Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Jeff Tweedy's newest book contains short and sometimes pithy discussions of songs that influenced his life and music. He intersperses them with memories and events that augment his thinking. Generally fun, often astute, occasionally maddening, but always entertaining, the book often goes in unexpected directions. Tweedy finds new life within the grooves and the stories that surround his musical discoveries. The most eye-opening moments  to me happen when Tweedy finds something in each song that might relate to any of us. However, I also loved his discussions of early SST punk and lesser-known songs, and he often changed my mind or gave me new perspectives to ponder. He might also influence your approach to some popular tunes that he covers. 

It's hard to believe that I will be moving back to the Midwest soon. I snagged a teaching job in Ironwood, Michigan, a town that I visited often in the late 90s because it was an hour from my hometown. I generally went there to buy records at a corporate record store (Was it a Sam Goody?). I was living in my small hometown after a poor trial run at college, and did not get back to central Wisconsin until Fall 1999.  I had heard there was a punk venue, and I found it on one of these forays into Upper Michigan. It was called The Rat Cellar. They sold a few records and had shows in the basement. For a few years, I hung out with the local punk kids and watched many local and national touring bands in that dank basement.   There were a few highlights from those shows besides the friends I made. Sadly, I did not keep in touch with any of them. However, I did see one of the little kids who attended those shows more than a decade later in a Wisconsin Rapids basement. Connections ...

Jeremiah and I rented the Lost House some time in 2001 because we wanted a bigger place that would hold us and our friend, Matt. The place was too big, so we had to get a roommate. Eventually, Jeremiah's cousin moved into a room in our house that was not that bigger than a closet. Another guy  moved in upstairs with Mat, and maybe I will discuss him in more detail in a future post. Needless to say the guy was a mess and caused us more stress than you could ever imagine.  We decorated the house in Punk and Industrial Chic, taping flyers, newspaper clippings, and comic strips to the dirty walls. It soon resembled  a larger version of my bedroom in high school. Much to my mother's dismay, I covered the walls of my room with clippings and pictures from floor to ceiling, tacking up whatever took my fancy from punk ads to clippings from old books. My room was on the second floor of the house, which earlier had been converted from an attic, so the lower half of the wall had pa...

I moved in that summer, not prepared for a hot, festering several months in a strange, small house that had seen its share of drunken, college parties. I moved in with three other guys who I had known awhile: Dave, Joe, and Jeremiah. We were a motley crew: a punk rock English major, a brusque music major, a science major, and an opinionated psychology major. I was the progressive English major that flirted with anarchism, like a less obnoxious version of Rik from The Young Ones . In some ways, we resembled that troupe, except with far less humor.   Joe was a more conservative psychology major who liked to argue. We were both from the same hometown and had honed our friendship as outsiders. Dave majored in teaching music; he was the authoritarian taskmaster that wanted to keep us in line. Jeremiah, the science major, added a new flavor to our little group of outsiders. We met Jeremiah when he took a room in the house the previous January. He and I would move into another house, T...

As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction every day, I often discover snippets of writing in notebooks or in long-forgotten files on my hard drive. Generally, I know what they are. At least, I have some idea of why I wrote them. If they are nonfiction, I sometimes revise them for blog posts. The fiction snippets are more difficult to use. I always tell myself that I will finish the story or find a place to use it in the ever-expanding novel that I secretly contend is narratively daring. This snippet is amusing, if nothing else, so I am sharing it. Perhaps, I want to remind myself at some future date that I will eventually finish each of these brief pieces. Another thing, why did I think I could use goosebump as a verb? For this story, I wonder what was coming next: a scary ghost story, a humorous tale, a novel about Bill and his madcap crew of camp rangers, or the secret life of William Jefferson Clinton. One thing I do know is that I am now hungry for s'mores. Take it ...

There are days when I feel like I have told the same story to numerous people multiple times because I cannot stop dwelling on it. I have always struggled with letting things go. People tell me that I am too sensitive and that I just need to let things go. I battle with trying to forget the small injustices from twenty years ago, blaming others for being mean to me when they barely remember doing it. I think I tell stories to try to reorder my life and take control of situations that I cannot control. Of course, my inability to stop dwelling does not account for how I start forgetting minor details and adding others after years of telling stories. We all do this because memory is fallible and people like to entertain. The process of understanding what has happened to us throughout the years is hard to comprehend and understand, especially for those of us who have difficulty not dwelling on every detail. We blame others for the minor bumps in the road and we blame ourselves for im...