About the Author

A thread on UHX recently suggested that blogs ought to have author bios. It feels cheesy and dumb. I should hire a publicist to do this for me.

Anyway, this is a draft. Is there stuff you think i should put in or take out? Stuff you wonder about me? I am into awkward uncomfortable levels of self-disclosure.

Kevin Erickson cannot write about himself in the third person for more than one sentence at a time.

I live in Anacortes, Washington, where I'm a resident worker at this crazy arts infrastructure in an old fire station called The Department of Safety.

I got my B.A. in Religion at Whitman College in Walla Walla, a small town out in the wheatfields of Eastern Washington. My senior thesis was an in-depth examination of Relevant, a magazine for hip evangelical twenty-somethings, interpreted in light of Thomas Frank's concept of commodified dissent/fake counterculture.

I was a recipient of the tenth annual David Nord Award in Gay & Lesbian Studies. My project, advocated DIY music culture as an important component of a comprehensive praxis of queer liberation.

At various times, I have been general manager, music director, and news director for KWCW. Briefly, I was a music writer for the Whitman College Pioneer, where i won the Robert Hosokawa award for Excellence in Opinion Writing. I should do freelance stuff? Someone throw money at me.

Location history:
Age 0-8 Jacksonville, Oregon
Age 9-18 Yakima, Washington
Age 18-24 Walla Walla, Washington
Age 25-26 (now) Anacortes, Washington

I run a small CD-R label, currently dormant, ready to hit the restart button in 2007. I play in some bands, sometimes.

This blog is about the nexus of politics, religion, and culture, so maybe I should disclose my biases?

Politics: if i had to align myself with a particular ideology, "social democrat" works. But, I also think some of the best political discourse is that which pushes us past stereotypes. I think the populist subset of the right-wing is in touch with some important realities that young leftists like me usually miss. They have an acute sense of the mounting pressures on families, the spiritual depravity of mass culture, etc (although they generally misidentify the source of these problems). I also think my politics can be kind of cheesy. I am okay with this.

Religion: I am interested in studying religion as an outside observer, but also as a practitioner. I am a stubbornly loyal member of the United Methodist Church, a denomination which includes both theological liberals and conservatives. My personal beliefs tend to emphasize liberation theology, feminism, ecology, etc, but with a dollop of neoorthodoxy to keep me from getting too hippy-dippy. I'm strongly influenced by other faiths, especially Buddhism. I believe in universal truth, but I think epistemelogical humility is really important.

Culture: My favorite kinds of culture are those that help create networked communities of resistance, that communicate something meaningful and attempt to transform things. I'm sort of old-fashioned in that I think mass culture is more a force of hegemony than a potential space for resistance, but I'm not necessarily knee-jerk anti-mainstream. That said, I do find that the most interersting stuff happens at the fringes, off the radar. Weird stuff. Fun stuff. Smart stuff. I'm suspicious of postmodern understandings of culture, because postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, which sucks.