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.
He wakes up without remembering the descent. Not the drinking. Not the last message. Not the shape of the night leaving his body. Just the slow return of weight.
The house is rented, not lived in. A clean, architectural expanse in western Tokyo—glass, pale wood, too much air between objects. The kind of space that does not ask questions because it assumes nothing will answer.
He sits up once, then stops. 1:13 PM. The afternoon has already begun without him. He lies back for a moment and listens to the silence of money maintaining itself. There is a bottle on the floor beside the bed. Half-finished. Warm now. He doesn’t look at it again.
He stands, showers without thinking, dresses in the order that muscle memory dictates: black shirt, trousers, jacket. No tie. Never a tie unless someone insists.
His phone is already lit when he returns. Two messages. One from Tomoyo.
“Weekend still okay?”
One from Mina.
“Bar As One. Late.”
He reads them without responding yet. Then another notification appears. A different rhythm. Alejandro.
No name attached. Just the letter cluster, like something filed incorrectly in a system that never bothered to correct itself.
“Need you in Akasaka. KBS situation. Quiet, but messy.”
That word—extraction—is always a translation problem. It never means only one thing. He exhales, once.
And for the first time that day, he is fully awake.
KYOTO — That Same Day
I am in my classroom when I see the notification. I’m not during anything important. Just one of those pauses between things where students are pretending to work and I am pretending not to notice they aren’t.
The phone is face down. I flip it. It’s Signal. I don’t even check the sender first anymore; I know it’s from the Thin Man.
“Akasaka. KBS. Quiet job.”
That’s it. No greeting. No explanation. No punctuation beyond necessity.
I look up at the room. The students are writing essays on narrative voice, ironically enough. I tell them to keep going and step into the hallway.
Outside, the corridor smells like floor wax and winter coats that never fully dry. I write back:
“You’re back?”
A pause.
Then:
“Always.”
I sit down on the stairs and realize I’ve been waiting for this message more than I admitted to myself. Not because I want the job. Because when he appears, the world becomes legible again.
Even if it shouldn’t.
TOKYO — 5:57 PM That Same Day
Akasaka in daylight is almost offensive in its normality. Glass buildings pretending they are neutral. People moving like they have somewhere else to be even when they don’t. He enters KBS through a side entrance.
Not invited. Not uninvited. Just expected. The problem is explained in fragments.
A mid-level finance manager has flagged irregular payments in a production budget. Someone else has flagged the flag. A third layer has erased the second.
Now everyone is quietly pretending nothing happened while insisting something must be done. He listens. He does not take notes. He asks three questions.
The answers contradict each other in useful ways.
By 4:02 PM, he knows what happened. By 4:07 PM, he knows who benefited. By 5:12 PM, he knows why no one will say it out loud.
He leaves without announcing that anything is resolved. This is the job.
On the street outside, he finally replies to Tomoyo who he has beeb seeing for about two moths now:
“Saturday still okay.”
Then Mina:
“Later.”
Then Alejandro:
“Done.”
No embellishment. No summary. Just closure.
KYOTO — 10:02 PM That Same Day
I am in a shisha place near Sanjo when he updates me. Not the kind of shisha place you imagine. Cleaner. Quieter. Students pretending to be older than they are. A place where time slows down but doesn’t stop.
I have a draft open on my laptop. A text arrives. It is about him. It is always about him these days.
“KBS resolved.”
That’s all. No story. No detail.
I type:
“What was it?”
Three dots appear. Disappear. Return.
“Accounting.”
That word again. He uses it the way other people use weather reports. I lean back.
Outside, Kyoto is doing its careful thing—bicycles, soft neon, the sense that nothing ever fully arrives here.
I realize I’ve stopped writing fiction and started writing evidence.
TOKYO — 11:35 PM That Same Night
Bar As One is half-lit, as always. Mina is behind the counter like she has been there longer than the building. She does not ask what happened in Akasaka. She never asks anything that can be answered incorrectly.
He sits and orders a whisky ginger. They talk about nothing that matters. Tomoyo arrives later. She wears corporate black like it is a second job. She kisses him once, briefly, like a scheduled interruption. He notices everything about her that is real and nothing about her that is performance. That is what he likes about her.
At some point, his phone vibrates again. A new Signal message. It’s from Matt.
KYOTO — 11:26 PM. That Same Night.
I’m still at Shisha, still thinking about the Thin Man, I shouldn’t be doing this in public. But I am.
Me:
“I think I understand what you do in Tokyo.”
A reply comes faster than expected.
“You don’t.”
I almost smile. Then I don’t. I type:
“I’m going to Costa Rica.”
This time there is a long pause. Then:
“Why.”
I look at the ceiling of the shisha place. Smoke moves like it has intention.
“Luciana.”
The name sits there on my screen like it has weight. I don’t know if he will respond.
But I know I’ve crossed a line.
TOKYO — 12:14 AM The Next Morning
He reads the name once. Then again. Luciana.
Not spoken in years. Not held in any current system. Not part of any job file. He steps outside for a smoke.
Akasaka is quieter at night, but not safer. Just less honest about itself. He does not ask Matt not to go. That would be meaningless.
Instead he writes:
“Don’t dig wrong.”
Then, after a pause:
“If you’re going, be precise.”
He puts the phone away. Tomoyo is still inside, laughing at something someone said that is not funny. Mina is polishing glasses that are already clean.
He thinks, briefly, of leaving Tokyo again. Not because something is wrong. Because something has started.
And that is usually enough.
KYOTO — 12:44 AM The Next Morning
I read his message twice.
Be precise.
As if precision is the problem. As if I have ever been anything else.
I close my laptop. Outside, Kyoto continues as if nothing has happened. But I know it has.
I have a name now. And names are how you begin to lose your distance from things.
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: 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: 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.
Note: This is the first entry in a new series about my time in Kumamoto, Japan between April of 1997 and December of 1998. What began as a recollection of a short, chaotic teaching stint but became an excavation of place, power, and early adult identity under surveillance. Set against the compressed social ecosystem of a small Japanese city in the late 1990s, the piece moves through NOVA’s glass-room culture, its porous rules, and the peculiar cast of lifers, bosses, and drifters who inhabited it. What emerges is not a complaint but a tonal study: of being watched, of improvising freedom within constraint, and of the quiet luck of finding something real—Sachie—amid a system that often felt artificial.
Epigraph:
Kim You Bore Me to Death
—Grandaddy
I arrived in Kumamoto in April of 1997 to teach English at NOVA, which at the time felt like a pretty wild thing to be doing. Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It’s a smaller city, slower, and NOVA was right at the north end of the Shotengai, basically downtown. Everyone knew everyone, or at least knew of them, which I didn’t fully understand yet.
What I also didn’t fully understand was that I would be living with one of my bosses.
Her name was Sam. She was about 35, from Wales, and she had this story she loved to tell—more like boast—that Donovan had written a song for her mother. I never quite figured out which one. She was in the apartment with me and another teacher, Heather, and she was there all the time. Not just physically there, but present. Observing. Asking. Not in a relaxed roommate way, but in a way that felt like she was always slightly checking something.
NOVA had a loose rule about no fraternization between students and teachers. Loose being the key word. It happened all the time. Another teacher, Cameron, told me a lot of the young women came to find a boyfriend. Whether that was true or not, relationships were constant. There was this big izakaya on the Shotengai where everyone went, and it was basically understood that whatever the rule was, it wasn’t really enforced.
By early June I was seeing Sachie, who had been my student. She was my girlfriend then and is my wife now. I went to her house pretty early on. Her father, Tetsuyo, a gruff, older, very conservative Japanese dad, said he would meet me, but then he went to take a “bath” and didn’t. So I didn’t meet him for months. Her mother, Kazuko, was lovely then and is lovely now.
We couldn’t really spend time together at my place, obviously, so we’d drive around in her car. That was our space. We’d park wherever passed for lovers’ lane in Kumamoto, which, thankfully, was not the Zodiac. No Zodiac in Kyushu, thankfully. We’d sit there, windows cracked, the car quiet, the whole thing feeling both secret and completely ordinary at the same time. That was just how it worked.
At some point I told Joy, another teacher, that I was seeing Sachie, and I told her not to say anything because it was technically against the rules. She said of course. And then, of course, she immediately went and told John G., and from there it got around.
By that point it didn’t really matter. I had to leave, but I also wanted to leave. NOVA felt like a factory. The hours, the structure, the constant low-level supervision—it wasn’t for me. I gave my one month’s notice and in July of 1997 I moved to Washington. Better hours, easier gig, and a lot more freedom.
There were a couple of long-term guys at NOVA, both Brits, both lifers in a way I couldn’t really imagine.
Cameron was the more interesting of the two. We’d go to the big izakaya on the Shotengai—yakitori, big beers in frosty mugs, the usual—but his real place was Madam’s Bar, also on the Shotengai. Madam was the owner, a transvestite, and Cameron loved her. Absolutely loved her. He went there every night.
He took me a few times. It was small and dark, always smoky, with Queen playing on a loop. I drank White Russians and, for reasons that made sense at the time, felt like a bit of a stud. It had its own rules, though. You could feel that pretty quickly.
By Halloween of 1997 I was already at Washington, but I was still around Kumamoto a fair bit, still seeing people. The week before Halloween I went back to Madam’s with Cameron.
“Matty baby, T-shirt time,” Madam said. “You will buy the bar T-shirt. Halloween theme. ¥4000.”
¥4000 was a lot for me then.
“Madam baby, that’s a bit steep,” I said. “I’ve already got plenty of T-shirts. Maybe next year.”
She and Cameron had a quick whispered conversation off to the side. We finished our drinks and left. Outside, Cameron turned to me.
“Matty baby, there’s not going to be a next year. You’re banned. 86’d. Hit the bricks, pal. You’re out.”
“For not buying a T-shirt?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “T-shirts are serious business.”
And that was it. Never went back.
Mark was the other lifer. Late thirties, married, one daughter. Solid guy. He loved his wife in a way that was both sincere and slightly odd in its phrasing.
“I can hack this job,” he’d say, “as long as I can go home each night to my little mouse’s ear.”
I never heard that expression before or since.
John E. was our boss, technically over Sam. He was always in and out—Osaka, Fukuoka, training sessions, that kind of thing. When he was around, though, he had a habit.
When we drank, he would smack Mark on the butt. All the time. Didn’t ask. Just did it. Mark would try to laugh it off.
“John E. baby, maybe not tonight,” he’d say.
Didn’t matter. It kept happening.
One night John E. turned to me. “Matty baby, can I smack your ass?”
“John E. baby, no way,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
At least he asked.
John G. was an anomaly. Everyone else was in their twenties or thirties; he was in his sixties. He said—said, mind you—that he had made and lost six fortunes, mostly in gold in South Africa. Maybe. By the time I met him he was broke as fuck.
He would fall asleep in class. Not subtly either. Full-on snoring, loud enough that you could hear it through the glass walls. And these were small classes, three or four students at most, everyone sitting there while he just drifted off. You could see it happen in real time.
John E. had a number of supervisory conversations with him. Nothing changed.
Then there was Paul, who wasn’t even at Kumamoto—he worked out of Osaka. I met him during training in late April of ’97, and he was a strange guy from the jump.
He told this whole story about growing up in Arkansas, parents who were abusive, into drugs, no money. Said he ran away at sixteen and found God on the road shortly after. Compared himself—without irony—to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Claimed he made a living hustling poker, which might have been true, but there was something else in there too. Not exactly dishonest, but… flexible.
He wanted to convert me. That was clear immediately.
We walked all night. Ten hours, maybe more, all over Osaka. Through neighborhoods, through stations, at one point through a huge homeless encampment—post-bubble Japan, a lot of salarymen who had fallen hard. It stuck with me. Paul talked and listened in equal measure, which is its own kind of technique, but there was always one direction to it.
The goal was simple: Matty finds Jesus tonight, come hell or high water.
I didn’t.
A couple of months later he came down to visit Kumamoto. We went to the izakaya on the Shotengai, then another bar—not Madam’s. Different energy.
There was a girl there, Yoko, and she was very clearly interested in me. So she’s all over me and Young Mr. Johnson is getting, uh, perky. I’m kind of nuzzling her neck and all, and Sachie and I are barely dating, not exclusive yet. Cameron leans over.
“Uh, Matty baby, YMJ is looking a little perky there.”
“Ruh roh,” I said. “Gotta go.”
There were a few good reasons for that.
One, I wanted to date Sachie only. I wanted to be exclusive. I told her the next day what had happened and she was like, “Good. Let’s go exclusive then.” So that was that.
Two, Yoko was like nineteen and I was twenty-three, and she had tons and tons of pancake makeup, which just wasn’t my thing.
So I jetted. Walked fifteen minutes home.
On the way I passed Fumachi. Of course, “machi” means street in Japanese, so to me it read FU-machi, which I found hilarious. I tried to explain this to Sachie once and she was like, “Yeah, machi just means street.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s funny.”
Didn’t really translate.
By the river, as always, hammered dudes were out there pissing into the water. Just part of the scenery.
I get home, it’s around eleven, I’m getting ready for bed, and a taxi pulls up.
Out step Paul and Yoko.
Ruh roh.
Paul’s staying over, sleeping on a futon in the living room, and I’m thinking, what’s the plan here—hook up with Yoko right there while me, Heather, and Sam are all in the apartment? Outta control. Maybe that’s just how he rolled.
Anyway, Yoko took one look at me and jets. She’s gone.
Paul shrugged it off.
“Easy come, easy go.”
We end up playing poker instead. For a little money. I’d played all through childhood, in college, figured I was about a B+.
He wiped the floor with me. Took all my lunch money and didn’t lose a hand.
That’s when I started to believe him.
Looking back, those first two months in Kumamoto feel both chaotic and oddly contained, like everything was happening all at once but also exactly as it was supposed to. NOVA was a factory, no doubt—bad bosses, strange rules, glass rooms, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a black turtleneck and a white short-sleeved shirt constituted a violation of “regs.” I smoked Mild Sevens like it was part of the job description, drifted between pool halls and izakayas, and tried to make sense of a place where everyone seemed to know more about what I was doing than I did. And in the middle of all that, somehow, I met Sachie. That part feels less like chance the older I get, more like the one thing that cut cleanly through all the noise.
It didn’t last long—April to July, just a couple of months—but it stuck. The people, the rhythms, the small absurdities, the feeling of being watched and not quite fitting and also not really caring. I left because I had to, and because I wanted to, and both things were true at the same time. Better hours, easier life, more freedom. But Kumamoto was the start of something, even if I didn’t know what at the time. I never did get that T-shirt.
Dedication:
For my wife Sachie. Glad I met ya baby.
Note: If you like this piece, you may like the pieces below, which take up my time just before moving from the US to Japan.
Illustrations presented with thanks by Riko Kusahara
Note: This piece was written for the Psiber Dreaming Conference offered by IASD in September 2018, under a strict word limit that forced a level of compression I don’t always allow myself. It draws on a series of lucid dreaming experiences to explore how we determine whether we are dreaming or awake, and why those determinations so often fail under pressure. Looking back, I’m less interested in the specific techniques of lucidity than in the broader question the paper circles: what happens when our usual markers of reality—stability, plausibility, even self-awareness—prove unreliable? The result is less a theory of dreaming than a compact record of trying to think clearly inside a system that continually revises its own ground.
Epigraph I:
The difference between most people and myself is that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent. That is my peculiarity.
—Carl Jung
Epigraph II:
The conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless. They’re images and sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random {…} Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgement.
—Chuck Klosterman
Dream I: I awake in a warehouse. The bed is against one wall–on the other is a thirty-foot mountain of cantaloupes. I realize I am dreaming. I get up and run my hands over the cantaloupes. They feel absolutely real—as tangible as in life. I remember that tangibility is not a viable reality test—I’ve made that mistake before. Now fully lucid, I decide to levitate. The room dissolves, and I float suspended somewhere in dense, colourless space. Eventually, I feel the need to come back to earth but cannot locate it. I feel something beneath me. This is my bed, and I awake back in the warehouse, relieved yet exhilarated. The cantaloupes are still there, however I don’t question them. I just happen to live in a room full of fruit. Moments later I awake again, this time in diurnal “reality.”
The most common dream experience is of waking from a dream we take to be real, only to understand that it was “just a dream.” However, a subset of dreamers, probably more than we generally imagine, have experienced lucid dreams, dreams in which, to some degree, they are aware they are dreaming. Lucid dreamers may also experience “false awakenings”[1]— the sensation of waking progressively through dream “levels.” False awakenings can be disorienting (Robert Waggoner writes that after seven successive false awakenings he “would accept {…} any reality {…} as long as it stayed put”[2]), or sought after (Daniel Love and Keith Hearne have independently developed techniques to induce false awakenings[3]). Regardless of the desirability of the experience, the existence of dream levels, far from a simple oddity, provides a potential window into massive metaphysical questions.
First, we need to understand how dreamers use evidence to establish whether they are dreaming or awake.
II:I am in a dreaming contest with another dreamer. The contest begins and slimy amphibians begin to appear. Some resemble frogs;others are in shapes that don’t exist in nature. Their size varies from that of a pinky to that of a fist and they are verycolourful.I am nottryingto dream them, rather they are spilling everywhere around my feet. I sense this is a dream and check on the other dreamer. He is standing to my right in empty space. He looks just like me and hasn’t begun his dream.
This dream is non-lucid at first and becomes lucid because of the bright color and absurd number of the amphibians. An awareness beyond the dream senses a non-natural situation.
III: I am picking out fruit at a fruit stand. There are some huge avocados, almost too good looking. I wonder if I am in a dream, and touch an avocado to check. The one I choose is ripe and soft—I squeeze it a little. There is no doubt that I am having a tactile experience, and I conclude I am not dreaming. Of course, I am.
Two dreams, two types of evidence. In Dream II, I correctly identify the amphibians as anomalous, and become lucid. In Dream III, my attempt to test the lifelikeness of the avocado as an indicator fails. Simply put, realistic sensation is not sufficiently indicative of reality. Love agrees: “we are not looking for a qualitative difference in how realistic the experience feels {…} we are {…} on the lookout for issues with stability and plausibility.”[4] In Dream I, at first the huge pile of melons in my bedroom appears implausible and triggers lucidity; after moving up a dream level, my mind overrides the implausibility by “justifying”[5] the anomaly.
Because we awake from sleep and dreams every morning, we are very familiar with the experience of awakening. It is therefore unsurprising that when we wake inside a dream we accept the new reality as the waking world, even if it contains anomalous elements.
IV: I am in a huge house where a large group of families on motorcycles arrive. The families are making noise all night. I realize I am dreaming and levitate over to the families. Later I decide to wake up. I ease myself out of bed, bumping my nose into an ironing board. The room looks and feels exactly like my room. I don’t recall theironingboard being there, but whatever. Moments later I awake again—the situation is identical, only, the ironing board is gone. I feel a pit in my stomach, wondering what is ultimately real.
Dream IV is a good example of how dream levels can become increasingly realistic as we move through them. An ironing board in front of the bed is (for me) more plausible than a house full of bikers. Dreams such as this beg the question of how we can ever be sure we are awake. I have dreamt of getting up, walking to the front door, opening it, and emerging into the sunshine in my neighbourhood. At every point, this dream felt entirely realistic with no anomalies. After experiences like this, is it wholly unrealistic that we could dream an entire morning? An entire day?
There are different ways to approach this kind of question. The first is to use rigorous reality tests.[6] Using reality tests after each fresh awakening can help us filter anomalies in what may be an increasingly realistic dream state. The second is to open ourselves to a wider set of questions. Although space limitations make full exploration of these questions impossible, modern dreamers would do well to recall that throughout recorded history people have speculated on the meaning of the dream state and what it can tell us about space, time, life after death, and the nature of reality.
As dreamers, we know that dreamtime behaves very differently than waking time. Robert Moss distinguishes between Chronos (“linear time”) and Kairos (the “spacious now.”) He writes that when Kairos operates in waking life, “ordinary time is {…} suspended or elastic,” and that the world can “quiver or shimmer.”[7] Moss’ Kairos time sounds a great deal like dreamtime. Jung in his memoir writes “our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity,”[8] and “there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time.”[9] Jung makes multiple connections between dreams and life after death, suggesting that our waking world,
in which we are “conscious,” may in fact be a projection of a more “real” and permanent, even timeless, unconscious.[10]
In the Tibetan tradition of dream yoga, the yogi prepares for death through dreams and meditation, entering death consciously by releasing the bodily energy in such a way that the body partially or entirely dissolves into pure light. This “rainbow body” is well-documented in Tibet and China, and cases of this phenomenon have been reported across multiple religious traditions.[11] Finally, Moss connects dreams with the much discussed Many Worlds theory, as does, in popular culture, Richard Linklater. [12]
V:I am among a large group ofpeople on the top floor of a building. We lie down on our backs and formbundles. The molecular structure of these bundles begins to dissolve, webecome lighter, thentotally empty. This process is dictated by a power outside of us which doesn’t speak. Once empty, we have the choice to become anything we want. I choose to become white light. Suddenly I am transported through space in a burst of pure white light, my old body left entirely behind. This is the most peaceful and thrilling feeling in the world. Then, I am back into a new bundle, trying again to become empty. I make progress, but it is hard and I am over-concentrating. Progress ceases; I wake up.
Although I have thought at length about dreams, I am a normal person with a normal job, dreaming anonymously night after night. I don’t belong to a spiritual tradition, am not a yogi or a meditating hermit. As a lucid dreamer, like many of us, I am self-taught. While we anonymous dreamers are wise to suspend judgement about the particularities of a theory as mind-boggling as dreams as an interface to infinite parallel universes, it is perhaps not by chance that my dreams of ascending to a state of pure white light bear close resemblance to innumerable near-death experiences or the reported manifestations of a lifetime of dream yoga. Although admittedly outside of our normal rational mode of apprehension, the experience of journeying through multiple dream levels, and the energy and amazement which often accompany these experiences, may point the way toward worlds far above, below, or beyond our own.
Who are we in our trek through life? Are we the maker, or the made? The writer, or the page? The actor, or the stage? The happening, or the happened to? Perhaps, our ability to exercise agency in the vastness of forever depends in part on learning to navigate levels of “reality,” however we encounter them. Or, perhaps, journeying to the far side of the dream can bring us face to face with that which is actually dreaming us.
Note: This is Part IV of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II and Part III are available. This post will take up my friendship with Ann, the Sports Show John Innes and friends had, and losing my job at the print short.
I was living in the delta Wasting most of my time
Car Seat Headrest
I mentioned in Part III that I was on a sports talk show on the college radio station, WHCL. This was called Sports Corner. John Innes was the leader; it was his show. A friend of ours called Jeff Kingsley was on the show, as well as myself. Kingsley was a huge Buffalo Bills fan, and he stayed on top of the sports news, especially the NFL. Innes was always super prepared, and taped the shows which he would later play for his dad when we got back to Washington State. I sort of kept up with the sports scene, but I was mostly there for comic relief. I would crack jokes and make fun of stuff, but was definitely the third banana on the show.
The radio station didn’t have a lot of bandwidth so the listeners were mostly on campus and Clinton locals, but I recall Sports Corner having a number of regular listeners who would call in. From my point of view, the callers were the best part of the show. We treasured our listeners and gave them plenty of airtime. I never told any of them to “cold compress ma’am.” I was a regular as a sophomore and the first half of junior year until I went abroad to New Zealand. When I came back as a senior I think I just guested. I remember one show where Innes asked me what kind of sports were big in New Zealand. I said “marbles, marbles are really big.” I was just fucking around, but it was pretty funny. Although I was only marginally prepared, Sports Corner was a blast and Innes was a great host. He totally could have done it professionally.
I also talked in Part III about Ann. Ann was Ian’s girlfriend sophomore year, and I got to know her pretty well. Ann sort of took over where Rochelle left off in the mothering department, but she was really different from Rochelle. More intense. Ann didn’t like smoking and she tried to stop me from doing so, to no effect. I remember once, I think it was junior year actually, where at a dorm party she grabbed my cigarette from me and threw it out the window. I just shrugged and lit another one.
If Ann was intense, she thought I was. Innes and Ann and I were hanging out once and Innes said “M.A. (that was my nickname at college) is the chillest guy I know,” and Ann replied “I think he is the most intense.” Well, someone will maybe eventually get to the bottom of that one. One day I dropped by Ann’s room and there was a big jigsaw puzzle partially done. I started picking at it, and she stopped me. “That’s for me and Ian,” she said. Must have been some puzzle. Another time I went to Ann’s house with Ian and she tried, I guess, to pair me up with one of her friends. This wasn’t going to take, but we all did sleep, clothed, in the same bed that night. I don’t think I got a lot of sleep.
While some friends came and went at Hamilton, Ann I was close to sophomore, junior and senior year. After graduation she moved to the U.K. for a bit. I wrote about this elsewhere and will reprint it here.
“My friend Ann from Hamilton College went to England after graduation and she and I exchanged a few letters, back when people still wrote letters. She wrote me that she was drinking some, so I wrote a poem about my image of her over there. The original poem had two or three more verses, but they were terrible. Then a little while back I reconnected with Ann, which was great, and re-worked the poem, which wasn’t. It might have been a little better, but it was still bad. These two stanzas, on the other hand, are awesome, and maybe that’s all there ever needs to be said about Ann in England, you know?” Here is that poem fragment:
Ann belle princess of the isles the orbs whisper your name even if you’ve gotten piles or if you’re on the game
Buxom barmaid or bellicose barfly begs the inevitable question booze improves the poet’s eye. but ruins her digestion
I still like it.
Ann has read some of this blog, and even contributed a piece as a guest writer, which is not currently live.
The other big event sophomore year was when Deb fired me. I mentioned that as a freshman I skipped work some, and the next year this pattern was exacerbated. I still had no money, however work was becoming really tough. This was not Deb and Sally’s fault at all–I just couldn’t hack walking all the way up the hill just to collate. Instead, I spent time in the woods jumping off little cliffs and messing around in the late afternoon. No hard feelings; looking back I should have done things differently. I don’t remember exactly when I was fired, but I think it was about two thirds of the way through the year.
That’s it–this is a short one. There are a bunch of other things that may have happened this year or the next, so I’ll cover some of these in my upcoming junior year pieces.
New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.
The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.
Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.
Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:
“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”
In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.
The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.
Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”
We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.
Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.
After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.
Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.
Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:
i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.
ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.
iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.
Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.
I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.
I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.
The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.
If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight
If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight
We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules
Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.
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.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 