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Why Pale Waves Hits So Hard

Subtitle: From “Red” to “Not a Love Song” and Beyond

A deep dive into the band’s emotional architecture, generational melancholy, and why their hooks stay with you long after the chorus fades.

“I’m the only one you want — they just fill the void.”
— Pale Waves, refracted

It started with “Red.” Not a slow burn — more like a temperature check that came back clinically elevated. One song, one groove, one sly little melody running its fingers along the back of my neck. I put it on thinking it was a fluke, some algorithmic curveball, and then suddenly I was ten songs deep, then twenty, then living inside Pale Waves’ entire catalog before I had time to pretend I was making a choice. “Red” didn’t introduce me to the band so much as trap me in a mood: sleek, hungry, neon-lit, dangerous at exactly the dosage you want. It’s the kind of song that feels like you’re being pulled by the collar toward something you definitely shouldn’t do — which, of course, is exactly why it works.

And here’s the thing: I missed them. Pale Waves actually came through Tokyo pre-pandemic — Shibuya, one of those tight little rooms where the sound ricochets just right — and I couldn’t get myself organized. Life was too loud, work was too much, and I let the date slip. I’ve made dumb choices in my life, but missing that show? I genuinely regret it. There’s a very specific kind of shame in knowing you passed on a band right before they detonated in your bloodstream. It’s like the universe held the door open and I just didn’t walk through. Now I listen to “Red” and “Not a Love Song” and imagine what that night would’ve felt like — the sweat, the lights, the bassline kicking up old memories — and I know I blew it. That’s part of the story too.

Adult me knows exactly what I missed. It wasn’t just a concert — it was the moment to catch a band right before they became a band you have to chase across oceans. Pre-pandemic Tokyo had this pulse, this easy access to indie acts who’d drop into Shibuya for one night and disappear, and I let Pale Waves slide right past me. Now the landscape’s different. Post-COVID, a lot of bands never fully came back to Japan; the touring circuits shrank, the economics got weird, and the scene still feels like it hasn’t fully woken up. If I want to see Pale Waves now I’ll probably have to fly to England, and that’s on me. That’s adult regret — the kind where you can name the loss precisely, and you know no amount of streaming will fix it.

And that’s the part that stings: I was already in a cracked-open phase back then — loosening, becoming more porous to the world in that very specific pre-pandemic Tokyo way. A Shibuya show like that would’ve widened the fissure. I don’t even need the exact date to know it. I could’ve stood in that dark little basement room, basslines running up my spine, and let myself feel something louder than my schedule. And I didn’t go. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t quite in the habit of saying yes to the things that might’ve helped me open faster. That’s adult regret: knowing where the hinge was, knowing you didn’t turn it, and knowing it would have mattered — not massively, not mythically — just enough.

What I’m really grateful for is that I stuck with them. Through the years, through the algorithm cycling them in and out, through the slow-drip evolution of their sound — Pale Waves stayed in my orbit long enough for me to catch them at the right emotional angle. And that angle turned out to be 2024. Not a Love Song comes off their newest full-length, and you can hear the maturity in it — the confidence, the invitation, the bite. It’s recent, yes, but in a strange way it feels like the song they were always writing toward. And maybe it’s the song I was always listening toward. I didn’t go to the Shibuya show, but I stayed in the relationship. The band kept doing the work, and so did I, and now we meet here — in a track that hits harder than anything they’ve made before — and knows exactly what it’s doing.

That’s the thing about that line — “I’ll be the reason that your father gets so fucking mad.” I don’t respond to it as rebellion. I’m not wired that way and never have been. Pissing off my parents was never the objective; it was just the wake behind me. The real truth is simpler, and more dangerous in its own quiet way: I’d follow her anywhere. That was always the engine. Not defiance, not swagger — just that clean, unmistakable gravity — someone pulling you forward without even trying. And Pale Waves captures that better than almost anyone: the feeling of stepping over a line you didn’t plan to cross because the person on the other side didn’t give you a choice in the best possible sense.

What Pale Waves understands — and why Red and Not a Love Song hit like they were written in the same room as your adolescence — is that desire isn’t ideological. It’s kinetic. It’s momentum. Their songs don’t ask why you’re following someone, or whether you should, or what the consequences will be. They just capture the tilt of it — the way you lean forward without noticing, the way your body decides before your mind catches up. Their best tracks feel like the moment your foot leaves the ground and you realize you’re already crossing the threshold. That’s why the lyrics sound dangerous but never cruel: the danger is simply that you’ve already committed. You’re moving. And once that motion starts, it’s almost impossible to stop.

In the end, Pale Waves didn’t crack me open in 2018. They were there, pulsing at the edges of my life, but I wasn’t quite porous enough yet. I missed the Shibuya show, missed the easy chance to let the night do what nights sometimes do — nudge you forward, pull you sideways, unfasten something. And that’s fine. I don’t need to rewrite that version of me. He was doing his best with the life he had.

What matters is that the band stayed close. I kept listening, kept circling back, kept letting their songs take up a little space in the background until suddenly, in 2024, they weren’t background at all. Not a Love Song hit at exactly the angle I was ready for — older, clearer, more awake — not cracked so much as intentionally open. It landed in the version of me who can finally hear what they’d been working toward all along.

And that’s the real loyalty story here.
Not fan-to-band.
Human-to-self.

You don’t always meet the right music at the right time. Sometimes you meet it later — when you’re able to feel it fully, without flinching or rushing or worrying what it means. That’s what this new album is for me. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not some lost Shibuya night I can’t get back. It’s something quieter and more earned: the sound of arriving in my own life at the same moment a band I’ve followed for years arrives in theirs.

And if I need to fly to England to hear these songs live?
Fine.
I’m ready right now, baby.

Dedication: For everyone who ever missed a show and still wonders what might have been.

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On Why I Told the World to Fuck Off for 36 Hours

Subtitle: And Saved My Life in the Process

So I called you a cab and they called you a hearse,
and I knew what they were talking about.
— The Mendoza Line, “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)”

Note: This piece pairs naturally with my recent essay On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl). Both pieces are about the small moments that hold us together when we are breaking apart. You can read that piece here.

By 2012 I finally understood what I had been circling back in 2008 without fully naming: the business hotel wasn’t just a neutral space — it was a controlled dissociation chamber. A place where my mind could flatten without collapsing. A room where the world muted itself into CNN-colored soft focus, where time thinned out, where nothing asked anything of me. I didn’t know it then, but all those mid-range rooms — the bland art, the sealed windows, the gentle hum of an air conditioner tuned to the exact frequency of psychic anesthesia — were teaching me a skill I would need later: how to disappear just long enough to come back intact.

So when the pressure finally broke, when I had been working thirty straight thirteen-hour days and felt myself sliding toward the edge of something unnamed, I took the Shinkansen to Tokyo, checked into a business hotel, turned my phone off, and told the world — or most of it — to fuck off for thirty-six hours. And the shocking thing wasn’t that it worked. The shocking thing was realizing I had been preparing for it years earlier, in those identical rooms where the towels were always clean, the windows always closed, and 9-ball was always on.

So I ducked into the nearest konbini and bought a latte from the machine — the one small ritual that still made sense. The warm cup in my hand steadied me just enough to get through the turnstiles. Kyoto Station felt too bright, too full of intersecting lives and needs, the air full of other people’s urgency. I didn’t have the bandwidth to absorb anyone else’s story; I barely had enough for my own. All I knew was that the next Shinkansen to Tokyo was leaving in eleven minutes, and if I didn’t get on it, something in me would snap in a way I wouldn’t be able to walk back. The latte was cooling fast, my hands were shaking, and every part of my body was saying the same thing: Go. Now. Before you say yes to one more thing you don’t have the energy to carry.

Once the room was arranged — bag on the stand, shoes lined up by the door, Pocari Sweat sweating slightly on the desk next to the bottle of red — my whole system downshifted into something like relief. Not joy. Not peace. Just the quiet recognition that, for the next thirty-six hours, my time belonged to me and no one else. I didn’t have to speak. I didn’t have to answer. I didn’t have to hold anything together. All I needed to do was sit on the bed, take a long drink of Pocari, a short drink of wine, and let my body loosen by degrees. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was just freedom in the smallest, most essential sense: I get to be here, in this room, alone, and the world can wait.

After the first wave of relief, the question always arrived: Do I go out?

Tokyo was right there.

Akasaka-Mitsuke humming five floors beneath me, restaurants lit up like little stages, the crossing full of men in suits walking fast enough to convince you they knew exactly where they were going. I never did. So I’d sit on the bed and pull up the map — not to plan, but to orient. Izakaya here, ramen there, a bar tucked down some side street with red lanterns and a name I couldn’t pronounce. Nothing fancy. Nothing difficult. Just food, warmth, and maybe one drink that wasn’t red wine from a convenience store. I wasn’t looking for a night out. I was looking for simple movement, the kind that doesn’t require performance or decision-making. A walk, a meal, a seat at a counter. A single beer poured by someone who didn’t know my name and didn’t need to.
That was the whole question every time: stay in the bubble, or slip into the Tokyo night just long enough to remember I was a person.

Stepping out into Akasaka-Mitsuke wasn’t lonely — it was liberating. The air felt different the second the sliding doors breathed me out into the crosswalk light. I wasn’t hiding from anyone. I wasn’t avoiding anything. I was simply off the clock in a way that almost never happened in my real life. No one knew where I was, and for the first time in weeks, that fact didn’t carry a threat or a stain of guilt. It felt clean. It felt earned. I wasn’t missing; I was saving my own damn life by giving it a night without responsibility. The freedom wasn’t dramatic. It was simply this: I could walk in any direction, and every direction was allowed.

Out in the Akasaka night, I felt like the version of myself that gets buried under work and obligation — the real me, the one who just wants to wander and see who’s out, what’s open, what energy the city is holding. I wasn’t searching for anything dramatic. I wasn’t looking for revelation or escape. I was just checking things out — the izakaya with the red lantern, the alley with the quiet bar, the group of people laughing too loud on the corner. Dabbling. Moving lightly. Letting Tokyo show me whatever it wanted to show, without needing to make a night out of it. It was the simplest, purest freedom: explore until something feels right, and stop when it doesn’t.

I walked the Akasaka backstreets the way I always do when I’m in this mode — cutting down alleys, taking long cuts and shortcuts that don’t make geographic sense but feel right in my body. Tokyo is a city you navigate by instinct, not logic. You follow energy. You drift. You take the turn that looks interesting, then the one that feels safe, then the one that’s pulsing with life. Sometimes I’d follow the Google map to the place I thought I wanted to eat, only to walk past it and keep going. Other times I’d catch a glimpse of something through a noren curtain — warm light, the sound of laughter, a chef moving with the right kind of ease — and that would be the signal. It was never about the spot itself. It was about finding the right spot, the one that matched the night’s frequency. And over the course of the evening, I usually did both: follow the algorithm, then abandon it; trust the map, then trust myself.

Eventually I found the place — an oyster bar tucked behind one of those half-lit alleys where Akasaka feels a little European and a little dreamlike. Warm light, wood counter, the soft clatter of shells, and a chef who moved with the kind of quiet competence that settles you the moment you sit down. This was exactly my jam: an oyster platter arranged like a small geography, cold and briny and perfect, a bowl of clam chowder steaming in front of me, and a carafe of white wine that I poured slowly, deliberately, one glass at a time. Spendy, sure — but in this mode spendy isn’t excess. Spendy is permission. Spendy is dignity. Spendy is saying to yourself: I get to take my time with this. I get to have a meal that cares for me back. And in that moment, slurping an oyster with the city humming outside, I could feel the night open around me in the cleanest way.

The white wine hit me in that way good pairings do — not as a buzz, but as a reminder of how people take care of themselves when they’re not drowning. White wine and oysters belong together; everyone knows that, and sitting there I felt myself re-enter that understanding. The pairing wasn’t fancy. It was human. It was the kind of small, civilized pleasure most people allow themselves without thinking, and I’d been so buried under work and obligation that I’d forgotten what that felt like. The red I’d had earlier had already warmed me, softened the hard edges, and now the white layered over it, sharpening the night just enough to make everything shimmer. I was slightly buzzed and buzzing — not out of control, not hiding, just finally aligned with myself again.

I left the oyster bar with that warm, gentle buzz humming through me — the kind that makes Tokyo feel lit from within — and walked until I found the sort of place I always look for on these nights. A spendy cocktail bar: dim lights, bottles arranged like small works of art, a bartender in a crisp vest moving with that Japanese mix of precision and grace that makes you feel taken care of without being noticed. I took a high seat at the counter and ordered something I never drink in real life — a proper cocktail, layered, balanced, spendy. Spendy was the point. Spendy meant: I am worth slowing down for. Spendy meant: no one is waiting, no one is watching, no one needs anything from me. I sipped slowly, letting the night stretch out in front of me like a long exhale, feeling myself settle into the version of me that only Tokyo brings out — curious, quiet, open, free.

The bar I ended up in wasn’t some sleek Tokyo cocktail temple — it was better. Two bartenders from Nepal were working the counter, the kind of guys who’ve lived ten different lives before landing in Japan, commuting in from way out because Akasaka rent is a joke. We talked the way travelers talk when no one is trying to impress anyone — about where they were from, how far they lived, what Kathmandu feels like in winter. I wasn’t performing, just listening, rapping with them in that easy drift that happens when you’re slightly buzzed and buzzing in a foreign city. I ordered red wine — not more cocktails — because that was the right shape for the night, and when I finished my glass one of them poured me another, full to the brim, “for the gentleman.” It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t special treatment. It was the small grace of the night saying: You came to the right place. You came at the right time. And you’re not carrying anyone else’s weight right now.

When I stepped back out into the night after the second glass of wine, the whole neighborhood felt like it belonged to me. Not in a macho way, not in a performative way — just in that rare, private way where the city’s pace matches your own and you fall into step with its pulse. Akasaka was quiet but lit, humming but not crowded, and for five or six blocks I felt like I owned a slice of it. My slice. The alleys, the crosswalk glow, the last trains whispering underneath the city — all of it moved around me without touching me. I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t disappearing. I was just walking back to my faded little hotel in a state of clean, earned sovereignty, knowing the world wasn’t tracking me for once. And for those fifteen minutes, Tokyo wasn’t a megacity. It was mine — exactly the size of the person I was in that moment.

Back in the room — my little faded Akasaka hideout five or six blocks from the bar — I didn’t overthink a thing. I drank more red wine, chased it with Pocari, stripped down to my boxers, and let my body fall exactly where it wanted to fall. There was nothing left to hold, nothing left to manage, nothing left to translate. I slept like a baby — a full, unbroken twelve hours, eleven to eleven — the kind of sleep that only arrives when you’ve been carrying too much for too long and finally set it all down in a room no one else can enter. No dreams, no interruptions, no alarms. Just the deep, uncomplicated sleep of someone who gave himself thirty-six hours of mercy and actually took them.

When I woke up around eleven, I felt clear-eyed and ready for more of exactly what the night had been—a continuation of me time. No urgency, no guilt, no one waiting on anything. Just hunger in my stomach and calm in my body. I didn’t rush. I stayed in the room for hours, drifting between the bed and the window, drinking instant coffee, sipping a little more Pocari, scrolling nothing, letting the quiet stretch. I could go out or stay in—either was fine. The whole point was that the day was mine to waste or spend however I wanted. After twelve hours of baby-level sleep, I wasn’t reborn—I was simply functional again. Hungry, steady, grounded, and free.

The next day I was set to return to Kyoto. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go — and the Thin Man cleans up quick. I showered, shaved, packed my bag with the same neat ritual I’d used the night before, and stepped back out into Akasaka like someone who had never been tired in the first place. Before heading to the station I picked up omiyage — the small gesture that makes the return feel seamless — something for the office, something for home. It wasn’t guilt; it was continuity. A way of saying: I left for a day and a half, and now I’m back in the world with all the edges smoothed. By the time I boarded the Shinkansen back to Kyoto, I was already shifting into IB mode — the coordinator, the problem-solver, the guy who keeps the whole thing moving. But now the engine was clean again. The reset had worked. Thirty-six hours alone in a faded Tokyo hotel, oysters, wine, a long sleep, a morning that belonged only to me — and suddenly I could re-enter at full tilt. Not as a martyr. Not as a runaway. Just as myself, restored enough to carry everything again.

Dedication:

For Akasaka — whoever designed that little slice of urban order also re-ordered my mind in the best possible way. Thanks there, baby.

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On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl)

Epigraph:

Heather, remind me how this ends

Dolorean

I’ve been trying, lately, to understand the early spaces in my life where safety and memory intersect — the brief rooms in time that opened something in me before I even had language for it. Some moments don’t turn into stories, but they still leave a shape. This is one of those moments.

The Christmas Dance wasn’t held in the high school that year at all. It was downtown, in one of those Spokane venues that tried to look older than the city around it — chandeliers, carpeted floors, bathrooms with real mirrors. We had been dancing all night, the kind of teenage drifting where everyone is shy and bold by turns. And then it was over, and people were peeling away, breaking into rides and carpools and winter air.

She and I ended up in the hallway.

We were already wrapped into each other — that soft, accidental teenage cuddle that feels both unplanned and absolutely right. The near-near kiss wasn’t something either of us aimed for. It was just the way our faces happened to be turned, the warmth, the pause, the sense that one more inch would have turned the moment into something else entirely. Instead it stayed suspended, held in the exact shape it needed to take.

Her name was Blythe.

I used to say I wrote poems “for girls who told me they were pearls,” but that was just self-mythology. In truth, I only ever wrote for one girl. And she never asked for anything.

Most of the real fun we had wasn’t during dances at all. It was in the gym at Saint George’s in Spokane. For high school games, boys and girls, the gym would be packed, and during the boys games she would sit in the front-row, and every single time I did anything even vaguely ok — a decent pass, a shot that actually went in, a little rebound — I’d look over mid-play and smile, and she’d already be smiling. She was in my corner before I understood what that meant. She didn’t push. She didn’t need to. She just stayed.

There was a suspended electricity in those years — innocent, unclaimed, lightly glowing. We never really dated. We never made a move beyond the moment that almost happened and didn’t. But she calibrated me. She was my corner girl. And that mattered.

The ending came the way some endings do when you’re young — clean as scissors. She graduated. Life tilted. The season shifted. Nothing dramatic, nothing painful. Just a quiet snap. A door that didn’t slam but simply shut.

I miss what we could have been, but I don’t regret a thing.
Some connections aren’t meant to become stories.
They’re meant to become orientation.

I don’t go back to that time for longing. I go back because that was the first time safety arrived before desire — and because that pattern stayed with me. It’s how I know when something is real.

I don’t need anyone to remind me how it ends.
A hallway, a graduation, a clean break.
What I keep going back for isn’t the ending anyway.
It’s the part before — the girl in my corner,
the room that opened in front of me,
the feeling I carried forward.

Dedication


For Blythe, who stood in my corner before I even understood what that meant.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy the ones below which take up somewhat similar themes.

Mariko

https://thekyotokibbitzer.com/2026/02/10/simona/

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On Why I Don’t Think People Are Stupid

Epigraphs

“The self… is something that one does.”
— Erving Goffman

“Most people are running on less air than they admit.”
— Myself

I’m was at my local, ING bar in Kyoto, on a Friday night recently. The bar was half-full and I was sitting at the bar facing Haku, the Master. The Master has a very specific role in Japanese bar culture, which I will write about in more detail at.a future point. At one point a large Australian guy with a goofy necktie and shorts (!) got up to use the bathroom and started talking to me on his way back to his table. He turned out to be a massive music geek — the kind who could rattle off entire discographies, sub-genres, bootlegs, and obscure side projects without stopping for breath. This guy was off-the-hook, in a good way.

And every time he mentioned a name I didn’t recognize — and there were some — I heard myself say, “I don’t know that one.” Which was true. But right behind the truth, like a soft pressure behind the teeth, was the pull of a different line:

I might have heard of that.

The little social maneuver that keeps you from losing footing in a conversation. A tiny verbal hedge — not to appear smarter, but simply to avoid looking out of the loop.

I didn’t use it. Not that night. But I could feel the pull of it.

And this is where the issue comes in. We see moments like that, other moments too — the small hedges, the conversational feints, the soft dodges — and we assume the other person is being evasive or dim. It’s a common enough misread. The sociologist Erving Goffman would say we’re mistaking the face-work for the face, the performance for the person. Most of adult life is a choreography of tiny adjustments meant to preserve dignity in rooms that are, in a way, more pressurized than they appear.

I’ve misread people this way too, more often than I’d like to admit. It’s easy to do. You walk into a bar, a meeting, a lobby, a dinner, and you start tracking the surface behavior — the deflections, the little pauses, the canned lines — without registering the pressures underneath. You forget that everyone else is doing what you’re doing: trying not to look foolish, trying not to fall behind the conversation, trying not to reveal how little air they may be running on. And if you’re honest with yourself, you’ve probably made the same mistake once or twice — assuming so-called stupidity where there’s really just someone trying to keep their footing.

Once you start thinking in terms of air, psychologically speaking, a lot of human behavior kind of snaps into place. Most adults are operating in rooms—literal and metaphorical—that feel tighter than they look. Workplaces that punish hesitation. Relationships where honesty has a cost. Conversations where losing face feels like falling off a cliff. You can watch people brace themselves against these pressures: the fixed smile, the extra sentence, the too-quick agreement, the sudden laugh that doesn’t quite match the moment. These aren’t signs of stupidity. They’re evidence of someone rationing whatever psychological oxygen they’ve got left. A person with plenty of air moves freely. A person with none moves with constriction. And nearly everyone you meet is somewhere in between.

You can see this most clearly in smoking areas — those little outdoor, and sometimes indoor, pockets where the smokers step out, but so do the people who “just need a minute.” It’s one of the last places in adult life where the frontstage drops almost instantly. Nobody is performing out there. They’re too cold, too tired, too frankly over it to keep the act going. You get fragments of real conversation in those spaces: the outward complaint about a boss, the unguarded revelation about a relationship, the offhand confession that would never surface elsewhere. Goffman would have called this a protected frame, a place where the stakes are low enough that a person can breathe without the threat of losing face. Laud Humphreys found something similar in his own research: when the public stage gets too tightly patrolled, people create hidden rooms off to the side — not because they’re deceptive, but because they need air. Smokers know this intuitively. Most adults do. If you want to see who people are, you don’t watch them inside. You watch them in the places they go to recover themselves.

The trouble is that we’ve built a culture where it’s far too easy to write people off as stupid. Someone fumbles a point, misreads a question, overplays a joke, reaches for a half-remembered fact — and we take it as evidence of a deficient mind. It’s a convenient explanation, but it’s also a lazy one. Most of the time, what you’re seeing isn’t a lack of intelligence at all. It’s someone managing their oxygen, protecting their face, doing the quiet calculations that let them stay inside the conversation without falling through the floor. People aren’t idiots; they’re just compressed a lot of the time. And when you’re compressed, you behave in ways that look strange from the outside but make perfect sense from the inside. If you’ve ever felt that tightness in your own chest — and you have — then you know exactly what I mean.

If you look closely, most of what gets labeled “stupidity” in adult life is something else entirely. People hesitate, double back, second-guess themselves, or let a thought trail off — not because they don’t understand, but because they’re scanning the room for consequences. They’re gauging tone, adjusting for status, trying not to embarrass themselves or anyone else. That slight wobble you see isn’t ignorance; it’s self-preservation. Most confusion is just caution in disguise. I’m reminded of this every time I step into a smoking room — those little unofficial classrooms where waiters, consultants, cops, hotel staff, bartenders, and people, perhaps, on both sides of the law gather for a minute of air. People talk plainly in those spaces. You can learn more about intelligence, pressure, and human behavior in five minutes in a smoking area than in a week of formal conversation. Once you see people that way — not as idiots, but simply as adults trying to survive tight rooms — you read them differently. You read them with more depth, and more accuracy.

Coda

I’ve seen this play out in real time. Years ago, at a large student event I was helping to run, a few kids pushed just past the edge of the rules. It wasn’t chaos — but it was enough that you could feel the room tense in that particular way adults do when something might become a problem. We didn’t have the usual layer of senior oversight that day; it was just us, reading and reacting to the situation as best we could. And once you’ve been responsible for a big, delicate event, you learn how differently people perceive the same moment — how something that feels technically alarming can be, in practice, entirely survivable if you stay calm.

What stood out to me wasn’t the misstep itself, but the speed with which the narrative around it could have hardened into something much darker. In the absence of context, adults often reach for the most dramatic interpretation available — not out of malice, but out of reflex. Yet when you’re close to the ground, when you actually know the students and the rhythm of the event, you can see the difference between a moment that needs steady hands and one that needs alarm bells. I won’t pretend it’s always an easy call — it isn’t — but it’s a call worth taking the time to consider in real time. We’re much better about these judgments today, much more attentive to context and the whole field, but I sometimes wonder if a little controlled rebellion doesn’t still exist, and for reasons that are, frankly, understandable.

You realize, in moments like that, how rarely adolescent behavior is actually about ignorance. The students weren’t trying to sabotage anything; they were trying to navigate the tension between who they felt themselves becoming and the structures that still treated them as children in so many ways. What looks like recklessness from a distance often reads, up close, as an awkward attempt at agency — a signal that they want to be trusted with the real world, not the simplified version institutions hand them. And that’s something institutions rarely have the courage to provide.

I think about those in-between spaces a lot. Not the conference halls or the meeting rooms, but the five-minute pockets on the margins where people finally let their real face surface. Adults and students both. You can see the pressure lines ease, the performance drop half an inch, the truth of what they’re trying to navigate flicker through. Those moments tell you more than any official report ever will. W.H. Auden once wrote that from murals and statues we glimpse what the Old Ones bowed down to — but never the situations where they blushed or shrugged their shoulders. It’s the same for modern institutions: they’re good at capturing ideals as concepts, less so at catching people’s actual humanity. Those liminal pockets remind me that everyone in the room — kid or grown-up — is doing the same basic thing: trying to stay upright in a tight space without losing who they are. That’s why I never read these episodes as stupidity. They’re just people showing their real face for a second, in a place where they feel safe enough to do it.

Dedication

For those who learned to survive the tight rooms —
and for those who taught me where the doors really are.

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Everybody Always Argues with the Decoy

Epigraph: Deep Dream, 2017 — the “Boys of Summer” cover one, the one where she sings about seeing him everywhere, even behind the sunglasses.

Most of the time we’re not actually arguing about the thing in front of us.
Instead, we’re fighting the decoy — the safe, tidy stand-in we put there to avoid touching whatever’s underneath. You see it in houses, offices, relationships, etc. You see it in yourself most of all. The argument, the quirk, the habit, the “I’m fine,” the thing you pretend matters because the thing that really matters still feels radioactive.

Once you start noticing this pattern you can’t unsee it. You realize how many tiny skirmishes in your life were just rehearsals for a truth you didn’t want to say out loud. And how many times other people came at you sideways not because they were petty, but because they were protecting something tender and didn’t know another way.

This is where the essay begins.

I. The Decoy in Yourself

My own decoys have never been super dramatic.
They show up in the places no one would think to look: diet, routine, food rules I adjusted and re-adjusted until even I couldn’t remember what the point was. I’d get fussy about what I could or couldn’t eat, what was “safe,” which days were exceptions. It felt like control, but it wasn’t. It was a decoy — something tidy to fuss over when the real issue was elsewhere.

Surface-level arguments make excellent shields. They give you something to grip, something you can adjust without changing anything that matters. They let you believe you’re fixing the thing, when really you’re just polishing the handle of the locked door.

Everyone does this.
The trick is noticing it early enough to stop polishing.

II. The Decoy in Others

If you can spot it in yourself, you start spotting it in everyone else.

Someone blows up about dishes, or a missed message, or a tone you barely remember using. But it’s not about the dishes, or the message, or the tone. The decoy is standing in front wearing a name tag, and the truth is sitting in the back of the room with its shoes off.

You learn to listen for the emotional key change — that little drop in the voice where the deeper thing is trying to come through.

People don’t argue about the thing they’re arguing about. They argue about the thing they can name.

III. Decoys in the wild (Home)

Take playing music around the house.
Someone wants it louder, someone wants it quieter, someone keeps changing the song halfway through. The conversation is supposedly about volume or mood — but everyone knows it’s actually about space, attention, presence.
It’s rarely about what it seems to be about. It’s about how seen (or unseen) someone feels that day.

Decoys let people stay safe inside small arguments because the true ones feel too exposed.

IV. Decoys in the Wild (Office Edition)

Workplaces are full of decoys because no one wants to name what’s actually happening.

Take something as apparently boring as office seating. One person wants the window, another wants the corner, another complains about the AC blowing on their neck. It all looks like preferences — but the real story is proximity to power, avoiding someone who drains you, or trying to reclaim a little control your job doesn’t actually give you.

No one says that, of course.
They argue about airflow.

And by the time you see it clearly, it’s almost funny — how earnestly everyone insists the argument is about a chair.

V. When Someone Shows You Who They Are

Then there are the moments — the small, good ones — where someone cuts through all of it.

Like today: I emailed Kohei from my work to say I’d be five minutes late for supervising gym CAS (weightlifting), expecting the usual shuffle or ripple of inconvenience. But he just took it. No commentary, no guilt trip, not even a pause.

A gesture that clean tells you everything you need to know. Not about the schedule. About the man.

It hits you that for all the decoys you and everyone else keep arguing with, some people just solve the problem and move on. No storyline. No subtext. No self-importance.
Just a straight, humane act.

If you’re paying attention, you learn from people like that.

VI. The Bottom Line

If there’s a moral here — and I don’t always like pieces with morals — but nonetheless, it’s this:

Try to catch the decoy early. It saves everyone a little time and a little quiet pain.

Some days you’ll manage it.
Some days you won’t.
And that’s okay too.

For Kohei, simply.

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Everybody Tips

Note: There’s a Ryan Adams song that’s always felt like a quiet diagnosis. The emotional math is simple: people give you just enough tenderness to keep you upright, but never quite enough to really move you from wherever you are. It’s from “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.” — track 5 on Easy Tiger (2007).

You find out you’ve been underpaid, in a sense, for years, not because anyone meant you harm, but because the default setting in some long-forgotten form was never double-checked. The system assumed it was correct. Everyone assumed it was correct. And the thing is, it makes sense—you look like the sort of person who doesn’t need tending. So you stand there with the revised numbers in your hand, not angry exactly, just noticing the symmetry of it all. This is the pattern: people offer small kindnesses, small gestures, small acknowledgments.


Everybody tips.

Just not quite enough to knock me over.

It reminded me of something from years ago at my little IB school here in Japan. Back then I was stretched thin in a way you can only be in your thirties—trying to prove something, mostly to myself. I’d rush through lunch like it was another task to complete. One day Scott, one of our English teachers and a high school homeroom teacher, watched me finish a meal in about two minutes and said, gently, almost to himself, “That’s not good.” It wasn’t an intervention. It wasn’t even advice. Just a small observation from someone who was paying attention in the limited way people do. A tip, not a gesture. A flicker of care that landed, and then the moment passed.

Looking back, I think that’s why the moment stayed with me. It was concern, yes, but it was also something rarer: someone catching a glimpse of the strain I kept tucked under the surface. I wasn’t used to that. Most people saw the polished version—competent, fast, self-sufficient—and adjusted their care accordingly. Scott’s comment didn’t rearrange my life, but it landed in that narrow space where a person can be briefly seen without being exposed. A small kindness with a little weight on it, though not enough to shift anything. Another tip.

When I think about it now, it wasn’t an isolated moment. My life is full of small gestures like that—light touches of concern, half-noticed details, people offering just enough care to register but not enough to alter the trajectory. It’s not their fault; it’s how most of us move through the world. We read surfaces. We assume competence means comfort. We assume steadiness means abundance. So what comes my way is always the manageable version of kindness, the soft-edged form that stays within social limits. It accumulates, in its way, but it never quite tips the balance.

And then there’s the other meaning of the word I keep circling. To tip isn’t only to offer a small gesture—it also means to wobble, to shift the weight of something just enough that it might tilt. In that sense, everybody does tip me. Every small kindness knocks me a little off balance, just not in the dramatic way Adams means. It’s more like a brief lean in the direction of connection, a momentary swerve in the steady line of the day. A soft recalibration, not a collapse. The world nudges, not crashes. It’s movement—just not the kind that bowls you over or forces a change. The cumulative effect is real, but subtle enough that you only notice it in retrospect.

Most days, that’s all life is: a series of micro-tilts. A colleague covering five minutes without comment. A student bowing an extra beat longer than expected. A friend sending a small message at the exact right moment without knowing why. They don’t change your direction, but they do alter your angle by a degree or two. You barely feel it while it’s happening. You just register that your emotional center shifts slightly—a soft lean, a subtle recalibration, the faintest sense of being moved without being moved on. These moments don’t rewrite your story; they just keep it from calcifying. They are the human version of a brushstroke: slight, necessary, almost invisible unless you stand back and look at the whole canvas.

Every once in a while, though, someone doesn’t just tilt you—they land with actual force. It’s rare, but every few years, if you’re lucky, someone steps forward with something closer to full human weight. No calibration, no optics, no politeness. Just the clean, unmistakable feeling of another person showing up without trimming the edges of what they mean. Those are the moments you remember because they interrupt the pattern. They don’t just adjust your angle; they reset your coordinates.

That’s what happened to me in 2018. I’ve told this story in my Bad Moves piece, however to re-state I’d been traveling to see the band Phosphorescent in New York, Boston, Philly, and D.C. I was moving through my own private fog, the kind you don’t mention to anyone because you don’t want to make a spectacle of it. I told the merch gal I’d flown in from Japan, not as a plea for anything, just as passing context. She passed it on to Matthew Houck, the lead singer. And he didn’t do the socially appropriate thing, the small nod or the quick thanks. He came down off the stage and hugged me. A real hug, the full weight of it, twice across two different nights. No hesitation. No half-gesture. He gave me the exact amount of human force the moment called for.

What stayed with me wasn’t the hug itself, but the certainty behind it. Most gestures come wrapped in hesitation or self-consciousness; people soften their own impact before they even reach you. Houck didn’t. And part of the weight was this: he’d been through it himself—not abstractly, not a decade removed, but in the very songs he wrote on Muchacho, the record he made after his own life had come apart. He’d talked about it publicly, openly, without varnish. So when he came down off the stage to hug me, it wasn’t fandom or performance or politeness. It was recognition—one human being who had already walked through his own fire seeing another who was still in it. And the thing about weight is that you feel it instantly. It bypasses the usual filters, lands somewhere deeper, rearranges whatever you were carrying. For a second, you’re not holding yourself up alone. Someone else is taking on a share, however briefly. That’s why I remember it. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was unmistakably real.

I still don’t expect the big gestures. Most people don’t have them to give, and institutions certainly don’t. But my little allowance situation reminded me of something I should probably stop forgetting: I can be steady without letting people assume I’m inexhaustible. I can be competent without accepting the bare minimum as my baseline. Everybody tips, and I do appreciate it. But that doesn’t mean I should be content with being underpaid, overlooked, or treated as some kind of default. The small gestures matter; they keep things from freezing over. They’re just not a substitute for fairness, or for the kind of presence that actually moves you.

And if I’m honest, before the Houck hugs the last time I got knocked over didn’t happen at a show, or in a meeting, or anywhere you could itemize on a form. It was one of those chance crossings where someone walks in at full voltage, doesn’t shrink themselves, and then carries on while you’re still quietly recalibrating. Nothing official changes. Your job is the same, your allowance is the same, your life on paper is the same. But now you know, in your body, what real weight feels like when it lands. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to pretend that tips—however kind—are the whole story.

Dedication

For the White Russians — the ones who tilt the whole room just by arriving.

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An Open Book

Note: This little poem was originally written way back as early as 2008, and is also collected in a piece about John and his dad the pretty famous singer songwriter Bruce Innes, and that can be found here. John and I were together both in high school and college, and had a lot of great times together.

As I’ve written about before, Innes would tell his students marginally true stories about my time at St. Georges’s school and Hamilton College. I did get up to some things, I admit, but Innes does like to exaggerate a bit. All in good fun, and good faith. In any case, one time one of his students became kind of interested in my story, and wrote me asking for information. So I wrote him this back, in verse. This poem is below.

The reason I’m re-printing this today is, I’m finally working on a book. Well, I’ve been working on it all along, and now I’m just arranging things. The book will have, among other things, some oral history in the form of interviews. I have done a few and am doing more, and would like to expand my interview scope a bit. So if that sounds like something you would be interested in, for whatever reason, do let me know. And as always, thanks for reading.

“An Open Book”

Not really in the mood
but you’ll think me quite rude
if I don’t make a reply
around me on the plane
folks eat, are entertained
no one’s writing save I

So I’ll take a look back
to days at the dog track
where I ended up by mistake
thought we could beat the odds
just silly teenage sods
there was no money to make

I know not if J.I.
has spun a pack of lies
concerning my personhood
Yes, I wrote poems for girls
who told me they were pearls
ah–but they weren’t any good

About a cold river,
and the rest of his quiver
of myths and exaggerations
well if someone was shoved
it was done out of love
or congratulations

So to upstate New York
in a trench coat–what a dork
but the world took pity
the life there was fine
but naught was on the line
should have gone to the city

I did two things quite well,
needing something to sell
I wrote brilliant excuses
‘bout ridiculous capers,
couldn’t finish my papers
I claimed aces, held deuces

My second great skill
is one I hold still
I fell for crazy ladies
locals, Russians, and Turks
they all drove me berserk
with a boatload of maybes

Four years in the dorms
and countless reforms
led to little of note
I left sans a sob
a plan or a job

and without my trench coat

Dedication: For Innes. Let’s rock this little decade baby. And for biographers everywhere. It’s an interesting genre.

Note: If you enjoyed this poem, you may also enjoy “Some B-Side Poems.” You can read that here.

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On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)

A hotel room: the same cell in a different city — clean towels, a window, and the sense of being contained but cared for

Mark Sandman, refracted

A haunted hotel room, unblessed, charged with static; objects shifting on their own.

The Church, refracted

New Note: On the kibbitzer (two b’s there Mr. Auto-Correct baby), I am re-printing certain select pieces for a little while while I work on another writing project. Today I am re-printing this piece on hotels. This piece has gone through several iterations over time, it is in fact probably my most heavily edited piece, and concerns the experience of staying at business hotels. In a way this is perhaps my very best piece in that it is one of only three that survive from my first blog Classical Sympathies, which I started in 2008, right around the time I began working to build the IB Course at our school. Of course given later (and earlier) events, this was no coincidence. Essentially, the blogs were, for lack of a better phrase “trauma blogs,” or, to put it more positively, recovery blogs. I like that–let’s stick with it. So this piece was about finding safety, physical and psychological, in a hotel room, while at the same time knowing, paradoxically, that hotels, especially fancy ones, are sometimes, or even often, the target of violence for various reasons.

Note: I have stayed in a number of such hotels over the years and engaged deeply with the room-space in each case. At this point, I am prepared to say that I am “good at” staying in hotels (an absurd claim that I advance nonetheless), and feel authorized to advance some notes toward a general hotel theory. Facility as a hotel guest though not exactly a marketable skill, has yielded some insights about the general, perhaps archetypal, nature of the modern hotel stay. Despite at this point considerable experience in the field, I continue to find the hotel experience at once comforting and bizarre, and hotel rooms, when properly apportioned, womb-like and exercising a specific and fascinating gravity. Also, the first draft of this piece was completed when Larry King was still alive.

This piece also mentions my “fugue state,” and it is true that as a PTSD response to childhood sexual abuse I would sometimes, more than once for sure, slip into a kind of state of taking automatic actions which I recall, but only somewhat. During these states I would arrange and re-arrange the room, the things in my bag, etc. in a way to place little reminders to myself in the future. It is a little hard to explain, however once again psychologically literate folks will follow along.

Finally, in my opinion, this is a pretty funny piece. Not as funny as Mason Anderson but still not bad. And it advances the absurd, yet still somehow defensible, position that I am “good at” staying in hotels. I hope you enjoy it.

Part I:

The TV was turned to CNN, which was focused on violence somewhere. I could not tell where. The experts in their suits and hairsprayed hair presented the conflict as if conflict was inevitable. They agreed it was happening now and could be prevented, but at the same time at the conclusion of the piece they smiled politely and signed off as if the violence was also occurring in a land so distant it might as well be the past.

Emily Maloney

I have stayed in quite a number of business hotels, in quite a number of countries. This piece provides, in essence, a sort of “psychograph” of the business hotel experience. Three features of business hotels that we may want to consider are: i) like airports, all business hotels share a single ethos, an un-pindownable character that feels, wherever one happens to be geographically speaking, of a piece; ii) the effect of the television offerings, in particular CNN International, on the business traveler, is one of overwhelming relaxation, bordering on complacency and even numbness; iii) as a corollary to i), it is far easier to enumerate how business hotels resemble one another than to lay out any salient differences.

Oddly, minor local variations only seem to further reinforce a central sameness. Checking into an 11th floor room at a classic example of the species, for instance the Numzau Tokyu Hotel, half an hour south of Tokyo, Japan, one is affected at once by that strangely pleasant fugue state, a state of mind almost exactly halfway between bliss and malaise, attendant on “business” hotels. Once inside a business hotel, especially those neither top-of-the-line nor quite down-and-out, one is confronted with a kind of disembodied space which seems at once connected to a global network of similar hotels (accomplished in part through the simultaneously soothing and hypnotizing effect of CNN International) and disconnected from the local environment. The traveler is sucked into global weirdness through a combination of the flat, post-political window of CNN, the persistent low hum of the air conditioner, and the anodyne staleness, almost spartan, quality of the decor.

Oddly, any “artwork” or decorative flourishes that a hotel room may possess only serves to further a sense of featurelessness; the art in question being almost exclusively of the most banal nature–bland seascapes, abstracts denuded of all edge or verve, and those odd non-paintings that, try as you might, you forget the second you exit your room. One has to remind oneself that a business trip means that there is work to be done–the TV, the slight high resulting from contact with the bowing attendants, the men in black, and the blushing young lady who carries your bag, the knowledge that your company is footing the bill–all this lulls you into a kind of sleep of the spirit.

Turning on the TV, you feel that you could spend years, lifetimes even, staring at CNN’s Larry King (the long-dessicated one), the post-racial female anchors who bring that special Code 46 feel of the non-overt future, or the exquisitely paralyzing “World Weather,” before awakening in another age, the Rip Van Winkle of the travel world. When CNN finally wears out its welcome, one’s choices of pay channels open up the fascinating worlds of…golf (the Golf Channel), silicone starlets (the Playboy Channel), intimate acts in close-up (the “adult channel”), and, most fittingly, drama set in outer space (the Battlstar Galatica channel). This profile of options, golf, softcore, hardcore, and outer space, the result, presumably, of reams of data on the tastes of business travelers like me, the mobile working male, I want to find depressing, but the menu has something beautifully efficient about it. Not wanting to get sucked into the anesthesizing vortex of any of these choices, I have to force myself to rise from the supine contemplation of the only-vaguely Chinese news anchor and move on with the day.

My senses are momentarily quickened by a report of an attack on a hotel in Pakistan: a horrific assault which has taken place at a Marriott in Islamabad. Oddly, the reality of this event quickly fades, and what Richard Todd calls the “non-ness” of the Marriott up the road strangely becomes the non-ness of violence–the attack in Islamabad conveys, through the lens of the CNN International, not exactly shock, but a continuing and deepening sense of global weirdness only slightly tinged by fear resting on the realization that as a business traveler in exactly this kind of hotel, I am the target. Oddly, this realization is not as disturbing as it ought to be: my fugue state is such that I am more in, more of, Islamabad than Numazu, but not wholly there either. Instead, I am poised somewhere between Islamabad and Battlestar Galactica, cavorting with post-racial android news anchors who bring me news of a planet this 11th floor, air-conditioned bubble of a non-space has left far behind.

Part II:

In part II of this essay will we delve a little deeper into the business hotel experience using as a lens “J.G. Ballard: Conversations.” Ballard probably needs no introduction, but for those who have yet to fall until his influence, he is the author of “Empire of the Sun” and “Crash” who wrote dozens of fantastic semi-Sci Fi short stories in the late 1950s and through the 1960s including “Prima Belladonna,” Thirteen to Centaurus,” and “The Terminal Beach.” Ballard novels, in my opinion, are not as uniformly satisfying as his short stories; at novel length his “obsessions,” beach resorts, empty swimming pools, gated communities, plastic surgery, car crashes, the interplay of sexuality and technology, tend to wear a little thin.

In “Conversations,” Ballard offers the following defense of his insularity and thematic repetition: “I think the values of bourgeois society by and large have triumphed. We’re living in a world where people at the age of 22 and 23 are thinking about their mortgages. It is a fact, and there’s nothing much on can do about it, except cultivate one’s obsessions and one’s own imagination” (144), but this approach works better in his short stories (which Ballard has not written for nearly two decades now), where his limited set of concerns are reflected and replayed through a panoply of settings and situations such that he resembles a virtuoso musician building off of certain stable base elements to create endless riffs and improvisations.

As a boy, Ballard was, famously, incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, and this formative experience informs both his autobiographical “Empire of the Sun” and his short stories. But instead of literal prisons with externally imposed walls and limitations, Ballard’s characters seem over and over again to be immured within prisons of their own creation. Story after story features some variation on one of two related themes; scientists careening off on private quests that eventually destroy them or people seemingly sequestered or restrained who turn out to be acting in psychic complicity with their imprisonment. Ballard himself admits to the centrality of the prison experience in “Conversations” when Mark Pauline asks him “Writing Empire of the Sun hasn’t helped you forget those horrible years in the camp” and Ballard responds “But I’ve been writing about it all the time–I just wrote about it in disguise” (138).

“J.G. Ballard: Conversations” was overseen by one V. Vale, who, to all appearances, is a full-fledged Ballard maniac, and contains a number of Vale’s telephone conversations with Ballard and other Ballardians including the composer Graeme Revell and Ballard archivist, David Pringle. Ballard has a lot to say about that particular semi-reality fugue state described in my earlier post. As noted above, Ballard has a special fascination with self-imposed psychic incarceration: “I have a nightmare vision of a gated community of extremely expensive houses inside a larger gated community. It’s bizarre” (72). Ballard is also concerned with the dual themes of self-immurement and the mind-meld that occurs between the individual and their media systems. These two themes may not seem to be obviously related, but after reading 300 pages of Ballard on the telephone, all of his particular obsessions do seem intertwined, and connect with my experience of staying in business hotels. Take for example Ballard on why Surrealism no longer obtains:

“Classical surrealism, beginning after the First World War, made a very clear distinction between the outer world of reality {…} and the inner world of imagination {…} But after the Second World War, particularly as the media landscape developed enormously–thanks to television, mass advertising and the whole consumer goods landscape–the distinction between our reality and inner fantasy began to break down {…} This means that it’s very difficult to maintain the dichotomy, that contrast that the Surrealists required {…} As I’ve said before, in the last 20 years if you stop somebody in the street and ask the time, you might look at a watch with Mickey Mouse on the dial {…} It cuts the ground from under classical Surrealism” (166).

When viewing CNN International at a business hotel, I realize, pace Ballard, that the world as reflected does have aspects of the surreal, especially in the consummately inoffensive manner in which it presents horrific international incidents interlaced with “the exquisitely paralyzing World Weather” and 9-ball tournaments from Bangkok replayed several times a day. This approach effectively colonizes my own imagination by rendering the unthreatening creepy and and the unbearable passe.

The oddest thing about CNN International is that the news itself is actually not all that bad. Real news about real, important, global events, comes across the airwaves, but it gets somehow stripped on much of its impact through the presentation. Ballard in 1991: “We get the Newzak all the time. It’s been homogenized, trivialized, and there’s too much filler added to smooth it down so that it comes out like paste from a tube” (178). It’s not that the news isn’t there, it’s just that, pace Ballard, there is no room for either surrealism or real impact. Ballard explains that the Dali/ Bunuel films (Un chien andalou and L’ Âge d’or), so shocking at the time, would not work today: “The sight of people dragging dead donkeys through a dining room would {seem to be} some sort of advertising stunt–a beer commercial” (166). Here is David Pringle on why Ballard is not a Marxist:

“Ballard, being a good Freudian, is much more interested in the individual’s–yours and mine–collusion with what’s going on, our secret wishes, that in the idea of conspiracy–that there are conspiratorial entities out there trying to ‘get us’ {…} Ballard asks, ‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?'” (226).

Ballard also writes “I accept the Surrealist formula: the need to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, to remake the world around us by the power of one’s imagination, which after all is all we’ve got. I mean, the central nervous system is faced with a world of Mariott hotels and ex-actors turned world leaders, dangerous medicines and you name it. The individual central nervous system can only attempt to make sense of this” (276).

Eventually, if she has even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, the business traveler comes face to face with Ballard’s question: “‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?’ This is because the enervating lassitudinal comfort of your standard Mariott is, in the worst possible sense, addictive. When you begin to run down the list of hotel features: airport pickup, bowing attendants, elevators, room service, air conditioning, permanently locked windows, security barrier, ubiquitous carpeting, fresh towels and soap, overpriced but almost appetizing meals, pool and hot tub, 9-ball on a loop, world weather, all these items add up to a simulacrum of a total existence that very quickly begins to edge out the rest of the world–there is no need to leave the compound and submission to the soft tyranny of over-priced conveniences sets in almost immediately.

At the same time, CNN International allows the illusion of connectedness while in fact only furthering one’s suspension in the high-rise ether of the business hotel complex. “One has the illusion you’ve seen a place in fact when you haven’t seen it at all. All you’ve seen are the airports and the hotels” (288). Ballard here hints at something I have long felt to be the case: all airports actually belong to a single country, and the vast majority of business hotels likewise sit uneasily within their supposed national confines; they are more like each other than they are like the buildings or community around them. The overpriced airport hotel in Tokyo resembles nothing so much as the overpriced airport hotel in Vancouver, which in turn is the kissing cousin of the airport hotel in Beijing, etc. Here again, local differences only seem to accentuate a basic central identicalness.

Ballard again: “People use mental formulas that they’ve learned from TV. Even in ordinary conversation, if you’re talking to the mechanic at the garage about whether you need new tires for your car, you and he probably talk in a way that his equivalent thirty years ago would never have done. You use–not catch phrases but verbal formulas. Suddenly you realize you’re hearing echoes of some public-information, accident-prevention commercial. It’s uncanny” (83).

(Ballard has the strange habit of ending thought after thought with “It’s bizarre;” “It’s strange;” “It’s uncanny”–this verbal tick serves as a running indicator of the way that Ballard sees the world and helps explain how, over the course of a novel, he can focus on a certain object, a tennis machine for example, or swimming pool, with such relentless obsessed focus that the formerly normal becomes invested with a kind of pathological creepiness that entirely transcends simplistic one-to-one correlative symbolism.)

Ballard’s central point here hints again at the colonizing power of certain ideas and turns of phrases which seep into our everyday speech, tempered only by feeble attempts to ironize. Thus, when in the course of normal conversation one refers to a storm as “an extreme climatological event,” to a sign as “singage,” or to a car crash as “a simultaenous intersection of vehicular components” the use of such terms, although masked with a patina of apparently self-knowing irony is still, in its own way, perfectly sincere. Here, submission to the linguistic idiocy of corporate non-speak marries submission to the blissful “non-ness” of the business hotel, a paradise of our own collective fantasy where the towels are always clean, the windows are always closed, and 9-ball is always on.

Dedication: For the APA chain. I know it’s kind of a cult, but man are they reasonable, conveniently located, and comfy.

Works Cited:

J.G. Ballard, J.G. Ballard: Conversations, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Emily Maloney, from an essay in an early-2000s political anthology (exact source lost to time)

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On Some Bands That Don’t Like Each Other I: The Breakup of Galaxie 500

Note: This new series will take up a seriously interesting topic, band break-ups. We will also look at some bands that don’t like each other but somehow stay together, such as The Rolling Stones. Some bands I hope to write about include Jane’s Addiction, The Smiths, and Pink Floyd–these are all situations I know something about and am interested in. Other bands that had a bad break up, or at least serious tension, include of course The Beatles, The Clash, and Guns ‘N Roses. I’m not sure if I’ll write about The Beatles because that has all been heavily covered, but the other two maybe, when I can look into them. But we will start with the breakup of the late 80’s and early 90’s band, Galaxie 500. This piece draws on a collection of snippets about the situation on the website A Head Full of Wishes, which is run by Galaxie and Luna’s biggest fan, who I believe lives in the U.K. Dean knows him well I believe. I think a lot of people are interested in this general topic, so I hope this series reaches some of you.

Galaxie 500 broke up in 1991, when the lead singer and songwriter Dean Wareham quit the band on the phone after a final show at Bowdoin College on the 5th of April of that year. The band had been on an extensive tour, and played some dates as the opener for The Cocteau Twins, which would have been a pretty big deal for what was still an up-and-coming band. Galaxie 500 was set to begin a tour in Japan shortly after this, and Dean quit when his bandmate Damon Krukowski called him to book plane tickets. AI gets the part about Dean quitting, suddenly, at least from Damon’s perspective, but also says that a contributing factor was that Damon and his partner Naomi Yang were becoming “disillusioned” with the band’s situation. However I don’t think this is really right, because Damon and Naomi are on the record saying how devastated they were by the breakup and that they did not see Dean quitting coming at all. It is clear that Dean and Damon were not getting along for a while prior, but Damon definitely wanted to continue the band. Dean would go on to form Luna almost immediately, one of the great bands of all time, and Damon and Naomi would record several records under their own names, some of which are good, however it would take them some years to recover from the ending of Galaxie.

I have actually written about this breakup a bit twice before, in the context of other pieces. I first wrote about it in my piece about seeing Damon and Naomi live in Kyoto in the earlier part of this century. This was the famous night that Damon told me to shut up, and the whole story is pretty funny. I also alluded to the breakup in a different piece about stage banter when I was discussing the Luna record Luna Live. The two extracts below actually tell a good bit of the story.

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From my piece on Damon:

Damon and Naomi were members of the late 80s/ early 90’s band Galaxie 500 with Dean Wareham. The band didn’t really know what it was doing at first, like many a band before, and kind of stumbled into near-greatness before Wareham walked and started Luna, the world’s greatest band. Wareham details the reasons behind the break-up in his memoir Black Postcards. Poe is supposed to have said that any man who tells the simple truth of his life would write a masterpiece. Wareham gets pretty close to following Poe’s dictum.

The ending of Galaxie 500 came about, according to Wareham, essentially because Wareham was tired of being treated like a child by the other two, a long-time couple. I think he wanted his own band, and wanted to chill a little.  From Black Postcards:

Traveling is stressful. And with Damon tour-managing, it seemed like every hotel check-in, every seat assignment, and every rental car was a problem. Damon would argue about what floor his room was on. He would get annoyed if he didn’t get the seat he wanted on the flight. I shouldn’t have let this bother me. I should have minded my own business. But traveling together highlights your differences.

At one show in late 1990, a techie shone a spotlight on Dean as he stepped downstage for a solo. This seems to have been the breaking point. Black Postcards again:

Damon: “In retrospect I notice that Dean chose the L.A. show to launch this new trick, when the audience was full of music industry people. We hadn’t had any spotlights in Columbus or Dallas!”

Dean in his contemporaneous tour diary: “Damon said he doesn’t like me walking in front of his drum kit–it throws him off. I didn’t tell him to go fuck himself.”

Things were rough, and Dean split in 1991. (Wareham quotes a Damon interview saying “Here are the dirty facts!  What happened was simply that Dean quit, more or less out of the blue, on the telephone one day.”  Ah oui, les sales faits.) Galaxie 500 is still an interesting band and has a handful of great songs. Then, Damon and Naomi formed their own group, named eponymously. They are pretty good. I like “This Car Climbed Mount Washington,” from More Sad Hits, and the whole record Playback Singers is strong.  Still, they are a far cry from Galaxie, much less Luna.

From my piece on Dean’s stage banter:

Luna Live is a showcase record from 2005 from one of the greatest bands ever, Luna. It basically serves as a greatest hits pre-Rendevous (their final album and my personal favorite), and features killer renditions of a number of classics, including “Chinatown,” (their poppiest tune); “Friendly Advice,” (guitar on the original by Sterling Morrison); “23 Minutes in Brussels” (Luna’s “Marquee Moon,” and somehow their most popular song); and, epically, “4th of July,” originally a Galaxie 500 song.

4th of July, from Galaxie 500’s last album This is Our Music, is relevant here as it firmly established Wareham as a comedian. The inter-band dynamic of Galaxie 500 is interesting, suffice it to say here that the sonic and lyrical nature of the band did not obviously lend itself to comedy, although comedy was there in Wareham, the beating heart of the band, all along. In his awesome memoir Black Postcards, Wareham calls This is Our Music the band’s weakest record, and Wareham at the time was in the process of leaving the band. Wareham has his own reasons for his opinion about the final Galaxie record, however 4th of July is the seminal Galaxie song, with “Don’t Let Our Youth go to Waste,” as its only real competition. 

The song opens with one of Wareham’s deadpan mini-monologues — a tossed-off poem rejected by a dog, a drunken glance at the Empire State Building, everything reduced to the size of a nickel — all of it funny and self-deflating in the signature Galaxie way.

Later, the narrator holes up on July 4th, staging what he calls a “bed-in” for one, a perfect slacker-era joke that half-mocks and half-honors Yoko-and-Lennon theatrics. Given that his band mate Naomi Yang was heavily influenced by Yoko Ono, that Dean was trying to get out of Galexie and change his style but having a hard time getting up the nerve to make the break, that the song comes from 1991, the beginning of the “slacker” era, and that Wareham himself describes himself as “lazy” on numerous occasions in his memoir, there is no finer kiss-off to the idea of a visibly politically engaged artist than this line. (Of course Wareham was also a big Lennon fan, and his cover of Jealous Guy on The Best of Luna is sweet and cool.)  4th of July also blows Oasis’ “start a revolution from my bed” from the water. Oasis doesn’t come within a million miles of Dean Wareham.

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According to A Head Full of Wishes, there were about forty of fifty people at the Bowdoin show, which was kind of normal for shows at a small college back in the day. I have written elsewhere about shows at small colleges in one of my pieces about my time at Hamilton College. In Black Postcards, Dean states that the opening band at the Bowdoin show played too long and the band was irritated about it. After the show Dean left in his car (an attendee of the show said “he packed up and went out the door and drove away. I don’t even think he said thank you”) and apart from the Japan phone call I don’t know if Dean and Damon have ever spoken again. In 1997, Damon stated that they had not, but that’s a long time ago and Galaxie 500 still collects royalties so there must be some communication, at least between business managers. I find the whole royalties situation in general very interesting, and would like to know more about how it all works.

As seen above, in Black Postcards, Dean details some of his running frustrations with Damon and it is clear from this book that he had been getting up the nerve to leave for a while, and had discussed this with Damon and Naomi more than once. “Damon called first. My heart skipped a beat. The moment was upon me. I said don’t buy the tickets to Japan because I was leaving the band, and this time it was for real. They weren’t so nice and understanding this time. They were furious. There were three days of angry phone calls.”

Naomi basically confirms this, saying that, in an out of character moment, she yelled at Dean on the phone. “I couldn’t believe that Dean could just throw everything away so carelessly and not even want to discuss it.”

Now Galaxie 500 were a very good band, but I also suspect that what was happening was that Dean, over and above his frustrations with Damon’s tour managing and the rest, just wanted his own thing. Luna’s first album is Lunapark from 1992, released on Elektra Records, and although there may be traces of the Galaxie sound on it, it basically sounds quite a bit different. Luna is much smoother than Galaxie, less experimental, and, by the time of 1994’s Bewitched (also on Elektra), at least in my opinion, much more polished. For my money, Luna is a far better band, especially after the arrival of the guitarist Sean Eden who played on Bewitched and has played on all of their subsequent records. There is another funny bit from Black Postcards where Dean talks about Sean’s approach to making music:

By the end of the Rendevous sessions, Bryce had come up with a new way to produce Sean.  “Sean,” he said.  “You can come in at eleven tomorrow morning and play your twenty guitar solos, and figure out which one you like.  Adam will record you.  I don’t need to be here for that.”  “Sean is a brilliant guitarist,” Bryce told me.  “But he is one of these people who equates the music-making process with a great deal of pain.”

Dean also talks about in his book how at their final shows (Luna actually also broke up in 2005 but got back together in 2014 and are still together today, although Dean records more under his own name these days) Sean kept pushing to get his own songs (Eden wrote and sang two songs on Rendezvous) on the setlist, and Dean resisted because the songs aren’t much good, which is true, but because Eden is a key part of Luna, Dean was willing to give way. However another member of the Luna universe, not a band member more like a producer of their live shows I kind of forget, would change the setlist at the last minute to remove the Eden songs. Dean approved, but didn’t want to do it himself.

Dean was the beating heart of both Galaxie 500 and Luna, so it is understandable to me that he called the shots in both cases. Damon and Naomi are both interesting musicians, and contributed a lot to Galaxie’s more arty sound, however sans Dean they are ultimately pretty minor, artistically. Damon is known today for two other reasons; the first is he is a prominent and very articulate, critic of Spotify, and secondly he hosted a podcast, and maybe still does, on sound and its various incarnations, which I have listened to and it’s good. So Damon is pretty high level, even if he got in my face in 2005 or 2006.

Overall, the break up of Galaxie 500 (as well as the much less dramatic tension in Luna) is a fascinating example of the push and pull that occurs in bands. Personally, I’m glad the band did break up because the Luna records are indispensable and the Galaxie ones, for the most part, are not, at least for me. I have not, incidentally, had a chance to see Luna play live, however I did see Dean play in 2018 as a kind of support for a guy called Cheval Sombre. They did a record together, which is pretty good, but not great. I didn’t get a chance to talk with Dean after the show, however I did speak with Cheval and he said “now I need to go and hide” and basically told me how miserable he was. Now that was not great, because he was playing with Dean motherfucking Wareham! But Cheval clearly had his own things going on. In any case, I really want to see Luna live. They are still touring, but seem to be only playing a few shows here and there according to Songkick.com, a super great website that tells you where everyone is playing. If I can get my little resources together I’m gonna do it. As for Damon and Naomi, they haven’t played live for about a year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they added new dates sometime. And if they come to Japan, I’ll be sure to be there with my Pernod.

Dedication: For all three members of Galaxie 500, who have all had a pretty big impact on me one way or another.

Sources:
Black Postcards (Dean Wareham),
A Head Full of Wishes (galaxie500.com),
Prior Kyoto Kibbitzer posts.

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On Jason Molina’s “Leave the City”

Here on the far side of a fading streak, my thoughts drift too far. Let me share a little solitude, buy the next drink, and try to defend these misunderstood hearts.
— after Dawes

The old Molina idea — half your life lived on highways, half of it chosen for you — still hits me hard.
— after Jason Molina

This post takes up the song “Leave the City” by Jason Molina. Molina recorded both under his own name and under the name Magnolia Record Co. Leave the City is collected on the record Trials and Errors, released on Secretly Canadian in 2005. It is track 8 of 10, anchoring the back half of the record. It also appears, in a different version, on the record “What Comes After the Blues,” also in 2005 and also on Secretly Canadian. What Comes After the Blues was produced by the Uber-producer, now deceased, Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana among many others and also recorded his own music with a few different bands. On What Comes After the Blues, Leave the City is track 3 of 8. I prefer the Trials and Errors version; it is more acoustic, contains less reverb, and for my money there is just a little more emotion in Molina’s voice, however both versions are great.

This piece will be a little different in that I won’t actually comment on or analyze the lyrics. They totally speak for themselves. What I will say, and if you have been following along with my story you will have already intuited this, if Molina spent half his life on the highway, well I have him beat.

Molina was born just one year before me, and died in 2013 at the age of 40 of advanced alcoholism. On Leave the City, especially again the Trials and Errors version. I don’t know what kind of issues really he may had had, but some for sure. You don’t write Leave the City without issues.

I too left the city, left my place of birth, and moved halfway across the world when I was 22. Before that, I spent my junior year in New Zealand, also a long way from home. I wrote about this year here in my Hamilton College series. I plan to recount more about my moving to Asia and subsequent events in future pieces, however for now if you want to understand why I left, while I think I always had a taste for adventure, but also there’s this.

The song opens with Molina describing how leaving the city shattered what was left of his heart — the part that wasn’t already broken. He admits he once had good reasons for leaving, but can’t name a single one anymore. It was a hard time, and somehow he came through it, grateful in a bruised way for the blues that carried him.

He sings about spending half his life on highways, half in places he never quite chose. He remembers catching the North Star over a freight yard — a moment of lonely illumination that told him just how rough the road had been, and yet how it still carried him forward.

The line that always devastates me is his admission that someone was waiting for him, but he “had so many things to do.” It’s the gentlest explanation and the harshest truth. He knows the person deserved better luck, but his voice softens: with them, he’s not giving up — not tonight.

Dedication: For the road, tiring as it may be. You do meet a lot of interesting folks along the way.