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This article originally appeared in The Declaration on 22 April 2004.

Recently the Cavalier Daily bounced its business page (this was reasonable: no one read it, fewer wanted to edit it) in favor of a health and sexuality section. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and for the most part it is. There are articles about STDs, condoms, drugs–stuff that the average college kid should be paying attention to, but isn’t. And then there are the sex columns. They are titled with bad puns that would make even the Dec blush: “The G-Spot,” “How Come?” And they are filled with supposedly cutting edge information that just about everyone already knew.

There was an old Poodah joke about “Lee Camp’s Original Comedic Thought of the Week,” which slimmed the former CD humorist’s column down to four words of unoriginality: Men don’t like shopping! Amusement parks are crowded! Similarly, the new sex columns are just as banal: Men who ejaculate too early are bad in bed! Women may or may not enjoy the taste of semen! Relationships are hard! As the urinal said to the sink, “No shit.” For fuck’s sake–this is supposed to be edgy?

I remember being in high school and voraciously reading every one of Susie Bright’s columns over at Salon.com. This was a heady time, in the late days of the Clinton administration, when just about everything seemed to be focused on sex, money, and how people, from whom you didn’t expect it, were getting sex and money. So on the poster child of the new journalism, you could read about dot-com start-ups and sex columns and a serial novel by a former call-girl.

The novel was okay, and it was certainly better than either “Silicon Follies” or that new Dave Eggers one that I haven’t read past the first couple of paragraphs. And Bright’s column was, to this high schooler, fucking awesome. The logic worked along this line of reasoning: “Hey! Girls! Having sex! And I can read it in the computer lab of my all-guy Catholic school! ALL RIGHT!” Her column wasn’t that bad; often times it touched upon things other than sex. I enjoyed it. I also liked to consider myself fairly sexually liberated, despite the fact that I was a virgin.

Bright writes about sex intelligently, with the aim of enlightening her readers and maybe, maybe getting them slightly aroused at 4 pm on the fifth floor of a Manhattan school, although there’s a few things she missed in retrospect. Here’s Bright, writing about her plans for a new book in a Salon essay:

I want to examine the dark side of sex, and ask just how much deliverance we can expect from the sexual revolution. I’m going to look at the connection between beauty and eroticism (they’re not the same thing, you know). I’m going to tease out the role of envy in sexual repression. (link)

Bright understands that the whole issue of human sexuality is anything but simplistic; that it’s not a one- or two-sided issue, or even a spectrum, but a whole multi-dimensional mess that would make M-theory physicists get lost (and most do). Even sexual orientation is completely up in the air. There are so many facets to the human personality, so many different ways we get turned on and off, that it’s not a simple issue of “here is a hot [object of desire], go nuts.” These are good questions that need to be asked, and answered intelligently. In her columns, Bright would dissect the etiquette of a porn shop, or maybe how to sleep with a hotel concierge. She always understood, though, that this wasn’t for everyone, but that some people would benefit from her writing about it.

I fail to see, though, how anyone benefits from the over-simplified situations written about in the CD’s sex columns. The first one I read–Katja Schubl’s article about “one-minute men”–isn’t written to enlighten, but rather to scare the poor boy into doing a good job. She talks about longing for sex while in Germany, only to come back to a boy who doesn’t satisfy her; she dumps him without a second thought. Way to strike a blow for deep, lasting relationships, Katja. Even if one accepts that her goal was just to get her rocks off, Schubl’s article is the opposite of erotic or instructive. Instead, it gives the fear to the poor boy taking a girl to bed for the first time: it doesn’t matter how witty or compatible you are, it only matters how you are in the sack (and for God’s sake, you better be a demon). Moreover, it assumes that there is only one type of relationship on the planet, that sex is simple. (Her column this past Monday only further reinforces that she can’t comprehend, or at least write about, more than one style of dating.) Cut-and-dried “advice” like this, or the article about how men can improve the taste of their sperm, take away the joy and discovery of sex: they leave you robotically pumping and sucking away, wondering why you aren’t having sex like everyone else.

In his essay “Books in Bed,” Jonathan Franzen reveals his own anxiety about sex writing (or, to be more specific, writing about sex). He takes on Bright (unfairly, I believe), Dr. Susan Block and a host of other sex writers with the same ferocious intensity that Penn and Teller reserve for feng shui experts. “Their work creates the bumbling amateur,” he writes. “Their discovery of sexual technique’ creates a population bereft of technique.” Taking something private and making it part of public discourse doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly have amazing sex lives; it means that everyone has higher expectations than they can handle. It means that sex becomes another measuring stick, laying right besides your car, your clothes or your stack of cds, for what you are as a human being. The one thing that should have remained outside the American desire for normality has, paradoxically, become the center of it.

Although Bright understands that sexuality is complicated, she is also of the school that our SEXUAL REPRESSION needs to be broken through to a glorious world of hot nights and hotter days; here’s Bright again, this time from her personal webpage:

Sexual expression is THE most repressed form of American speech. You can rail against capitalism in this country, you can tele-evangelize from a pulpit that only exists in your mind, you can be gross, gratuitously violent, and just plain insane, but in this country, you cannot say certain words in public because they are SEXUAL, you cannot look at certain pictures in public because they’re SEXUAL and you cannot articulate many ideas to the mainstream because their SEXUAL nature deems them inadmissible. (link)

This is true (if a little bombastic), especially in these heady years of the waning Bush administration. But, at the same time, it ignores that we are swimming in so much sexual obsession that it’s impossible to get away from. It’s hard to say that there are pictures you can’t look at, due to their SEXUAL nature, when billboards of slim models in skimpy underthings cover Times Square; when Victoria’s Secret ads (Is that you, Bob?) and specials are all over TV; when a show like The Swan gets airtime on Fox; or when the flimsy dress of a singer falls apart on national TV and the entire nation convulses.

But because of this notion that all sexual expression is “repressed,” many people mistakenly think that sexual expression is “edgy.” Any time sex is talked or written about, it’s shocking, or it’s immoral, or it’s transgressive. Howard Stern is a “shock jock” with a lot of job insecurity at the moment. And MTV and Virgin Records were prepared to ride the wave of edginess following the Super Bowl halftime show to record sales and profit. None of these things are edgy, whatever “edgy” means. They’re pedestrian. I couldn’t care less about a middle-aged woman’s pierced right nipple. Or the adventures of a woman getting evaluated on Stern’s show (that’s less edgy, more sad). Franzen’s against all sex writing, for reasons I can understand if don’t agree with. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an honest examination of sex–or rather, the stuff that happens around sex (i.e. dating)–but when it becomes tinged with the touch of edgy or transgression, it’s got something to prove. The writing has an air of desperation–please find this arousing and interesting and exciting! Christ. Instead , it has the same tiring quality of writing that liberal use of shitty cussing has. (Are you tired of the cursing in this article yet? Good. I’ll stop.)

Granted, it’s this edginess that sex writing is supposed to erase. Writers of sex columns will tell you that their intent is to get rid of this feeling, to make talking about sex normal and acceptable dinner-time conversation. So why does Gretchen Zimmerman discuss her sexual history and self-identify herself as a slut? Did she really think she was reclaiming the word for millions of “sexually liberated” women around the country? No. She could have said “sexually liberated.” Instead she used a word with a negative connotation to catch the eyes of her readers, not to mention reinforce the whole Madonna/whore thing that everyone in this country seems to have trouble with. It appeals the prurient interest more than the rational parts of the brain, which makes sense, because there’s no rationality to sex. The brain may be an erogenous zone, but sex is just the pleasurable banging of parts against each other like mammals have been doing for millions of years. To talk about sex, and only sex, is to limit oneself drastically in one’s subject matter, one in which it’s impossible to say anything new.

More importantly, it’s almost impossible to make it interesting or essential. Reading about someone else’s sex life is like listening to your roommate talk about that dream he had last night: it’s long, it’s rambling, it makes little sense and has no point. It can be somewhat amusing, if done well, but you’re not going to walk away with a better understanding of your roommate or humanity in general. Who cares that he found himself chased by little three-foot tall H2s while running on the surface of the sun? Who cares about someone else’s sexual history? I’m not better off knowing these things about a complete stranger (who, with my luck, I’ll have a discussion with next semester). I am, in fact, worse off, because the private details of his or her life are now a part of the public sphere. I have to put up with them, regardless of whether or not I want to.

I’m going to make a bold statement here: we shouldn’t really talk about sex. I don’t just mean in columns, I mean on cell phones, in coffee shops–anywhere. We can talk about dating all we like, because dating is about relationships between people and therefore infinitely fascinating and infinitely complex. But sex is the most private of acts, one that people should keep to themselves. There’s no need to open the blinds and show our naked selves to the worlds, because it’s hard enough to show our naked selves to the one we’re sleeping with. We gain nothing but a quick smirk in the back of Wilson 402. We lose nothing but a respect for intimacy and a sense of discovery that is our birthright as college students. If you don’t mind losing that, go nuts. Just don’t tell me about what you find.

So here’s the thing about Chuck Klosterman’s new book: he’s stolen almost every idea I had for when I published my first in two, three, or ten years. Romantic love as a Hollywood concept? Yeah, I’d thought of that. The importance of Saved by the Bell to a certain generation of young people? Yeah, I’d gotten that too. The NBA as the only sport that matters? Check. Presenting the table of contents as a CD track listing? That was my ace in the hole.

What I’m getting at is that I should be pissed off, or offended, or something, since I’ve now been beaten to the punch on just about everything I had to contribute to popular culture. Surprisingly, though, I’m not. Because Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is not only better written than I could manage at this point, it’s also probably more insightful than I ever get. And, oh yeah, he’s an editor at Spin and I run a tiny-ass mezine.

So here’s a quick briefing on what “cultural criticism” is: it’s a way for guys who are too obsessed with Pop Culture (capitals are necessary) and know it to turn things around, rationalize their behavior. It’s okay that Klosterman has watched nearly every episode of The Real World three times, identifying with the protagonists like close friends, because he’s smart enough to realize that this is dumb. He’s also smart enough to argue that everyone’s been affected by the quintessential reality program to some degree (at least, those of us of a certain age), resulting in a lot of people who are, for all purposes, one-dimensional. You’ve got your guys who are party animals, the folks who are quiet intellectuals, the folks who are screamingly ignorant, and your Pucks. He points out that as the producers realized that boiling down the roommates to their defining characteristic equaled drama, the MTV-watching populace did essentially the same thing.

And so it goes for a wide range of topics: why soccer is a loser sport (it’s for those kids who aren’t good at anything else, because you can’t be bad at soccer); how the “downer ending” of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: Non-Special Edition led to slacker culture and a stoned Winona Ryder singing “My Sharona” in a gas station; how children’s cereal ads lay the groundwork for hipsters and other elite groups in college and beyond; the strange, Rapture-oriented world of Evangelical Christians.

There is a problem with this approach, though, and that’s that it tends to solipsism, a definition of which is handily included among the epigrams at the start of the book. Almost all of these essays are directly from Chuck’s mind; there are not a lot of external sources that he quotes other than his friends and associates (though there are many hilarious footnotes regardless). The best essay in the book is, hands down, “Appetite for Replication,” in which he goes on a road trip with a Guns & Roses cover band called Paradise City; he gets a lot out of the descriptions of the band members, how they react to others on their tour. It’s not surprising that this is one of the two essays that appeared in magazines first. Everything else is new to this book, and it suffers somewhat because of this.

Even then, he stumbles on some cultural news that’s pretty revealing. In an essay about The Sims, that game where we try to remake our lives as much as possible on a computer, he writes this about his seven-year-old cousin, Katie, as she tells him to ignore the backstory of his Sim:

“It was uncharacteristic for Kate to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. . . . [But] in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception.”

It’s a pretty damning account of the effect computers have on kids imaginations, and it’s no less powerful because Klosterman stuck with someone he knew pretty intimately to write about.

But I guess the beef I’m getting at is that the book never really comes together as an argument. It’s great that he details all these things about how we are and how we behave in such a highly connected, corporate driven world (though he does, strangely, omit chat rooms and instant messaging and the web except for a brief chapter on porn–at last, something original to contribute!). He says at the beginning that everything is connected, even if nothing matters on it’s own. But the problem is that he doesn’t really write about these connections. He doesn’t talk about how The Sims is connected to internet voyeurism, or how the characters can emerge as one-dimensional as the characters on The Real World (and how can you miss that, when half the Sims Family Album pages are wanna-be Kristof’s directing The Real World LCXI: Bobby’s Computer?). He doesn’t draw parallels between Saved by the Bell and the cereal commercials, even though they were presumably shown in between one another. If you’re going to have an essay titled “George Will vs. Nick Hornby,” and have it be about baseball and soccer, don’t you at least owe it to yourself to reference how Nick Hornby added to the previously mentioned John Cusack Experience mentioned in the first essay, “This Is Emo”? Klosterman has all the pieces there, but he never really puts them together. Maybe that’s what he intended, though. I’m sure that he’d say this is exactly what our lives are like today.

Appeared in The Declaration in copy-edited form on 18 April 2002.

In these days of meta-humor, meta-fiction, meta-websites and meta-everything, it can be difficult to figure out what’s original, what’s derivative, and what’s originally derivative. It’s tough to figure out the different levels of meta necessary for full understanding of a piece of data. For example, there’s something like Ben Greenman’s “Blurb,” which is a story consisting entirely of blurbs about the story “Blurb.” This is the first degree of meta and, since it’s self-referential, fairly easy to decipher.

As obscure references begin to pile up, however, it can be more difficult to determine what it is the author (or musician, or artist, or reporter, or web designer, an alia) is trying to impart. Take a look at Dynamite Hack’s “Boys in the Hood.” Originally a song by NWA, it was covered from a bunch of white kids from . . . somewhere. The lyrics are exactly the same, but they’re imparting a different message because of who is singing them. This is the second degree of meta: you can grasp it on the non-meta level (dudes singing a song about drinking and whoring), on a the first degree of meta (white dudes singing a song about drinking and whoring while living in the ghetto) or, finally, on the second degree (white dudes ironically covering a song by NWA to indicate the love of suburban white boys for gangsta rap). This is where it starts to get confusing.

Degrees of meta-ness can continue infinitely though, once you get past the third degree, it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out what the hell is going on. It can hurt your brain as well, which is why we will not follow this definition of meta any further. We will, however, progress on to the main subject at hand.

You see, as meta has progressed on, it has infilitrated mass culture and, with culture, our notions of cool. Remember last year, when you saw all those kids looking like they stepped out of a Sears Catalog, circa 1977? The whole reason for that was simple: these clothes were inherently uncool, even when they first came out. However, because they were so uncool, they became cool in a meta sense. You also saw people wearing bellbottoms again; even though they were cool in the seventies, a love of so-called retro fashion brought them back. This, too, was meta: it was brought about by a conscious decision to look like someone from the seventies (though with a decidedly nineties twist to it). However, this fashion wasn’t considered as cool as the sears catalog look. Why? Because bell-bottoms were only first degree meta, while “the Sears catalog” look was second degree. There’s also the added problem of intent: doing something to be cool makes said something uncool; doing something uncool becomes cool.

See why cool has become so complicated?

If you’re having trouble with this, don’t feel bad: rocket scientists have been unable to figure this stuff out for decades. We’ve prepared a few case studies for you to study. Once you’ve looked them over and feel you understand them, there’s a short quiz on which you can test your newfound powers of perception.

Case One - The Bomber Jacket

Jack owns a leather bomber jacket that he picked up at a vintage clothing shop. Though he normally wears it with the collar down, he occasionally decides to place the collar in an upright fashion. Is this (a) Stylin’; (b) Cool; (c) Uncool; or (d) Meta-cool?

ANSWER: The answer is entirely dependent on his intent. If Jack has not put any conscious thought into his decision to wear the collar up–it may have just happened as he put the jacket on–then the answer is (b) Cool. However, if a decision was made along the lines of, “Wearing my collar up will make me cool,” this makes Jack uncool. The answer is then (c). However, some of you may be asking, “What if Jack knows that actively upturning his collar is an uncool action, and proceeds regardless?” This is when it begins to get complicated. If Jack knows that what he is undertaking is inherently uncool, then the decision is reversed and it becomes cool again. The answer in this case would be (d) meta-cool. Finally, if Jack decides that he is going to wear his collar up regardless of what anyone else thinks, his fashion choice has become stylin’, so the answer would be (a).

Case Two - Smoking

Sarah, like many of her friends, prefers to smoke Camel Lights. She began smoking her junior year of high school, and now smokes three-quarters to a pack a day. Can you classify her smoking as cool or uncool? Does her standing change if she smokes something other than Camel Lights? Explain.

ANSWER: The simple fact of the matter is that everyone started smoking for one reason: to look cool. This would seem to indicate that smoking is, no matter what, an uncool action. Many doctors and parents of impressionable teenagers would agree that this is so. The problem with this attitude is simple: smoking really does make you look cool. Why the hell do you think she started? Besides, by the point of smoking roughly a pack a day, you’re addicted. Since smoking is no longer a conscious choice, it becomes cool without reservation. However, should she begin smoking cigarettes other than Camel Lights, smoking would become uncool. There’s no explanation for this; perhaps superstring theory will one day have a solution.

Case Three - Vintage T-Shirts

Tony buys shirts by the ream from his local salvation army. He prefers to wear shirts with outrageous and/or odd messages on them, such as “Liars Go To Hell” or an old Arena Football shirt. Is this action cool or uncool?

ANSWER: Uncool. No matter how cool the damn shirts look, going to a vintage store means you’re trying to concoct a look. This makes you uncool. Get the hell over yourself, and get some fresh air and sunlight while you’re at it.

Hopefully, you now have some ideas of what cool really is. With everything that you’ve learned, you should be able to answer the following questions with assurance.

The Quiz

1. Juanita is buying albums at a used record store on St. Mark’s Place. She is wearing a tight, plaid miniskirt and a loose blouse. Her boots are beat-up old Doc Martens that she’s had since seventh grade. She has a messenger bag (not from Manhattan Portage) and thick-framed black glasses. What is her cool status?

   (a) Hip
   (b) Hep
   (c) Emo’d out
   (d) Depends on what records she’s buying
   

2. Mona’s mother bought her an ugly new shirt for her birthday, which she begins wearing everywhere. What is her most likely motivation?

   (a) To placate her mother
   (b) Because it’s not cool at all
   (c) To achieve meta-cool
   (d) She actually likes the shirt

3. Brian is listening to Shampoo’s “Uh oh! We’re In Trouble!” What are your feelings about this?

   (a) I love that cheesy song
   (b) Meh.
   (c) Wasn’t that song on the Power Rangers Movie soundtrack?
   (d) Who the fuck is Shampoo?

4. Donald has purchased a Vespa scooter. He begins riding it everywhere–to work, to classes, etc. Discuss all his possible motivations for these actions, and their relative merits of cool.
5. MTV: What happened? Explain your answer.

Answers (Don’t look until you’ve finished)

1: d.
2: a (also acceptible: d).
3: a.
4: Vespa scooters are cool. People named Donald are not.
5: I don’t know, either. The Osbournes is pretty funny, though.

Coolness has always been a relative thing–even more so in today’s confusing post-modern world. It’s complicated down to the words used to describe it. Hip, hep, keen, tragic, ill, and even meta have been used as substitutes for the word. Even with what you’ve picked up from this article, you may still be unable to become cool yourself. We suggest that you just do what everyone else is doing. Emulating your peers may not appear to be cool, but it can never hurt. It’s worked for people for years. So get yourself a pair of tight jeans and some thick-framed glasses, and go out there and rock.

This article appeared in modified form in The Declaration on 24 October 2001.

Woe to the unfortunate bands whom contract that most horrible disease, Rock Savioritis, especially if they’re on tour at the time. Radiohead, for example, came down with the condition while they were touring in support of OK Computer. They had a horrible time, pretty much stopped caring about their shows (remember the moment in Meeting People Is Easy where Thom, standing still, just held the microphone out to the audience during “Creep?”), and very nearly broke up. It took them nearly four years to come out with their next album, and it was drastically different than anything they had done before.

The Strokes, who played last Monday at the 9:30 Club in Washington, seemed to have been afflicted with the same ailment. Their album, Is This It, has been hailed as one of the greatest rock records in years by just about everyone, including the Dec. Constantly. Insistently. Word of the New York City-based group’s impending greatness reached us from across the ocean over the summer, and built up as the album neared its release date. Hype is a very bad thing, certainly: it creates anticipation beyond what should be reasonably expected from even the highest quality events, which inevitably depreciates the actual product (note the final episode of Seinfeld). The concert was no exception to this rule.

The Moldy Peaches, who also hail from NYC, opened. The Peaches consist of two vocalists who sing odd songs, and over time added a drummer and a few guitarists and what-have you. They came out on stage in costume, doing their best to surprise the audience (like you could get a rise out of this audience, anyway–but I’ll get to that). The two vocalists consisted one really, really hyper guy, who flailed himself across the stage, and one girl, wearing a large, blond wig who just kind of stood there clutching the microphone like it was the only thing keeping her from tipping over. Oh, and they really didn’t sing well. That’s the fun part.

The songs they sung were basically of the inane, gleefully offensive vein, many revolving around the girl’s unpopularity as a youngin. There was one song where she sang about “want[ing] to watch cartoons” with the subject of her adoration, and another called “Who’s Got the Crack?” The group reminded me of nothing so much else as the Bloodhound Gang, minus the Gang’s interesting, dynamic stage presence (an example: pulling a kid up out of the audience and forcing him to drink an entire case of Sprite) and clever wordplay. Compare and contrast: the lyrics of the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof Is On Fire” (”Well, if I go to hell / I hope that I will burn well / I’ll spend my days with J.F.K., Martha Raye, Marvin Gaye and Lawrence Welk”) with “Who’s Got the Crack?” (”It’s hard to be a garbage man when a sailor stole my glove”). I’d provide context, except that (a) I don’t remember any and (b) the line had no context anyway. It did have the effect of having the whole audience utter a collective, “huh?”

So that was the Moldy Peaches. They played a rather long set, unfortunately, about an hour and fifteen minutes or so (I might be wrong, but I wasn’t wearing a watch, and thus cannot be sure.) There was a longish pause in between bands; we made fun of odd videos that the 9:30 club played.

The Strokes finally came out. The whole place went wild. Headbanging, crowd surfing, tossing one another around . . . it was wild. Actually, it wasn’t. There was clapping and a few people shouted, some heads bobbing as the band played the first chords to “Is This It,” the first song of the album. But for the most part, nobody really moved. Though there were a few jumping pockets in the audience, everyone else pretty much stayed still. Now, I understand that not everyone comes from a family where dancing, or at least attempting to move in a rythymic to music, is instilled from birth. But rock is an especially energetic genre of music, and nothing angers me so much as people sitting around on their hands.

Julian Casablancas, the lead singer, didn’t move around anymore than the majority of the audience did. His main movement was the act of lighting a cigarette. Other than that, he stood in front of the microphone and let his vocals drip out of his mouth into the microphone. In other words, not particularly enthusiastic about singing his songs. This was a very sad thing. The songs that had so interested me on the album just ran together. Also not helping was the fact that Casablancas wasn’t interested in interacting with the audience, introducing songs occasionally but nothing of note else. All these things combined to give a sense of distance, which doesn’t contribute to enjoyment of music. As one of my friends noted afterwards, they write such great songs but don’t have much interest in performing them.

They opened with the first song on the album, played one song that was on the British release of the album but not the American, “New York City Cops,” and ended with “Take It Or Leave It,” the last song on the album. That was it. Twelve songs, and I, who had listened to the album one or two times prior to the concert, can’t really remember the setlist beyond that. The extreme economy of the set, thirty or forty minutes at best, didn’t help by reminding us that the Moldy Peaches were on for so damn long.

You can’t really blame them. They’ve put up so long with hype and brilliant reviews that, well, they couldn’t live up to the hype and be brilliant. Rock Savioritis is a dangerous disease, more damaging to a band than a CD case filled with anthrax spores. Anthrax can be defeated with Cipro, but there’s no anti-biotic to rock criticism (I suppose this implicates myself, too, in an odd way). But at the same time, I have to wonder: the fact that they’ve only written twelve songs thus far, apparently, and their dispassionate live playing, calls into question whether they’re going to be able to continue on in the future. The concept of the Strokes calling their album, “Is This It,” now seems less like a mockery of everyone wondering if they are The Chosen Band, the saviors of rock, and more a question of: “Will there be any more?”

Appeared, copy-edited, in The Declaration on or about 1 September 2001.

Let’s take a moment to conjure up the magical land of the New Jersey Turnpike. New Yorkers and New Englanders don’t have a problem with this, but since most of the people reading this are from Virginia and probably have not had a great deal of experience with the great jewel of the Garden State, so here’s a little description for you: Imagine a post-apocalyptic world of the near future. Bush has fucked up big time. Saddam Hussein finally got the nuclear weapon for Christmas that he’s been hoping to get for the past twenty years or so. He unloaded it on the American Embassy in Jerusalem, and then everything went nuts. ICBMs were launched across the world, from the United States, from Russia, from China–hell, even France got in on the fun. Every place on earth becomes part of the new global wasteland. Water is scarce. The only buildings left are rotting shells, scattered across the dusty land every twenty or thirty miles.

In this hopeless, desolate world, the New Jersey Turnpike would remain unchanged.

The Jersey Turnpike is 130 miles of asphalt, with service stations scattered about every twenty-five miles or so. Many of these rest stops are under renovation, so you’ve got Burger King and Roy Rogers running out of modified RVs, and convenience stores that are little more than shacks selling stale Combos and warm soda. Add to this mix the Mafia (the opening sequence of The Sopranos is James Gandolfini driving past various “landmarks” on the Turnpike), easily angered New Yorkers, and overzealous cops, and you’ve got one horrible stretch of highway. And we won’t even get started about the smell.

Basically, what I’m getting at is that the Jersey Turnpike is not the most scenic stretch of highway in the Northeast, and also that I’m bitter because I spent far too much time driving it over the course of the summer. Of course, there’s a silver lining in every clich

Originally appeared in The Dec. I don’t remember when, and I can’t look it up because I made such a crappy webmaster.

Neal Pollack is the greatest American writer to have ever lived. He has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other literary organizations that begin with “The New.” He has written over forty books, won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award (three times!), and has been twice selected as a member of Oprah’s Book Club. He is fluent in Spanish, was close friends with John McCain, and has posed undercover as a transgendered teenager to get the scoop. He is elegant, dashing, charming and, above all else, handsome. He has slept with over 500 women. Wait. You’ve never heard of him? What do you mean? Are you culturally ignorant? Stupid? A pitiful excuse for a human being?

Actually, you probably just don’t read McSweeney’s, the upstart literary magazine founded by Dave Eggers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Might Magazine fame (and whether or not this makes you culturally ignorant is a discussion for another day). Pollack, a columnist for the Chicago Reader, has been writing extensively for both the print version and the online journal (www.mcsweeneys.net) of McSweeney’s for the past year. He has been writing so extensively, in fact, that many reviewers believed him to be Eggers himself, a situation that slightly angered Pollack, Eggers, and Pollack’s mother, to say the least.

Pollack has now completed a compendium of his work, except that it isn’t much of a compendium at all. The book is, instead, almost completely original, though some of his pieces for McSweeney’s, such as “Europe: the Forgotten Continent,” are mentioned as his literary works of genius. The basic notion behind the Anthology is that, in addition to being a great novelist, etc, Pollack has also written great pieces of journalism, which he is now, finally, sharing with a deserving public in one essential volume.

His writing style is, unfortunately, somewhat difficult to describe. For the most part, Pollack takes freelance writing’s bloated sense of ego to the extreme. To picture this, take your favorite Dec article, and imagine how it would have sounded if the author was twenty times more egotistical than he or she really is (in the event you chose Mark Grabowski as your base, make it just five times more self-important). Then retitle it with something along the lines of, “The Albania of My Existence,” “Introduction to the New Slavery,” or “An Interview with My Sister, Who Is a Lesbian.”

For example, in “I Am Friends with a Working Class Black Woman,” Pollack’s analysis of life in the South Bronx, he writes, “Then I realized: I was friends with this woman, this Cora Johnson, this subject of mine. I’d had black friends before

This article originially appeared in The Declaration on 1 February 2002.

As we all know, the Nineties were a time when conspiracy theorists flourished. They ran trashy websites that got unjustifiable hit counts. They showed up on those Sunday morning news programs that no one outside of Washington watches. They created a show about FBI agents that was uncool, then cool, then uncool, and now cool again. They were married to the leaders of our nation, and then ended up in the Senate. The conspiracies that they concocted ranged from hidden mind probes that turned the Buffalo Bills into spastics each Super Bowl to Hillary Clinton’s "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" — from Roswell to Whitewater, from crack in the ghetto to the pronunciation of ghetto as "get-TOE." Even the most intrepid nut had trouble keeping track of which theories were hot and which were colder than the Army’s secret genetics research base in Antarctica. Thus, to help these poor, lost souls, I present the Top Five Conspiracies of 2000:

5. "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" — Theorized by the "Political Right"

The late 1990s were rough years for the political Right. They knew that something was going on in the White House, but there was no way to prove it. That whole impeachment thing sort of backfired, the Vince Foster thing was getting passé, and no one believed Buddy the dog was actually an alien like that pug in Men In Black (an accusation that, to be fair, Marion Barry made up in a crack-fueled rage). Thus, in 2000, they flocked to the idea that the Clintons were responsible for the death of JFK, Jr.

Far from being the New York Democratic Committee’s favorite choice to succeed Patrick "Big Irish" Moynihan, Hillary Clinton took a backseat to John F. Kennedy, Jr. You see, John-John wanted to run and reestablish the political power of his family. The Clintons didn’t like that, so they decided to dispose of him. It wasn’t easy, but the Commander-in-Cheat ended up utilizing the same plan that he used on Payne Stewart: take a few parts out of a plane, switch the oxygen tanks with nitrous oxide, and get the hell out of there.

4. "Survivor" — Theorized by APeWWBI (the Association of People Who Watch Bravo Incessantly)

Contrary to popular belief, the contestants on last summer’s most popular television show were not the greedy, demoralized, pathetic humans you made them out to be. Rather, CBS and Mark Burnett walked the highways of America, hijacking cars and taking the potential stars of that show hostage, along with their families. After painstaking demographic analysis and multiple focus groups, CBS finally decided on the sixteen contestants we would soon meet, quickly "eliminating" the remaining potential players and their loved ones. The chosen sixteen then faced the most difficult choice of their lives: Go on national television and become despicable, bottom-feeding cockroaches, or watch their significant others turn into blabbering idiots who loved "Big Brother."

3. "The Honor Committee" — Theorized by The Honor Committee

Although the Honor Committee at the University of Virginia is purported to be fair, troubling statistics were reported that the group seemed more likely to recommend expulsion when the defendents were minorities or athletes. There were also rumors going around that Honor judges occasionally took revenge on some members of the student body and kicked them out of the university in spite. However, the truth is far more insidious. A group of students, faculty and alumni, known only as "The Shadow Committee," carried out these acts, booting students that encroached upon or abused their power. The original report on the Honor Committee uncovered these actions, and it had to be delayed — ostensibly for "legal reasons" — while "The Shadow Committee" edited out revealing passages. Meanwhile, thanks to the heroic efforts of the J.A.D.E. task force, the original authors were quickly eliminated.

2. "Y2K" — Theorized by The Readers of Slashdot.org

Back in the golden age of Sunday comics, the early

Appeared, copy-edited, in The Declaration on 25 October 2000.

The great white north. The phrases “oot and aboot” and “eh?” Hockey. The Kids in the Hall. Unguarded borders. Perhaps Alanis Morrisette. Perhaps not.

Mounties.

These are some of things you think of when you think of Canada, the rather large expanse of land to our north. You probably don’t think of one first-year’s crazed attempt to go see his favorite band in Toronto. Toronto is, for those of you keeping score at home, a good 750 miles away from Charlottesville by car.

Thus, before I go any further, let me point out three things about myself.

1. I really, really like Radiohead. A lot. I own all three albums, a few EPs and can name all five band members off the top of my head.

2. I missed them when they played New York during the massive OK Computer tour and thus was itching for a chance to see them live. In order to ensure that I got the tickets, I woke up an hour before the tickets went on sale and took over an ITC lab, hitting ticketmaster.ca with no less than ten computers (please see point one).

3. Radiohead only played three shows in North America this fall. They performed in New York, Toronto and Los Angeles. However, the New York show was announced only after I already had purchased my tickets to the Canadian venue, and there were no refunds.

My parents were kind enough to drive home after parent’s weekend in a rental car, leaving the family car for me to take on Monday evening. After my last class, I (after an upperclassman drove me out of Albemarle county, of course) drove up to Syracuse University, where I picked up my friend, Rachel, and the next morning drove into Toronto.

Let me say that it was all worth it.

The opening act was the Handsome Boy Modeling School, consisting of Prince Paul (yes, that Prince Paul), Dan the Automator and Kid Koala. The first two didn’t do a spectacular job of getting the crowd excited–they were only there to “spin some records for you,” said Paul–though Paul’s expert blending of De La Soul’s “Me, Myself and I” into House of Pain’s “Jump Around” was excellent. One wonders about the decision to pick two rap producers to open for a group like Radiohead, but the final member of HBMS explained why they were chosen. Kid Koala, playing eerie, depressing music somewhat reminiscent of DJ Spooky, knew the best way to get the attendees riled up: put a Radiohead track into the mix. Upon hearing the computer-generated voice from “Fitter, Happier,” the crowd went wild.

At nine, there was a pre-recorded symphony of strings that heralded the coming of Thom Yorke and Co. They came out and started immediately with a revved up version of “The National Anthem.” The energy arising from Ed O’Brian and Colin Greenwood’s drum and bass work was palpable; the audience quickly got into the show. There was no brass band supporting them on this song as in recent performances, but Johnny Greenwood made up for it by playing lead guitar. In fact, one of the most notable things about the concert was the band’s reliance on guitars. Despite the quiet electronica of the Kid A songs on CD, they were transformed into much more straightforward rock songs here.

Over the course of a nearly two hour set–with two encores and twenty-four songs–they covered nearly all of their material. Pablo Honey was, due to their hatred of “Creep”, completely ignored. Still, they played good versions of Bends- and OK Computer-era songs. “My Iron Lung” and “Paranoid Android” almost brought those lucky enough to be on the floor back to moshing, while “Lucky” and “Exit Music”–the former being my favorite Radiohead song–brought out the lighters. They played everything off of Kid A except for “Treefingers,” but also played a few B-sides and songs from the upcoming fifth LP.

“Talk Show Host,” the song they contributed to the Romeo & Juliet soundtrack, was a big hit with everyone. As the night went on, however, they played songs that fewer people knew, but were also some of the most beautiful moments of the night. While Thom sat alone with a piano or acoustic guitar to play “You and Whose Army” or “Follow Me Around,” his plaintive voice quietly reaching out to fill the entire stadium, the crowd was stunned into silence.

When Thom was playing with the whole band, he got a little, well crazy. Thom wasn’t acting as out of control as he did during the SNL performance and other shows, but he definitely seemed to be in a good, almost happy mood. “That last one was brought you by, um, Sony,” he said after “National Anthem,” reacting in bemusement to the advertisements plastered around the hockey stadium. “This next one is dedicated to Labatt’s.” Most of the songs ended up with fictitious corporate sponsorship: “Airbag” was brought to you thanks to Ford, Microsoft delivered “Idioteque” and Disney, naturally, paid for “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” During “Idioteque,” Thom started running around the stage and posing in various positions, to the cheers of the audience.

The only truly poor part of the night was when they came out for their second encore and began to play “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” I cannot express in words how much I dislike the new version of this song, but, in concert, the harp, bass and electronic organ seemed almost as earnest as the original acoustic version. Still, I prayed that they wouldn’t end with that song and, thankfully, after the song Johnny went over to the piano and Thom picked up a guitar. They then played the best version of “Karma Police” I have ever heard. Johnny played a jazzed-up version of the piano riff, while the crowd shouted out every word along with Thom. Thematically, it was the perfect way to close the evening: the audience that cheerfully exclaimed, “for a minute there, I lost myself,” as the stage lights slowly became blinding soon found itself outside, back in the Toronto night.

After having lost themselves in Radiohead’s music for two hours, they got into their cars and drove off to their homes in the suburbs, to get up for work or a fourteen hour drive back to Charlottesville in the morning. And it was definitely worth it.