As most of the folks reading this already know, my primary web vocation is writing short music reviews (CDs, tapes, what have you). I also have a day job with one of those internet start-ups (until the impending layoffs reach me, that is), but if I am "known" at all it is through my scribbling about seriously obscure bands.

I'm not even a big fish in a small pond. I'm relatively unknown within the circle of people who review seriously obscure bands. Ask any music critic you know--I'm quite sure he or she has never heard of me.

Which makes weeks like the past one somewhat surreal.

While doing research on a story I was editing (at the aforementioned day job), I came across an interview I gave someone. The site was one of a million devoted in indie music, and I sure didn't remember giving that particular interview (people don't interview me very often), but my never-bashful ego pushed me to read the piece, and I have to say the answers sounded like ones that I would give. Either this guy knows how to channel me, or it's a legit interview.

Alright, that's strange enough. I'm quite aware that I'm not even a minor player in a field that has no celebrities. To come across this interview by chance is a one-in-a-billion shot. Won't happen again.

Of course, that would be an incorrect assumption. The very next day, I was fact-checking a story (once again, at my day job). While checking a link, I came across this wonderful, multi-colored picture of Kim Gordon. A picture that my youngest brother took at Lollapalooza a few years back. A photograph that resides on the Lies Mag pages within the Aiding & Abetting site. A picture that my brother, the photographer, blew up and framed for me and happens to be staring at me from behind my monitor as I write this.

Here is the picture:

Anyway, the site I was checking didn't give my brother credit for the photo, so I'm not going to give credit to the website in question.

Still serendipity like this is this is the power of the web. All of the unimportant crap that you toss off will come back to haunt you. Okay, so my brother considers this photo to be the best one he ever took (it is damned good), but still. We put that photo up in the Lies Magazine pages few years ago, and now it comes back to us on the cover of some young woman's punk site. Unlike Vger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the picture hasn't been improved or gained personal consciousness. Too bad. The boomerang effect itself is still unnerving.

I remember when video first took off, when all the pre-video movies were beginning to show up on tape. More than one actress (Susan Dey and Jodie Foster among them) complained that she did a nude scene with the expectation that no one would see the film in question and that the work would disappear in a matter of months, if not weeks.

HBO, of course, had a similar effect. Guys around my age still whisper in reverential tones about the Phoebe Cates bikini strip scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I don't remember how many times the network showed that movie, but it was on an awful lot. HBO showed Fast Times enough so that if asked, I could readily produce storyboards and dialogue from every scene in the movie. The thing was broadcast often enough so that even when Cates is dead and gone, her attributes will still be available to titillate yet another generation.

This boomerang effect can be good and bad. When I post stuff to my site, I do so in a vacuum. I don't begin to think about what the reaction to the work will be. I'm always astonished when anyone responds.

But when I'm old and wise, and I've done much better work that is appreciated by the mainstream of society (with the possible exceptions of I.F. Stone and Roky Erickson, this happens to just about every "underground" commentator or artist--look at what happened to Lester Bangs, fer chrissakes), I will be haunted by my unsavory past. Will all this silliness cause me grief in my old age?

Probably not.

But still, the boomerang effect is unnerving. Once you've joined the party, you can never really leave. There will always be pieces of you hanging around somewhere. You will always have to answer for the least and the greatest of your accomplishments.

Kinda like a certain afterlife eschatology that involves St. Peter. But I'm not even going near that one.

Those billion-to-one odds mentioned earlier would have been more handy Tuesday night, when Jon Worley failed to come up with six little numbers that would have given him a share of the $360 million Big Game lottery prize.