Great moments in bad editing:

Here's the letter I wrote to New York Magazine:

I've interviewed JT LeRoy twice, once for Bookslut and once for Poets and
Writers. Over the past two years, we've become good friends, exchanging
hundreds of emails, blowing several hours on the phone, and spending time in person. (Note: I attended the Deitch Gallery launch for "Harold's End" last November. Your photographer, Danielle Levitt, took some test Polaroids of me, a curly-haired woman in a pink boucle coat.)

The truth is far more banal than Stephen Beachy's turgid story alleges. JT writes his own work. On numerous occasions, he's called or emailed
throughout the day with sequential drafts of stories or articles on which
he's working. He has a predilection for animated e-cards, only burns soy
candles, and loves my mom's baklava. And I've met Emily: she and JT sound
nothing alike.

In order for JT to be a hoax, he would have had to fool Vanity Fair (the
U.S. and British versions), the New York Times, BlackBook, Interview, Paper, Index, I-D, Spin, 7 X 7, Viking Press, Bloomsbury Press, Last Gasp Books, Zoetrope, Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida, Bono, Zadie Smith, Gus Van Sant, Madonna, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Arthur Bradford, Mary Karr, Carrie Fisher, Yoko Ono, Jerry Harrison and my mom and me, among others. (Perhaps you can fool Madonna, but you can't fool my mom.)

Also, he would have to had raise several thousand dollars over the years for Dr. Terrence Owens' McAuley Institute at St. Mary's Hospital, *spontaneously and for no apparent reason.* And anyone who knows JT well knows he could never pull off a hoax. He's erudite and silly and probably a genius, but I once spent five minutes on the phone with him while he looked for stamps. He could never perpetuate fraud--not only because he's moral--but because he's totally unorganized.

Sincerely,

Litsa Dremousis
Seattle,WA

Here's what New York Mag ran this week:

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymag/letters/14960/index1.html

The Real LeRoy
Over the past two years, I’ve become friends with JT [“Who is the Real JT
LeRoy?” by Stephen Beachy, October 17]. He has a predilection for animated e-cards, burns only soy candles, and loves baklava. To be a hoax, he would’ve had to fool Vanity Fair, the New York Times, BlackBook, Interview, Paper, Index, I-D, Spin, 7X7, Viking Press, Bloomsbury Press, Last Gasp, Zoetrope, Dave Eggers, Bono, Zadie Smith, Gus Van Sant, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Arthur Bradford, Mary Karr, Carrie Fisher, Jerry Harrison, Madonna, me, and my mom. And anyway, JT could never perpetuate fraud—he’s totally disorganized.
—Litsa Dremousis, Seattle, Wash.

A New York Mag fact-checker called three times over two weeks to verify everything, and I was told twice that my "letter [was] probably going to run". I never would have agreed to let them print it, though, if I'd known they were going to alter its tone. I know they can edit for clarity, but they changed the thing's intent. The edited version is poorly written and sounds like I'm taking a swipe at JT, which I'm not doing. Obviously.

Regardless, I hope everyone is done with this inane topic. I know I am.

I will be so fucking happy when the rest of the world catches up:

The Long Winters' "Ultimatum" is #8 in Seattle:

Seattle Weekly: Music: Countdown: Oct. 26-Nov. 1, 2005

Buy the disc and/or download the title song:

The Long Winters : ultimatum

Today, it does not suck to be a Democrat:

CNN.com - Democrats force Senate into unusual closed session - Nov 1, 2005

Apparently, Stephen Beachy has time on his hands:

I hate to respond to this because it's so absurd, but I've been asked about it more than once, so here goes:

In order for JT to be a hoax, he would have had to fool Vanity Fair (the U.S. and British versions), the New York Times, BlackBook, Interview, Paper, Index, I-D, Spin, 7 X 7, Viking Press, Bloomsbury Press, Last Gasp Books, Zoetrope, Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida, Bono, Zadie Smith, Madonna, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Arthur Bradford, Mary Karr, Carrie Fisher, Yoko Ono, Jerry Harrison and, oh yeah, my mom and me, among others. (Maybe you can fool Madonna, but you can't fool my mom.)

Also, he would have to had raise several thousand dollars over the years for Dr. Terrence Owens' Mc Auley Institute at St. Mary's Hospital, *spontaneously and for no apparent reason.*

And anyone who knows JT well knows he could never pull off a hoax. He's erudite and silly and probably a genius, but I once spent five minutes on the phone with him while he looked for stamps. He could never perpetuate fraud--not only because he's totally moral--but because he's too unorganized:

Who is JT LeRoy? The True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler

A tiny green man gave me a blintz one time:

My friend's story, "The Day the Aliens Brought Pancakes", was selected as a "Notable Story of 2004" in the new "Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005". All hail, Mr. Spitznagel:

monkeybicycle.net

Yay, Jay Tay!

My friend, the finest writer and most sartorially adept individual to come out of West Virginia, has another essay in the New York Times:

By JT LeRoy
Published: September 25, 2005

"Cheese! It's hailing cheese!" We cover our heads. Our 8-year-old, Thor, cowers beneath us - his parents, Astor and Speedie, and me, a surrogate brother, sister, wannabe parent - as we form a shield between him and the miniature cubes pounding down on us. This is France, so it was only a matter of time till the cheese blasted us; we didn't expect it at the Tour de France, though.

We arrived two days before the tour's end. It was all anyone talked about as soon as we opened our mouths and revealed our furtive identities as Americans, noticeably scarce in Paris right then. A man in the lobby of our hotel, the Monna Lisa - situated two blocks from the Champs-Elysï¿1⁄2es, where the tour would wind up - informed me as I was struggling with a map that I was there for the tour: "Ah, you are here to see your Lance win!"

"Well, we came to go to Euro Disney."

His face crumpled, he folded his paper and, in an unyielding tone, rectified my faux pas: "You mean to say, 'Disneyland Paris!'"

By the threat in his tone, I instantly capitulated. "Yes, uh, Eur - Paris of Disney. What you said." After this happened a bazillion other times, I finally got the drift that the antipathy toward outfitting Disney with the "Euro" prefix could have something to do with its being the equivalent of "Dollar Disney." I started pronouncing it "Disneyland Paris" and received no more looks of vile disgust. Well, at least not for that.

More:
Uncle Walt, Parlez-Vous Fran?ais? - New York Times

We field a hell of a rugby team, too:

Among the Believers - New York Times

Nada Surfin':

I've been listening to the promo ceaselessly since I received it in June. If Nada Surf's "The Weight is a Gift" doesn't become one of your favorite discs of 2005, well, I don't want to know you:

The Weight is a Gift by Nada Surf - New York Fall Music Preview 2005

The best summation I've read so far:

From today's New York Times:

Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street - New York Times

Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

By DAN BARRY
Published: September 8, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

The sight of corpses has become almost common on the mostly abandoned streets of New Orleans, as rescue and evacuation operations have taken priority over removing the dead.

Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.

The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store.

A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: "Hey, how do you get to the interstate?"

Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here - not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here - is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane's aftermath: floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.

Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has granted haunting glimpses of the past, present and future, with the rare comfort found in, say, the white sheet that flaps, not in surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St. Charles Avenue.

"We Shall Survive," it says, as though wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether different New Orleans.

Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells - that of rancid meat - is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.

The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a soldier's boot print. The "take-away" signs outside restaurants taken away. The corner kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New Orleans's Times-Picayune: "Katrina Takes Aim."

Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses, S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.

Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the portal to the Williams Super Market in the once-desirable Garden District. And who could blame them if all they wanted was food in those first desperate days? The interlopers took the water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.

On the other side of downtown across Canal Street in the French Quarter, the most raucous and most unreal of American avenues is now little more than an empty alley with balconies.

The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone cooing "ma chère," of men sporting convention nametags and emitting forced guffaws - the absence of us - assaults the senses more than any smell.

Past the famous Cafe du Monde, where a slight breeze twirls the overhead fans for no one, past the statue of Joan of Arc gleaming gold, a man emerges from nothing on Royal Street. He is asked, "Where's St. Bernard Avenue?"

"Where's the ice?" he asks in return, eyes narrowed in menace. "Where's the ice? St. Bernard's is that way, but where's the ice?"

In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods, the severely damaged streets bear the names of saints who could not protect them. Whatever nature spared, human nature stepped up to provide a kind of democracy in destruction.

At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from the crushed door, offering a view of the complementary coffee table. A large woman named Phoebe Au - "Pronounced 'Awe,' " she says - materializes to report that men had smashed it in with a truck. She fades into the neighborhood's broken brick, and a thin woman named Toni Miller materializes to correct the record.

"They used sledgehammers," she said.

Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks rumble past a smoldering building, the roads are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The city parked them on the riverbank for the hurricane, after which some hoods took them for fare-free joy rides through lawless streets, and then discarded them.

On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since the police took away the gun he was carrying - "They beat me and threatened to kill me," he says - but there are benefits to this new world.

"You're able to see the stars," he says. "It's wonderful."

Today, law enforcement troops began lending muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin's vow to evacuate by force any residents too attached to their pieces of the toxic metropolis. They searched the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and that woman whose name sounds like Awe.

Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled black water over someone's corpse.

The best part is that it's well-deserved:

Nothing Is Certain but Death and Taxis - New York Times

Nothing Is Certain but Death and Taxis

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: August 28, 2005

BEN GIBBARD, the lead singer and main songwriter for Death Cab for Cutie, has had a wildly eventful few years. His band's sweet, melancholy songs have helped a generation of listeners rediscover the joys of heartfelt balladry. And along the way, Mr. Gibbard has gone from semi-obscure singer to unlikely heartthrob. Who could have predicted that someone like him would wind up dominating the gossip columns? And who could have foreseen the sold-out stadium concerts, the punch-up with a paparazzo, the fruitful marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow?

O.K., strike that last bit: I think I'm getting Mr. Gibbard mixed up with that guy from Coldplay. But it's a surprisingly easy mistake to make. Both of them know their way around grand, sighing love songs. And while Mr. Gibbard isn't quite a mainstream rock star yet, he's surprisingly close. The last Death Cab for Cutie album, "Transatlanticism" (Barsuk), has sold more than 300,000 copies since its release in 2003. And with an electronic side project called the Postal Service, Mr. Gibbard released another 2003 album, "Give Up" (Sub Pop); it was a surprise indie smash, selling more than 600,000 copies.

On Tuesday, Death Cab for Cutie is to release "Plans" (Atlantic), its first major-label album, which is all but assured to be its best-selling one so far. In an earlier era, indie-rock fans might have worried about the new record deal and the newfound popularity, but Death Cab's evolution into a pop-chart-ready band has been steady and relatively uncontroversial. Whereas older indie-rock groups sometimes struggled furiously against the current of listener demand, this one has found a graceful way to swim with it.

"Plans" also represents a challenge for the mainstream music industry. Modest Mouse proved that indie-rock bands (you don't necessarily outgrow the genre when you outgrow your record label) could earn a platinum plaque, and Bright Eyes proved that an indie-rock act could make its debut in the Top 10. Now the executives at Atlantic Records have a chance to raise the bar again, although no one knows how high. Could Death Cab be the first of these bands to break into the Top 5? The first to go double-platinum? The first to score a remix from Kanye West? (A Gibbard can dream, can't he?)

Ever since Death Cab's 1999 debut album, "Something About Airplanes," this Bellingham, Wash., band has been finding ways to record music that is pretty but not fussy. The members first perfected their approach on "We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes" (Barsuk), an astonishing CD full of hard songs that sounded soft. Mr. Gibbard sang,
When your apologies fail to ring true
So slick with that sarcastic slew
Of phrases like, 'I thought you knew'
While keeping me in hot pursuit

but the words came out not as angry accusations but as one long, gentle sigh.

After "The Photo Album" (Barsuk), from 2001, the band outdid itself with "Transatlanticism," which showed off Mr. Gibbard's crystalline voice and also the crystalline production of the guitarist, Chris Walla. He stripped away almost all the noise and fuzz, letting listeners concentrate on intoxicating little details, like the owlish hoots hidden in the background of a song called "Lightness."

With "Translatlanticism," Mr. Gibbard also found a simpler and more suspenseful way to write songs. Sometimes he began with a scientific observation ("And when I see you, I really see you upside down/ But my brain knows better, it picks you up and turns you around") and worked his way toward an unadorned confession ("I know it's too late/ And I should have given you a reason to stay"). Songs from the album found their way to soundtracks, including that the of TV show "The OC." The sugary songs of the Postal Service became sleeper hits, too, and Mr. Gibbard found himself the figurehead of an unexpected indie-rock boom.

Whatever the cause, it wasn't Mr. Gibbard's rock-star swagger. If anything, his success seems like a byproduct of his humility. A prouder band might find defiant ways to alienate newcomers, and to keep longtime fans at arm's length. But Death Cab excels at giving listeners what they want: wistful, neatly written indie-rock ballads. Instead of insisting that we humor them (like noisier, pricklier indie bands of a decade ago), Death Cab has agreed to humor us, instead; like the Shins and Rilo Kiley, Death Cab has figured out that there's nothing wrong with being eager to please.

Now comes "Plans," which is fuller than "Transatlanticism" but otherwise quite similar. There are delicious (and, still, melancholy) songs that unfold like the last batch. "What Sarah Said" begins with some rolling keyboard chords (come to think of it, they don't sound wholly unlike something Ms. Paltrow's husband might play), and some opening remarks: "And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time." (It's the closest Mr. Gibbard comes to singing the title.) By song's end, the lyrics have grown shiveringly direct: "I'm thinking of what Sarah said/ That love is watching someone die/ So who's gonna watch you die?" These are cruel words, but Mr. Gibbard sings them as if he really wants to know.

This album feels a bit more premeditated, a bit more familiar, than "Transatlanticism." (In fact, the new album ends with a throwback: "Stable Song" is a rearrangement of "Stability," which was released on an EP in 2002..) But it's a triumph all the same, with semisweet refrains that glide into your brain and refuse to leave; millions of Coldplay fans should give this CD a chance. In "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," which seems destined to become one of the album's most beloved songs, there is only an acoustic guitar to accompany Mr. Gibbard's memorable promise of endless love: "If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks/ Then I'll follow you into the dark." On this album, couples don't just part, they dearly depart.

Mr. Gibbard's lyrics have changed subtly over the years. The early albums were full of odes sung by lovers left behind. In one old song, "Company Calls Epilogue," Mr. Gibbard evoked an ex's wedding: "You were the one/ But I can't spit it out when the date's been set." Now he's as likely to be the leaver as the left. "Someday You Will Be Loved" offers cold comfort to an ex: "The memories of me will seem more like bad dreams/ Just a series of blurs like I never occurred."

On the album's first single, "Soul Meets Body," Mr. Gibbard delivers a soothing pick-up line. "You're the only song I want to hear," he sings, "A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere."

That phrase sums up what Death Cab for Cutie promises its listeners. Most bands, of course, promise far more. But it's worth remembering, too, that almost all of them wind up delivering far less.

No, not because we're friends:

A smart, funny essay from one of my favorite writers:

June 5, 2002 | CANOGA PARK, Calif. -- Canoga Park is a rarely visited graveyard where celebrity pool cleaners go to die. It's less a suburban oasis than an apocalyptic dustbowl, an unfathomably ugly San Fernando Valley sprawl of strip malls, factories and cul-de-sacs that can only boast affordable housing and a lower crime rate than Los Angeles. During the summer, the valley is always at least 10 degrees hotter, and exponentially more humid, than anywhere else in Southern California. From the moment you cross the border, it feels like you've ventured inside the mouth of a dog.

More:

Salon.com Sex | Fast forward

Or perhaps, make out with you:

If you speak German and translate the following article for me, I'll be your best friend:

BANDS Magazine - V.A. - Future Soundtrack Of America (Barsuk/RecRec)

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Trend-bucking Paste now trendy magazine":

Trend-bucking Paste now trendy magazine | AccessAtlanta

Trend-bucking Paste now trendy magazine

By SONIA MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/14/2005

Back in college, the founders of Paste magazine surely couldn't have imagined 9-to-5 ever being this much fun.

Sipping free liquor before noon, brought in by a 3 Vodka representative who wants to discuss advertising and potential sponsorships.

What differentiates Paste from the No. 1 magazine on the Tribune's list, music magazine Blender, as well as mainstays such as Rolling Stone and Spin, is that you can pretty much bet that no matter how much pop superstar Britney Spears agrees to bare, she will never be on its cover.

Opening boxes of complimentary CDs every day.

Gorging on chips, queso and a seemingly endless supply of fish tacos during two-hour lunches.

But don't be misled — these are working lunches.

Today, in a six-room Decatur office that, with its walls lined with shelves of CDs and music posters, feels a little like a dorm room, eight music and movie lovers are eating and holding energetic talks about the best ways to share their favorite new finds with the world.

Editor Josh Jackson points out that there hasn't been a woman on the cover in a while.

Some names are tossed out: India Arie. Lizz Wright. Fiona Apple.

"Yeaah," says assistant editor Steve LaBate. "With [Apple's] album that's not coming out floating around, that would be unexpected."

"And with her being out of the spotlight," Jackson adds, "and most of all, good ."

These are men who take their roles as tastemakers seriously.

Think of Paste magazine as a dream come true for that high school classmate who used to make mixtapes for his friends. In fact, partners Jackson, Nick Purdy and Joe Kirk were those guys, spreading mixtapes around their high schools in Dunwoody, Norcross and Naples, Fla. Their fourth partner, Tim Porter, says he was more of a tape and CD loaner at his high school in Jackson.

Seven years ago, Purdy, Jackson and a friend created pastemusic.com, an online retailer of indie music. In July 2002, Jackson, Purdy and Porter, a classmate of Jackson's at UGA, launched Paste magazine as a quarterly with 600 subscribers, most of them Web site customers. (Kirk, who had been mastering the magazine's free CD samplers, was brought in as a partner shortly afterward.) By October 2003, Paste had grown so much that it became a bimonthly.

And with the release of its August/September issue, Paste got even bigger, more than doubling its print run to 225,000 thanks to a recent buyout of the rock music magazine Tracks.

But its founders' influence extends beyond its subscription base. Every Tuesday at 1:54 p.m., either Jackson or Purdy — the two main faces of the magazine and friends since they met at a Presbyterian church youth group 18 years ago — share their interests with the hundreds of thousands tuned in to "CNN Headline News."

And 37 independent record stores in 24 states feature Paste Recommends listening stations programmed by the magazine's 19-member staff.

Those listening stations present certain challenges, though, which have the staff at the lunch meeting concerned.

"So what are we going to do when our reviewer gives one-and-a-half stars to something on the Paste Recommends station, or the sampler?" LaBate asks.

(The CDs for the stations and the songs for the samplers are chosen before staff and freelance critics review albums.)

"Everything is not always going to line up," Purdy answers. "What we have to do with the sampler is fill it with the 22 songs we love. And if there are one or two things in editorial that conflict with that, hey, we can still stand by the fact that the 22 songs on the sampler we love!"

Their passion is getting them noticed.

In June, the Chicago Tribune named Paste one of the 50 best magazines, placing it at No. 21 — six places ahead of the British music magazine Mojo, which Paste aspires to emulate.

What differentiates Paste from the No. 1 magazine on the Tribune's list, music magazine Blender, as well as mainstays such as Rolling Stone and Spin, is that you can pretty much bet that no matter how much pop superstar Britney Spears agrees to bare, she will never be on its cover.

"We live and die by our tagline — 'Signs of Life in Music, Film and Culture,' " explains Purdy, far and away the most matter-of-fact of the generally easygoing foursome.

The staff added "film" to the tagline when its December/January 2004 issue hit stands with director Wes Anderson ("Rushmore," "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou") on the cover.

"Film has always been a component of the magazine," Purdy says. "We've increased our emphasis on it in the last year. But in the future the magazine, ultimately, will be seen as an entertainment magazine."

It is Paste's mission, says Kirk, to help people find art that has value and to help encourage its development.

"Paste finds the edgy, really provocative, forward-thinking, progressive musicians," says Lindsey Pearl of Press Here Publicity, whose clients (danceable rock band Franz Ferdinand, beloved indie wordsmith Bright Eyes) have been given major feature treatment in Paste. "I think as music diversifies more and more, it's important to have publications that really do honor the music itself and are not paying attention to politics, fashion and culture."

Dave Siff, a bassist in a couple of local bands and the "Headline News" executive producer who brought the Paste guys to CNN, says the look and content of the magazine caught his eye.

"I was told by somebody, like, 'Hey, check out this local music magazine.' And I'm thinking to myself, Stomp and Stammer. Not that there's anything wrong with Stomp and Stammer. But I just thought, like [Stomp], it was gonna be paper, thin, that kind of thing. And the first time I got my hands on Paste I was literally blown away. Mouth agape."

Porter came up with the name Paste when some of the partners were sitting around one day trying to come up with a good metaphor for connection.

"We really feel music is not inert," Purdy says. "It has emotional, spiritual, inspiring-type power over people. It's not something that's just food that goes in your body and out. It affects you. So that's why we're toying around with the idea of a connection. Paste is a metaphor for connection."

With that kind of purpose and focus from its start, it's no wonder they're taking some abuse from their readers for giving the ever-writhing pop star Shakira a positive, full-page review. Or — gasp! — actually liking mainstream favorite Coldplay's latest CD, "X & Y."

After all, the Tribune deemed Paste "hip without sacrificing credibility on the altar of corporately deemed 'cool.' "

Pardon Kirk as he snickers a bit.

"We're often seen as having a bias toward artists nobody ever heard of before, but that's mostly because other people aren't paying attention to artists nobody's heard of," he says with a laugh. "And yeah, we probably are more likely to help people discover the next little thing, but we kind of really don't care. If it's good, it's good. You can't please everybody."

If there has been one consistent knock against Paste, it's that it hasn't seemed to have found many "signs of life" in the work blacks, Latinos and other people of color are creating.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, of the hip-hop band the Roots, is the only black person to have a Paste cover. "And I can see where that could be perceived as a plus and a minus," Thompson says.

Purdy doesn't dodge the issue.

"Absolutely we could and should be stronger there," he says. "And slowly and surely, we are putting our money where our mouth is. We're working on a big feature on [black Atlanta singer-songwriter] India Arie. The whole neo-soul thing seems to be a place where folks in our audience — who, let's just say, don't listen to a lot of music made by black people — can start."

The Paste guys know tastes can be changed.

After all, Purdy admits that the mixtapes they made back in high school included songs like DeBarge's "Rhythm of the Night."

Little chance of such dopey pop seeing daylight on a future Paste sampler.

Next week? That I'm actually a guy:

Last week, a message boarder said that I was Jewish. This week, I'm listed as a poet. (See below.) Anyhow, if you're in the Bay Area on Thursday, drop by Pegasus Books in Berkeley for Cranky's first out-of-state reading:

Events

Oh, *that* guy again:

My Paste Magazine profile on the LWs' JR is online now:

Paste Magazine :: Feature :: The Long Winters :: Seasons Changing (Page 1)

From today's New York Times: "Sometimes Snarkiness is Preferable to Sincerity"

Sometimes Snarkiness Is Preferable to Sincerity - New York Times

I'm glad the Dorothy Parker bit got singled out because it's one of my favorite parts. Mr. Sanneh quotes me accurately, though--in context--it's obvious that I'm not the posterchild for tender-hearted emo sincerity. Whatever. My first piece for The Believer is referenced in the New York Times and JR gets well-deserved props, too. Nice.

June 23, 2005
Sometimes Snarkiness Is Preferable to Sincerity
By KELEFA SANNEH

One of the funniest and meanest music-criticism blogs publishes no original music criticism at all. It's called The Shins Will Change Your Life, online at indierock4eva.blogspot.com, and it compiles excerpts from breathless or fawning articles about indie-rock albums and musicians.
One writer in the site's crosshairs promises that after hearing the new album by the singer-songwriter Maria Taylor, "you'll soon be wondering how you've lived so long without having these songs in your life." Another declares that the new Art Brut album is "as clear as crystal a piece of untainted genius." And a third notes that "No Wow," by the Kills, is "a brutal record that changes you the same way prison changes a man." No extra commentary is provided, and none is necessary; the site's scathing sarcasm goes entirely unstated.

The Shins Will Change Your Life reads like a delayed reaction to the great snark debate of 2003, begun in the pages of the literary magazine The Believer and continued, for a few months, in the Snarkwatch section of the magazine's Web site, believermag.com. Heidi Julavits, an editor of The Believer, used the term snark to refer to the "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt" that she often noticed in book reviews, including some that have been published in The New York Times Book Review. (The essay is online at believermag.com/issues/march_2003/julavits.php.) And the Snarkwatch site did the opposite of what the Shins site does now: instead of snarkily mocking music critics for their overwritten encomiums, it took book critics to task for "needlessly unpleasant" or unfair reviews.
It makes a certain sort of sense, then, that the editors of The Believer have just given the anonymous Shins blogger a big, fat new target. The magazine's new issue is its annual music issue, featuring 88 pages of articles ("Incl. non-music essay on George Plimpton," as the cover promises, or perhaps warns) and one CD full of musicians covering songs by their peers; almost all of these cover versions are previously unreleased.

The Believer prides itself on being omnivorous, and usually for good reason. The editors love to give the essays long subtitles followed by even longer lists of the subjects discussed. In the next issue, due out later this summer, the magazine sort of promises ("Not all contents are guaranteed; replacements will be satisfying") to print an article entitled "Ignatius Donnelly, Prince of Cranks: How a nineteenth-century Minnesotan's catastrophic imagination predicted the Internet, chemical warfare and demon airships." This is a magazine that aims to show readers a bigger, weirder world.

That's why it's so puzzling to find, for the second year, that The Believer's music issue contains almost nothing outside the alt-rock world. The five musicians interviewed offer five different flavors of alternative: the post-punk singer Karen O, from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; the puckish singer Beck; the sisters, ages 11 and 13, who make up Smoosh; the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann; and the indie-rock singer John Roderick of the Long Winters.

The interviews are long and appealingly casual, and the best are full of unexpected little anecdotes and asides, as when Mr. Roderick's interviewer compares some Long Winters lyrics to Dorothy Parker's writing. The response is a half-serious warning: "Be careful not to compliment me too much, because I'm apt to say, 'Don't you think my last quip was rather like Dorothy Parker?' " But the relentless focus on alternative rock is not only strange but also slightly depressing. What fun is it to explore a musical world that seems so small?

The CD is similarly frustrating, not least because there's much to recommend it. Many music issues come with freebie sampler CD's that are little more than record-company-sponsored promotional tools. But this one has new recordings, some of them great (like Spoon's version of "Decora" by Yo La Tengo) and some not so great (like Devendra Banhart's rather graceless reading of "Fistful of Love" by Antony and the Johnsons).

Again, the problem is the limited focus. The CD is accompanied by an essay that begins, puckishly, with an ultra-condensed history of songwriting: "The oldest recorded song that we know of was etched on clay tablets in western Syria 3,400 years ago." The essay leaves readers free to imagine that the CD is a wide-ranging collection of contemporary songs, even though it's mainly devoted to the work of a small cohort of indie-rockers.

Maybe it's unfair to judge a magazine by its music issue. The style magazine Nylon just published its annual music issue, too, and it's full of stylishly disheveled bands so similar-looking that they could probably trade members without anyone's noticing. This is a small world that's small on purpose; the little details (like the hilarious and quite lovely Will Sanders photograph of the teenage Nashville punk band Be Your Own Pet, half-hidden behind a blossoming tree) more than make up for the lack of range.

If The Believer's music issue is more problematic, that's because it's also more neutral. In an effort to stamp out snark, the editors also seem to have stamped out skepticism, and so the magazine takes it for granted that indie-rockers are the most important musicians on the planet: the harpist and songwriter Joanna Newsom, for example, taps into "a deep, universal pain." (Might those words appear on a certain blog sometime soon?)

There is scarcely any mention of the kind of music left out. Mainstream pop music is mainly off-limits, although Rick Moody makes a grudging confession: "I like pop songs, too, of course, in reasonable doses." (Later, he takes a swipe at "the bland affirmations of the contemporary 'country' radio format.") And black and Latin music is almost entirely absent. At one point, Mr. Roderick claims that "indie-rock culture is the real ghetto of people who have convinced themselves that they're too sensitive to be yelled at or to yell." The interviewer responds with what might be The Believer's unofficial credo: "When it's genuine, though, it's different."

Compared with the ostentatious sincerity of The Believer's music issue, a site like Shins probably seems like an exercise in bad faith, a place where writers are pilloried for daring to be enthusiastic. But while Shins provides plenty of cheap laughs, it also hints at the prejudices that usually go unexamined in music writing, assumptions about what smart or genuine or good or life-saving music should sound like, and about who should be making it. Sure, indie-rock fans and musicians have plenty of reasons to be glad that The Believer throws such an entertaining party every year. But they - and others - might also pause to wonder who's not invited, and why.

Because it's all fun and games until someone kills a sibling:

My one-sentence story for Monkey Bicycle is here:

monkeybicycle.net

Relax--you should see what he writes about me.

"Darling, darling, darling/I can't wait to see you/in the flesh..."--Blondie

I read my short story, "A Young Irene Dunne, Maybe", at the Third Place Books in Ravenna on Friday night. Details:

The Seattle Times: Entertainment & the Arts

NWsource: Event details - "Cranky" Contributors Read

Calendar of Events - Ravenna Third Place

Because who *doesn't* like reading about illness?

The CFIDS Association of America asked me to tell part of my story. That's Ms. Posterchild to you, bitches:

CFIDS

Get your ass to a newsstand:

It's here!

The Believer - Interview with John Roderick