Drawing the Line of Personal Privacy Online: Where is it?

The more that I work as a journalist and as a writer, the more I feel the need/desire to censor myself—even just for personal space reasons. I’m a public person for the sole fact that I work in journalism, so boundaries between personal and professional have to be in place to some degree…you have to maintain some level of personal and professional integrity. 

The internet was born and came of age after I was born, so the compulsion to share everything and anything about oneself is something I thankfully lack. However, I have struggled at times in deciding what to share of my personal life on this blog and other social media platforms—what do you share that will connect with your readers? What do you share to build some sense of a relationship/friendship with said readers? After all, social media is about and is formed around community, is it not?

Still, I try to keep my personal life out of it…most of the time.

This doesn’t exactly happen when it comes to writing about music. Music is such a visceral experience and the joy in sharing music with others revolves around that innate relationship we all have to music—removing personal experience just isn’t possible. I have the wonderful consequence of listening to some amazing sounds, boomeranging conversations with some prolific songwriters and composers, and at the end of the day teem with an intangible resulting spark. 

 My work in the industry has undoubtedly led to relationships and friendships that I wouldn’t trade for anything…you find your people where you find your people. What I haven’t wasn’t prepared for (who knows why? It’s the music industry, right?) were groupies (theirs, not mine.) Groupies are different than hardcore fans (All groupies are fans, but not all fans are groupies.) and the lack of distinction between what is appropriate to share and what is far too personal to blast to “public” people IN PUBLIC has me wondering what the hell happened. 

Am I just behind on a trend that I find appalling? Or am I the weirdo that looks at the trend of over-sharing personal information as a voluntary violation of personal privacy? Granted, it’s not just groupies that do it…I guess that everyone wants the fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol guaranteed all those years ago. Or perhaps I’m still wrapped up in Marshall McLuhan’s “the message is in the medium.” 

So where do you draw it? How personal is too personal? How personal is not personal enough?

And what is the kicker in setting those boundaries?

Sucking: The Most Important Thing About Writing

Everyone has their own opinion about what makes for good writing: what you should pay attention to in terms of delivering to your readers, formatting, style, and a million other bullshit boundaries that are supposed to elevate your writing on this mythical pedestal, magically illuminating it in all its prodigious potential.

What they don’t tell you is that your writing should suck—to someone. If you’re not pissing someone off with your content or overusing footnotes as part of your style or breaking the rules, you’re not writing well.

And is it not true that fecund writers such as Dostoevsky or Adrienne Rich or Walter Benjamin would not be nearly as prolific without the biters?

Break the Rules Only If You Know How to Do It Well

I’m not a fan of rules.

I’m that person that has a problem with following printed instructions if I can find a more efficient (read: better) way to do things. I’m the person that questions authority without question because I’ll be damned if I don’t have all the information. I’m that pain in the ass that has to fail at doing it my own way before I get serious about consulting “professionals” unless it’s something I’m quite certain I can’t possibly figure out with a dictionary/Google/etc. In short, I bend and break the rules any damn way I possibly can because I get more work (and better work) done that way. 

I’m currently taking a writing course for professional development and while the class is aimed at writing for a certain type of publication, the textbook’s advice on style is maddening.

  • Follow these guidelines. 
  • Readers don’t want to read _____. 
  • Do this—not that. 
  • Beginning writers do ____, so avoid that.
  • And a million other things that are supposedly right and wrong about writing for a particular audience/demographic/genre.

Follow those prompts only if you ARE a beginning writer uncomfortable with your own abilities. Follow those prompts only if you DON’T ever read. Follow those prompts only if, from a mechanical standpoint, your writing sucks.

However, when it comes to style—in any medium—break the fucking rules. I’ve been writing long enough to know that constraining to the limits of the fucking rules guarantees stilted, underdeveloped, voiceless writing that swandives beyond short of absolutely everything it could be. How do I know this? Because I attempted to stick to such stupid rules for forever. Eventually you realize (hopefully) that some advice is meant to be chucked.

People don’t read David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion or Orhan Pamuk because they play nice, always pick the vanilla cone, and are magically without one kind of neurosis or another. People read these authors because the work isn’t generic, doesn’t follow easy-to-copy structure and formatting, and isn’t running around the mill. (And for what it’s worth, broken rules are fun. It’s fun to write against trend, it’s fun to read against popularity, and both of these activities are how cultural shifts occur.)

One caveat to rule snapping: you have to know how to do it and do it well. If you don’t have some sense of organized chaos upstairs, it’s not going to translate well—not on paper and not on life. You have to have an end destination: what are you hoping to accomplish and why? If you can’t answer this simple question, no one’s going to “get” whatever you’re trying to do. In fact, no one’s going to care. 

Out of my head and into my ears

I can’t complain about how I make my living: I write…and I write mostly about music. I go to shows for free, I hang out with musicians, and I get to listen to some of the most spectacular tunes being composed right now. It’s not all good—sometimes I’m overbooked to the point that going to one more show makes me want to run to my bed, sometimes the venue management and security are morons (no heat during a show in November? When it’s 20 degrees outside? Seriously?), and sometimes the album is a horrible ripoff imitation of music that came out 20 years ago and I want to bang my head on the table…but don’t because it’s not headbanger metal.

Either way, the last year heard the good, the bad, and the “why on earth did I voluntarily  put myself through that?”

The Good

Hands-down, these bands and musicians rocked my speakers and my ears.

  • Blue Sky Black Death: For fans of instrumental hip-hop, it doesn’t get much better than this. Again, this was a group that has continually colored my speakers the last couple of years.
  • Fotoshop: This was a serendipitous find during a night of blog-surfing—electronica that’s reminiscent of Brian Eno at certain points and then completely original at others.
  • Beirut: See this band in person. Their studio work, while a treat for the ears, cannot compare to experiencing them live. Yes, it is an experience and one unlike any other.
  • KMFDM: What better way to knock off a bucket list item than getting paid to photograph and review a band that you’ve wanted to see live for more than a decade?

By and far, however, the most spectacular band I’ve crossed paths with recently is Army of the Universe—an English-singing Italian industrial band whose debut album was produced by Chris Vrenna. There is something untouchable about this trio—the music alone is accessible in a way that most industrial music is not. There’s a strange nostalgia about the sound, but in no way is it dated.

The Bad

There’s been little music I’ve heard that has rendered itself a poor review. However, efforts from The Horrors, Ginuwine, and Off Color certainly made my ears bleed in a bad way and seeing Billy Corgan “cover” the Smashing Pumpkins live as “The Smashing Pumpkins” made my skin crawl. Maybe it’s time to retire the moniker since none of the other band members remain? 

Again, though, I can’t complain. 

Where the light meets the dark

Death. The word has such finality to it. We, as thinking beings, attach so much weight to it and we live in a culture where the idea of living forever is hammered into our brains on a daily basis. Yet, what if death is merely a pause or a transformation?

Sometimes transformation is a blooming that we strive for. Sometimes we remove the clutter from our lives—possessions, jobs, or people. Stepping lightly, we do not grow teary-eyed from the shedding of the unwanted—no matter how changed we, or the world around us, may be. In a way, the death of our former selves is a celebration.

However, transformation is not always gradual—sometimes it is an abrupt splitting from the past. At times, transformation is violently painful and not at all desired—the loss of someone from our lives or events that irreversibly alter our perspective of the world. Sometimes we cannot say what exactly has changed, but we know we are permanently different. We mourn, we grieve, and we try to understand the void that now resides in our life like an uninvited visitor.

But death is death—no matter the light through which one looks upon it. Whether it is a joyful matter or one of despair, it is the enduring metamorphosis of the past into the present. While we too often look at death itself as a sorrowful event, remembering that it marks where we’ve been, whom we’ve been, and whom we’ve been with over the years allows us to see it for what it is. Every moment of our existence passes beyond us at some point, but leaves behind an impression imprinted on our hearts and our heads. Even as we travel from one place to another, prior versions of our lives and those that have been a part of them live on as the very foundation upon which we walk.

So as you grow a little closer to the completeness that will be your legacy, remember that the living and the dead meet again and again along the same line where the light meets the dark.


This is the April edition of the monthly newsletter that I write for the yoga studio I help manage.