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Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

Epigraph:

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…

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Scenes from Hamilton College I: Meeting Ian and Jake

New Note: It’s been a while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back here as a republication. “Hamilton I” remains one of my favorite entries on the Kyoto Kibbitzer—an early chapter built around friendship, music, and the strange, formative textures of freshman year, especially the central presence of my good friends Ian and Jake, who shaped so much of that time. It’s also one of the more widely read pieces on the site, which I appreciate. Re-reading it now, I’m struck by how much of what came later was already there in embryo: the scenes, the sounds, the late nights, and the people who mattered. As always, thanks for reading.

And I recall the moment
More distant than it seems
When five green queens
On a black bin bag
Meant all the world to me

The Pogues

I attended Hamilton College, and managed to graduate–possibly in linen. At Hamilton I was an English major, and intended to be from when I enrolled. This was a decent choice; however both Hamilton and English were kind of my father’s choices. I also managed to cobble together an Asian Studies minor through the good auspices of my advisor who checked out my credits and told me I could put that together. This was a good call on his part, and even though I kind of stumbled into it, The Asian Studies minor was my choice.

I was pretty unprepared for college. Before going I was asked to fill out a kind of questionnaire to help the college place me with roommates. One of the questions was, are you clean, messy, or in the middle. I chose in the middle, which was sort of a mistake because it turns out men are pigs, and I was cleaner than most. At the same time though it wasn’t a mistake because if I had selected clean I may not have met Ian and Jake. Jake was my roommate, and we lived in a quad. The other two roommates were Brian and Geoff, and although I had a relationship of a sort with both of them freshman year, we were not really on the same page. Jake and I were. Ian was our next door neighbor, and he roomed with Marc Campbell, and two other people. Ian, Jake, and Marc are still in my life.

My parents came with me to upstate New York, and before I moved into the dorm we stayed for a few days in a hotel near campus. I was kind of apprehensive, and spent the days listening to The Pogues and quietly stressing. But when I moved into the quad things were fine. This was mostly because of Jake.

Jake was a bit of a wild character. He was from either New York or Connecticut as I recall, and I think he came from decent money. When I visited his house later that year it was very patrician, for lack of a better word. His father seemed like a super old-school WASP patriarch, and his mother didn’t work I don’t believe. His younger brother held right-wing political views at the time, while Jake was a lefty. This was a point of serious disagreement between the brothers, but other than that the family seemed pretty solid. I believe that his brother has since switched his political views.

I didn’t meet Jake’s family until Thanksgiving however, and got to know him first in the context of the quad. We lived in a dorm called North, on the first floor right by the door. (My buddy John Innes, who joined me at Hamilton from our high school lived in the neighboring dorm Kirkland, and next to that was South.) The door to North would be locked at night, and other dorm folks would regularly misplace their key and crawl through our always open window. Jake and I rarely slept, and I got in the habit of staying up until about five AM. After that I would get a little sleep before first period English class. Then I would attend Geology class, which satisfied some kind of Science graduation credit. For English class I was alert and on top of it, although I was still hand-writing my papers, which changed once I got in the habit of using the computers in the library. English class was small, maybe 12-15 people, whereas Geology was huge and held in a lecture hall. I would go lay down in the back in the aisle and try and sleep. I ended up getting As in almost all my English classes, and a C- in Geology, which was deserved to an extent because of the sleeping. However, the main question on the final was brutal and pretty unfair, which was to draw a seismograph. Literally, draw one, which we had never studied and I did cram for the final. Brutal action. Somehow I still made the honor roll that year, and every year, because of my performance in the humanities.

Jake was an English major as well as far as I recall, I kind of forget, but he knew a lot of the teachers I knew. In any case, we did not bond primarily in the classroom, but in the dorm and then at “Sig,” the frat he was associated with and later pledged. Sig was the alternative frat. I hung out there a bit, but when pledge season started they kind of cracked down on non-pledges attending parties. For Halloween, Jake snuck me in early, and although that night I got a few looks I was good with Jake’s blessing. That night I wore all black with a turtleneck and a paper sign on my back saying “No future for you.” As in the Sex Pistols. I was talking with an older guy, an alum (there were always some alums that hung at the frat parties at Sig) at the party and he said something to the effect of “I like you, but I don’t like your shirt.” OK dude.

That was the same night I believe that inspired the following little ditty I later shared with Jake:

I pissed in the toilet

He pissed in the sink

He said I haven’t got a god above

I haven’t got a drink

Jake later took umbrage with the lines, not the sink part, which was and remains credible, but the god part. I think he is, or was, a believer. In any case, he’s my friend and won’t sue.

I appreciated Jake showing me the ropes at Sig and elsewhere. In the dorm we would play his music–he was into the classics, Beatles and Stones, Kinks, Bowie. We would sing “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and “Come Together,” mostly the former over and over, no doubt to the annoyance of our roommates. Jake also liked The Pogues, and this made me think even more highly of him.

Jake smoked, Marlboro Reds, and I soon started smoking too, the same brand. This was not out of a desire to be a smoker, but rather as a way to keep my hands occupied and look busy at parties, where I had some difficulty mixing. I picked up, or invented, a little trick where I would fold up the flaps of a cigarette pack so they looked like a paper airplane, and then lob the cigs around the room, usually to any girl that wanted one. This got me some attention and some affection, and I kind of became known for the move. It didn’t get me laid, but at least it was something. Jake and I were fast friends, and hung out a lot in the early part of the year, before he began to branch out. Once he started pledging Sig though I saw less of him, naturally enough I guess.

By the time Jake started pledging, and even before, I was spending more time with Ian. Ian was from Boston and his father was a medical doctor. He lived in a nice house in the suburbs–both Jake and Ian had quite a bit more money than I, a common feature at Hamilton where pretty much everyone had money expect me. I was on a pretty decent scholarship, despite my not so impressive high school record, and could not have afforded the school without the scholarship. I visited Ian once or twice I believe in college, and then stayed with his family for a few months in the fall after college, but that’s a story for a future post.

Ian had a massive record collection in his quad, next door to mine as I have said. I liked Jake’s music, especially “Rebel Rebel,” “Come Dancing,” and The Stones, however his selection was somewhat limited. Ian’s was capacious. He was into bands like The Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Ride, and a bunch of other British bands I didn’t know at the time. But he was really into everything. I spent hours in Ian’s room soaking up his music, and my association with him kind of took over where Dyche Alsaker’s left off. I think it was Ian who also introduced me to Luna, who was coming up at the time and is still one of my favorite bands to this day. Later, in senior year I think, Ian and I had a radio show together and one night we got to play records all night long when a few other people canceled suddenly. I would play The Replacements and the Pogues, and Ian would play his music, but I was also getting deep into the 4AD label and bands like Big Star, This Mortal Coil, and a little known band called The Binsey Poplars (who I’m not sure were even on 4AD), named after a Hopkins poem. But my favorite around that time was Nick Drake, who was on Rykodisc.

Drake is now pretty well known, mostly on the back of his song “Pink Moon,” which was featured on a Volkswagen commercial, but back then he was not well known outside serious music circles. I loved his song “Rider on the Wheel,” and was an evangelist for him, telling all and sundry to listen. Most people didn’t, of course, but the whole move was just odd enough to get a little attention, which I was definitely seeking. (Another friend from that time John mentioned to me a few years ago that I would sit on the front steps of his frat in my trench coat and read a book. I don’t really remember this, but if it’s true it was for sure for attention.) I remember one evening Ian had a kind of band that was playing and I “opened” for them. My act was simply talking about Nick Drake, painting him as a forgotten genius, which he was, and pleading with the crowd to listen. It went over pretty well, like I said probably just because it was different.

Later on, mostly the next year I think, Ian and I went to a few shows in Boston, including The Red House Painters, The Fall, and Love Spit Love. Ian would drive, and blast The Pogues with the window down to stay awake on the way home. Before one of these shows we managed to source a little green, which was enjoyable. We would park, illegally, in some lot Ian knew. In the lot, there were rats.

Jake and I were sort of on the same level–both semi-degenerate English majors–but Ian I looked up to. He was definitely the leader in the friendship, although he must have seen something in me because we hung out a fair bit. Ian was also friends with Marc, but he was perhaps closer to another group of guys who lived in two adjacent quads on the third floor. This included John and a guy called Will. I would go up there too, and Will would ask “what Dead do you want to listen to?” I always went with Reckoning because I liked the country-folk sound and the song “It Must Have Been the Roses.” I liked the third floor guys too, especially John.

Next door to Jake and my quad was Adam and Basmo. Adam and Basmo (a nickname) were seniors who for some reason decided to stay in what was basically a freshman dorm. Adam was cool, but pretty grown up. Basmo was still a kid, and loved to get high. Loved to get high. Early on in the year he would come over and ask “anyone want to get stoned and session?” A session, it turned out, was you would smoke, put on The Beatles, and watch Bugs Bunny or something with the sound down. The idea was the music would synch up with the cartoon and it would be hysterical. It totally worked, although I just liked to listen to music and bullshit rather than session. Real heads will remember the session. (Jake told me that sadly Basmo later took his own life as a result of the worsening effects of ef. That was really too bad because Basmo was just a pure open-hearted soul.) So basically we would get stoned when we could, smoke Reds, and stay up all night and listen to music, which was a pretty decent life all in all. Jake and Ian took me in, and made the first part of freshman year so much better in all ways than it would have been if I hadn’t known them.

Dedication: For Ian and Jake, for seeing something in me, and helping make me a little somebody.

to be continued…

Note: If you liked this piece, you may other like the other pieces below in the Hamilton series.

Scenes from Hamilton College III: Sophomore Year I (with cameos from Sonic the Hedgehog, Ani DiFranco, and Candle Time)
Scenes from Hamilton College IV: Sophomore Year II: The Sports Show, Ann, Getting Fired

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On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”

New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.

The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.

Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.

Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:

“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”

In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.

The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.

Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”

We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.

Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.

After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.

Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.

Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:

i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.

ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.

iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.

Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.

I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.

I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.

The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.

If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight

If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight

We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules

Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.

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On Larry King, the Radio GOAT

Epigraph:

“I listened to the radio / I waited all night long…”
— Radio Radio, Elvis Costello

Note: This piece reflects my personal memories of listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with later impressions from television appearances, interviews, and conversations with people who knew him. It is written in the spirit of appreciation and nostalgia rather than media criticism, and emphasizes the uniquely loose, humane, and unpredictable quality of King’s radio work, which for me remains the defining core of his legacy.

I grew up listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show between roughly 1988 and 1992, and in my opinion — which happens to be correct — the radio show was much better than the television version that later made him famous. The TV show was good, even great at times, but radio was longer, looser, freer, and far more unpredictable. It had weird guests, weirder callers, and the feeling that anything might happen at two in the morning. That’s where Larry really lived.

I would listen in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Spokane, Washington, the volume turned low, the house quiet, insomnia hovering. The Spokane AM station — KGA 1510 — carried the show from around 9 PM Pacific time, and then, wonderfully, they would run it again. So I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, wake at two or three, and hear the same segment again in a half-dream. The effect was surreal. Didn’t I just hear that caller? Didn’t Larry just say that? It created a strange loop of late-night déjà vu that only made the whole thing more atmospheric. The show felt less like programming and more like a continuous nocturnal conversation.

My friend Kelly Rudd loved Larry too. When we were in high school we were both big fans of the radio show, and we talked about it constantly. There were a couple of things that we especially liked. The first was that Larry famously did no preparation. He knew a huge amount about the world, of course, but he didn’t read guests’ books ahead of time. He wanted to come in cold. If his guest was a firefighter, he’d ask, “So what’s it like to be a firefighter?” It sounds lazy, but it was brilliant. By staying open and getting out of the way, he let the conversation go anywhere. This way the show became eventful.

Another thing we loved was what happened after the guest left. Larry would open the lines and take questions about absolutely anything. Most of the time he was generous and patient, but when callers went off the rails he had a signature phrase. He’d cut them off gently: “Cold compress, ma’am,” or “Cold compress, sir.” Basically: lie down, ice your head, regroup. It was hysterical, especially because he used it sparingly. When “cold compress” dropped, you knew things had gotten weird.

Anyway, Kelly and I loved Larry so much that when the station suddenly dropped the show, Kelly proposed we drive to the radio station and protest. So we skipped school, drove across town, and rang the intercom demanding to speak to someone about the cancellation. The station manager eventually came down and heard us out. We knew we weren’t changing anything, but it felt right to try. Larry never came back to Spokane radio, and the show faded not long after, but the whole episode captured what the show meant to us. It wasn’t just background noise. It felt alive.

Larry’s on-air style was the key. He was unbelievably relaxed. By the late ’80s you could tell he had done thousands of hours. Nothing fazed him. Weird guests, drunk callers, eccentrics — all the same to Larry. He absorbed everything. He had pet phrases — “cold compress” chief among them — and he deployed them like a veteran reliever, only when needed. He famously did no prep, and he leaned into naïve questions. He’d ask something simple and let the guest do the work. The effect was disarming. People opened up. He also had real humanity. He listened. He didn’t mock callers. He didn’t rush them. There was compassion there, and I think that’s what I loved most.

And the show could get wonderfully out of control. In one story Larry told from his old Miami days, an adult actress he was interviewing suggested they just have sex during the commercial break. Larry, amused, asked the producers to clear out — but there wasn’t enough time. That kind of anecdote captures the looseness of late-night radio. It wasn’t polished. It was alive.

Larry left the overnight Mutual Radio show in 1994 to focus on television. By then I had already drifted away, but I still caught Larry King Live on CNN over the years. I remember watching during the O. J. Simpson trial while at Otago University in New Zealand, when the show became part of the nightly noise. Later there were the Vladimir Putin interviews — classic Larry, conversational and oddly disarming. And of course there were the great comic moments, like the interview with Jerry Seinfeld where Larry suggested the show had been canceled and Seinfeld snapped back in disbelief, and the Norm Macdonald appearance where Norm kept repeating, “I’m a deeply closeted homosexual,” and Larry tried earnestly to parse it. “So that means you’re gay?” “No, Larry,” Norm replied, “it means I’m deeply closeted.” Pure Larry: sincere confusion meeting absurdist comedy.

Larry’s personal life was famously complicated. He married eight times, had several children — including sons Chance and Cannon later in life — and lived in a kind of perpetual romantic improvisation. The marriages came and went. The last ended painfully and publicly. He once joked he’d never leave his wife unless Angie Dickinson came along — and when she did, he married her. That was Larry: impulsive, affectionate, slightly chaotic. Despite decades of success, he didn’t leave the kind of massive fortune people assumed. The money came and went, as did the marriages. It was a life lived in motion.

My friend Sergio Mandiola actually knew Larry in his later years in Los Angeles. Sergio was running an independent studies program at Beverly Hills High School, and Larry’s sons Cannon and Chance, and he taught his sons for three years. Larry would come by for open nights or just to chat.

Sergio Mandiola: “Larry would come in from time to time and we would talk. He was lovely and open. He talked about his family and his career. One time he told me, ‘Sergio, you should totally have a radio show!’ I was flattered. One thing about Larry is his politics were more to the left than he let on on air. He had strong views and wasn’t afraid to share them in person. Larry was a true mensch and I’m glad I got to spend time with him. I miss him.”

In the end, I’ll say it plainly: for me, Larry King is the radio GOAT. There was no one like him, and there probably never will be. It wasn’t just longevity. It was the curiosity, the looseness, the humanity, the love of people, politics, baseball, and life. He trusted the conversation. He let the night unfold.

And then there was that absurd, wonderful USA Today column, which read like a diary gone completely outta control. Mets lose 6–4…Rain in Baltimore…Clinton flies to Ireland…You’d read it and think, Larry, baby, WTF is this? And also, Mr. USA Today, WTAF are you doing paying for this? But somehow it worked. It was pure Larry — fragmentary, observational, intimate.

And that’s how I remember him most clearly: late nights in high school, the radio turned low, insomnia hanging in the room, Spokane quiet outside.. Sometimes I’d listen from nine to midnight, fade, then wake again to the rerun, half-dreaming, half-aware, caught in that strange déjà vu — didn’t I just hear this? — while Larry kept talking, calm as ever, taking calls from truckers and insomniacs and eccentrics. My listening years were brief, but they stuck. And when I think of Larry now, that’s where I go back to: the low hum of AM radio, the half-fade, and the sweet sounds of his voice in my ear.

Dedication:

For the one and only GOAT, Larry Motherfucking King. RIP baby.

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On The X-Files: The Paranoid Style of 1990s Television

Note: This reflection comes out of a long-standing fascination with The X-Files, one of the most distinctive television shows of the 1990s. When it first aired, the series managed to occupy a strange and compelling middle ground between science fiction, horror, conspiracy culture, and something closer to philosophical inquiry. Week after week the show asked the same unsettling question from slightly different angles: what if the world is not quite as stable or intelligible as we assume?

What made the series especially effective was the dynamic between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Mulder represented the pull of belief, intuition, and pattern-seeking; Scully stood for skepticism, evidence, and scientific restraint. The tension between those two orientations created a kind of philosophical engine that powered the show for many seasons.

The major episode discussed here is one of the early “mythology-adjacent” stories that sits near the boundary between the show’s monster-of-the-week format and its deeper conspiratorial arc. Watching it again years later, what stands out is not only the eerie storytelling but also the way the series captured a particular cultural mood of the 1990s — a time when technology was expanding rapidly, institutions were increasingly distrusted, and the possibility of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of ordinary life felt strangely plausible.

In that sense, The X-Files was never just about aliens or government cover-ups. It was about uncertainty itself — the uneasy space between explanation and mystery.

Epigraph:

“Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.”

Clyde Bruckman, The X-Files

The X-Files is my second favorite television show of all time, behind only The Wire, and it’s not close.

That may sound like a bold claim given the sheer amount of television produced over the past thirty years, but for those of us who came of age in the 1990s the show hit a nerve that very few cultural artifacts ever have. It wasn’t just entertaining. It was atmospheric. It was unsettling. It felt like it was plugged directly into the cultural nervous system of the time.

To understand why, you have to begin with a simple generational fact. I was born in 1974, just eleven short years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event cast a shadow that lingered for decades. My parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were deeply scarred by it in ways that people my age never fully understood. Something in the national psyche broke that day. Trust in institutions never really recovered.

Historians later described this cultural mood as “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” borrowing the famous phrase from the essay by Richard Hofstadter. Whether one agreed with Hofstadter or not, the phrase stuck because it captured a very real undercurrent in American life: the suspicion that unseen forces were operating behind the scenes.

The genius of The X-Files was that it leaned directly into that atmosphere. It didn’t treat paranoia as pathology. It treated it as narrative fuel.

Discovering the Show

I was an early adopter.

The show premiered in 1993, and by 1994 I was already watching it in the dorms at Hamilton College with a group of friends. If possible we’d get a little baked first, which in hindsight may have been perfect. The X-Files is a show that rewards slightly altered states of perception.

At first it was something of a cult discovery. A few people watched it religiously while others barely knew it existed. But by the time the second and third seasons rolled around it had become a communal ritual. Thursday nights meant Mulder and Scully.

The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had what we would now call “shipping chemistry,” although that term didn’t really exist yet. We simply knew that something electric was happening on screen. The characters worked because they embodied opposing ways of understanding the world. Mulder believed everything. Scully was more skeptical. Between them the truth hovered in an unresolved middle ground.

The show was also disciplined enough to hold that tension for years. In an era before streaming algorithms and social-media speculation, viewers waited week to week to see how the relationship evolved.

Hovering over them was their boss, the enigmatic Walter Skinner. For several seasons it was impossible to tell whether Skinner was helping Mulder and Scully or quietly managing them on behalf of darker forces. That ambiguity was one of the show’s greatest pleasures.

In a delightful twist of pop-culture irony, the actor Mitch Pileggi was at one point named TV’s Sexiest Man by a glossy magazine. Which is hilarious when you remember that Skinner is essentially a bald FBI bureaucrat in a gray suit. Such was the cultural power of the show.

The Smoking Man

Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.

The Cigarette Smoking Man is one of the great villains in television history. Played with eerie understatement by William B. Davis, he appeared whenever the conspiracy thickened.

He looks exactly like the kind of man who would be at the center of a decades-long government cover-up. Three packs a day. Cheap cologne. A lingering Jameson hangover. The sense that he spends most of his time in dim Washington parking garages and windowless offices and only emerges from his crypt when the conspiracy requires it.

It’s a performance so physical that you can almost smell the character through the screen.

Three Essential Episodes

Every long-running show has defining episodes, and The X-Files produced dozens. But three in particular illustrate what made the series so special.

The first is the pilot itself, which introduces Mulder investigating mysterious disappearances in the Oregon woods. A key moment occurs when the agents experience missing time on a dark forest road. The scene establishes the tone immediately: eerie, ambiguous, and faintly plausible.

The second is Fallen Angel, an early classic that introduces the lovable conspiracy obsessive Max Fenig. Max’s jittery paranoia captures the spirit of the show perfectly. When he remarks that “someone’s always watching, Mr. Mulder,” it feels less like dialogue than like a thesis statement.

The third is the masterpiece of dark humor, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, written by the great Darius Morgan. In it, a weary insurance salesman named Clyde Bruckman discovers that he can foresee the exact circumstances of people’s deaths. Played beautifully by Peter Boyle, the character delivers a hilarious and oddly touching performance. It is Bruckman who also delivers the immortal line that also gives us our epigraph: “Autorerotic asphyxiation is not a pleasant way to go, Mr. Mulder.” Run roh. Take that belt off Fox baby.

What makes the episode remarkable is that it gently mocks the show’s own hero. Mulder spends the entire series searching for hidden meaning in the universe. Clyde Bruckman, by contrast, believes life is largely arbitrary and tragic.

His prediction of Mulder’s death—immortalized in the epigraph above—is both absurd and strangely profound. It’s also a sign that by Season Three the show had gained enough confidence to poke fun at itself.

When the Mythology Expanded

Like many successful serialized shows, The X-Files eventually struggled under the weight of its own mythology. One of the central narrative engines involved Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha Mulder. Early on, the mystery added emotional depth to Mulder’s obsession with the paranormal.

But as the seasons progressed the storyline became increasingly convoluted. Samantha might have been abducted by aliens, or replaced by a clone, or transformed into something else entirely. Meanwhile the conspiracy expanded to include frozen alien ships in Siberian ice, shadowy government syndicates, and the infamous black-oil virus that seemed capable of possessing human hosts.

At a certain point the mythology began to chase its own tail.

Then, as the final blow, David Duchovny left the show. Gillian Anderson remained excellent, but The X-Files was always fundamentally a two-hander. Without Mulder and Scully together the balance of the series shifted in ways it never fully recovered from.

Why It Still Matters

And yet, for all the narrative tangles of the later seasons, the early years of The X-Files remain extraordinary television.

The show captured a very particular moment in cultural history: the twilight of the pre-internet era, when conspiracy theories spread through late-night radio programs, photocopied newsletters, and whispered conversations rather than social media feeds.

It was a time when the idea that powerful institutions might be hiding enormous secrets still felt plausible rather than merely exhausting.

For a few seasons in the 1990s, Thursday nights belonged to the weirdest, smartest, most paranoid show on television.

The truth, as Mulder kept reminding us, was out there

Dedication

For Dana and Fox. You know we still want to know what went down in that motel room baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay you may also enjoy the two essays below, both of which, in different ways, take up themes of intrigue and mystery.

The Thin Man in Singapore Part I: Washing Ashore
Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation
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On Trying (and Failing) to Learn Go

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

Naturally, I tried to learn it.

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

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

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

Epigraph

This game is bloody impossible!

— Matt Thomas

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

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

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

It made Go sound mystical.

Naturally I decided I should learn it.

This did not go well.

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

Then I tried actually playing the game.

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

I was completely hopeless.

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

Within a short time I realized a painful truth.

I was a complete washout at Go.

I gave up quickly.

The books remain on my shelf to this day.

Go, as it turns out, is not chess.

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

Experts talk about influence, thickness, and sente.

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

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

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

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

Patience is not my natural game.

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

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

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

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

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

Which leaves the rest of us where we began.

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

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

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

Dedication

For Dean, who plays the long game.

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

https://atomic-temporary-151252646.wpcomstaging.com/2026/03/11/on-the-strangest-soundtrack-of-the-1990s/
https://atomic-temporary-151252646.wpcomstaging.com/2026/02/28/on-the-song-encounter-at-3-am/
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Shotgun in Seth’s Ford Explorer

Note: This piece takes place in Spokane, Washington in the fall of 1991, during our senior year at St. George’s School. CDs were still a relatively new luxury item for teenagers, Zip’s runs counted as real excursions across town, and a hunter green Explorer in the school parking lot could serve as the center of an entire small social world.

Epigraph:

Out with the posse on a night run
Girls on the corner, so let’s have some fun
Donald asked one if she was game
Back Alley Sally was her name
She moved on the car and moved fast
On the window pressed her ass
All at once we heard a crash
Donald’s dick had broke the glass

Ice T

Seth drove a green Ford Explorer, which meant two things: he was always the driver, and John Innes almost always called shotgun.

Ours was a class of twenty-eight boys at St. George’s School, which meant the social landscape was less a battlefield than a small archipelago of cliques. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone more or less supported everyone else. Still, there were natural groupings. Seth, Innes, and I spent a good deal of time together, with Kelly sometimes orbiting the car and Richard Barkley frequently around as well.

The Explorer usually lived in the SGS parking lot behind the lower school. During the day it sat there waiting for the moment seniors could leave campus, which we could do whenever we wanted. When that moment came, Seth’s Jeep became a kind of small republic on wheels.

There were rules, or something close to rules. Seth drove. Innes called shotgun. He cared about it the most and therefore usually got it. Occasionally Barkley or I would challenge him, which would inevitably produce an argument about whether the call had been made properly or whether the timing had been unfair. The exact legal framework of shotgun was never fully settled, but the outcomes were usually predictable.

Inside the Explorer there were CDs everywhere. Not in a messy way—Seth kept the car pretty well—but there were dozens of them, probably stored in one of those large CD wallets that seemed to exist in every car in the early nineties. Seth would sometimes come back from Hastings with six or eight discs at a time. I remember watching those purchases with something close to disbelief. I could rarely afford a CD myself, so when I did manage to acquire something like Tindersticks or Billy Bragg’s Spy vs. Spy, it was a very big deal.

The music rotation in the Explorer was remarkably tolerant. Seth tended to favor Judas Priest and Metallica, while Innes leaned toward Ice-T. Joe Tyllia loved Cat Stevens and so Cat Stevens appeared frequently. I personally preferred Dire Straits at the time, which never quite made the regular rotation, so I generally waited for Warren Zevon or Cat Stevens to come back around. Nobody vetoed anyone else’s music. Whatever disc was in play generally stayed there.

The Explorer had a few regular destinations. State B basketball games were one. Another was Zip’s on the north side of town. Seniors could leave campus whenever they liked, and sometimes that meant simply deciding that a run across Spokane for burgers was necessary. Seth’s house was another stop, as was Hastings, where the CD acquisitions occurred.

Occasionally the driving extended further into the South Hill at night. Sometimes we would pass near Manito Park, though I remember doing those wandering drives more often with a slightly different crew—Dyche, Jonah, Karin, and Lisa. Once that group went to a show by They Might Be Giants, and afterward Kelly reported that the band had stiffed the opening act and paid them only ten dollars. Kelly knew this because his cousin was in the opening band.

The one time I ever took shotgun from John Innes without calling it came on the ride home from the state cross-country meet during our senior year. Our team had finished second by a single point, which felt at the time like the most unfair outcome imaginable. James Johnson had been our first runner, Cam Turner second, and I was third.

When we piled into the Explorer for the three-hour drive back to Spokane, I simply grabbed the seat. No call. No discussion. Just took it. And for that ride home I ran the decks.

For a while Seth’s Explorer was simply part of the landscape of our lives. It sat behind the lower school during the day, appeared at the Coleman house west of the South Hill at night, and carried us between games, fast-food runs, music stores, and wherever else we decided to go.

Then, like most small countries of teenage life, it quietly disappeared

Dedication: For my homies.

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What Ever Happened to the ACLU?

Note: This essay reflects a personal memory of what the American civil libertarian tradition once represented to many people who came of age politically in the late twentieth century. Organizations evolve, and the American Civil Liberties Unionhas played an important role in many areas of constitutional law and civil rights over the past century.

The purpose of the piece is not to dismiss that legacy but to reflect on a perceived cultural shift in how civil liberties—particularly free speech—are understood within contemporary progressive politics. The older civil libertarian framework emphasized neutral principles that applied equally to all speakers, even those whose views were widely considered offensive or dangerous.

Whether that framework still holds the same cultural authority today is an open question. This essay is simply one observer’s reflection on how that shift has felt from the inside.

Epigraph:

F the CC

Steve Earle

When I was younger, the American Civil Liberties Union had a certain reputation among politically attentive Americans.

They had balls.

The ACLU was the organization that defended people nobody liked. Neo-Nazis marching in small Midwestern towns. Communists during the Cold War. Religious cranks, fringe activists, offensive speakers. The principle was simple and bracing: civil liberties matter most when they protect speech we find offensive.

I admired that. Many people did.

In the 1990s the ACLU seemed to embody a kind of austere civil libertarianism. The idea was that the Constitution protected everyone equally, and that civil liberties meant very little if they only applied to people we already agreed with.

And there were plenty of examples that made the point vividly.

The most famous was the controversy over whether a small group of neo-Nazis had the right to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie in the late 1970s.

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie

Skokie was home to many Holocaust survivors, which made the proposed march especially painful and inflammatory. But the ACLU nevertheless defended the Nazis’ right to demonstrate, arguing that the First Amendment could not be applied selectively. Free speech, if it existed at all, had to apply even to people whose ideas were repellent.

That case became a kind of civic legend among civil libertarians.

There were many others.

During the Cold War the ACLU repeatedly defended the rights of individuals accused of Communist sympathies, arguing that political belief alone could not be grounds for government punishment. In later decades the organization defended the speech rights of controversial artists, religious minorities, and political extremists across the ideological spectrum.

Every once in a while a case would appear that tested the principle in uncomfortable ways. I remember reading about things like the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and the legal questions surrounding the government’s conduct toward Randy Weaver. Weaver himself was hardly a sympathetic figure to most Americans, but the civil liberties questions raised by the incident were serious enough that organizations committed to constitutional rights had to pay attention.

That, at least in my memory, was the ACLU’s zone of operation: defending civil liberties even when the individual involved was politically or culturally radioactive.

For a long time that seemed like the organization’s defining characteristic.

Then something began to feel different.

My moment of realization came around 2017 at a conference at Case Western Reserve University. The event was filled with what felt like an entire arena of fucking international liberals—academics, activists, policy types, the whole familiar ecosystem.

At one point a speaker took the stage and launched into a full-throated denunciation of Donald Trump.

Now, criticizing a president is of course perfectly legitimate speech. But as I sat there listening, something about the moment felt off.

The energy in the room was not about civil liberties. It was about political opposition. The speech had the tone of a campaign rally rather than a lecture about constitutional rights.

And I remember thinking very clearly: this is not the ACLU I admired in the 1990s.

Something about the mission had shifted.

To be fair, institutions rarely change because they suddenly become foolish. They change because the culture around them changes first.

The older civil libertarian tradition that shaped organizations like the ACLU grew out of a very specific intellectual climate. It emphasized neutral principles, distrust of government power, and a willingness to defend speech even when that speech was deeply unpopular.

The logic was austere but powerful: the moment we begin deciding which speech deserves protection, the principle itself begins to erode.

But the dominant strain of progressive politics today often approaches these questions differently. Instead of asking whether a principle applies equally to everyone, the question increasingly becomes whether a particular form of speech contributes to harm, inequality, or social injustice.

That shift in moral emphasis naturally changes how civil liberties are understood.

Speech that once would have been defended in the name of neutral principle may now be evaluated in terms of its social consequences. And organizations that operate inside a particular political culture tend to absorb the assumptions of that culture over time.

The ACLU did not necessarily set out to abandon its older civil libertarian posture. It may simply have followed the broader ideological current of the progressive world in which it operates.

Still, for those of us who grew up admiring the older model, the change can feel disorienting.

The ACLU once stood for the uncomfortable proposition that freedom of speech requires defending people whose views we might find offensive, foolish, or even dangerous.

It is not entirely clear whether the culture that once sustained that belief still exists.

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Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation

Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.

The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”

The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.

The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.

Epigraph

There are aliens in our midst.

Wussy

The Jung Problem

At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.

Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.

In other words, the sky fills with things.

Medieval Precedents

This pattern is not entirely new.

During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.

Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.

Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.

The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.

Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.

One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.

Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.

But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.

Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.

She might have reported a craft.

The Cold War Sky

By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.

The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.

The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.

Weather balloons.

Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.

Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.

The Mulder Doctrine

By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.

The X-Files:

In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.

The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.

Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.

His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.

Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.

A Modern Lens

Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.

Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.

Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.

Which brings us back to Mike.

So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?

It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.

From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.

This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.

Provisional Conclusions

My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.

Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.

Mike has simply moved the story offshore.

The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.

If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.

But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.

In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.

Footnote: The Ocean Logic

It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.

From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.

Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.

POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony

Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.

According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.

When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.

These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.

Mike considers them decisive.

A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.

In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.

According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.

At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.

Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I
Jungian Intimations: I
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In Defense of Ryan Adams

Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t. Also, I fucking love Ryan Adams. He is the motherfucking man.

Epigraph:

“When the stars go blue.”
— Ryan Adams

For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?

Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From the early Whiskeytown albums, to his solo debut Heartbreaker, on to today, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, often heartbroken, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.

When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams’s shows were cancelled for a while, he was dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped listening immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.

That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.

But the songs remain.

Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, Chris, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.

None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.

What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about his own condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as part of the problem.

And that distinction matters.

One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.

If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.

The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.

In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.

The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.

There is something oddly honest about that.

The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.

That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.

The songs were never about innocence. They were about self-knowledge.

And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.

Dedication

For Ryan, one of the five greatest songwriters ever and the motherfucking man. I love you baby.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like these others in the same “In Defense Of” series.

In Defense of Conor Oberst
In Defense of Mark Kozelek