WHY "WHAT DO YOU DO?" IS THE LAMEST QUESTION ON EARTH RIGHT NOW.

So what do you do? I do pretend to enjoy it when I'm asked this and I usually answer that I am a writer. When they press further (because no one has anything interesting to talk about—more on that in a future post), I usually give a broad description of the kind of copywriting I usually do. Yes, I write my own stuff, to answer their next question. They think it's cool probably because it sounds enough like work but without bitchy bosses or inflexible hours. Sometimes, a more "established" acquaintance will say, "at least you're not a waiter, right?" Whatever. I always knew it would be this way. Still, the ubiquity of the question demonstrates what occurs when a younger generation steps up into its fathers' society and, I think, underscores the need for us to develop healthier ways of looking at ourselves and others.

When I was in high school, "what do you do for fun?" was the default, small-talk opener amongst peers. In college, "what's your major?" or "what do you want to be?" took its place. Already, a shift was underway from seeing one another as people with rich inner lives to units of economic production. And yet each of these questions, trite and cliché, at least aimed at uncovering some sort of sympathetic truth. To ask them is to inquire into the nature of a human being. Since college, "what do you do?" is the unsurprising victor of the small-talk wars. I am told it will remain this way for the rest of my life.

Of course, this was not the first thing on my mind when I tied to read Chrisopher Hudspeth's "19 Tips of Females in 2012" (Note: introducing it as I have is in no way an attempt to legitimize this slipshoddery as worthwhile reading. It is not. I could write a rage-filled book with no punctuation about what's wrong with masquerading this glorified anthology of vaguely misogynistic tweets as an "article."). My first attempt to read this stalled at tip #4:

"Just because a dude has a Nikon camera and is decent at Photoshop does not make him a photographer. And more importantly, posing for him doesn’t make you a model."

The question this leads us to is an obvious one: what does make him a photographer? There are a number of legitimating criteria—consider things like taking photography "seriously," actively engaging in its history and craft, or regarding it as "the dream"—that become increasingly abstract by our mid-twenties, when, basically proficient at everything that interests us, the obstacles between "the hobby" and "the real" never feels greater than one evening of single-minded devotion.

More often, rather than wade into the quagmire of serious philosophical thinking, people employ the single expedient of commoditization: to wit, you are a photographer when someone pays you for photographs.

Anyone who has ever seriously attempted to make art has bumped up against this kind of resistance at one time or another. Even Paul Varjak is asked of the infallibly loveable Holly Golightly of 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's, "Are you a real writer? I mean, does anybody buy what you write?" That Varjak is a prostitute is, to my eyes, beside the point. To society, to the Empire, it is the entire point. It is obvious what that makes Miss. Golightly.

It is obvious, also, what this makes the thousands (millions?) of aspiring artists and activists derided constantly for their perceived unwillingness to get "a job" while trying to make it. But under the conditions of the society they've inherited, some reluctance is entirely appropriate. For better and worse, the upbringing of a young intellectual builds, slowly and meticulously, her identity. At a time when she owns very little besides debt, it is the only thing that belongs to her and the thread that ties together her every experience. In a culture where she is defined as a person by the task for which she is mostly highly paid, we ask her to compromise her identity for minimum wage at McDonald's? We ask her to define herself as a fast food fry cook so that the next guy she meets at a party who asks her what she does before he asks her name will immediately identify her as low class and lacking in guile? It is preposterous and especially cruel.

And I know that the world can be cruel at times. I know that the economy is an unsympathetic reality to which we have all, more or less, agreed. I am not suggesting that naïve petulance is acceptable or that artists starve ("Hunger actually makes it really hard to concentrate." - Science). I just believe that if we must continue to extol the virtues of the "American work ethic," let's stop making our jobs the only thing we need to know about one another. Then maybe the next Picasso will bag your fucking groceries.

Tunes Today:

AMERICAN SPIRIT

There is no need to put this cleverly: nothing makes me gag harder than American chest-thumping. That said, it is hard not to be at least a little proud of the first few comments dropped under this morning's Newser article about the latest Al-Qaeda eThreat.

The threat, which comes on the heels on reports that many (most? all?) Mideast Al-Qaeda propaganda sites have been inexplicably shut down for weeks. Currently unsupported rumors that this could be the work of a Western hackivism group like Anonymous initially captured the public imagination positively. If the intent was to disrupt Al-Qaeda's ability to reach out, we can infer that it is somewhat successful. However, some fear that down sites exacerbate the challenge of the intelligence community to monitor the terrorist activity. Either way you look at it, the threat itself, which intriguingly calls to mind a print ad for a Hollywood blockbuster, was weird turn. Nearly a week after the sites were taken down, this image was posted in many of their places:

The timing of the sites going down to their replacement by these images suggests to me that the former was not an altogether deliberate move on Al-Qaeda's part. The word from the intelligence community is that "there is no specific or credible threat to New York at this time." At any rate the image, a little cheesy, and its message are somewhat chilling, even to we Americans who don't reside in The Big City. So please partake in my pleasant surprise at knee-jerk response from the Newser community, many of whom I have very familiar with over the few months on the site:

JackNelsonSteward: Do we have here the modern, social media equivalent of, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US "? ... or is it al Qaeda's attempt to elicit the "Sky is Falling!!" response from our Security State, y'know, giving DHS and the NSA and ... God only knows WHO else ... some exercise?

04052063: "no specific or credible threat to New York at this time." The NYPD later added that in response to the alleged threat they will now be tailing more Muslim men without credible evidence."

Jingo: "With any luck, they will get mugged in NYC

Ivan: I am extremely scared and terrified. I'm gonna lock my self inside and only come out to work and SHOPPING! I will never question anything media or my government tells me.

Starvethedead: "Coming soon again in New York." They can infiltrate security and fly planes but they can't use proper grammar?

Ifbit replies: The War on Errors is rife with casualties.

Finkster: These bunch of creeps need to be annihilated off the face of this Earth

This is a job for Green Lantern....:-)

Oh, you're all heroes in my book! In short, we seem to have replied first with the same nonplussed and sarcastic wit expected of us. Call me jaded, but I for one find that incredibly reassuring.

B.S. 1000

It is universally acknowledged that in addition to a major, all undergraduates major in bullshit. It does not have to be this way. Every student has imagined aversion of herself that never misses a house party or a reading assignment. Thankfully, every technological advance of the past 20 years has, in some way, made it easier to imitate preparedness for class on a half hours' notice. 

This is not to say that the old referents we have of university life—I picture, here, young men in school-colored sweaters carrying a stack of thick books for young women in hoop skirts seated in silent, venerable, library rooms—is entirely outdated. Why, to "live in the library" has become a somewhat trendy badge of honor. The day a security guard got fired for locking a girl in after closing, may very well been the proudest day of the lucky sophomore's life. To become such a fixture to the site of serious learning that your personhood is disavowed, that you are forgotten entirely, that you become part of the architecture, can be worth the strangest of cool points within snobby, young, literate social circles

I would say, however, that all our age of instant access to knowledge encourages a new standard for the kind of skills it should take to merit a degree. Bullshitting is, I say with no squeamishness, is one of the fundamental life skills of the liberal arts major. If by your last semester, you can't orate competently for half the morning about a book you've never read, you would not pass my class. Period. If you cannot piggyback off of a classmate's comment, derail your Lit course with a 30-minutes discussion of social-psychology and make your teacher thank you for it, you aren't ready for a degree. Period.

Because, let me warn you, young professionals have bullshit down to a science.

Tunes today:

SOMETHING HAPPENED--IT WAS HORRIBLE AND OVER MUCH TOO QUICKLY

When blogging these days, it is advisable to always do your best. Give your post a clear theme, for instance. Maybe offer a thesis statement humbly masquerading as a Seinfeldian observation of modern culture. Open up a favorite book and steal a few lines you like. Don't attribute the quotes. Don't say: this is important, my thesis, so read it with care! That way, if it sucks, no one will know how much you mind. Most of the time, it will suck.

Take lately: I haven't written a new post in three weeks, but thanks to a few kind "Stumblers," and that I comment often on the many blogs run by friends, acquaintances, and writers I both hate and admire, my readership has undergone a steady but unprecedented bump. I am a little uncomfortable with this. With very few exceptions, I do not write for a general audience; I write for the narrowest selection of my friends. My last post, for instance, WHAT MORE HAVE I TO SEE THAT I'VE SEEN ALREADY?, had all the cultural relevance of a tweet (Twitter circa 2006, pre-social activism, when every life-detail could be proclaimed as a controversial, post-privacy, evolutionary statement). And because it was the newest post, people viewed it. A lot.

Suddenly, I feel the pressure of needing something to say.

-----

I've read a lot of blogs lately by people sort of like me—we are mid-twenties, educated, and uncertain—that have attempted to reflect on what being like me means. There is always a market for article cobblers who tap into some sort of zeitgeist (he word itself has become unspeakably lame). Blog factories are addicted to it. Thought Catalog, as much as I enjoy it, is guilty of indulging geist-riders to an unsavory extent. In its own way, it is perhaps an art from to sum up what [mid-twenties, educated and uncertain] are thinking. Like a lazy standup comedian, blogs like TC thrive by corroborating what we already believe about the mid-twenties reality. At best, readers leave with a little insight into what they believe, how they believe, and why. More often, I fear they leave with something new to take for granted, or go apeshit in the comments section. 

I have gone apeshit in the comments section. I've gotten more likes for it than anything I have ever shared on Facebook. The market is there and its need is big and hungry.

Fueling the market is an underlying agreement that we, the people like me, are at least in it together. But what are we in together? If I am to draw an axiom, through induction, about people like me from the way we talk about our lives on the internet, it would be this: we are defined by small regrets. We regret our liberal arts degrees, the amount of time we spent online, the records we bought because our friend suggested them, the global issues that became memes that we once worried over, the coeds who wrote shitty fiction and heard what they wanted to hear when we said they "might have potential," the nights we made a pact to "say YES to anything." Most of all, we regret 70-90% of the people we've gone home with and 100% of the people we've loved. Romantically, sexually, spiritually we must only be capable of bad moves.

I don't deny that this is an awkward age; we all expected to be stronger, slicker, and less longsuffering by now. I don't deny that there is even something beautiful about our awkwardness, how clumsily we move through the world, how frankly we love and how we bruise when disappointed. But I am dismayed, truly, by how ready we are to put it all into perspective.

 I encounter too often people like me who try to sum it all up and close the books on an age they consider to have been the thrashing of their lives. I have seen too many once interesting people make up their minds to take themselves seriously.

Here I am at twenty-something, looking back on the last bunch of years. I made a lot of mistakes. I have been arrogant, reckless, and cowardly, and naïve and I have burned bridges, squandered opportunities, woken up I jail cells and hospital rooms, and humiliated myself, my kind, and my loved ones. Other days, things were not so bad. And if I could reach back and erase only little bits, I would try not to do so. Somewhere, in an alternate universe, there is a me who did not do those things, but I do not know him. He is not the me that I have slowly come to really root for and like. If I could, would always let myself be scared and hurt. If I could, I would only erase the times when I was cruel.

If I have a comment to add to the dialogue on our geist, it is this: I think that one of the biggest traps of your mid-twenties is thinking that you have yourself more-or-less figured out. I know that it seems mature to know yourself, but it just isn't. Keep trying. Keep fucking up. Keep letting it hurt.

Even if you know yourself, just ignore it. It's not good to always know the truth about yourself. It's better to lie to yourself just a little, I think. It's brave to try to surprise yourself. In fact, you should do your best. You should tell yourself that you can still do anything. It's always a lie, but it's usually a good one.

"WHAT MORE HAVE I TO SEE THAT I'VE SEEN ALREADY?" - SANCHO

I got a freelance assignment yesterday to write [some bullshit] for [someone I don't want to reveal because at least they were nice to me]. It was nice and easy payday. I felt energized and eager to dive into it. I had reference books on the table. Like everything I write, I wished deep down for it to be the "the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable." While I began punching the keys in my room alone, I was as if a being of singular virtue, focus and drive.

When my girlfriend came home, I became Don again. I told her about the assignment.

"But why would somebody need another [some bullshit]," she asked.
"Well, it's like when you're starting a new journal or website or something..."
"You don't know what it's for, right?" she said.
"I didn't ask." She rolled her eyes. "Anyway, when you start something like that sometimes you want to include a [some bullshit]. But you need to generate original content. You can't just copy/paste from Wikipedia or some book"
"But that's all you're going to do," she said.
"No. I'm going to read all that stuff and write it in my own words and... stuff."
"Yeah, OK," she said.

My productivity was shot for the rest of the night. I woke up this morning with the intention of getting an early start and powering through this [some bullshit] copy with time to spare. I wrote for about two hours through frequent interruptions and my ego replayed yesterday's conversation for about a dozen encores (this one goes out to the true fans!) until the thought of [some bullshit] made my mouth taste like throw up. I ate lunch. Then I quit.

You're right, Girlfriend, the world probably doesn't need another hack [some bullshit]. I thought I wanted that $80 bad enough, but I guess I want your respect a little bit more.

And that sucks.


Tunes Tonight:

"THERE IS NO PROGRESS. THINGS START GREAT, THEN GET CRUMMIER AND CRUMMIER." – HEIDEGGER (ABBRIDGED)

The morning of the 17th, around 10 AM, I woke up and immediately pulled my laptop off my nightstand. I breezed through my morning internet rounds (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Newser, Ezra Klein's Wonkblog, Nympho Ninjas [NSFW], Questionable Content and Mangareader) with a general sense of well-being from having finally gotten my mandatory one smug rant about music out of my system. I look forward to never thinking that hard about what I listen to again. 

I followed one link to another to a Youtube video about the contraception "debate." I scrolled through the comments with increasing distaste as the dialogue moved almost instantly to indiscriminate gender war. I spent nearly an hour writing about this phenomenon before I came upon this comic from 2010 which basically sums it all up for me.

Oh well.

Tunes tonight: "Climax" by Usher sounds so much like a The Weeknd song that he should be a little embarrassed for himself. It is catchy, though.

GRAMMYS, INDIE, AND BEST OF 2011

The Grammy's aired two nights ago. I don't know if award shows are becoming better or more controversial, or if a hundred tweets, statuses and blogs can make anything once stale seem vital again. Either way, I threw the 54^th Grammy's up on the bedroom TV while I wrote with the expectation that I was participating in something somehow important.

I was not.

We could talk about the trend of mainstream recognition of "indie music" or dubstep. But other people already are, people that get it what all of it "means" more than I do.

LL Cool J said that Grammy night is a night to celebrate music. If anything, I have to take issue with that. I mean, is Chris Brown even a singer, or is just the front man of the "Chris Brown Lip-Sync and Dance Troupe?"

The Grammy's are not a celebration of music. Unfortunately, they are a celebration of a music industry. Nominations are not handed out for great music but popular music. Sometimes greatness and popularity coincide, but it's usually a bit of an accident. The major labels have pop/rock/rap stars on their payrolls who come and go. They also have producers, songwriters, image consultants and marketing gurus—they tend to have longer careers. They trend-watch and focus-test all around the clock to create radio-friendly music geared to least offend a general audience. It's good business.

Thanks to the taste-makers in backroom deals between Clear Channel and the five super-labels (Sony, Universal, BMG, UMI, and Time Warner), pre-approved music stars get played over and over everywhere in the country. Think about it, when was the last time you heard a "new artist" on the radio who wasn't, somehow, already popular? Where does that popularity come from if you, radio listener, haven't even heard it yet? 

This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is a conspiracy fact.

When Bon Iver said there was a lot of talent "out there" that will never be nominated for a Grammy, he wasn't just feigning humility. He has spent his career until now as part of another music industry, one where people learned to play instruments and made music with their friends because they loved it. It was a world where no one got "best new artist" trophies, especially for their second album. Seriously, what does it mean to call someone a "new artist" who has been around for years? "You career doesn't matter until we say so?"

-----

 

I have an ex who has told me that she "is over" indie music. The enormity of that statement overwhelmed me. What did it even mean? Indie is not a genre. It doesn't have a "sound." Of course, anyone can tell when a song is an indie song: it doesn’t sound like something on the radio.  But there is much more new indie music each year than new mainstream music, and there much more room for variety. 

So why can't you be over indie music? Because indie is the discovery that there are not dozens of professional acts to choose from, there are thousands. It is the discovery that some bands do not write songs for a general audience, some bands write songs just for you.

So Fuck the Grammys, just a little. Here are some of MY favorite albums of 2011:

WAR WATCH 3: Revenge of the Sith

Funny/Edgy? Is HIPSTER RUNOFF ruining my writing style?

HEADLINE: ""Madonna Fans in Israel: Don't Bomb Iran Before Show.

WAR WATCH 2: Electric Bugaloo

How I regret getting so carried away with myself in my last post. You would think that all the time I spent in the journalism library combing through back issues of papers--ramble, ramble, ramble, I'm so educated, ramble--finding data to code for Poli Sci research would have taught me better than to expect new stories about any non-economy-non-election story every day. As it turns out, you would be extraordinarily wrong.

Anyway, here's yesterday and today:

Headlines:"Iran: We Can Strike US 'Around the World'"; Israel, Iran Terrorists Are Killing Scientists: Officials

From The Onion: Iran Worried US Might Be Building 8500th Nuclear Weapon


Tunes today: Lana Del Rey - Born to Die (I'm still with you! #LDR! #pray4carles!)

WAR WATCH

Ask my friends to agree on just how to take Newser*. I dare you.

*Newser, from journalist and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolffe, meets the expectations and attention spans of the casual consumer of online news by doing away with most that pesky text. "La-la-la, reading's for fags." Newser serves you headlines on the main page as a sort of photo-menu. Clicking a photo takes you to a one-or-two-paragraph summary of a fresh story along with links to the full story (wherever it was earnestly reported). Money in the bank.Whatever. I think it means well. 

I'm not sure what I hope to accomplish here. But I think can best be explored by my initial reaction to checking Newser this morning: "God, what if every story about Iran sounds like a predetermined lead-up to war and we actually end up in a fucking Iran War this year?" I've been thinking it for months. So now Newser is on watch--twice-daily screenshots until wars breaks out, the year ends, I get bored, or I forget.

(Headlines: "US Fears Israel Will Hit Iran Without Warning;" "US: Iran May Be Cozying Up to al-Qaeda")



Tunes this morning: "Elysium" by Portishead; "Still Blazin'" by Wiz Khalifa