End of Year List Fun...

My Top 25 Favorite Albums of the Decade

For the Christmas of 1999, in a fit of indecisiveness I told my parents to choose a CD for me that they thought I might like. The result was a 10-song The Who compilation, provoking a quick subsequent purchase of Tommy (years later, I’d actually understand “Fiddle About”). Since then, I’ve been in awe of a lot of rock musicians, in varying degrees for varying reasons. But, although I don’t listen to The Who much now, no musical discoveries have the same virginal resonance as lying in my bed, listening to “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” anticipating the point where Roger Daltry screams, The World pauses, and then there’s that fucking guitar. And then skipping back 10 seconds on the CD player for Roger to start again, wondering if the real Who had to go through a similar process for that scream be so goddamn great.

It strikes me as odd that all of these records have been released since that Christmas. Well, odd isn’t exactly it—maybe mildly superfluous that so much could be created in, what seems to me, a relatively short amount of time. At the very least overwhelming (though in the best, most possibility-infused sort of way, like being in a place that sells lots of ice cream).

Anyway, here they are. My favs:

25. The Clientele- Suburban Light

24. Lifter Puller- Fiestas + Fiascos

23. The Thermals- Fuckin A

22. Beulah- The Coast is Never Clear

21. The Arcade Fire- Funeral

20. Jens Lekman- Night Falls Over Kortedala

19. Common- Be

18. Interpol- Turn on the Bright Lights

17. Modest Mouse- The Moon and Antarctica

16. Ghostface Killah- Supreme Clientele

15. The Strokes- Is This It?

14. The Mountain Goats- We Shall All Be Healed

13. Radiohead- Kid A.

12. Grizzly Bear- Veckatimest

11. Fleet Foxes- Fleet Foxes

10. The Clientele- Strange Geometry

Other than the flirtatiously intersecting guitar work (really, just listen to those strings!) the first thing one notices about The Clientele is that Alasdair MacLean sounds kind of like John Lennon. And, though its probably irresponsible to milk the Beatles reference too much, like Lennon, he has a way of making pop a very serious thing. Strange Geometry is a likeable, British pop-rock album. But don’t let it stop you there. Every listen will take you a little bit deeper in love with the melodies, how MacLean’s voice seems to float on top of them, how his whisper can tame or intensify the rhythm based on minute inflections, and how the songs, though instantly distinctive and catchy on their own, melt into each other. It’s a piece of suave beauty.

Current Favorite Song: “Since K Got Over Me”

9. The National- Alligator

Alligator is aptly named. Its mood reminds me of the animal’s skin: ultimately slick, but with rough spots that add character, and an underlying toughness that demands to be taken seriously. While Boxer sounds like a long walk home defined by complex acceptance, Alligator is anxious and volatile—it stumbles, stops to think, and repeatedly stands up with more tense resolve than it began with. The songs build, seemingly to avoid combustion, into climaxes that make the negative space somehow more subtle and comforting. Matt Berniger’s voice sounds a little more hoarse here than in Boxer, and it works for the way the songs ebb and flow. Though many of the songs seem to manifest a sort of mature tension, that tension functions within a structure of the band’s comfort with each other (at least that’s how I, subjectively, perceive it), ultimately serving as a testament to the group’s enormous potential.

Current Favorite Song: “All the Wine”

8. The Antlers- Hospice

I’m not the first to have said this, but I see Hospice as a cousin to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. An album about tragic obsession, and one that it feels equally important and satisfying to obsess over. Where the albums diverge, though, is that In the Aeroplane is an eclectic platter of joy and paranoia, hope and solemn acceptance. Hospice, however, slices through the ambiguities of attachment and loss, instead functioning as a sort of three-dimensional crescendo that seems to gather emotional depth and mass as it progresses. Yet this momentum is somehow brought to a halt at the end, with “Epilogue”—and not reluctantly so. It’s as if the album has stopped to listen to itself, recognized its time, and nobly walked away with all its glorious mass intact.

Current Favorite Song: “Epilogue”

7. Wilco- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

This was my favorite album for nearly a year, and its ability to build admiration and retain a following has to do with how you can develop a relationship with each song. The album, of course, flows well. But I conceive of it as being at the same time very song-driven. From the opening chimes of “I am Trying to Break Your Heart,” there is a universe unique to each of the songs that requires an occasional breath, just to appreciate the distinctive complexity of it all. Guitarist Jay Bennett sadly left the band after the album’s release, and, though I won’t pretend to be knowledgeable about the internal politics, I can say that it sounds like each track has the intensity of a band fighting for its own survival, and believing in it, too.

Current Favorite Song: “Jesus, Etc”

6. The Mountain Goats- The Sunset Tree

The Mountain Goats have released three good records since The Sunset Tree, but I get the impression that, even on the best songs on these, there has been a little too much discussion about how long to hold that note, or how quiet to get at the song’s end, or little things that package the song’s emotional inspiration into something neat and definitive. To do that, is, of course, an impressive accomplishment. But The Sunset Tree is more raw than that (in some ways, I think more raw than many of its early 2000s predecessors). It instead leaves you feeling at times confused, even violated, but more than anything hungry. It demands more listens. It screams for closure, yet its strength is in its resistance to that closure. It’s that rare jarring experience that’s positively addictive.

Current Favorite Song: “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod”

5. The Mountain Goats- Tallahassee

The Mountain Goats’ catalogue is difficult to evaluate comparatively, because, since they started recording in the early 1990s, their sound has become slowly more produced—instruments have increased, tape fuzz has disappeared. Thematically, they’re remained relatively constant, so a lot of what one is really thinking about is how John Darnielle best communicates his anxiety, suffering, and occasional cathartic joy. How raw is too raw to discern the underlying idea, and when does polish become equally obfuscating? Tallahassee is probably the answer here, the archetype. The opener, “Tallhassee,” foreshadows the increasing contemplative orchestration that this year’s The Life of the World to Come saw mature. But the remnants of their four-track days are manifested in lyrics that still have the same ironic power that present Darnielle more omnipresent than he has been in any other record. And, good god, their delivery. Listen to “Old College Try.” It’s a monologue, yet it’s a dialogue, yet it’s a manifesto for anyone who is willing to dedicate 2 minutes and 55 seconds of their life to becoming part of something stunning.

Current Favorite Song: “Old College Try”

4. The Hold Steady- Separation Sunday

For an album in which much of the appeal lies in how unironically fun it is to hear straightforward hard rock (the “meta bar rock” label is fitting), there’s a lot going on here, irony included. The Hold Steady have managed to create an album of intersecting stories, complete with an underlying theme of Catholic guilt that is treated just seriously enough to be laughed about. It’s at once a record of vignettes, a record of themes, and a record that was made to be heard and sang along with. It’s stories are propelled by perfect song characters, too—Craig Finn’s lyrics lay out anecdotal skeletons for them, but the guitarwork fills in their flesh. And who can resist a song that makes use of the line “you’ll be high as hell and born again” with so much power and triumph that you’ll believe its happened already? Sorry, Roger.

Current Favorite Song: “Banging Camp”

3. LCD Soundsystem- Sound of Silver

There is something ineffably impressive about someone’s ability to carve out a singular niche within a genre already colonized with niches. It’s even more impressive when that niche, wrought out of one’s own stylistic mastery, evolves back out of its place, into something self-defining. I don’t know how James Murphy managed to do this with LCD Soundsystem, in two albums, but he has managed create an album that will forever be embedded in how I conceive of dance music. Or dancepunk, or—really—my idea of what a good songwriter can accomplish with a vision of how instruments are supposed to sound. In Sound of Silver he is a jaded poet, an overflowing repository of nervous energy, a passive conductor of electronica (sometimes a passive conductor, sometimes a mischievous ringleader), and, in “Someone Great,” a singer-songwriter who has blessed us with the opportunity to share some time with him. He’s the difference between hearing something and thinking “nothing else sounds like that” and “nobody else could make something that sounds like that.”

Current favorite song: “All My Friends”

2. Radiohead- In Rainbows

This might be the best Radiohead album there is. There’s nothing it doesn’t do right. “All I Need” fulfills Kid A’s promise to combine electronic soundscapes with vocals that couldn’t be more human. “Bodysnatchers” combines a heavier rhythm section reminiscent of Ok Computer’s hard rock tracks and flips it into a more mature paranoia. “15 Step” makes you want to dance and scream. “House of Cards” and “Reckoner” make you want to lay down after dancing and screaming and somehow never lose a grasp on the songs themselves—they sort of beg for possession. And, despite the mastery of all the dissimilar and fantastic things that Radiohead does, the album has a singular identity. There is nothing this album cannot do.

Current favorite song: “House of Cards”

1. The National- Boxer

Most of my attempts to describe The National are somewhat oxymoronic. Unless I submit to an inability to characterize them, opting instead for impressive but relatively meaningless statements like “just listen to them; they’ll make you a better person,” I tend to get stuck using competing superlatives that really just communicate that I feel about them in very strong magnitudes. Magnitudes of what isn’t always clear, which is somewhat ironic for a band whose music seems extraordinarily well thought-out. Boxer is the culmination of this thought, which is somehow so powerful that it elevates the tendencies of Matt Berninger’s voice to be both soothing and exciting, of lyrics that are mysterious and instantly familiar, and instruments (Berninger’s voice included) that manage to simultaneously compete for prominence and submit to a sparkling, ghostly sound that is more of a whole than any combination of musicians I can think of. The National might not make you a better person, but I sincerely believe they’ll make you a better listener; their songs do the little things that construct a world within the album, one that is both universally and individually accessible. Which is, again, somewhat contradictory, but that’s okay. They do it all, and so well that every vying component deserves proper recognition.

Current favorite song: “Apartment Story”

Dispatches from an Ex-Creative Writing Enthusiast

So I was cleaning out some of my folders to create hard drive space and came across the following beginning of a story. I think it’s interesting for a few reasons. First, to the extent that it represents a part (stress: part) of myself, “drawing” should be substituted by “writing” and “listening to music and pretending I could articulate creativity in that way, while simultaneously regretting quitting piano in seventh grade.” But, less obviously, it reflects portions of me in form as well as content.

The document title is “Firsts.” That’s because the concept of new beginnings was intended to frame the protagonist’s love of drawing in terms of each drawing containing a new possibility for the world. As the plot progresses, (though I don’t recall really coming up with too many specifics on that front) he interprets each event as either more or less conducive to being reconstructed into something new.

That I never really got further than I have (and certainly never conceived of an appropriate ending) is reflective of the way in which the concept itself is intriguing to me. It’s an idea, wrought out of an impetus to rearticulate a notion, creating something new and mine out of it. Once, by writing the introduction, I had created something new, moving forward seemed redundant. A new beginning contains no implication of closure.

At this point, I run the risk of turning this self-critique into a manifesto for why I shouldn’t finish what I start (the lack of dedication is symbolic, bro). That’s not quite what I’m saying. I do hope to finish it sometime, though that probably won’t happen anytime soon. It’s more, to me, an observation about the difficulty of applying focus in circumstances in which it seems irrelevant or even counterproductive. It’s also a comment on the transparency of whatever results when that focus is not applied. Finally, it’s an open question as to whether that transparency in form is really so bad:

“Firsts”

So have you ever noticed how it feels when you’re drawing something and you focus really hard on it and then finally look up? Like that’s the moment you realize the outside world exists—just then, at that moment. Not that you actually didn’t know it existed, but that you suddenly remember that you are, in fact, where you are.

I crave the feeling. It gives me hope in where I am, and with reconciling that place with where I could be. And I really do like the idea of raising my head after drawing and suddenly being exposed to a sun with a shine that actually feels warm. I draw to articulate my stimulation from the external world, and, somehow, I expect it to pay me back for the trouble. I really do. Every time I expect that sun.

Most times I draw pictures of myself, except I have longer bangs. They have a really unique wave to them, like the sand on those beaches you’ve probably seen on calendars somewhere. The sprawling ones that look like they’re spooning with this clear, sexy body of water. It seems impossible that there would actually be real beaches like that since human activity would ruin their wavy perfection, right? Maybe someone decided to set aside some beaches, to be curvy and spoon and look perfect.

My hometown has no beaches. There are two sandbars and just enough grass growing on the first that I’m not sure if it’s a grassy sandbar or a sandy grassbar. One time we—me and my friend Jeff—we tried to pick all the grass out of the first sandbar but we had to stop because we weren’t sure where to put all the grass. We didn’t want a big grass pile on our sandbar, and the river had enough shit floating in it already. We kind of just left it halfway, with some grass scattered around and making the river a little bit more opaque, and I went home feeling bummed out. All my life I’ve wanted to take things, put them aside and make them good: that means not unfinished, confusing, or indistinguishable from how they were.

But I digress. I swear it’s not just escapism that accounts for my love of drawing (though sometimes I do like to pretend I work for a plastic surgeon, sitting there in the operation room, sketching my suggestions to the doctor and patient’s family). It fucking definitely isn’t talent that drives me, either. I don’t have the attention span or manual dexterity to make my pictures lifelike, nor do I have the dedication to craft these shortcomings into a cohesive style. Revisiting my pictures is like looking at bird shit on your windshield after a long drive. You can tell everything came from different places, but none of the variation matters because it’s all equal manifestations of Unwanted.

So why do I do it? I mean, to keep the metaphor going, I guess I’m waiting until I come up with some windshield wipers, right? Something to make my world better, and to make all its imperfections loose their obfuscating power.

Maybe then, when I look up, the sun will come through.

Indie, Dancepunk, and the Economy of Satisfaction

These days you have to quantify relaxation. Carve it up it and shove those pieces into your schedule; do whatever it takes to manage your time and appease both that sense of obligation to other humans and to the self. I’ve been less creative about this lately, and the result has been an extreme submissiveness to music.

Costs: ambivalence toward the lack of active creating of art or original thoughts. Doubts about the implications of the passivity of listening: wondering if I should be doing something that leaves a trace. Should I be making rather than taking? Time is productivity, creativity, and satisfaction.

Benefits: Opportunity to engage with my emotions on a completely visceral level. An escapism I can control by clicking on things on a screen. I-Tunes represents a language of empowerment that organizes my passions, clearly and accessibly presenting them to others.

Not all of those points should be trapped in such narrow categories, but the point is that this is how a hyperstructured life makes me think. I’m adjusting to it, though. And this adjustment has had profound implications for how I navigate my music tastes. I’m living in a state of perpetual fragmentation, but want to find a way for everything that I find important to fit into this structure, music included. Which means that there has to be a sort of logic and efficiency to what I listen to: how do I let my emotions explore as far as they want to go in a limited amount of time? I remain unwilling to compromise music’s emotionally restorative and challenging function, and this is difficult to reconcile with time constraints.

It is through this framework that I’ve been able to understand my infatuation with The National and LCD Soundsystem this school year. The type of music they play has a way of best capturing the urgency of understanding and embracing one’s cluttered life, with all its tension, contradictions, and fluctuating intensities.

This is, interestingly, not a reflection of inherent genre qualities or my own genre preferences, as neither The National’s (fairly straightforward) style of indie rock or LCD Soundsystem’s wry electronica are types of music that necessarily thrive on tension. But this is almost the point: each of these bands find their strength in presenting their respective styles of music in ways that negotiate obvious senses of self-consciousness with a mastery of their genres in the technical sense. It’s as if they’re playing to prove to themselves that they are capable of creating something great. And through all the doubts and triumphs of this process is a beautiful search for redemptive equilibrium that results in tremendously powerful music.

This can maybe most easily be seen in the thematic content of their albums. Both bands released masterpieces in 2007, as The National’s Boxer and LCD’s Sound of Silver were, I think, some of the very best albums of that year and the decade. The songs of both records manifest their creators’ anxiety in similar ways. They present imagery that represents a fatigue with excitement, with social lives that are propelled by the prospect of something better, with the fact that the growing up process never really ends.* They treat hope with a sense of desperation and express disillusionment with reverence. This is all, however, done with a completely unironic grace that resists defeatist cynicism, instead suggesting a fundamental battle with the concept of optimism. It is, wonderfully, the occasional embrace of this same optimism that provides each record with its moments of triumph.

Somehow, though, the records also resist the extreme cohesion or dissonance that would allow one to comment on whether or not optimism triumphs in the end (as a sort of final statement). Instead it simply exists, as a concept that people must relate to their own lives.

I could analyze every song in each album, and though it would be fun, it would probably get self-indulgent and tedious. But there is a way in which the bands negotiate the tension of their music that makes them so important for me at this time:

The ambivalent relationship I have towards the scheduled fragmentation of my life is a symptom of a transition into self-sufficiency, and the struggle to find a lifestyle that can be attuned to the needs of this transition. Accordingly, the ambivalence these bands express in the execution of their own music and the articulation of its subject matter is a way of making that same struggle into something magnificent.

And there is also something profoundly reassuring about the fact that this magnificence is the product of a battle with that process, not the conquering of it.

Time can be productivity, creativity, or satisfaction if you want it to be. But with these pieces of music, it’s a chance to capture the complexity of self-affirmation, in all of its intricate contexts.

*The best examples of this, I think, are The National’s “Apartment Story” and LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.”

Ames, I love you to death, but we got some issues.

The following is a letter to the editor I just submitted to the Ames Tribune. Since it does sit at about 600 words and may be potentially volatile, I have no idea if it will be published in its entirety, so I thought I'd post it here for anyone who cares. 

If you are reading this and live in Ames, I really do encourage you to do whatever possible to be an advocate for new residents. If their treatment around other parts of town is anything like the treatment I've seen at the library (and by this i mean by the general public in addition to a small amount of staff-most of my coworkers were great) or by the police, then we have a lot of work to do.

I might also take a moment to mention something that there wasn't space to note in the letter- that while racism and classism are certainly gigantic factors in the current state of affairs, there has also been a thread of ageism that I've been conscious of ever since I was 13 and stopped by the police on my walk home for looking suspicious- in this case, it meant having long hair and being young after dark. In other cases it meant wearing a jumpsuit, being near a bonfire, or-heavens, no!- being in Northridge after 10:00pm.

Not that it mattered either way. I should have known it wouldn't be the last time.

To the Editor: 

            I am a 2008 graduate of Ames High School who recently finished a visit back to Ames for the summer. I worked full-time at the Ames Public Library, where I feel as if I was exposed to a cross-section of Ames residents that is as comprehensive and representative as I could find anywhere in the city. It is through this exposure, along with the quasi-outsider’s perspective gained by nine months away from Iowa, that I was made so starkly uncomfortable by the portrait of race-relations I saw in Ames.

            It is no secret that Ames has seen some “demographic changes” in the last few years. In short, this means that the development of Section 8 housing complexes (in which the resident family does not have to pay more than 30% of their monthly income for rent; the rest is federally subsidized) has drawn many minority residents from larger metropolitan areas in the Midwest.

            On paper, this trend looks like a tremendous opportunity: Section 8 residents can reduce living costs and potentially escape some of the hazards of larger cities, and Ames residents benefit from the perspectives of increasingly diverse neighbors. While I deeply hope I am mistaken, this was not the impression I received. What I experienced was a tense environment, characterized by fear on behalf of both established residents and new inhabitants. What is so upsetting about this fear, though, is that it seems to originate in attitudes of longstanding members of my hometown.

Paranoia over increased criminal activity (and the subsequent stereotyping of new residents as inherently deviant) and subtle methods of condescension or exclusion (referring to a group of young African-Americans as “those people” really doesn’t hide a lot) are both prevalent issues. I do understand that in many cases, these may be personal biases that decent people are sincerely fighting to overcome. However, this reality cannot supercede the urgency of the problem, as it has real and pressing effects on local law enforcement and on the psyche of any new (or returning) residents to Ames.

In addition to enforcing the law, a primary concern of police forces is to maintain what is considered the normal societal order—they create sanctions to discourage nonstandard behavior. Therefore to the extent that the biases of a city’s citizenry are echoed in how it reports crime, these biases will be reflected and harshly reinforced by the police. If young black males are perceived to be criminals, they will be singled out and treated as such by authorities (often regardless of any practical foundation), which can create dangerous antagonism towards law enforcement and other public faces of authority. Police, like any public entity, are subject to the political power of the people they serve, and the Ames Police Department is in no way an exception. It is imperative that this power is used positively.

Otherwise, the effects of such power can be tragic. If Section 8 residents—or any new inhabitant or any minority inhabitant for that matter—feel as if they are being watched, racially profiled, or looked upon with even a general sense of fear or resentment (both by individual residents and by public bodies), it is only reasonable to expect discomfort or animosity in return. And it is this very same discomfort and animosity that fosters a high-risk atmosphere for crime and explosion of racial tensions. As citizens, our best hope to diffuse such an atmosphere is through conscious self-examination—an evaluation of our attitudes and where they come from, and how they appear to and affect others.

Ames, I know from experience that you are a thoughtful and engaging community. I challenge you, for this purpose, to be just that.

If I Were To Catalogue This Post, it Would Go Somewhere in the 100's

More than any other institution I can think of, libraries emulate society, creating their own little hierarchies and communities within the greater clientele. Lots of kids, parents coming together through the medium of their kids, lonely twentysomething singles, the elderly and the homeless—every day of work at the Ames library is a pretty constant stream of these same groups, although I suppose I may just arrange the general public in such categories unduly, or spend too much fucking time at the library.

Either way, the extensiveness of the library’s programming, compounded with the relatively small market in Ames, frequently has the effect of exacerbating the visibility of these microcosmic social groups. It is with this notion in mind that I try to sort out my affinity for working with the library’s teen volunteers.

There are over 100 11-18 year olds (though mostly on the younger side) that come in weekly to clean shelves, sort books, and do other menial tasks while employees such as myself supervise, savoring the break from the menial tasks we would otherwise be doing. What fascinates me about my interaction with these kids is that the library’s environment, both by being a physically small space and putting parameters on the teens’ expected behavior, serves to accentuate the awkward adolescent dynamics. Thursday I learned that if someone is a “friend,” (quotation marks, of course, added physically at the time) then you hate talking to them but do it anyway. The “friend” carries a different, more subtly flirtatious social meaning than the friend or the friend.

The environment is especially interesting in how it can make me feel both closer and further removed from that pubescent period than I would have thought.

I’m close enough to understand how they see me. As someone who is still under twenty and doesn’t normally work with the volunteer program, I carry a sense of detachment from Authority that works in interesting ways. Remember the sub that you always got excited about because they’d let you get away with shit the regular teacher wouldn’t? It’s kind of like that, and I revel in seeing the baby steps that some of the volunteers will take to rebel using the space my person gives them—partially because they’re so hilariously trivial, and partially because its exactly what I would have done.

But that’s the other thing: I may have done all that, sure. But it would have carried the weight of my whole pride with it, the integrity of my Subversive Enough to be Interesting but Tamed Enough to be Allowed way of interacting with peers and authority figures. Get in-school-suspension for showing a girl the boys bathroom? I’d do it, but I’d be equally pissed if I missed that question about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in U.S. history as I would if no one knew I went into Victoria’s Secret stores on dares. It’s the same thing in the library, but in a different, arguably clearer context: a Led Zeppelin t-shirt can make one feel countercultural, but its hard when there’s a Library Volunteer pin stuck to it.

Of course now, with the help of my work situation, the contradictions are pretty clear. But it continually amazes me how deeply and for how long I lived those contradictions. Insulated rebellion is, apparently, long-lasting and completely mind-encompassing.

There are a couple places I could go from that realization: I could try, and likely fail, to identify the points at which what I stood for became more cohesive, or at least easily readable. But singling out the forces that most strongly catalyzed my maturation process seems unlikely at 19. What’s probably more plausible is that I embody the same sort of trifling deviance now, and it’s just considerably more difficult to recognize in context (which could be why it was so hard in 7th grade, too). I do, after all, spend most of my time on a campus where the security system is designed to accommodate this deviance. Maybe drinking beer in the woods is today’s sneaking into R-rated movies, although, at this point, the former has really ceased to feel subversive.

So the question, then, on my mind, is less when did I ever seriously find that sense of unified purpose (whether proactive or antagonistic, assimilatory or anti-authoritarian) as it is will I ever? The same goes for the teens in the program, for anyone who is profoundly ambivalent toward the idea of biting the hand that feeds them. It does seem weirdly premeditated in hindsight, though, the extent to which I’ve spent in this quasi-defiant limbo. But maybe it’s been so constant because it makes sense.

It’s probably better than losing any attachment to the safety net of real-life competence, and it sure beats losing that defiance at all.

What the Fuck am I Doing?

When I was a sophomore in high school some friends and I made a horror movie called the Iowa Chansaw Massacre, a 2 1/2 minute excuse to trespass, break shit and pour Hershey’s syrup on each other. The end product has minimal dialogue, but during filming we briefly discussed whether the film’s murder victims should be established as having deserved their slaughter. In said raw footage, the dialogue goes as follows:

-Y’know what I have opinions about?
-No, what?
-Things.
-Dude, you should get a blog.

Enter Axe Murderer.

In my life, I’ve generally tried to avoid being pretentious enough to warrant retaliatory killings. I’ve also generally been hyperconscious of whether my actions—especially with regard to self-expression (namely writing)—are worthy of acknowledgment as somehow legitimate. Legitimacy—truly, always my main concern—is a barometer of both quality and purpose. I’ve always wanted my shit to be good, perhaps even able to meet some standard of peer acceptance. The shadow of this aspiration meant that nothing could be more embarrassing than being told “nobody writes like that,” or the like. Even if some of these accusations (though surely not all of them—I’ve written some unbearably stupid shit) were arbitrary, they could still make me feel like some sweat-coated piece of my heart had been stolen.

My anxiety, however, has also focused on whether my output was ever truly worth the time and attention of whomever was confronted with it. Worth it, as in whether or not it provided some sort of inherent (yet of course fresh) service or value to its immediate recipients and Greater Conceptual Audience. This was the underlying yet supreme meaning of legitimacy. My internal pressure to make a statement that would change the world became so strong that, for awhile, my sense of purpose was too large to be channeled into anything remotely functional. I could never write freely in such neuroticism, of course. But it also seeped into my ability to relate to other people, into how I ran my life.

May 2008: park bench, somewhere in Des Moines:

-How are you feeling?
-I don’t know…I don’t really have anything profound to say, anyway.

The response of a well-intentioned teenager with cripplingly ambitious personal standards, or just a self-righteous motherfucker? Your call.

I’ve actually been wondering about that one for some time and all I’ve decided is that legitimacy is a bitch to define. Once you’ve crafted out a meaning for it, all of your actions can then be scrutinized through the framework of their relationship to that definition of legitimacy. Contradictions—breaches of the integrity of whatever you’re trying to say—arise like skeptical eyebrows. And, despite the more conventional advice I’ve been given, I don’t think that navigating those inevitabilities is quite as simple as just writing what you know, or, in life, acting as your conscience dictates. Your work will still be internalized by others within a (generally critical) personal context; people can only understand their surroundings with the help of their own exposure to others’ works and their own life experiences with the subject matter.

My exposure is limited. So is my experience. Sure, I can be concise about some things in writing, but when I try to communicate big, personal ideas (profundities? I can only fucking hope so), they inevitably go through this gauntlet of the audiences’ immediate circumstances, long-term contexts, and previous biases about myself. Usually, this is okay. But it also means that any opinion, impression, emotion I express will be understood by the reader with some impurity, with some dissonance.

I won’t argue that an important job of a good writer is to communicate ideas through that discord, but the practice also serves more personal functions. Writing is a way of contextualizing observations for oneself—of giving life and meaning to our notions; building them up or bringing them down. It’s a way of interacting more dynamically with our surroundings by asking ourselves if we understand them well enough to say something. There are times when this can be as meaningless (or misunderstood) to the reader as it is therapeutic to the author, but I’m getting to the point where I don’t think that’s so bad. Sure, these instances could often be avoided by less compulsive writing or more careful consideration, but why should I cheat myself of that sense of urgency? I’d rather take a pure idea and have it run me into a wall than quietly contemplate a better place.

So, do I believe that legitimacy has more to do with purity of intent than the ability to communicate that intent? I suppose so, but my convictions can be prone to significant ebbing and flowing. What’s constant though, is the necessity of playing with them—of considering their worth, or even just considering them all. Which is really the point of all this post, and the blog in general: a medium for me to legitimize that consideration. So far it feels pretty alright.

But I do hope you enjoy it, too.