scrubbing one's internet history

the conventional wisdom is that if you are trying to get hired, don't leave anything embarrassing lying around on the internet to incriminate you -- amateur porn, rants against capitalism or evil bosses, drunk-o-logues, etc.  this was brought to mind for me by the news that CmdrTaco is leaving Slashdot.  people like him built their entire careers on "potentially embarrassing things posted on the internet".

i am right now picturing myself as the hiring manager of a company.  i'm looking over the web presence of a potential hire with their resume on my desk in front of me.  following the breadcrumbs, i find that they have posted:
1) a rant complaining about an evil boss.  (hire her!!)
2) a rant about annoying co-workers.  (do not hire!!)
3) a rant about stupid customers.  (VERY do not hire!!!!)

as a boss i would not care about someone having problems with me -- maybe it would drive them to follow their own creative path and contribute more to the company.  someone who stabs their colleagues in the back, however, i can do without; and someone who doesn't know which side of their toast the butter is on? forGETaboutit.

4) amateur porn? creative!
5) racist/sexist/homophobic screeching? let the post office take 'em! okay, that's unfair and hostile to postal workers.  let the rodeo clowns have them!! maybe that's unfair to rodeo clowns.
6) BAD/BORING WRITING: sorry, that's where my own prejudice comes in, and i have to push the "reject" button and open the trapdoor to the alligator pond.

in this day and age, i figure if someone DOESN'T have anything incriminating online somewhere, they've been lazy.

Episode I: What It Is, and What It Was

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

Episode I: What It Is, and What It Was

[note: this was originally written as an anonymous blog entry some time ago.]

i know that my endless and repetitive rantings about the same old subjects may be tiresome to some, but i reserve the right to indulge in them, as this is above all else [as the title clearly indicates] a web diary, and ostensibly the reason you are here is because you have some slight accidental curiosity regarding my processes. in any case: let the inchoate, directionless and self-indulgent ranting begin.

i was, again at low ebb today, thinking about the way in which things were done once, versus how they are done now.

in the surreal landscape of high school, even the most alienated soul was privy to a local network of profound, if obscure, communitarian sensibility, a sort of ad-hoc anarchist playground where society was reduced to an abstract microcosm. one heard by word of mouth that certain people were musicians, and that they were good; it wasn’t hard to find them, as someone inevitably had a class with them, particularly jazz band. one’s word of mouth network was all the network one needed to find experts at anything - home manufacture of designer drugs, for example, or cultivated contraband; or someone who could draw a poster, or silkscreen a logo on a trenchcoat, or who could acquire firearms or explosives or other devices of terror; or someone who might have a guitar or drum kit for sale, or who might be interested in playing bass.

all it took was an exchange of phone numbers on scraps of paper, a saturday afternoon in common, which was universal, since no one had a job [well, the bass player, the elder statesman, had a job; but he showed up for rehearsal anyway]. all it took was the mere suggestion and somehow will and energy coalesced, because the landscape was devoid of imminent responsibility or entertainment. none of us were anxiously preparing for the next meeting of the model UN, or as a favorite chemistry teacher so biliously put it, “going to discover the next element”. we had time, and we had the inclination of “why not?”, and we had living rooms.

how did one write a song? one thought of a melody, imagined accompaniment, wrote down lyrics - a song was born. how did one lead a band? one demonstrated the arrangement - how difficult could it be? “it goes like this - then it goes like this - then it goes like this.” how did one promote one’s band? with a logo and a sharpie pen and a tile wall in a high school corridor. with a xerox machine and a staple gun and yards of plywood fenced construction site. how did one get bookings? one called up club owners, got hung up on, called again, got hung up on, and called again. one told stories of hundreds of kids turning out in the high school courtyard, of benefit concerts, of parties. one somehow landed a wednesday night opener. all of one’s schoolmates showed up. soon enough, the wednesday night opener became a friday night headliner.

before there were managers and booking agents and road managers and label executives and entertainment lawyers and professional photographers and producers and engineers and caterers and lighting and sound technicians and roadies and guitar and drum techs…there were some people, and some songs, and some instruments, and a living room, and a name. before all of the dross, before the muddled album cover designs and the unattractive T-shirts, before the effects pedals, before the solos that were longer than the verses, before the bragging about the previous night’s groupie sex, before the showing up late to the gig high as a kite, before the rehearsals broken up by near-fistfights, before the sudden unannounced firings of band members, before the rifts in the dream, there was the dream itself: where a consolidation of creative wills came together in an atmosphere of naivete and positivity, where nothing was ever reduced to the practical, much less the profitable; where any gig was a good gig; where even an audience of one was a triumph; where the joy and excitement of listening to ourselves play was enough motivation.

there was a time when it was enough to notice someone else’s clothes to know they were of a like mind, one could broach a conversation about bands, then in three swift moves have recruited a fellow musician for a project. there were no day planners and no day jobs, no palm pilots or palm greasing, there were no contracts, there were no riders, there were no hourly rates. there was a time when one was willing to enter into any opportunity to actually play music, before the tendency arose to find any and every practical excuse why it must be an untenable and unprofitable excursion. there was a time when people would get into a dirty white chevy van and risk life and limb to drive to some college town, raid their student council entertainment fund for cash and liquor, and blow people’s minds. there was a time when one was on nothing other than a fanatical quest to blow people’s minds, and nothing would stand in one’s way. not to entertain, but to blow their minds. before there was american idol, before there was mtv, before there was “bling bling”, before anyone even cared about a record contract - there was a time when no mental obstacles separated one from direct expression to one’s constituency - to one’s peers. you went out and you made things happen because nobody told you that you couldn’t, and when they did tell you that you couldn’t you said “fuck you anyway” and moved on. you didn’t pay to play, you “rocked the party”. you didn’t say “c’mon, everybody, put your hands together!”, you screamed “i’m an antichrist!” or “nazi punks fuck off!”

before there was alternative this or indy that, before there was a scene or scenes, before DJ’s, before the booking agent you had to know personally to get a gig, before “buzz”, you created everything, because you had no fear, because you had no hope. you did it because you were unruly and untamed. you did it because no one could stop you. not your parents, not your family, not your congregation, not your teachers, not the police, not the guidance counselor who wanted you to go to college, not the fucking losers at your school who thought they were greek gods but in reality were merely trolls.

you didn’t “break in” to anything, you stood your ground and blasted, and you let them all come to you. you didn’t do market research, you didn’t have “visioning” meetings, you didn’t read Variety or CMJ. you showed up to school in fashions you made yourself, you had music in your head you made yourself, everything about you was made yourself, not bought in a store or bought from anywhere. you were the creator of your own memetic universe, your own total reality map. you cultivated obscurantism. you cultivated eccentricity. you weren’t afraid of being divested of your livelihood because you didn’t have one - you had nothing, no freedom, no capital, no assets. all you had was your attitude and your rage. and you funneled it all into a total assault on the reality proscribed and prescribed by your inferiors, the people who lived in fear of a vision of anything beyond what had been proscribed and prescribed for them. you spit on them and climbed over their sorry asses. you shook the dust off of your sandals. you were the judgement of armagideon time upon the heads of the boring. you were righteous. you were fifteen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erik Rader was, like, this close to becoming a famous rockstar in the mid-1980’s. He lives on his elderly parents' lawn in a dismounted truck camper.

New post up at Serious Grounds

Percolator Coffee: Not Just For Grandma Any More

Writers Rising

I've just been invited by my friend Katherine Jenkins to contribute to "Witers Rising", which is here:
Writers Rising. Whenever possible I will be crosspsotng all articles at E. Rader Media, as well as my Faceook page.

Drop on by!

Staying current

Blogging, they say, is a harsh mistress. I've been informally (okay - read that as "in cowardly anonymity") blogging for most of this decade, and reading blogs voraciously during that time. What I have found is that blogging is not a hobby, nor a pastime, nor a sideline. If you're going to do it and do it to the hilt, it's a full-time job. It's the pinnacle of self-employment as a writer: You must set your own schedule, manage your time, and PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCE. The ultimate test of a blog is timeliness and prolificity. So what happens to even the best of us who aren't hunkered in a bunker, blogging our fingers to the bone? What happens is that after days of real-world networking, scouting out fresh opportunities, working on various projects paid and unpaid, and oh yes - taking care of our homes and families, we come back to our blog to find that we haven't updated it in a week...two weeks...a month...or more.

Did I mention that I have a vegetable patch in my backyard? Did I also mention that it is currently a wasteland barren as the moon? And before that, a trackless jungle of invasive and poisonous plant species?

This is a prime example of the two direst imperatives of blogging: UPDATES and EDITING. It is necessary that you blog about what you read, heard, saw, thought, felt, and did TODAY, and create linkages, and at the very same time, spare your readers your stream-of-consciousness unschooled and undisciplined rants.

UPDATE and EDIT. These things require a time and energy commitment. The easiest way to do this is to have "blogging time" scheduled in your calendar - first thing upon waking for example, or exactly at noon, or immediately after the dinner dishes have been washed. Otherwise you are in danger of leaving it on the "when I get around to it" pile with the rotting laundry and unspeakable vegetable crisper.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to put on my elbow-length gloves and head into the kitchen. If I don't report back within the hour, please send in a rescue team.

Some random thoughts on writing for the web

For creative writers like me who are old enough to remember manual typewriters, positioning oneself as a "creator of web content" can be a somewhat daunting task. Especially those of us who didn't get a degree in Journalism and who don't keep an APA style manual on their nightstand [not that it isn't somewhere on my shelf!] might find what we are asked to do a little nebulous. "Snappy! Friendly! Tech-savvy!" Except for that last part, it sounds pretty much like standard advertising copy. [note: if that last link doesn't creep you out, then you're not a professional writer.]

Meanwhile, I surf the web every day [sometimes I miss those days of hanging out at the public library, but the coffee's better at my house] and I keep coming across sentences [or the fragments thereof] that make me groan. While snappy is good, language pared down to the point of being little more than a thin layer of buzzwords is not something that enhances communication.

I'm on Facebook just like you are - come on, no sense in denying it - and do you know what I've noticed? Every day, i read the complaints of users who are saying [1] the interface gets in the way of their easily finding out things or telling about things; and [2] they're "dumbing themselves down" in terms of language. Is this an inescapable side effect of the medium? I don't think so. The "Notes" area that's linked to on every Facebook page, for example, is a rich and mostly unexplored opportunity to get back to something pretty close to what you and I might recognize as blogging - I know, it seems so old-school now.

As for Twitter, it certainly is very Zen, very editorial, and very good for one's character - like a literary bran muffin or dish of broccoli, if you will - to be forced to condense one's thoughts down to what can be expressed in 140 characters or less. One of the many hats I wear is the rock trivia fanatic, and sometimes the impulse comes over me to "Tweet" a brief song lyric pertinent to the way I'm feeling in that moment, to see if any of my followers will respond with the next line. And for creative writers, anything that helps to stir the pot is worth keeping around. Not to mention the fact that using Twitter has greatly reduced my need to carry countless little scraps of paper in my pockets.

I guess what it all boils down to is this: Use the tools, but don't let them use you. When I was in college, I typed when I was sitting at my typewriter, I scribbled in my diary when I was away from my dorm room, I doodled in the margins of my class notes; my walls were covered with drawings and paintings, and everything I drew and painted contained some text. I also wrote letters both on my typewriter and longhand whenever I could. This helped me flex my creative muscles as well as keeping my friends and family up to date as to how I was doing. Similarly, online social media are great for networking or just keeping in touch with your friends, sharing an in-joke or a crazy candid snapshot - but they're also useful for keeping in touch with yourself and your own process. In the next few weeks, I'm going to be spending a lot of hours consolidating and editing things I've blogged under various fake names since, oh, about 2000. I'll probably be discarding a lot of commentary around links that have gone dead, but there are some rants out there that could be very entertaining, maybe not too incriminating, and most definitely would never have come into existence without the provocation inherent in this medium.