Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Great Roast of Bill Simmons, The Podcasting GOAT

Note: Bill Simmons has many gifts, but none more enduring than his ability to take a perfectly good idea and turn it into a totalizing worldview. Chief among these is his obsession with “who gets the keys,” a concept that began as a useful shorthand for late-game NBA hierarchy and has since metastasized into a governing principle for all human activity. In Simmons’ hands, the question is no longer who closes Game 7, but who closes anything: marriages, movies, bands, revolutions, and possibly even the Enlightenment. It is a framework so elastic that it explains everything and therefore, in a quiet and almost admirable way, explains nothing. Yet Simmons returns to it again and again, like a man who has discovered fire and insists on using it to cook every meal. The result is less analysis than ritual: a familiar incantation that reassures both host and listener that control exists, that someone always has it, and that identifying that person is the highest form of understanding. Whether this is insight or compulsion is an open question, but in the meantime, Simmons has the keys—and he’s not giving them back.

I. The Obsessive With the Keys

Bill Simmons is a strange and singular figure in American media, a man whose greatest innovation may have been to take the interior monologue of a slightly obsessive sports fan and publish it wholesale, unfiltered, and then slowly convince an entire industry that this was not only acceptable but essential. He is not quite a journalist, not quite a commentator, and not quite a comedian, but rather a hybrid form: a “Sportish Guy,” as Cousin Sal once put it, who treats every game, every movie, and every stray anecdote as part of a single, ongoing argument about how the world works. Central to that argument is his enduring fixation on control, on agency, on the question he returns to again and again with the devotion of a man checking the locks before bed: who gets the keys?

It is tempting to dismiss this as a bit, and in some sense it is, but like all of Simmons’ best bits, it has metastasized into something larger and more revealing. What began as a useful shorthand for late-game NBA hierarchy—who has the ball, who takes the shot—has expanded into a general theory of human behavior. Quarterbacks have the keys. Movie characters have the keys. Entire bands, dynasties, and historical figures are evaluated based on whether they had, lost, or never quite secured the keys. That Mark Sanchez could, for a brief and inexplicable moment, be discussed in these terms tells you less about Sanchez than it does about Simmons’ commitment to the framework. He does not particularly care if the fit is perfect. The system must be applied.

This is what makes Simmons both compelling and faintly ridiculous. He is, at heart, a “who’s on my team” guy, a loyalist who rewards proximity, familiarity, and shared history, sometimes to a fault. Former colleagues have occasionally noted that he can cool on people once they leave his orbit, a tendency that reads less as malice than as a kind of emotional sorting mechanism: you are either in the ecosystem or you are not. Some, like Kevin O’Connor, speak warmly of early generosity—gifted shirts, guidance, a foothold in Los Angeles when money was tight. Others have been less charitable, and the occasional critique, including a much-circulated piece in The New York Times, has tried to frame Simmons’ blind spots, particularly around race, as more systemic. These critiques are not wholly without merit, but they often feel slightly overdetermined, flattening a personality that is better understood as idiosyncratic rather than ideological. Simmons himself tends to respond not with grand rebuttals but with motion—hiring voices like Van Lathan, insisting, plausibly, that such moves were already in progress, and continuing on as if the conversation will resolve itself over time.

There is also, undeniably, an ego in play. Simmons has built an empire—Grantland, then The Ringer—largely on the strength of his own voice, and he is not shy about asserting it. Stories persist, as they do in any media ecosystem, including the long-running rumor that he played a role in Magic Johnson’s exit from NBA Countdown, a claim Simmons has repeatedly and emphatically denied. More verifiable is the moment that effectively ended his ESPN tenure: a live broadcast of NBA Countdown in which, after a colleague spoke at length, Simmons leaned in with heavy, unmistakable sarcasm—“Oh, is it my turn to talk now?”—a line that was funny, revealing, and, in the context of corporate television, fatal. It was the voice of the columnist breaking through the format, the irrepressible instinct to comment on the comment, to seize the keys even when the structure said otherwise.

What makes Simmons unique, and worth writing about at all, is that these contradictions—generous and insular, insightful and reductive, earnest and performative—are not bugs but features. He is a weird obsessive who has turned his obsessions into a career, and in doing so has given us a language that is at once clarifying and absurd. He loves the game, he loves the conversation around the game, and above all he loves the feeling that somewhere, in any given moment, someone has the keys.

II: The Bits That Ate the Brain

If the keys are the theory, the bits are the practice. Simmons has always understood that repetition is power: say something often enough, with just enough conviction, and it graduates from joke to canon. Thus “greatest stickman,” a phrase that should have died in a driveway, becomes a legitimate category, and suddenly Burgess Meredith is being floated as an all-timer. “Sal, Sal, BM was the greatest stickman of all time. Every lady wanted a ride.” It is ridiculous, obviously, but also irresistible. The specificity disarms you. The confidence sells it. The framework expands.

This is the Simmons trick: take a private-language riff and run it until it becomes a public one. It does not matter that no one else has ever considered ranking “stickmen.” What matters is that Simmons has, and that he will return to it, again and again, until you find yourself half-convinced that you, too, should have an opinion. It is analysis as inside joke, inside joke as analysis.

III. The Ecosystem

No system survives without a supporting cast, and Simmons has assembled one of the most durable in podcasting.

There is Cousin Sal, the indispensable counterweight, quicker and often funnier, whose primary function is to puncture Simmons at exactly the right moment. The Vegas trips are their shared masterpiece: two grown men insisting, year after year, that this time they will behave differently, and then not. Simmons, improbably, claims that he only smokes in Vegas. No one believes this. The morning-after pod is the payoff—hungover, frayed, the truth leaking out in fragments. “I only had three cigarettes last night,” Simmons offers. Sal, without missing a beat goes: “Yeah, more like three lighters.” It is the kind of line that ends the discussion because it cannot be improved.

There is Joe House, lawyer by day, chaos agent by night, who turns every appearance into a small act of self-destruction. “House Eats” remains a high-water mark: an adult man consuming Chinese food until he vomits, captured and distributed as legitimate sports media content. It should not work. It works perfectly. Drunk House—slurring, swearing, denouncing Daniel Snyder with operatic intensity—is not a bug but a feature. Simmons does not rein him in; he amplifies him. The ecosystem thrives on this permissiveness.

And then there is Nephew Kyle, the quietly essential, publicly baffling producer whose qualifications are, at best, opaque. The nepotism is acknowledged, even embraced. Simmons does not pretend otherwise. He does not have to. The show goes on. The levels are sometimes off. The energy is always on.

IV. The Interviews: High Risk, High Variance

Simmons as interviewer is a study in range. At his best, he is disarming, patient, and genuinely curious, capable of extracting moments that feel both candid and consequential. His conversation with Al Michaels is a case in point: Michaels, relaxed, recounts the day of the O.J. chase, including the now-legendary call-in where a supposed eyewitness punctuates his tip with “Baba Booey.” The co-host takes it seriously. Michaels does not. “It’s a joke, dude,” he essentially says, and in that moment you see the difference between professionals. Simmons knows enough to step back and let the story land. It is radio as it should be: a master talking, a host listening.

The interview with John Skipper is another apex moment. Post-ESPN, Skipper speaks with a level of openness that borders on the shocking—cocaine use, morning routines, the normalization of behavior that would end most careers. Simmons guides rather than pushes, and the result is a “huge get,” the kind of conversation that justifies the entire enterprise.

At the other end of the spectrum sits the Denzel Washington interview, a minor classic of mismatch. Washington arrives as if for one kind of conversation; Simmons is clearly expecting another. The opening is awkward, the rhythms off. To his credit, Simmons does not retreat. He leans in, tries to find common ground, and eventually does, or at least something like it. It is not a triumph, but it is revealing: the limits of the format, the limits of the host, the persistence of the effort.

V. Homerism as Method

Simmons’ greatest cultural contribution may be the legitimization of homerism. Before him, fandom was something to be managed, disclosed, occasionally apologized for. With him, it becomes the point. He is, unapologetically, a Boston guy: the Boston Celtics are not just a team but a lineage, a narrative, a near-mythological entity anchored by figures like Larry Bird, whose legend grows incrementally with each retelling. The takes are, at times, outta control. They are also, in their way, coherent. Simmons is not pretending to objectivity. He is offering a perspective, and trusting that the audience will meet him there.

This approach extends beyond basketball. Baseball, once a central obsession—AL keeper leagues, granular analysis—fades over time, dismissed as too long, too slow, no longer aligned with the rhythms of his life or his listeners’. Basketball remains the core competency, the area where his knowledge is both deep and defensible. Everything else orbits around it.

VI. Family and Formation

The personal mythology is never far from the surface. Simmons’ father, a longtime Celtics season-ticket holder, is both character and audience, the origin point of the fandom that would become a career. The pride is evident, even when unspoken. The access—courtside seats in the 1970s—becomes part of the narrative, a credential as meaningful as any byline.

His mother, less present on the pod but frequently referenced, provides another axis: a love of movies, a different kind of cultural literacy that feeds into Simmons’ broader interests. The recurring mention of being a child of divorce functions as a kind of grounding note, a reminder that the voice, however confident, has origins in something more fragile. He seems, by most measures, to have come out fine.

VII. Drift and Discipline

As the empire grows—Grantland, then The Ringer, now under the umbrella of Spotify—Simmons changes in ways both subtle and obvious. He fades certain voices who no longer fit the evolving brand: Adam Carolla, once a regular presence, becomes less so; Michael Rapaport, similarly, drifts out of the rotation. The official reasons are varied—tone, fit, the simple passage of time—but the underlying dynamic is familiar. Simmons is, at heart, a “who’s on my team” operator. The team changes. The roster turns over.

And yet, it is hard to shake the sense that the affection remains. These are not clean breaks so much as quiet reassignments, the byproduct of a system that requires a certain level of control. Spotify money, corporate expectations, the need to maintain a particular tone—these exert their own pressure. The outta-control energy that defined earlier iterations of the pod is still there, but it is managed, channeled, occasionally held back.

VIII. The Countdown Moment

If there is a single scene that captures Simmons in miniature, it is the one that ends his ESPN tenure. On NBA Countdown, a colleague speaks at length. Simmons waits. And waits. And then, with a level of sarcasm that is both unmistakable and, in context, disastrous, he interjects: “Oh, is it my turn to talk now?” It is funny. It is honest. It is, within the rigid structure of live television, unacceptable.

He is removed not long after.

The moment endures because it reveals the core tension: Simmons the columnist versus Simmons the employee, the impulse to comment versus the requirement to conform. He cannot quite suppress the former, even when the latter demands it. He reaches for the keys, even when they are not his to take.

VIII. Conclusion

Bill Simmons is the GOAT podcaster, full stop, and it’s worth saying that clearly at the outset because we only roast the ones we love. Bill Simmons has given us an entire language—keys, stickman, Vegas nights, Sal lines, Drunk House—and if you’ve been along for the ride, those bits don’t wear out, they compound. They get funnier with time, richer with context, a kind of private shorthand that becomes, almost accidentally, a shared culture. You either hear “three lighters” and laugh immediately or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s not much point explaining it.

This is part of what makes Simmons both beloved and, in certain circles, a little contentious. He has clearly made enemies—inside ESPN, across the broader media landscape, and occasionally among former employees—and while it’s easy to chalk this up to ego or looseness, the better read is that the looseness is largely performative. Underneath the hangout vibe, the teasing, the Nephew Kyle chaos and the Drunk House indulgence, there is a very real set of standards, and Simmons enforces them. He is, at heart, a “who’s on my team” operator, and the team matters. People drift out. Some of that isn’t pretty. Most of it, however, is consistent with how he’s always operated: loyal, selective, and ultimately in control of the room.

At the same time, there is a sense now that Simmons is, if not slowing down, then at least rounding off the sharper edges. He talks openly about retirement in a way he didn’t a decade ago, and you get the feeling that he is aware, at some level, of the limits of the bit. Will he be seventy-five, still ranking stickmen and assigning keys? It’s hard to see it. He’s a boss now, a central figure inside Spotify, with responsibilities that extend well beyond the pod. The insurgent has become the institution, and while the voice is still there, it’s necessarily more managed than it once was.

There’s also the simple fact that Simmons is no longer a writer in the way he once was, and he knows it. The old columns—the mailbags, the trade value pieces, the obsessive digressions—have given way to the pod, to conversation, to rhythm. He jokes that his fingers don’t work anymore, and like most of his best lines, it’s funny because it’s partly true. The Book of Basketball stands as the monument to that earlier phase: long, ambitious, slightly out of control in the best way, complete with the famous pyramid (Jordan at the top, Magic above Bird, a decision that still tells you everything you need to know about him). But the shift from writing to talking isn’t a decline so much as an evolution. Simmons was always more voice than text anyway. The medium finally caught up to the man.

If and when he does step back, what we lose is not just a podcast or a brand but something rarer: a genuinely original voice that bent an entire corner of the media world toward itself. Plenty of people analyze sports. Plenty of people talk about culture. Almost no one has managed to fuse the two into a single, durable, endlessly riffable system the way Simmons has. The keys, for all their absurdity, are real in that sense. He found them early, used them often, and built something that will outlast the bit itself.

And if he eventually decides to set them down, or even just hold them a little more loosely, it will mark the end of a run that, for all its contradictions, was unmistakably his.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

WAYFARER: A PLAY

Note: This piece is a five-act play based loosely on a week I spent in Oxford in 2018. Unlike my previous narrative essays on the same material, (here, here, and here), this is written as a staged work, with dialogue, silence, and structure doing the heavy lifting. At its core, the play explores the tension between experience and narration—what happens when a person tries to turn a living moment into a story too quickly, and what is gained (and lost) in that process. While grounded in real events, it is not strictly autobiographical; it is a shaped and curated version of those experiences. As with all my work, the hope is that it resonates beyond its immediate context. Thank you for reading.

A Five-Act Play

EPIGRAPH

I can’t believe all the good things that you do for me
Sat back in a chair
Like a princess from a faraway place
Nobody’s nice
When you’re older your heart turns to ice

Mark Kozelek — Have You Forgotten

ACT I — THE WAYFARER

Scene 1 — Registration Desk (Threshold)

Lights: institutional white. Gradual warm shift beneath it, as if memory is already leaking into the space.

Sound: distant conference murmur. A faint, unresolved piano note.

A desk. A GATEKEEPER. A lanyard laid out like an object of passage.

MATT enters. Slightly lost. He has clearly been walking longer than intended.

GATEKEEPER
Name?

MATT hesitates. Reaches for something that is not yet ready.

MATT
Here. I think.

He presents credentials.

Stamp sound. Too loud for the space.

The badge is handed back.

CHORUS (from off, soft, not fully placed in space)
Arrival.
Conference.
Inn.
Story begins again.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside, not heard by others)
I thought I came to learn.

The badge feels heavier than it should.

Lights soften.

Scene 2 — Inn Common Room

Warm, slightly unreal hospitality lighting.

Tables. Cups. A space that feels both public and private but refuses to decide which.

ELODIE is present as if she has always been there.

MATT notices her immediately.

NARRATOR-MATT
Voltage.

ELODIE
Tea?

MATT
Yes. Thank you.

Beat. Nothing rushed.

CHORUS (slightly brighter, almost encouraging)
House lady.
Innkeeper.
Muse—

(a correction, quieter)
No. Person.

ELODIE does not acknowledge the Chorus.

Scene 3 — “Sing for Your Supper”

Sound: faint guitar motif. The room subtly shifts into performance space without fully becoming one.

CHORUS subtly rearranges space like memory editing.

MATT sings quietly:

MATT (singing fragment — The Clientele, “The Violet Hour”)
so that summer came and went
and I became cold
yeah I became cold

ELODIE listens. No visible transformation.

NARRATOR-MATT
Hospitality is not destiny.

The room remains unchanged.

Blackout.

ACT II — THE HOT ZONE

Scene 1 — The Casino

Green felt lighting. Rotating overhead spot.

CROUPIER replaces Gatekeeper.

CROUPIER
Place your bet.

MATT
Meaning.

CHORUS
Luck.
Chance.
Myth begins when odds are misread.

MATT places chip.

Sound: chip hits felt—final, sharp.

Scene 2 — Triptych (Three Trips)

Lighting pulses three times. Distinct beats.

MATT (low, repeating)
Three trips.
No more trips.

CHORUS fractures into three figures: GENIE / GHOST / MESSENGER.

NARRATOR-MATT
Inspiration gone.

GENIE (brief, playful)
First.

GHOST (slow, distant)
Memory.

MESSENGER (clear, neutral)
Transmission.

All fade.

Scene 3 — Jungle Confrontation

Green light. Reduced set. No realism.

MATT
Her.
Leave everything.
Frontman.
Practice.

ELODIE
No.

MATT
What is this?

ELODIE
Not your exorcism.

CHORUS
Brink.

Blackout.

ACT III — NAMING THE PATTERN

Scene 1 — Needy Boys

Two chairs. Neutral white light.

ELODIE
Don’t narrate me.

MATT pauses. This lands fully.

NARRATOR-MATT
I was writing her.

Silence.

Scene 2 — Chapel

Stillness. Breath-level sound only.

CHORUS (barely present)
Meaning.
Destiny.
Story.

NARRATOR-MATT
Room, not revelation.

Silence holds.

Scene 3 — Pattern Recognition

Lighting: subtle timeline shifts—memory flickers, not time travel.

NARRATOR-MATT
Senior year.
Again.

ELODIE
Your pattern is yours.

MATT
I see it.

CHORUS
First choice.

Blackout.

ACT IV — RELEASE

Scene 1 — The Offer

Dusk light.

MATT
Part-time.
Scout.
Not jungle.

ELODIE
Boundaries are kindness.

Scene 2 — The Pivot

Warm domestic light replaces earlier symbolic tones.

MATT
Family.
Music.
Life.

CHORUS
Myth.
Escape.
Hero.

MATT
No.

Silence holds. No response from Chorus.

Scene 3 — Chorus Dissolves

Lighting: references dim one by one.

CHORUS removes masks.

NARRATOR-MATT
The story stayed.
The spell lifted.

Blackout.

ACT V — OXFORD CODE

Scene 1 — Gesture

Morning Oxford grey. Minimal space.

ELODIE
Take care.

MATT
You too.

Beat.

No escalation. No closure ritual.

Scene 2 — Benediction (Chapel Revisited)

Same chapel. Quieter now.

Sound: Arvo Pärt piano. Sparse. Non-declarative.

NARRATOR-MATT
Gratitude.

Silence. Breath.

MATT listens without narrating.

Scene 3 — Train

Sound: distant platform announcement. Train readiness.

Gatekeeper becomes CONDUCTOR.

CONDUCTOR
All aboard.

CHORUS
Run back.
Declare.
Confess.

MATT
No.

MATT boards train.

NARRATOR-MATT
The jungle is real.
The girl is real.
The story remains.

Beat.

NARRATOR-MATT (softer)
You think you’ve finished it. Then it comes back different.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside)
She knew more than I could say.

Train departs.

Lights fade with motion, not blackout.

FIN

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Levels of Lucidity in Dreams: A Close Reading

Illustrations presented with thanks by Riko Kusahara

Note: This piece was written for the Psiber Dreaming Conference offered by IASD in September 2018, under a strict word limit that forced a level of compression I don’t always allow myself. It draws on a series of lucid dreaming experiences to explore how we determine whether we are dreaming or awake, and why those determinations so often fail under pressure. Looking back, I’m less interested in the specific techniques of lucidity than in the broader question the paper circles: what happens when our usual markers of reality—stability, plausibility, even self-awareness—prove unreliable? The result is less a theory of dreaming than a compact record of trying to think clearly inside a system that continually revises its own ground.

Epigraph I:

The difference between most people and myself is that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent.  That is my peculiarity.

—Carl Jung

Epigraph II:

The conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless. They’re images and sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random {…} Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgement.

—Chuck Klosterman

Dream I: I awake in a warehouse.  The bed is against one wall–on the other is a thirty-foot mountain of cantaloupes.  I realize I am dreaming.  I get up and run my hands over the cantaloupes.  They feel absolutely real—as tangible as in life.  I remember that tangibility is not a viable reality test—I’ve made that mistake before.  Now fully lucid, I decide to levitate.  The room dissolves, and I float suspended somewhere in dense, colourless space.  Eventually, I feel the need to come back to earth but cannot locate it.  I feel something beneath me.  This is my bed, and I awake back in the warehouse, relieved yet exhilarated.  The cantaloupes are still there, however I don’t question them.  I just happen to live in a room full of fruit.  Moments later I awake again, this time in diurnal “reality.”

The most common dream experience is of waking from a dream we take to be real, only to understand that it was “just a dream.”  However, a subset of dreamers, probably more than we generally imagine, have experienced lucid dreams, dreams in which, to some degree, they are aware they are dreaming.  Lucid dreamers may also experience “false awakenings”[1]— the sensation of waking progressively through dream “levels.”  False awakenings can be disorienting (Robert Waggoner writes that after seven successive false awakenings he “would accept {…} any reality {…} as long as it stayed put”[2]), or sought after (Daniel Love and Keith Hearne have independently developed techniques to induce false awakenings[3]).  Regardless of the desirability of the experience, the existence of dream levels, far from a simple oddity, provides a potential window into massive metaphysical questions.   

First, we need to understand how dreamers use evidence to establish whether they are dreaming or awake.  

II: I am in a dreaming contest with another dreamer.  The contest begins and slimy amphibians begin to appear.  Some resemble frogs; others are in shapes that don’t exist in nature.  Their size varies from that of a pinky to that of a fist and they are very colourful.  I am not trying to dream them, rather they are spilling everywhere around my feet.  I sense this is a dream and check on the other dreamer.  He is standing to my right in empty space.  He looks just like me and hasn’t begun his dream. 

This dream is non-lucid at first and becomes lucid because of the bright color and absurd number of the amphibians.  An awareness beyond the dream senses a non-natural situation.  

III: I am picking out fruit at a fruit stand.  There are some huge avocados, almost too good looking.  I wonder if I am in a dream, and touch an avocado to check.  The one I choose is ripe and soft—I squeeze it a little.  There is no doubt that I am having a tactile experience, and I conclude I am not dreaming.  Of course, I am. 

Two dreams, two types of evidence.  In Dream II, I correctly identify the amphibians as anomalous, and become lucid.  In Dream III, my attempt to test the lifelikeness of the avocado as an indicator fails.  Simply put, realistic sensation is not sufficiently indicative of reality.  Love agrees: “we are not looking for a qualitative difference in how realistic the experience feels {…} we are {…} on the lookout for issues with stability and plausibility.”[4]  In Dream I, at first the huge pile of melons in my bedroom appears implausible and triggers lucidity; after moving up a dream level, my mind overrides the implausibility by “justifying”[5] the anomaly.  

Because we awake from sleep and dreams every morning, we are very familiar with the experience of awakening.  It is therefore unsurprising that when we wake inside a dream we accept the new reality as the waking world, even if it contains anomalous elements.  

IV: I am in a huge house where a large group of families on motorcycles arrive.  The families are making noise all night.  I realize I am dreaming and levitate over to the families.  Later I decide to wake up.  I ease myself out of bed, bumping my nose into an ironing board.  The room looks and feels exactly like my room.  I don’t recall the ironing board being there, but whatever.  Moments later I awake again—the situation is identical, only, the ironing board is gone.  I feel a pit in my stomach, wondering what is ultimately real.

Dream IV is a good example of how dream levels can become increasingly realistic as we move through them.  An ironing board in front of the bed is (for me) more plausible than a house full of bikers.  Dreams such as this beg the question of how we can ever be sure we are awake.  I have dreamt of getting up, walking to the front door, opening it, and emerging into the sunshine in my neighbourhood.  At every point, this dream felt entirely realistic with no anomalies.  After experiences like this, is it wholly unrealistic that we could dream an entire morning?  An entire day?

There are different ways to approach this kind of question.  The first is to use rigorous reality tests.[6]  Using reality tests after each fresh awakening can help us filter anomalies in what may be an increasingly realistic dream state. The second is to open ourselves to a wider set of questions.  Although space limitations make full exploration of these questions impossible, modern dreamers would do well to recall that throughout recorded history people have speculated on the meaning of the dream state and what it can tell us about space, time, life after death, and the nature of reality. 

As dreamers, we know that dreamtime behaves very differently than waking time.  Robert Moss distinguishes between Chronos (“linear time”) and Kairos (the “spacious now.”)  He writes that when Kairos operates in waking life, “ordinary time is {…} suspended or elastic,” and that the world can “quiver or shimmer.”[7]  Moss’ Kairos time sounds a great deal like dreamtime.  Jung in his memoir writes “our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity,”[8]  and “there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time.”[9]  Jung makes multiple connections between dreams and life after death, suggesting that our waking world,

in which we are “conscious,” may in fact be a projection of a more “real” and permanent, even timeless, unconscious.[10] 

In the Tibetan tradition of dream yoga, the yogi prepares for death through dreams and meditation, entering death consciously by releasing the bodily energy in such a way that the body partially or entirely dissolves into pure light.  This “rainbow body” is well-documented in Tibet and China, and cases of this phenomenon have been reported across multiple religious traditions.[11]  Finally, Moss connects dreams with the much discussed Many Worlds theory, as does, in popular culture, Richard Linklater. [12]

V:  I am among a large group of people on the top floor of a building.  We lie down on our backs and form bundles.  The molecular structure of these bundles begins to dissolve, we become lighter, then totally empty.  This process is dictated by a power outside of us which doesn’t speak.  Once empty, we have the choice to become anything we want.  I choose to become white light.  Suddenly I am transported through space in a burst of pure white light, my old body left entirely behind.  This is the most peaceful and thrilling feeling in the world.  Then, I am back into a new bundle, trying again to become empty.  I make progress, but it is hard and I am over-concentrating.  Progress ceases; I wake up. 

Although I have thought at length about dreams, I am a normal person with a normal job, dreaming anonymously night after night.  I don’t belong to a spiritual tradition, am not a yogi or a meditating hermit.  As a lucid dreamer, like many of us, I am self-taught.  While we anonymous dreamers are wise to suspend judgement about the particularities of a theory as mind-boggling as dreams as an interface to infinite parallel universes, it is perhaps not by chance that my dreams of ascending to a state of pure white light bear close resemblance to innumerable near-death experiences or the reported manifestations of a lifetime of dream yoga.  Although admittedly outside of our normal rational mode of apprehension, the experience of journeying through multiple dream levels, and the energy and amazement which often accompany these experiences, may point the way toward worlds far above, below, or beyond our own.  

Who are we in our trek through life?  Are we the maker, or the made?  The writer, or the page?  The actor, or the stage?  The happening, or the happened to?  Perhaps, our ability to exercise agency in the vastness of forever depends in part on learning to navigate levels of “reality,” however we encounter them.  Or, perhaps, journeying to the far side of the dream can bring us face to face with that which is actually dreaming us.

Bibliography

Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books, 1989.

Linklater, Richard, director. Slacker. Orion Classics, 1990.

Love, Daniel. Are you Dreaming? Enchanted Loom Publishing, 2013.

Moss, Robert. Sidewalk Oracles. New World Library, 2015.

Rinpoche, Gyalwai Nyugu.  “About Rainbow Body.” http://www.gyalwai-nyugu.com/about-rainbow-body/.  Accessed 24 July 2018.

Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Snow Lion Publications, 1998.

Thomas, Matthew.  “On Coming Through”: A New Meditation on Intention. https://craftfollowsconcept.com/2013/05/13/on-coming-through-statement-of-intent-on-the-approach-of-my-39th-birthday/#more-11. Accessed 24 July 2018.

Waggoner, Robert. Lucid Dreaming. Moment Point Press, 2009.

[1] Waggoner, 61

[2] ibid., 63

[3] Love, 131

[4] Love, 71

[5] Love cites “poor reasoning skills” as one common reason for failing to recognize dream signs and achieve lucidity.  Love, 73.

[6] Love, 78-79; Waggoner, 259.  (Wagonner uses the term “reality check” instead of “reality test.”)

[7] Moss, 49

[8] Jung, 300

[9] ibid., 304

[10] ibid., 324

[11] Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, 314; Gyalwai Nyugu Rinpoche

[12] Moss, 74-74; Linklater

Posted on by Matt Thomas

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.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Coming Through

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epigraph:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication:

For all the smart kids.

Works Cited/ Referenced:

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

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

Ecclesiastes.

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

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

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

Robert Johnson, He.

Carl Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche.

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

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

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

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrological Houses.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker.

Posted on by · 2 Comments

On Why Sicario Is the Greatest Film of the 2010s

Note: This essay reflects on the film Sicario and its place within the cinema of the 2010s. It is written in the spirit of cultural criticism rather than formal film scholarship. My aim is not to produce a definitive ranking of the decade’s films, but to articulate why Sicario stands out as a particularly revealing work about power, violence, and the uneasy moral landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

The film’s depiction of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the covert war against drug cartels resonated strongly with me because it refuses many of the narrative comforts typical of American action cinema. Instead of heroic triumphs or clear moral resolutions, Sicario presents a world in which institutional power often operates through ambiguous methods and morally troubling compromises.

In that sense the film belongs to a small tradition of American cinema willing to look directly at the realities of U.S. involvement in Latin America. An earlier example is Salvador, which similarly attempted to depict American policy in the region without the usual patriotic framing.

Readers who disagree with the claim that Sicario is the greatest film of the 2010s are very much invited to do so. Film arguments are part of the pleasure of cinephile culture. The claim here is intentionally bold because bold claims tend to produce interesting conversations.

At the very least, the border extraction sequence alone earns Sicario a place among the most unforgettable cinematic moments of the past decade.

I first watched Sicario on Netflix.

Which is not the way great films are supposed to enter one’s life. Great films are meant to arrive in dark theaters, on enormous screens, in the company of strangers who feel the tension at the same moment you do. Netflix, by contrast, offers films casually, like items on a digital buffet.

But sometimes a movie survives even that.

Sicario does.

Within half an hour it becomes clear that the film is operating at a different frequency from most thrillers. The dialogue is spare. The pacing is deliberate. The camera lingers on landscapes and silences. Something about the atmosphere suggests that the story is heading somewhere morally uncomfortable.

Then comes the border crossing.

The Extraction

The convoy moves slowly toward the border crossing at Juárez. The mission seems straightforward: extract a prisoner from Mexico and return him to the United States. The vehicles move through traffic in tight formation. Nothing dramatic is happening yet.

And yet everything feels wrong. Cars begin to surround the convoy. Drivers stare from their windshields. Traffic slows to a crawl. The camera—guided by the extraordinary eye of Roger Deakins—cuts between glances, mirrors, steering wheels, hands resting near weapons. The tension builds with almost mathematical precision.

What makes the scene so powerful is not the violence itself but the certainty of its arrival. Everyone in the vehicles understands what is about to happen. The operators watch the surrounding cars with an eerie calm, as if they are simply waiting for a timer to run out.

Disaster is not possible. It is inevitable.

When the gunfire finally erupts it is sudden, efficient, and disturbingly professional. The scene ends almost as quickly as it began.

By the time the convoy crosses back into the United States, the viewer understands that the film is not interested in the usual heroics of the crime thriller. It is interested in something darker.

The Line Between Law and Power

Part of what makes Sicario extraordinary is the way it gradually dissolves the moral categories the audience expects.

Emily Blunt’s character, FBI agent Kate Macer, begins the film believing she is participating in a legitimate law enforcement operation. But as the mission unfolds, she begins to realize that the institutions she represents are operating according to rules that have very little to do with the law.

The key figure in this realization is the relaxed, almost cheerful CIA operative called Matt Graver played by Josh Brolin.

Graver is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because he openly blurs the lines between legality and strategy. He treats the war against the cartels not as a legal battle but as a geopolitical game in which certain rules simply no longer apply.

He jokes. He smiles. He reassures Kate that everything is under control. And yet the deeper the operation goes, the clearer it becomes that the “control” he represents has very little to do with justice.

Alejandro

If Matt Graver represents the pragmatic face of American power, Alejandro, played wonderfully by Benicio Del Toro, represents something older and more elemental. Alejandro is not a police officer or a soldier in any conventional sense. He is a weapon deployed inside the machinery of the state.

His presence reveals the film’s central truth: the war on drugs, as depicted here, is not really about drugs. It is about power, revenge, and the maintenance of geopolitical equilibrium through violence.

The final dinner-table scene—quiet, controlled, almost polite—delivers one of the most chilling moments in modern cinema.

Alejandro does not rage. He simply completes the task.

A Film Without Illusions

The reason Sicario stands above most films of the 2010s is that it refuses to decorate its subject with comforting illusions.

American cinema has often struggled to portray U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with any degree of honesty. Films frequently soften the narrative with patriotic framing or moral reassurance. Sicario does the opposite.

In that sense it belongs to a small tradition of films willing to examine American power without the usual gloss. One earlier example is
Salvador.

Like Salvador, Sicario presents U.S. involvement in the politics and violence of the region not as a heroic intervention but as a complicated and morally ambiguous system of influence.

The film does not sermonize about this reality. It simply shows it.

The Craft

What elevates the film from strong political thriller to masterpiece is its extraordinary craftsmanship. Director Denis Villeneuve constructs the story with remarkable restraint. Exposition is minimal. Dialogue is sparse. Much of the narrative unfolds through mood and implication rather than explanation.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns the borderlands into a stark visual landscape of highways, deserts, and shadowy tunnels.

And the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the film’s subterranean heartbeat—deep, rumbling tones that feel less like music than like distant artillery beneath the earth.

Together these elements create an atmosphere that is almost hypnotic.

The Film of the Decade

Every decade produces films that entertain, and a smaller number that capture the psychological mood of their time. Sicario belongs to the second category.

The 2010s were a decade in which institutions increasingly appeared opaque, power operated through indirect mechanisms, and the line between legality and strategy often seemed disturbingly thin.

Sicario does not attempt to solve these problems. It simply looks at them without flinching.

And that honesty may be precisely why it stands as the greatest film of its decade.

Posted on by

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