I Am Very Tall

The following is a set of clips that I found interesting. The first is an interview that Stephen Colbert had with Rep. Wexler from Florida.

It's been awhile since I posted. I've seen this happen to other blogs before. After a run of furious posting, the posts start trickling out a bit more slowly, then they just stop. Without becoming part of a larger dialogue, these things are just on-line diaries. And at the end of the day, when you're done with work and you've finally just gotten home, what do you really want to do? Spend a half hour writing a post that no one will read, or make yourself a nice dinner, watch some television, and then try and get your girlfriend to take off her clothes?

Anyway, I had a thought this morning. Incredible, I know.

I'm not entirely sure why I was thinking about this, but it struck me how people are always trying to find someone/something to blame for the problems that they see. I think the reason for this is pretty intuitive. When a specific problem can be attributed to a particular source, it's much easier to deal with. You can isolate the problem and work towards a solution, or at least dismiss it in some way.

When you don't know what the problem is, it suddenly becomes far more insurmountable. Without having a clear target to attack, it's harder to control whatever it is that's bothering you. You have less predictive power over when the anxiety will strike and this only makes things worse. 'Sourceless' problems like these seem to be what cause people to become deeply depressed and/or generally unhappy.

Some time ago, I read about a distinction between fear and anxiety. It categorized problems with identifiable sources as fears and the others as anxiety. I wish I could remember what article it was, because it was kind of neat if you're into keen word-mincing.

In any case, what I was thinking about this morning is how there's probably a very strong inclination to blame one's problems on the first plausible source, especially if you're possessed of a Type A personality and have a borderline compulsive need to do something about it. By blaming something else, it's a quick and virtually costless way of regaining a bit of control and composure.

Obviously, you can't just blame anything. Blaming your insurmountable feelings of inertia on a cheeseburger you ate in 9th grade won't ring true enough to pass even the weakest of internal dialogues.

That being said, I think the problem with this approach to regaining control is that it focuses too much on identifying the problem and not enough on solving it. In some cases, identifying the reason that the problem arose won't lead to a solution. For instance, if you're driving on a highway and your direction-giver doesn't tell you about your exit until it's too late, identifying that person as the problem isn't going to fix the fact that you now have to find a way to turn around and get back to that exit.

Ok, that's all.

In She's All That, we're taught that ordinary-looking girls (with nice eyes and flawless bone structures) can be made super-hot by switching their glasses for contacts, letting their hair down, and the application of makeup. While I think that most people know that there's a little more to it than that (I've never heard of makeup that covers up multiple chins), I think that there's a feeling out there that by giving a person a proper makeover, all sorts of hidden hotness can come out.

Here's my question. Are there any movies that say the same thing about guys, i.e. nerdy guys can suddenly become awesome, ripped and popular? Do I sound incredibly homosexual because I'm asking that question? Oh well. Just curious.

So I got caught in a lie this weekend. The details aren't important, but the fallout was pretty bad. There was a lot of discussion about this and that, being truthful and trustworthy, etc.

A lot of that got me thinking about lies as a whole. Is it ever ok to lie? To this, there are several responses.

I think the most conventional one is "No." From the day that we're born, people tell us that lying is bad. On occasion, we're given a thwacking if we're caught lying. We're told the parable of the boy that cried wolf to reinforce the theory that lying undermines people's trust in what you say.

Kant had a much more sophisticated response, which might be of interest to some people. Bypassing a lot of his discussion of rationality and ends, it boiled down to the fact that when we lie, we are making a decision for someone else and effectively place our decision-making faculties above the same faculties of the people that we lie to. For Kant, this is a big no-no, especially since an equal weighting of all such faculties underpins his entire moral philosophy.

Of course, absolute moral prohibitions run into problems when we start talking about either-or situations. Kant had a problem figuring out what to do when faced with the question, "What if a murderer came to my master's house and asked me where he was?" Relatively speaking, abetting the murder of your master seems like a greater evil than lying to a murderer.

Going with a bastardized version of Ignatieff's "lesser evils" theory, we could say that lying is permissible so long as we continue to recognize it as an evil, and only use it if abstaining would necessarily result in an even greater evil.

If that's the case, then we have to put together a pretty robust framework for figuring out what constitutes a "greater evil." Suppose I'm trying to sell a weak product so that my start-up and all of its employees can scrape through another meager year. Would that qualify as a reason to overstate the strengths of my product to customers?

Realistically speaking, I think this is the theory that's guiding most people, if they're being guided by anything at all. Most of us tend to figure out the pros and cons of a lie, and if the pros outweigh the cons, we'll go with it. The only problem is that this is a really loose way of dealing with ethical issues. If this was a widely accepted framework, GW Bush could easily say that all of his lies about WMDs in Iraq and all of the spinjobs he's done on torture and imprisonment without due process were done "for the greater good" of national security. Strong odds say that he would even believe what he was saying. But for a lot of us, I don't think that would make it right. Morally relativistic double-speak eventually leaves me with the feeling that you don't have morals at all.

Another response that I've heard is the "victimless crime" theory. Here, the lie is justified by the fact that it a) introduces a benefit into the world, and b) provides no downside. It's the moral equivalent of finding a $20-bill on the street. Sure it came from someone else's pocket, but they'll never even know they lost it.

A better example might be as follows. Suppose that someone you love and care about is having some sort of crisis of confidence. They just don't think that they're up to the task of doing whatever it is that they're supposed to be doing. To a certain extent, you think that they're probably right. But you know that these confidence issues will only compound their problems and make matters worse. And who knows, maybe if they got their confidence back, they'd do fine. So. Would it be ok to lie to them? Could you make something up that would make them feel a bit better about themselves and be right about it?

This is a tough one. I think a lot of people would probably say sure, go ahead. Their reasons might be as follows: a) you're not hurting anyone, so long as the person doesn't find out, b) this isn't even for your own benefit, it's for theirs; it's a selfless lie. But I think that a lot is hinging on the qualification in reason A. Supposing that the person does find out that you've been lying, then a lot of the self-esteem that you've been trying to build up might go poof! and vanish. Even some of the honestly good things that you've said might be considered to be garbage. Boy who cried wolf, etc.

Interesting note: Frankfurt's On Bullshit distinguishes between a liar and a bullshitter by pointing out that liars are actively trying to steer people away from the truth, whereas bullshitters don't particularly care about what the truth is or is not. Well, I thought it was interesting.

It is with great sadness that I note the passing of Steve Irwin. Aside from the fact that his last name has a passing resemblance to my first, the man was absolutely fearless. Many of my friends considered him to be certifiably insane. Still, his unrelenting enthusiasm for his job made many of us, including me, think that he may have been on the right side of that very fine line.

His means to fame - wrestling around with lethal, deadly animals - has been copied many times over by people like Jeff Corwin and other random zoologists that don't really know that much (I saw this guy on Shark Week that was a certifiable idiot). Hopefully, his freakish, excruciatingly painful-sounding death (stabbed in the heart by a stingray) will not have them all running for the hills.

"I think the reason that Sprint and Nextel are failing is because of the yellow."

This is a real quote, coming from the mouth of a person that is influencing a major corporation's acquisition strategy.

At first blush, I'm inclined to dismiss this as utter sillyness. When people are trying to choose between various phones and service plans, do they really care about the corporate color? Is Cingular's orange really so much cooler?

Well, maybe. Branding works in strange and mysterious ways, which are mostly incomprehensible to me. I will say this though. T-mobile turns me off with its pinkness. I defend this sentiment by thinking about how any T-mobile phone that I purchase will have a pink little logo on it, adding a feminine touch to even the most masculine of phones. Being the insecure person that I am, this means something to me.

So something is probably wrong with yellow too. Cingular is playing it safe with a tasty looking orange. I have no idea what Verizon's chosen color is - maybe the red that's in their little check mark thing?

Anyway, this can't be very interesting for anyone to read. I'll come back with something more intelligent later.

Over the past few weeks, I've had a lot of time to think about what it means to "say the right thing." This thought has been inspired by spending a lot of time preparing for job interviews, talking to my girlfriend, and so on.

There's a pretty high premium placed on saying the right thing these days. Knowing what to say can you get you a job, a girl, a hot meal, and more. Moreover, there's a certain amount of in-the-moment pressure to say what you know the other person wants to hear. Along with a lot of other people, I guiltily admit to loving instant-gratification. There's nothing like saying the right thing for getting a smile of approval, one of the ultimate forms of inst-grat.

There's a part of me that really hates self-presentation. I'm really bad at hyping myself - I don't want to tell other people that I'm smart, rich, capable, or ridiculously good in bed, even if it happens to be the truth (which it, unfortunately for my girlfriend, is not). Consequently, there's probably a part of me that really hates having to do things like this.

Really, I'd much rather have some sort of brain-scan that would show prospective employers where I actually stand. Not only would that relieve the pressure of having to go through interviews, it would also make me a lot less uneasy about whether I'm being hired for who I am, or for who I represented myself to be. Having sat behind the interviewer's desk, there's really only so much that you can pick up about a person in an hour. Sure, you can toss out a case question and see if they're smart. But it's hard to tell if they're lazy, the full extent of their skill set/experience, and whether or not you'll actually be able to work with them over an extended period of time.

As a guy that just got hired, I'm totally freaked out that they might be expecting a lot more from me than I can actually do. Anyway, I'm sure it'll be fine. But still. I think the whole interview process could be done better.

I just started reading The Lesser Evil, by Michael Ignatieff, in an ill-advised attempt to get back to my roots in philosophy. I can already tell that it's going to be significantly slower going than it should be. Moreover, I won't pick up half as much from this book as I would have about a year or two ago.

The feeling reminds me of sentiments expressed in an article in the Times. Having previously been able to quickly read and digest this sort of text, it's depressing to pick up a book which should really be a light read and feel as if it requires a bit more lifting than I would have expected. Moreover, whereas the article refers to highly trained athletes that no longer need to use their muscles, this is my mind we're talking about here. My mind since college. I was really hoping that I'd be getting sharper, not duller. Oh well.

The book, or the thirty pages of it that I've read, is a discussion of evil and politics. The book was written post 9/11, so the reason for its writing is fairly transparent. Ignatieff is trying to better understand the extent to which a government can abridge its citizens' civil liberties in the name of security, while still staying on solid politically moral ground. There's obviously a lot going on here, which I don't want to get into here.

His thesis (so far) is that when faced with such dilemmas, the government should adopt the policy that represents "the lesser evil," (hence the title of his book). The position seems pretty uncontroversial to me, if you can get beyond the fact that it's probably impossible to implement in any real sense. I think what's more interesting is the root of the idea, which basically assumes that evils can be weighed against each other.

This is something that people don't really like doing, although I think we all know that it has to happen at some point. The canonical case is whether or not you're allowed to torture a suspect if you think he may be the only person that knows the location of a megabomb that's set to go off in the middle of a crowded metropolis within the next hour. Most people give in to their more practical side and start saying, "Ok, maybe in that case." But there's also a strong inclination to say that as soon as you take that step, you're opening up a Pandora's box of violations, exceptions, human rights violations, and what not.

Qualifier: I haven't quite finished the relevant chapter yet. However, it looks like Ignatieff is saying that this is OK, so long as we continue to recognize that what we are doing is an evil. The fact that it is mitigated by the presence of a greater evil does not excuse it. But the realities of politics make it necessary.

That being the case, my impression is that it's all about measuring the greatness of an evil. I'm dying to find out how Ignatieff proposes that we do this. What makes something more evil than another? The number of people affected? The severity of the effect? Or will it be one of those "by their own lights," kind of deals?

My guess is that he'll post some helpful if not particularly concrete guidelines. Since this is where the most substantive theories will have to be, I'll reserve my judgement on his position until I find out where his lines are. However, preliminary paragraphs indicate that Ignatieff thinks that suspension of civil liberties in the name of combatting terror is not a bad thing, so long as the suspensions are "temporary." Given that the war has the potential to last almost indefinitely, much like the war on drugs, I'm very curious to see how this plays out. If civil liberties are "temporarily" suspended for eighty years, then I'd be inclined to say that something is wonky in his theory.

I settled on a job today. I chose to continue down the consulting path and see where that takes me.

While I was declining the other offer, it struck me how reticent I am to make large decisions like this. It's something akin to buyer's remorse, only, buyer's remorse is a bit sillier because you can always just return whatever it is that you bought (unless it's food, but those are relatively smaller purchases). A decision like this is a bit bigger. Much like the college that you go to, it's something that's going to define you and your path as time goes on. This means the magnitude of the mistake can be that much larger.

I don't think that I made a mistake though. Fundamentally, I like the place that I'm going and I like the work that I will be doing. If I find out that I've made a mistake, there are some reasonably good exit options. I think the biggest thing is that I like the people there, at least from the few I've met. For me, that's always been big.

Am I curious about what would have happened if I'd taken the other job? Absolutely. Will I look back on this day and wonder if I did the right thing? Sure. Will I come to regret this moment? I don't think so. And if I do, at least I'll learn something from it.

Pudge has a blog that I'm linking to right here. She's far more adept at this stuff than I am.

Here is another site that she pointed me to. Thomas tells me that it's old, but that's probably because he's a huge dork and has nothing better to do than surf web sites all day. Unlike some people I know. Anyways.

So, this isn't going to be an actual book review. While I appreciate high quality book reviews - and would love to contribute a couple to the world at large - I just don't have the time or patience to really think too deeply about what I'm reading these days.

I do have the time to put down my immediate impressions, which I think might be more valuable anyway. After all, this is more or less for my own sense of posterity. So here goes.

Natsuo Kirino - Out

Asa recommended this book to me, possibly because some of the content might be considered extreme or ultra-. I thought the book was "OK," mainly because its focus wavered too much for my taste.

The book began with something that was close to social commentary, describing the plight of working women in Japan. There was a strong sense of entrapment (hence the book's title, I suppose) - trapped in debt, in familial relationships, or in a passionless existence.

However, instead of delving into this more deeply, the author segued over into murder, dismemberment, rape and other craziness. Entertaining, sure. Deep and probing, not so much.

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

I'm a little bit ashamed to say the following. This was a good book. The reason I'm ashamed is because I don't have much more to say on the matter. I'm sure that there's a lot to say -I could discuss how the book's theme of mystic escapism are a fantastic lens through which to view the otherwise highly depressing content matter that the book covers. I would probably also comment on how the book refuses to allow that lens to totally distort reality, which comes crashing back into view with some frequency. I'd probably comment that the author twists us into having the same thought about his work that his characters have about another work within the novel, which is so "meta" that I can't even properly describe it without using way too many words.

But all of these comments would turn into loose, rambling, incoherent statements about the book that I wouldn't be able to fully substantiate through proper literary analysis. They'd be something closer to my own highly subjective take on the book. So, I'll just say it was a good book and leave it at that.

Now that I've switched to the new blogger beta, I can't delete the post containing the pictures anymore. Everyone just ignore it for now.

In any case, I've successfully made my first non-text based modifications to this page. The sidebar should now be significantly larger and the useless Google search bar should now be replaced with a hideous Google Adsense button. I'm probably just going to get rid of the whole thing, come to think of it. The Technorati part will probably go away as well. It's not like this blog is cool enough to require all of Technorati's services.

In the meantime, I've been trying to choose a job. My indecisive nature is proving to be highly problematic, since I can't comfortably choose one job without thinking that I'm really missing out on the other. Deadline is on Monday. Wish me luck.

So, I just redid the template - i.e. stole a template from another website and then modified it to fit my needs. There's still some stuff that I want to do though.

First, I want to modify the sidebar a bit, basically make it wider so the books section (that I added myself) doesn't look so cramped.

Second, I want to create a flickr account (with a Shozu uplink from my phone, how cool is that!) and modify the flickr badge on the side.

Third, I might put the javascript back in. It originally made it so that the sidebar was collapsible, but not quite in the way I wanted it to be. Basically, you could only have one section open at a time, which was silly. If I could get it so things opened and stayed open until you clicked on the heading again, then I would keep it. Of course, I really don't know much/anything about javascript so this is sort of a moot point.

Fourth, maybe add a blogroll.

Fifth, I need to get a readership for this sucker. For real.

I just ran across this blog - ephemeral-deliberations - and it's all about a guy at Haas that's currently going through an internship and doesn't get any sleep.  Actually, there seems to be a couple recurring themes:

a) Not getting enough sleep
b) Count-down until his job is over
c) Eating
d) Laundry trouble, lack of socks/underwear (I feel that one)
e) Wishing he was outside, but also enjoying his job

I feel bad for the guy and everything but the thing that gets me is that he's constantly updating the world about how he's not sleeping!  If you were at 44 hours of wakefulness, 4 shy of being awake for two full days, would you really care about posting to your blog?

I'm guessing that it's a way of venting - constantly telling people about how little sleep you're getting must be a major downer for your friends.

I'm also curious about whether San Francisco has wash and fold services, cause it sounds like that guy could use one.

An article from today's Times pseudo-confirms my intuitions on a subject that I'm sure has graced the minds of most people that have recently been in college. Where do our drunken words/actions come from? Is it a manifestation of some sort of schizophrenic personality disorder that alcohol unleashes? Or is it actually a less inhibited version of the people that we already know?

The article, citing the opinion of two experts, claims that it is the latter. This makes sense to me. Throughout college, I ran into all sorts of people that did or said "crazy" things when they were drunk, then dismissed it the next day. The crazy behavior normally ran in a couple of directions, influenced slightly by being male/female. First, there were the people that would just sleep with anything. Second, there were the people that would start getting violent. Third, there were the people that would just be a**holes and say really unpleasant things. Oddly enough, I always found the last group to be the most objectionable.

Anyway, I always felt like being drunk or otherwise intoxicated wasn't really enough to change the type of person that you really are. You might just be a different version of yourself, but it seemed to me that the core should stay the same. This view came largely from my own limited perspective. But it seems like there's a pretty strong incentive to make a claim one way or the other, depending on who you are. If you're the type of person that does things that you regret the next day, then you obviously want to say, "I only slept with that person because I was messed up." If you're not that type of person, then you might want to go the opposite route and say that inebriation displays a more unfiltered view of the self, so that you can claim some sort of moral superiority over your more bashful peers.

While I subconsciously lean towards the latter in my own views, I think that the real answer is this: while alcohol may give a glimpse into what a person wants to keep covered up, the real measure of a person should be based on what they do. If someone thinks that what they're doing while being intoxicated is really, egregiously, criminally bad, they'll probably stop drinking. For example, if every time I took a hit of drug Alpha, I murdered one of my friends, I would probably stop (or go to jail). This is obviously an extreme case, but the idea is the same. It might be harder to make this decision if the outcome was less black and white. That being said, maybe it is the real me that comes out and starts murdering people. But if I can look at that side of myself and say, "That's not who I want to be," and stop, then that decision should be equally reflective of what's going on inside my head.

Pitchfork columnist Chris Dahlen just dropped an article on the lack of great pop-culture critics in modern society. While it eventually devolves into a meandering expository exercise, I think his first argument is interesting. Briefly put, he thinks that the lack of great critics can be attributed to the cultural switch from drugs to technology as the primary turning point in our daily lives. The switch is important as the two occupy very different places within the cultural landscape, with drugs being dark, dirty, mind-expanding, cool, etc. while technology has at best a neat-o, gee-whiz kind of quality.

Two-second thought: I think Dahlen may have a point - there's definitely something about the way that we write about technology that's a bit formulaic and that is substantially less visceral. The degree to which it can be considered "life-changing" is generally measured by the degree to which it increases a person's level of efficiency, whether it be at working or goofing off.

But I think that if I were to make my own uneducated guess, it would be that pop critics are on their way out not because their subject is now technology related, but because technology has completely reshaped the competitive landscape and the size and accessibility of the criticizable world. As of now, basically anyone in the world can be a critic with the advent of the Internet. Pitchfork itself is an example of a site that started from nothing, with no publishing "cred," that has managed to turn itself into the poster board for indie music. Moreover, it is surrounded by a community of bloggers, which are mainly reviewed musicians and former columnists, that can reasonably claim to have the same level of credibility as any of the people that actually write anything on PF. Given that blogging is now a free, readily available service, there are no barriers to entry keeping any would-be upstart writer from jumping in with his/her two cents. With so many people talking at theoretically equal volume, how could one person possibly come out with the biggest voice?

The same kind of description can be leveled at virtually every facet of pop culture - movies, television, celebrity gossip, video games. Each of these subjects can now be viewed with both macro- and microscopic intensity. I can look at the television industry as a whole, or I can read detailed descriptions of the blacklight picture that Locke saw on Lost in that one episode, accompanied by well-articulated if completely insane theories on what the picture might actually mean.

This information is also incredibly current. Whereas old-school critics might have had some sort of informational edge over the consumer, those days seem to be rapidly disappearing. There are enough critics constantly pushing out information as soon as they get it that there no longer seems to be a set of people that can comfortably claim to know more about their pop-culturish subject than any research-hungry consumer.

Lastly, the level at which I look at these issues is completely at my discretion. This creates a problem for traditionally trendsetting magazines like Rolling Stone, which historically have had a much easier time corraling unfragmented public opinion. As soon as everyone can go out on their own and figure out what is cool for themselves, then the number of tastes/opinions that Rolling Stone has to successfully address becomes infinitely larger/less manageable. At that point, Rolling Stone has two options: they can either:

a) Cater to the largest customer segments by covering that which is already popular
b) Try and strike out on their own and continue to be perceived as a trendsetter

The problem with a) is that it is essentially a concession of defeat. It turns the Rolling Stones of the world into trend-followers, rather than trend-setters. The problem with b) is that it's just ridiculously impossible, especially given the exponentially-growing numbers of competing voices.

So, it's not very surprising to me that there are no new great critics. Whereas critics could previously rely on inside information and the undivided attention of a public untainted by media-saturation, critics today no longer have any of those luxuries. While Rolling Stone and all of the other great taste-setters will still have a place in this world, I doubt it will ever be the way that it used to be.

I was just perusing some blogs and found a reference to the red paper clip guy. Apparently, he just got done up on 20/20, less than a month after Boing Boing posted about him successfully trading up for a house (?!).

Two things come to mind, albeit in fairly divergent areas. First, I'm really curious about how quickly stories like that take off and what the key tipping point is. I remember reading about him sometime late last year, but it wasn't until earlier this month that I suddenly started seeing him being written up on other blogs. To a certain extent, you could see that through Google Trends, although it doesn't give you hard numbers, nor will it give you the channels through which the story was distributed (I hardly think 20/20 found the site just by searching for random ideas). On a side note, one red paper clip is apparently very popular in Canada.

I think it would be great if there was some way that you could discernably track the progression of an idea, pinpointing exactly when and how it was redistributed across the Internet, where it gained attention, and so on. While this might be a pipe dream now, I'm hoping that it will become a reality in the future. Given recent progress in linkage systems, social bookmarking, and other tagging services, I'm going to guess that someone will come up with something that will eventually make this into a reality.

The other thing that I'm curious about is just how far this "come-up-with-a-financially-lucrative-performance-art-piece-and-post-it-on-the-web" thing will go. The red paper clip thing, after all, isn't the only one of its kind. About a month ago, a guy named Remi Frazier got written up in Business Week because he was going to go to NYC with $100 with a vow to film himself in the process of making a million dollars(!) in a month. Although he didn't quite get to his goal, he did manage to get a bunch of volunteer consultants to help him out and sold the firm shortly after his deadline.

I think there's a fine line between cool innovation and half-baked lunacy. While I'm glad that there are people out there that are willing to test the limits of what can be done, I find that it serves more of a novelty function than anything else. I wonder what other people think.

Hey Blog.

I think the name blog sucks. I know it's supposed to be a condensed version of "Weblog," but when I hear it, it sounds more like an amalgamation of the words "blah" and "log," the first word connoting the quintessence of whateverness and the second a floating piece of scatology. Or a round piece of wood, but seriously, "blah."

That being said, this is going to be my first hunting trip into the wilderness of my thoughts. For far too long, I have kept them floating in my brain, assuming that they would just be gradually refined by my continuous contact with the world. However, the fault with this approach has been that my thoughts have become muddled. Instead of gaining clarity, I have become intellectually lazy, refraining from codifying my thoughts because I "know" that they will probably change later. Just "knowing" things is the slacker's way of taking the easy way out and I am trying to cast off my slug-on-a-log ways. Plus, I need to work on my writing skills, since they suck.

So, I'm going to write in this thing pretty much like most people would write in a diary. By way of introduction, I graduated from Harvard undergrad and have been "working" since October of 2004. Although I tend to actively disparage my job, it has given me bullet points that I can add to a resume, an amount of money that keeps me sheltered, well-fed, and taxi-driven, as well as a beautiful, loving girlfriend who (in all probability) is really way too good for me.

Today, I'd like to voice my reservations about "indie" rock. First, a qualification. I used to think of myself as an indie rock fan. I listen to a good number of bands that are not distributed by major labels. That doesn't mean that I have a major dislike for the music from the major labels. It's just that I'm going through a phase where most good music that comes my way seems to come from alternate sources. This leads into my general gripe. I really, really don't like the social strings that seem to be attached to indie rock as a genre. From what I can tell, the quintessential indie rocker is a proto-metro-sexual; he cares about his appearance, but simply subscribes to a different style mag than the other metro's. They need their torn jeans and hipster shoes so they can signal to other indie rockers that they're cool too. I guess this could be said about a lot of other groups (e.g. Goths, punk rockers, or really, and any number of fashion-loving girls) but I'm not picking a bone with any of them right now.

The style point is a digression. Here's the pith. I tend to think that what one listens to should be dictated by what one enjoys listening to. For me, music is capable of quickly evoking/accentuating feeling(s) that would be otherwise inaccessible. Just think of the difference between going to a club with good music vs. a club with terrible music vs. a club with no music. A club with good music (and maybe an open bar) can frequently get crowds of lumbering white people to shake their asses in a way that would make you think that they think that they're black. A club playing crap leaves most of these same people standing around, chattering loudly about their life insurance plans while they try and hustle down their third vodka tonic.

For numerous reasons, those examples didn't really illustrate my point. There are a lot of reasons why a club-related experience might be good or bad, e.g. drinks, friends, scantily-clad women, drug-related intoxication. What I really wanted to convey is the following: No one wants to listen to music that bores or irritates them, just like no one wants to smell dead fish as they're tucking themself into their covers. The experience just sucks.

The indie rock genre produces a lot of music that I really like. About a year ago, I picked up the Go! Team's album. It's awesome and I still love it. And I appreciate the fact that this is probably due to the fact that they were not on a major label and were consequently given much more creative latitude to create the kind of music that they did. However, I think indie rockers have a tendency to get confused by this last point. I think they tend to express disdain for more mainstream music simply because they think that the type of music that is produced under major labels can't be good/creative. They essentially tune out everything that they think to be too mainstream simply because they can't believe it's good.

There are a couple of things in this. A) Music doesn't have to be creative to be good. There's a lot of music out there that I would unhesitantly call "... creative." That doesn't mean it's good. In fact, a lot of it sucks the proverbial donkey nut. A lot of my favorite music tends to be standard, listenable music based off of a major chord progression. B) Just because music is popular or mainstream doesn't mean that it's not creative. Witness the Beatles, the largest pop phenom in history. Although they weren't the first of their kind, they were very creative and set the trend for a lot of music today. In this world, only bad people dislike the Beatles. And yet, their popularity still remains.

In fact, I don't think that the indie rocker's beef with mainstream music has anything to do with the actual music itself. In reality, it's all about coolness. And let's face it, when you get down to brass tacks, being cool is really about arbitrarily defining what's not cool, then setting yourself on the other side of the line. In this case, indie rockers/hipsters/cool people music is made cool by the fact that no one else really knows about it. It is generally cooler if people would like it if they heard it, but since the taste of the masses can be a fickle beast, this is a trait that, at best, is merely hit or miss. Since cool people must maintain a veneer of unwavering coolness, this last attribute generally goes out the door. What happens instead is that some set of people that have crowned themselves as "the cool crowd," choose a bunch of music that happens to fit some sort of taste line, and then revoke their endorsement of those songs as soon as too many people start liking it.

Certain high-browed muckity mucks might point out certain consistencies in their song choices. But really, that doesn't mean so much. Given a sliding range of generality, you can find consistency in anything. Iron & Wine and Pink, after all, are both extremely similar in that they both use articulated vocals and guitars to carry their melodies. The self-appointed grand poobahs of awesomeness could also point to the fact that mainstream music sucks, but only by pointing at specific instances of suckitude. While I'm definitely crapping on a generalized version of their viewpoint, I stand by my position, which is as follows:

* I think it is a mistake to listen to music based upon the social status it will lend to you. The subjective quality of a song should be entirely based on the internal emotions it evokes in a person (whether you enjoy it or not). It should not be based on calculations of whether or not it gives you a couple extra ticks on the cool meter.

The idea of "indie cred" that I find so pervasive in all indie rock crit (published and verbal) ultimately seems stupid to me. WTF do I care that Dave Matthews is now looked down upon by a community of musical snobs? I have a lot of good memories linked with his music and I will continue to enjoy those songs simply because of those memories. I probably won't play it at a party or anything, but that doesn't mean I dislike the music. And if anyone wants to try and dis me or say that it's embarassing for me to have his music in my library, my response is that they are simply missing the point of music in general.

*****

In looking at what I have written, I would like to make a few qualifications. First, I have a touch of indie snob in me, so I can easily be called a hypocrite. Second, the definition of "coolness" that I used is a bit out-dated and probably only works for critics and high schoolers. Most of the people that I know now subscribe to an updated version of coolness that preaches tolerance and acceptance. Third, if anyone was actually paying attention to what I was saying, the arguments don't actually lead up to the point. Which is sad and adds further fuel to my belief that I really need to work on my writing skills.