The piece starts out with this:

Before we begin, let us be clear: We speak not of the Rivers Cuomo that was, nor of the Rivers Cuomo that is, nor yet of the Rivers that shall be. We speak, now, of the Platonic ideal of a Rivers Cuomo: The Rivers Cuomo you have never met, nor ever can meet, nor can ever be sued by (subsequent to writing a blog post that uses his name quite a lot), but who lives, nevertheless, within your brain. Specifically, if you happen to have grown up in the 1990s, and are heterosexual, and also a girl.

And then breaks up into headings like “Seduction” “Consummation” “Couples Therapy” etc. and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of Rivers Cuomo as the secret boyfriend we ladies wished we had at some point in our pre/teen years.

I had to turn off the rest, because that is not how I related to Pinkerton at all when I first heard it, or when I listened to it in college. Obviously my relationship to Pinkerton is complicated, but not because I loved him then discovered he was a creep, or even because I related to him and then was repulsed (further complicating things, of course, is that I am still working on the 33 1/3 Pinkerton book, to be published posthumously). But it is a bit closer to the latter. The latter is harder, and tons more interesting to me, because if I believe that I was a Pinkerton fan because I related to it (him? Or the him that is part bio, part stolen from Harvard classmates, part fictional character, part Capt Pinkerton), and now it makes me uncomfortable, then I have to work on the reasons why I related to it. But I do not feel cheated by Pinkerton or Cuomo.

Also I have a lot of notes (some on books, some song-by-song reactions, some free-associated, some labored over) about Pinkerton. I found this from some early notes (I think I was trying to sketch out why I thought I was qualified to write about Pinkerton):

I understand how desire can transform into hate or apathy. I understand that sometimes a collection of charcteristics [sic] can stand in for any sort of real attraction. I understand desire as purely a way to satisfy a lack of honesty or to fill in a self-loathing. To let that self-loathing form an inverse proportion to a capacity for love.

Also later, a pretty cryptic line: ” I never found an outlet for that paralysis.”

The paralysis above refers to the further above, a basic relating-to-boys paralysis, not my Pinkerton fandom. My natural reaction in middle school to hearing Nirvana and Weezer was to buy a guitar and insist on lessons, not crush on guys that looked like Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo.

I will stop here, since I have the book to write. I will say, however, that I haven’t written anything so far about My Personal Relationship To Pinkerton. I’m sure it’ll show up, but it’s still not the most interesting aspect of Pinkerton for me, so I doubt it would be to anyone else. I’ll re-read the piece this weekend.

About six months ago someone asked a question on Metafilter that made me feel 200% closer to a normal person. The question was basically of the “So, does this happen to anyone else?” variety, but it was so random and so precise that it got tons of responses:

When I think of / remember something embarrassing from my life, I compulsively make some kind of noise. It seems to happen unconsciously, before my censor can catch it and stop myself (it even happens when I am in a quiet or inappropriate place).

It’s not especially loud, in fact it’s often under my breath. The sound is usually just a quiet grunt, or a word/syllable or two. If I remember an embarrassing conversation, I tend to blurt out a random word of the conversation (as in, I’m replaying the dialogue in my head but then all the sudden one of the words pops out of my mouth). If it happens while I’m reading, I tend to blurt out one or two of the words that happen to be under my eyes at the moment.

It usually only happens when I’m remembering something palpably embarrassing or humiliating from my life — not for mild everyday kind of stuff. (Again, I had a fairly happy childhood and have nothing particularly traumatic in my past — I don’t think my embarrassing memories are any worse than the average joe’s)

I’m one of those people who does this and thought they were the only one. My usual utterance takes the form of a short, pointed laugh—literally a ‘ha!’ or a noise close to ‘ack!’ Basically, when I remember something embarrassing I turn into a comic strip.

But someone else revealed another habit that I happen to share (and thought no one else did):

If an embarrassing memory comes up (along with some sort of “oofy” noise or clutching my body like I’ve just been covered in slime) if I’m in the car I have to change the radio station or the track playing on my iPod. I don’t know what that has to do with it but the song must go, right now…
posted by Brainy at 12:25 PM on July 23, 2008

This is something I do even more than the embarrassment utterance. If I start to think of a bad memory, I have to change the song I’m listening to right away. It doesn’t matter what the song is or what’s up next. I just need something, a new thought really, to distract me, even if it’s “This Pink Mountaintops songs is terrible.”

But sometimes it’s the song itself that triggers a bad memory that I have to change. Like, when I’m unhappy with how the Pinkerton thing’s going, I cannot listen to Pinkerton, which makes writing a book about it much harder.¹

I thought about that again when Nick wrote about Merriweather Post Pavilion and mentioned the hard-to-describe feeling certain music can give you:

There is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart.

I know that feeling. But what happens when the song triggers the wrong cold and dizzy, like the feeling/memory of the worst thing you did or said, the declaration you should have kept to yourself, the third drink past the one you should have left the bar on? I can name songs I can’t listen to anymore because of this. And they’re not “THIS WAS OUR SONG”-type jams that I’ve shared with a boyfriend. Nor does it have much to do with the lyrical content. They’re usually songs I was listening to when I did something regrettable. The songs have nothing to do with me, they don’t remind me of myself or hold any memories on their own, but they act like containers. They’re like looking at bad photographs of myself. And just to be clear–these aren’t songs that remind me of bad memories, just embarrassing situations that I had control over.

One of the worst songs for me is the New Pornographers’ “Testament to Youth In Verse.” I’m not going to tell you why. But, if you do this (either the noise or the song-changing thing), please come forward. You’re in okay company. I’d love to hear what your trigger / utterance / song is.

I’m a couple months into my column, talking to bands about recording for Stereogum. I enjoy hearing about their process, and what it takes them to physically start producing stuff.

I want to know because it’s something that I struggle with a lot. I think I’m fairly productive–I set a goal of completing and submitting one piece a day, and I track the number of pitches and ideas I sent to editors every week, too. But for things without a deadline or a vague deadline, I’m lost sometimes. I have a book due, I have a list of essays and longer pieces I want to research even before I pitch them, and a list of blog post ideas, but I keep putting them off. They fall off in the face of daily goals deadlines.

So how do bands do it? Their problem is somewhat similar: touring is their daily deadline–they must be somewhere, doing something, by a certain time. Their next album? That’s their book / essay that needs to be out there at some point. Now there’s one big difference: I could probably go a long time just doing my assignments, but I won’t improve my own work unless I start tackling the bigger pieces. Bands can’t just tour on one album forever, unless they’re Peter Frampton.

What I hear from bands is that touring can’t be combined with writing; they take two different types of energies. Touring is like muscle memory at some point, you’re going through the motions (those motions might be awesome), but it’s not, as John Vanderslice said, “making new shit.”

Writing reviews/features is “making new shit,” but in a lot of ways it’s making the same shit. I know how I write reviews, and I approach each the same basic way: the background/foreground listens, the same note-taking, the same way I pull in what I want to say and then push around words and edits. It’s fun and challenging, but it’s not always as creative as I want it to be (I already hear the response there, and thanks). It’s closer to touring than making a new record.

Now being on the internet, that’s also primarily a triggered activity, a gathering activity, I think. I read twitters and respond; I find links and re-post; I tag photos and videos and songs I’m listening to. This shouldn’t be mistaken for blogging or creating. Most people know this (and have Tumblrs for it), but I think there’s a danger in doing nothing but collecting without then trying to do some output. There’s also a danger in combining them. Dhould this long post be on the same page as a bunch of Flickr and Youtube favorites and what I finished on Goodreads? Probably not. But I’ve been doing that long enough to pretend I am “making things” when I have been just “gathering things,” often without any time set aside for processing.

I want to split that stuff up, and not pretend one is the other (though I do find both to be valid and useful activities). That’s why I moved my blog to /blog, and will use my front page on www.jessicasuarez.com for all that aggregated/gathered stuff. Part of my inspiration is Emily Gould’s blog, www.emilymagazine.com. For all the making fun she gets–probably mostly unfair–her long posts are consistently entertaining and smart. Her posts are also completely bare and on a default WordPress template. I’m sure it’s all deliberate, I think she’s someone who thinks all the time about what things on the internet mean. When you have good writing you don’t need the clutter.

That said, I probably will spend too much time formatting / re-templating my blog and front page.

A couple weeks ago I logged into 43Things, a goal-tracking website, for the first time in a year or so. I was happy to see I had achieved some of the goals I wrote down then, happy to see others (try the world’s hottest hot sauce? I’ve tried the 7th hottest, thanks Arizona), and surprised to see this one: “get a credit or thank you on an album’s liner notes.”

I am not sure why this goal was so important to me two years ago. I think then I was still in fan mode, excited to talk to bands, eager to have them acknowledge me. When I wrote for the college paper in Tucson, people I interviewed would invite me to ‘say hello’ at the show, and I would. I used to love doing this. The intervening two years have really driven this out of me, because it’s a job now, etc. etc., and having to interview a few people a week really drives the excitement out of it.

Anyway I did ‘achieve’ this ‘goal’ this year, Man Man thanked me (and 100+ other people) on their CD. I’ve talked, at too much length, about how much I like them. And I like their new CD actually better than the last now, so that helps as well.

Next up is world’s hottest hot sauce, which is probably around 6,000,000 Scovilles. That’s the same heat as eating pepper spray. I once convinced a kid to touch a tiny chili from our home garden, then touch his eye when I was in elementary school. His eye turned bright red and he cried. So I’ll probably deserve whatever pain 6,000,000 Scolville units causes.

[audio:http://www.jessicasuarez.com/audio/man_man-top_drawer.mp3|titles=Top Drawer|artists=Man Man]