Matt texts the Thin Man before he has even fully decided to.
There is a kind of threshold in sending a message like that, where intention arrives slightly after action. The screen shows the name and then the words appear as if they were always going to exist.
Found her.
There is no immediate reply.
Matt goes to the hotel rooftop pool instead, because the body refuses to remain still when the mind is doing work it cannot complete. The city below is a port city, functional rather than beautiful, ships moving like punctuation marks across water that does not care about narrative.
He swims slowly. Not exercise. Just repetition. Something to keep him inside himself.
The Thin Man arrives without announcement.
Matt sees him later in the lobby, as if he has always been there and only now decided to become visible. There is nothing theatrical about his movement. He is dressed simply, unremarkable in a way that only becomes noticeable after you have already started paying attention.
They do not greet each other like friends. They never have. They greet each other like continuity.
Matt watches him cross the space and feels, not for the first time, that proximity to him changes the temperature of events.
LUCÍANA
The café is near the port, where the air carries salt and fuel in equal measure. Luciana arrives slightly early, not because she is nervous, but because she is efficient. She chooses a table where she can see the entrance without appearing to be watching it.
When Niko arrives, she recognizes him immediately, though recognition does not translate into welcome. Time has done what time does, which is soften edges without removing structure. He is older now, but not unfamiliar in the way she expects him to be unfamiliar.
They sit.
For a long moment, neither of them performs memory. When they finally speak, it is careful, almost formal. He asks about her life. She answers without inviting him into it. There is warmth in her tone, but it is bounded. Controlled.
She tells him about their son. He listens without interrupting.
“He is in Dubai,” she says after a time. “He is working in media. Content. Travel. He is doing well for himself.”
Niko nods once. No visible reaction beyond that. But something in the air shifts slightly, as if a long thread has been acknowledged without being pulled.
Luciana continues. She has a daughter now. A marriage. A life that has moved forward without apology. When Niko asks nothing more, and she is briefly grateful. Then she tells him, clearly and without cruelty, that this is not something she wants reopened.
He understands. He does not argue. He never argues with time.
MATT THOMAS AT THE HOTEL
I am still at the hotel when he returns. He does not look like a man who has just been refused something. He looks like a man who has confirmed a hypothesis and chosen not to act on it. There is a difference, and I am beginning to understand it.
I ask him if he saw her. He says yes.
I ask what she said. He does not answer immediately. Then he tells me about Dubai, about the son, about the fact that life has continued in a direction that does not require his permission.
I wait for more. There is no more.
That is when I realize how little I actually know about him, even now. Later that night, I finally ask the question I have been circling since Tokyo.
“What is your real name?”
He does not look surprised.
He never looks surprised.
He says he is from Georgia. That his name is Niko. That he was born in 1977.
Nothing more.
And somehow that is enough to change the entire shape of what I thought I was holding.
CODA — MATT THOMAS IN KOYTO
I am back in Kyoto, but I am not fully back in anything that resembles ordinary life. The school still exists. I still teach. I still perform the version of myself that can explain narrative voice to students who are mostly thinking about lunch. I have had readings now—one in Kyoto, one in Tokyo—and people are starting to treat me as if I might become something recognizable.
It does not go to my head. But the Thin Man does. He’s always there.
We talk on Signal in fragments. Nothing structured. No schedule. Just interruptions in time that feel more real than the rest of the day. I sit in shisha places after work and try to write, but what I am actually doing is waiting for the next message.
Book II is already taking shape in my head.
I am just not sure yet whether I am writing it is writing me.
Before I got on the place for Costa Rica the school was still trying to pretend this was still a normal conversation.
Vice Principal Nakata-san called me into the office with the kind of politeness that always signals something is already decided. The room was too bright, the air-conditioning too strong, the framed notices on the wall insisting on order. I sat down expecting administrative concern and got something closer to procedural disbelief.
“If you leave during term time,” Nakata-san said carefully, “your employment status may be affected.”
I nodded as if this was news I could process. Inside my mind was pure white. I said I understood. but I was going anyway.
There was a pause after which neither of us spoke.
“I am not firing you,” Nakata-san added, almost gently. “But you are… on thin ice.”
I thanked him, which felt like the wrong response but also felt like the only one available. When I left the office I was not thinking about consequences in the way institutions intend. I was thinking about distance, and how quickly it can become irreversible.
The flight to Costa Rica felt like a correction rather than a journey.
I watched the map on the screen and thought about how absurd it was all becoming. Somewhere over the Pacific, I opened my laptop and tried to write some notes, but nothing useful formed. Everything kept collapsing back into the same name.
Luciana Solís.
I did not yet know what I was looking for. I only knew that stopping now would mean admitting the shape of the obsession too clearly.
San José arrived humid and unceremonious. Costa Rica did not announce itself so much as absorb you. I moved through it with the slightly displaced awareness of someone who has read too many fragments of a story before seeing the whole thing.
I started where any amateur investigator starts: public record offices, municipal archives, online registries that are barely maintained but still technically alive. Marriage records, birth records, civic logs that feel like they were designed to discourage curiosity rather than enable it.
The work was slow and unglamorous. Most of it was administrative noise.
And then, on the third day, something aligned. A record. A name. Luciana Solís.
It is not dramatic when I found it. There was no cinematic recognition, no surge of certainty. Just a quiet moment where the page refused to behave like a coincidence.
I sat back from the screen and realized that my hands were slightly cold.
That is when I knew I was no longer guessing. This was the Thin Man’s son’s mother.
Note: Nina Van Pallandt moves through this piece as a kind of drifting hinge figure between art and biography, cinema and scandal, half-real and half-mythologised: from her striking, uncanny presence in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye—where she plays the abused, luminous spouse of Roger Wade and becomes, briefly, a kind of muse/anima figure for Philip Marlowe—to her earlier life in the Danish pop duo The Baronets, through her entanglement with Clifford Irving and the great Howard Hughes hoax that later reverberates through Orson Welles’ F for Fake, and onward into the quieter aftermath of fame, reinvention, and partial retreat. The essay follows her not as a stable “character” but as a site where male-authored narratives—Hollywood noir, literary fraud, journalistic myth-making—keep trying (and failing) to fix her meaning, while she keeps slipping free in ways that are at once accidental and oddly deliberate. In the end she becomes something like a case study in cinematic and cultural afterlives: a woman repeatedly written by others, occasionally complicit, sometimes resistant, and finally legible only as a residue of performance, gossip, and unfinished stories that refuse to settle.
I first became aware of Nina Van Pallandt the way most people probably do: not through biography, but through atmosphere—specifically Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, The Long Goodbye), a film that feels less like a narrative than a slow collapse of narrative reliability itself. It is a film in which people drift through scenes as if they have forgotten whether they are supposed to be characters or witnesses, and Nina arrives inside it already slightly misfiled, already too composed for the emotional weather she is asked to endure.
She plays Roger Wade’s wife, but “plays” is almost the wrong verb. Altman’s casting logic is not psychological realism in the classical sense; it is something closer to behavioral residue. People are dropped into the frame and asked not to perform identity but to inhabit proximity—to money, to violence, to desire, to failure. Nina’s presence has that peculiar Altman quality: she does not dominate the scene, but she stabilizes it just enough to make everything else look unstable.
Roger Wade (the blocked writer, the alcoholic genius-in-decline) is already collapsing before the plot admits it. Nina is the counterweight that never quite becomes balance. She is care without resolution, intimacy without clarity, the kind of emotional presence that suggests there is a story somewhere but refuses to confirm what it is. And then there is Marlowe, Elliott Gould’s version of Marlowe—half-stoned, half-wandering, permanently a few seconds behind the moral implications of what he is witnessing.
The film keeps staging small ruptures in epistemology. One of the most famous arrives early and feels almost accidental in its perfection: Terry Lennox appearing at 4 AM, asking for a ride to Tijuana. There is a moment—“Tijuana now?”—where Gould’s Marlowe is briefly jolted out of his procedural fog into genuine surprise, as if even he cannot believe how far the plot is willing to drift from explanation. That tonal instability is the world Nina inhabits as well, except she does not get Marlowe’s ironic distance. She gets consequence.
There is a domestic sequence—one of the film’s most disarming—that feels almost out of register with the noir frame: Nina cooking, the soft logic of food and attention, a candlelit dinner shared with Marlowe, where violence and absence are temporarily suspended by something as ordinary as butter and chicken. It is precisely the kind of scene that should resolve emotional ambiguity, but in Altman it does the opposite: it deepens it. Intimacy here is not revelation; it is another form of deferral.
What the film keeps doing, quietly and persistently, is refusing to assign stable moral weight to anyone. Roger Wade is both victim and self-destroyer. Marlowe is both agent and sleepwalker. Nina is both witness and participant, but never allowed the comfort of explanation. Even her suffering—when it arrives—is not narratively sanctified; it is simply another event in a world where events do not accumulate into meaning.
And this is where Nina becomes interesting beyond the film itself. Because she does not resolve into a character arc, she persists as something else: a figure who has been “used” by multiple narrative systems without ever fully belonging to them. In a conventional noir, she would be femme fatale or redemption object or tragic spouse. In Altman, she is none of these cleanly. She is what remains when genre stops enforcing coherence.
What begins to emerge, if one steps back slightly from her, is that she belongs to a broader category of women who are not simply “in” cultural narratives but are written into them by proximity to men who are doing the narrating. The pattern is subtle but persistent: women become legible to the public through the structural gravity of male projects—films, scandals, bands, memoirs—while simultaneously attempting, with varying degrees of success, to assert an interior life that resists that formatting.
It is difficult not to think here of Marianne Faithfull, who occupies a parallel register in the British version of the same phenomenon. Marianne Faithfull is initially rendered publicly intelligible through association—romantic, cultural, chemical—with the Rolling Stones orbit, and specifically through a media ecosystem eager to translate her into a kind of emblem: muse, fallen angel, tragic accessory to male genius. But what is striking about her trajectory is not the initial inscription but the long, stubborn insistence on rewriting it from within.
In both cases—Faithfull and Van Pallandt—the question is not simply “agency” in the abstract liberal sense, but something more structurally constrained: how does a person reassert authorship of self once they have already been written as a function in someone else’s story? Faithfull does this through survival, reinvention, and the eventual authority of her own voice as an artist. Nina does it more quietly, less performatively, by simply not continuing to cooperate with the demand that her life be endlessly narrativized into legible arcs.
And this is where Nina stops being just a cinematic presence and becomes entangled with a second, more volatile narrative system: the world of Clifford Irving and manufactured truth. I remain, in a slightly persistent way, puzzled by Clifford Irving—not in the sense that his actions are obscure, but in the sense that the scale of the gamble still feels oddly disproportionate to the era in which it occurred. Clifford Irving occupies that 1970s threshold where narrative fraud still had room to breathe: before the internet, before instantaneous archival correction, before every claim arrived already cross-checked by a thousand invisible clerks. The rope, in other words, was longer. Not infinitely elastic—but long enough that someone could plausibly believe they might walk it all the way across.
What he did, of course, was fabricate the authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes and briefly convince a publishing system that this fiction was fact. And one cannot quite shake the sense that this sits in a parallel register to Orson Welles’ late-career meditation on forgery and authorship, F for Fake, where the art forger is not simply a criminal but a kind of metaphysical irritant—someone who reveals how fragile the category of “authenticity” already is, even before it is attacked. In Welles’ world, the faker is almost honest about the fact that everyone is faking something. In Irving’s world, the system briefly forgets to notice.
The irony, of course, is that Irving’s fraud depended on a very pre-digital faith in paper trails, intermediaries, and the general slowness of institutional verification. Today it feels almost quaintly physical: forged documents, publishing contracts, phone calls that had to be believed in real time. One can imagine the same scheme now collapsing within hours, not because people are more moral, but because the feedback loops are instantaneous.
And then there is prison. Irving did time—real time, not narrative time—and emerged into a world that had already moved on to other, faster deceptions. Yeah, I mean what did you expect, dude. The arc compresses there in a way that feels almost unsatisfying: scandal, exposure, incarceration, partial reinvention. One wants something more operatic, but what you get is the bureaucratic version of consequence.
The interesting part is not that he was punished, but that for a brief historical window the system was even buildable enough that his plan could function as a kind of temporary reality. That is the shared atmosphere he has with Nina Van Pallandt: not guilt, not innocence, but proximity to narrative systems that were still slow enough to be fooled by their own assumptions.
In later life, Nina becomes harder to place in any of the familiar compartments that earlier decades tried to assign her. The cinematic afterglow fades into cult memory, and the Irving episode recedes into archival texture. What remains is a quietness that feels deliberate rather than accidental—not disappearance, but refusal of continued amplification. She does not convert notoriety into permanent self-mythology in the way later media ecosystems would almost require. Instead, she settles into a lower frequency of visibility: remembered, cited, intermittently revived, but no longer authored by the same pressures that once pulled her forward.
And here the comparison widens again, because what she resembles is not a “sidekick” at all—that word is too structurally comic, too dependent on hierarchy—but something closer to an attendant presence: a figure whose job, in other people’s stories, is to make emotional or moral instability legible without ever fully resolving it.
There is a related category, more neutral and slightly more precise: the faithful interlocutor. Not in the devotional sense, but in the structural one—the person who remains close enough to the main character’s instability to render it speakable, without ever becoming fully absorbed into its explanatory system. Nina performs this function in The Long Goodbyewithout being granted interpretive authority over it.
And there is another: the witness who does not testify cleanly. Not unreliable, but resistant to conversion into stable narrative fact.
We all make mistakes; that much is banal. The more interesting question is what kind of cultural weather those mistakes occur in, and how much agency is genuinely available inside it. Nina Van Pallandt seems, in retrospect, to have lived inside a period when men were still doing a great deal of the writing—of scripts, scandals, explanations—and women were often expected to appear inside those scripts as if they had authored them themselves. Her resistance to that framing is not always loud or declarative. Sometimes it is simply a matter of stepping out of the demand to be continuously interpretable.
And in that sense, what she ultimately carved out is not a grand public myth but something more modest and, arguably, more durable: a minor legacy, lightly held, slightly resistant to over-definition. Not central, not erased, not simplified—just there, in a way that feels unexpectedly intact.
I really like Nina Van Pallandt. In The Long Goodbye, and in the shadow of the Clifford Irving story, it is impossible not to root for her—not because she is resolved, but because she is never fully reducible. She drifts through systems built by men who are busy writing meaning onto the world, and she does not quite consent to being finalized inside any of them. We all make mistakes. She was written into a few. She was also, quietly, a drifter inside Hollywood’s narrative machinery, and what she ultimately leaves behind is a minor but distinct and instinctively cool legacy: not the center of anyone’s story, but one of the few figures who never fully became owned by it.
Note: Spokane, early 1983: minor league baseball, cheap seats, and kids living in the gaps between innings. This piece recalls Spokane Indians games, chasing balls during batting practice, and a strange collision of childhood mischief and adult volatility at the edge of the outfield fence. Sandy Alomar Jr.—then a local catcher on his way to a long MLB career—signs a baseball in handwriting so precise it feels like a signature on a future already underway, while a moment of chaos involving thrown persimmons and a furious adult named Mike Trowbridge becomes the kind of story that sticks far longer than the season itself.
Epigraph:
Do you know who you’re fucking with?/ You’re fucking with a stallion mange.
Ween
It was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go. We played Little League baseball in uniforms that never quite fit right, and then on weekends we graduated to something bigger and looser and more important: Spokane Indians games at the old stadium, Single A ball, where the dreams were real and still close enough to touch.
The Spokane Indians were a kind of civic promise back then. It was a small town, and in the early 1980s there wasn’t always a lot going on. The Indians were not quite big league, but not quite nothing. Just enough baseball to make you believe that something important was always one bus ride away. The seats were cheap, the beer cheaper, and the fences closer than they should have been. The whole place had that slightly improvised feel—like the city had built it thinking, this will do for now.
We didn’t go to games like spectators. We went like we belonged.
Behind the outfield wall during batting practice, kids gathered like scavengers. We chased homers, argued over balls, sprinted through patches of grass worn down by repetition. Sometimes we were the only ones back there. Sometimes there were older kids, or dads, or random locals who knew the angles better than we did. It was a loose territory. Not quite policed. Not quite ours. Something in between.
That summer, the Indians had a catcher everyone knew. Local kid. Quiet confidence. Clean mechanics. The kind of player adults already talked about like he had a future attached to him.
Sandy Alomar Jr. was that guy even then—before the long MLB career, before the All-Star years, before anyone outside Spokane would know the name properly. He was already different. You could see it in the way he stood when he wasn’t moving, like he was always half a second ahead of the next pitch.
I got his autograph once. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a moment after BP, when he signed a ball for a cluster of kids leaning too far over a rail. His handwriting was unexpectedly beautiful—controlled, deliberate, almost elegant in a way that didn’t match the dirt and sweat of the field. I remember thinking even then: this is what someone looks like when they’re going somewhere.
I kept that ball for years.
Because baseball wasn’t just baseball. It was a hierarchy you could see. You had the guys who were going to make it, the guys who might make it, and the rest of us orbiting the idea that proximity alone might transfer something.
Most of them wouldn’t go anywhere. That was obvious even then, though nobody said it out loud. But that day, none of that mattered yet. What mattered was the fence.
Our party was up high in the stands on the first base side, just beyond where the stadium fence met a thin strip of wild space. A tree had grown there—some kind of fruit tree, nobody was ever fully sure what it was. Persimmons, maybe. Something orange-red and heavy-looking, the kind of fruit that doesn’t look like it should be thrown but absolutely is.
Some kids started throwing them. Just kids, just fucking around. But they didn’t know who they were fucking with. Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you.
The fruit flew. Not carefully. Not aimlessly either. More like experimentation. Testing distance. Testing reactions. Some of them were aiming at fans, others just launching them over the fence because it felt like something you could do if no one stopped you.
It was mildly funny at first. Then mildly annoying. Then mildly dangerous in a way that nobody fully acknowledged.
Because persimmons, if that’s what they were, aren’t soft. They hit like small decisions.
I remember one bouncing near a row of seats and rolling under a foot. Someone laughed. Someone else shouted. But nobody moved with urgency yet. It was still in the category of “kids being kids.”
Until Mike Trowbridge noticed.
Mike T was there with his kids—David Trowbridge and his sister Dawn. David had been a teammate of mine in Little League, a few years younger, outfield guy, quiet in the way younger kids sometimes are when they’re still deciding how loud they’re allowed to be. Dawn was just there in the background of everything, observing.
Their dad, Mike, was not background.
He was one of those adults you noticed before you understood why. Volatile energy. Tight posture. Goatee, black tank top, gold chains around his neck. A bit of a greaser; drove a Harley. Always slightly too close to losing his temper. He wasn’t a bad guy exactly—he could laugh, he could talk—but you always felt like there was a second version of him sitting just under the surface.
He saw the fruit being thrown. And something in him snapped into motion. He walked straight to the fence line, fast enough that it changed the temperature of the moment.
“Knock that shit off right now,” he yelled.
The kids paused. Not because they were scared exactly, but because the voice had weight.
Then one of them—small kid, maybe ten, sunburned confidence, the kind of kid who doesn’t fully understand consequences yet—looked up and said:
“Don’t pump me, man.”
It was such a strange sentence. Too casual for the situation. Too confident for the speaker. Like he had borrowed it from somewhere older and wasn’t sure how it fit yet.
There was a beat of silence where the entire stadium noise seemed to pull back slightly.
Mike T looked at him.
“Don’t pump me?” he said.
Then his voice shifted.
“You want me to pump you? I’ll pump you.”
And in that moment—this is the part that still feels unreal even now—he climbed the fence. Not slowly. Not theatrically. Just decisively. Like the boundary wasn’t a boundary at all.
Everything changed at once.
Me, David, Dawn—everyone nearby—we all froze in that wide-eyed way kids do when they realize the rules might not hold. It wasn’t comedy anymore. It wasn’t baseball anymore.
It was just: Mikey baby don’t kill that kid.
That’s what it felt like in my head. Not words were spoken, just panic translated into something almost verbal.
The kids scattered instantly. Full sprint. No hesitation. The fruit stopped mid-air and dropped forgotten. The stadium behind us suddenly felt far away, like it belonged to a different scene entirely.
Mike T took a step forward, still inside the fenced edge of this improvised battlefield, breathing hard, still locked in that strange overlap between anger and disbelief.
And then—somehow—it was over. No actual violence. No contact. Just the threat of it, large enough to erase the mischief that had caused it.
The kids were gone. The fruit stopped flying. The tree stood there like nothing had happened. Afterwards, the stadium noise came back slowly, like a system rebooting.
My dad, Ross, had seen the whole thing. He was laughing, hard. Not the kind of polite laugh adults do when they think they’re supposed to. This was involuntary. Almost helpless. The kind of laugh that tries to stay respectful but can’t quite hold the line.
Because it was funny. In that terrible, chaotic way childhood sometimes is when it brushes up against adult intensity and survives without breaking.
Ross would tell that story for years after. The kid. The fence. The persimmons. The line: don’t pump me man. He never stopped laughing at that part.
Neither did I.
But at the time, I just stood there thinking about Sandy Alomar Jr. somewhere on that field, already on his way to something else entirely, signing baseballs in beautiful handwriting, while right behind the stadium wall the rest of us were learning the difference between games and consequences in real time.
Most of us wouldn’t make it to the Bigs. But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.was 1983 in Spokane, the kind of summer that felt permanently suspended in late light and dry heat, where the air at night still carried the dust of the day like it had nowhere else to go.
But for one afternoon in 1983, it all felt like it might matter just the same.
Dedication:
For Mike T. And for the kid. You got balls young man, I’ll say that.
Note: This piece will take up “Soft in the Center,” track 2 on Heaven is Whenever (Vagrant Records, 2010) by The Hold Steady. This one will be a little different for a couple of reasons. First, Heaven is Whenever was the first Hold Steady record after the departure of their keyboard player Franz Nicolay, and Nicolay was (and is, because he rejoined in 2016) a huge part of the Hold Steady sound. Therefore, I will look briefly at the personal dynamics of the band, insofar as they’ve been made public. Second, I will take up song order, something I intend to return to in future pieces. Third—and maybe most importantly—I am using this piece to set an intention. A serious one.
Epigraph:
You can’t tell people what they want to hear
If you also want to tell the truth
Craig Finn
I want to be a music writer.
I have always wanted to play music, and I remain fascinated with the role of the frontman or frontwoman. There are so many great ones—Finn, Mick Jagger, Bret Michaels (I really just want to perform “Shelter Me”), Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and many others. But I am not, at this moment, a songwriter or a singer, and I am still working on understanding songwriting from the inside.
So my goal is simpler and, in some ways, harder: to be the best music writer that I can be.
I don’t think I can be as good as Chuck Klosterman, who is amazing, and I am not really a reviewer. I don’t write reviews; I write analysis. I’m less interested in telling you whether something is good than in understanding what it is doing—how it works, what it reveals, and what it becomes when placed next to a life.
So I’m not competitive with Klosterman, and I’m not competitive with reviewers generally. But I am competitive with myself, and in a narrower sense, I am competitive with myself to be the best Craig Finn analyst around. Finn has, in my opinion, leveled up his songwriting several times across his career, and I want to level up alongside him as a writer.
That’s the goal. Let’s take up “Soft in the Center.”
The Hold Steady’s on and off again keyboardist Franz Nicolay joined The Hold Steady in 2005, after the release of 2004’s Almost Killed Me. Almost Killed Me may be my personal favorite Hold Steady record, but it is also true that the band’s sound took a major step forward with Nicolay. Some of their most iconic songs depend on his presence as much as on Finn’s voice.
There isn’t a great deal of publicly available detail about Nicolay’s departure in 2010. Compared to famously volatile bands—Jane’s Addiction, The Rolling Stones, Galaxie 500—this one seems almost restrained. Finn described it as amicable. Nicolay described it as a “closed book.” Both statements feel composed, even careful, which in itself tells you something about the people involved.
What matters for our purposes is the effect. Without Nicolay, the band’s sound on Heaven is Whenever is leaner. The keys are still there, but diminished, less central, less cinematic. There is more space, and that space exposes Finn a bit more.
For a long time, I misheard this record. I thought the highlights were the obvious ones—“The Weekenders,” “Sweet Part of the City.” Recent listening corrected that. My favorite, by a ways, is “Soft in the Center,” with “Our Whole Lives” in second place. The latter contains the line, “We’re good guys, but we can’t be good all the time,” which could stand as a thesis for much of Finn’s writing.
The fact that I missed both songs initially is not trivial. It suggests that some of Finn’s best work doesn’t announce itself immediately. It waits.
Which brings us to song order.
“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on the record and one of its most immediate. I tend to favor leading with your strongest statement, and I think there’s a case that it should have opened the album. There is a long tradition of bands doing exactly that—“Janie Jones” by The Clash, “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth, “Rocks Off” by The Rolling Stones. These are not just songs; they are openings that define tone and intent.
Finn has acknowledged that “Soft in the Center” has a certain built-in audience response, particularly around its chorus. He can feel when a line is going to land, when a certain type of listener is going to raise a fist. That’s not calculation so much as familiarity—he understands the emotional economy of his audience because he helped build it.
The song itself unfolds as a conversation, and more specifically, as advice. It is an older voice speaking to a younger one. In that sense, it mirrors earlier Hold Steady material like “Killer Parties,” but from the opposite side. In those earlier songs, Finn is inside the chaos, narrating in real time. Here, he stands outside it, looking back, trying—gently, imperfectly—to intervene.
The opening image is stark: a young man leaving a hospital, returning to a city that has not changed. The implication is clear without being over-explained. Something went wrong—an overdose, an accident, a night that tipped too far. And yet the conditions that produced that moment are all still in place. The city remains. The temptations remain. The system resets.
Finn’s great line—“You can’t tell people what they want to hear / if you also want to tell the truth”—lands here as a kind of thesis. It is a statement about songwriting, but also about mentorship, about friendship, about any attempt to guide someone who is not yet ready to be guided. The truth, in Finn’s world, is rarely what anyone wants to hear in the moment.
When he follows it with a direct address—“I’m just trying to tell the truth, kid”—the dynamic becomes explicit. He is the older figure now. Not removed, not sanctimonious, but positioned. He has been through something. He has survived something. And survival, in Finn’s writing, tends to confer not authority exactly, but a certain obligation to speak.
The chorus distills the advice into something almost disarmingly simple: you can’t have everything; you learn to love what you have. Finn himself has noted that he knows lines like this will hit. They scan as universal, almost cliché at first glance. But in context, they are not glib. They are corrective. They push back against a younger worldview built on accumulation—of experiences, of people, of intensity.
This is one of Finn’s recurring moves: to take a sentiment that could sound obvious and place it in a context that makes it necessary.
The second verse introduces the song’s central metaphor: the frozen lake. Finn, being from Minnesota, grounds it in lived experience—“a place with lots of lakes”—but the image does more than local color. It becomes diagnostic.
On the surface, everything looks stable. Solid. Safe. But “sometimes they get soft in the center,” and that center is “a dangerous place.”
This is the song’s title, and its key. The “center” here is not just the literal middle of the lake; it is the middle of the action, the heart of the scene, the dead center of the city, the place where things feel most alive. It is also the place where the structure is weakest. The danger is not at the edges, where you might expect it, but at the point of maximum immersion.
That is a sophisticated inversion, and it maps cleanly onto the nightlife world Finn has chronicled for years from his albums with his first bands Lifter Puller through to today. The parties, the drugs, the endless nights—they are not dangerous because they are marginal. They are dangerous because they are central, because they feel like the point.
Finn frames the young man’s situation with unusual generosity: “you can probably do anything, if you can get yourself right.” This is not moralizing. It is not even particularly prescriptive. It is conditional. The possibility is there, but it depends on an internal realignment that the speaker cannot perform for the listener.
There is also, quietly, autobiography here. Finn writes in the great song “Most People Are DJs” about his own youthful excess—“I was a Twin Cities trash bin/ I’d jam it all into my system”—and the process of pulling back from that edge. What matters is not just that he got himself right, but that he remembers what it was like not to be.
From there, the song largely reiterates its central ideas, but with increasing insistence. The chorus returns. The advice is repeated. And then comes the bridge: “I know what you’re going through / I had to go through that too.”
This is where the song earns its authority. Not in the cleverness of its lines, or even in the sharpness of its metaphors, but in its identification. Finn is not speaking from above. He is speaking from experience. The distance between the older voice and the younger listener is real, but it is not absolute.
And yet—and this is crucial—that identification does not guarantee transmission. The younger figure may still ignore the advice. He may return to the city, to the center, to the unsafe ice. Finn knows this. The song does not resolve that tension. It simply articulates it.
What makes “Soft in the Center” so effective is its clarity. Finn is not being coy about the theme. He is saying, in essence: the action is real, the lights are bright, and the pull is powerful. You will want to stay in it as long as you can. But there are costs. There are limits. There is time.
You age. You win and lose people. You push your system until it pushes back. You end up in rooms—hospitals, apartments, empty bars—where the energy has drained out and something quieter, and less negotiable, remains.
“Take your time,” the song seems to say, but also: think it through.
That balance—between permission and warning, between empathy and clarity—is where Finn’s later songwriting lives. It is a long way from the breathless immediacy of Lifter Puller, but it is not a rejection of it. It is a reframing. The same world, seen from a different distance.
“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on Heaven is Whenever and one of the strongest in Finn’s catalog. It is direct without being simplistic, reflective without losing momentum, generous without losing edge.
Simply marvelous.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with the songs of Craig Finn.
Note: This piece is a wide-ranging meditation on Laud Humphreys’ notion of “role drift” in his book The Tearoom Trade, drawn outward into unexpected but structurally suggestive parallels with the historical conversion the Apostle Paul and lived military hierarchy through an interview with an ex-US solider. Beginning from Humphreys’ account of observational immersion and the tendency for participants and observers alike to “go over” through sustained proximity, the piece tracks how identity can be reshaped by exposure to institutional logics and repeated social frames. A military anecdote from the First Gulf War anchors the theory in lived experience, while the figure of Paul becomes an extreme historical case of allegiance reversal that tests the limits of the model. The result is a speculative sociology of affiliation and transformation, where roles are not merely performed but slowly internalized until the boundary between observer and participant, or “they” and “we,” begins to dissolve.
Epigraph:
I believe in this/ and it’s been tested by research/ that he who fucks nuns/ will later join the church.
The Clash
This post takes up that sexiest of subjects, “role-drift.” In this post I will connect Laud Humphreys’ investigation of “the Tearoom Trade,” that is, casual homosexual encounters in public toilets, the initiation process in the United States military, and the conversion of Paul the Apostle. Those easily offended by sociological explanations of religion, of sexual preference, or of the comradeship among soldiers should cease reading immediately.
Recently, I finished reading a book–which, as my next post will detail, is a somewhat rare occurrence. The book was Laud Humphreys’ “The Tearoom Trade,” published in 1970. It concerns men hooking up with other men, usually strangers, in the public restroom facilities in St. Louis, and it is an eye-opening read. The blurb on the book jacket pretty much tells the story: “Many American men seek impersonal sex in public restrooms. Called ‘tearooms’ in the argot of the homosexual subculture, these restrooms are accessible to and easily recognized by those who wish to engage in anonymous sexual encounters {…} By passing as deviant, the author was able to engage in systematic observations of homosexual acts in public settings. Methodologists will be interested {…} in this unusual application of participant-observation strategies.” Indeed, methodologists everywhere, I can say without hesitation, were and are all ears. But the odd thing is that Humphreys, married and purportedly straight when he conducted his research, later divorced his wife and came out as gay.
Now, it may not be considered particularly odd that someone, sociologist or no, who spends several months or years in public toilets observing “insertors” and “insertees” would himself come out eventually, and Humphreys’ persistent use of “us” and “we” to refer to the denizens of the restrooms of St. Louis appears, in retrospect, to be something of a “tell.” Consider, for instance, sentences such as the following: “when a group of us were locked in a restroom and attacked by several youths, we spoke in defense and out of fear {…} This event ruptured the reserve among us and resulted in a series of conversations among those who shared this adventure for several days afterward” (12), and several other similar uses of plural pronouns. (It may be of interest here that Humphreys and his study of tearooms enjoyed a brief week in the sun a few years ago when Senator Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested in an airport bathroom stall for foot-tapping–Humphreys covered this topic as well, making clear that foot-tapping was, in 1970, a well-established method of making contact from stall to stall, and already in use by police decoys so many decades ago (20, 87).)
Indeed, the whole study is fascinating, and peppered with wonderfully matter-of-fact passages such as: “There is a great deal of difference in the volumes of homosexual activity that these accommodations shelter. In some, one might wait for months before observing a deviant act. In others, the volume approaches orgiastic dimensions. One summer afternoon, for instance, I witnessed twenty acts of fellatio is the course of an hour while waiting out a thunderstorm in a tearoom. For one who wishes to participate in (or study) such activity, the primary consideration is one of finding where the action is” (6) (alert readers will recognize the influence of Erving Goffman here; Goffman’s study of gambling establishments is titled “Where the Action Is”). But the passage which really caught my attention deals with what Humphreys calls “role instability” or “role drift.” He makes two major points; i) those who start out pitching tend to end up catching; “It appears that, during the career of any one participant, the role of insertor tends to be transposed into that of insertee” (55) (Humphreys attributes this tendency to “the aging crisis” common to tearoom participants); ii) “If {straights} remain exposed ‘too long’ to the action, they cease to operate as straights” (56). Humphreys here is not referring to men who one day, by accident, may wander into an operational tearoom, but rather to members of the parks department or vice squad who, over time, may be exposed to a wider swath of tearoom activity. Here is the key passage:
“When some communication continues to exist, parents tend to be ‘turned on’ by their pot-smoking offspring. Spectators tend to be drawn into mob action, and kibitzers into card games. Even police may adopt the roles they are assigned to eliminate:
‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance’” (Here, Humphreys is quoting from Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner from 1967. My emphasis).
It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad they begin to ‘go over’. The moment I read this, having known of Humphreys’ own history before I read his book, I immediately recognized either a brilliant justification for future defection or an alternative, sociologically-based, theory for how sexual preference is formed. After all, Humphreys himself spent several years researching and writing “The Tearoom Trade,” over which time he subjected himself to sufficient “action” to push him into shifting his primary allegiance, and to “go over.” This theory, it goes without saying, flies in the face of the idea that sexual preference is genetic or established in the womb–and just as obviously it cannot explain all instances of same-sex attraction. But, as a sociologically fascinating explanation for Humphreys own conversion, it remained in the back of my mind.
Several weeks later I was reading Robert Wright’s Atlantic article “One World, Under God,” about the relationship between religion and globalization. Much of the article deals with the Apostle Paul, and I read something I had long known but never fully processed–Paul persecuted Christians right up until his conversion. Here’s Wright: “The ‘Apostle Paul’ wasn’t one of Jesus’ 12 apostles. Quite the opposite: after the Crucifixion he seems to have persecuted followers of Jesus. According to the book of Acts, he was ‘ravaging the church by entering house after house: dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.’ But then, while on his way to treat Syrian followers of Jesus in this fashion, he underwent his ‘road to Damascus’ conversion. He was blinded by the light and heard the voice of Jesus” (40). The rest is history, of course, as Paul went on to establish ministries across the Near East, and, according to Wright, recast Jesus’ message as one of love and peace. There are a couple of classic explanations for Paul’s conversion–first, as Wright says, that he heard the voice of Jesus or God and converted–simple enough. Second, that Paul was epileptic and had a seizure in which he imagined he heard Jesus. The first explanation is religious or mystical; the second medical. But when I read this paragraph, the first thing I thought of was Humphreys–‘It is a well-known phenomenon that when officers are left too long on the vice-squad–the maximum allowable at any one time being four to five years–they begin to ‘go over’, adopting the behaviorisms and mores 0f the criminals with whom they are dealing, and shifting their primary allegiance.’” Had Paul spent too much time on the vice-squad exposed to this rogue new faith and fallen prone to “role-drift”? This post is not a polemic, and I would not want to rule out religious, medical, or genetic explanations of human behavior–but the unifying thread excited me.
The general topic of role-drift has, in one form or another, been on my mind for several years, and I recently posted an extract of a conversation I had with my editor Dean Williams several years ago. The narrow topic is how men in the military adapt to the culture–the wider topic is social adaptation and investment in an ideology over time.
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In the interview below “MT” is the author Matt Thomas and DW is Dean Williams, my editor, who served in the US military in the early 1990s during the First Gulf War.
MT: We’re here with U.S. army lieutenant Dean Williams, and he’s going to tell us a story from his military career. Dean, set the scene for us.
DW: OK, so I was a lieutenant back in the 19–early 90′s in Germany and there was an officer party. And a group of lieutenants, with me among them, we’re sitting next to a very famous general, his name was General Michael Kelly. And he was famous because he had become a one star general in a faster time than any other general in the signal corps. So we were very honored to be sitting there, and having a drink or two, with this kind of military celebrity.
MT: So you’d never talked to a one star general before in such a close setting?
DW: Yes, right, not a nice close setting. Not at a kind of a party where–he was being very open and honest with us, and we really got the sense that he had taken off his, kind of, stars, you know his general stars, he felt like more of a human being than is normally the case. And then I just, I felt this honesty and I felt it was a chance to tell him something that I had always felt in the last few years of being an officer and that was that you really got the sense that there was this vast, you know, impersonal, very powerful “they” that was above you; you had to do things, but “they” were up there controlling things, watching you, sometimes praising you, sometimes yelling at you, but they were there and you were here and there really wasn’t, there wasn’t much of a connection. And yet here was this general, he was part of the “they,” but here he was sitting right in front of us having a beer. And I said that to him; I said “so I really feel this gap between us so this is a good, you know, interesting chance,” and then I’ll never forget, he sat back and he put–he was smoking a cigar, by the way he was a very small man, like a lot of generals are…
MT: Were you smoking a cigar?
DW: No, I was not smoking a cigar ’cause I would have gotten sick, but he was a very small, but very dynamic and powerful guy, with piercing blue eyes, drinking his beer and just very animated and dynamic and energetic, and he leaned back and he actually put his cigar down, and he said “young lieutenant, let me tell you something,” he said “I’ve been in the army around thirty years, and I know exactly what you mean.” But he said, “and I went through as a lieutenant, in Vietnam, and did many many things, and I’ve done many field problems and solved many problems, and yelled and gotten yelled at, and in all my long career, as I went through, at some point, that “they” you speak of became a “we.” And now I feel that I am that “we.” And we were all very impressed with that, and I’ve never–I’ve forgotten many things from that evening; I’ve forgotten many things from the military…
MT: But not that? Not that moment?
DW: Yeah. It seems to me the most powerful statement of what it’s like to be part of an organization and to feel either powerless or have power…
MT: So what he meant is that over time, that you too would become part of that thing that you described as a “they,” you’d be part of it?
DW: Yeah…
MT: You would become it.
DW: You would, and as you spend time and invest in an organization, and as the organization gives you more power, more money, more reasons to stay, it doesn’t become–it gets nearer and nearer–it’s almost like some alien force but then it finally goes into you and you are part of it, actually, which is a very…at that time it was very positive. Now I’m more, I’m thinking was it positive or negative? For all of us.
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The vice-squad officer “goes over”
the straight becomes queer
the jailer of the faithful becomes an apostle of the faith
the hipster sells out
“every cheap hood makes a bargain with the world and ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl”
the would-be uncommitted passive intellectual confronts the realization that action is ideology and the personal is political
the they becomes a we
the world turns, stays pretty much the same.
Dedication:
For Puritano
Note; If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the pieces below which also deal with my editor, the Souther Man and one and only Motherfucking Dean Williams.
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.
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.
Note: We don’t do a lot of film reviews here, but Code 46 earns the exception—partly because Michael Winterbottom is one of my very favorite directors, and still wildly underrated, and partly because this film quietly seeps into you in a way that feels unshakable; set in a world that is clearly not ours but just similar enough to be discomforting—real Shanghai that isn’t quite real, deserts that feel earned, a system of “cover” and genetic law that replaces freedom without ever announcing itself—the film follows William, a kind of intuitive investigator who lives more than feels, and Maria, who works in a bureaucratic “fate factory” and senses, before she knows, that something is already off; their connection unfolds in fragments—interrogation as flirtation, impulse as rebellion, intimacy as violation—until the central truth emerges: in a world where memory can be edited and biology legislated, even love itself can be illegal; the genius of the film is its restraint.
Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton don’t overwhelm you with chemistry, which actually makes the relationship feel more provisional, more real, more doomed—and by the time the system reasserts itself (memory erased, lives restored, Maria exiled with the burden of remembering), you realize the film hasn’t been building to a climax so much as a quiet erasure; it’s less than 90 minutes, barely announces its futurism beyond small details (languages blending, empathy viruses, low-fi surveillance), and yet it lingers in a way much louder films don’t; it also clearly fed into the DNA of the Thin Man—this idea of movement through controlled spaces, of intuition over evidence, of relationships that feel both fated and structurally impossible—and in that sense it’s not just a film I admire, it’s one that got under the skin and stayed there.
Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 is less a conventional sci-fi film than a drifting, half-lucid meditation on love, control, and memory. It runs under 90 minutes, but it feels strangely elongated—like a dream you keep slipping back into.
The hero, William (Tim Robbins), isn’t exactly living—he’s existing. A kind of insurance investigator, a “driver” moving through a world defined by pollution, restriction, and bureaucratic control. This isn’t the neon overload of something like Blade Runner—Shanghai here feels real, but off. The deserts outside the cities are harsh and empty; if people can’t get “cover” to move, there’s a reason. The world is closed, stratified, quietly oppressive.
William is established early as compassionate—at a checkpoint, he shows a kind of human softness that marks him apart. But he’s also slippery. He bluffs and charms his way through situations, his “cunning” explicitly noted as one of his professional tools. He doesn’t rely on evidence so much as intuition: “It’s intuition you’re paying for.”
Maria (Samantha Morton) narrates parts of the film, grounding it in something more intimate and unstable. Her sense of time is fractured—lucid dreaming, recurring visions, a sense that something is about to happen. “Every year I have this dream… is this the night I wake?” There’s a constant feeling that fate is closing in. She works in what is essentially a “fate factory,” issuing the cover documents that determine where people can go and what they can do. In this world, fate substitutes for freedom.
When William meets Maria, there’s an immediate sense of déjà vu—she feels she’s met him before. Their early interactions blend interrogation and flirtation. The dynamic is unusual: older man, younger woman, but the aesthetic—her shaved head, the stripped-down environments—blunts the cliché. Their connection feels tentative, exploratory. She tests him; he reads her. There’s attraction, but it’s not fully trusted on either side.
Their relationship develops in fragments: subway encounters, shared meals, small rule-breaking gestures. William knows she’s impulsive—she admits it. The film introduces the idea of engineered “viruses” that alter human ability—perfect pitch, empathy. It’s a strange, understated sci-fi touch that reinforces how mediated everything is, even emotion.
There’s a looseness to their chemistry. Robbins and Morton don’t generate overwhelming heat, but that actually works. The relationship feels uncertain, provisional—two people circling something they don’t fully understand. Their intimacy is uneven, sometimes tentative, sometimes urgent. Maria seems to need William more than he needs her, or at least she feels the stakes more sharply.
The world around them continues to intrude. There are hints of smuggling, of bureaucratic corruption, of quiet desperation. Maria has lived “outside” for ten years—without cover, presumably—which raises questions the film never fully answers. William’s moral stance, when it emerges, feels weak, almost performative.
When he returns home, he tries to reassert control—rejecting Maria, then calling her back. But the narrative destabilizes. A colleague dies; William is sent back to investigate. The technology—video links, surveillance—feels oddly low-fi, as if the future never quite fully arrived.
As William digs deeper, the film’s central taboo emerges. Maria has violated Code 46—a genetic restriction law. Through fragments of dialogue and investigation, William pieces together the truth: they are biologically too similar. A “50% match.” Worse, her mother was a clone—one of many. The implications are quietly devastating.
Maria’s past is altered—an illegal pregnancy erased, along with the associated “memory cluster.” Identity itself becomes unstable. Memory, love, and experience can all be edited, removed, rewritten.
Their attempts to escape—to flee together, to build something outside the system—feel almost doomed from the start. The idea of Jebel Ali, drawn from her father’s stories, becomes a kind of imagined refuge. But the system closes in. A car crash. Memory erasure. Reintegration.
In the end, William is returned home, restored to his life, his wife, his routine. Covered for. Maria, by contrast, is exiled—sent out into the desert with her memories intact. She becomes the one who remembers, who carries the weight of what happened.
The final note is pure loss. Lost love, stripped of even the possibility of reunion. Maria staring out into the distance, holding onto something the world has decided should not exist.
Code 46 is not a perfect film. It’s uneven, sometimes opaque, and emotionally muted in ways that can frustrate. But its ideas linger. It captures something rare: a future where control is soft but absolute, where love is possible but prohibited, and where memory itself becomes the final battleground.
Jessamine must have had some dreams/ but she never really said what they were.
Craig Finn
Note: This is the third entry in my little ongoing series on Craig Finn / The Hold Steady songs that take up nightlife, messy adult relationships, and the long shadows cast by fleeting encounters. Part I and Part II are available. I’ve also written at length about what I consider Finn’s two greatest songs: A Bathtub in a Kitchenand It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.
Jessamine is track 8 off of A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s 2022 solo record distributed on his own label, Positive Jam Records. It clocks in at a tight 3 minutes and 25 seconds, and once again I am simply overawed by Finn’s concision and his ability to tell a whole story in just a few words. It is my opinion, and I do not say this lightly, that Finn is the greatest short story writer to have ever lived.
Jessamine tells the story of a three week relationship between the narrator, who we will continue to call C. for convenience, and a goth girl with a need for speed. A Legacy of Rentals contains at least three excellent songs, the crime caper “The Amarillo Kid,” the gorgeous “The Year We Fell Behind,” and Jessamine. I would love to write about The Year We Fell Behind as well, however Jessamine falls neatly into our conceit of nightlife and adult relationships, although this one seems to depict more of a young person’s relationship. Close enough.
Jessamine is folky and lilting, of a piece with Finn’s later work which tends toward folk and country as opposed to Lifter Puller’s indie fever dreams and The Hold Steady’s soaring rock anthems. The Finn song that it most closely resembles is “Esther,” from a 2018 EP by The Hold Steady which also depicts an intense and short-lived relationship. “The party ended suddenly, suddenly it’s over/ That left me and Esther all alone and getting older/ All alone and getting older smoking in the street/ Now everything is Esther and it’s been that way all week.”
Jessamine opens thusly:
I met Jessamine in Cherry Hill
Her dress all done in daffodils
The sticker on her skateboard said, “Speed kills”
And yeah, it probably did just what it said
Cherry Hill is in New Jersey, where the song is set. Jessamine is probably a younger woman, and a skater. The first verse foreshadows her ultimate fate. Incidentally, the first time I visited New Jersey was junior year of college with my Asian Art History class. It was also on this trip that I first visited New York City, the most intoxicating place on earth which I have written about relatively extensively. I wrote about my Art professor in my piece on my senior year at Hamilton College, in relation to a girl I had a total crush on, called L. L. was not exactly goth, but she might have been goth-adjacent. And she was totally intense. More on goths in a minute.
Verse II adds a little more context.
I only knew her for like three weeks straight
And the whole time we were wide awake
You know “Trenton Makes, the World Takes?”
She had it spray-painted over her bed
It is my experience that short-term relationships can be, probably are, the most intense and intoxicating type of relationships in a sense. The depth that comes with a true crush, while of a completely different valance from a long-term relationship, is, I believe, without parallel. But then again, I’m an action junkie, as is Finn. I wrote about the power of a crush in my Bad Moves piece where I confessed to a serious crush on their lead singer, Katie Park. I actually sent the piece to the band via Instagram, and they responded saying “Thanks for the write-up.” I don’t know, but I like to believe Katie read, or at least saw, my piece! Unfortunately, Bad Moves are disbanding and are, I believe, on their farewell tour.
The wording “three weeks straight” implies that C. and Jessamine were, temporarily, inseparable, sleep deprived, and deep into each other. Trenton is, of course, also in New Jersey, and though I hadn’t heard of the exact phrase quoted until I listened to the song, it is apparently well known locally and appears in neon on a bridge.
Verses III and IV introduce Jessamine’s death obsession, and to me anyway suggest that she is what I would call a kind of a goth.
We used to hang around her room
Getting off on all the gloom and the doom
Watching cavemen in the cartoons
Playing xylophones made out of bones
She was sexy, but still death-obsessed
She said the bloodshed makes such a mess
But you really don’t even have to market it
Yeah, it pretty much sells itself
Now I am not really into a lot of bones and blood personally, but I do like me some goth girls. In fact, in the course of my life I have sort of quasi-dated a few, and for whatever reason they are just my speed. I find goth girls sexy, like Jessamine, caring, and deeply intriguing. And mysterious, of course. I have a weakness for crazy women; I cannot lie. And already I can totally see Jessamine’s appeal.
Jessamine has a number of semi-chourses, and the first one goes like this:
I should’ve asked her before she departed
How did all these wars get started?
Why do rival crews show up to the same parties
If they hate each other so much?
It’s like they’re secretly in love
Again, we foresee Jessamine’s demise up front. Why would Jessamine have insight into the origins of global conflicts? I’m not quite sure, however the image of rival gangs being secretly in love is oddly compelling. However, it is with the next verse and chorus that the song really gets going.
Verse V and Chorus II go like this:
She said, “Suspicion isn’t wisdom
And the drones look just like doves”
And there was something laying siege to her kingdom
But she never really said what it was
While the incense turned to ashes
And the sunrise was unsure
Jessamine musta had some dreams
But she never really said what they were
Yeah, she never really said what they were
Here we learn that our goth girl heroine has something going on that is unarticulated, or perhaps inarticulable. “Jessamine musta had some dreams/ But she never really said what they were” is such a wonderful and moving line. We all have dreams, I suppose; some come to fruition and some don’t. But Finn is in no way judging Jessamine’s relative inability to describe her dreams; instead this aspect of her character only adds to her obliqueness, her mystery.
The next verse and chorus show that Jessamine in the end, and probably in the beginning, had the upper hand in the relationship.
We kinda ended how we began
With Jessamine meeting a man
And liking that man just a little bit more
Than the boy she had before
I hadn’t even seen her since
I guess this new guy was some kind of prince
I guess his castle was a front for some fence
And then the whole damn city got warm
And they were trying to ride out that storm
Again, Finn is a total master of precision and compression. C. is immature, Jessamine is, to some extent, on the make, her new boyfriend is crime-adjacent (so many of Finn’s songs feature characters on the margins of the legal world), and the whole damn city mirrors Jessamine’s flightiness. The crush is over; C. is dumped and he never sees her again. That’s a weird and kind of almost frightening part of short-lived relationships–while their depths are as intoxicating as anything in life, people will just move on and the moment exists only in memory, burned into the fabric of time, but still fleeting.
The next verse points toward C. getting over Jessamine, and alludes to the idea that what may seem for a time to be a storm will pass; a crush, with all its power, is also somewhat illusory.
‘Cause the rain is inconsistent
And the thunder is insincere
‘Cause it makes a big commotion
But eventually it clears
The next verse and chorus puts a pin in Jessamine’s story, and Finn employs his classic penchant for alliteration along the way. Maybe to get away from the scene, or perhaps for some other reason, C. moves out west, loses his shirt, metaphorically, and literally perhaps, and gets word of Jessamine’s demise.
I went out to San Francisco
And some sailor stole my shirt
I was sitting on the passenger side in a taxi
The first time that I heard
That she was probably speeding
And no one else was hurt
Jessamine must’ve had some dreams
But she never really said what they were
Yeah, she never really said what they were
I love the line here “and no one else was hurt.” It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. Finn doesn’t even really register what C.’s reaction is to Jessamine’s death is, he simply repeats the lines about dreams such that she dies as she lived, unknown to herself and unknowable to others.
Overall, Jessamine might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness as a song like A Bathtub in the Kitchen. Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like Jessamine. Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.
I wish her to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated that fact that he liked this “music,” but I have to confess that I could not have cared less. The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. And this is, essentially, because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like Jessamine. I won’t get super political here, however the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate a Jessamine, or Return of the Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, or Come in from the Cold by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me. As implied above, Finn had to live 50 years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to Jessamine. At 3 minutes and 25 seconds it is a mini-masterpiece.
Dedication:
For goth girls everywhere.
Note: If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy the pieces below, which also cover the singer-songwriter Craig Finn.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 