Today’s recommendation is perhaps a bit crass, in a way, but it is crass with good intentions and in a selfless way. Today, I recommend donating to my autism walk.
I will spare you the statistics, which you likely have already heard countless times and can look up easily anyway. The fact of the matter is, this is a disability that we really don’t understand as much as we should. It has a huge effect on those who live with it, and for the number of people diagnosed with autism, it’s truly puzzling how little funding is available for research.
I have been working with individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities for nearly nine years. About six years ago I first became involved with N.A.A.R., which later merged with Autism Speaks. Autism Speaks is currently the nation’s largest autism awareness and advocacy organization and is the major sponsor of the autism walk.
As you can see from the page, I have set a high fundraising goal for myself, but I believe that I can do it with your help. I also wish to call to your attention my two incentive campaigns. The first campaign is a donation-matching campaign; I will submit my personal donation to match the largest single donation I receive from any individual up until the evening before the walk. It’s pretty straightforward; I’m putting my money where my mouth is. Note the qualifiers: single donation and individual. Corporate donations, including employer’s matching charitable gifts, do not apply to this campaign, and a series of small donations will not be aggregated for these purposes.
The second incentive campaign, from my point of view, is the interesting one: if you donate to my fundraiser, I will play and sing a song for you. Any song that you like. I will compile all these songs onto a CD (or, hopefully I will have enough donations to make it a double-CD or even a box set!), which will then be distributed as a gift to everyone who has donated. This is my third year running such an incentive; two years ago, I covered songs at open mic nights for donations. Some of the songs I played included “Fire in Cairo” by The Cure and “Sexyback” by Justin Timberlake. Seriously, this really happened!
Last year, I recorded two EPs of cover songs. Covers included songs by Coldplay, Okkervil River, Shearwater, *Nsync, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Phil Ochs, as well as The Most Unwanted Song. I believe I still have a few copies of these EPs lying around, so if you want one of these, please let me know in the comments. Those requesting old EPs will waive their request for this year’s set, unless they make another donation.
Note that I do reserve the right to set a price on certain songs; if a song is ridiculously difficult to learn/perform or has the potential to be highly embarrassing, I may need a more substantial donation than the minimum in order to fulfill the request. Also note that multiple donations will give you multiple request credits.
So go! Donate! E-mail me your requests (I’d prefer to keep the requests a secret so people are surprised when they get their CDs, so I ask that you do not leave requests in the comments)! Help me reach my fundraising goal! Earn your good Samaritan points for the day!
Hopefully I will be back with a real recommendation tomorrow!
Hello, interpeople. I’ve been neglecting to greet you in my posts lately. I apologize to be so rude and thoughtless. I don’t want the five of you or so who read this and wait with baited breath for each day’s new recommendations to think that I take you for granted. (N.B..: I am including Miranda in that estimate of five people. Prove me wrong.)
Today, in conjunction with/in honor of Record Store Day, I am recommending supporting independent record stores.
When I first starting purchasing my own music (first two CDs I purchased: Out of Time and Automatic for the People by R.E.M., both purchased at the same time!), I never gave much though to where I was purchasing it. One place was as good as another, I thought. Of course, when I went to a local chain called Tunes, I did notice that he selection was much cooler and more varied, but at that point I did not think of choosing a location from which to purchase music in terms more complicated than convenience, proximity, and cost.
I think it was around the time that I discovered and started hanging out in my dearly departed Full Circle Records in 1998 or so that I began to think about what I got from independent record stores as opposed to the Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Sam Goodies, Tower Records, et cetera. The fact that the owners took the time to talk to me and get to know my tastes and recommend things that I might like, and that I could strike up a conversation with random customers, sparked something in a part of me that had never quite been touched in that way. Before I knew how to articulate it as such, Full Circle had become a source of community for me. That was what I loved about it – it was so much more than a record store. It was a place to hang out with friends, to make new friends… and, of course, to discover some really, really great music.
Like all great things in life, it had to come to an end eventually. I worked there for a while, and I loved getting my pay from Mike just to turn right around and hand almost ll of it right back to him. It was at Full Circle that I first started purchasing vinyl, that I ordered most of the Mountain Goats and Red House Painters and Elliott Smith and Elvis Costello catalogues, that I would have debates with Scott or George (well, a debate with George usually just involved vehement repetitions of contradictory positions with no reasoning involved). I shot some video of my friend Bob's band, The Young Professionals, at Full Circle. I played my very first “show” at Full circle, probably also setting the record for the longest show Full Circle has ever hosted. I played the last show that Full Circle would host before closing its doors. Anyone who was paying attention would have seen me shedding some tears during my truly horrendous butchering of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” at the end of the show. Somehow, I knew that Full Circle closing marked the end of a lot more than just Full Circle.
After Full Circle closed, I started going to Mars Red records in Haddonfield. The owner, Scott, was a great guy. Unfortunately, it was not more than a year and a half after I discovered Mars Red that it, too, closed its doors forever. I will spare my analysis of what has happened to create such a state of affairs; that is not the point of this entry, and would probably be better suited to my solo blog, if I ever get that one off the ground. But, all finger-pointing aside, I am now in the unenviable position of not having a good independent record store to call my own. I really don’t like Tunes very much; it is rather impersonal and geared increasingly toward the mainstream, and its chain status, regardless of the fact that it is strictly local, is a turn-off for me. AKA Music and Repo Records in Philadelphia are just inconvenient to get to, and have a bit of a slick, glossy feel to me. Princeton Record Exchange is kind of far and is sort of oppressively overwhelming, intimidating, and impersonal. Vintage Vinyl is even further and kind of has the same feel. Bloomington is fortunate to have a great independent store in Landlocked Music and a truly mind-blowingly awesome shop in T.D.’s CDs and LPs, but I won’t be moving to Bloomington until January.
These places are true sources of community for music lovers, and they have been and are drying up at an alarming rate. It is up to us music lovers to take a stand and save them. I’m not going to engage in hyperbolic and George W. Bush-esque rhetoric about the big box stores being the enemy and supporting them being tantamount to treason, but, well, I suppose I have already put the suggestion there, haven’t I? I know that the economy is in shambles and that expendable income is hard to come by these days, so I’m not taking the hard line here and demanding that everyone drop everything and immediately spend $200 at a local independent. However, I am imploring everyone, when they want to purchase a new record, please consider not going to Amazon or iTunes or Best Buy or wherever you would normally shop for such an item. Instead, visit an independent record store. Go to your usual haunt. If you don’t have a usual, just pick one. Talk to the employees. Start a conversation with a customer. Independent record stores are one of the few kinds of retail establishments in which you can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger at random and not be thought crazy. It’s a pretty magical thing.
And, with tomorrow being Record Store Day, seriously, what better time to start? I know that I had a pretty good time with Anthony on Record Store Day last year, traipsing to AKA and Repo in Philly, Princeton Record Exchange, and Princeton Record Exchange. I came out with all kinds of cool loot last year, including Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks’s “Cold Son” 10” single, a 12” EP of Arthur Russell covers including Jens Lekman, and 7” singles from Death Cab for Cutie, R.E.M., The Breeders, and the Black Keys. Tomorrow’s list of exclusive releases is a completely tl;dr clusterfuck of amazing releases, which promises some hard decisions on my part. Among the highlights:
A box set of Jesus Lizard 7” singles
An exclusive Flight of the Conchords single
An Iron & Wine live album
Two Sonic Youth split singles!(one with Beck, one with Jay Reatard)
A Flaming Lips/Black Keys covers split 7” (FL do Madonna’s “Borderline,” BK do a Captain Beefheart song)
A live Pavement album recorded in 1997
A My Morning Jacket live EP
Reissues galore!: Jane’s Addiction, MC5, The Smiths, and more
New 7”s from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, the Decemberists
And there will be more that I will find interesting, I’m sure. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s likely recommendation, listening to 5 days worth of new music.
***
N.B. Miranda has directed me to an interesting interview with a gentleman who has made a film on the state of the independent record store. He shares some of my ideas about the record store being a community space beyond just a retail space. You can find it here.
Today I recommend taking a day off. From anything. (Actually, I guess I recommended that yesterday.)
Okay. Take two.
Today I recommend: checking your credit report.
I had never done this before. It’s not that I didn’t care what my credit rating it; it was just that I was not concerned. I was secure in the knowledge that my credit was good. I paid my things on time. I didn’t abandon debts. I had gotten into some situations when I was younger, but I had resolved it all, and it was all old enough that it should have been off of my report.
A couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I decided to check my credit reports as a way of procrastinating from actually doing anything productive, i.e. schoolwork. What I found really shocked and amazed me.
The first one I ran was through Experian. Experian just had a staggering amount of blatantly false/inaccurate information about me. I’m talking:
4 alternate forms of my name, two of which were just wrong and which neither I nor any or my family members had ever used.
3 SSNs on file for me, besides my real one.
1 address in the boondocks of NJ. Neither my parents nor I have ever resided at this address.
Countless (okay, about 7) accounts that were not and never have been mine. Many of these were either accounts belonging to my father or joint accounts he shared with my mother. Several of these were opened BEFORE I WAS EVEN BORN. Experian even acknowledged that they were opened before I was born, and that it “may be suspicious.” Amazing how it just blatantly tells you, “Yeah, somebody fucked up and this can’t possibly be yours, but we’re going to hold it against you anyway.”
I filed disputes with all of the incorrect information on Experian, then moved on toTransUnion. TransUnion’s free service is very helpful, in that it will actually supply you with your report for all three credit reporting agencies. TransUnion was also the most accurate of the three with my records, although I still found a lot of my parents’ accounts somehow tied in to my identity. Still, though, the fact that they had the most accurate records of the three was tied in to the fact that my numerical score with them was also the highest.
I’m warning you all now – EquiFax is a pain in the ass. It’s a good thing TransUnion allowed me to view my EquiFax report, because EquiFax did not seem to allow me to generate a free report. EquiFax’s website seems to imply that one is only entitled to a free online report if one was recently denied credit. Otherwise, I was free to request a hard copy via mail. Fortunately, I already had the report from TransUnion, socould just take that information and dispute it online, right?
Wrong.
In order to dispute something online with EquiFax, one needs to have gotten their report online from EquiFax. Something for which I was not eligible.
Oh well, there’s always telephone.
Right, except that in order to dispute by telephone, one must already have a report number. One obtains a report number from… that’s right, you guessed it, opening an online report from EquiFax.
At least they allowed me to print out a PDF and write in my information and EVERY DISPUTE I wished to make. By hand. I couldn’t even type into it and then print it out. Fail. EquiFax is quite obviously the least user-friendly and most behind-the-times of the three agencies.
Perhaps it is not coincidental that my EquiFax score was the lowest of the three. Like, depressingly low.
So basically, after being responsible and working my ass off to keep up with this stuff and rebound from some mistakes I made years and years ago, it was a real revelation to find that my scores, which I had assumed were safely in the at least moderately high range, were just scraping along in the acceptable range (and one of them not even). All due to misinformation, mistaken identities which should never have been an issue, and some off-the-wall random errors that seem to have come from absolutely nowhere.
I’m waiting to get all of this straightened out. I’m already so stressed out with school and with work, It’s really taken a mental/psychic toll on me. I suppose the lesson/moral here is that it is your right to view your information on this shit and to make sue that everything is nice and accurate. If you don’t do it, nobody is going to do it for you. These companies, it goes without saying, don’t care about you and will not hesitate to crush you given the chance. Don’t let it happen. Be assertive and call these companies out on things when they need to be called out.
Now, more than ever, we need to stand up to these corporations and claim the rights to which we are entitled. If we don’t, who will?
***
N.B.: Do not make the same mistake I did and go to each credit reporting agency website individually. It would have saved me a lot of trouble last week had I seen this before I did so. In any case, I have already cancelled the “free trials” of the services that are rather bogusly associated with these agencies, since I have already gotten the information I wanted out of them. At least for next year I know about this truly free consolidated report.
It goes without saying that there are some problematic dynamics at play here – namely, the fact that I am heterosexual, and therefore this is not necessarily my issue (N.B.: the tendency of some to claim ownership of an issue and not allow those outside of it to either stand in solidarity with them or to show them how the issue has an effect on the larger culture/society has always been a pet peeve of mine) – and because this is currently a widely-debated and complex issue, I suspect that my writing about it will ultimately be somewhat redundant with writings on other blogs and also incomplete (and quite possibly disorganized and incoherent). Perhaps one day I will take these ramblings and hone them into a more thoughtful and focused piece, but for now, I want to express my feelings on the issue and hopefully do so in an idiosyncratic way that can stand out in some way from the rest of the discourse.
(N.B.: All I have written so far is my opening paragraph and a disclaimer/statement of intent, and this post is already tl;dr. So it goes.)
A few years ago, I got into a pretty intense debate with a close friend of mine concerning this topic. My friend is fairly progressive, stands where I do on a lot of the issues, and shares a lot of the same friends and acquaintances, some of whom are homosexual or bisexual. He is African-American, and a single father. He was also strongly opposed to same-sex marriage.
I had trouble wrapping my head around this, and we argued back and forth for about half an hour over the telephone about it. The definition of marriage, he said, was a man and a woman. When I asked why it couldn’t just be two people, he responded that that is just the way it is. Besides, New Jersey had legally recognized civil unions. Shouldn’t they just be happy with that?
My head was spinning to think that a friend of mine with whom I shared so many political platforms would use such an argument. I invoked another argument from the past, one that I perhaps shouldn’t have, but it just seemed so apropos – separate but equal. Isn’t this the same mentality that enabled legal segregation in the south? Wasn’t it found that separate was not, in fact, equal? At all? Wasn’t excluding homosexuals from certain rights tantamount to racial segregation? He said no, it wasn’t. It was different. In the end we agreed to disagree on this topic.
But here I am several years later insisting that no, it isn’t different. And honestly, it has filled me with an immense sense of both pride and vindication to see the developments of the last couple of weeks. I have heard before that Iowa gets overlooked and lumped in with the Bible Belt states, to which it supposedly does not really belong. But still – did anybody really see this coming from Iowa? I certainly didn’t. Vermont was not a big surprise. And D.C. – well, I’m just trying not to get too far ahead of myself.
These are exciting times. There is a lot to be gloomy and depressed about, but when things like this are happening in real time, I feel the optimism with which I was imbued in November has been justified. I really do feel that the country is turning a crucial corner. No, everything will not be perfect. However, it is victories like these that make me believe in our system in spite of myself. I am, and I remain, standing in solidarity with those who have been denied this right, and will continue to do so until this wrong has been reversed.
Remember, the point here is not for me to be politically correct. This is about just, decent, and equal treatment and rights for fellow citizens and human beings.
***
Appendix
So I was initially planning on responding to all of the usual arguments against gay marriage rights in the main body of my post, but I decided against for a few very good reasons: 1) it was too obvious, 2) my answers would likely be too obvious and too redundant when compared to other blogs on the subject, and 3) I have to admit I have not done a tremendous amount of research on the topic, so I thought it would be better to have a passionate personal response rather than an unresearched pseudo-intellectual one. There are, however, a couple of anti- arguments that I want to mock, and one very big and often overlooked point that I want to make.
We will start then with the point I want to make, in response to the separate but equal argument. There is one very, very, insanely big way in which civil unions are inherently unequal from marriage: financially. With so many federal laws on the books making reference to marital status, the inability to marry presents a large financial liability to same-sex couples, particularly in the current economy. Again, I have not done all the research here, so I can’t go into detail, but if anyone is interested in finding out more about this issue, Dr. Lee Badgett, an economist who teaches at UMass Amherst, has done some extensive research and publishing in this particular area.
And now on to the mockery, much of which will be obvious. First off, the idea that the sanctioning of homosexuality will be a “gateway” to the sanctioning of pedophilia, bestiality, etc.. I understand why the fear-/hate-mongers chose to associate homosexuality with pedophilia, but really, when will this stop? Aren’t we past that? If I were less classy, I would argue that the sanctioning of Catholic priests is a gateway to sanctioning pedophilia. But I’m an adult and I refuse to lower myself to those kinds of tactics, so I won’t say that. What? Did somebody say something?
The whole argument that homosexuality is a sin and that “God hates fags” is just ridiculous. Can we please make those people go away? First of all, I thought Christians were supposed to believe in the kind and loving and benevolent God 2.0 from the New Testament, not the vengeful, fire-and-brimstone beta testing version from the Old Testament. If there is a God (and I do mean God in the capital-G sense, along with all the bells and whistles that implies), I can practically assure you that he does not care with whom you are sleeping. The world is a really big place, and there’s a lot of more important shit to worry about that will keep you busy. Yes, even if you’re God. There are still only so many hours in the day. Besides, the idea that this country was to be founded exclusively on Christian values is just plain wrong. This has been documented extensively by so many sources that I’m not going to do the work for you.
Another frequent argument is that same-sex marriage will somehow destroy traditional marriage. Bullshit. Same-sex marriage should have no impact whatsoever on what heterosexuals do. You know what's destroying traditional marriage? Divorce. You want something to outlaw, well, there you go. Logic, people. Use it!
I was going to say something else, I think, but I forget what it was, so now I will just give you this, which you have likely already seen:
Not much to say about this that you can’t say yourself, but I do want to draw your attention to the 0:47 mark.
Posts
