotions the writing speaks of - "A woman is not a girl/ I could show you a thing or two," Tucker sings, and damned if she doesn't show you a thing or two. It segues immediately into "Night Light," a three minute anthem that speaks of the forces of life and death, if not the ultimate conflict of all things. Tucker looks up to the sky and asks, "how do you do it/ with visions of worse to come/ live in the present/ and spin off the rays of the sun?"

But mostly there's "Entertain." I think this song will, amongst the few of us that knew of their existence, define Sleater-Kinney until the end of time. The drums pound in its opening seconds in a manner that subdues the listener, and Brownstein launches into "So you're here 'cause you want to be entertained/ please look away/ we're not here 'cause we want to entertain." This, of course, cannot be true of any band - after all, if you didn't want to entertain, why go on tour? Why release records? Why write, in 2000, a song about whiny boy rockers called "You're No Rock N' Roll Fun"?

However that thought will not arrive when listening to "Entertain." No thoughts will, really, besides those ones that keep us going, those thoughts that make us want to accomplish anything, those thoughts about not dying slowly, not giving into to the forces that oppress, the ones that keep all people from living their lives, from trying to find truth, from doing anything really. "Entertain," with its rallying cry of "Don't tread me down, I'm not falling down," is about the most exhilerating recording I've ever heard. It's a song of such ferocity that after the guitar and drums stop abruptly in its 6th minute, the recording lingers on a clank of the amps recovering, the equipment itself responding to the galvanic intensity of their own creation.

I wish I could have said that to Corin Tucker. That with The Woods, Sleater-Kinney made the type of album that inspires on the deepest of sensory level, but these things do not mean much when said, so I simply told her the album was "amazing." It speaks to the ongoing irrelevance of music critics everywhere that most of them named albums like Kanye West's Late Registration or Sufjan Stevens' Illinois or The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema as the album of the year. I like all of those albums, but they are, despite their various accomplishments, simply records. The Woods is not.

Me and Joan

I've probably read close to 1000 pages of Joan Didion's nonfiction work (which, doing the math, is not a great proportion), but it was only today that I found the piece with which I most closely identified.

"On The Morning After The Sixties" ends like this: "If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending." Reading just this sentence it would be easy to assume Didion was talking about 60's foolishness, saying a giant ba-hum-bug to the 60's - or, really, the young - change-the-world mentality, but that is not the subject of Didion's essay. Instead, she's talking about the peculiar, lost mentality of a peculiar, lost generation - one nestled uncomfortably in the comfortable 50's. Without saving you the necessity of reading the essay (not to mention ease - the thing is, like much of her most stunning work, under 4 pages long), I'll say it evokes a time for her that is like its titular morning, a time of her youth in which the isolation of man's long-term situation was an assumption, a time for which the Lost Generation was a foundation of thought.

It's interesting, as a person raised in the 90's, to think that this mentality even had room to exist in the smiles-and-hair-curlers vision of the 50's we're most presented with. What I identified most closely with is something I think the people of my age identify with quite closely, and the thing that I've spent the bulk of my own writing trying to make sense of - that is, a time of vague, unoriginal, baffling thoughts, a mentality for which the only assumption we can all agree on is that things, in general, are going to spend a long time not making much sense.

So what is it of our generation? I would say I - born in 1982, raised in small town Colorado - am of a generation in which irony is our preferred coping skill - things don't have to necessarily make sense if we can mock them and, by proxy, be above them. Therefore, there is no thought left to think nowadays, it's already been thought, rejected, and turned into an ironist punchline starting with the words, "He's one of those people who..." Being "one of those people who..." is about the worst punishment one of our age can work to avoid. For example, I right now am someone placing value on writing my thoughts down in a spot which few people will read (just then I had to fight the ironist instinct to replace "thoughts" with "inane thoughts"), and those that do will most certainly be people who already know me, are mostly fond of me, and will shrug and not think much of their existence. Which is a fine reaction to have.

The first time I read Joan Didion was for an assignment in a nonfiction writing class, and of that, I'll simply say "assignment" would be a less accurate word than "gift," and that I should send Peter Michelson a candy-gram for forcing "Goodbye to All That" into my life, thereby uprooting my sense of writing. I followed that reading with a ten-page essay about Bob Dylan and my father that was syntactically identical to her essay. To say I have plagiarized her in my writings since then would not be true, but also not entirely false - I've seeped in the way Joan writes, I've taken it in via every sense, and I know think and sweat in the precise and evocative syntax she created. She's made me learn the value of a well-placed "and," made me write down seemingly irrelevant details at parties, made me find the most emotive and honest way to describe a generality when those details are unavailable.

What that is, I think, is what Joan excells at, and why I'd like to think my generation is hers, on the morning after the 60's, the endless 60's, and the endless spectre of someone else's idealism - a sense of lost sincerity. I can't stop reading her descriptions and the descriptions like hers, things respecting the quizzical aspects of human nature embedded in every experience - the every-string-of-the-tapestry-counts depiction of observations and detachments, the way they add to and complete our longterm sense of confusion, and the way that acknowledging that confusion is, somehow, party to its own dissipation.

When the rats run riot

How weasely is Rob Sheffield? The life of a music critic, even one for Rolling Stone, doesn't afford a person much personality, but Sheffield seems like the world's most eager high school journalism student, a beanpole with too many copies of Rosie O'Donnel's Kids Are Punny lining his bookshelf.

I've never liked the guy - his svelt, smug, troll-puppet face slouching in VH1 interviews making bad jokes about, say, Haddaway ("He haddaway, he got away, then he faded away!"), always seemed to me the mark of someone making an annoying and too-easy shorthand for substantive thought. But in reviewing Sonic Youth's recent release Rather Ripped, Sheffield's ascended my list of mortal critic enemies, snuggling somewhere below Rolling Stone colleague Peter Travers (he of the "This movie's got bite!" interchangeable poster-ready aphorisms) and somewhere above the first film critic to say Million Dollar Baby "Floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee!"

Sheffield gave the album a positive review, in a way - he said the record is "One of the strongest to emerge in Sonic Youth's amazing late period." My problem is not with his opinion on the album, because, of course, criticism of any medium is based entirely on a simple and honest reaction, of which two people are bound to experience differently. I say "in a way," though, becuase his review of Rather Ripped is one of the most puzzling and vituperative "positive" reviews I've ever experienced.

Vituperative because it spends a good 60% of its text criticising the band. Puzzling because it gets most of that wrong.

Sheffield's ultimate attempt is, I think, to portray himself as unquestionable Sonic Youth authority. I may have too much of a problem handing over that title, as I think I'd find few other people able to discuss the point-by-point distinctions between, say, 1992's Dirty and 1990's similarly jangly Goo. But that is, of course, not much of an issue. Perhaps no fan is comfortable relinquishing judgmental control over artists that have been meaningful in their lives.

Sheffield offers an odd history of the band, though: "Daydream Nation [the band's seminal 1988 release] sounded like a vision of the future, yet the Youth never dared to follow it up... They marked time in the 90's with drab, quasi-heavy records, but they've been on a creative roll ever since A Thousand Leaves in 1998." I can't imagine anyone with some familiarity of Sonic Youth records would agree with that statement (and granted, most of Rolling Stone's increasingly teenage audience will not have that). Those "drab" 90's records - Goo, Dirty, Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star, and Washing Machine - were seminal alternative recordings, making the band underground heroes by, including many others, critics like Rolling Stone; describing this string of records on the release of Washing Machine, critic Tom Moon wrote, "With surgical skill and a desire to stretch if not demolish the frontier, they've developed an attack that is astonishingly intricate and jazzlike in its extreme flexibility."

Now, there is no reason Sheffield should be required to stick with this opinion, but I do think it shows his remarks as rather revisionist - Goo, the album Sonic Youth used to help usher Nirvana onto their DGC label, drab? A Thousand Leaves, the album opening with a line like "Alice, it's just a kitten, just a kiiiitten," is exhibiting a band "on a roll?" Even his details seem misplaced - Sheffield claims "embarrasing beat-poetry interludes" have marred their last albums, but this only occurred in one song ever - "Small Flowers Crack Concrete," from 2000's NYC Ghosts and Flowers, 4 albums previous. And hey, I loved that song (although, I'll admit this is probably a minority opinion, as is my worship of that supremely mournful, forgotten album). As I have loved the songs bassist/guitarist/guru Kim Gordon's made in the past decade - 2002's "Sympathy for the Strawberry" and 2004's "I Love You, Golden Blue" are amongst the best songs she's ever recorded. Sheffield claims her songs here are her first worthwhile contributions since Washing Machine (odd such a "drab" album contained such worthwhile tracks, eh?). He says the opposite about Lee Ranaldo's contribution, "Rats," ("Just OK," says Sheffield), but I thought it a terrific song, and a step back into artistic relevance for Ranaldo, whose last song, 2004's "Paper Cup Exit," was boueyed by the silly line "Skimmin' the top of tall trees/ through the clear line of free speech."

I would like to just pass Sheffield's review off as a simple cavil of quirky taste, but considering all the bizarre assertions in his review, I find it mostly indicative of the type of weasely persona Sheffield cultivates - the effete indie rocker of obscure theories and opinions. Music criticism, more than any other critical medium, is a nearly impossible place to form an honest opinion - you're swayed by loyalties to artists you respect and dislikes on principle even before you get to those pesky things like critical consensus. Rolling Stone's reviews are especially all over the map, but I think they do their magazine a disservice with writers like Sheffield, or, for that matter, writers like Travers also - people so willing to chuck whatever opinion they feel is the most quotable, "edgiest," or pretentiously thick, they all wind up sounding equally meaningless.

Short Form

There was a period for three months last year when I was unemployed, probably depressed, definitely understimulated, and going through some sequence of personal turmoil that could best be described as joining the real world. It didn’t look like I thought it would, things like that very rarely do, but there was something involved then – short reading, copious amounts of short stories and essays.

I’d spend my days waking up too late, feeling worthless for missing that morning rush of applying for jobs (“When 90% of jobs are given out!” my mother reminded me). Of course, I was attempting to find “real” jobs, jobs requiring skill or a degree or were at least in the vicinity of the office of someone with skill and a degree. So, I’d send out resumes, update cover letters with minute variations – case worker! Case manager! Youth advocate! Editor! There wasn’t a position I didn’t claim I was perfect for, and I kept hitting wall after wall, so, to ease the personal incertitude so squarely housed in my bedroom, I’d leave. To the Espressoria for two hours – sometimes more – book reading. Sometimes I’d walk, iPod in tow, down the populated length of Arapahoe to 17th and make my way to Buchanan’s, dreadful in the school year, but perfect in the May and June netherworld of departed students, as I could sit in their busted green armchair and stare out at the sparsely populated Hill of the summer, always doomed to the world of odd thoughts what I read opened up to me.

Not whole books, that would require an attention span, an indefinite span of time devoted to reading in coffee shops. Everything I read was short – short stories and essays, occasionally the types of “fact” books I could feel no emotional devotion to. Even though I probably read the length of 7 or 8 novels in this time, I couldn’t commit to something of that size – only something 15-50 pages of length, only something I could eat up the better part of an hour with then walk away.

Rick Moody at first. I’d browsed through my copy of Demonology for some quick stories, but the longer ones mattered most – “The Mansion On The Hill” that gets so sly with its misery, and “On The Carousel,” simply one of the truest, compact pieces of fiction I’ve ever encountered. Moody has a tendency to italicize every fourth or fifth word and it gets to be the strangest of motifs, but it never dulled my love.

From there, the whack-job works of David Foster Wallace. From there the classicism of Isak Denisen. From there Joan Didion’s great book of essays The White Album. Wallace and his “Little Expressionless Animals.” Denisen’s “The Pearls.” Didion’s “The White Album.” In each, the language was precise, the goals lofty and thought-expanding, and they perfectly invaded my thinking from start to finish.

I handed my ex a copy of Tobias Wolff’s “Face to Face,” only to receive looks of bewilderment. No one else admired what was consistently blowing me away (for a time, at least – my wise friend Zach in California knew better, matched every short recommendation with two of his own and tales of how he’d written the author to express his appreciation. He understood.). Each one featured something different – “Face to Face” stared with mesmerizing scrutiny at a man of clouded, odd actions, and no one else could understand my awe at the choice of doing this in first person – another veil from which the scrutiny must pierce through. Wolff excels in this sort of thing, of course – his “Hunters in the Snow” needed simply an all-you-can-eat meal to probe the depths of the way men need to keep secrets from each other, and the inimitable ways they accept these secrets anyway.

Here’s the reason no one understands it like me, though – these goals incorporate the “closeness” of experience I seek out in all forms of art. The short story is the best equipped to log each of these experiences, to gape wide-eyed and sometimes fantastically at each strange turn and thought under the umbrella of human interaction, from the minutiae to the ridiculous. Like Alice Munro’s quasi-stalker in Australia in “The Jack Randa Hotel.” Like the mystical power of choices not yet made in Haruki Murakami’s “Thailand.” The feet-in-the-rain specificity of Marquez’s allegory “Monologue of Isobel Watching It Rain in Macado.” The allure of gossip in Eudora Welty’s “A Piece of News,” of an exgirlfriend’s urn in David Benioff’s “Neversink,” of the inability to leave a bar in Hemingway’s “A Cool Dry Place.” I ventured far and wide – Stephen King’s ability to make even the lamest story a rapt experience, such as “Grey Matter,” the tensest work ever to be written about people being turned into puddles of gruel, or such as Roald Dahl’s “The Boy Who Talked To Animals,” which featured a longing that surpasses description, even if its intended audience is 12-year-old’s.

I needed each of them, each strange turn of each strange screw. I marveled at the fantastic tragicomedy of George Saunders and the precise ultra-minimal realism of Raymond Carver. I admired the conceptual thread and goals of Murakami’s After The Quake and (based on Zach’s recommendation) ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere – books with ambitions lofty and simple enough that only a set of short stories could accomplish them. I fell in love with Joan Didion’s and June Jordan’s essays alike. I needed them all and I still do – even with the full financial independence and dental insurance and HIPAA contracts that signify “real world,” these short works remind me my mind’s not so out of the ordinary, and why it matters to keep saying that when it comes to minds, none are ordinary, not exactly.

24 In Quick Takes

24 in Quick Takes

1.
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer's wise and underrated final season, there was an episode called "Help," written (typical for the Rebecca Rand Kirschner, the show's weakest writer) without a shred of credibility, but with a haunting ending. In retrospect, the ending must have been decided first and the rest of the episode become an excuse for it - Buffy, in her new position as Guidance Counselor at Sunnydale High, meets Cassie, who swears (via precognition, natch) that she'll be dead in a week. Buffy, certain she can change her fate, stops all the supernatural foes in Cassie's way but woefully doesn't understand that Cassie has a terminal health problem. In the penultimate scene, Buffy and Dawn cry together, wondering why to bother if they just can't help anyway.

Dawn tearfully says, "So what do we do?" It cuts to its final shot: Buffy coming into the office the next day and sitting at her desk.

2.
For those of you who don't know, I work in an alternative school doubling as day treatment for emotionally disturbed middle schoolers. Today, my favorite kid was arrested. Randy - not his real name, I signed far too many papers - was on probation, violated the terms, and without divulging too many specifics, I'll say I will likely never see him again. My time in day treatment has been a rough entryway into the world of mental health - I see what happens when things work, I see when it doesn't. I later asked about a couple of other kids of ours who'd wound up with similar fates - neither are doing well.

Yesterday, before we knew of this, I was asked to join Randy's treatment team, as I seemed to be the adult he trusted most. I was honored - I love this kid, and I quite easily forgive all he's done. In fact, considering the actual experience of my daily work life, it's safe to say I am a forgiving person in general, and have a high threshold for the sort of things 14-year-olds will do. Randy - a bright kid, a kid who wants to go to college - wanted to turn things around. He recorded an impersonation I did of Arnold Schwarzenegger on an MP3 player.

We waited as my principal asked Randy to gather his personal belongings from his locker. I asked her what would happen to him. With a mournful look and a shrug, she said, "Detention and lockup maybe?" He'd used up his warnings, and once you've been to day treatment, the likelihood of a last straw is higher than normal.

Later, a teacher told me in her last job in mental health, they used to measure success rates simply, "by the number of kids who, at age 18, were not incarcerated." Not necessarily employed, in school, childless, or healthy - simply, not incarcerated.

One unquestionably true fact in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces: 15% of those seeking treatment for substance abuse addiction will stay clean. This is in a highly successful treatment facility.So what do we do?

3.
The pleading lyrics to Sleater-Kinney's "Night Light" that I thought of all day: "How do you do it, with visions of worse to come/ live in the present and spin off the rays of the sun."

4.
Of the many many revelations in the extraordinary season premiere of The Sopranos, none was more chilling than the sight of Eugene Pontecorvo staring at seashells on his end table. An eyeline match with the sea-shells and Eugene's eyes (embodied to typical Sopranos perfection by Robert Funaro) revealed he was seconds away from hanging himself. We watched every excrutaiting twitch and huff that eminated at the end of his life.

Eugene wanted to retire. He'd gotten inheritance and wanted to move to Florida, to be done and finish his years with his wife and kids. But his son was on drugs and in "The Family," the oath trumps long-term dreams.

How do we get the things we want in life? How do we do good deeds with our time, make an impact? Go right back to work like Buffy or stare at the seashells like Eugene (who never "did good")? How can you keep up the hope when the best you can hope for, sometimes, is not incarceration?

5.
I bought a shirt from Hollister this weekend. Hollister doesn't seem like a clothing store, it seems like the most happening cabana around. There aren't racks for merchandise inside, there are hard maple shelving. The room is barely visible, lined with chairs, magazines, deafeningly cheerful pop-punk music, mannequins with no arms or heads, but perfectly defined abdominal muscles.

It occurred to me that in order to plant the notion that you wanted to buy their clothes, Hollister had to convince you that you were living your life in the wrong way. This is what people are supposed to do - chill by the beach in California (even in Colorado), look at fashion magazines, not be able to hear your closest friends, and be determined by the success of sculpting your body parts.

The salesman who helped me wore a bright pink muscle-t shirt, plaid shorts, flip flops, had a dyed blonde mohawk and looked perfectly at home. Later, when I saw him in line for food at the Hot Dog On a Stick, snow blowing outside, he looked more ridiculous than the yellow-and-blue striped hotdog server behind the counter.

6.
My dad was dejected last Fall at the notion that Bush's miserable approval ratings - only slightly higher than Nixon's post-Watergate - would never lead to an end of the Republican order. He said to me, "Sometimes I think we were wrong about things in the 60's, that people caring then was just a fluke. This is the way people really are. They don't care. We can't do any good."

That feeling has to be rampant in the Democratic party - what other explanation is there for not staging a coup when President Bush makes statements as baffling as "I ask you not to focus on the bloodshed, but on the positive influences of the War in Iraq."

What are those, exactly? The civil war? Still, no talk of a coup, no certainty this Fall's election will be at all useful for getting any Democrats elected (and who doesn't sometimes feel like also adding - why would we want to?).

I still believe all I can try to do with my life is make things better when I leave my life than when I came in. My father might not, but he continues to be the only lawyer advancing liberal defenses in El Paso and Teller Counties in central Colorado. He remains my favorite person on the planet.

7.
My roommate and I this evening watched Andrew Bujalski's uber-indie movie Funny Ha Ha. Shot on 16mm, and with dialogue realistic enough to make you certain you're catching every recent-college-grad's average Friday night, the movie had the DIY aesthetic of a 70's porn movie, and a storyline in which most people who attended college would recognize themselves (not necessarily a compliment).

The message I got from Funny Ha Ha? Life is a string of rather awkward, fruitless encounters, none of it meaning much of anything.

Marnie, its main character, turns 24 towards the end of the movie. She sits on the steps of an ornate public building and writes a list of goals - learn to play chess, spend more time outside, don't drink for one month.

I identified with the movie - for any of it to work, I'm forced to - but probably not for the reason it wanted to me. I identified with feeling aimless, a wanderer in a nonsensical play of encounters that don't add up to anything of clear purpose.

I'm with Buffy, though - I'm going back to work tomorrow.