Matt texts the Thin Man before he has even fully decided to.
There is a kind of threshold in sending a message like that, where intention arrives slightly after action. The screen shows the name and then the words appear as if they were always going to exist.
Found her.
There is no immediate reply.
Matt goes to the hotel rooftop pool instead, because the body refuses to remain still when the mind is doing work it cannot complete. The city below is a port city, functional rather than beautiful, ships moving like punctuation marks across water that does not care about narrative.
He swims slowly. Not exercise. Just repetition. Something to keep him inside himself.
The Thin Man arrives without announcement.
Matt sees him later in the lobby, as if he has always been there and only now decided to become visible. There is nothing theatrical about his movement. He is dressed simply, unremarkable in a way that only becomes noticeable after you have already started paying attention.
They do not greet each other like friends. They never have. They greet each other like continuity.
Matt watches him cross the space and feels, not for the first time, that proximity to him changes the temperature of events.
LUCÍANA
The café is near the port, where the air carries salt and fuel in equal measure. Luciana arrives slightly early, not because she is nervous, but because she is efficient. She chooses a table where she can see the entrance without appearing to be watching it.
When Niko arrives, she recognizes him immediately, though recognition does not translate into welcome. Time has done what time does, which is soften edges without removing structure. He is older now, but not unfamiliar in the way she expects him to be unfamiliar.
They sit.
For a long moment, neither of them performs memory. When they finally speak, it is careful, almost formal. He asks about her life. She answers without inviting him into it. There is warmth in her tone, but it is bounded. Controlled.
She tells him about their son. He listens without interrupting.
“He is in Dubai,” she says after a time. “He is working in media. Content. Travel. He is doing well for himself.”
Niko nods once. No visible reaction beyond that. But something in the air shifts slightly, as if a long thread has been acknowledged without being pulled.
Luciana continues. She has a daughter now. A marriage. A life that has moved forward without apology. When Niko asks nothing more, and she is briefly grateful. Then she tells him, clearly and without cruelty, that this is not something she wants reopened.
He understands. He does not argue. He never argues with time.
MATT THOMAS AT THE HOTEL
I am still at the hotel when he returns. He does not look like a man who has just been refused something. He looks like a man who has confirmed a hypothesis and chosen not to act on it. There is a difference, and I am beginning to understand it.
I ask him if he saw her. He says yes.
I ask what she said. He does not answer immediately. Then he tells me about Dubai, about the son, about the fact that life has continued in a direction that does not require his permission.
I wait for more. There is no more.
That is when I realize how little I actually know about him, even now. Later that night, I finally ask the question I have been circling since Tokyo.
“What is your real name?”
He does not look surprised.
He never looks surprised.
He says he is from Georgia. That his name is Niko. That he was born in 1977.
Nothing more.
And somehow that is enough to change the entire shape of what I thought I was holding.
CODA — MATT THOMAS IN KOYTO
I am back in Kyoto, but I am not fully back in anything that resembles ordinary life. The school still exists. I still teach. I still perform the version of myself that can explain narrative voice to students who are mostly thinking about lunch. I have had readings now—one in Kyoto, one in Tokyo—and people are starting to treat me as if I might become something recognizable.
It does not go to my head. But the Thin Man does. He’s always there.
We talk on Signal in fragments. Nothing structured. No schedule. Just interruptions in time that feel more real than the rest of the day. I sit in shisha places after work and try to write, but what I am actually doing is waiting for the next message.
Book II is already taking shape in my head.
I am just not sure yet whether I am writing it is writing me.
Before I got on the place for Costa Rica the school was still trying to pretend this was still a normal conversation.
Vice Principal Nakata-san called me into the office with the kind of politeness that always signals something is already decided. The room was too bright, the air-conditioning too strong, the framed notices on the wall insisting on order. I sat down expecting administrative concern and got something closer to procedural disbelief.
“If you leave during term time,” Nakata-san said carefully, “your employment status may be affected.”
I nodded as if this was news I could process. Inside my mind was pure white. I said I understood. but I was going anyway.
There was a pause after which neither of us spoke.
“I am not firing you,” Nakata-san added, almost gently. “But you are… on thin ice.”
I thanked him, which felt like the wrong response but also felt like the only one available. When I left the office I was not thinking about consequences in the way institutions intend. I was thinking about distance, and how quickly it can become irreversible.
The flight to Costa Rica felt like a correction rather than a journey.
I watched the map on the screen and thought about how absurd it was all becoming. Somewhere over the Pacific, I opened my laptop and tried to write some notes, but nothing useful formed. Everything kept collapsing back into the same name.
Luciana Solís.
I did not yet know what I was looking for. I only knew that stopping now would mean admitting the shape of the obsession too clearly.
San José arrived humid and unceremonious. Costa Rica did not announce itself so much as absorb you. I moved through it with the slightly displaced awareness of someone who has read too many fragments of a story before seeing the whole thing.
I started where any amateur investigator starts: public record offices, municipal archives, online registries that are barely maintained but still technically alive. Marriage records, birth records, civic logs that feel like they were designed to discourage curiosity rather than enable it.
The work was slow and unglamorous. Most of it was administrative noise.
And then, on the third day, something aligned. A record. A name. Luciana Solís.
It is not dramatic when I found it. There was no cinematic recognition, no surge of certainty. Just a quiet moment where the page refused to behave like a coincidence.
I sat back from the screen and realized that my hands were slightly cold.
That is when I knew I was no longer guessing. This was the Thin Man’s son’s mother.
He wakes up without remembering the descent. Not the drinking. Not the last message. Not the shape of the night leaving his body. Just the slow return of weight.
The house is rented, not lived in. A clean, architectural expanse in western Tokyo—glass, pale wood, too much air between objects. The kind of space that does not ask questions because it assumes nothing will answer.
He sits up once, then stops. 1:13 PM. The afternoon has already begun without him. He lies back for a moment and listens to the silence of money maintaining itself. There is a bottle on the floor beside the bed. Half-finished. Warm now. He doesn’t look at it again.
He stands, showers without thinking, dresses in the order that muscle memory dictates: black shirt, trousers, jacket. No tie. Never a tie unless someone insists.
His phone is already lit when he returns. Two messages. One from Tomoyo.
“Weekend still okay?”
One from Mina.
“Bar As One. Late.”
He reads them without responding yet. Then another notification appears. A different rhythm. Alejandro.
No name attached. Just the letter cluster, like something filed incorrectly in a system that never bothered to correct itself.
“Need you in Akasaka. KBS situation. Quiet, but messy.”
That word—extraction—is always a translation problem. It never means only one thing. He exhales, once.
And for the first time that day, he is fully awake.
KYOTO — That Same Day
I am in my classroom when I see the notification. I’m not during anything important. Just one of those pauses between things where students are pretending to work and I am pretending not to notice they aren’t.
The phone is face down. I flip it. It’s Signal. I don’t even check the sender first anymore; I know it’s from the Thin Man.
“Akasaka. KBS. Quiet job.”
That’s it. No greeting. No explanation. No punctuation beyond necessity.
I look up at the room. The students are writing essays on narrative voice, ironically enough. I tell them to keep going and step into the hallway.
Outside, the corridor smells like floor wax and winter coats that never fully dry. I write back:
“You’re back?”
A pause.
Then:
“Always.”
I sit down on the stairs and realize I’ve been waiting for this message more than I admitted to myself. Not because I want the job. Because when he appears, the world becomes legible again.
Even if it shouldn’t.
TOKYO — 5:57 PM That Same Day
Akasaka in daylight is almost offensive in its normality. Glass buildings pretending they are neutral. People moving like they have somewhere else to be even when they don’t. He enters KBS through a side entrance.
Not invited. Not uninvited. Just expected. The problem is explained in fragments.
A mid-level finance manager has flagged irregular payments in a production budget. Someone else has flagged the flag. A third layer has erased the second.
Now everyone is quietly pretending nothing happened while insisting something must be done. He listens. He does not take notes. He asks three questions.
The answers contradict each other in useful ways.
By 4:02 PM, he knows what happened. By 4:07 PM, he knows who benefited. By 5:12 PM, he knows why no one will say it out loud.
He leaves without announcing that anything is resolved. This is the job.
On the street outside, he finally replies to Tomoyo who he has beeb seeing for about two moths now:
“Saturday still okay.”
Then Mina:
“Later.”
Then Alejandro:
“Done.”
No embellishment. No summary. Just closure.
KYOTO — 10:02 PM That Same Day
I am in a shisha place near Sanjo when he updates me. Not the kind of shisha place you imagine. Cleaner. Quieter. Students pretending to be older than they are. A place where time slows down but doesn’t stop.
I have a draft open on my laptop. A text arrives. It is about him. It is always about him these days.
“KBS resolved.”
That’s all. No story. No detail.
I type:
“What was it?”
Three dots appear. Disappear. Return.
“Accounting.”
That word again. He uses it the way other people use weather reports. I lean back.
Outside, Kyoto is doing its careful thing—bicycles, soft neon, the sense that nothing ever fully arrives here.
I realize I’ve stopped writing fiction and started writing evidence.
TOKYO — 11:35 PM That Same Night
Bar As One is half-lit, as always. Mina is behind the counter like she has been there longer than the building. She does not ask what happened in Akasaka. She never asks anything that can be answered incorrectly.
He sits and orders a whisky ginger. They talk about nothing that matters. Tomoyo arrives later. She wears corporate black like it is a second job. She kisses him once, briefly, like a scheduled interruption. He notices everything about her that is real and nothing about her that is performance. That is what he likes about her.
At some point, his phone vibrates again. A new Signal message. It’s from Matt.
KYOTO — 11:26 PM. That Same Night.
I’m still at Shisha, still thinking about the Thin Man, I shouldn’t be doing this in public. But I am.
Me:
“I think I understand what you do in Tokyo.”
A reply comes faster than expected.
“You don’t.”
I almost smile. Then I don’t. I type:
“I’m going to Costa Rica.”
This time there is a long pause. Then:
“Why.”
I look at the ceiling of the shisha place. Smoke moves like it has intention.
“Luciana.”
The name sits there on my screen like it has weight. I don’t know if he will respond.
But I know I’ve crossed a line.
TOKYO — 12:14 AM The Next Morning
He reads the name once. Then again. Luciana.
Not spoken in years. Not held in any current system. Not part of any job file. He steps outside for a smoke.
Akasaka is quieter at night, but not safer. Just less honest about itself. He does not ask Matt not to go. That would be meaningless.
Instead he writes:
“Don’t dig wrong.”
Then, after a pause:
“If you’re going, be precise.”
He puts the phone away. Tomoyo is still inside, laughing at something someone said that is not funny. Mina is polishing glasses that are already clean.
He thinks, briefly, of leaving Tokyo again. Not because something is wrong. Because something has started.
And that is usually enough.
KYOTO — 12:44 AM The Next Morning
I read his message twice.
Be precise.
As if precision is the problem. As if I have ever been anything else.
I close my laptop. Outside, Kyoto continues as if nothing has happened. But I know it has.
I have a name now. And names are how you begin to lose your distance from things.
Note: A reflective piece on an Of Montreal track and a cluster of other listening moments where music stopped being background and became something closer to intervention. Starting in a cramped, overheated apartment in Furano, Hokkaido, on New Year’s Day 2006, the essay moves through a snowbound walk soundtracked by Kevin Barnes’ The Past is a Grotesque Animal, then branches outward to two other formative listening experiences—Bob Dylan on a half-awake AM radio morning, and Father John Misty in mid-career exhaustion on a city commute. It is less about music as taste than music as rupture: the way certain songs bypass interpretation and reorganize the inner self in real time, leaving the listener briefly unarmoured, and then altered.
Furano, New Year’s Day, 2006.
Outside, Hokkaido is doing what it does in winter when it stops pretending to be habitable: the air is an exposed blade, the snow hard-packed and granular underfoot, everything outside reduced to distance, glare, and breath. Inside Ken and Eri’s small apartment it is the opposite problem—heat pushed to excess, a sealed, overcompensating warmth that turns the room into a kind of shared pressure chamber. We are all in it together: Ken, serving in the Japanese army and posted up here in Furano; Eri, quietly and expertly holding the domestic center; their son Shinya, one year younger than our son Hugh; and the four of us effectively folded into one cramped sleeping arrangement that collapses night into proximity. It is kind, it is hospitable, it is also inescapably too much. The bed feels like it belongs to no one and everyone at once.
I remember wanting, with a clarity that felt almost physical, to go home. Not anywhere abstract—Kyoto specifically. My own bed. My own thermostat. The ability to set the heater somewhere between restraint and comfort rather than Arctic evacuation or sauna collapse. Kyoto’s winter is mild enough to forgive you for being human. Furano’s winter is not.
It is late afternoon on New Year’s Day. The holiday has that particular suspended quality: nothing is open, nothing is moving, and even time seems to have adopted local weather conditions. I have just discovered I have lost my wallet—ID, credit cards, the small administrative skeleton of a life—and I am trying not to let it tip everything further off balance. Eri will later find it, of course, lodged under the couch cushions, and post it back as if this is just another minor adjustment to the day’s equilibrium. At the time, though, it feels like the world tightening a little further around me.
So I go for a walk.
It is not a decision so much as a pressure release. I put on headphones, step out into the cold, and immediately the winter reasserts itself with total authority. No negotiation. Just air, snow, and the sound of my shoes biting into frozen ground. I am wearing sneakers instead of boots, which already feels like a small error in judgment that will have consequences.
And then I press play.
The Past is a Grotesque Animal arrives like a system taking over the system. Of Montreal, Kevin Barnes—whatever name you want to use for the person or force behind it—unfolding a twelve-minute architecture of confession, excess, fragmentation, and emotional overexposure that does not so much accompany the walk as overwrite it.
I do not listen once.
I walk for an hour in circles, or near-circles, or something that becomes circular by repetition. The song loops again and again—four times, maybe more—and each return feels less like repetition and more like deepening. The cold sharpens, the snow crunches, my breathing becomes part of the rhythm. At some point I am no longer fully tracking direction. I am just in motion inside the sound.
And I am crying.
Not the polite kind of emotional leakage you can disguise as weather or fatigue, but something closer to surrender. Barnes is doing something too exposed, too unguarded, too structurally unstable to defend against. It is not just lyrics—it is tone, duration, refusal of containment. The line lands like a fracture: you know things could be different / but they’re not.
That is the moment. Not because it is the most complex line, but because it is the simplest possible articulation of something I am already carrying without knowing it.
Ken and Eri are not the problem. In-laws are not the problem. Furano is not the problem. The problem is the accumulation: ambition just starting to harden into structure (new full-time role at Rits Uji after years of part-time teaching), the sense of trajectory toward IB, the pressure of becoming legible professionally, and underneath it all the quieter, more persistent anxiety about language, about my son’s future English, about whether proximity is enough when communication is not yet guaranteed.
Hugh is three. He doesn’t yet speak English in any sustained way. He will, later—Kyoto International School, gradual unfolding—but at this moment it feels like a future I am trying to pre-pay emotionally, as if worry could accelerate outcome.
And so the walk becomes something else entirely: a cold, repetitive loop through snow and sound, a private weather system synchronized to a song that refuses to stay at a safe emotional distance. I am half-lost in it, half-anchored by it. At some point I stop thinking in sentences.
When I finally turn back, the house is still there, still too warm, still intact. The ordinary world resumes its shape as if nothing has happened. Dinner will happen, conversation will happen, the night will pass.
But something has already been displaced.
That walk, that loop, that song—those remain as a fixed point. Not resolution, not transformation exactly. More like an encounter with a register of feeling I did not previously have language for, but which now exists and cannot be removed.
Barnes did not explain anything.
He just got through.
Kevin Barnes, the lead singer of Of Montreal, is one of those contemporary indie figures who refuses the clean categories people like to file musicians into. What’s known, in fairly plain terms, is that Barnes has moved over time into an openly fluid understanding of gender and sexuality—identifying in recent years as non-binary and queer, using multiple pronouns, and explicitly framing earlier work (including the Georgie Fruit persona) as something they now see as a problematic, overextended act of identification and performance. That matters because it retroactively clarifies what was already visible in the live persona you’re describing: drag-inflected glamour, exaggerated femininity/masculinity, theatrical self-invention as method rather than costume.
The deeper pattern is that Barnes’ sexuality and identity have never been “announced” in a single stable form so much as continuously staged—worked through performance, breakdown, and reinvention. The turbulence people sometimes read as “issues” (depression, relationship collapse, manic productivity, alter-egos like Georgie Fruit) sits less in the register of scandal than in the register of aesthetic method: self as unstable material. Albums like Hissing Fauna… are basically internal monologues set on fire, where romantic relationships, identity, and chemical imbalance are all entangled rather than separated into neat clinical categories.
Barnes sits in a lineage of glam and art-pop performers (Bowie is the obvious shadow) where gender play is not commentary on identity but the medium through which identity is continuously rewritten. The result is that the work feels emotionally confessional even when the persona is highly stylised: the sincerity and the artifice are not opposites; they are fused, sometimes uncomfortably so.
In short: Barns does not have a fixed sexuality, and lives t a life in which sexuality, gender, and performance are permanently entangled, and where his “issues” are inseparable from the creative engine itself.
Grotesque Animal arrives less like a track than like a prolonged exposure to someone thinking out loud with no filter, no editing instinct, and no interest in letting the listener rest. The Past is a Grotesque Animal begins with a kind of conceptual detonation: the past is no longer memory or narrative continuity, but something bodily and misbegotten, an organism that looks back at you with the capacity to reveal not just error, but total epistemic miscalibration. The emotional register is already unusual here—this is not nostalgia, but retrospective humiliation at the fact of having ever thought you were right about anything.
From there the song folds into a second movement that is almost aggressively self-conscious: desire framed through embarrassment, attraction filtered through cultural overreach, intimacy mediated by theory. The encounter with a “cute girl” is not allowed to remain simple; it immediately drags in philosophical reference points, as if feeling itself requires justification through external intellectual scaffolding. What should be direct becomes over-determined, and the over-determination is precisely the point: the narrator cannot experience attraction without simultaneously watching himself experience it. Even love becomes something like a performance being observed in real time.
Then comes the pivot where the track sharpens into something more brutal. The language shifts from reflection to collapse—academic failure, emotional disintegration, the recognition of being “gone” while simultaneously narrating that disappearance. The crucial gesture here is not despair but authorship: the insistence that even breakdown is self-produced. That phrase—“authoring disaster”—is doing a great deal of work. It removes the possibility of passive suffering and replaces it with something more modern and more punishing: agency inside collapse. One is not simply breaking; one is composing the form of one’s breaking as it happens.
By the time the song reaches its midsection, it has abandoned restraint entirely. What had been psychological becomes infrastructural. The fantasy of tearing things apart—houses, bodies, structures of containment—is not really about violence in a literal sense, but about the release from moderation. It is a desire for total unbinding, for a condition in which limits no longer apply and intensity can proceed without correction. It feels adolescent in energy but philosophically adult in implication: if order is already failing, why not accelerate the collapse and inhabit it consciously? “Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart.” Indeed.
What prevents the song from becoming mere excess is its final register shift into intimacy as circuitry rather than refuge. The closing idea is not reconciliation but connection as transmission—human relation imagined as something like hidden wiring beneath visible separation. Two people are not joined by resolution or understanding, but by something involuntary and continuous, an electrical sympathy that persists even when emotional coherence has dissolved. Love here is not stabilising; it is conductive. It carries instability rather than resolving it.
That is what makes the piece so unusual over its length. It does not progress toward clarity or resolution; it deepens a single proposition through repetition and escalation: that consciousness is unstable, self-authored, and perpetually aware of its own failure to stabilise. And yet, paradoxically, that awareness itself becomes the form of continuity. The song does not resolve the grotesque past—it learns to live inside its ongoing presence.
I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them, and the distinction has mostly to do with form rather than intent. A lot of the catalogue is deliberately baroque—dense production, shifting textures, long runtimes that feel less like songs than elaborately staged environments you’re expected to inhabit rather than enter. There’s a kind of aesthetic overgrowth to it: too many surfaces, too many internal modulations, too much happening at once for easy emotional access. It’s not background music, and it doesn’t really want to be. The cost of that ambition, for me, is that it can be hard to get inside the songs in a way that feels immediate or bodily. You end up listening at them more than through them.
Which is why The Past is a Grotesque Animal feels so different. It breaks the pattern entirely. It is still maximal, still structurally excessive, still willing to stretch time, but it has a strange internal clarity that most of the other material doesn’t. There’s no sense of ornamental distraction or sonic clutter for its own sake. Instead, everything feels metabolised into a single forward-moving emotional logic. It doesn’t feel like it’s demonstrating complexity; it feels like it’s trapped inside it.
And crucially, it has no filler energy whatsoever. Even at length, it maintains pressure. It doesn’t meander—it accumulates. Each section feels necessary to the psychological arc it is tracing, even when the content is volatile or self-cancelling. That’s the paradox: it is expansive but not indulgent, long but not diffuse. It behaves less like a composition and more like a sustained state of consciousness that refuses to close.
That’s why it stands apart. In a catalogue where density sometimes becomes opacity, this one remains piercingly legible. It is maximal, but it is also focused. It doesn’t just add material—it tightens around an emotional core until it becomes unavoidable.
The final movement of this piece is really about how certain songs don’t just soundtrack life, they puncture it and then rearrange the internal furniture. I don’t have many of these, but I have a few, and they tend to arrive at moments when I am not exactly looking for them.
One is Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand,” heard half-awake at around 6:30 in the morning on AM radio, sometime in my late teens. I hadn’t slept properly in years—there was a long adolescent stretch where nights just bled into mornings—and the room was that grey-blue pre-dawn wash where nothing feels fully solid. I remember lying there with the radio still on from the night before, drifting through news bulletins, late-night voices, static, and then this song arriving like a kind of moral weather system. It doesn’t announce itself so much as settle in. Something in it made the world feel both unbearable and forgiven at the same time. I stayed in bed longer than I intended, not because I was tired, but because getting up felt like leaving something important unfinished.
Another is much later, in 2017, walking down the steps toward a Starbucks after work, head full of obligations, deadlines, the general low-grade administrative pressure of being a functioning adult in motion. On comes Father John Misty’s “Leaving LA” from Pure Comedy, and I just stop. Not dramatically—no cinematic pause—but enough that I find myself going up and down the steps again, as if I’ve temporarily forgotten what the destination was supposed to be. The song is slow, almost patient with its own despair, and it carries that peculiar tone of someone who has both succeeded and slightly lost the plot in the process. There’s a line of thinking in it about authorship, irony, and being turned into something by other people’s projections—about how the self becomes a kind of public object. And it landed at exactly the wrong/right time, which is to say: it landed perfectly.
And then there is the Of Montreal experience, specifically Kevin Barnes’ “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them in general. The songs are often too baroque, too long, too densely wired to immediately enter; they resist casual listening in a way that can feel like work. But this one is different. It is not just long, it is internally necessary. It moves through regret, desire, self-destruction, erotic confusion, intellectual posturing, collapse, and a kind of exhausted self-awareness that never quite resolves. The refrain—“things could be different, but they’re not”—is almost banal on paper, but in the context of the song it becomes something closer to a philosophical statement about adulthood itself. There is no exit ramp offered. Only repetition, escalation, and admission.
What ties these three moments together is not genre or mood, but exposure. Each of them removes a layer of insulation. Dylan makes meaning feel too large to comfortably contain. Misty makes authorship feel slightly embarrassing, slightly external, as if the self has already been narrated elsewhere. Barnes, in the Of Montreal track, does something more aggressive: he refuses to simplify anything at all, and in doing so forces the listener into a kind of emotional honesty that is hard to sustain.
These are not “favourite songs” in any simple sense. They are more like points of contact where life briefly becomes too legible, and then continues anyway.
Dedication:
For Kevin. I know you’ve been through it baby. I’ve been through it too and I can hear it dude. 100. You rock baby.
Note: If you ilke this piece you may also like the pieces about music below.
Note: Nina Van Pallandt moves through this piece as a kind of drifting hinge figure between art and biography, cinema and scandal, half-real and half-mythologised: from her striking, uncanny presence in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye—where she plays the abused, luminous spouse of Roger Wade and becomes, briefly, a kind of muse/anima figure for Philip Marlowe—to her earlier life in the Danish pop duo The Baronets, through her entanglement with Clifford Irving and the great Howard Hughes hoax that later reverberates through Orson Welles’ F for Fake, and onward into the quieter aftermath of fame, reinvention, and partial retreat. The essay follows her not as a stable “character” but as a site where male-authored narratives—Hollywood noir, literary fraud, journalistic myth-making—keep trying (and failing) to fix her meaning, while she keeps slipping free in ways that are at once accidental and oddly deliberate. In the end she becomes something like a case study in cinematic and cultural afterlives: a woman repeatedly written by others, occasionally complicit, sometimes resistant, and finally legible only as a residue of performance, gossip, and unfinished stories that refuse to settle.
I first became aware of Nina Van Pallandt the way most people probably do: not through biography, but through atmosphere—specifically Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, The Long Goodbye), a film that feels less like a narrative than a slow collapse of narrative reliability itself. It is a film in which people drift through scenes as if they have forgotten whether they are supposed to be characters or witnesses, and Nina arrives inside it already slightly misfiled, already too composed for the emotional weather she is asked to endure.
She plays Roger Wade’s wife, but “plays” is almost the wrong verb. Altman’s casting logic is not psychological realism in the classical sense; it is something closer to behavioral residue. People are dropped into the frame and asked not to perform identity but to inhabit proximity—to money, to violence, to desire, to failure. Nina’s presence has that peculiar Altman quality: she does not dominate the scene, but she stabilizes it just enough to make everything else look unstable.
Roger Wade (the blocked writer, the alcoholic genius-in-decline) is already collapsing before the plot admits it. Nina is the counterweight that never quite becomes balance. She is care without resolution, intimacy without clarity, the kind of emotional presence that suggests there is a story somewhere but refuses to confirm what it is. And then there is Marlowe, Elliott Gould’s version of Marlowe—half-stoned, half-wandering, permanently a few seconds behind the moral implications of what he is witnessing.
The film keeps staging small ruptures in epistemology. One of the most famous arrives early and feels almost accidental in its perfection: Terry Lennox appearing at 4 AM, asking for a ride to Tijuana. There is a moment—“Tijuana now?”—where Gould’s Marlowe is briefly jolted out of his procedural fog into genuine surprise, as if even he cannot believe how far the plot is willing to drift from explanation. That tonal instability is the world Nina inhabits as well, except she does not get Marlowe’s ironic distance. She gets consequence.
There is a domestic sequence—one of the film’s most disarming—that feels almost out of register with the noir frame: Nina cooking, the soft logic of food and attention, a candlelit dinner shared with Marlowe, where violence and absence are temporarily suspended by something as ordinary as butter and chicken. It is precisely the kind of scene that should resolve emotional ambiguity, but in Altman it does the opposite: it deepens it. Intimacy here is not revelation; it is another form of deferral.
What the film keeps doing, quietly and persistently, is refusing to assign stable moral weight to anyone. Roger Wade is both victim and self-destroyer. Marlowe is both agent and sleepwalker. Nina is both witness and participant, but never allowed the comfort of explanation. Even her suffering—when it arrives—is not narratively sanctified; it is simply another event in a world where events do not accumulate into meaning.
And this is where Nina becomes interesting beyond the film itself. Because she does not resolve into a character arc, she persists as something else: a figure who has been “used” by multiple narrative systems without ever fully belonging to them. In a conventional noir, she would be femme fatale or redemption object or tragic spouse. In Altman, she is none of these cleanly. She is what remains when genre stops enforcing coherence.
What begins to emerge, if one steps back slightly from her, is that she belongs to a broader category of women who are not simply “in” cultural narratives but are written into them by proximity to men who are doing the narrating. The pattern is subtle but persistent: women become legible to the public through the structural gravity of male projects—films, scandals, bands, memoirs—while simultaneously attempting, with varying degrees of success, to assert an interior life that resists that formatting.
It is difficult not to think here of Marianne Faithfull, who occupies a parallel register in the British version of the same phenomenon. Marianne Faithfull is initially rendered publicly intelligible through association—romantic, cultural, chemical—with the Rolling Stones orbit, and specifically through a media ecosystem eager to translate her into a kind of emblem: muse, fallen angel, tragic accessory to male genius. But what is striking about her trajectory is not the initial inscription but the long, stubborn insistence on rewriting it from within.
In both cases—Faithfull and Van Pallandt—the question is not simply “agency” in the abstract liberal sense, but something more structurally constrained: how does a person reassert authorship of self once they have already been written as a function in someone else’s story? Faithfull does this through survival, reinvention, and the eventual authority of her own voice as an artist. Nina does it more quietly, less performatively, by simply not continuing to cooperate with the demand that her life be endlessly narrativized into legible arcs.
And this is where Nina stops being just a cinematic presence and becomes entangled with a second, more volatile narrative system: the world of Clifford Irving and manufactured truth. I remain, in a slightly persistent way, puzzled by Clifford Irving—not in the sense that his actions are obscure, but in the sense that the scale of the gamble still feels oddly disproportionate to the era in which it occurred. Clifford Irving occupies that 1970s threshold where narrative fraud still had room to breathe: before the internet, before instantaneous archival correction, before every claim arrived already cross-checked by a thousand invisible clerks. The rope, in other words, was longer. Not infinitely elastic—but long enough that someone could plausibly believe they might walk it all the way across.
What he did, of course, was fabricate the authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes and briefly convince a publishing system that this fiction was fact. And one cannot quite shake the sense that this sits in a parallel register to Orson Welles’ late-career meditation on forgery and authorship, F for Fake, where the art forger is not simply a criminal but a kind of metaphysical irritant—someone who reveals how fragile the category of “authenticity” already is, even before it is attacked. In Welles’ world, the faker is almost honest about the fact that everyone is faking something. In Irving’s world, the system briefly forgets to notice.
The irony, of course, is that Irving’s fraud depended on a very pre-digital faith in paper trails, intermediaries, and the general slowness of institutional verification. Today it feels almost quaintly physical: forged documents, publishing contracts, phone calls that had to be believed in real time. One can imagine the same scheme now collapsing within hours, not because people are more moral, but because the feedback loops are instantaneous.
And then there is prison. Irving did time—real time, not narrative time—and emerged into a world that had already moved on to other, faster deceptions. Yeah, I mean what did you expect, dude. The arc compresses there in a way that feels almost unsatisfying: scandal, exposure, incarceration, partial reinvention. One wants something more operatic, but what you get is the bureaucratic version of consequence.
The interesting part is not that he was punished, but that for a brief historical window the system was even buildable enough that his plan could function as a kind of temporary reality. That is the shared atmosphere he has with Nina Van Pallandt: not guilt, not innocence, but proximity to narrative systems that were still slow enough to be fooled by their own assumptions.
In later life, Nina becomes harder to place in any of the familiar compartments that earlier decades tried to assign her. The cinematic afterglow fades into cult memory, and the Irving episode recedes into archival texture. What remains is a quietness that feels deliberate rather than accidental—not disappearance, but refusal of continued amplification. She does not convert notoriety into permanent self-mythology in the way later media ecosystems would almost require. Instead, she settles into a lower frequency of visibility: remembered, cited, intermittently revived, but no longer authored by the same pressures that once pulled her forward.
And here the comparison widens again, because what she resembles is not a “sidekick” at all—that word is too structurally comic, too dependent on hierarchy—but something closer to an attendant presence: a figure whose job, in other people’s stories, is to make emotional or moral instability legible without ever fully resolving it.
There is a related category, more neutral and slightly more precise: the faithful interlocutor. Not in the devotional sense, but in the structural one—the person who remains close enough to the main character’s instability to render it speakable, without ever becoming fully absorbed into its explanatory system. Nina performs this function in The Long Goodbyewithout being granted interpretive authority over it.
And there is another: the witness who does not testify cleanly. Not unreliable, but resistant to conversion into stable narrative fact.
We all make mistakes; that much is banal. The more interesting question is what kind of cultural weather those mistakes occur in, and how much agency is genuinely available inside it. Nina Van Pallandt seems, in retrospect, to have lived inside a period when men were still doing a great deal of the writing—of scripts, scandals, explanations—and women were often expected to appear inside those scripts as if they had authored them themselves. Her resistance to that framing is not always loud or declarative. Sometimes it is simply a matter of stepping out of the demand to be continuously interpretable.
And in that sense, what she ultimately carved out is not a grand public myth but something more modest and, arguably, more durable: a minor legacy, lightly held, slightly resistant to over-definition. Not central, not erased, not simplified—just there, in a way that feels unexpectedly intact.
I really like Nina Van Pallandt. In The Long Goodbye, and in the shadow of the Clifford Irving story, it is impossible not to root for her—not because she is resolved, but because she is never fully reducible. She drifts through systems built by men who are busy writing meaning onto the world, and she does not quite consent to being finalized inside any of them. We all make mistakes. She was written into a few. She was also, quietly, a drifter inside Hollywood’s narrative machinery, and what she ultimately leaves behind is a minor but distinct and instinctively cool legacy: not the center of anyone’s story, but one of the few figures who never fully became owned by it.
Note: Spokane, early 1983: minor league baseball, cheap seats, and kids living in the gaps between innings. This piece recalls Spokane Indians games, chasing balls during batting practice, and a strange collision of childhood mischief and adult volatility at the edge of the outfield fence. Sandy Alomar Jr.—then a local catcher on his way to a long MLB career—signs a baseball in handwriting so precise it feels like a signature on a future already underway, while a moment of chaos involving thrown persimmons and a furious adult named Mike Trowbridge becomes the kind of story that sticks far longer than the season itself.
Epigraph:
Do you know who you’re fucking with?/ You’re fucking with a stallion mange.
Ween
It was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go. We played Little League baseball in uniforms that never quite fit right, and then on weekends we graduated to something bigger and looser and more important: Spokane Indians games at the old stadium, Single A ball, where the dreams were real and still close enough to touch.
The Spokane Indians were a kind of civic promise back then. It was a small town, and in the early 1980s there wasn’t always a lot going on. The Indians were not quite big league, but not quite nothing. Just enough baseball to make you believe that something important was always one bus ride away. The seats were cheap, the beer cheaper, and the fences closer than they should have been. The whole place had that slightly improvised feel—like the city had built it thinking, this will do for now.
We didn’t go to games like spectators. We went like we belonged.
Behind the outfield wall during batting practice, kids gathered like scavengers. We chased homers, argued over balls, sprinted through patches of grass worn down by repetition. Sometimes we were the only ones back there. Sometimes there were older kids, or dads, or random locals who knew the angles better than we did. It was a loose territory. Not quite policed. Not quite ours. Something in between.
That summer, the Indians had a catcher everyone knew. Local kid. Quiet confidence. Clean mechanics. The kind of player adults already talked about like he had a future attached to him.
Sandy Alomar Jr. was that guy even then—before the long MLB career, before the All-Star years, before anyone outside Spokane would know the name properly. He was already different. You could see it in the way he stood when he wasn’t moving, like he was always half a second ahead of the next pitch.
I got his autograph once. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a moment after BP, when he signed a ball for a cluster of kids leaning too far over a rail. His handwriting was unexpectedly beautiful—controlled, deliberate, almost elegant in a way that didn’t match the dirt and sweat of the field. I remember thinking even then: this is what someone looks like when they’re going somewhere.
I kept that ball for years.
Because baseball wasn’t just baseball. It was a hierarchy you could see. You had the guys who were going to make it, the guys who might make it, and the rest of us orbiting the idea that proximity alone might transfer something.
Most of them wouldn’t go anywhere. That was obvious even then, though nobody said it out loud. But that day, none of that mattered yet. What mattered was the fence.
Our party was up high in the stands on the first base side, just beyond where the stadium fence met a thin strip of wild space. A tree had grown there—some kind of fruit tree, nobody was ever fully sure what it was. Persimmons, maybe. Something orange-red and heavy-looking, the kind of fruit that doesn’t look like it should be thrown but absolutely is.
Some kids started throwing them. Just kids, just fucking around. But they didn’t know who they were fucking with. Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you.
The fruit flew. Not carefully. Not aimlessly either. More like experimentation. Testing distance. Testing reactions. Some of them were aiming at fans, others just launching them over the fence because it felt like something you could do if no one stopped you.
It was mildly funny at first. Then mildly annoying. Then mildly dangerous in a way that nobody fully acknowledged.
Because persimmons, if that’s what they were, aren’t soft. They hit like small decisions.
I remember one bouncing near a row of seats and rolling under a foot. Someone laughed. Someone else shouted. But nobody moved with urgency yet. It was still in the category of “kids being kids.”
Until Mike Trowbridge noticed.
Mike T was there with his kids—David Trowbridge and his sister Dawn. David had been a teammate of mine in Little League, a few years younger, outfield guy, quiet in the way younger kids sometimes are when they’re still deciding how loud they’re allowed to be. Dawn was just there in the background of everything, observing.
Their dad, Mike, was not background.
He was one of those adults you noticed before you understood why. Volatile energy. Tight posture. Goatee, black tank top, gold chains around his neck. A bit of a greaser; drove a Harley. Always slightly too close to losing his temper. He wasn’t a bad guy exactly—he could laugh, he could talk—but you always felt like there was a second version of him sitting just under the surface.
He saw the fruit being thrown. And something in him snapped into motion. He walked straight to the fence line, fast enough that it changed the temperature of the moment.
“Knock that shit off right now,” he yelled.
The kids paused. Not because they were scared exactly, but because the voice had weight.
Then one of them—small kid, maybe ten, sunburned confidence, the kind of kid who doesn’t fully understand consequences yet—looked up and said:
“Don’t pump me, man.”
It was such a strange sentence. Too casual for the situation. Too confident for the speaker. Like he had borrowed it from somewhere older and wasn’t sure how it fit yet.
There was a beat of silence where the entire stadium noise seemed to pull back slightly.
Mike T looked at him.
“Don’t pump me?” he said.
Then his voice shifted.
“You want me to pump you? I’ll pump you.”
And in that moment—this is the part that still feels unreal even now—he climbed the fence. Not slowly. Not theatrically. Just decisively. Like the boundary wasn’t a boundary at all.
Everything changed at once.
Me, David, Dawn—everyone nearby—we all froze in that wide-eyed way kids do when they realize the rules might not hold. It wasn’t comedy anymore. It wasn’t baseball anymore.
It was just: Mikey baby don’t kill that kid.
That’s what it felt like in my head. Not words were spoken, just panic translated into something almost verbal.
The kids scattered instantly. Full sprint. No hesitation. The fruit stopped mid-air and dropped forgotten. The stadium behind us suddenly felt far away, like it belonged to a different scene entirely.
Mike T took a step forward, still inside the fenced edge of this improvised battlefield, breathing hard, still locked in that strange overlap between anger and disbelief.
And then—somehow—it was over. No actual violence. No contact. Just the threat of it, large enough to erase the mischief that had caused it.
The kids were gone. The fruit stopped flying. The tree stood there like nothing had happened. Afterwards, the stadium noise came back slowly, like a system rebooting.
My dad, Ross, had seen the whole thing. He was laughing, hard. Not the kind of polite laugh adults do when they think they’re supposed to. This was involuntary. Almost helpless. The kind of laugh that tries to stay respectful but can’t quite hold the line.
Because it was funny. In that terrible, chaotic way childhood sometimes is when it brushes up against adult intensity and survives without breaking.
Ross would tell that story for years after. The kid. The fence. The persimmons. The line: don’t pump me man. He never stopped laughing at that part.
Neither did I.
But at the time, I just stood there thinking about Sandy Alomar Jr. somewhere on that field, already on his way to something else entirely, signing baseballs in beautiful handwriting, while right behind the stadium wall the rest of us were learning the difference between games and consequences in real time.
Most of us wouldn’t make it to the Bigs. But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go.
But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.
Dedication:
For Mike T. And for the kid. You got balls young man, I’ll say that.
Note: This piece takes up On Late Style, the posthumously published and deliberately unfinished work by Edward Said on what he, following Theodor Adorno, calls “lateness”—not serenity or resolution at the end of a career, but tension, contradiction, and a refusal to reconcile. It’s a short book that opens out into large questions, and this will be less a full treatment than an attempt to think alongside it, particularly around the strange fact that a book about unresolvedness arrives in a form that is itself, in some essential way, unresolved.
Edward Said’s On Late Style is as rich a book as an unfinished work can be. Published posthumously, On Late Style expands on Theodor Adorno’s concept of “late works.” Late works are works with fall toward the end of an artist’s career, but not those like The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest which “reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality” (6), but those like Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or Lampedusa’s The Leopard–works which, in Adorno’s words are “devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation,” or, in Said’s phrasing, are “uncoopted by a higher synthesis: they do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved” (12).
Said died in September 2003, before On Late Style was completed. In the foreward, his wife, Miriam writes of how Said was planning to get to work and get it done: “{In late August} he said to me as we were having breakfast that morning, ‘Today I will write the acknowledgments and preface to Humanism and Democratic Criticism {…} The introduction to From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map I’ll finish by Sunday. And next week I’ll concentrate on completing On Late Style, which will be finished by December” (vii). He didn’t make it, and the little quote is a moving reminder that we never know how much time we have left. But Michael Wood, who arranged the various fragments Said had written on the topic of late style into this nearly seamless finished product, says that he doesn’t believe that Said ever wanted to finish the book: “Or rather, he wanted to finish it but was waiting for a time that would perhaps never have come. There would have been a time for this book about untimeliness, but this time was always: not quite yet” (xvi-xvii).
What does Adorno, and Said, mean by “late style,” and why would Said perhaps have not wanted to finish his work on this topic? Again, to understand what the term means we need to understand that late style is not simply synonomous with work accomplished late in life. Wood puts it this way, the “type of lateness {that Said was interested in} is quite different {…} from the unearthly serenity we find in the last works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Oedipus at Colonus, The Tempest, and The Winter Tale are late enough in their way, but they have settled their quarrel with time” (xiii). In other words, these works are transcendent yet resigned–the author, knowing perhaps that death is coming to claim them, moves to preempt death by surrendering his grasp on reality and moving in the direction of a “higher synthesis,” and in the process attaining “a remarkable holiness and sense of resolution” (6). Said has nothing against such works at peace with themselves and with time, but these are not his subject. Lateness here seems to take its raison d’etre from Dylan Thomas; it rages against the dying of the light. As Said puts it, “Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality” (9) and is “a form of exile” (8).
But if late style finds its power in a righteous rage against resignation, senescence, and serenity, it is at the same time complicit with disintegration and ultimately with death. In other words, an artist can embrace lateness in Said’s conception of the term, but can never be quit of it. Said writes: “For Adorno, lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal; in addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness” (13). Here, we understand why it was the Said, though he worked on the idea of lateness for over a decade, was not able to finish off what at only 160 pages is still a relatively slight work–only death itself can put a period on lateness. Wood writes: “for all his deep interest in lateness {…} Said was not attracted by the idea of a late, dissolving self. {…} Said wanted to continue with the self’s making, and if we divide a life into early middle, and late periods, he was still in the middle when he died at the age of sixty-seven {…} Still a little too early, I think he would have said, for real lateness” (xviii).
Another reason why On Late Style cannot exactly be classified as a “late” work is the urbane depth of its learning and its lightness of touch. Though deeply serious, Said in On Late Style wears his learning lightly, as only a true elitist can. For the fact is that despite its topic the book is oddly comforting; I can open it to any page in the moments before sleep and feel a rush of almost narcotic satisfaction and harmony. This effect is obtained not because Said takes an oppositional stance to his topic but because the extent of his learning is so colossal that it seems to achieve “a remarkable holiness and sense of resolution” based on its own gravitational force, even though acting in opposition to Said’s own thesis.
Thus, although we have only begun to scratch the surface of what Said has to say about lateness, it is already clear that while the relation between late style and classicism must for the moment remain unresolved, On Late Style as a text is a deeply classical enterprise, and this classicism is rooted in the remarkable range and depth of Said’s mind. Wood reminds us that being in opposition need not always mean manning the barricades–and this at least sets up the question raised in an earlier post about the ability of leftism and classicism to co-exist: “It is part of the generosity of Said’s critical imagination that he sees ‘amusement’ as a form of resistance. He can do this because amusement, like pleasure and privacy, does not require reconciliation with a status quo or a dominant regime” (xiv).
So perhaps On Late Style is complete in the only way a book about lateness can be. It circles, it deepens, it resists arriving. Edward Said writes against resolution, and the book quietly enacts that refusal, never quite allowing itself the satisfaction of a final statement. There is something fitting in this. Lateness, as he and Theodor Adorno understand it, is not a stage one passes through and exits, but a condition one can only move further into. Said, still “in the middle” by his own reckoning, never closed the circle. And so the book remains open—not unfinished in the sense of lacking something, but unfinished because its subject will not permit an end.
Note: This piece will take up “Soft in the Center,” track 2 on Heaven is Whenever (Vagrant Records, 2010) by The Hold Steady. This one will be a little different for a couple of reasons. First, Heaven is Whenever was the first Hold Steady record after the departure of their keyboard player Franz Nicolay, and Nicolay was (and is, because he rejoined in 2016) a huge part of the Hold Steady sound. Therefore, I will look briefly at the personal dynamics of the band, insofar as they’ve been made public. Second, I will take up song order, something I intend to return to in future pieces. Third—and maybe most importantly—I am using this piece to set an intention. A serious one.
Epigraph:
You can’t tell people what they want to hear
If you also want to tell the truth
Craig Finn
I want to be a music writer.
I have always wanted to play music, and I remain fascinated with the role of the frontman or frontwoman. There are so many great ones—Finn, Mick Jagger, Bret Michaels (I really just want to perform “Shelter Me”), Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and many others. But I am not, at this moment, a songwriter or a singer, and I am still working on understanding songwriting from the inside.
So my goal is simpler and, in some ways, harder: to be the best music writer that I can be.
I don’t think I can be as good as Chuck Klosterman, who is amazing, and I am not really a reviewer. I don’t write reviews; I write analysis. I’m less interested in telling you whether something is good than in understanding what it is doing—how it works, what it reveals, and what it becomes when placed next to a life.
So I’m not competitive with Klosterman, and I’m not competitive with reviewers generally. But I am competitive with myself, and in a narrower sense, I am competitive with myself to be the best Craig Finn analyst around. Finn has, in my opinion, leveled up his songwriting several times across his career, and I want to level up alongside him as a writer.
That’s the goal. Let’s take up “Soft in the Center.”
The Hold Steady’s on and off again keyboardist Franz Nicolay joined The Hold Steady in 2005, after the release of 2004’s Almost Killed Me. Almost Killed Me may be my personal favorite Hold Steady record, but it is also true that the band’s sound took a major step forward with Nicolay. Some of their most iconic songs depend on his presence as much as on Finn’s voice.
There isn’t a great deal of publicly available detail about Nicolay’s departure in 2010. Compared to famously volatile bands—Jane’s Addiction, The Rolling Stones, Galaxie 500—this one seems almost restrained. Finn described it as amicable. Nicolay described it as a “closed book.” Both statements feel composed, even careful, which in itself tells you something about the people involved.
What matters for our purposes is the effect. Without Nicolay, the band’s sound on Heaven is Whenever is leaner. The keys are still there, but diminished, less central, less cinematic. There is more space, and that space exposes Finn a bit more.
For a long time, I misheard this record. I thought the highlights were the obvious ones—“The Weekenders,” “Sweet Part of the City.” Recent listening corrected that. My favorite, by a ways, is “Soft in the Center,” with “Our Whole Lives” in second place. The latter contains the line, “We’re good guys, but we can’t be good all the time,” which could stand as a thesis for much of Finn’s writing.
The fact that I missed both songs initially is not trivial. It suggests that some of Finn’s best work doesn’t announce itself immediately. It waits.
Which brings us to song order.
“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on the record and one of its most immediate. I tend to favor leading with your strongest statement, and I think there’s a case that it should have opened the album. There is a long tradition of bands doing exactly that—“Janie Jones” by The Clash, “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth, “Rocks Off” by The Rolling Stones. These are not just songs; they are openings that define tone and intent.
Finn has acknowledged that “Soft in the Center” has a certain built-in audience response, particularly around its chorus. He can feel when a line is going to land, when a certain type of listener is going to raise a fist. That’s not calculation so much as familiarity—he understands the emotional economy of his audience because he helped build it.
The song itself unfolds as a conversation, and more specifically, as advice. It is an older voice speaking to a younger one. In that sense, it mirrors earlier Hold Steady material like “Killer Parties,” but from the opposite side. In those earlier songs, Finn is inside the chaos, narrating in real time. Here, he stands outside it, looking back, trying—gently, imperfectly—to intervene.
The opening image is stark: a young man leaving a hospital, returning to a city that has not changed. The implication is clear without being over-explained. Something went wrong—an overdose, an accident, a night that tipped too far. And yet the conditions that produced that moment are all still in place. The city remains. The temptations remain. The system resets.
Finn’s great line—“You can’t tell people what they want to hear / if you also want to tell the truth”—lands here as a kind of thesis. It is a statement about songwriting, but also about mentorship, about friendship, about any attempt to guide someone who is not yet ready to be guided. The truth, in Finn’s world, is rarely what anyone wants to hear in the moment.
When he follows it with a direct address—“I’m just trying to tell the truth, kid”—the dynamic becomes explicit. He is the older figure now. Not removed, not sanctimonious, but positioned. He has been through something. He has survived something. And survival, in Finn’s writing, tends to confer not authority exactly, but a certain obligation to speak.
The chorus distills the advice into something almost disarmingly simple: you can’t have everything; you learn to love what you have. Finn himself has noted that he knows lines like this will hit. They scan as universal, almost cliché at first glance. But in context, they are not glib. They are corrective. They push back against a younger worldview built on accumulation—of experiences, of people, of intensity.
This is one of Finn’s recurring moves: to take a sentiment that could sound obvious and place it in a context that makes it necessary.
The second verse introduces the song’s central metaphor: the frozen lake. Finn, being from Minnesota, grounds it in lived experience—“a place with lots of lakes”—but the image does more than local color. It becomes diagnostic.
On the surface, everything looks stable. Solid. Safe. But “sometimes they get soft in the center,” and that center is “a dangerous place.”
This is the song’s title, and its key. The “center” here is not just the literal middle of the lake; it is the middle of the action, the heart of the scene, the dead center of the city, the place where things feel most alive. It is also the place where the structure is weakest. The danger is not at the edges, where you might expect it, but at the point of maximum immersion.
That is a sophisticated inversion, and it maps cleanly onto the nightlife world Finn has chronicled for years from his albums with his first bands Lifter Puller through to today. The parties, the drugs, the endless nights—they are not dangerous because they are marginal. They are dangerous because they are central, because they feel like the point.
Finn frames the young man’s situation with unusual generosity: “you can probably do anything, if you can get yourself right.” This is not moralizing. It is not even particularly prescriptive. It is conditional. The possibility is there, but it depends on an internal realignment that the speaker cannot perform for the listener.
There is also, quietly, autobiography here. Finn writes in the great song “Most People Are DJs” about his own youthful excess—“I was a Twin Cities trash bin/ I’d jam it all into my system”—and the process of pulling back from that edge. What matters is not just that he got himself right, but that he remembers what it was like not to be.
From there, the song largely reiterates its central ideas, but with increasing insistence. The chorus returns. The advice is repeated. And then comes the bridge: “I know what you’re going through / I had to go through that too.”
This is where the song earns its authority. Not in the cleverness of its lines, or even in the sharpness of its metaphors, but in its identification. Finn is not speaking from above. He is speaking from experience. The distance between the older voice and the younger listener is real, but it is not absolute.
And yet—and this is crucial—that identification does not guarantee transmission. The younger figure may still ignore the advice. He may return to the city, to the center, to the unsafe ice. Finn knows this. The song does not resolve that tension. It simply articulates it.
What makes “Soft in the Center” so effective is its clarity. Finn is not being coy about the theme. He is saying, in essence: the action is real, the lights are bright, and the pull is powerful. You will want to stay in it as long as you can. But there are costs. There are limits. There is time.
You age. You win and lose people. You push your system until it pushes back. You end up in rooms—hospitals, apartments, empty bars—where the energy has drained out and something quieter, and less negotiable, remains.
“Take your time,” the song seems to say, but also: think it through.
That balance—between permission and warning, between empathy and clarity—is where Finn’s later songwriting lives. It is a long way from the breathless immediacy of Lifter Puller, but it is not a rejection of it. It is a reframing. The same world, seen from a different distance.
“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on Heaven is Whenever and one of the strongest in Finn’s catalog. It is direct without being simplistic, reflective without losing momentum, generous without losing edge.
Simply marvelous.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with the songs of Craig Finn.
Note: This post takes up Songs for Drella (1990), Lou Reed and John Cale’s uneasy reunion album/biographical song-cycle about Andy Warhol, moving track by track through Warhol’s trajectory from Pittsburgh outsider to Factory-era icon to post-shooting isolation and mythic afterlife. Along the way it reads the record not just as tribute or elegy, but as a sustained meditation on work, style, and the thin boundary between populist gesture and aesthetic theory—especially in the pointed figure of “classicists” versus Warhol’s downtown anti-orthodoxy. What emerges is less a linear album review than a set of reflections on art, authorship, and cultural literacy, with Warhol as both subject and pretext for thinking about what it means to make anything count as art in the first place.
In 1990, Lou Reed and John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, latterly famously not getting along, reunited to make Songs for Drella, a tribute/ musical biography of their first patron, Andy Warhol. Drella is a 15 song cycle which takes the listener through Andy’s life and career, from his early days in Pittsburgh, through success in New York, getting shot, latter-day isolation and and loneliness, and ending with an epitaph. The songs fit loosely together in chronological order. Here is the basic scheme: “Smalltown” sees Andy unhappy in Pittsburgh and dreaming of the big city; “Open House” describes the early days of the factory, when all and sundry stopped by and provided Andy with inspiration; “Style it Takes” gives an overview of some of Andy’s famous works and his working method; “Work” explains the considerable work ethic that underlay Warhol’s success; “Trouble with Classicists,” in what is presumably Andy’s voice, provides a series of opinions about “classicists”, “impressionists”, and “personalities”; “Starlight” appears to consider Andy’s flirtation with Hollywood, or Hollywood’s flirtation with him; “Faces and Names” kicks off the second section of the record and finds Andy in despair, something like a midlife crisis; “Images” details Andy’s philosophy of art and hits back at the critics of his method; “Slip Away,” “It Wasn’t Me,” and “I Believe” represent the nadir of the record in which Andy is warned about the people he associates with, confronts a junkie, and is shot by Valerie Solanis; “Nobody But You” sees Andy bereft of companionship hanging out and paying the price of dinner of a nobody; “A Dream” synthesizes all which has come before and puts Andy’s life into fuller perspective; “Forever Changed” sees Andy’s past slipping away; and “Hello It’s Me” represents Reed’s epitaph and apology to Warhol.
Some of the songs are better than others; specifically, I get comparatively little out of “Starlight,” “It Wasn’t Me” and “Forever Changed,” but every song has its place in the story of Warhol’s life and his influence on Reed and Cale, his circle, New York city, and the art world in general. This post will take up the first five songs as a bridge into a wider discussion of the meaning of “classicism” today. There may or may not be a part two to this post.
“Smalltown” is about leaving Pittsburgh, and introduces us to the fact that Andy was gay:
When you’re growing up in a small town Bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty People look at you funny When you’re in a small town
New York is more to his liking, and provides a context for his art to flourish:
Where did Picasso come from There’s no Michelangelo coming from Pittsburgh
I hate being odd in a small town If they stare let them stare in New York City
The theme of small town boy (girl) made good in the big city is classic and well worn, of course, but Andy thrives in NYC, and soon “The Factory” is open to all comers (“Open House”):
Come over to 81st street I’m in the apartment above the bar You know you can’t miss it, it’s across from the subway and the tacky store with the Mylar scarves
Andy wants people around him, and this is one of the major themes of the record; his ability to work is dependent on company and inspiration from associates, peers, and even hangers-on:
It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me The way to make friends Andy is invite them up for tea
It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me Give people little presents so they remember me
Whereas “Smalltown” is loud and bracing, the music on “Open House” is soft, elegant, gentle even. But even in his halcyon early days in NYC Andy cannot entirely escape the demands of the market or of other people’s ideas of what he should be doing:
I think I got a job today they want me to draw shoes The ones I drew were old and used They told me — draw something new Open house, open house
You scared yourself with music, I scared myself with paint I drew five-hundred fifty different shoes today It almost made me faint Open house, open house
Andy’s career takes off, and he clearly has something that people want–he has “The Style It Takes.”
You’ve got connections and I’ve got the art You like attention and I like your looks and I have the style it takes and you know the people it takes
I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket ‘Cause I’ve got the style it takes
Here, Reed and Cale delve into the perennial question of the definition of art–what’s good, what’s bad, and how do we know the difference? The answer which “Style It Takes” seems to offer is: the status of something as “art” is dependent upon someone with “style” telling so. This observation is at once banal (we know art is art because it hangs in a museum and because of the reverent hush of the patrons), and somehow inspiring (a kid from Pittsburgh, “bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty,” can take the New York art world by storm simply be possessing some quicksilver attribute called “style,” something so powerful that a simple box of soap pads becomes accepted as art less on its own merit and more on the strength of its association with Warhol, who by 1964 was rapidly ascending to the status of an icon). This song also sees the first appearance on the record of a little group called The Velvet Underground, who Andy “shows movies on.”
“I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art”–is this a populist claim or an elitist one? Is it classical? Certainly not classically classical, but is there not a way in which Warhol’s “pop art”–which is often read as representing the “emptiness” of modern popular culture, is perfectly sincere and actually uninflected with irony? Another major theme of the record is Andy’s work ethic–he was a working artist on whose sweat the whole Factory scene was dependent. Andy’s work ethic, according to Reed and Cale, even had a religious aspect. “Work” starts with Andy in prayer, and despite the neat twist on the phrase “Protestant ethic” here, we are left with the strong feeling that Andy was no self-ironizing dilettante, and that his blue-collar background stuck with him throughout his life:
Andy was a Catholic, the ethic ran through his bones He lived alone with his mother, collecting gossip and toys Every Sunday when he went to church He’d kneel in his pew and he’d say, “It’s work, all that matters is work.”
He was a lot of things, what I remember most He’d say, “I’ve got to bring home the bacon, someone’s got to bring home the roast.” He’d get to the factory early If you asked him he’d told you straight out It’s work
In “Work,” Andy stresses quantity over quality; just as he had painted 550 different shoes in “Open House,” here he advises Reed to write like there is no tomorrow:
No matter what I did it never seemed enough He said I was lazy, I said I was young He said, “How many songs did you write?” I’d written zero, I’d lied and said, “Ten.” “You won’t be young forever You should have written fifteen” It’s work
But despite his working artist approach, Andy is not content to merely record the surface of what he sees. Neither, however, is he given to too much soul-searching or self-analysis about why he is who he is, or why he does what he does. “The Trouble with Classicists” is the central song on the record, the song where Reed and Cale get closest to defining Warhol’s attitude toward art. It is also here from which I was moved to take on the issue of classicism in our times:
The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree That’s all he sees, he paints a tree The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky
The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log He doesn’t know who he is, standing, staring, at this log {…} That’s the trouble with impressionists
If neither classicism nor impressionism, than who or what is Warhol drawn to? The answer is graffiti artists, of all things:
I like the druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains I like their lack of training, their primitive technique I think sometimes it hurts you when you stay too long in school I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool That’s the trouble with classicists
Let’s dig a little deeper. Cale, who sings “Classicists,” is himself famously a “classically trained” musician, who has drunk heavily of modernism and dissonance without surrendering what I still see as a fundamentally classical musical and aesthetic sensibility. Moreover, writing a song called “The Trouble with Classicists” in this day and age is in itself a classical act. This I think is a key point; whereas once upon a time a Romantic poet could have defined himself or herself in violent opposition to Classicism and made it stick, today, and perhaps even in Warhol’s day, the ability to criticize classicism as a form or style is evidence of a degree of learning and cultural literacy which can only be described as classical, and, yes, a little elitist.
Is this right? It sounds right, at least, and I would add the following: a) the vagueness with which I am approaching the question of a modern definition for classicism in these paragraphs is symptomatic of the generally pitiable state of true learning on that part of what Edward Said calls “the general intellectual”; b) Said’s general intellectual today tends also to be as Dean Williams has said a “profound modernist”–which is a nice way of saying someone who knows, and cares, very little about Western culture’s classical roots, very little about the Bible, very little about the great religion (at least in any fine grained way), probably very little about Shakespeare for that matter; c) today’s general intellectual knows very little about music compared with his 18th or 19th century counterpart. This is a point which Said makes in his chapter on Glenn Gould in On Late Style: “Today’s literary or general intellectual has little practical knowledge of music as an art, has hardly any experience playing an instrument or studying solfege or theory, and except for buying records or collecting a few names like Karajan and Callas, does not as a matter of course have a sustained literacy–whether that concerns being able to relate performance, interpretation, and style to one another, or recognizing the difference between harmonic and rhythmical characteristics in Mozart, Berg, and Messiaen–in the actual practice of music” (115). Any of my general intellectual readership care to take this argument on? If so, please produce 100 words on solfege without reference to Wikipedia before wading in.
My point, which is, I fear, on the verge of getting lost, is less that Warhol or for that matter Reed and Cale are in any specific way “classical,” but that because what Said calls the lack of “sustained literacy” in music on the part of the general intellectual is not confined to music, but extends to art, classical and great literature (how many of us who name drop Aristotle have actually spent any time reading him? how many of us who attempt to evince first-hand knowledge of Marx have actually broached Capital?), and philosophy. That is to say that the general intellectual today is apt not only to be a profound modernist, but also to be a profound generalist, who knows a miniscule amount about a huge number of things, a little bit about a few things, and knows almost nothing is any truly extensive or impressive detail. In this context, not only is “The Trouble with Classicists” deeply classical, not only is Classical Sympathies, by very virtue of its being and intent, classical, but any attempt to engage in a serious way with issues of aesthetic definition marks one out as both a classicist, and at least a minor elitist. Certainly Said, for all his “oppositional” stances and leftist politics, was both–but the question of how leftism and classicism can co-exist is best left for a latter date; it is time to stop work on this post and risk being called a fool.
Note: This piece is a wide-ranging meditation on Laud Humphreys’ notion of “role drift” in his book The Tearoom Trade, drawn outward into unexpected but structurally suggestive parallels with the historical conversion the Apostle Paul and lived military hierarchy through an interview with an ex-US solider. Beginning from Humphreys’ account of observational immersion and the tendency for participants and observers alike to “go over” through sustained proximity, the piece tracks how identity can be reshaped by exposure to institutional logics and repeated social frames. A military anecdote from the First Gulf War anchors the theory in lived experience, while the figure of Paul becomes an extreme historical case of allegiance reversal that tests the limits of the model. The result is a speculative sociology of affiliation and transformation, where roles are not merely performed but slowly internalized until the boundary between observer and participant, or “they” and “we,” begins to dissolve.
Epigraph:
I believe in this/ and it’s been tested by research/ that he who fucks nuns/ will later join the church.
The Clash
This post takes up that sexiest of subjects, “role-drift.” In this post I will connect Laud Humphreys’ investigation of “the Tearoom Trade,” that is, casual homosexual encounters in public toilets, the initiation process in the United States military, and the conversion of Paul the Apostle. Those easily offended by sociological explanations of religion, of sexual preference, or of the comradeship among soldiers should cease reading immediately.
Recently, I finished reading a book–which, as my next post will detail, is a somewhat rare occurrence. The book was Laud Humphreys’ “The Tearoom Trade,” published in 1970. It concerns men hooking up with other men, usually strangers, in the public restroom facilities in St. Louis, and it is an eye-opening read. The blurb on the book jacket pretty much tells the story: “Many American men seek impersonal sex in public restrooms. Called ‘tearooms’ in the argot of the homosexual subculture, these restrooms are accessible to and easily recognized by those who wish to engage in anonymous sexual encounters {…} By passing as deviant, the author was able to engage in systematic observations of homosexual acts in public settings. Methodologists will be interested {…} in this unusual application of participant-observation strategies.” Indeed, methodologists everywhere, I can say without hesitation, were and are all ears. But the odd thing is that Humphreys, married and purportedly straight when he conducted his research, later divorced his wife and came out as gay.
Now, it may not be considered particularly odd that someone, sociologist or no, who spends several months or years in public toilets observing “insertors” and “insertees” would himself come out eventually, and Humphreys’ persistent use of “us” and “we” to refer to the denizens of the restrooms of St. Louis appears, in retrospect, to be something of a “tell.” Consider, for instance, sentences such as the following: “when a group of us were locked in a restroom and attacked by several youths, we spoke in defense and out of fear {…} This event ruptured the reserve among us and resulted in a series of conversations among those who shared this adventure for several days afterward” (12), and several other similar uses of plural pronouns. (It may be of interest here that Humphreys and his study of tearooms enjoyed a brief week in the sun a few years ago when Senator Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested in an airport bathroom stall for foot-tapping–Humphreys covered this topic as well, making clear that foot-tapping was, in 1970, a well-established method of making contact from stall to stall, and already in use by police decoys so many decades ago (20, 87).)
Indeed, the whole study is fascinating, and peppered with wonderfully matter-of-fact passages such as: “There is a great deal of difference in the volumes of homosexual activity that these accommodations shelter. In some, one might wait for months before observing a deviant act. In others, the volume approaches orgiastic dimensions. One summer afternoon, for instance, I witnessed twenty acts of fellatio is the course of an hour while waiting out a thunderstorm in a tearoom. For one who wishes to participate in (or study) such activity, the primary consideration is one of finding where the action is” (6) (alert readers will recognize the influence of Erving Goffman here; Goffman’s study of gambling establishments is titled “Where the Action Is”). But the passage which really caught my attention deals with what Humphreys calls “role instability” or “role drift.” He makes two major points; i) those who start out pitching tend to end up catching; “It appears that, during the career of any one participant, the role of insertor tends to be transposed into that of insertee” (55) (Humphreys attributes this tendency to “the aging crisis” common to tearoom participants); ii) “If {straights} remain exposed ‘too long’ to the action, they cease to operate as straights” (56). Humphreys here is not referring to men who one day, by accident, may wander into an operational tearoom, but rather to members of the parks department or vice squad who, over time, may be exposed to a wider swath of tearoom activity. Here is the key passage:
“When some communication continues to exist, parents tend to be ‘turned on’ by their pot-smoking offspring. Spectators tend to be drawn into mob action, and kibitzers into card games. Even police may adopt the roles they are assigned to eliminate:
‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance’” (Here, Humphreys is quoting from Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner from 1967. My emphasis).
It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad they begin to ‘go over’. The moment I read this, having known of Humphreys’ own history before I read his book, I immediately recognized either a brilliant justification for future defection or an alternative, sociologically-based, theory for how sexual preference is formed. After all, Humphreys himself spent several years researching and writing “The Tearoom Trade,” over which time he subjected himself to sufficient “action” to push him into shifting his primary allegiance, and to “go over.” This theory, it goes without saying, flies in the face of the idea that sexual preference is genetic or established in the womb–and just as obviously it cannot explain all instances of same-sex attraction. But, as a sociologically fascinating explanation for Humphreys own conversion, it remained in the back of my mind.
Several weeks later I was reading Robert Wright’s Atlantic article “One World, Under God,” about the relationship between religion and globalization. Much of the article deals with the Apostle Paul, and I read something I had long known but never fully processed–Paul persecuted Christians right up until his conversion. Here’s Wright: “The ‘Apostle Paul’ wasn’t one of Jesus’ 12 apostles. Quite the opposite: after the Crucifixion he seems to have persecuted followers of Jesus. According to the book of Acts, he was ‘ravaging the church by entering house after house: dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.’ But then, while on his way to treat Syrian followers of Jesus in this fashion, he underwent his ‘road to Damascus’ conversion. He was blinded by the light and heard the voice of Jesus” (40). The rest is history, of course, as Paul went on to establish ministries across the Near East, and, according to Wright, recast Jesus’ message as one of love and peace. There are a couple of classic explanations for Paul’s conversion–first, as Wright says, that he heard the voice of Jesus or God and converted–simple enough. Second, that Paul was epileptic and had a seizure in which he imagined he heard Jesus. The first explanation is religious or mystical; the second medical. But when I read this paragraph, the first thing I thought of was Humphreys–‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance.’” Had Paul spent too much time on the vice-squad exposed to this rogue new faith and fallen prone to “role-drift”? This post is not a polemic, and I would not want to rule out religious, medical, or genetic explanations of human behavior–but the unifying thread excited me.
The general topic of role-drift has, in one form or another, been on my mind for several years, and I recently posted an extract of a conversation I had with my editor Dean Williams several years ago. The narrow topic is how men in the military adapt to the culture–the wider topic is social adaptation and investment in an ideology over time.
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In the interview below “MT” is the author Matt Thomas and DW is Dean Williams, my editor, who served in the US military in the early 1990s during the First Gulf War.
MT: We’re here with U.S. army lieutenant Dean Williams, and he’s going to tell us a story from his military career. Dean, set the scene for us.
DW: OK, so I was a lieutenant back in the 19–early 90′s in Germany and there was an officer party. And a group of lieutenants, with me among them, we’re sitting next to a very famous general, his name was General Michael Kelly. And he was famous because he had become a one star general in a faster time than any other general in the signal corps. So we were very honored to be sitting there, and having a drink or two, with this kind of military celebrity.
MT: So you’d never talked to a one star general before in such a close setting?
DW: Yes, right, not a nice close setting. Not at a kind of a party where–he was being very open and honest with us, and we really got the sense that he had taken off his, kind of, stars, you know his general stars, he felt like more of a human being than is normally the case. And then I just, I felt this honesty and I felt it was a chance to tell him something that I had always felt in the last few years of being an officer and that was that you really got the sense that there was this vast, you know, impersonal, very powerful “they” that was above you; you had to do things, but “they” were up there controlling things, watching you, sometimes praising you, sometimes yelling at you, but they were there and you were here and there really wasn’t, there wasn’t much of a connection. And yet here was this general, he was part of the “they,” but here he was sitting right in front of us having a beer. And I said that to him; I said “so I really feel this gap between us so this is a good, you know, interesting chance,” and then I’ll never forget, he sat back and he put–he was smoking a cigar, by the way he was a very small man, like a lot of generals are…
MT: Were you smoking a cigar?
DW: No, I was not smoking a cigar ’cause I would have gotten sick, but he was a very small, but very dynamic and powerful guy, with piercing blue eyes, drinking his beer and just very animated and dynamic and energetic, and he leaned back and he actually put his cigar down, and he said “young lieutenant, let me tell you something,” he said “I’ve been in the army around thirty years, and I know exactly what you mean.” But he said, “and I went through as a lieutenant, in Vietnam, and did many many things, and I’ve done many field problems and solved many problems, and yelled and gotten yelled at, and in all my long career, as I went through, at some point, that “they” you speak of became a “we.” And now I feel that I am that “we.” And we were all very impressed with that, and I’ve never–I’ve forgotten many things from that evening; I’ve forgotten many things from the military…
MT: But not that? Not that moment?
DW: Yeah. It seems to me the most powerful statement of what it’s like to be part of an organization and to feel either powerless or have power…
MT: So what he meant is that over time, that you too would become part of that thing that you described as a “they,” you’d be part of it?
DW: Yeah…
MT: You would become it.
DW: You would, and as you spend time and invest in an organization, and as the organization gives you more power, more money, more reasons to stay, it doesn’t become–it gets nearer and nearer–it’s almost like some alien force but then it finally goes into you and you are part of it, actually, which is a very…at that time it was very positive. Now I’m more, I’m thinking was it positive or negative? For all of us.
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The vice-squad officer “goes over”
the straight becomes queer
the jailer of the faithful becomes an apostle of the faith
the hipster sells out
“every cheap hood makes a bargain with the world and ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl”
the would-be uncommitted passive intellectual confronts the realization that action is ideology and the personal is political
the they becomes a we
the world turns, stays pretty much the same.
Dedication:
For Puritano
Note; If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also deal with my editor, the Souther Man and one and only Motherfucking Dean Williams.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 