Hello World
I don’t like how I look in pictures. Every time I see a shot of myself, my face looks too skinny, or vulturish, or my smile looks wrong. Sometimes when I’m posing for a photo I raise one of my eyebrows – like I’m trying to make a joke, but I know it’s not funny. I don’t know what I’m supposed to look like – maybe more natural, like I’ve got a real smile and a face with a normal shape. The same thing happens when I look back at my articles. I’ve been writing freelance for over five – six? – years, starting for a while with just Pitchforkmedia.com, and then slowly crawling my way into Boston alt-weeklies, a couple of magazines, and lately, a few papers people have heard of. Da Capo stuck me in the “other notable essays” list last year – hey hey! I’m inching up the honor roll. But I don’t like my voice. Looking at my clips, I can see three or four different styles of acting colorful, serious, thoughtful, or wacky, but none of them feels natural. (Okay, maybe my Avril Lavigne article from ‘02 – still the best thing I’ve ever written – really “let go.”) Sometimes i’m trying to be funny, and sometimes I sound like I’m auditioning for The New Yorker. I didn’t even think about this until a New Yorker article by Louis Menand (no link available), a review of the popular but lightweight grammar handbook Eats Shoots and Leaves – which is the punchline of a dirty joke, but I don’t know if the author (or Menand) knew that. After smacking around the book until he was good and sick of it, Menand goes into a digression on the nature of voice – on what a writer’s voice is, and where it comes from (he doesn’t know). He references opera belter Pavarotti taking a bite from an apple and walking on stage to sound like Pavarotti. How do you do that? I’m not at ease with myself. I’m not comfortable with my career – whatever you’d call a career: I write part-time, around a full-time job that has nothing to do with writing. In fact, my full-time career is a plane crash – oh wait, these things turn up on Google, right? I meant it in a good way.
But to get back on track, it seems like a good time to kick off a blog. I tried this a couple years ago and I got sick of it – didn’t know what to write about. But I’ve been trying to “brand” myself, and “corner the market” on … well, not sure what yet, and I always say musicians should blog their music, so let’s see if this goes anywhere.
