Blah
It's midnight and I have a headache. Yesterday I was engrossed in reading the Lyrix thread over in poptimists and wanted to post at length about Ashlee complicated vs. Ashlee uncomplicated (former is better), "Love Makes The World Go 'Round" vs. "Coming Back For More," but knew I was at my last chance to take a walk before the day got unbearably hot, so I hotfooted it out the door but kept stopping to excitedly write in my pocket notebook. ("All this static - haze - swarm of gnats. 'I just want to talk to you/My broken heart it has no use.' But call to silence: 'Promises better left unsaid.' Relationship = haze of static. But, at the end, she's coming back for more! (End will switch places like an O. Henry story.) Teen tragedy lyrics.")
Then I got home, listened for the first time to "Blush," the beautiful song that was on the promo for Aly & A.J.'s Insomniatic but was dropped from the official release: already knew what was coming from the discussion on the rolling teenpop thread, and the lyrics right off lay out all the issues, almost torturous in their explanations ("Even though I like your honesty/It won't lead me to your bed/So go ahead and say it/Even though you know it makes me uncomfortable/Go ahead and say it/If you must make me blush"), yet when she gets to the last line of the song - an obvious one, summing up what she was saying in the entire song, but I won't tell you it because... well, poignancy, it whomped me and I want it to whomp you, all of a sudden tears are in my eyes, I'm up on my feet in the other room and pacing back and forth. An explosion of feeling from I'm not sure where or why (see this classic Mark Sinker ilX thread), and... what to do with it? Well, I'm a writer, so what to do with it is write it, obviously, and there's a Lyrix thread waiting for it and...
Fucking livejournal. I sit down and realize that Britain's already gone home and maybe even gone to bed and will never look at that comment thread again, so I'd be only writing for a handful of American poptimists at most. So, um, maybe could make it a Song Of The Day over on my MySpace (which I suppose will happen), but somehow I've lost my voice there, or never quite found my way into one, and after taking a vacation from Song Of The Day during my vacation I'm not sure where I am with that feature.
Several hours later it dawned on me that I could write on the teenpop thread, but... well, this is astonishing, that it took me several hours to think of the teenpop thread, when six months ago I'd have headed there instantly. What happened? Well, ilX went sour, but that's been happening for a good long time, and the teenpop thread is its own world pretty much separate from ilX. But not from the eyes of ilX, and I hate to say it, but the fact that Shipley and Enrique and all those other scumbags were sliming us has finally gotten to me; the impetus, the joy just isn't there anymore. And maybe my problem isn't just that the joy has left the rolling teenpop thread (though there's no way it could have the excitement of discovery for me that it had last year, when I eagerly taking in five overlooked years of the genre and trying to figure it all out), but there are now so many other places I go to first, before ilX (almost never look at the New Answers pages), my emotion is engaged elsewhere...
An unexpected event, back in 2005 - Sunday, 18 December 2005, to be exact - on Rolling 2005 Country Thread: gut instinct takes over, and I simply decide that my year-end preliminary Pazz & Jop musings will go there, on the country thread, even though that means I'm suddenly talking about Lindsay Lohan and t.A.T.u. and Madonna and Kelly Clarkson and Shakira and the Rolling Stones and the Hold Steady. My motive was quite simple. I knew - I KNEW - that my words would sing there, ont that thread, and that my words wouldn't sing as well at another venue, on another thread or board. And I knew the words I'd get back from others would be twice as smart and twice as alive as the words I'd see elsewhere. So, more to the point, I felt my words couldn't sing in other places.
But here's my problem now: My voice suddenly feels homeless. I was hoping my original idea for the Las Vegas Weekly column - a main column, online, with a followup a few days later, also online - would create an ease of conversation. Low profile but with a lot of back and forth. Now that it's down to once a week, in print as well as online, but with no followup, I'm finding my diction goes overformal, and I seem not to be able to stop this from happening. And I'm now confused as to where to turn for my subject matter. There are hundreds of good directions, but I'm not feeling my way into them. The first ten columns (weeks 1 through 7) had a direction, each building on the last. Now I'm confused.
Then I got home, listened for the first time to "Blush," the beautiful song that was on the promo for Aly & A.J.'s Insomniatic but was dropped from the official release: already knew what was coming from the discussion on the rolling teenpop thread, and the lyrics right off lay out all the issues, almost torturous in their explanations ("Even though I like your honesty/It won't lead me to your bed/So go ahead and say it/Even though you know it makes me uncomfortable/Go ahead and say it/If you must make me blush"), yet when she gets to the last line of the song - an obvious one, summing up what she was saying in the entire song, but I won't tell you it because... well, poignancy, it whomped me and I want it to whomp you, all of a sudden tears are in my eyes, I'm up on my feet in the other room and pacing back and forth. An explosion of feeling from I'm not sure where or why (see this classic Mark Sinker ilX thread), and... what to do with it? Well, I'm a writer, so what to do with it is write it, obviously, and there's a Lyrix thread waiting for it and...
Fucking livejournal. I sit down and realize that Britain's already gone home and maybe even gone to bed and will never look at that comment thread again, so I'd be only writing for a handful of American poptimists at most. So, um, maybe could make it a Song Of The Day over on my MySpace (which I suppose will happen), but somehow I've lost my voice there, or never quite found my way into one, and after taking a vacation from Song Of The Day during my vacation I'm not sure where I am with that feature.
Several hours later it dawned on me that I could write on the teenpop thread, but... well, this is astonishing, that it took me several hours to think of the teenpop thread, when six months ago I'd have headed there instantly. What happened? Well, ilX went sour, but that's been happening for a good long time, and the teenpop thread is its own world pretty much separate from ilX. But not from the eyes of ilX, and I hate to say it, but the fact that Shipley and Enrique and all those other scumbags were sliming us has finally gotten to me; the impetus, the joy just isn't there anymore. And maybe my problem isn't just that the joy has left the rolling teenpop thread (though there's no way it could have the excitement of discovery for me that it had last year, when I eagerly taking in five overlooked years of the genre and trying to figure it all out), but there are now so many other places I go to first, before ilX (almost never look at the New Answers pages), my emotion is engaged elsewhere...
An unexpected event, back in 2005 - Sunday, 18 December 2005, to be exact - on Rolling 2005 Country Thread: gut instinct takes over, and I simply decide that my year-end preliminary Pazz & Jop musings will go there, on the country thread, even though that means I'm suddenly talking about Lindsay Lohan and t.A.T.u. and Madonna and Kelly Clarkson and Shakira and the Rolling Stones and the Hold Steady. My motive was quite simple. I knew - I KNEW - that my words would sing there, ont that thread, and that my words wouldn't sing as well at another venue, on another thread or board. And I knew the words I'd get back from others would be twice as smart and twice as alive as the words I'd see elsewhere. So, more to the point, I felt my words couldn't sing in other places.
But here's my problem now: My voice suddenly feels homeless. I was hoping my original idea for the Las Vegas Weekly column - a main column, online, with a followup a few days later, also online - would create an ease of conversation. Low profile but with a lot of back and forth. Now that it's down to once a week, in print as well as online, but with no followup, I'm finding my diction goes overformal, and I seem not to be able to stop this from happening. And I'm now confused as to where to turn for my subject matter. There are hundreds of good directions, but I'm not feeling my way into them. The first ten columns (weeks 1 through 7) had a direction, each building on the last. Now I'm confused.