Alex Ross, author of the revelatory blog "The Rest Is Noise," inspiring music critic for The New Yorker, and a consistently welcome reminder to listen to all the Bob Dylan my rock-musicologist cousin loaded onto my iPod last August, raises a good point about Web searching today. He asks linkers to list his blog under his name so as to counteract the irritating way Google has rendered his Web-search-results image, and I, for one, have suffered too many indiscretions at the hand of search engines not to quickly oblige. First there's the "other" Adam Baer, an apparently brilliant installation artist with a Guggenheim under his belt and a rising career that consistently unseats me on Google results lists. Then there are all the embrassingly sophomoric ramblings I contributed to my college newspaper in the '90s. Then there's a bizarre reposting of a simple inquiry letter I wrote years ago to some porn blogger about an article I had been casually assigned by the hipster sex mag Nerve.com, where the editor at hand eventually moved on and seemed to care less and less about the topic he had asked me to investigate: that a college student in Wisconsin had been virtually ruined and run out of town due to the rampant downloading of a private sex video posted on peer-to-peer file-trading sites. So this is how I'm constantly imaged by search-engines: a blowhard college student, postmodern artist, and sex-mag journalist obsessed with some poor girl who achieved urban-legend status for a dorm-room striptease. I don't know what to be more embarassed about: that or my addition to and grandiose mythologizing of bad pop culture. (Just kidding: I'm not embarassed about that. I side with Chuck Klosterman who with great humor rages in November's Esquire against the use of the term "guilty pleasure" to identify the pop-culture obsessions of people who think themselves above such pursuits. I wish the article were online to link to; alas, some writing doesn't come cheap.)
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