On Trying (and Failing) to Learn Go

Note: This essay reflects on my long and mostly unsuccessful attempt to learn the game of Go. I first encountered the game through Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which portrays Go not merely as a contest but as a cultural ritual tied to patience, tradition, and dignity. Like many readers, I came away with the impression that the game contained some deep strategic wisdom.

Naturally, I tried to learn it.

The attempt did not go well. Despite buying a few introductory books and trying computer tutorials, I quickly discovered that the game required a kind of spatial patience and intuition that I simply did not possess. The books remain on my shelf as evidence of that early ambition.

The essay also reflects on a friend who has continued studying the game seriously for years, meeting regularly with a teacher and approaching the board with a patience I deeply admire.

Finally, the piece briefly touches on the modern transformation of Go through artificial intelligence. Even as machines have surpassed human players, the quiet ritual of the game continues wherever people sit down together and place the stones.

Epigraph

This game is bloody impossible!

— Matt Thomas


I first heard about Go when I was around twenty-one.

This was 1995 and I was going through what might fairly be called a Japanese literature phase. I was reading Natsume SōsekiJunichiro Tanizaki, and Yasunari Kawabata, along with a terrific mystery writer named Seicho Matsumotowhose books I devoured with great enthusiasm.

Somewhere in that run I encountered Kawabata’s famous novel The Master of Go, which tells the story of an aging master playing a final match against a younger challenger. The novel is less about the tactics of the game than about ritual, tradition, and the quiet passing of an era. The old master loses, and the loss seems to symbolize something larger than a board game.

It made Go sound mystical.

Naturally I decided I should learn it.

This did not go well.

I bought a couple of books with encouraging titles. One of them was called Get Strong at Invading, which sounded promising. Invading! I imagined bold strategic incursions and elegant positional mastery. The whole thing seemed very Japanese, very subtle, very deep.

Then I tried actually playing the game.

At the time I had a computer program that included a beginner tutorial board — the little 9×9 version, which is supposed to be the simplest possible entry point into the game.

I was completely hopeless.

Not slightly confused. Not rusty. I mean utterly lost. I stared at the board as if it were some kind of philosophical diagram whose meaning had been explained to everyone else but me. Stones appeared, shapes formed, and somehow everything I did made the position worse.

Within a short time I realized a painful truth.

I was a complete washout at Go.

I gave up quickly.

The books remain on my shelf to this day.

Go, as it turns out, is not chess.

Chess feels like an argument. Pieces attack and defend, plans unfold, and even when you lose you usually understand why. Go feels more like weather. Stones accumulate quietly across the board until suddenly there is a vast pattern you cannot quite explain but which apparently determines everything.

Experts talk about influence, thickness, and sente.

I am still trying to figure out which group is alive.

My friend Dean, on the other hand, actually plays the game.

Every month or so he meets with an older Japanese gentleman who teaches him. Dean told me once that the teacher has very few students, so he feels a kind of obligation to keep showing up. I admire this enormously.

Dean is a patient man. I have known this since about 2003. He has the stamina to sit with the board, to think, to place stones carefully and let the game develop at its own pace.

Patience is not my natural game.

While Dean studies Go properly, I have mostly watched from the sidelines as the larger story of artificial intelligence unfolded around the game. I had followed the earlier moment when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov back in the 1990s, and I suspected something similar had eventually happened in Go as well.

Sure enough, the breakthrough arrived when AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, defeated top human players. Even the greatest masters of the game now study the moves produced by machines.

The machines, it turns out, understand Go better than we do.

Even attempts to escape the machines do not entirely succeed. When Bobby Fischer invented Fischer Random Chess — now called Chess960 — he hoped to eliminate opening theory and restore creativity to the game. Yet modern engines have mastered that variant as well.

Even Fischer’s attempt to outflank the machines eventually became another playground for them.

Which leaves the rest of us where we began.

Dean continues to sit across the board from his teacher, patiently placing stones and learning the game properly. The ancient rhythms of Go continue quietly in small rooms all over the world.

Meanwhile I remain stuck where I started, staring at a tiny beginner board and wondering what on earth I am supposed to do next.

And the books, I should add, are still on the shelf.

Dedication

For Dean, who plays the long game.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like the essays linked below.

On Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Note: This essay gathers together several different periods of my life when money was tight and the margin for error was thin. Some of these moments go back many years, including a student exchange year in Dunedin, New Zealand, when a bureaucratic oversight left me without a meal plan for most of the academic year and forced me into a very basic daily routine of trail mix, apricot bars, and coffee. Others come from later phases of adulthood: early teaching years in Kumamoto, young family life in Kyoto’s Mukaijima district, the strange suspended months of COVID, and the present day.

I include these episodes not as a complaint but as a recognition of how common this experience actually is. Living paycheck to paycheck is often imagined as the result of bad choices or personal irresponsibility, yet in reality it is frequently the ordinary condition of people who are working hard, raising families, paying tuition bills, navigating institutional decisions, and simply trying to keep their lives moving forward.

The story of my friend Mandiola, included here with his blessing, illustrates another version of the same pattern. A long career in education, a series of institutional shifts, and one administrative decision were enough to push a once-stable life into years of financial improvisation before things slowly stabilized again.

What these experiences have taught me is less about money than about perspective. Hunger sharpens the mind, small kindnesses matter enormously, and the distance between stability and struggle is often much smaller than we imagine. For that reason, the real lesson of living paycheck to paycheck is not resentment but compassion.

Epigraph

Money won’t save your soul.
— Tim Burgess


A lot of people talk about living paycheck to paycheck as if it were a kind of personal failure. A budgeting problem. A lack of discipline. A mistake someone somewhere made.

In reality it is something far more ordinary than that. It is simply the condition in which millions of people live their lives. Often quietly, often competently, and often without anyone around them quite realizing how narrow the margin really is.

I first learned that margin in Dunedin.

I was on exchange at the University of Otago and through a small bureaucratic mix-up I was not on the meal plan. I had no work visa and no savings. My parents sent twenty dollars here and there, but it took months before anyone realized the full situation.

So for nearly the entire academic year I developed a system.

Breakfast and dinner came from a large white bucket in my room: trail mix, carob chips, raisins, peanuts. Lunch every day was the same: one yoghurt-covered apricot bar and one black coffee at the campus canteen. NZ $3.50.

Day after day after day.

My roommates didn’t know. They just thought I hated the mutton they cooked every night. And to be fair, I did hate the mutton.

Every once in a while a friend named Maren would buy me a Snickers and a Coke at the student club and we would sit there watching the O.J. Simpson chase and the trial coverage on television. Those snacks felt like luxury.

But even then I understood something important.

I wasn’t even the hungriest fellow.

After Dunedin, life improved but the margins never entirely disappeared.

In Kumamoto in 1997 I was earning about ¥250,000 a month teaching English at NOVA. It wasn’t a fortune but it was enough. I could go to the izakaya, drink Asahi, play pool, and date the woman who would later become my wife.

It wasn’t abundance, but it was livable.

A few years later, from 2002 to 2004, my wife and I were living in a subsidized apartment in Mukaijima on the Kintetsu Line outside Kyoto. I was working part-time as a social studies teacher and earning roughly the same ¥230,000–250,000 a month.

Our rent was only ¥40,000 thanks to her hospital job in Uji. The apartment had three large rooms, a kitchen, a genkan, and it was surprisingly well insulated.

Our son Hugh had just been born and wasn’t yet in daycare. My wife worked night shifts and often made more money than I did.

We weren’t rich, but we made it work. And we were happy.

Then years later came another version of the same story.

During COVID I took leave from work and drifted into a strange suspended routine. I spent most of my time in my room playing chess online, watching chess streamers, and talking on the phone.

My peak rating reached about 1200, which I was absurdly proud of.

My expenses were minimal because my life had contracted. I only went out drinking with a friend named Philip maybe three times a month, usually to places like Takimiya’s, Stones, or Rub-a-Dub.

Things were precarious, but manageable. Barely.

And then there is the present.

In January of 2024 I had roughly $60,000 in savings and no debt. My wife and I also had about $20,000 in gold and platinum and a couple of retirement plans. It looked, on paper at least, like stability.

But the final years of my son’s schooling at the University of Auckland slowly drained those savings.

As I write this in March of 2026, at age fifty-one going on fifty-two, I have about $3,000 in the bank and another $3,000 on a Kyoto Bank credit card. My ANA card covers most day-to-day expenses, but that line of credit has already been cut once and could disappear again at any time.

I am a professional educator with thirty-five years of experience. I am gainfully employed and reasonably skilled at what I do.

And yet the margin remains thin.

But my story is hardly unique.

My friend Mandiola is sixty-three years old and has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He knows that city better than almost anyone I have ever met. His first job after high school was delivering maps for a map store, which meant driving all over the city and learning it street by street.

Later he earned a degree from a University of California campus and became a high school teacher in the Beverly Hills public school system.

For a while things were stable. Then life intervened.

Divorces, relocations, graduate school that never quite finished, and years of improvisation eventually brought him back to Los Angeles where he landed what he considered a dream job in an independent study program. He taught the children of show-business families and even got to know people like Larry King through the students he worked with.

He loved the work. He was his own boss and taught every subject except music. After school he played board games with the kids.

He was, in his words, in hog heaven.

Then a new administration arrived. He calls them the Chicago mafia.

They decided he was too expensive and too independent. He was replaced, after years of conflict and legal battles, by what he describes as three bureaucratic drones.

A $60,000 settlement kept him afloat for a while, but the money vanished quickly.

When I visited him in Los Angeles in March of 2024 he was essentially broke. He struggled to cover his mortgage, his association fees, his car insurance, and groceries at Trader Joe’s. He borrowed money from friends, from his mother, from anyone willing to help.

Eventually he pieced together work again through substitute teaching and tutoring. Today he earns about $4,100 a month and is just months away from retirement eligibility.

Even now he occasionally borrows money.

Not because he is irresponsible, but because life sometimes simply runs that way.

And that, in the end, is the point.

Living paycheck to paycheck is not a moral failure. It is a structural reality for a huge portion of the population. Careers falter. Administrators make decisions. Tuition bills arrive. Children grow up. Systems fail. Life shifts.

Hard times can strike almost anyone.

What those years taught me — from Dunedin to Kumamoto to Mukaijima to the strange suspended months of COVID and the present day — is how little we actually need to survive, how hunger sharpens the mind, and how enormously small acts of kindness can matter.

But most of all they taught me how close to the edge so many people really are.

Which is why compassion is not optional.

It is necessary. Now more than ever.

Dedication

For the middle and lower classes.
For now and eternity.

Note:

On the Other City

Note: This piece grew out of a long fascination of mine with what might be called the “night economy” — the network of bartenders, servers, managers, taxi drivers, and late-shift workers who keep a city alive after most people have gone home. If the daytime city is governed by office hours and commuter rhythms, the nighttime city runs on a different clock entirely.

The two figures mentioned here, Haku and Haru, are part of that world in Kyoto. Haku runs the bar at ING and seems to operate on a schedule that would puzzle most daylight citizens, opening in the evening and closing well into the small hours while somehow producing food, music, and atmosphere in a space not much larger than a good-sized living room. Haru manages a shisha lounge in eastern Gion and moves easily between the daytime and nighttime rhythms of that neighborhood, which has its own distinct ecosystem of bars, touts, and late-night wanderers.

The small bar Ishimaru Shoten, tucked down an alley off Pontocho in the Kiyamachi district, serves in the essay as a kind of neutral ground — one of those places where the various inhabitants of the nocturnal city briefly cross paths once their shifts end.

The central idea is simple enough: most cities contain two cities. The first is the one that tourists and office workers see during the day. The second comes into view only after midnight, when the people who keep the lights on, the drinks pouring, and the plates spinning begin their own quieter rounds.

Epigraph:

Last night, I told a stranger all about you
They smiled patiently with disbelief
I always knew you would succeed no matter what you tried
And I know you did it all
In spite of me

Morphine, In Spite of Me


Most people believe a city goes to sleep around midnight. This is not true. Around that time a city simply changes populations.

The day city winds down: office workers, shopkeepers, commuters heading home, lights switching off floor by floor. But another population wakes up. The bartenders. The shisha managers. The taxi drivers. The people who work the strange hours when the streets are quieter but the human drama is often louder.

This is the other city.

If you spend enough nights wandering around it, you begin to recognize its citizens. They are the people who actually know how the place works after midnight.

One of them is Haku.

Haku runs the bar at ING. He opens around seven in the evening and closes somewhere between three and four in the morning. Prep starts around six. By the time the first customers wander in, the night has already begun for him.

He has long greying hair and rotates through a collection of Rolling Stones T-shirts, something like twenty-eight of them. I have never seen him wear anything else. He smokes constantly, drinks Sapporo if he is drinking at all, and otherwise survives on black coffee.

Somehow he produces a full menu in a kitchen that appears to consist primarily of a Bunsen burner and sheer stubbornness.

Haku’s bar has rules. No Japanese music is the main one. The other rule is that the bar itself is reserved for singles. Groups can sit elsewhere. The bar is for individuals who have come out into the night alone.

But Haku’s real gift is music. He reads the room the way a card player reads a table.

If the crowd is German he might throw on Rammstein. If Scandinavians wander in the speakers might suddenly fill with black metal. Australians get The Saints. If I’m there he might put on My Morning Jacket. The world rotates through the speakers depending on who happens to be occupying the stools that night.

Simply and totally the original man.

Another citizen of the other city is Haru.

Haru manages the shisha lounge in eastern Gion, a part of town where the nightlife becomes a little more ambiguous. The streets there are full of micro-touts, men and women both, gently trying to guide passersby into Thai or Japanese dancer clubs. Small space heaters glow outside doorways and mama-sans smile from behind them like patient spiders.

I never go into those places, though the invitations are often persuasive.

Haru opens the shisha lounge most days at noon sharp. If she is not there, someone named B. or a long-haired young guy handles things until she arrives. She tends the charcoal, mixes my Malibu Milk, and quietly extends the session when the official time runs out.

She knows my habits well enough by now that when I head up the stairs she doesn’t assume I am leaving. She knows I am just stepping outside to smoke.

For a long time she existed in my mind simply as the shisha girl, one of the many figures who keep the other city functioning. But then one night I ran into her somewhere unexpected.

The place was Ishimaru Shoten, a tiny late-night bar down an alley just west of Pontocho in the heart of Kiyamachi. Outside the entrance hang bright red, green, and blue lamps that glow like a small carnival in the dark.

I first discovered the place at four in the morning on a very long night. I was broke that evening, absolutely skint, and there was a very aggressive Japanese guy at the bar who clearly believed the entire establishment belonged to him.

The bar woman, who is about forty-five and still hot as blazes, was batting her eyes at me with what seemed like professional enthusiasm. Meanwhile I realized with growing clarity that I did not actually have the money to pay for the large bottle of beer I had just ordered.

But men are predictable creatures.

I understood immediately that if I played my cards right the territorial guy would buy the drink for me. So I joked with him, gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, made it clear I recognized him as the reigning emperor of the room. He razzed me a little but saw that I was no threat to his throne.

Sure enough, he covered the beer.

I stumbled home to the Royal Park Hotel on Sanjo Street as the sky was turning pale, crashing into bed around five-thirty in the morning.

Weeks later I returned to Ishimaru and found Haru sitting there.

I teased her gently about sometimes opening the shisha lounge five or ten minutes late when she bikes over from home. I suggested she must be hungover. She laughed, not the polite laugh people sometimes use for customers but a bright, real laugh.

She said she was happy to see me.

And that was when I learned her name. Haru.

We talked for a while. I drank a White Russian and ate dashi maki while she sipped something that might have been shochu or nihon-shu. I felt a strange rush of adrenaline the whole time, those goosebumps that run up both arms when the night suddenly opens into possibility.

Not necessarily romantic possibility. Just the larger sense that anything could happen.

Anything can come.

After twenty or thirty minutes she said goodnight and promised we would meet there again sometime. We did run into each other once more about a week and a half later, though the evening remained just as light and brief as the first.

But something had shifted.

She was no longer simply the shisha worker in my mental map of the city. She was Haru, a fellow traveler in the other city.

And that is the thing about the people who live their lives after midnight. They know parts of the city the rest of us never really see. They watch the celebrations and the arguments, the flirtations and the quiet breakdowns. They see who walks home alone and who finds someone to share the long dark streets.

Every city has two maps.

The one everyone uses during the day.

And the other one that only appears after midnight.

Dedication:

For the men and women of the night. Who keep the drinks coming and the plates spinning. It’s a rocky world, and you rock it baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the two essays below, which also feature Kyoto and Osaka nightlife in all it’s beautiful glory.

When the Taxi Driver Loses the Plot

Note: This poem is a reconstruction. The original version appeared briefly on my first blog, Classical Sympathies, sometime around 2010, and like many things from that early site it was eventually lost in the digital shuffle. What remains here is an attempt to recreate the spirit of the piece from memory.

The poem itself is a mash-up of two real taxi rides that somehow fused together in recollection. One took place in Adelaide, Australia, during a ride from a hotel to the airport where the driver became thoroughly disoriented and began looping through unfamiliar streets. The other occurred years later in Kyoto, somewhere north of Sanjo, when a similarly confused driver managed to transform a short ride into a wandering tour of the nighttime grid.

Over time the two rides merged in memory into a single universal experience: the moment when a passenger realizes that the person holding the wheel may no longer fully know where he is going.

The result is presented here, perhaps a little mythologized, as a small recovered relic from the early days of the archive — a lost classic of the wandering taxi ride.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
took another right,
the meter ticking bravely
in the middle of the night.

The city slid past sideways
in a crooked grid of light,
and every turn he promised
somehow made the journey slight.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
muttered to the wheel,
as if the streets were hiding
some essential missing deal.

A restaurant we’d passed before
returned into my sight,
which meant the haunted driver
had again chosen wrong from right.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
took another right,
and wiped his brow dramatically
beneath the yellow light.

Now when your taxi driver loses the plot
this could go on all night,
because the man who holds the wheel
is captain of your flight.

You sit behind his kingdom
like a mildly troubled guest,
while every wrong decision
slowly multiplies the rest.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
leans forward in his seat,
as though the road might whisper
some confession through the street.

The meter ticks its steady hymn
to time and mortal plight,
while hostage to the haunted man
who’s searching for the right.

The haunted sweating taxi driver
takes yet another right,
and somewhere in the city
dawn prepares its quiet light.

But we remain in orbit
of his navigational blight—

for when your taxi driver loses the plot
this could go on all night.

Note: If you like this poem, you may also like the poems linked below. Happy reading!

On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians II

Note: This is the second piece in our series “On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians.” You can find the first installment here.

The encounters described here span more than thirty years and several cities — from a first arena concert in Pullman, Washington in 1991 to small club shows in Cambridge, Osaka, and Kyoto in the decades that followed. As with many memories of live music, the exact setlists and dates sometimes blur, but the rooms themselves — the sound, the atmosphere, the strange and fleeting meetings between artists and audiences — remain vivid. These sketches attempt to capture a few of those moments as they were experienced at the time.

Epigraph

No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd

In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud

— Dire Straits, “Skateaway”

Live music produces strange meetings. Sometimes you meet the musicians themselves. More often you meet a moment — a room, a sound, a feeling that sticks with you for decades while entire years of ordinary life quietly disappear.

Here are a few such encounters.


I. Initiation

My first real concert was the On Every Street tour in 1991.

The band was Dire Straits, the venue was Pullman, Washington, and the company was the usual Spokane crew: Seth, Innes, Kelly.

I was the biggest fan in the car by far. The others liked the band well enough but I was the one who had studied the records, who knew the guitar parts, who was ready for the moment when the lights dropped and the first notes hit the arena.

They played everything: Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, Sultans of Swing. It was a great show, though at the time I had no real way to judge such things. It was simply enormous — lights, volume, spectacle. I bought the black and blue tour shirt and wore it for five years.

At the time I thought concerts were supposed to be like that: huge, polished, and far away.

I would later learn otherwise.


II. Revelation

Several years later, during the Hamilton years, I saw Red House Painters at the Middle East in Cambridge.

I went with Ian.

The room was small, maybe a few hundred people at most. Nothing about it resembled the arena in Pullman. And then, near the end of the set, Mark Kozelek began playing “Little Drummer Boy.”

It lasted nine minutes.

You could hear a pin drop in the room.

No spectacle. No lights. Just absolute concentration from everyone present. When the final notes faded the silence lingered for a moment before the applause came.

Afterward Ian and I drove back toward New York through the cold night with the windows cracked open, heaters flying out into the darkness, and Hell’s Ditch blasting through the car stereo to keep us awake.

That was the night I realized concerts could be something else entirely.


III. Chaos

Not every show produces reverence.

I once saw The Fall with Ian as well. The band’s leader, Mark E. Smith, seemed to be operating in his traditional mode of total hostility.

The set was short — twenty-eight minutes by my estimate. Ian later checked the official record and insisted it was forty-three. Either way it felt brief and volatile. Smith barked into the microphone, glared at the band, and treated the entire enterprise with the air of someone barely tolerating the existence of the audience.

Which, to be fair, was exactly what many people had come to see.


IV. Theatre

The strangest performance I ever witnessed may have been Cat Power at Club Quattro in Osaka.

The evening began badly. An opening act — a woman in what appeared to be a fairy costume — sat at the piano and played for what felt like an eternity. Forty-five minutes at least. Perhaps longer. By the end of it the audience was openly confused.

Then Cat Power appeared.

Or rather she refused to appear in the conventional sense. Instead of remaining on the stage she wandered through the venue with a handheld microphone, singing while walking among the crowd, occasionally placing an arm around a patron or leaning against the bar.

At one point she came right up to where I was standing near the back rail and sang a line or two before drifting off again into the room.

The entire show felt less like a concert than a piece of improvised theatre.


V. Ritual

A few years later I saw Damo Suzuki at Club Metro in Kyoto.

Damo had once fronted the legendary German band CAN, but this night bore no resemblance to those recordings. Nothing recognizable from the catalog appeared.

Instead he stood a few feet away from the audience with long black-and-grey hair flowing, bellowing and chanting over a constantly shifting improvisational band.

It was less a performance than a ritual.

Damo passed away not long ago. I’m grateful I saw him when I did.


VI. Canada Night

Not all memorable shows are mystical.

Sometimes they’re simply loud.

One such evening occurred at Club Quattro in Osaka when Broken Social Scene and Death From Above 1979 came through town.

The Canadian ambassador was present and delivered a brief speech before the set explaining that Death From Above 1979 represented a fine example of Canadian enterprise because they were “only two men making so much noise.”

The room was packed with Canadian expats and the atmosphere was celebratory chaos.

The ambassador was probably correct.


VII. Breakdown

Not every concert goes well.

I once saw Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the small Kyoto venue Taku Taku. Something had clearly gone wrong with the lineup. The guitarist appeared to be brand new and could barely navigate the chords.

Will Oldham tried to push through but quickly grew frustrated and began openly calling the guitarist out from the stage.

It was uncomfortable for everyone involved.

The show never recovered.


VIII. Redemption

Fortunately the story has a better ending.

Some years later I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy again, this time at the beautiful Kyoto venue Urbanguild.

Everything worked.

Low benches and tables filled the room, Heartland beer bottles glowed green under the lights, and the band played a relaxed, confident set drawn mostly from the Bonnie “Prince” Billy catalog with a few Palace songs mixed in.

Opening the evening was an instrumental group called Bitchin Bajas whose sound reminded me faintly of early Phosphorescent if Phosphorescent had chosen to make instrumental records.

After the show I found myself talking with three members of the band while they drank beer and ate fries.

They were humble, friendly, and slightly surprised that anyone in Kyoto knew who they were. We talked for a while about touring and the constant challenge of trying to make a living as working musicians.

Eventually the conversation drifted off and the room began to empty.

The music was over. The musicians were just people again, finishing their drinks and preparing to move on to the next city.

And that, in the end, may be the most interesting encounter of all

Dedication

For live music fans everywhere.

My true people.


Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essay below on the four time I met Yo La Tengo. Happy reading!

On Wearing Only the Color Black

Note: Clothing essays have a way of sounding more intentional than the habits they describe. In reality, most personal “styles” are not carefully engineered systems but small practical decisions repeated over time until they become a pattern. Black clothing, in particular, tends to accumulate this way: one shirt becomes three, three become six, and eventually the wardrobe settles into a quiet monochrome.

The appeal of black has been noted in many places — from musicians and writers to bartenders, stagehands, and city dwellers who prefer a certain anonymity in public life. It simplifies choices, travels well, and works in nearly every setting from classroom to barstool.

None of this was planned in advance. It simply turned out that black shirts, black trousers, and a good pair of shoes made the day a little easier to begin. Over time that small convenience hardened into habit, and habit into something that might almost be called a uniform.

Epigraph:

I could listen to all my friends
And go out again
And pretend it’s enough,
Or I could make a career of being blue
I could dress in black and read Camus,
Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth
Like I was 17
That would be a scream
But I don’t want to get over you

The Magnetic Fields

At some point in my adult life I realized that I wear almost nothing but black.

This wasn’t the result of a manifesto, or some deep philosophical commitment to minimalism. It simply happened. One day I looked in the closet and noticed that nearly everything hanging there was black: shirts, sweaters, jackets, trousers. Even the socks.

But the habit actually goes back much further. In high school I developed what could fairly be called a monotone sartorial program. The uniform was simple and extremely effective: a black turtleneck, black chinos, black loafers, black socks, and — for the sake of total conceptual coherence — black boxers as well.

I never felt better.

There was something immediately satisfying about the whole arrangement. No fuss, no pattern matching, no color balancing. Just black on black on black. A complete system.

People probably assumed it was a bit of a pose. High school audiences are naturally suspicious of anyone who appears to be making a stylistic statement. But black is also just a normal color, and the outfit was apparently acceptable enough that nobody made too much of it. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious or intellectual. I just liked the way it looked and, more importantly, the way it simplified the day.

The system continued into college.

At Hamilton College the core wardrobe remained black, but I added one important layer: a tan trench coat. It cost $199 at the Men’s Wearhouse in downtown Spokane and felt, at the time, like a serious investment in adulthood. The coat went over the black shirts and black trousers, and on top of that I wore a tan floppy felt hat.

That was the look.

Looking back, it probably struck some people as theatrical. A young man walking across campus dressed entirely in black with a trench coat and a floppy hat could easily be mistaken for someone attempting a role. But at the time it didn’t feel like an imitation of anyone. Later I became aware of figures like Johnny Cash, the famous “Man in Black,” or the elegant nocturnal wardrobes of Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. But when the wardrobe first appeared in my life it was entirely sui generis.

I was just doing me.

Over the years the practical advantages of black clothing became increasingly obvious. Wearing mostly black eliminates an astonishing number of small daily decisions. You don’t stand in front of the closet wondering whether this shirt matches that pair of trousers or whether the shade of blue is slightly wrong for the jacket. Everything works with everything else.

Shopping becomes easier. Cleaning becomes easier. Packing for travel becomes easier. A black shirt can be worn day after day without drawing much attention, and a good pair of black chinos can quietly carry a person through an entire week.

In this sense, wearing black is less a fashion statement than a small act of logistical efficiency.

The habit also works remarkably well in cities. Black is neutral enough to move through almost any environment without attracting attention. Restaurants, classrooms, airports, bars — the wardrobe fits all of them without adjustment.

This turns out to be particularly true in Kyoto, where I now live. The city’s narrow streets, dim bars, and late-night corners seem almost designed for dark clothing. Walking into places like ING or Mafia or Haku in a black shirt and black trousers feels perfectly natural. No one notices, and that is exactly the point.

One unexpected side effect is that Kyoto locals often assume I am a local as well. Something about the overall look apparently signals familiarity rather than tourism. While visitors frequently move through the city in bright outdoor gear and colorful jackets, the monotone wardrobe seems to blend easily into the quieter rhythms of the place.

I never feel out of place.

Which may be the real secret of wearing black: it allows you to move through the world without the constant small negotiation of appearance.

There are, of course, occasional deviations. Every now and then a pink shirt or a purple one appears in the rotation, like a brief holiday from the system. But these are temporary excursions. The gravitational center of the wardrobe remains the same.

Black shirt.
Black trousers.
Black shoes.

Some people wear black because they believe it signals seriousness or artistic temperament. Others wear it as a form of rebellion against brighter fashions. For me the explanation is much simpler.

It works.

And once you discover something that works every day, there is very little reason to stop.

Dedication:

For the LL Bean turtleneck. You rock baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy this one.

On the Strangest Soundtrack of the 1990s

Note: Until the End of the World exists in multiple versions, the most expansive being the nearly five-hour director’s cut released years after the original theatrical run. The longer version allows the film’s wandering structure — its globe-spanning travel, technological speculation, and philosophical detours — to breathe more fully, though it also requires a certain stamina from even devoted viewers.

The soundtrack occupies a special place in the film’s legacy. Director Wim Wenders reportedly asked participating musicians to imagine the kind of music they might be making a decade in the future when composing their contributions. The result is less a literal prediction of future sounds than a fascinating snapshot of major artists working at the outer edge of their early-1990s creativity.

As for the film itself, it remains a curious hybrid: part road movie, part technological fable, part romantic obsession, and part philosophical meditation on images, memory, and dreams. Like many of Wenders’ most ambitious projects, it is best approached less as a tightly engineered narrative and more as a long cinematic journey — one whose most memorable moments often arrive when the plot pauses and the mood takes over.

Epigraph

In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
With the man in the woman and the woman in the man
In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
We wanted the union, oh the union of the woman and the man
— Peter Gabriel, “Blood of Eden”

I love Wim Wenders. My favorite of his films is Until the End of the World, followed closely by Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire is good too, though perhaps a little chalk. The American Friend — with Dennis Hopper wandering through a Patricia Highsmith plot — is offbeat and charming in that peculiar late-70s European way.

The End of Violence is terrible.

But Until the End of the World is something else entirely: a sprawling, beautiful, occasionally baffling film that might best be described as a magnificent mess. The director’s cut runs close to five hours, and even devoted fans tend to fade somewhere around hour three. That’s not really a criticism. The movie feels less like a conventional narrative and more like a long road — something you travel through rather than simply watch.

The story centers on Claire Tourneur, played by Solveig Dommartin, a restless Parisian drifting through life when she encounters a mysterious traveler named Sam Farber, played by William Hurt. Sam is carrying stolen technology — a device capable of recording images directly from the human brain — and he is trying to reach his father, a scientist working in the Australian desert. The purpose of the machine is unexpectedly tender: Sam’s father believes it may allow his blind wife to see again by transmitting visual images through Sam’s eyes.

But because the technology has been stolen from a corporate research project, Sam is being chased by various interested parties who would very much like the machine returned. This sets the film in motion. Claire becomes fascinated with Sam and begins following him across continents as he attempts to evade his pursuers.

What follows is one of the great wandering journeys in cinema.

The story moves through Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and eventually Australia. There are gangsters, satellite technology, eccentric scientists, and the faint sense that the entire world has become one enormous road. The film is technically a thriller, but it rarely behaves like one. Wenders is much more interested in movement, landscapes, and the strange emotional gravity that develops between two people traveling together.

The relationship between Sam and Claire is itself slightly unstable. Part romance, part obsession, part philosophical partnership. At times it almost feels like a kind of mutual kidnapping. Sam keeps disappearing, Claire keeps chasing him, and neither seems entirely capable of escaping the other’s orbit.

It probably didn’t help that the two actors reportedly did not get along during the making of the film. Hurt, already an established star after performances in films like Body Heat, brought a certain American cool to the role. He had that slightly detached, inward quality that made him so effective in the early 1980s. Dommartin, on the other hand, plays Claire with an intensity that borders on obsession. The tension between them gives the film a strange electricity. At times it feels less like romantic chemistry than two people circling each other warily.

Eventually their journey brings them to Australia, where Sam’s father is conducting his experiments in the outback.

And then comes one of the great scenes in modern cinema.

Claire and Sam are flying over the Australian desert when the plane suddenly loses power. The engines fall silent. Instead of plunging toward the earth, the aircraft begins to glide, drifting quietly over the vast red landscape below.

There is no panic.

Just sky.
Motion.
Silence.

And then the music enters.

Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel begins to play.

Gabriel’s voice arrives slowly, almost as if it were rising from the land itself. The plane floats over the outback. The desert stretches endlessly beneath them. For a few minutes the film stops being a story and becomes something else entirely — a meditation on distance, longing, and the strange human desire to see and be seen.

It’s one of those rare moments where cinema and music fuse perfectly.

The soundtrack surrounding that moment is one of the most unusual ever assembled. When Wenders commissioned the music for the film, he asked the participating artists to imagine the kind of songs they might be making ten years in the future. The film itself was set slightly ahead of its time, so the idea was that these musicians would try to anticipate their own sound in the coming decade.

The lineup was absurdly strong: Lou Reed, R.E.M., Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, U2, and others. It reads almost like a summit meeting of late-twentieth-century alternative music.

The idea was that they would create future music.

But artists rarely predict the future.

What they tend to do instead is deepen the present.

Listening to the soundtrack today, what you mostly hear is 1991 at its most imaginative. The musicians push their sound slightly outward into darker, more atmospheric territory, but they’re still working with the tools they had.

And the tools were 1991.

Still, several of the songs are outstanding. What’s Good is classic Lou Reed: dry, philosophical, slightly amused by the whole strange business of being alive. Reed had an unmatched ability to deliver lines that sound both cynical and strangely tender. At one point he sings, “life’s like bacon and ice cream / that’s what life’s like without you,” which somehow manages to be both ridiculous and oddly moving at the same time.

Then there is Until the End of the World by U2, written during the band’s remarkable early-1990s creative surge. The song carries the darker propulsion of the Achtung Baby era and hints at the experimental atmosphere the band would later explore more fully on albums like Zooropa and the Passengers project. The lyrics, told from the perspective of Judas speaking to Jesus after the betrayal, give the song an almost Biblical scale.

But the emotional summit of the whole enterprise remains Gabriel’s Blood of Eden.

When that song arrives during the silent glide over the Australian desert, the movie suddenly lifts into another register. The wandering plot, the strange technology, the global chase — all of it falls away for a moment, leaving only the image of two people floating above the earth while Gabriel sings about the ancient longing between man and woman.

The future, it turns out, rarely sounds like the future.

It usually sounds like the present imagining what might come next.

Dedication:

For Lou. What’s good baby?

On the Three Fundamental Types of Drinkers

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 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.

On the Mixed Tape

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.

On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians

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