Sometime last summer, I started doing polls on Twitter that prompted people to choose things like the best Radiohead record or the best song on The National’s 2007 album Boxer. What set me off on doing polls is that one night, I was watching the movie Tootsie in bed, and in the hazy vacuum-void of 12:30AM, when all ideas are valid ideas because there’s no one there whose judgement could deem them otherwise, I started wondering whether we, the audience, are meant to find Dustin Hoffman’s character sexy when he’s out of drag.
I took this question to Twitter:
I found it immediately hilarious that almost half of the people who clicked an answer in this poll either had no idea what the movie Tootsie is or were appalled that anyone could even consider thinking that Michael Dorsey is sexy. (For those wondering, yes, I do think Michael Dorsey as played by Dustin Hoffman is sexy; I have a thing for easily riled-up men with dark hair who talk with their whole bodies. Am I also describing myself? Who’s to say.)
That first poll opened the floodgates. I wanted to know what people thought about everything I was thinking about, which, often, very often, is music. I started putting up other queries. I didn’t think about this at the time, but later I came to realize that I use three criteria to craft these polls:
They have to be about artists whose names most people would at least recognize.
They have to reflect an actual debate I have had or am having with myself.
I have to have an opinion on what the answer should be.
These criteria create an experience that is 1. communal, 2. organic, and 3. for me only — high-stakes. I want people to reflect my very strong and very correct opinions back at me! They rarely do. I love this.
What people do do is share their very specific and very varied opinions about whatever artist or song or genre. They are convicted. They know what they like. Or they know what they don’t like. Or they are mad that I am making them choose. They have very specific reasons for liking certain things and not others, often related to a time or place or event in their lives. On multiple occasions, people have told me that having to pick an answer made them reconsider their relationship to a certain artist, or that they didn’t realize how important an album was to them until they had to think about choosing the best song on it. At this point, the polls have sort of taken on a life of their own, and people I don’t know will DM me asking to make a poll about X or Y thing, and I have to say, no, do it yourself, I don’t have an opinion on that and therefore I can’t post it.
Anyway, the point here is not the polls. The point is that I have practically endless curiosity about what people like, why we like those things, how those things make us feel, and why they make us feel that way. I think frequently about the line that Rob (John Cusack) delivers to the camera in High Fidelity — “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like” — and have spent basically my whole life trying to figure out whether this is true. I have found no evidence that it isn’t.
The intro to this newsletter briefly recaps the story of my writing for a music blog and subsequently losing all the pieces I’d written. Until it happened, a loss of that sort had seemed unfathomable. Then it did, and I had a choice: try to understand it, or try to forget about it. The latter was impossible to me because I am unskilled at lying to myself. So, I spent a long time thinking about how it felt to have lost of all of that, especially considering that I had made significant progress as a writer in those pieces. The evidence of my progress was gone! As was the historical record of the dozens of albums I had listened to and developed opinions about, and the evidence that I didn’t know about Pavement until I was assigned a review of a Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks album.
Since then, I’ve developed a theory that the art we really like burrows inside us and lives there until we find it outside of ourselves. We can never lose it. Our whole lives are spent trying to convert these bits and pieces — lines from poems, song lyrics, movie scenes — from unfulfilled destiny into premonitions.
That’s mostly what this newsletter will be about. The bits and pieces of music that have burrowed inside me. I can’t promise that I won’t write about other things in the future; I like and think frequently about lots of things:
movies, lately ones by Richard Linklater
architecture, in particular buildings whose architects no one would care to know about
poems about love
poems that use the word “cruel”
food, especially eggs boiled in the shell for seven minutes and oat-porridge sourdough bread
novels with woman characters who are hyper-self-aware but whose self-awareness makes no difference, positive or negative, in their lives
I believe these things to be absolutely essential to remaining alive. The strength of this conviction has only grown alongside my conviction to the fight for socialism, which is ultimately about winning a world where we can more easily nurture our humanity. Until we win, and as we struggle, we still have to nurture it — otherwise, how will we remember what we’re fighting for?
Lots of things can feed our humanity. I am unconcerned with passing judgement on anything or telling you what to think. That’s what the polls are for. What you’ll find here is more expansive — thoughts on my world, the world, what I see, how I see it — often, almost always, tethered to music.
Thanks for subscribing. I’ll always keep the option to get this newsletter for free, but if you can spare it, $5 a month makes it easier for me to write it. And, if you like what you read here, please give it a little heart, and share it.
Until next.
"I’ve developed a theory that the art we really like burrows inside us and lives there until we find it outside of ourselves. We can never lose it. Our whole lives are spent trying to convert these bits and pieces — lines from poems, song lyrics, movie scenes — from unfulfilled destiny into premonitions." I can relate. My writing is full of allusions to lyrics and song titles to punk and post-punk. Its not only, or even especially, out of nostalgia for youth, but for the powerful combination of excitement, possibility and political awakening that I tune back in to every time.
Have you read An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler? The line about “eggs boiled in the shell for seven minutes” instantly reminded me of the book, which I love and feel compelled to recommend whenever it crosses my mind.