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

On Nina Van Pallandt: Muse, Witness, Residual Character, and Her Own Woman

Note: Nina Van Pallandt moves through this piece as a kind of drifting hinge figure between art and biography, cinema and scandal, half-real and half-mythologised: from her striking, uncanny presence in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye—where she plays the abused, luminous spouse of Roger Wade and becomes, briefly, a kind of muse/anima figure for Philip Marlowe—to her earlier life in the Danish pop duo The Baronets, through her entanglement with Clifford Irving and the great Howard Hughes hoax that later reverberates through Orson Welles’ F for Fake, and onward into the quieter aftermath of fame, reinvention, and partial retreat. The essay follows her not as a stable “character” but as a site where male-authored narratives—Hollywood noir, literary fraud, journalistic myth-making—keep trying (and failing) to fix her meaning, while she keeps slipping free in ways that are at once accidental and oddly deliberate. In the end she becomes something like a case study in cinematic and cultural afterlives: a woman repeatedly written by others, occasionally complicit, sometimes resistant, and finally legible only as a residue of performance, gossip, and unfinished stories that refuse to settle.

I first became aware of Nina Van Pallandt the way most people probably do: not through biography, but through atmosphere—specifically Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, The Long Goodbye), a film that feels less like a narrative than a slow collapse of narrative reliability itself. It is a film in which people drift through scenes as if they have forgotten whether they are supposed to be characters or witnesses, and Nina arrives inside it already slightly misfiled, already too composed for the emotional weather she is asked to endure.

She plays Roger Wade’s wife, but “plays” is almost the wrong verb. Altman’s casting logic is not psychological realism in the classical sense; it is something closer to behavioral residue. People are dropped into the frame and asked not to perform identity but to inhabit proximity—to money, to violence, to desire, to failure. Nina’s presence has that peculiar Altman quality: she does not dominate the scene, but she stabilizes it just enough to make everything else look unstable.

Roger Wade (the blocked writer, the alcoholic genius-in-decline) is already collapsing before the plot admits it. Nina is the counterweight that never quite becomes balance. She is care without resolution, intimacy without clarity, the kind of emotional presence that suggests there is a story somewhere but refuses to confirm what it is. And then there is Marlowe, Elliott Gould’s version of Marlowe—half-stoned, half-wandering, permanently a few seconds behind the moral implications of what he is witnessing.

The film keeps staging small ruptures in epistemology. One of the most famous arrives early and feels almost accidental in its perfection: Terry Lennox appearing at 4 AM, asking for a ride to Tijuana. There is a moment—“Tijuana now?”—where Gould’s Marlowe is briefly jolted out of his procedural fog into genuine surprise, as if even he cannot believe how far the plot is willing to drift from explanation. That tonal instability is the world Nina inhabits as well, except she does not get Marlowe’s ironic distance. She gets consequence.

There is a domestic sequence—one of the film’s most disarming—that feels almost out of register with the noir frame: Nina cooking, the soft logic of food and attention, a candlelit dinner shared with Marlowe, where violence and absence are temporarily suspended by something as ordinary as butter and chicken. It is precisely the kind of scene that should resolve emotional ambiguity, but in Altman it does the opposite: it deepens it. Intimacy here is not revelation; it is another form of deferral.

What the film keeps doing, quietly and persistently, is refusing to assign stable moral weight to anyone. Roger Wade is both victim and self-destroyer. Marlowe is both agent and sleepwalker. Nina is both witness and participant, but never allowed the comfort of explanation. Even her suffering—when it arrives—is not narratively sanctified; it is simply another event in a world where events do not accumulate into meaning.

And this is where Nina becomes interesting beyond the film itself. Because she does not resolve into a character arc, she persists as something else: a figure who has been “used” by multiple narrative systems without ever fully belonging to them. In a conventional noir, she would be femme fatale or redemption object or tragic spouse. In Altman, she is none of these cleanly. She is what remains when genre stops enforcing coherence.

What begins to emerge, if one steps back slightly from her, is that she belongs to a broader category of women who are not simply “in” cultural narratives but are written into them by proximity to men who are doing the narrating. The pattern is subtle but persistent: women become legible to the public through the structural gravity of male projects—films, scandals, bands, memoirs—while simultaneously attempting, with varying degrees of success, to assert an interior life that resists that formatting.

It is difficult not to think here of Marianne Faithfull, who occupies a parallel register in the British version of the same phenomenon. Marianne Faithfull is initially rendered publicly intelligible through association—romantic, cultural, chemical—with the Rolling Stones orbit, and specifically through a media ecosystem eager to translate her into a kind of emblem: muse, fallen angel, tragic accessory to male genius. But what is striking about her trajectory is not the initial inscription but the long, stubborn insistence on rewriting it from within.

In both cases—Faithfull and Van Pallandt—the question is not simply “agency” in the abstract liberal sense, but something more structurally constrained: how does a person reassert authorship of self once they have already been written as a function in someone else’s story? Faithfull does this through survival, reinvention, and the eventual authority of her own voice as an artist. Nina does it more quietly, less performatively, by simply not continuing to cooperate with the demand that her life be endlessly narrativized into legible arcs.

And this is where Nina stops being just a cinematic presence and becomes entangled with a second, more volatile narrative system: the world of Clifford Irving and manufactured truth. I remain, in a slightly persistent way, puzzled by Clifford Irving—not in the sense that his actions are obscure, but in the sense that the scale of the gamble still feels oddly disproportionate to the era in which it occurred. Clifford Irving occupies that 1970s threshold where narrative fraud still had room to breathe: before the internet, before instantaneous archival correction, before every claim arrived already cross-checked by a thousand invisible clerks. The rope, in other words, was longer. Not infinitely elastic—but long enough that someone could plausibly believe they might walk it all the way across.

What he did, of course, was fabricate the authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes and briefly convince a publishing system that this fiction was fact. And one cannot quite shake the sense that this sits in a parallel register to Orson Welles’ late-career meditation on forgery and authorship, F for Fake, where the art forger is not simply a criminal but a kind of metaphysical irritant—someone who reveals how fragile the category of “authenticity” already is, even before it is attacked. In Welles’ world, the faker is almost honest about the fact that everyone is faking something. In Irving’s world, the system briefly forgets to notice.

The irony, of course, is that Irving’s fraud depended on a very pre-digital faith in paper trails, intermediaries, and the general slowness of institutional verification. Today it feels almost quaintly physical: forged documents, publishing contracts, phone calls that had to be believed in real time. One can imagine the same scheme now collapsing within hours, not because people are more moral, but because the feedback loops are instantaneous.

And then there is prison. Irving did time—real time, not narrative time—and emerged into a world that had already moved on to other, faster deceptions. Yeah, I mean what did you expect, dude. The arc compresses there in a way that feels almost unsatisfying: scandal, exposure, incarceration, partial reinvention. One wants something more operatic, but what you get is the bureaucratic version of consequence.

The interesting part is not that he was punished, but that for a brief historical window the system was even buildable enough that his plan could function as a kind of temporary reality. That is the shared atmosphere he has with Nina Van Pallandt: not guilt, not innocence, but proximity to narrative systems that were still slow enough to be fooled by their own assumptions.

In later life, Nina becomes harder to place in any of the familiar compartments that earlier decades tried to assign her. The cinematic afterglow fades into cult memory, and the Irving episode recedes into archival texture. What remains is a quietness that feels deliberate rather than accidental—not disappearance, but refusal of continued amplification. She does not convert notoriety into permanent self-mythology in the way later media ecosystems would almost require. Instead, she settles into a lower frequency of visibility: remembered, cited, intermittently revived, but no longer authored by the same pressures that once pulled her forward.

And here the comparison widens again, because what she resembles is not a “sidekick” at all—that word is too structurally comic, too dependent on hierarchy—but something closer to an attendant presence: a figure whose job, in other people’s stories, is to make emotional or moral instability legible without ever fully resolving it.

There is a related category, more neutral and slightly more precise: the faithful interlocutor. Not in the devotional sense, but in the structural one—the person who remains close enough to the main character’s instability to render it speakable, without ever becoming fully absorbed into its explanatory system. Nina performs this function in The Long Goodbyewithout being granted interpretive authority over it.

And there is another: the witness who does not testify cleanly. Not unreliable, but resistant to conversion into stable narrative fact.

We all make mistakes; that much is banal. The more interesting question is what kind of cultural weather those mistakes occur in, and how much agency is genuinely available inside it. Nina Van Pallandt seems, in retrospect, to have lived inside a period when men were still doing a great deal of the writing—of scripts, scandals, explanations—and women were often expected to appear inside those scripts as if they had authored them themselves. Her resistance to that framing is not always loud or declarative. Sometimes it is simply a matter of stepping out of the demand to be continuously interpretable.

And in that sense, what she ultimately carved out is not a grand public myth but something more modest and, arguably, more durable: a minor legacy, lightly held, slightly resistant to over-definition. Not central, not erased, not simplified—just there, in a way that feels unexpectedly intact.

I really like Nina Van Pallandt. In The Long Goodbye, and in the shadow of the Clifford Irving story, it is impossible not to root for her—not because she is resolved, but because she is never fully reducible. She drifts through systems built by men who are busy writing meaning onto the world, and she does not quite consent to being finalized inside any of them. We all make mistakes. She was written into a few. She was also, quietly, a drifter inside Hollywood’s narrative machinery, and what she ultimately leaves behind is a minor but distinct and instinctively cool legacy: not the center of anyone’s story, but one of the few figures who never fully became owned by it.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Don’t Pump Me Man!

Note: Spokane, early 1983: minor league baseball, cheap seats, and kids living in the gaps between innings. This piece recalls Spokane Indians games, chasing balls during batting practice, and a strange collision of childhood mischief and adult volatility at the edge of the outfield fence. Sandy Alomar Jr.—then a local catcher on his way to a long MLB career—signs a baseball in handwriting so precise it feels like a signature on a future already underway, while a moment of chaos involving thrown persimmons and a furious adult named Mike Trowbridge becomes the kind of story that sticks far longer than the season itself.

Epigraph:

Do you know who you’re fucking with?/ You’re fucking with a stallion mange.

Ween

It was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go. We played Little League baseball in uniforms that never quite fit right, and then on weekends we graduated to something bigger and looser and more important: Spokane Indians games at the old stadium, Single A ball, where the dreams were real and still close enough to touch.

The Spokane Indians were a kind of civic promise back then. It was a small town, and in the early 1980s there wasn’t always a lot going on. The Indians were not quite big league, but not quite nothing. Just enough baseball to make you believe that something important was always one bus ride away. The seats were cheap, the beer cheaper, and the fences closer than they should have been. The whole place had that slightly improvised feel—like the city had built it thinking, this will do for now.

We didn’t go to games like spectators. We went like we belonged.

Behind the outfield wall during batting practice, kids gathered like scavengers. We chased homers, argued over balls, sprinted through patches of grass worn down by repetition. Sometimes we were the only ones back there. Sometimes there were older kids, or dads, or random locals who knew the angles better than we did. It was a loose territory. Not quite policed. Not quite ours. Something in between.

That summer, the Indians had a catcher everyone knew. Local kid. Quiet confidence. Clean mechanics. The kind of player adults already talked about like he had a future attached to him.

Sandy Alomar Jr. was that guy even then—before the long MLB career, before the All-Star years, before anyone outside Spokane would know the name properly. He was already different. You could see it in the way he stood when he wasn’t moving, like he was always half a second ahead of the next pitch.

I got his autograph once. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a moment after BP, when he signed a ball for a cluster of kids leaning too far over a rail. His handwriting was unexpectedly beautiful—controlled, deliberate, almost elegant in a way that didn’t match the dirt and sweat of the field. I remember thinking even then: this is what someone looks like when they’re going somewhere.

I kept that ball for years.

Because baseball wasn’t just baseball. It was a hierarchy you could see. You had the guys who were going to make it, the guys who might make it, and the rest of us orbiting the idea that proximity alone might transfer something.

Most of them wouldn’t go anywhere. That was obvious even then, though nobody said it out loud. But that day, none of that mattered yet. What mattered was the fence.

Our party was up high in the stands on the first base side, just beyond where the stadium fence met a thin strip of wild space. A tree had grown there—some kind of fruit tree, nobody was ever fully sure what it was. Persimmons, maybe. Something orange-red and heavy-looking, the kind of fruit that doesn’t look like it should be thrown but absolutely is.

Some kids started throwing them. Just kids, just fucking around. But they didn’t know who they were fucking with. Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you.

The fruit flew. Not carefully. Not aimlessly either. More like experimentation. Testing distance. Testing reactions. Some of them were aiming at fans, others just launching them over the fence because it felt like something you could do if no one stopped you.

It was mildly funny at first. Then mildly annoying. Then mildly dangerous in a way that nobody fully acknowledged.

Because persimmons, if that’s what they were, aren’t soft. They hit like small decisions.

I remember one bouncing near a row of seats and rolling under a foot. Someone laughed. Someone else shouted. But nobody moved with urgency yet. It was still in the category of “kids being kids.”

Until Mike Trowbridge noticed.

Mike T was there with his kids—David Trowbridge and his sister Dawn. David had been a teammate of mine in Little League, a few years younger, outfield guy, quiet in the way younger kids sometimes are when they’re still deciding how loud they’re allowed to be. Dawn was just there in the background of everything, observing.

Their dad, Mike, was not background.

He was one of those adults you noticed before you understood why. Volatile energy. Tight posture. Goatee, black tank top, gold chains around his neck. A bit of a greaser; drove a Harley. Always slightly too close to losing his temper. He wasn’t a bad guy exactly—he could laugh, he could talk—but you always felt like there was a second version of him sitting just under the surface.

He saw the fruit being thrown. And something in him snapped into motion. He walked straight to the fence line, fast enough that it changed the temperature of the moment.

“Knock that shit off right now,” he yelled.

The kids paused. Not because they were scared exactly, but because the voice had weight.

Then one of them—small kid, maybe ten, sunburned confidence, the kind of kid who doesn’t fully understand consequences yet—looked up and said:

“Don’t pump me, man.”

It was such a strange sentence. Too casual for the situation. Too confident for the speaker. Like he had borrowed it from somewhere older and wasn’t sure how it fit yet.

There was a beat of silence where the entire stadium noise seemed to pull back slightly.

Mike T looked at him.

“Don’t pump me?” he said.

Then his voice shifted.

“You want me to pump you? I’ll pump you.”

And in that moment—this is the part that still feels unreal even now—he climbed the fence. Not slowly. Not theatrically. Just decisively. Like the boundary wasn’t a boundary at all.

Everything changed at once.

Me, David, Dawn—everyone nearby—we all froze in that wide-eyed way kids do when they realize the rules might not hold. It wasn’t comedy anymore. It wasn’t baseball anymore.

It was just: Mikey baby don’t kill that kid.

That’s what it felt like in my head. Not words were spoken, just panic translated into something almost verbal.

The kids scattered instantly. Full sprint. No hesitation. The fruit stopped mid-air and dropped forgotten. The stadium behind us suddenly felt far away, like it belonged to a different scene entirely.

Mike T took a step forward, still inside the fenced edge of this improvised battlefield, breathing hard, still locked in that strange overlap between anger and disbelief.

And then—somehow—it was over. No actual violence. No contact. Just the threat of it, large enough to erase the mischief that had caused it.

The kids were gone. The fruit stopped flying. The tree stood there like nothing had happened. Afterwards, the stadium noise came back slowly, like a system rebooting.

My dad, Ross, had seen the whole thing. He was laughing, hard. Not the kind of polite laugh adults do when they think they’re supposed to. This was involuntary. Almost helpless. The kind of laugh that tries to stay respectful but can’t quite hold the line.

Because it was funny. In that terrible, chaotic way childhood sometimes is when it brushes up against adult intensity and survives without breaking.

Ross would tell that story for years after. The kid. The fence. The persimmons. The line: don’t pump me man. He never stopped laughing at that part.

Neither did I.

But at the time, I just stood there thinking about Sandy Alomar Jr. somewhere on that field, already on his way to something else entirely, signing baseballs in beautiful handwriting, while right behind the stadium wall the rest of us were learning the difference between games and consequences in real time.

Most of us wouldn’t make it to the Bigs. But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go.

But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.

Dedication:

For Mike T. And for the kid. You got balls young man, I’ll say that.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Lou Reed and John Cale’s Album Songs for Drella (aka The Trouble With Classicists)

Note: This post takes up Songs for Drella (1990), Lou Reed and John Cale’s uneasy reunion album/biographical song-cycle about Andy Warhol, moving track by track through Warhol’s trajectory from Pittsburgh outsider to Factory-era icon to post-shooting isolation and mythic afterlife. Along the way it reads the record not just as tribute or elegy, but as a sustained meditation on work, style, and the thin boundary between populist gesture and aesthetic theory—especially in the pointed figure of “classicists” versus Warhol’s downtown anti-orthodoxy. What emerges is less a linear album review than a set of reflections on art, authorship, and cultural literacy, with Warhol as both subject and pretext for thinking about what it means to make anything count as art in the first place.

3

In 1990, Lou Reed and John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, latterly famously not getting along, reunited to make Songs for Drella, a tribute/ musical biography of their first patron, Andy Warhol. Drella is a 15 song cycle which takes the listener through Andy’s life and career, from his early days in Pittsburgh, through success in New York, getting shot, latter-day isolation and and loneliness, and ending with an epitaph. The songs fit loosely together in chronological order. Here is the basic scheme: “Smalltown” sees Andy unhappy in Pittsburgh and dreaming of the big city; “Open House” describes the early days of the factory, when all and sundry stopped by and provided Andy with inspiration; “Style it Takes” gives an overview of some of Andy’s famous works and his working method; “Work” explains the considerable work ethic that underlay Warhol’s success; “Trouble with Classicists,” in what is presumably Andy’s voice, provides a series of opinions about “classicists”, “impressionists”, and “personalities”; “Starlight” appears to consider Andy’s flirtation with Hollywood, or Hollywood’s flirtation with him; “Faces and Names” kicks off the second section of the record and finds Andy in despair, something like a midlife crisis; “Images” details Andy’s philosophy of art and hits back at the critics of his method; “Slip Away,” “It Wasn’t Me,” and “I Believe” represent the nadir of the record in which Andy is warned about the people he associates with, confronts a junkie, and is shot by Valerie Solanis; “Nobody But You” sees Andy bereft of companionship hanging out and paying the price of dinner of a nobody; “A Dream” synthesizes all which has come before and puts Andy’s life into fuller perspective; “Forever Changed” sees Andy’s past slipping away; and “Hello It’s Me” represents Reed’s epitaph and apology to Warhol.

Some of the songs are better than others; specifically, I get comparatively little out of “Starlight,” “It Wasn’t Me” and “Forever Changed,” but every song has its place in the story of Warhol’s life and his influence on Reed and Cale, his circle, New York city, and the art world in general. This post will take up the first five songs as a bridge into a wider discussion of the meaning of “classicism” today. There may or may not be a part two to this post.

“Smalltown” is about leaving Pittsburgh, and introduces us to the fact that Andy was gay:

When you’re growing up in a small town
Bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty
People look at you funny
When you’re in a small town

New York is more to his liking, and provides a context for his art to flourish:

Where did Picasso come from
There’s no Michelangelo coming from Pittsburgh

I hate being odd in a small town
If they stare let them stare in New York City

The theme of small town boy (girl) made good in the big city is classic and well worn, of course, but Andy thrives in NYC, and soon “The Factory” is open to all comers (“Open House”):

Come over to 81st street I’m in the apartment above the bar
You know you can’t miss it, it’s across from the subway
and the tacky store with the Mylar scarves

Andy wants people around him, and this is one of the major themes of the record; his ability to work is dependent on company and inspiration from associates, peers, and even hangers-on:

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
The way to make friends Andy is invite them up for tea

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
Give people little presents so they remember me

Whereas “Smalltown” is loud and bracing, the music on “Open House” is soft, elegant, gentle even. But even in his halcyon early days in NYC Andy cannot entirely escape the demands of the market or of other people’s ideas of what he should be doing:

I think I got a job today they want me to draw shoes
The ones I drew were old and used
They told me — draw something new
Open house, open house 

You scared yourself with music, I scared myself with paint
I drew five-hundred fifty different shoes today
It almost made me faint
Open house, open house

Andy’s career takes off, and he clearly has something that people want–he has “The Style It Takes.”

You’ve got connections and I’ve got the art
You like attention and I like your looks
and I have the style it takes and you know the people it takes

I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art
It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket
‘Cause I’ve got the style it takes

Here, Reed and Cale delve into the perennial question of the definition of art–what’s good, what’s bad, and how do we know the difference? The answer which “Style It Takes” seems to offer is: the status of something as “art” is dependent upon someone with “style” telling so. This observation is at once banal (we know art is art because it hangs in a museum and because of the reverent hush of the patrons), and somehow inspiring (a kid from Pittsburgh, “bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty,” can take the New York art world by storm simply be possessing some quicksilver attribute called “style,” something so powerful that a simple box of soap pads becomes accepted as art less on its own merit and more on the strength of its association with Warhol, who by 1964 was rapidly ascending to the status of an icon). This song also sees the first appearance on the record of a little group called The Velvet Underground, who Andy “shows movies on.”

“I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art”–is this a populist claim or an elitist one? Is it classical? Certainly not classically classical, but is there not a way in which Warhol’s “pop art”–which is often read as representing the “emptiness” of modern popular culture, is perfectly sincere and actually uninflected with irony? Another major theme of the record is Andy’s work ethic–he was a working artist on whose sweat the whole Factory scene was dependent. Andy’s work ethic, according to Reed and Cale, even had a religious aspect. “Work” starts with Andy in prayer, and despite the neat twist on the phrase “Protestant ethic” here, we are left with the strong feeling that Andy was no self-ironizing dilettante, and that his blue-collar background stuck with him throughout his life:

Andy was a Catholic,
the ethic ran through his bones
He lived alone with his mother,
collecting gossip and toys
Every Sunday when he went to church
He’d kneel in his pew and he’d say,
“It’s work,
all that matters is work.”

He was a lot of things,
what I remember most
He’d say, “I’ve got to bring home the bacon,
someone’s got to bring home the roast.”
He’d get to the factory early
If you asked him he’d told you straight out
It’s work 

In “Work,” Andy stresses quantity over quality; just as he had painted 550 different shoes in “Open House,” here he advises Reed to write like there is no tomorrow:

No matter what I did it never seemed enough
He said I was lazy, I said I was young
He said, “How many songs did you write?”
I’d written zero, I’d lied and said, “Ten.”
“You won’t be young forever
You should have written fifteen”
It’s work

But despite his working artist approach, Andy is not content to merely record the surface of what he sees. Neither, however, is he given to too much soul-searching or self-analysis about why he is who he is, or why he does what he does. “The Trouble with Classicists” is the central song on the record, the song where Reed and Cale get closest to defining Warhol’s attitude toward art. It is also here from which I was moved to take on the issue of classicism in our times:

The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree
That’s all he sees, he paints a tree
The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky
He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky

The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log
He doesn’t know who he is,
standing, staring, at this log {…}
That’s the trouble with impressionists 

If neither classicism nor impressionism, than who or what is Warhol drawn to? The answer is graffiti artists, of all things:

I like the druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains
I like their lack of training, their primitive technique
I think sometimes it hurts you when you stay too long in school
I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool
That’s the trouble with classicists

Let’s dig a little deeper. Cale, who sings “Classicists,” is himself famously a “classically trained” musician, who has drunk heavily of modernism and dissonance without surrendering what I still see as a fundamentally classical musical and aesthetic sensibility. Moreover, writing a song called “The Trouble with Classicists” in this day and age is in itself a classical act. This I think is a key point; whereas once upon a time a Romantic poet could have defined himself or herself in violent opposition to Classicism and made it stick, today, and perhaps even in Warhol’s day, the ability to criticize classicism as a form or style is evidence of a degree of learning and cultural literacy which can only be described as classical, and, yes, a little elitist.

Is this right? It sounds right, at least, and I would add the following: a) the vagueness with which I am approaching the question of a modern definition for classicism in these paragraphs is symptomatic of the generally pitiable state of true learning on that part of what Edward Said calls “the general intellectual”; b) Said’s general intellectual today tends also to be as Dean Williams has said a “profound modernist”–which is a nice way of saying someone who knows, and cares, very little about Western culture’s classical roots, very little about the Bible, very little about the great religion (at least in any fine grained way), probably very little about Shakespeare for that matter; c) today’s general intellectual knows very little about music compared with his 18th or 19th century counterpart. This is a point which Said makes in his chapter on Glenn Gould in On Late Style: “Today’s literary or general intellectual has little practical knowledge of music as an art, has hardly any experience playing an instrument or studying solfege or theory, and except for buying records or collecting a few names like Karajan and Callas, does not as a matter of course have a sustained literacy–whether that concerns being able to relate performance, interpretation, and style to one another, or recognizing the difference between harmonic and rhythmical characteristics in Mozart, Berg, and Messiaen–in the actual practice of music” (115). Any of my general intellectual readership care to take this argument on? If so, please produce 100 words on solfege without reference to Wikipedia before wading in.

My point, which is, I fear, on the verge of getting lost, is less that Warhol or for that matter Reed and Cale are in any specific way “classical,” but that because what Said calls the lack of “sustained literacy” in music on the part of the general intellectual is not confined to music, but extends to art, classical and great literature (how many of us who name drop Aristotle have actually spent any time reading him? how many of us who attempt to evince first-hand knowledge of Marx have actually broached Capital?), and philosophy. That is to say that the general intellectual today is apt not only to be a profound modernist, but also to be a profound generalist, who knows a miniscule amount about a huge number of things, a little bit about a few things, and knows almost nothing is any truly extensive or impressive detail. In this context, not only is “The Trouble with Classicists” deeply classical, not only is Classical Sympathies, by very virtue of its being and intent, classical, but any attempt to engage in a serious way with issues of aesthetic definition marks one out as both a classicist, and at least a minor elitist. Certainly Said, for all his “oppositional” stances and leftist politics, was both–but the question of how leftism and classicism can co-exist is best left for a latter date; it is time to stop work on this post and risk being called a fool.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Concept of “Role Drift” in Laud Humphrey’s The Tearoom Trade and the US Military and Paul the Apostle

Note: This piece is a wide-ranging meditation on Laud Humphreys’ notion of “role drift” in his book The Tearoom Trade, drawn outward into unexpected but structurally suggestive parallels with the historical conversion the Apostle Paul and lived military hierarchy through an interview with an ex-US solider. Beginning from Humphreys’ account of observational immersion and the tendency for participants and observers alike to “go over” through sustained proximity, the piece tracks how identity can be reshaped by exposure to institutional logics and repeated social frames. A military anecdote from the First Gulf War anchors the theory in lived experience, while the figure of Paul becomes an extreme historical case of allegiance reversal that tests the limits of the model. The result is a speculative sociology of affiliation and transformation, where roles are not merely performed but slowly internalized until the boundary between observer and participant, or “they” and “we,” begins to dissolve.

Epigraph:

I believe in this/ and it’s been tested by research/ that he who fucks nuns/ will later join the church.

The Clash

This post takes up that sexiest of subjects, “role-drift.”  In this post I will connect Laud Humphreys’ investigation of “the Tearoom Trade,” that is, casual homosexual encounters in public toilets, the initiation process in the United States military, and the conversion of Paul the Apostle.  Those easily offended by sociological explanations of religion, of sexual preference, or of the comradeship among soldiers should cease reading immediately.

Recently, I finished reading a book–which, as my next post will detail, is a somewhat rare occurrence.  The book was Laud Humphreys’ “The Tearoom Trade,” published in 1970.  It concerns men hooking up with other men, usually strangers, in the public restroom facilities in St. Louis, and it is an eye-opening read.  The blurb on the book jacket pretty much tells the story: “Many American men seek impersonal sex in public restrooms.  Called ‘tearooms’ in the argot of the homosexual subculture, these restrooms are accessible to and easily recognized by those who wish to engage in anonymous sexual encounters {…} By passing as deviant, the author was able to engage in systematic observations of homosexual acts in public settings.  Methodologists will be interested {…} in this unusual application of participant-observation strategies.”  Indeed, methodologists everywhere, I can say without hesitation, were and are all ears.  But the odd thing is that Humphreys, married and purportedly straight when he conducted his research, later divorced his wife and came out as gay.

Now, it may not be considered particularly odd that someone, sociologist or no, who spends several months or years in public toilets observing “insertors” and “insertees” would himself come out eventually, and Humphreys’ persistent use of “us” and “we” to refer to the denizens of the restrooms of St. Louis appears, in retrospect, to be something of a “tell.”  Consider, for instance, sentences such as the following: “when a group of us were locked in a restroom and attacked by several youths, we spoke in defense and out of fear {…} This event ruptured the reserve among us and resulted in a series of conversations among those who shared this adventure for several days afterward” (12), and several other similar uses of plural pronouns.  (It may be of interest here that Humphreys and his study of tearooms enjoyed a brief week in the sun a few years ago when Senator Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested in an airport bathroom stall for foot-tapping–Humphreys covered this topic as well, making clear that foot-tapping was, in 1970, a well-established method of making contact from stall to stall, and already in use by police decoys so many decades ago (20, 87).)

Indeed, the whole study is fascinating, and peppered with wonderfully matter-of-fact passages such as: “There is a great deal of difference in the volumes of homosexual activity that these accommodations shelter.  In some, one might wait for months before observing a deviant act.  In others, the volume approaches orgiastic dimensions.  One summer afternoon, for instance, I witnessed twenty acts of fellatio is the course of an hour while waiting out a thunderstorm in a tearoom.  For one who wishes to participate in (or study) such activity, the primary consideration is one of finding where the action is” (6) (alert readers will recognize the influence of Erving Goffman here; Goffman’s study of gambling establishments is titled “Where the Action Is”).  But the passage which really caught my attention deals with what Humphreys calls “role instability” or “role drift.”  He makes two major points; i) those who start out pitching tend to end up catching; “It appears that, during the career of any one participant, the role of insertor tends to be transposed into that of insertee” (55) (Humphreys attributes this tendency to “the aging crisis” common to tearoom participants); ii) “If {straights} remain exposed ‘too long’ to the action, they cease to operate as straights” (56).  Humphreys here is not referring to men who one day, by accident, may wander into an operational tearoom, but rather to members of the parks department or vice squad who, over time, may be exposed to a wider swath of tearoom activity.  Here is the key passage:

“When some communication continues to exist, parents tend to be ‘turned on’ by their pot-smoking offspring.  Spectators tend to be drawn into mob action, and kibitzers into card games.  Even police may adopt the roles they are assigned to eliminate:

‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at  any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance’” (Here, Humphreys is quoting from Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner from 1967.  My emphasis).

It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad they begin to ‘go over’. The moment I read this, having known of Humphreys’ own history before I read his book, I immediately recognized either a brilliant justification for future defection or an alternative, sociologically-based, theory for how sexual preference is formed.  After all, Humphreys himself spent several years researching and writing “The Tearoom Trade,” over which time he subjected himself to sufficient “action” to push him into shifting his primary allegiance, and to “go over.”  This theory, it goes without saying, flies in the face of the idea that sexual preference is genetic or established in the womb–and just as obviously it cannot explain all instances of same-sex attraction.  But, as a sociologically fascinating explanation for Humphreys own conversion, it remained in the back of my mind.

Several weeks later I was reading Robert Wright’s Atlantic article “One World, Under God,” about the relationship between religion and globalization.  Much of the article deals with the Apostle Paul, and I read something I had long known but never fully processed–Paul persecuted Christians right up until his conversion.  Here’s Wright: “The ‘Apostle Paul’ wasn’t one of Jesus’ 12 apostles.  Quite the opposite: after the Crucifixion he seems to have persecuted followers of Jesus.  According to the book of Acts, he was ‘ravaging the church by entering house after house: dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.’  But then, while on his way to treat Syrian followers of Jesus in this fashion, he underwent his ‘road to Damascus’ conversion.  He was blinded by the light and heard the voice of Jesus” (40).  The rest is history, of course, as Paul went on to establish ministries across the Near East, and, according to Wright, recast Jesus’ message as one of love and peace.  There are a couple of classic explanations for Paul’s conversion–first, as Wright says, that he heard the voice of Jesus or God and converted–simple enough.  Second, that Paul was epileptic and had a seizure in which he imagined he heard Jesus.  The first explanation is religious or mystical; the second medical.  But when I read this paragraph, the first thing I thought of was Humphreys–‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance.’” Had Paul spent too much time on the vice-squad exposed to this rogue new faith and fallen prone to “role-drift”?  This post is not a polemic, and I would not want to rule out religious, medical, or genetic explanations of human behavior–but the unifying thread excited me.

The general topic of role-drift has, in one form or another, been on my mind for several years, and I recently posted an extract of a conversation I had with my editor Dean Williams several years ago.  The narrow topic is how men in the military adapt to the culture–the wider topic is social adaptation and investment in an ideology over time.

===== =====

In the interview below “MT” is the author Matt Thomas and DW is Dean Williams, my editor, who served in the US military in the early 1990s during the First Gulf War.

MT: We’re here with U.S. army lieutenant Dean Williams, and he’s going to tell us a story from his military career. Dean, set the scene for us.

DW: OK, so I was a lieutenant back in the 19–early 90′s in Germany and there was an officer party. And a group of lieutenants, with me among them, we’re sitting next to a very famous general, his name was General Michael Kelly. And he was famous because he had become a one star general in a faster time than any other general in the signal corps. So we were very honored to be sitting there, and having a drink or two, with this kind of military celebrity.

MT: So you’d never talked to a one star general before in such a close setting?

DW: Yes, right, not a nice close setting. Not at a kind of a party where–he was being very open and honest with us, and we really got the sense that he had taken off his, kind of, stars, you know his general stars, he felt like more of a human being than is normally the case. And then I just, I felt this honesty and I felt it was a chance to tell him something that I had always felt in the last few years of being an officer and that was that you really got the sense that there was this vast, you know, impersonal, very powerful “they” that was above you; you had to do things, but “they” were up there controlling things, watching you, sometimes praising you, sometimes yelling at you, but they were there and you were here and there really wasn’t, there wasn’t much of a connection. And yet here was this general, he was part of the “they,” but here he was sitting right in front of us having a beer. And I said that to him; I said “so I really feel this gap between us so this is a good, you know, interesting chance,” and then I’ll never forget, he sat back and he put–he was smoking a cigar, by the way he was a very small man, like a lot of generals are…

MT: Were you smoking a cigar?

DW: No, I was not smoking a cigar ’cause I would have gotten sick, but he was a very small, but very dynamic and powerful guy, with piercing blue eyes, drinking his beer and just very animated and dynamic and energetic, and he leaned back and he actually put his cigar down, and he said “young lieutenant, let me tell you something,” he said “I’ve been in the army around thirty years, and I know exactly what you mean.” But he said, “and I went through as a lieutenant, in Vietnam, and did many many things, and I’ve done many field problems and solved many problems, and yelled and gotten yelled at, and in all my long career, as I went through, at some point, that “they” you speak of became a “we.” And now I feel that I am that “we.” And we were all very impressed with that, and I’ve never–I’ve forgotten many things from that evening; I’ve forgotten many things from the military…

MT: But not that? Not that moment?

DW: Yeah. It seems to me the most powerful statement of what it’s like to be part of an organization and to feel either powerless or have power…

MT: So what he meant is that over time, that you too would become part of that thing that you described as a “they,” you’d be part of it?

DW: Yeah…

MT: You would become it.

DW: You would, and as you spend time and invest in an organization, and as the organization gives you more power, more money, more reasons to stay, it doesn’t become–it gets nearer and nearer–it’s almost like some alien force but then it finally goes into you and you are part of it, actually, which is a very…at that time it was very positive. Now I’m more, I’m thinking was it positive or negative? For all of us.

===== =====

The vice-squad officer “goes over”

the straight becomes queer

the jailer of the faithful becomes an apostle of the faith

the hipster sells out

“every cheap hood makes a bargain with the world and ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl”

the would-be uncommitted passive intellectual confronts the realization that action is ideology and the personal is political

the they becomes a we

the world turns, stays pretty much the same.

Dedication:

For Puritano

Note; If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also deal with my editor, the Souther Man and one and only Motherfucking Dean Williams.

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!
On Trying (and Failing) to Learn Go
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Film “My Dinner with Andre” Part I: Wally in New York

Note: Opening a multi-part early series from my first blog Classical Sympathies back in 2009, this piece takes up the beginning of Wallace Shawn’s walk through New York en route to his meeting with André Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, using Wally’s voice-over as a lens on artistic precarity, everyday survival, and the comic disproportion between existential weight and mundane errands. The note situates the film’s opening movement as both narrative setup and philosophical framing: a winter city of post offices, xerox shops, and unanswered calls becomes the psychological prelude to a conversation that will later expand into memory, performance, and self-mythology. This installment follows Wally up to his arrival at the restaurant for the pre-dinner drink, where the film’s central encounter is still suspended in anticipation, and meaning is generated less by action than by the act of getting there.

My Dinner with Andre is the famous, or infamous, 1981 film of a dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, and Andre Gregory, the theater director. If I were to make a twofold claim for the film: i) that it is one of the most action packed films ever made, and ii) that it effectively encapsulates the thematics of the entire 20th century, I do not think this would be overstatement. My intent here, however, is not to establish either of these postulates, but rather to simply “blog” the script in the hopes that what needs to be said works its way to the surface. Fair warning: the undertaking will require several posts.

Money crops up on two of the first three pages of the script, and because money, and the lack of it, is a theme that runs beneath the entire script: Andre has money, has the freedom to travel and to spend several years trying to “find himself”; Wally does not. Still, “having money” is, as ever, a relative concept. At the opening of the film, Wally is seen walking through the streets of New York, heading for the restaurant where he is to meet Andre. It appears to be winter, maybe February. In the opening voice-over, Wally ruminates on the life of the artist: The life of a playwright is tough. It’s not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays, and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living–acting, in my case–and people don’t hire you. So you spend your days crossing the city back and forth doing the errands of your trade. Today wasn’t any easier than any other day. I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls, then I’d gone to the stationary store to buy envelopes, and then to the xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was doing my best (17).

One of the marvelous things about the film is the tongue-in-cheek humor that is rarely, if ever, directly alluded to. A deeply serious film, Andre is also a comedy, a fact which we can recognize because we see that the writers are having fun with the characters who are in turn themselves. That is, Wally and Andre are playing versions of themselves–we assume that most of the experiences that Andre recounts in the film are based on real experiences, and that Wally’s account of his home life is more or less true to life–but exaggerated versions. As Shawn says in the preface to the script, “I knew immediately that {…} I’d have to distort us both slightly–our conflicts would have to become sharpened–we’d have to become–well–characters {…} It would be an enormously elaborate piece of construction” (14). In this initial passage, the humor lies in Wally’s conception of a difficult life: “I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls.”

Wally’s sense of pressure is, from the outset, deliberately out of proportion to the scale of his circumstances. The tone is one of genuine complaint, but the complaint itself is almost comically domestic: the architecture of a “hard day” is built out of errands, envelopes, xerox shops, and an answering service that may or may not contain salvation in the form of an acting job. What Shawn achieves here, and what the film quietly sustains, is a recalibration of seriousness—where existential weight is not attached to grand events but to the texture of administrative survival. Wally’s New York is not a place of romance or revelation, but of circulation: between post office, mailbox, and telephone, as though modern artistic life has been reduced to a loop of deferred contact with recognition.

At the same time, the humor is never fully separable from sincerity. Wally is not merely being mocked; he is also articulating a recognisable condition of artistic precarity, one that the film refuses to glamorize. The genius of the opening monologue lies in this double register: we are invited to laugh at the disproportion between emotional tone and material fact, but we are also made to recognise how easily that disproportion becomes a lived reality. The “dozens of things to do” are not nothing; they are just insufficiently legible as crisis, which is precisely what makes them feel like crisis.

By the time Wally finally moves through the city toward the restaurant, the structure of the film has already been quietly established: this is a world in which meaning is not delivered through events but through the way events are narrated to oneself while walking between obligations. New York, in this sense, is not a backdrop but a medium of self-composition—an environment in which thought is constantly being assembled under mild pressure, as though consciousness itself were an errand.

He checks the time again, as he has been doing throughout the afternoon, and adjusts his route slightly, not out of urgency so much as orientation. The meeting with André already exists in his mind as something slightly unreal, a fixed appointment that has not yet been granted substance by arrival. He crosses another block, passes into the thinning evening light, and begins to approach the restaurant where, for the first time that day, the structure of waiting will shift from solitary to shared.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Song Prince Hal’s Dirge: Confidence, Reformation, and the Politics of Self-Making

Note: This short essay takes Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” as a lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, focusing on the idea of self-fashioning across time. It reads Hal’s apparent debauchery and later reform not simply as moral transformation, but as a theory of confidence—either consciously staged, in Shakespeare’s version, or more instinctively internalized in Wainwright’s. Moving between text and song, the piece explores how both versions hinge on the same underlying question: what kind of inner structure allows a self to pass through disorder, delay, and social misreading without collapsing, and to reconstitute itself as effective action when the moment arrives.

Epigraph:

Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Loudon Wainwright

This piece takes as its source the song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” by Loudon Wainwright III, itself based on Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal from Henry IV. The figure of Hal is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed political selves: a young man who deliberately inhabits disorder in order to make his eventual reformation into kingship appear all the more legitimate, even necessary.

In Henry IV, Hal openly announces this strategy to Falstaff and the other tavern companions:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

And again:

So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better that my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Hal’s logic is explicit: he will cultivate disorder as a kind of aesthetic and political foil. His apparent immersion in low company is not failure but strategy. Falstaff and the tavern world become, in effect, instruments in the staging of legitimacy.

Paraphrased, Hal is saying: I will live among you for a time, but only in order to abandon you later in a way that maximizes my transformation into kingship. He is a political animal who understands reputation as something staged across time.

Loudon Wainwright III’s “Prince Hal’s Dirge” takes up this same figure, but shifts the emphasis in a revealing way. Wainwright—still best known to many for novelty songs like “Dead Skunk,” though his broader body of work is far more substantial—reimagines Hal less as calculating strategist and more as self-contained performer of confidence within disorder.

The song opens in full immersion in debauchery:

Give me a capon
And some roguish companion,
A wench and a bottle of sack.
Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Here Hal is not yet strategy, but appetite. The political mask is absent; what remains is the world of consumption, drink, sex, and collapse.

But Wainwright then pivots:

My father, he thinks I’m a good for nothing
that I won’t amount to much.
But he’s not aware of my secret weapon.
I can count on myself in the clutch.

This is the key transformation. Shakespeare’s Hal is self-consciously future-oriented: he plans his reformation as spectacle. Wainwright’s Hal, by contrast, carries an interiorized assurance that he will simply “come through.” The emphasis shifts from calculation to instinctive resilience.

This continues in the song’s martial register:

Show me a breach,
I’ll once more unto it.
I’ll be ready for action any day.
I’ll straighten up, and fly most righteous.
In a fracas, I’ll be right in the fray.
I can drink you under twenty-five tables,
Fight and be a ladies man.
But all this will change,
When I’m good and ready,
To become the king of this land.

The phrase “any day” is doing important work here. It carries the rhetoric of readiness without commitment to timing. It suggests immediacy while quietly deferring it indefinitely. The transformation is always available, never enacted.

What emerges is a different psychological structure from Shakespeare’s original. Shakespeare gives us a political actor who consciously engineers perception over time. Wainwright gives us a man who believes in a durable inner core of competence—someone who can be disordered without being undone.

And yet both versions converge on the same underlying mechanism: confidence as political force. Whether staged (Shakespeare) or internalized (Wainwright), Hal’s power rests on the belief that identity can survive its own contradictions and ultimately reorganize them into legitimacy.

Singing “Prince Hal’s Dirge” before work, I find myself struck less by the irony of Hal’s transformation than by the necessity of something like an unbreakable interior core—something sealed enough to survive fluctuation, failure, and delay, but still flexible enough to return to action when required.

That, ultimately, is what both Shakespeare and Wainwright are circling: not morality, not reform, but the strange political psychology of self-belief under time pressure.

Dedication:

For my father, the biggest Shakespeare lover I know.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up various literary works.

On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)
On Raymond Carver’s “Fires”
Posted on by Matt Thomas

My Time in Kumamoto Japan I: NOVA and Meeting Sachie

Note: This is the first entry in a new series about my time in Kumamoto, Japan between April of 1997 and December of 1998. What began as a recollection of a short, chaotic teaching stint but became an excavation of place, power, and early adult identity under surveillance. Set against the compressed social ecosystem of a small Japanese city in the late 1990s, the piece moves through NOVA’s glass-room culture, its porous rules, and the peculiar cast of lifers, bosses, and drifters who inhabited it. What emerges is not a complaint but a tonal study: of being watched, of improvising freedom within constraint, and of the quiet luck of finding something real—Sachie—amid a system that often felt artificial.

Epigraph:

Kim You Bore Me to Death

—Grandaddy

I arrived in Kumamoto in April of 1997 to teach English at NOVA, which at the time felt like a pretty wild thing to be doing. Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It’s a smaller city, slower, and NOVA was right at the north end of the Shotengai, basically downtown. Everyone knew everyone, or at least knew of them, which I didn’t fully understand yet.

What I also didn’t fully understand was that I would be living with one of my bosses.

Her name was Sam. She was about 35, from Wales, and she had this story she loved to tell—more like boast—that Donovan had written a song for her mother. I never quite figured out which one. She was in the apartment with me and another teacher, Heather, and she was there all the time. Not just physically there, but present. Observing. Asking. Not in a relaxed roommate way, but in a way that felt like she was always slightly checking something.

NOVA had a loose rule about no fraternization between students and teachers. Loose being the key word. It happened all the time. Another teacher, Cameron, told me a lot of the young women came to find a boyfriend. Whether that was true or not, relationships were constant. There was this big izakaya on the Shotengai where everyone went, and it was basically understood that whatever the rule was, it wasn’t really enforced.

By early June I was seeing Sachie, who had been my student. She was my girlfriend then and is my wife now. I went to her house pretty early on. Her father, Tetsuyo, a gruff, older, very conservative Japanese dad, said he would meet me, but then he went to take a “bath” and didn’t. So I didn’t meet him for months. Her mother, Kazuko, was lovely then and is lovely now.

We couldn’t really spend time together at my place, obviously, so we’d drive around in her car. That was our space. We’d park wherever passed for lovers’ lane in Kumamoto, which, thankfully, was not the Zodiac. No Zodiac in Kyushu, thankfully. We’d sit there, windows cracked, the car quiet, the whole thing feeling both secret and completely ordinary at the same time. That was just how it worked.

At some point I told Joy, another teacher, that I was seeing Sachie, and I told her not to say anything because it was technically against the rules. She said of course. And then, of course, she immediately went and told John G., and from there it got around.

By that point it didn’t really matter. I had to leave, but I also wanted to leave. NOVA felt like a factory. The hours, the structure, the constant low-level supervision—it wasn’t for me. I gave my one month’s notice and in July of 1997 I moved to Washington. Better hours, easier gig, and a lot more freedom.

There were a couple of long-term guys at NOVA, both Brits, both lifers in a way I couldn’t really imagine.

Cameron was the more interesting of the two. We’d go to the big izakaya on the Shotengai—yakitori, big beers in frosty mugs, the usual—but his real place was Madam’s Bar, also on the Shotengai. Madam was the owner, a transvestite, and Cameron loved her. Absolutely loved her. He went there every night.

He took me a few times. It was small and dark, always smoky, with Queen playing on a loop. I drank White Russians and, for reasons that made sense at the time, felt like a bit of a stud. It had its own rules, though. You could feel that pretty quickly.

By Halloween of 1997 I was already at Washington, but I was still around Kumamoto a fair bit, still seeing people. The week before Halloween I went back to Madam’s with Cameron.

“Matty baby, T-shirt time,” Madam said. “You will buy the bar T-shirt. Halloween theme. ¥4000.”

¥4000 was a lot for me then.

“Madam baby, that’s a bit steep,” I said. “I’ve already got plenty of T-shirts. Maybe next year.”

She and Cameron had a quick whispered conversation off to the side. We finished our drinks and left. Outside, Cameron turned to me.

“Matty baby, there’s not going to be a next year. You’re banned. 86’d. Hit the bricks, pal. You’re out.”

“For not buying a T-shirt?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “T-shirts are serious business.”

And that was it. Never went back.

Mark was the other lifer. Late thirties, married, one daughter. Solid guy. He loved his wife in a way that was both sincere and slightly odd in its phrasing.

“I can hack this job,” he’d say, “as long as I can go home each night to my little mouse’s ear.”

I never heard that expression before or since.

John E. was our boss, technically over Sam. He was always in and out—Osaka, Fukuoka, training sessions, that kind of thing. When he was around, though, he had a habit.

When we drank, he would smack Mark on the butt. All the time. Didn’t ask. Just did it. Mark would try to laugh it off.

“John E. baby, maybe not tonight,” he’d say.

Didn’t matter. It kept happening.

One night John E. turned to me. “Matty baby, can I smack your ass?”

“John E. baby, no way,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

At least he asked.

John G. was an anomaly. Everyone else was in their twenties or thirties; he was in his sixties. He said—said, mind you—that he had made and lost six fortunes, mostly in gold in South Africa. Maybe. By the time I met him he was broke as fuck.

He would fall asleep in class. Not subtly either. Full-on snoring, loud enough that you could hear it through the glass walls. And these were small classes, three or four students at most, everyone sitting there while he just drifted off. You could see it happen in real time.

John E. had a number of supervisory conversations with him. Nothing changed.

Then there was Paul, who wasn’t even at Kumamoto—he worked out of Osaka. I met him during training in late April of ’97, and he was a strange guy from the jump.

He told this whole story about growing up in Arkansas, parents who were abusive, into drugs, no money. Said he ran away at sixteen and found God on the road shortly after. Compared himself—without irony—to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Claimed he made a living hustling poker, which might have been true, but there was something else in there too. Not exactly dishonest, but… flexible.

He wanted to convert me. That was clear immediately.

We walked all night. Ten hours, maybe more, all over Osaka. Through neighborhoods, through stations, at one point through a huge homeless encampment—post-bubble Japan, a lot of salarymen who had fallen hard. It stuck with me. Paul talked and listened in equal measure, which is its own kind of technique, but there was always one direction to it.

The goal was simple: Matty finds Jesus tonight, come hell or high water.

I didn’t.

A couple of months later he came down to visit Kumamoto. We went to the izakaya on the Shotengai, then another bar—not Madam’s. Different energy.

There was a girl there, Yoko, and she was very clearly interested in me. So she’s all over me and Young Mr. Johnson is getting, uh, perky. I’m kind of nuzzling her neck and all, and Sachie and I are barely dating, not exclusive yet. Cameron leans over.

“Uh, Matty baby, YMJ is looking a little perky there.”

“Ruh roh,” I said. “Gotta go.”

There were a few good reasons for that.

One, I wanted to date Sachie only. I wanted to be exclusive. I told her the next day what had happened and she was like, “Good. Let’s go exclusive then.” So that was that.

Two, Yoko was like nineteen and I was twenty-three, and she had tons and tons of pancake makeup, which just wasn’t my thing.

So I jetted. Walked fifteen minutes home.

On the way I passed Fumachi. Of course, “machi” means street in Japanese, so to me it read FU-machi, which I found hilarious. I tried to explain this to Sachie once and she was like, “Yeah, machi just means street.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s funny.”

Didn’t really translate.

By the river, as always, hammered dudes were out there pissing into the water. Just part of the scenery.

I get home, it’s around eleven, I’m getting ready for bed, and a taxi pulls up.

Out step Paul and Yoko.

Ruh roh.

Paul’s staying over, sleeping on a futon in the living room, and I’m thinking, what’s the plan here—hook up with Yoko right there while me, Heather, and Sam are all in the apartment? Outta control. Maybe that’s just how he rolled.

Anyway, Yoko took one look at me and jets. She’s gone.

Paul shrugged it off.

“Easy come, easy go.”

We end up playing poker instead. For a little money. I’d played all through childhood, in college, figured I was about a B+.

He wiped the floor with me. Took all my lunch money and didn’t lose a hand.

That’s when I started to believe him.

Looking back, those first two months in Kumamoto feel both chaotic and oddly contained, like everything was happening all at once but also exactly as it was supposed to. NOVA was a factory, no doubt—bad bosses, strange rules, glass rooms, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a black turtleneck and a white short-sleeved shirt constituted a violation of “regs.” I smoked Mild Sevens like it was part of the job description, drifted between pool halls and izakayas, and tried to make sense of a place where everyone seemed to know more about what I was doing than I did. And in the middle of all that, somehow, I met Sachie. That part feels less like chance the older I get, more like the one thing that cut cleanly through all the noise.

It didn’t last long—April to July, just a couple of months—but it stuck. The people, the rhythms, the small absurdities, the feeling of being watched and not quite fitting and also not really caring. I left because I had to, and because I wanted to, and both things were true at the same time. Better hours, easier life, more freedom. But Kumamoto was the start of something, even if I didn’t know what at the time. I never did get that T-shirt.

Dedication:

For my wife Sachie. Glad I met ya baby.

Note: If you like this piece, you may like the pieces below, which take up my time just before moving from the US to Japan.

My Time at Northern Arizona University Part I: Decision and Arrival
On My Interlude Between Hamilton College and Japan, 1996 and early 1997.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Note: This piece argues that male circumcision should be strictly outlawed for non-consenting minors. It approaches the topic from a strict bodily autonomy framework regarding non-consensual, non-therapeutic interventions on minors, and treats irreversible bodily alteration without consent as the central ethical issue. It is not addressing medically necessary or emergency procedures, nor situations where an intervention is required to prevent serious immediate harm, which are outside its scope. The argument also focuses on principle rather than comparative cultural practice, and is intended as a normative claim about legal consistency in liberal systems rather than a commentary on individual intent, belief, or identity.

Epigraph:

Jesus don’t touch my baby.

Ryan Adams

Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Male circumcision of non-consenting minors should be outlawed globally, with legal penalties applied to those who perform or facilitate it, and civil penalties imposed on parents who authorise it. I was circumcised in infancy in a Catholic family in 1974. The issue is not medical ambiguity or cultural discomfort but a basic question of bodily autonomy: whether irreversible, non-therapeutic alteration of a child’s body can ever be justified without consent. In a liberal legal system that claims to prioritise individual rights, the answer should be consistent and categorical. Anything less relies on inherited exemptions—religious, medical, or cultural—that do not withstand ethical scrutiny once the principle is stated plainly.

The core objection is simple: irreversible bodily modification without consent is impermissible when it is not medically necessary. A child cannot consent, and parental authority is not unlimited; it is a delegated responsibility bounded by the child’s future autonomy. Circumcision is not an emergency intervention. It is not a life-saving procedure in the vast majority of cases. It is the removal of healthy tissue from an individual who will live the entirety of their life with that alteration imposed before they had any capacity to participate in the decision.

This is where liberal societies already reveal a partial but incomplete consistency. We accept that consent is not static across childhood. We do not allow children to make binding decisions about sexual activity, because we recognise developmental thresholds of agency and understanding. That is why age of consent laws exist at all, and why they sit at or near adulthood in most jurisdictions. But the same logic applies more fundamentally to irreversible bodily alteration. If we accept that certain domains require maturity before consent is meaningful, then permanent physical modification must fall under the same principle. The difference is not moral category; it is legal lag.

The counter-case is not weak in structure, even if it fails ethically. It rests on four main claims: parental rights, medical justification, religious freedom, and social normalisation. Parents are routinely empowered to make medical decisions on behalf of children under a “best interests” standard. Circumcision is often placed within this framework as a preventive health measure. Some studies are cited to suggest reduced risks of urinary tract infections or sexually transmitted infections later in life, and complication rates in clinical settings are presented as low. On this basis, it is framed not as cosmetic alteration but as permissible preventive medicine.

Religion provides a second pillar. In Judaism, circumcision is a covenantal rite central to religious identity. In Islam, it is widely practiced as a tradition of purification and belonging. Liberal states are deeply reluctant to interfere with such practices, treating them as protected expressions of religious freedom. On this view, banning circumcision would represent not neutrality but intrusion into foundational religious life.

The third pillar is cultural and social integration. In societies where circumcision is widespread, particularly where it is near-universal within certain populations, deviation can create stigma or perceived abnormality. The argument follows that enforcing prohibition could impose social harm on children by marking them as different within their communities. Finally, legal systems distinguish male circumcision from female genital cutting on the basis of severity, medical context, and institutionalisation within healthcare systems, arguing that harm is not equivalent and therefore regulation need not be symmetrical.

Taken together, these arguments form a sort of a defense of permissibility under existing liberal frameworks: parental discretion within medical norms, protected religious practice, and harm-based legal classification.

But each of these pillars collapses under a stricter application of bodily autonomy.

Parental authority is real, but it is not sovereign. It exists only insofar as it serves the future autonomy and welfare of the child. It does not extend to irreversible, non-therapeutic bodily alteration where no immediate necessity exists. The “best interests of the child” standard is not a blank cheque; it is a constraint. We already recognise this in other domains where the state intervenes against parental choice when irreversible harm or violation of fundamental rights is at stake. The question is whether we apply that constraint consistently.

Medical justification also fails the threshold test when examined carefully. Even if certain population-level benefits exist, they are statistical, not essential. They can be achieved through far less invasive means—hygiene, education, barrier protection—without permanently altering the body of an individual who has not consented. Preventive possibility is not sufficient justification for irreversible intervention. Medicine does not normally operate on the principle that minor statistical risk reduction permits non-consensual surgery on healthy individuals.

Religious justification is where liberal systems most visibly reveal their tension. Freedom of religion is a foundational principle, but it is not absolute. It has never been interpreted as permitting unlimited parental action upon a child’s body. The critical distinction is between belief and irreversible physical imposition. Religious freedom protects the right to believe, to practice, and to transmit culture—but it cannot logically extend to authorising permanent bodily modification of an individual who has not consented to participate in that covenant. A child is born into a tradition, not owned by it.

The social integration argument similarly confuses descriptive normativity with ethical justification. That a practice is common within a group does not mean deviation is harmful in a way that justifies irreversible intervention. Social discomfort is not equivalent to bodily violation. Otherwise, any culturally dominant practice could immunise itself from ethical scrutiny simply by achieving prevalence.

The legal distinction between male circumcision and female genital cutting is often defended on the basis of harm severity and medical framing. But this distinction, while operationally convenient, becomes unstable when the underlying principle is examined. If the governing value is bodily integrity and consent, then sex-based differences do not determine permissibility. The relevant question is not comparative severity alone, but whether irreversible non-consensual alteration is being authorised at all. Harm thresholds may differ in degree, but the structural violation—altering a child’s body without consent—remains.

Once these counter-arguments are reduced to their core, what remains is not a justification but a set of accommodations: to tradition, to institutional history, to religious continuity, and to cultural inertia. None of these constitute a moral defence of the act itself; they constitute reasons why it persists.

This is why enforcement matters. A principle without enforcement is not a principle in practice. If bodily autonomy is to mean anything in a liberal legal system, it must be protected even when the practice is culturally embedded or religiously significant. That requires prohibition of the act itself, accountability for those who perform it in violation of the rule, and civil liability for those who authorise it on behalf of non-consenting minors. The aim is not punishment for its own sake, but alignment of law with the ethical principle it already claims to uphold in other domains of bodily autonomy.

What makes this issue more than historical critique is that it persists into the present as a live inconsistency. It is 2026. Liberal legal systems already recognise that bodily autonomy is foundational in adulthood. They already recognise that consent has developmental thresholds. They already prohibit non-consensual genital alteration in other contexts. The remaining question is whether they are prepared to apply the same principle consistently when tradition, religion, and medical normalisation converge.

A system that protects bodily autonomy only after adulthood has not resolved the ethical question; it has merely deferred it. The principle either applies universally to the body of the individual, or it does not. If it does, then non-therapeutic circumcision of minors cannot stand as an exception. 1 million percent.

Note: This piece is part of the Splinter Fraction series of political positions that the two-person Trans-Pacific political party has taken. You can find some of the others below.

On the Federal Age of Consent: A Reply to Alan Dershowitz
The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position
The Splinter Fraction: On Protected Medical Access for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
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Scenes from Hamilton College VI: Junior Year in New Zealand

Note: This is Part VI of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV and Part V are available.

Epigraph:

They all come and peep through a hole in the wall
Keep the bastards guessing
He likes to take the long way home,
It’s another fine decision

Peter Jefferies

I spent a full academic year, the second semester of my junior year and the first of my senior year, at The University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Otago is a pretty good university, but Dunedin is pretty small and kind of country. Overall, it was a good experience, but I was flat broke and not on a meal plan due to an oversight by I guess myself and my parents. More on that later.

After I landed, I spent one night at a hotel and bought a bottle of wine, for the first time in my life. I was of legal drinking age in New Zealand. I drank about three-quarters of it and was a little hungover the next day. At Hamilton people did not drink wine.

The first few days I was on a homestay in the country with a sheep farming family. The father spent the day watching cricket, and then would rouse and take the sheep out and move them around, with sheepdogs and all. I remember going to a local pub with two of his sons and their friends and we had five or six beers and they drove home. On the drive home they tried to run over rabbits on the road, and roared with delight when they got close. That was a scene.

Then, I went back to Dunedin, and met my roommates who were all in graduate school studying to be teachers. These were Tim, Ho (who was of Maori descent), Sharlene, and Donna. Tim was a musician and there was a large piano in his room. The roommates were good folks, however I think I disappointed them a little because they asked for an American roommate and were apparently expecting someone really flamboyant and loud. I was not that, and kept to myself much of the year. One time though that I lived up to their expectations was when Tim once again said “you’re from Washington D.C.” and I said “I’m not from fucking Washington D.C., I told you before I’m from Washington State!” Tim said to the roommates, “I told you rooming with an American would be fun.”

There were a number of other exchange students from the U.S. there and I got to know some of them a bit at first, but for some reason I was a little standoffish, and we didn’t hang out much after the first week or so. I was back into running, not smoking and barely drinking, although I did go out once with Ho and his Maori friends and got blasted. I would run 8-10 miles a day, sometimes more, and was in training for a marathon.

As I mentioned, my food situation was bad. We had neglected to put me on a meal plan, and I think my parents didn’t even know this, and at first I chipped in what I could to the communal roommate shopping. However, they ate very poor quality mutton all the time and I just couldn’t hack it. Mutton is pretty bad at the best of times, and cheap mutton is awful. So I went off the roommate plan and ate mostly trail mix for dinner. Trail mix, it turns out, is among the best value for money food around. I would buy raisins, peanuts, and carob chips and that’s what I ate at the flat. For lunch I would eat one apricot yoghurt bar and a cup of coffee, costing around $3.50 NZD. I would eat super slowly, taking about 45 minutes to finish the apricot bar and somehow this made me feel like I’d had a meal. I was living on about $7 NZD a day and was hungry all the time. With this and the running, I was also super thin.

At Otago I studied some more literature, and also a lot of Indian History, with a focus on Ghandi. I learned a great deal about Gandhi this year, and found him interesting. One incident I recall was in one class on Buddhism the professor assigned a paper on Zen. I had the bright idea to turn in an empty paper, which I thought would be symbolic, but the professor was a step ahead of me. “Don’t try and turn in an empty paper for this,” he said, “I’ve seen that move before.”

One more interesting thing that happened was when I was invited to the faculty club for drinks by my Australian literature professor. He was in his 60’s and was an Otago lifer. At first I was kind of flattered to be invited, however on arrival it was clear he had other motives. He started hitting on me in a most egregious manner, and it was obvious he had done this many, many times. I had two drinks and politely removed myself. To his credit this had no impact on how he treated me in class, and things went on as normal. I guess it was all par for the course.

The Otago campus was on the north side of town, and the south side was said to be pretty rough. “Don’t go down there,” I was told more than once, “it’s dangerous.” But I thought it couldn’t be that dangerous, so one day I walked down there by myself to check it out. There were a lot of industrial areas and such, and it was a little run-down, but I got home safe just fine. I suspected that “dangerous” in a New Zealand context might mean something a little different than in a U.S. context.

My roommate Sharlene had a friend who just had a breakup and Sharlene wanted us to get together. She invited us both to a party, and sure enough we started making out, under a table as I recall. It just lasted that one night, but Sharlene thought it was hilarious. “They were pashing,” she cried, “pashing away.” Pashing is apparently Kiwi slang for kissing, or maybe it was a Sharlene original.

Sharlene had a stepfather and I visited his house once. He had a nice car and complained on and on about how many tickets he would get from traffic cameras. Traffic cameras were on the scene in 1995. This appeared to be his only topic. He should have driven more carefully.

After the pashing incident, there was another girl who was interested in me. I forget her name, but it started with an M. M. was really into me, maybe because I read a lot and so did she. There was a kind of club place for students with TVs (I remember watching the O.J. Simpson car chase there), and I would hang out there. M. would come in and lob a snickers bar from over my shoulder for me and buy me a coke. This was really nice and super helpful because I needed all the calories I could get. M. wanted to get together, but I wasn’t into it. We did spend a fair amount of time together, at the club and going to the bookstore with another friend of hers.

As I mentioned, I was in good running shape this year and actually went out for a marathon. I was doing great through the first half, but started to fade really bad around the 20 mile mark. I had terrible blisters and pulled my groin and couldn’t imagine doing another 6 miles, so I pulled up. I asked a couple with a car for a ride to the finish line where there were buses, and they gave it to me but made it clear they were not impressed with me packing it in. I wasn’t impressed with myself either, but marathons hurt like hell.

In addition to running, and starving, I also went out for Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and I was already well on my way to my Asian Studies minor and was getting into all things Asian. Aikido was taught by a white couple, and this was their life. They were ok teachers, but the atmosphere was just a little culty. Despite my father’s fears, I have never been amenable to cults-like scenes. I stuck with it for a number of months however, and managed to get my first belt.

I don’t remember listening to a lot of music that year because I don’t think I had a stereo in my room, however, one day on the radio I did hear a song I immediately fell in love with. This was “The Fate of the Human Carbine,” by a Dunedin artist called Peter Jefferies. It was spooky and weird and totally captivating. Cat Power would later cover it, and lines from this song serve as the epigraph for this piece.

One more thing that happened this year was that Jenny from Hamilton visited. I don’t think she came specifically to see me, but I’m not sure. I was traveling, with god knows what money, in the New Zealand Alps which are on the South Island there and are really lovely. Jenny and I stayed at a hostel, and hung out which was really cool. That’s the same trip when I went for a walk in deep snow and almost died when the snow suddenly came up to my neck. Deep snow is almost as dangerous as the ocean, it turns out.

Those are my memories of New Zealand. Despite being so broke I had to eat a 45 minute apricot bar, it was a good year and I got really good grades. My academic focus would fall off, however, when I got back to Hamilton, but that’s a story for the next post.

Dedication:

For apricot bars and trail mix. You literally saved my life.