Agony Shorthand
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Friday, October 22, 2004
TRAIN WRECK IN PROGRESS.....There's a fascinating meltdown going on over at Chris Stigliano's BLOG TO COMM site. Like a Courtney Love interview, you want to look away, but you just can't. Poor Chris. The injustices keep piling up, and Chris just pours more fuel on the pyre. His post today is the best yet. I wouldn't get any more involved than I've been (which is not at all), but I keep getting e-mails directing me to a given Stiglianoism or another every couple weeks, often about me. Lots and lots about me. Chris wasn't very happy with a thing I wrote about his magazine earlier this year (the gist of which was I didn't like reading it anymore), and let me know about it both on his newly-developed-for-the-occasion site and with about 20 e-mails, some cordial, some totally frothing & off the rails. Feeling quite bad for the guy, who was genuinely hurt by what I wrote, I deleted my post from this site. I called him a bit "thin-skinned" in my original post, but the irony of his subsequent responses is apparently lost on him. An interesting line popped up in an earlier post of his this week that perhaps shows that, rather than being hurt, this sort of mano-a-mano "blog war" may just be what makes Chris's heart beat a little faster:
"I was having a perfectly happy day minding my own biz while scouring the competing blogs to see if anything nasty was being said about yours truly..."
Like I said, you can't look away. How do you tell such a person that you mean him no ill? Chris needs some validation, so I think we should all give him some. I tried to do this in some of my e-mail responses to him, and while it obviously didn't work, I'll try some here in public. Chris Stigliano was personally responsible, via his fanzine, for turning me onto some fantastic bands in the 80s and early 90s, like SIMPLY SAUCER (my personal acknowledgement in 2000 to Chris is at the bottom of the linked article) and the ELECTRIC EELS, probably more. His new web site has some interesting posts about music sometimes, and he got me curious about a modern Japanese compilation a few weeks ago. Chris has a lot of longtime fans who've enjoyed his tastes in music and Eisenhower-era popular culture for years. And at age 40-something, the man is still as deeply into music as ever, as I hope I'll be. Hats off to ya, Chris! What the Langs and Hinmans of the world think about him should matter about this much: 0%. I hope he patches things up with Mr. Yamamoto, and someday realizes that obsessing about me, or anything beyond girls, music & food just isn't worth the effort. Drop him a line and tell him he's OK, 'cause he is!
"I was having a perfectly happy day minding my own biz while scouring the competing blogs to see if anything nasty was being said about yours truly..."
Like I said, you can't look away. How do you tell such a person that you mean him no ill? Chris needs some validation, so I think we should all give him some. I tried to do this in some of my e-mail responses to him, and while it obviously didn't work, I'll try some here in public. Chris Stigliano was personally responsible, via his fanzine, for turning me onto some fantastic bands in the 80s and early 90s, like SIMPLY SAUCER (my personal acknowledgement in 2000 to Chris is at the bottom of the linked article) and the ELECTRIC EELS, probably more. His new web site has some interesting posts about music sometimes, and he got me curious about a modern Japanese compilation a few weeks ago. Chris has a lot of longtime fans who've enjoyed his tastes in music and Eisenhower-era popular culture for years. And at age 40-something, the man is still as deeply into music as ever, as I hope I'll be. Hats off to ya, Chris! What the Langs and Hinmans of the world think about him should matter about this much: 0%. I hope he patches things up with Mr. Yamamoto, and someday realizes that obsessing about me, or anything beyond girls, music & food just isn't worth the effort. Drop him a line and tell him he's OK, 'cause he is!
