The Kyoto Kibbitzer

Note: The taxonomy presented in this essay should not be interpreted too strictly. Like most human classifications, the categories are somewhat fluid. A One-Drink Person may occasionally drift into Three. A Three-Drink Person may, under the right atmospheric conditions, wander into Six. Cities, companions, and the general momentum of the evening all play their roles.

The individuals mentioned here — Jon Brooks, my brother Pat, my brother Mike, my father Ross, and my friends Philip and Mackenzie — are cited with affection and respect as exemplary specimens of their respective drinking styles. Any exaggerations should be understood in the spirit of barroom anthropology rather than scientific certainty.

The Simon Joyner lyric used below as the epigraph comes from one of the great chroniclers of American barroom life, whose songs capture with particular accuracy the strange fellowship and wandering philosophy that often emerge around a table of drinks.

Epigraph:

I met the drinker for the drink/ back when I was drinking everything/ but the kitchen sink.

Simon Joyner

Human beings go out for drinks for many reasons.

To loosen up after the day.
To bond with friends.
To flirt.
To seek the company of the opposite sex.
To complain about coworkers and bosses and get it all out of the system.
To chase novelty.
To see what the night might offer.

There may be pool involved. There may be a little weed involved. There may be laughter, storytelling, and occasionally the pursuit of romance. Some people even manage to get into fights, though I have always considered that an unnecessary complication.

Whatever the precise motivation, if you spend enough time in bars — conferences, faculty gatherings, Kyoto wanderings — a pattern begins to emerge.

Drinkers, broadly speaking, fall into three categories.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s remarkably reliable.

I. The One-Drink Person

The One-Drink Person possesses a trait that fascinates the rest of the drinking world: sufficiency.

One drink is enough.

Not “enough for now.”
Not “enough before the next bar.”

Just enough.

The One-Drink Person orders calmly, often something familiar.

“I’ll have my usual IPA. Just the one.”

They sip slowly. They participate in the conversation. They are fully present at the table. And then, at some point, they stand up and leave with perfect dignity while the rest of the group is still negotiating whether a second round is happening.

I know two pure examples of this species: Jon Brooks and Pat Thomas.

They are calm, stable, and mysteriously immune to the centrifugal forces that tend to expand most nights.

There is also a fascinating adjacent species in my father Ross, who is technically a Two-Drink Person. Ross orders two beers spaced exactly twelve minutes apart for what he calls the “maximum fade.” He informs the waitress of the twelve-minute interval with great seriousness, as if he were conducting a controlled laboratory experiment.

Among the other tribes, the One-Drink Person inspires both admiration and mild suspicion. Their discipline seems almost supernatural.

II. The Three-Drink Person

The Three-Drink Person represents the ideal of civilized social drinking.

Three drinks produce a predictable arc.

Drink one warms the room.
Drink two brings the conversation fully alive.
Drink three arrives at the sweet spot: relaxed, sociable, cheerful.

Then the Three-Drink Person goes home.

No drama.
No philosophical speeches.
No mysterious late-night decisions.

In theory this is the perfect category.

In practice, however, there is a complication.

Many people who identify as Three-Drink People are not actually Three-Drink People at all.

Their most common sentence is something like:

“I’ve only had four, chillax.”

Which is when the observant barroom anthropologist begins to suspect that the Three-Drink classification may be partly aspirational.

These days I am more or less a Three-Drink Person myself. But this is a relatively recent development. As recently as the late COVID years — say 2023 — I was still operating comfortably in a different category.

III. The Six-Drink Person

The Six-Drink Person rarely begins the evening intending to drink six.

In fact the Six-Drink Person almost always starts with a sentence that sounds very reasonable.

“I’ll just have one.”

But the night has a tendency to expand around them.

One drink leads to another conversation.
Another conversation leads to another round.
The stories become louder.
The table becomes friendlier.

The evening begins to acquire momentum.

At a certain point the Six-Drink Person may also say something like:

“OK motherfucker, we are going to arm wrestle!”

This is generally a signal that the night has entered its advanced phase.

My brother Mike is the purest Six-Drink specimen I know. Mike goes for it. If the night has possibilities, Mike will find them.

My friend Philip — known in this essay by his true name, Tommy — also operates comfortably in this zone. These are the drinkers who power the great stories.

They are responsible for a very large percentage of legendary nights.

Also, it must be said, a fair number of mornings that begin with a quiet promise to take it easier next time.

A Personal Adjustment

My own shift from Six-Drink territory into the Three-Drink category happened fairly recently.

One evening earlier this year I was sitting at ING and realized something unusual. I had already had two drinks. I ordered a third Negroni, and suddenly a small voice in my head said: that’s probably enough.

The old circuit was still there.

Concrete. Ishimaru. Haru.
The whole Kyoto 4-a.m. constellation.

Their siren songs were faintly audible.

But that night I did something unexpected.

I finished the third drink, paid the bill, and went home.

As Homer might say, Odysseus stayed on the ship.

The Final Observation

Most people believe they are Three-Drink People.

Very few actually are.

In reality the species are fluid. A One-Drink Person may occasionally drift into Three. A Three-Drink Person may, under the right atmospheric conditions, slide quietly into Six.

And certain cities — Kyoto among them — possess a remarkable talent for turning what begins as a perfectly innocent One-Drink Plan into something much more expansive.

Which is how, sooner or later, every barroom anthropologist eventually arrives at the same conclusion:

The taxonomy is real.

But the night always has the last word.

Dedication:

For drinkers everywhere. I love you, bro.

Note: If you liked this essay, you might also like the ones below, which also deal with Kyoto nightlife in all its glory.

Note: The mixed tape described in this essay — The M.A. Blues — was given to me by my friend Kelly Rudd when we were juniors at St. George’s School in Spokane, Washington in the mid-1990s. Kelly is now a distinguished attorney in Wyoming and will likely deny, with professional seriousness, certain details in this piece, particularly the late-night excursions to the basement to watch scrambled Playboy or Cinemax on cable. Nevertheless, a flat fact remains a flat fact.

The nickname “M.A.” came from our older friend Brent Olsen, who solved the problem of too many similar family names by assigning everyone initials: Matt became M.A., Mike M.I., Pat P.A., my father Ross R.O., and my mother Claudia C.L. Brent later went on to become a successful potato farmer in Republic, Washington, where Olsen’s Famous Potatoes now appear on menus across Eastern Washington and beyond.

The artists mentioned in the Kumamoto tapes from 1997 — This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Mojave 3, and His Name Is Alive — were central to the atmospheric indie and dream-pop soundscape of that era and formed the emotional palette of those early tapes.

As with most mixed tapes, the exact track lists have partly faded into memory. What remains vivid is not the precise sequencing but the feeling of the object itself: a hand-labeled cassette, built slowly, and handed from one person to another with care.

The first great mixed tape I ever received came from Kelly Rudd when we were juniors at St. George’s School in Spokane.

Kelly lived in what we always referred to, half joking and half in awe, as the Rudd mini-mansion, owned by his father Art Rudd the dentist and his mother Robin. It was the sort of house that made teenage sleepovers feel like minor expeditions. His bedroom was on the second floor, and that’s where the tape appeared.

He handed it to me casually.

“I made this for you,” he said. “Hope you like it.”

It was a black Maxell cassette. On the spine, written in careful handwriting, were the words:

The M.A. Blues.

“M.A.” was my nickname at the time. Our older friend Brent Olsen had decided that all the family names in our orbit sounded too similar, so he invented a system of initials: I became M.A. for Matt, my brother Mike was M.I., my brother Pat P.A., my dad R.O., my mom C.L. Brent later went on to become a well-known potato farmer up in Republic, Washington, selling Olsen’s Famous Potatoes to restaurants all over Eastern Washington. But at the time he was simply the guy who had given me a nickname that eventually ended up on the spine of a mixed tape.

Kelly and I stayed up late that night. I slept on the futon in his room. At some point we wandered down to the basement and watched scrambled Playboy or Cinemax on cable. Kelly will absolutely deny this now, as the distinguished Wyoming lawyer he has become, but a flat fact is a flat fact, baby.

The real moment, though, happened later.

Back at my own house.

My bedroom was at the front of the house, small and slightly chaotic. I had a green CD player with a tiny black-and-white TV built into it. VH1 ran constantly. I remember seeing the Replacements’ “Merry Go Round” on that little screen and falling in love with it. The room also contained a teenage anthropologist’s collection of beer bottles lining the walls. Beavis and Butt-Head ran on MTV. Seinfeld reruns. Law & Order reruns. The usual educational programming of the era.

That’s where I first really listened to The M.A. Blues.

The tape opened with George Thorogood’s “I Drink Alone.” I loved that immediately. It had swagger. It had barroom confidence.

Then came AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” That one hit even harder. Along with what came later on the tape, it felt strangely adult. Not scandalous exactly, but like it belonged to a slightly older world than the one I was living in.

Somewhere in the sequence Kelly slipped in Robert Johnson’s “They’re Red Hot.” Suddenly the tape reached backward sixty years into the original blues. That alone felt like a kind of lesson.

But the moment that sealed the whole thing was near the end.

Dire Straits — “Your Latest Trick.”

The slow saxophone intro.
The late-night mood.
The strange wooziness of the rhythm.

It sounded like 2 a.m. in a bar somewhere, even though I was just a high school kid sitting in a small bedroom in Spokane.

That was when I realized something important.

This wasn’t just a bunch of songs.

Kelly had built a mood.

The tape moved from rowdy blues swagger to something cinematic and nocturnal. It felt deliberate. Sequenced. Composed.

In other words, it felt like an art form.

---

Mixed tapes in those years were somewhat common, but rare enough that they still mattered. People made them for friends, sometimes for girlfriends. I never made one for my early high-school crushes Blythe or Gina, though I did write Blythe long romantic poems instead. (Those stories live elsewhere on this site.)

But the mixed tape itself carried a particular social meaning.

It was an intimate gesture.

A curated, hand-crafted artifact given and received with love.

You had to sit there with the stereo, dubbing songs one by one, rewinding, getting the levels right, deciding what went on Side A and what went on Side B. A standard cassette gave you about ninety minutes total, forty-five minutes per side. That limit mattered. It forced choices.

A mixed tape was basically a short story told with songs.

---

A few years later I found myself on the other side of the ritual.

In the summer of 1997, in Kumamoto, during the first weeks of my relationship with Sachie, I made three mixed tapes for her. They were on deep blue Maxell cassettes, and they were extremely moody.

Artists like:

• This Mortal Coil
• Cocteau Twins
• Slowdive
• Mojave 3
• His Name Is Alive

It was the full late-90s dream-pop emotional weather system.

Those tapes mattered. They were given to her within the first couple of weeks of our relationship, and they became part of the early rhythm of us dating. She would play them in her minivan, and I have the impression she played them a lot.

In the cassette era that was basically a form of romantic language.

Before texting.
Before Spotify.
Before sending links.

A mixed tape said something very simple:

I spent hours thinking about you.

---

The culture faded quietly around 2000.

Burned CDs arrived. Napster arrived. Then digital libraries and services like eMusic. I switched to digital music around that time and stopped using cassettes almost overnight.

Technologically the cassette lingered for another decade or so, but socially the mixed-tape ritual was already gone.

Today something of the spirit survives.

My friend Ian still makes enormous playlists mapping entire musical ecosystems — Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, the Dirty Three, the whole Cave universe. They’re impressive, but they often run hundreds of songs long. More like archives than gestures.

I’ve made a number of strong Spotify playlists myself — ones devoted to the Mendoza Line orbit (Shannon, Tim, Elizabeth) and another exploring the strange constellation around Michael Knott, Lifesavers Underground, and Aunt Betty’s. Those playlists really work.

But the social loop isn’t the same.

Only Ian has ever really listened to them.

That’s the quiet difference between eras.

A mixed tape once had a specific recipient. It was handed over physically. It traveled from one person’s room or car stereo into another person’s life.

A playlist floats in the cloud.

Which is why I can still picture that black Maxell cassette labeled The M.A. Blues.

It began in a second-floor bedroom in a Spokane mini-mansion and ended up playing through cheap speakers in a teenage bedroom full of beer bottles and VH1 reruns.

And when the saxophone from “Your Latest Trick” came out of the speakers, the room suddenly felt larger.

A door had opened.

Not just into music, but into the strange, beautiful possibility that songs — arranged carefully enough — could create an entire emotional world and hand it, quietly, from one friend to another.

Dedication:

For tapers everywhere.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like the one below.

Note: This piece gathers together a series of brief encounters I’ve had over the years with musicians whose work has meant something to me. None of these moments were arranged or particularly dramatic. Most of them happened in small rooms, hallways, or outside venues with cigarettes involved. In several cases I barely spoke to the artist at all.

That’s partly the point.

Live music has a strange ecology around it. The concert itself is only the visible center. Around it orbit all sorts of smaller human moments: waiting in line, wandering the wrong neighborhood looking for the venue, sharing a cigarette on a porch, talking to a guitarist you’ll never meet again, watching a performer interact with family, or occasionally—very occasionally—receiving an unexpected gesture that lands with real human weight.

The encounters recorded here took place over roughly two decades and across a handful of cities: Flagstaff, Kyoto, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Brooklyn. They involve musicians from several corners of the indie and folk worlds, from Richard Buckner and the Thompsons to Spencer Krug, Jay Som, and Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent. What they share is not a common genre but a certain intimacy of scale. None of these moments occurred in arenas. They happened in rooms where the distance between artist and listener was small enough for ordinary human contact to remain possible.

As with many essays on this site, the goal is simply to record these moments before they fade. Music culture is full of stories about bands, albums, and movements. What interests me just as much are the fleeting intersections between artists and listeners that occur around the edges of those larger narratives.

Sometimes those edges are where the real memory lives.

Epigraph
“There’s a girl with cherry chapstick on / and nothing more.”

---

I. Richard Buckner — Flagstaff, 1999

My first close encounter with a musician wasn’t really an encounter at all.

It happened in the dead of winter in 1999 in Flagstaff, Arizona, at a tiny bar where maybe twenty-five people had gathered to see Richard Buckner. There was no stage. The gear sat right on the floor. You could reach out and scratch someone’s itch if you felt like it. Buckner warmed up literally five feet from where I stood.

At the time Buckner had just come through his small breakthrough with Devotion and Doubt, a record I loved deeply. The Hill hadn’t come out yet. For a while before the show he seemed distinctly grumpy. He mentioned he’d driven solo through the mountains, through Four Corners and across long empty roads to get there, and he looked tired in the way a touring musician sometimes looks tired—bone-deep, like the road had followed him into the room.

I got a drink at the tiny bar. The place was so small that it felt less like a concert than a gathering.

Then he started playing.

He ran through most of Devotion and Doubt, and as the set unfolded the grumpiness lifted. Something about the songs reset the room. It was one of those nights where the distance between performer and audience collapses almost completely.

I never spoke to him.

But I remember the night vividly. Seeing a musician like Buckner that close, playing songs that mattered to me in a room barely larger than a living room, felt like glimpsing something essential about music itself. Not the industry, not the mythology—just the simple fact of a person standing there singing.

---

II. Linda and Teddy Thompson — Kyoto, 2013

Years later I found myself in a very different room: Taku Taku, a small venue on the south side of Teramachi in central Kyoto.

The room is wonderful: long wooden tables where everyone sits together, cheap beer—about five hundred yen—and a kind of relaxed intimacy that suits folk music perfectly.

The show was around 2013 and featured Linda Thompson and her son Teddy Thompson.

I had actually seen Teddy there the year before with Sachie and had been impressed. When I heard he was returning with Linda we immediately got tickets.

The dynamic between them was fascinating.

Teddy opened the show and it became immediately clear that he was acting as both performer and curator of his mother’s legacy. Linda had struggled with severe stage fright dating back to the days of Richard Thompson and their partnership in the 1970s. She had even cancelled a tour the year before that was supposed to include this very venue.

Teddy’s set was upbeat country-rock, confident and generous. He handled the room beautifully.

Then Linda came out.

She had an entirely different presence—quieter, cooler, almost regal. There was something transcendent about her, something that seemed to carry decades of musical history into the room.

She sang “Bright Lights” and “Walking on a Wire.” The room fell silent in the way good rooms sometimes do.

She didn’t play two of my personal favorites—“Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” and “Dimming of the Day”—but it hardly mattered.

After the show Teddy stood around happily talking with fans, signing things and chatting with anyone who approached him. Linda spoke to almost no one except Teddy.

Watching the two of them together gave a glimpse into the quiet gravity of family life inside a musical career.

---

III. Spencer Krug — Kyoto, 2018

Another Kyoto night, another small venue.

This time it was Urbanguild in 2018, where Spencer Krug was performing under his project Moonface.

Maybe forty or fifty people were there.

The room felt reverent, almost like a chapel.

Krug played solo piano and performed essentially the entire album Julia with Blue Jeans On. When he played “Julia”—a top twenty song of all time for me—and “Barbarian,” the room lit up completely.

Oh man was it on.

At the end of the set he apologized to the venue for one mistake he felt he’d made and joked that he’d beaten their piano to hell.

Then he stepped into the second-floor hallway for a cigarette.

I joined him.

We smoked together and talked for a few minutes. I told him how much I loved Moonface and Wolf Parade. He thanked me and talked about how wonderful their trip in Japan had been—about pasta, mountain cabins where they’d been playing shows, and the strange practical question artists like him face about housing.

He mentioned that for a working musician it’s not always clear whether buying a house is even possible.

It was a fascinating glimpse into the everyday realities of touring musicians.

That night remains the greatest musical moment of my life, followed only by Annie Hardy once playing “After the Gold Rush” on a piano in Band Home.

---

IV. Jay Som — Boston, 2018

Later that same year, in mid-December, I saw Jay Som in Boston at a tiny club.

There was no stage. Cables snaked everywhere like a rat’s nest across the floor. The band was maybe five feet away from the audience.

Thirty minutes before the show Jay Som stepped out to take a walk and see some friends. I remember briefly wondering whether she’d make it back in time.

Outside on the small porch I ended up smoking with the band’s guitarist. I offered him a cigarette made from fancy black tobacco I’d bought on 42nd Street.

He lit it and laughed.

“Man,” he said, “I haven’t had one of these in forever.”

We talked for a while. He asked my story. I told him I liked Jay Som a lot but was really in town to see Phosphorescent.

Then, for no particular reason, I told him about Isobel.

He listened patiently for several minutes, then told me about some of the women in his own life. It was one of those brief porch conversations between strangers that somehow becomes unexpectedly real.

Then Jay Som returned and everyone drifted back inside for the show.

---

V. Matthew Houck and the Phosphorescent Run

In December 2018 I followed Matthew Houck and Phosphorescent across several East Coast cities.

Brooklyn. Philadelphia. Washington, D.C. Boston.

It felt less like attending concerts than like a small pilgrimage.

---

Brooklyn

The first show was at Brooklyn Steel.

I got lost on the way because I mistakenly went to Brooklyn Bowl, where I’d seen a Hold Steady show earlier that week. I used their Wi-Fi to look up directions and the map claimed Brooklyn Steel was fifteen minutes away.

It took closer to an hour.

Eventually two guys outside an electrical shop pointed the way and mentioned that the building used to be a foundry. I walked another five blocks and found the place, still early enough to be the first person in line.

I smoked a few cigarettes, watched the roadies unload equipment, and studied the program.

The show started around seven.

The band sounded fantastic. Pedal steel, keyboards, guitars, bass, drums, Houck at the center introducing each member with his trademark warmth. I thought the highlights would be “A New Birth in New England” or “C’est La Vie No. 2,” but the song that truly stunned me was “These Rocks.”

After the show a young woman helped me borrow Wi-Fi so I could order an Uber back to my Best Western in Brooklyn. Without it I would have been completely stranded.

---

Philadelphia

The next night was Philadelphia, at a medium-sized venue somewhere between First and Tenth Street.

The crowd was rowdier than Brooklyn, which had felt a bit corporate and sedate.

The show itself was better.

It also happened to fall the night before a strange and memorable evening in the city—an encounter I later wrote about in a short story called Simona.

I’ll leave it at that here.

---

Washington, D.C.

The peak of the run came at the legendary 9:30 Club.

I arrived early enough to watch soundcheck and spent time talking with the merch girl. I bought a black sweatshirt with gold C’est La Vie lettering.

When she asked where I was from and I said Japan, and that I’d flown across the world to see the band, she smiled and said she’d be sure to tell Matthew.

The show was extraordinary.

“A New Birth in New England.”
“Song for Zula.”
“Wolves,” with Houck’s distinctive keening vocal.

After the show Houck came offstage sweating, a towel around his neck, and began greeting fans along the rope line—handshakes, fist bumps, quick thanks.

Maybe fifty people in he spotted me.

He stepped over the rope.

Then he gave me the biggest bear hug I have ever received in my life.

---

Boston

The final show was at Royale Nightclub on December 8, 2018.

After the show it happened again.

I was wearing the same C’est La Vie sweatshirt. Houck saw me in the line, stepped over the rope once more, and engulfed me in another huge hug.

The show itself was good—the third best of the run after DC and Philly—but the moment that stayed with me was the hug.

What stayed with me wasn’t the hug itself, but the certainty behind it. Most gestures come wrapped in hesitation or self-consciousness; people soften their own impact before they even reach you. Houck didn’t. And part of the weight was this: he’d been through it himself—not abstractly, not a decade removed, but in the very songs he wrote on Muchacho, the record he made after his own life had come apart. He’d talked about it publicly, openly, without varnish. So when he came down off the stage to hug me, it wasn’t fandom or performance or politeness. It was recognition—one human being who had already walked through his own fire seeing another who was still in it.

And the thing about weight is that you feel it instantly.

For a second, you’re not holding yourself up alone.

Someone else is taking on a share.

That’s why I remember it.

Not because it was dramatic.

Because it was unmistakably real.

---

Dedication:
May All Your Favorite Bands Stay Together

Note: This essay records a handful of brief encounters I had over the years with the members of Yo La Tengo, one of the great American indie bands and, for me personally, one of the most enduring. The moments themselves were small—concert lobbies, a quick conversation after a show, a late-night lounge in New York—but taken together they trace a kind of informal pilgrimage across three cities: Osaka, Nagoya, and New York.

I have always believed that one of the quiet pleasures of music culture lies in these peripheral moments that occur around the shows themselves. The concert may be the main event, but the surrounding details—the room layout, the crowd energy, the odd logistical mishaps, the late-night drift after the final encore—often linger just as vividly in memory. In that sense this piece is less a formal profile of Yo La Tengo than a record of how a band can intersect with the ordinary movement of a listener’s life over time.

Readers familiar with the band will recognize references to particular songs, shows, and traditions, including the annual Hanukkah run at the Bowery Ballroom. Those unfamiliar with them need only know that Yo La Tengo have spent decades building a reputation not only for adventurous music but also for an unusually warm relationship with their audience. The line that Georgia Hubley offered in the Bowery lounge—“I wasn’t laughing at you, I was laughing at us”—captures that spirit better than anything I could add.

As with many pieces on this site, the aim here is simply to record a moment in the long conversation between artists and listeners before the details fade.

Epigraph:

“There’s a girl with cherry chapstick on / and nothing more.”
— Yo La Tengo, “Cherry Chapstick”

---

Yo La Tengo are one of my five favorite bands of all time. This is not a ranking I arrive at lightly. I have spent a great deal of my life listening to music, following bands around cities and continents when possible, and forming what might politely be called attachments. Yo La Tengo are in that upper tier for me — a band whose records have followed me through several distinct eras of life and whose live shows I have tried to see whenever geography allowed.

Over the years I ended up meeting the band four separate times, in three cities on two continents. None of the encounters were long or particularly dramatic. But taken together they form a small personal arc that seems worth recording.

---

I. Osaka, 2013

The first time was in Osaka in 2013 at the old Club Quattro Osaka.

This was the old Quattro, not the newer one near Osaka Station. The room had a peculiar layout: two staircases rising on either side and a central standing area with a railing. It wasn’t quite a mosh pit but could probably have doubled as one in an emergency.

The room was packed that night.

I had seen Yo La Tengo a couple of times before by then, but this particular show was one of those nights where everything clicked. They played “Blue Line Swinger,” the electric version of “Big Day Coming,” and then about halfway through the set they launched into “Sugarcube.”

“Sugarcube” might be their most perfect single. Personally I have always had a soft spot for “Cherry Chapstick,” but “Sugarcube” is the one that detonates a room. When that opening riff landed the whole place lifted.

After the show my wife Sachie, my son Hugh, and I ended up in the lobby area where the band were greeting people. Hugh was ten years old at the time and wearing a bright orange Oregon State University T-shirt I had picked up at an IB World Student Conference a few years earlier. We asked if he could take a picture with Ira Kaplan and Ira kindly obliged. Hugh stood there grinning next to him in that oversized orange shirt while the rest of us hovered nearby.

The photo still exists on my Facebook page somewhere.

That was encounter number one.

---

II. Nagoya, November 2018

The second encounter came five years later in Nagoya.

This was during a strange and transitional period of my life. I had recently resigned from my position at Ritsumeikan and was in what might generously be called a wandering phase. I was writing a lot, experimenting with live-streaming shows on Periscope, and generally drifting around Japan following whatever cultural events caught my attention.

Yo La Tengo were playing at the Nagoya Quattro on a weekday, so I took a train up and stayed in a hotel right next to the venue.

The show itself was excellent, but the real drama of the evening involved the security guard.

I had started filming parts of the set for Periscope, which in those days felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Unfortunately the security guard — a Western guy — did not share this opinion. For the better part of the show we played a kind of duck-duck-goose game around the room. Every time he approached I would lower the phone. Every time he disappeared I would start filming again.

Eventually he gave up.

By the encore I filmed the whole thing.

I also managed to get a couple of photographs of Ira standing above the cables on the stage in a wash of purple fluorescent light that made him look vaguely angelic. They are still some of my favorite concert photos.

After the show I ended up speaking briefly with the band again. I mentioned that I would be coming to New York in a few weeks for their Hanukkah shows at the Bowery Ballroom.

Then I made what I now recognize was a somewhat ambitious request.

I asked if they might consider playing “Shy Dog,” a very deep cut from the early days.

Georgia Hubley laughed.

Fair enough.

So I tried again.

“Well,” I said, “if not that, maybe play something special in New York.”

Ira smiled slightly and said, in a tone that suggested nothing and everything at once:

“Oh, we’ll play something.”

That was the end of encounter number two.

---

III. New York, December 2018

A few weeks later I arrived in New York.

The first minor complication of the trip occurred before the show even began. For reasons that now escape me I had convinced myself that I needed a printed ticket. So I went to a Kinko’s somewhere near the Westin on 47th Street and printed one out.

It turned out the phone ticket would have worked perfectly well.

So I effectively paid twice.

The show itself cost forty-five dollars, which felt like a bargain.

Night one featured an opening set by the Sun Ra Arkestra. At one point Yo La Tengo joined them on stage and the whole thing became a swirling cosmic jam session. Afterward I wandered outside to smoke and gave a homeless guy two cigarettes and a light. He asked me for cash but I told him honestly that I didn’t have much on me and needed it for drinks inside.

Later that night I met a man who had written a history of LSD. He handed me a copy of the book, but it was a massive hardcover and too heavy to carry around. I ended up leaving it on the back stairs of the venue.

The next day I moved hotels to the citizenM New York Bowery, which sits practically next door to the Bowery Ballroom.

Night two opened with a small comedy trio — two women and a guy — who did an unexpectedly funny set involving various hats as props. After that Jon Langford performed, and once again Yo La Tengo joined him on stage.

The set that followed was eclectic and generous. Georgia sang a lot, which the audience clearly loved — songs like “Autumn Sweater” always seem to produce a particular kind of hush in a room.

They played “Cherry Chapstick,” which made me happy, along with “Blue Line Swinger” and a variety of other favorites.

No “Shy Dog,” though.

The encore leaned more toward the Langford material.

Good songs, but not quite the same thing.

---

IV. The Lounge

After the show I drifted down to the lounge area beneath the venue.

A beautiful woman was playing vinyl records — mostly old jazz LPs — pulling them out of crates one by one. There is something hypnotic about watching someone work through a stack of records late at night. She seemed completely absorbed in the process.

Eventually I saw Georgia again. Ira was nearby talking with other fans.

I reminded her about the Nagoya conversation.

“You laughed when I asked about ‘Shy Dog,’” I said.

She nodded immediately. She remembered.

Then she said something I have thought about many times since.

“I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said. “I was laughing at us.”

I loved that answer and told her so.

We talked a little longer. I mentioned that on this trip I was also seeing The Hold Steady and Jay Som, but that the main reason I had come east was to see Phosphorescent.

She said she didn’t know them, which surprised me.

Then she asked my favorite band.

“Luna,” I said.

She laughed again — in a friendly way this time — and told me they had actually considered inviting Luna to join the Hanukkah run but it hadn’t worked out.

“They all know Dean and Britta,” she added.

Small world.

After a while I said goodbye, lingered for a few minutes listening to the jazz records, and then stepped out into the night.

Within two minutes I had found myself at Mama’s Ruin, a place that would later appear in my Thin Man New York story.

But that is another tale entirely.

---

Dedication

For Ira, Georgia and James.

New Note: This essay sits roughly in the middle of my writing life online. By the time it was written I had already spent several years experimenting with ideas and forms in earlier blogs—first Classical Sympathies, which was more academic and literary in tone, and later Jungian Intimations, which tried to bring Jungian psychology, symbolism, and dream material into a more personal register. Both projects were attempts to understand the terrain of the mind and the pressures placed on a thinking person trying to live inside modern institutions.

“On Coming Through” belongs to that same line of inquiry, but it also marks a turning point. At the time I felt strongly that one phase of life—what might loosely be called early adulthood—was coming to a close. The essay reflects an effort to make sense of that closing: the roles I had played, the ambitions that had driven me, and the ways in which those ambitions both clarified and constrained the direction of my life.

The language of Jung, Hollis, and Rudhyar appears throughout the piece because those writers were the tools I was using at the time to think about cycles of development, identity, and what Jung famously called individuation. Looking back now, some of the terminology feels a little grand, but the underlying questions remain ones I still care about: how a person develops a provisional identity in youth, how that identity eventually exhausts itself, and how one finds the courage to begin again.

In hindsight this essay also foreshadows something that had not yet fully taken shape for me: the idea that writing itself might become the primary vehicle through which I would explore those questions. The project I mention near the end—“Where I’m Coming From: A Straight Answer to the Smart Kids”—was never completed in the form imagined here. But in another sense it never really went away either. Many of the later essays I would write over the following decade, including those that eventually appeared on The Kyoto Kibbitzer, are variations on that same impulse: to record honestly what it feels like to move through the world as a reflective person trying to make sense of culture, relationships, and the shifting terrain of the self.

For that reason I have left the essay largely as it was originally written. It captures a particular moment in the middle of the journey—after the early experiments of Classical Sympathies and Jungian Intimations, but before the more narrative, outward-facing voice that would later emerge. Seen from that vantage point, it reads less like a conclusion and more like a bridge between phases of thought and writing.

Note: This little piece is a lightly structured meditation on aspects of the past and clarification of intentions concerning the future.  It appends my previous statement of intent from four years ago (posted below).  Although there is some continuity of concern, specifically around the nature of the demands that playing a role or roles in society places on the individual actor, and some continuity of theory through the continued influence of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, hopefully there is some new material and new thinking as well.  I should acknowledge a debt to several writers whom I have read intensively over the past four years: most especially this piece bears the fingerprints of Carl Jung, James Hollis, and Dane Rudhyar, and many of the ideas here would not exist, or at least not be as fully articulated, without their assistance.  I should also acknowledge that I have been experimenting with different means of writing, different approaches to producing a text, and to the extent that anything herein bears traces of the spirit I can claim no credit.

Epigraph:

“I wanna dedicate this to someone out there watching tonight, I know she knows who she is.”

Bob Dylan, spoken introduction to “Oh Sister.”  From the bootleg record “Songs for Patty Valentine.”

Today I feel as if I stand at the edge of a new world.  The journey through early adulthood has drawn itself to a close, in stages, over the past several years, and I am alive to the fact that a new journey must now be set out upon.  In order to face any new journey properly, with intelligence and intention, we are called upon first to recognize the altered nature of the landscape we will make our way across in the new phase.

The longer I live, the more I understand the words of Ecclesiastes, “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens.”  Each era of our lives, each season, sometime even each week or set of weeks, seems to take on a certain coloring and certain characteristics that differentiate it from what came before, just as each zone of time seems to require different things of us.  The strength of our intention and will, as well as the quality and effectiveness of our reactions and decision making, are forever put to the test in small ways, and large ones, and we are forced to define, if only to ourselves, the nature of our relationship to our surroundings, our community, our dharma, our fate.

When we are young, time seems to stretch on almost indefinitely.  The summer of my eighth year, for example, was experienced as a vast expanse of almost undifferentiated time; two or three weeks would pass in a barely conscious haze of biking around my parent’s property, hiking and collecting stones from quarries in the area, or sitting on the roof in the sun, a child in the flow of nature, without “problems” of his own.  Looking back on such a period today, it indeed has a coloring of a kind, and this coloring is so loaded with low-grade nostalgia and barely remembered circumstances that my memories exist not so much in the form of events, rather in the form of a “feel.”  I have a sense of what it felt like to be eight, a sense of the patterns into which life energy fell or was collected, pooled, also a sense of my budding interests, which would in time round into what we are pleased to call “personality.”  There was nothing specific that I was “up to,” and I never had the need to think more than a day or so in advance.  The expression of my energy was essentially aligned with the desires of my heart as much as at that age we can know these at all–or perhaps that is just the point, in a state of primitive unknowingness we are naturally and effortlessly aligned with the desires of our heart, and only when we begin to have to analyze or ask after these do we begin to lose connection with them.

As we grow, the process of socialization begins to crowd in on us, and no person, no personality, is wholly free from the pressures of socialization, of collective expectation, of the reactive categorizations and projections of the always slightly behind-the-curve zeitgeist.  Depending on our own type and manner of apprehending the world as it appears to us, we react and position ourselves in some relation to, at some angle toward, the categories and projections that surround us.  Indeed, both the conformist and the rebel define themselves in relation to and reaction to “the system,” and in many ways their respective positioning is far more similar than otherwise.  Dane Rudyhar makes this point clearly, as do, in more elliptical and elaborated terms, Berger and Luckmann.  Even those (myself for example) who purport or imagine to be able to live outside of collective expectations, to create their own life and write their own script, yet define themselves primarily through the categories that the zeitgeist makes available–it takes work, huge, lasting work, to even begin to transcend one’s era and circumstance in even the smallest part.

The first part of life is necessarily a struggle to find one’s footing in the swim of society, to demonstrate value, usefulness, and the ability to check whichever boxes one is asked to check.  Occasionally, we meet someone who in significant ways seems to have wrenched herself free of some of this static at an earlier age, but even such persons habitually define themselves in terms of existing categories and remain to some extent still a prisoner of them.  For most of us, the child turned young adult, buffeted by external events and demands, adjusts herself over a period of years by applying her core characteristics, tendencies, and abilities to the game as it seems to present itself, and in the process slowly relinquishes immediate touch with that inner voice that provided direction to the child of nature who knew instinctively what was and wasn’t good for her, what was and wasn’t desirable.

At the same time, the goals that one identifies for oneself in youth are not to be lightly dismissed.  They do often provide a symbol sufficient, to borrow Jung’s phrase, to drive libido up a gradient steeper than nature; one learns to accomplish “work,” and to appreciate both the material and ego-related satisfactions that comes from this accomplishment.  Jung says as much when he tells us that it is essentially heathy and necessary when a young person becomes “entangled with fate” which “(involves) him in life’s necessities and the consequent sacrifices and efforts through which his character is developed and his experience matured.”  This dance with fate leads us into a variety of positions and stances, some of which we may carry out with grace and ease, others of which require contortions which we preform without a clear sense of the relationship between the presented or required form and our ability to functionally engage with that form.

Under the pressure to make something of ourselves, to build a career, a business, an image, a body of work, to make more of time by trying to subdue it, we may come to feel that we have found the game, we are on the fast track, we are properly situated under the stage lights, playing the part as it is supposed to be played.  A little light, a little attention, these things classically and nearly inevitably lead to a degree of what Jung calls “inflation,” the expansion of ego-consciousness and the over-identification with the product of one’s work in the world as the summum bonum.  The small still voice of the spirit recedes, or expresses itself through fantasy and other forms of idle ideational free association–fantasies of setting out to sea, of starting over with a new name in an unknown land, of being orphaned and having to fend for oneself, intriguing as these dreams may be they most often serve to cement through counterpoint the existence we actually live out and the style, or lack thereof, in which we do so.

My favorite singer, Matthew Houck from Phosphorescent has a song called Los Angeles where he describes the deeply ambivalent relationship one can have toward one’s accomplishments in the world.  He sings:

The road is alive/ And everybody’s all here/ I’m closing my eyes/ Till the colours appear/ Oh me oh my/ Ain’t it funny up here/ To stand in the light/ Said I ain’t come to Los Angeles just to die

They told me my eyes/ Would never be clearer/ To hold on to mine/ Make good money out here/ They told me those lies/ Just a grinning from ear to ear/ They said ‘here is our offer, ain’t it fine’

Are you getting a lot of attention now/ Are you bleeding in every direction now/ Are they covering you up with affection now/ Are they giving you a lot of attention now…Said I ain’t came here to Los Angeles, baby, just to die

I know, in exquisite and painful detail, exactly what Houck means (or I know exactly what he means to me, which is all the audience can ever really claim to know).  He means that when you bring your interior goods, your art, your vision, your beauty and light, out into the public eye and when some part of that is seen as having value or serving the purposes of established interests, an offer is made whereby your specific value, your original genius and spark, is rewarded at the same time as it is strangled, rewarded through exposure and compensation, and strangled as established interests nearly always (but perhaps not absolutely always) want and need to tie you to a set of projections and definitions that have already taken external form and are recognized as valid, and therefore commodifiable, categories.

At the same time, the singer in this equation is not without culpability in the narrowing of his own genius.  He knows that the kind of attention he is getting is dangerous for him, that it threatens to bring out his worst tendencies, his tendency toward excess, and to distance him from the source of his own art, but he is getting a little addicted to the attention, to the light.  The paradox, or trap, turns out to be that it is very, very difficult for a younger person in the first flush of ego-development to stand in the stage lights for too long without beginning to mistake this external light for the light inside.  Although the singer is trapped, he recognizes the trap, recognizes that he is dying out there, and the song remains hopeful, hopeful that the singer will be able to relocate the reasons for coming to Los Angeles in the first place.  After all, if he didn’t come all the way to Los Angles just to die, he came for some other purpose.

However, what the singer maybe does not recognize is that sometimes a death is necessary in order for life to begin anew.  Most ancient cultures, perhaps all, practiced sacrifice, and the idea at the heart of sacrifice is precisely this–new life follows inexorably from the exhaustion of the old.  The ancients, being literal minded and without the ability to metaphorize as fully as humanity has since learned to, could only see this sacrifice as taking physical form–thus human and animal sacrifice entailed actual bloodletting.  The story of Issac in the Bible, as well as the story of Job, are in fact kind of metaphors for a psychological hinge point in the development of consciousness among the people of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, a development which eventually led, among other things, to the dwindling of the use of such literal forms of religious sacrifice, but the core idea remains in our present culture in all sorts of places.  (Indeed, much of the Old Testament deals with the development of what we call “consciousness” and the alterations in the character of the Old Testament god mirror alterations in the fundamental psychological character and mentality of the swim of generations over a period of several hundred or a thousand years leading up to to the birth of Christ.)  That is kind of another story, so let us just say that all nature seems to be structured around cyclicality, not so much linearity.  From the ashes of the old comes the living spark of the new.  

The above outline of the first flush of adulthood and its inevitable compromises is not original to me, and those who have looked honestly and hard at the development of the human life have set out this process much more precisely.  James Hollis puts it this way: “What I have called the middle passage arises from the collision of the provisional personality–that group of behaviors, attitudes toward self and other, and reflexive responses which the child is obliged to assemble and manage its relationship with an all powerful environment–with the insurgency of the natural, instinctual Self (…) The passage is experienced as an enervation of the former way of seeing oneself or of one’s functioning in the world (…) The exhaustion of the old is the occasion for the advent of the new, though we are seldom pleased to suffer that death which is necessary for older values to be supplanted.  In fact, one may wander, alone and afraid, for a very long time in the great In-Between before a new psychic image will arise to direct libido into the required development channel.”  Enervation means weakening, loss of vigor, and what Hollis points to in his description of mid-life is a kind of inflection point that I think actually occurs periodically through life, a juncture where one is obliged to examine that agglomeration of the “provisional personality” and the diminishing returns it may be receiving.  Once again, constructing an effective set of behaviors and approaches to the work of life turns out not to be a fully linear process, rather it seems to be cyclical and to necessitate periods of emptiness and exhaustion as well as periods of zenith and culmination.

The last three years of my own life have been but stages toward the exhaustion of this provisional personality.  A character from the television show “The Wire,” explaining to another character that when he says he is ready he means it, says something to the effect of: “you have no idea what I had to do to get to where I am today.”  To the extent that I have embodied and carried out my statement of intent from 2010 (see post below), I can with some justification say the same.  Being in a position to say this is not necessarily the most pleasant place to be, and I cannot really recommend my process and progress through the proverbial belly of the whale to anyone, certainly not to anyone with a faint heart.  However, along the way I have been blessed, there is no better word, to have met extraordinary people who have given me essential clues as to from where and in which direction my second journey would launch.  I have also been fortunate beyond all measure and worthiness to have received several “big dreams,” and if this indeed characteristic of the stellium in my astrological ninth house (Rudhyar writes that a ninth house person will be drawn to “whatever expands a person’s field of activity or the scope of his mind–long journeys, close contacts with other cultures and with foreigners in general, and (…) ‘great dreams'”) I will take it.  Finally, through periods of intense work and strain which have combined, sometimes combustibly and unpredictably with both great people and great dreams, my consciousness has pulsed or rippled open a fraction, in the process integrating to some extent my inferior functions, first feeling, and then, more challengingly, sensing.

Coming to terms with one’s inferior functions is an essential part of coming to terms with one’s limitations, as these are much the same thing.  However, in some mysterious way that I can barely begin to name, I feel as if I am carrying, and trying to pay off, a larger karmic debt of some kind.  To be honest, I don’t even know how to begin to write about this.  Two years ago, in the autumn, I consulted a humanistic astrologer based in the United Kingdom.  Very well known in her field, she turned out, over Skype, to be deeply learned as well as deeply open and generous.  Her reading was strong, interesting in every respect, but still it was a reading–she has a professional method which she applied with ease and confidence.  Except in one respect–twice during the reading she stumbled, paused, lot her train of thought and said that she couldn’t put her finger on something.  The first time was when she said that I was on the verge of leaving behind an ancestral inheritance 500 years in the making.  She didn’t know what this was, but said it was in my bloodline.  Thirty minutes later or so she cycled back to it, saying she couldn’t make it out but that I was poised to see something or break out of a way of reacting or thinking that had held back my ancestors for generations.  Her reading took place a few months after my inheritance dream, which occurred in the summer of 2011.  Here is the dream:

My father is due to receive an inheritance, and his acceptance of it somehow enables others (his extended family) to also share in the inheritance.  My mother is telling me this in a darkened bedroom with my father outside the door.  She doesn’t want him to hear that she is telling me this, and keeps lowering her voice.  I get the impression that my father’s portion of the inheritance is relatively small, but somehow his taking of it is key to everyone’s access.  While at first I think that it is only a medium sized inheritance, suddenly the television comes on and begins to give more backstory.  It turns out, according to the program, that my father is attached, in a roundabout way, to one of the largest fortunes in the world, and one that is intimately connected to shadowy political power in some unnamed European countries (perhaps Germany, Austria, but spilling westward as well).  The program is a fairly typical expose of networks and hidden hands behind the throne, but nonetheless absolutely riveting.  There is a single male figure at the center of this network, shown briefly in the dream standing behind a spokesman who is speaking into a microphone.  This takes place on a lawn in front of a large and well-to-do house, but both the male figure and the house appear relatively normal and not obviously terrifying or malevolent.  My father’s reluctance to take up his inheritance thus represents a reluctance to involve himself in the political power networks, but the program makes clear through implication that failure to take up the inheritance poses a danger both to himself, and perhaps to my mother and myself.  Much or all of the action in the dream takes place indirectly–through implication or (literally) through a screen.

Humankind being a pattern seeking animal, of course I immediately connected the two data points with a third, the moment in which Ruth Van Reken, the author of “Third Culture Kids” and basically co-founder of this field of study, told me in a hotel lounge in Singapore in March of that same year that god had a mission for me, and a fourth, a quiet but persistent inner voice telling me I had a gift that was not being fully given to others, a gift I was holding inside, that I had another gear, that perhaps I hadn’t come to Los Angeles just to die.

What, in hindsight, I was dealing with and trying to make sense of was in fact Hollis’ insurgent self, a self which was seeking a new psychic image, a new core myth around which a fresh tapestry of charged energy could be woven.  I was living Jung’s individuation, or it was living through me.  This quest was apparent as the subtext to the inheritance dream, and many others of that period.  After writing down the inheritance dream I commented as follows:

There is a lot of context for the dream, best summarized as a fluid and somewhat wild/ chaotic/ noisy social night scene.  This kind of backdrop is quite common in my dreams, so much so I am inclined to refer to my ‘long night dreams’.  These usually take place over several ‘hours’ and spill late into the night or early morning.  They generally build through escalating events/ imagery and crystalize in a single memorable and stirring image.  The dream about an inheritance is in this larger category, but the specific incident in question feels broken out of its immediate context and stands alone in the dreamspace.

Another memorable long night dream from a slightly earlier period culminated in a scene where I came upon a group of revelers around a bonfire, deep in the forest, swinging in hammocks or dancing unrestrainedly some hours after midnight–maybe two in the morning.  Although I was not, knew I was not, of them, I longed to join in their joyous communal frenzy.  This image of a revelry around a bonfire possessed an energetic charge that animated all that came into contact with it, in other words this image, the image of the inheritance, and other images buried late in these long night dreams, were presenting themselves as possible material for my personal myth.  I can imagine a life founded on the idea of an enormous inheritance or a communal dance just as the grail image has, as Robert Johnson convincingly argues, served as the founding myth for western masculinity for a thousand years.

Standing back a little, and thinking about how it is that I have the courage to face a new journey, certain steps, some fairly conventional, others rather more esoteric and specific, have been necessary for me to face the future with confidence and with nerve, to lay the past to rest, to open a new channel to life.  Life, sounds, smells, textures, colors, spill into me and swirl around as never before, and a multi-year process has certainly reached exhaustion, and cleared the way for a realized rebirth.  Rudhyar writes revealingly about the ending of a cycle: “Any person who has had to improvise a speech after a dinner party knows how difficult it is to bring his talk to a convincing and significant end.  When coming to the close of their speech many speakers fumble, repeat themselves, go from climax to anticlimax, and perhaps let their words die out wearily and inconclusively (…) The composer of music, the dramatist, and the novelist often find the same difficulty when confronted with the obvious necessity of bringing their works to a conclusion.”  He goes on: “the natural end of everything is exhaustion–one gets exhausted and so do the people around you.  The speech or the individual himself, dies rather meaninglessly of old age.  Unless the self, the spiritual being, takes control and, binding up all the loose strings of the great lifelong effort, gathers the most essential elements into an impressive and revealing conclusion, there is danger that the great moment will become obscured by the settling dust of the struggle.”

Here, Rudhyar seems to be talking about the end of life, but a little later it becomes clear that he is actually talking about all acts, all events: “The art of bringing every experience to a creative end is the greatest of all arts (…) What this art demands first of all is the courage to repudiate the ‘ghosts’ of the past.  It is this repudiation that is also called severance (…) One must have the courage to dismiss the things unsaid, the gestures unloved, the love unexperienced, and to make a compelling end on the basis of what has been done.”  In other words, a graceful ending acknowledges that there is a great deal more that could have been done, and nonetheless strives to encapsulate and put into perspective that which was done.

With exhaustion of the old comes, as we have seen, the first breath of the new.  In what areas, to what purpose, and up which gradient ought I to apply my newfound energies and intent?  I suspect that the paying off of whatever karmic debt I am holding is a necessary feature of taking up whatever inheritance is to be assumed.  Once again, Rudhyar gives us a hint when he writes of crossing the threshold of rebirth: if the individual “has absorbed and assimilated the darkness represented by the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’–the memories and complexes of the personal and collective Unconscious–then the Tone of the new cycle can ring out clearly.  The individual, conscious of his true Identity, is able to use for his purpose of destiny whatever conditions have been inherited from his past and the past of his race, from his parents and from humanity” (italics in the original).

I love this phrase, “the Tone of the new cycle,” capitalized Tone, (by which we could also understand to mean “style”).  If indeed I am saddled with some sort of baggage from centuries past, an idea which I do not advance lightly in the least, then clearly it is my duty as a future directed individual who simultaneously “believes” in cyclicality as a basic principle of human and natural operations, to transform the elements of this baggage, this ragged tune, into a new tone which can ring clear to anyone who might benefit in some way from hearing it.  My listeners, my audience, are those smart kids who, blessed and cursed with preciosity, struggle to make sense of the terrain of their own mind which, in the immortal words of Gerard Manly Hopkins has mountains, O the mind, mind has mountains.

In order to reach authentically another I need then to perform in my own style.  Arriving at an original style is the first great challenge for any artist; in the arts formally this generally entails assimilating the style of others with one’s own insurgent urge toward expression such that the resulting product is recognizably your own and resonates with your inner sense of what you are about.  The effort to live one’s life with style, to make of one’s life a work of art, is harder still, for instead of working toward a finished product, a song, a novel, poem, or canvas, we are instead seeking to infuse each moment, each encounter, each event pocket, with creative intent and energy.  This effort requires attention as well as imagination, and here attention and imagination exist in a delicate and precise balance. Without attention the mind quickly loses itself in projection, in maya, the mist of illusion and fantasy.  However, without imagination attention may be overly focussed in the immediately apparent and explicable.  Hollis quotes Gaston Bachelard: “Psychically, we are created by our reverie–created and limited by our reverie–for it is the reverie which delineates the furthest limits of our mind.”  The courage to imagine, to wander, and to bring back to and integrate into diurnal consciousness the imprints and impressions of our furthest wanderings, this is the courage we may need in order to live at the highest levels of creativity.

This essay is beginning to feel the pressure to make a compelling end.  The other evening, I ran into an acquaintance from an earlier incarnation and we started talking event theory.  He summarized his own view of events in five words: “an event should be eventful.”  The eventfulness of an event depends on both the arrangement and combination of space, time and energy to create an event arc with pockets of luminosity and on the willingness of the participant to experience eventfulness, to happen.  Oddly, happenings are neither entirely willed and created nor entirely received.  Instead, happenings and events transpire in the liminal band between will and fate, writer and muse, figure and ground.  Phosphorescent again: “See I was the wounded master/ oh then I was the slave/ my hands and my mouth, aw honey/ they would not behave/ See, I was the holy writer/ then I was the page/ I was the bleeding actor/ then I was the stage.”  Who are we in our journey through life, around, and back again?  Are we the maker, or the made?  The master, or the slave?  The writer, or the page?  The actor, or the stage?  The happening, or the happened to?  Are we in charge of our own destiny or awash and afloat in a current so much stronger than we are?  Are we all of these things simultaneously?  What is my mission on this new journey I am called to alight upon?  What is the mission of my young friends, a generation younger than I, who face the difficult transition to adulthood in the keening wind of the 21st century?

My deepest wish is simply this, that today’s smart kids may navigate the delicate relationship between their mind and their life during the first half of life in a more graceful and integrated manner than have I, that they receive, if only from a handful of people, compassionate help and understanding to this end, and that the experiences visited upon me may in some small way assist this integration, if necessary as a sort of sacrifice.  Perhaps in the end this makes me too an “established interest.”  However, I hope I have no specific requirements any more than I have specific requirements for myself, no program, no method, no dogma other than the welling hope that when they reach their own Los Angeles they are able to negotiate their own terms upon being asked to stand for a while in the light.

On the last page of Italo Calvino’s masterpiece Invisible Cities, the Great Khan and Marco Polo are concluding their conversation about Polo’s travels across the globe.

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.  There are two ways to escape suffering it.  The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.  The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who worked at Cambridge, once advised a colleague to leave the university as there was “no oxygen” for him there.  Upon being asked why then he, Wittgenstein, stayed, the philosopher is said to have replied: “It doesn’t matter…I manufacture my own oxygen.”  While I am deeply grateful to those handful of people who have gone out of their way to give me space, in some ways I feel as if I have to too great a degree, had to manufacture my own oxygen.  Perhaps the atmosphere of the coming journey will consist of some other arrangement of elements such that oxygen, or whatever allows one to breath there, is made more freely available.  In the meantime, I intend to give the only gift that I have to whichever smart kids might take something away from it.  This gift is simply the truthful and open record of what it has been like for one relatively smart kid to navigate life, relationships, and his own psychology and mentality–a primer on the basic aspects of living the first half of life as a semi-ambitious introverted intuitive living between centuries and shuttling between east and west.  The work will be titled: “Where I’m Coming From: A Straight Answer to the Smart Kids,” and the title itself provides a gradient steeper than nature.

Before any new journey can be set out upon, passage must be secured–I know this because I have dreamt it.  Possessing no riches of my own, the price of the new journey will have to be paid by the brokering of an inscription, a text, of the old one.  This text will necessarily be partial, incomplete, subject to criticism for what it redacts, a map that barely begins to reflect the territory as was the dream text itself, as are all dream texts.  This has to be accepted at the outset; after all even the holy writer is perpetually bound by the constraints of form.  And even as we are writing the record of our coming through that earlier landscape, the greater work of embodying the living word such that the opulent and decorative higher floors of our co-constructed mansion are made manifest through our participation in reverie and revelry, of ascending the far-flung mountains of a new Aeon, will already have begun.

Dedication:

For all the smart kids.

Works Cited/ Referenced:

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

Ecclesiastes.

Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Mind Has Mountains (No Worst, There is None).”

James Hollis, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path.

Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind.

Robert Johnson, He.

Carl Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche.

Van Morrison, “No Guru No Method, No Teacher.”

Phosphorescent, “Los Angeles,” from Here’s to Taking it Easy.

Phosphorescent, “Terror in the Canyons,” from Muchacho.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrological Houses.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker.

Note: This essay takes up my personal four favorite books from the marvelous Adventures of Tintin series. I make no claim for these to be the best, and the list omits the very popular Moon books, however this is the list as it stands. I hope you enjoy Tintin as much as I do, and as always, thank you for reading.

Epigraph:

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you

U2

First Encounter

I first encountered Tintin in Grade 5, checking two slim hardbacks out of the elementary school library: The Blue Lotus and Tintin in America. I remember the physicality of them—the glossy covers, the bright blocks of color, the uncanny clarity of the drawings. They felt different from the other books on the shelf. Most children’s adventure stories required you to imagine the action. Tintin showed it to you panel by panel, with a confidence that made the whole world feel precise and alive.

Even before I fully understood the stories, I had the sense that I had stumbled onto something like treasure. The pages moved quickly. Cars skidded across city streets, gangsters hid in back rooms, deserts stretched into the distance. Tintin himself was fearless and tireless, a boy reporter who seemed capable of appearing anywhere in the world with little more than a notebook, a trench coat, and his small white dog.

But even at ten years old it was clear that the two books belonged to the same universe but not quite the same stage of its development. Tintin in America was energetic and funny but also loose and episodic, closer to a cartoon chase story than a carefully constructed narrative. The Blue Lotus, by contrast, felt deeper. The stakes seemed real. The world seemed larger and more dangerous. The book hinted at forces—politics, empire, war—that I could not yet name but could somehow feel moving behind the story.

Before going further, it’s worth acknowledging briefly the long-running controversy surrounding the politics of Tintin’s creator, Hergé. Some of the early Tintin stories reflect the colonial assumptions and stereotypes common in Europe during the interwar period, and Hergé himself worked for a newspaper in German-occupied Belgium during World War II. These facts have generated decades of debate. They are real and worth knowing. But they are also only one part of a much larger story. Over time Hergé’s work grew more humane, more attentive to other cultures, and more morally complex. For the purposes of this essay, it is enough to acknowledge the controversy and then move on to the books themselves, which remain among the most remarkable achievements in modern popular storytelling.

---

Mr Dreyer’s Class, 7th Grade:

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

---

The Blue Lotus

If the early Tintin books were clever adventure cartoons, The Blue Lotus was the moment the series entered history.

The story takes place in Shanghai during the turbulent 1930s, amid Japanese expansion and international intrigue. What distinguishes the book is not simply the exotic setting but the sudden moral seriousness that runs through it. Tintin is no longer merely chasing criminals. He is navigating a world shaped by imperial ambition, propaganda, and cultural misunderstanding.

Central to this shift is the introduction of Chang Chong-Chen. Chang’s friendship with Tintin humanizes the story in a way earlier books never attempted. Through Chang, the reader glimpses the everyday life of Chinese citizens caught between foreign powers and internal turmoil. The relationship is warm, sincere, and quietly revolutionary for its time.

One sequence has stayed with me since childhood: Tintin being smuggled into an opium den hidden inside barrels. As a child I read the scene simply as a thrilling act of infiltration. As an adult it evokes something darker—the lingering shadow of the opium trade and the colonial exploitation that shaped China’s nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even if young readers do not consciously grasp the historical weight behind it, they feel that something serious is at stake.

With The Blue Lotus, Tintin steps out of the cartoon world of early adventure stories and into a recognizably historical landscape. The hero is still brave and resourceful, but the world around him has grown more complicated.

---

The Crab with the Golden Claws

If The Blue Lotus deepened Tintin’s world morally, The Crab with the Golden Claws transformed it emotionally. The reason can be summed up in a single name: Captain Haddock.

Before Haddock appears, Tintin himself is almost too perfect. He is brave, clever, and incorruptible. Admirable, yes—but also somewhat distant. Haddock brings chaos into this orderly universe. When we first meet him he is a drunken wreck aboard a cargo ship, bullied by the crew and prone to bursts of confused outrage. In his introduction scene he is literally knocked around by events, bonked on the head and stumbling through the narrative like a man who has wandered into the wrong story.

Yet Haddock quickly becomes indispensable. His flaws—his temper, his drinking, his explosive vocabulary—make him recognizably human. Over the course of the series he evolves into the lord of Marlinspike Hall, a man readers root for not because he is flawless but because he struggles, blunders, and ultimately proves loyal beyond measure.

The mystery at the heart of the story—those curious tins of crab that conceal a narcotics smuggling ring—is classic Hergé plotting. An ordinary object becomes the gateway to a hidden criminal network. But what readers remember most is Haddock: the lovable rogue who changes the emotional chemistry of Tintin forever.

---

Land of the Black Gold

Land of Black Gold is one of the most unusual Tintin stories, blending geopolitical intrigue with comic delirium.

The plot centers on sabotage of the world’s gasoline supply, drawing Tintin into a web of international conspiracies in the Middle East. Yet what makes the book memorable is its sense of narrative labyrinth. The trader and raconteur Oliveira da Figueira talks endlessly, spinning stories within stories, improvising explanations that seem to circle back on themselves. His rambling style mirrors the complicated, byzantine nature of the intrigue unfolding around Tintin.

At the same time, chaos erupts in the form of Abdallah, whose relentless practical jokes push everyone toward exasperation.

And then there is the unforgettable desert sequence in which Thomson and Thompson pursue mirages while unknowingly driving in circles along their own tire tracks. The scene borders on hallucination. Heat, confusion, and comic misunderstanding combine to create one of the series’ most surreal episodes.

Where The Blue Lotus introduced moral depth and Crab introduced emotional warmth, Black Gold revels in controlled absurdity—the sense that the modern world is a maze of conspiracies, misunderstandings, and comic misadventures.

---

The Calculus Affair

By the time we reach The Calculus Affair, Tintin has entered an entirely new landscape: the Cold War.

The story begins with the kidnapping of Professor Calculus, whose research has attracted the interest of rival governments. Tintin and Haddock pursue him across borders, into secret fortresses and heavily guarded territories.

What makes this adventure distinctive is the absence of a clear moral center. Earlier Tintin stories often feature obvious villains. Here the lines blur. Rival states compete for technological advantage, intelligence services manipulate events, and even the heroes seem slightly overwhelmed by the scale of the intrigue surrounding them.

Tintin and Haddock are no longer simply solving a mystery. They are wandering into the murky machinery of international espionage.

Yet Hergé never abandons humor. The action sequences—helicopter pursuits, roadblocks, sticky-tape tricks, and frantic car chases—are thrilling while remaining faintly absurd. The tension builds like a spy thriller, but the comic timing prevents the story from becoming grim.

The result is perhaps the most sophisticated Tintin adventure: a tale in which suspense, humor, and geopolitical intrigue coexist in perfect balance.

---

Why Tintin Endures

Across these four books we can see the remarkable evolution of Tintin.

The Blue Lotus brings the series into history.
The Crab with the Golden Claws introduces human imperfection through Haddock.
Land of the Black Gold revels in the comic chaos of modern intrigue.
The Calculus Affair confronts the morally ambiguous world of Cold War espionage.

Through it all, Hergé’s storytelling remains astonishingly clear. Each panel advances the narrative. Each scene unfolds with the precision of a well-designed machine.

Tintin may begin as a boy adventurer, but over time he becomes something else: a traveler moving through the complicated landscape of the twentieth century. History deepens, friendships form, conspiracies multiply, and the world grows ever more ambiguous.

Yet the clarity of the storytelling never falters. That combination—simplicity of form paired with depth of experience—is the secret of Tintin’s endurance.

For many readers, the journey begins exactly as it did for me: a small book taken from a library shelf, opened with curiosity, and discovered to contain an entire world.

Dedication: For Grade School libraries everywhere.

Note: