"It's like a reason why my whole life I wanted to do the Artforum Top Ten, and this week I had a deadline on Monday to do it. And I thought so hard about it. All I had to do was pick these ten people, artists that I really care about, and write 20 to 100 words on each of them. And I did it, and I sent it in and, the next day, I couldn't sleep all night the next day because I was so repulsed by my own writing. Not because of the substance of my writing. It took me forever to write, and it was the most difficult thing. I realized it was something I didn't want to do, and I shouldn't have submitted it. It has something to do with me, right now, being unable to use 100 words or less to praise a piece of culture because I constantly read 100 word or less descriptions of art.

The record reviews and the restaurant reviews in my newspaper cover the same amount of ground-- sometimes they're of art and sometimes they're of pizza. I don't believe anything I read in that form. My own voice sounds so phony just because of the form, and I couldn't find a way just to get this icky feeling out of me. I guess it has be something to do with blogs, the icky feeling I get from whatever the length of a blog message, and the icky feeling I get from team-making and undeserved praise. I just don't want to be involved in it. It's something that I have to find a way to do because I want to continue to be able to praise people, but the whole existence of the top 10 list culture has made it impossible to the point where I have to turn down pristine writing assignments like, "A page in The Believer: Do whatever you want." I can't do those things right now because I can't stand it. I can't stand the consensus. You know what I'm saying? It's like a cliché that's really just coercive. It's empty. It's just a signal. That's what I feel like top ten lists are. They're not what they say they are. Its function has been completely superceded by meaning in the case of these top ten lists.

The funny thing is, there's this book that I have right now. It's this big cheap coffee table book I got at Barnes & Noble that's called The Big Top Ten Book. It's like the Guinness Book of World Records but put in the form of top ten lists. It's like the top ten glaciers, the top ten industrial disasters. I really love that, but it kind of brings it really down to mountains and valleys, and-- Where's that dumb top ten book? Well, forget it.-- but it's my number one this season."