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Scenes from Hamilton College VI: Junior Year in New Zealand

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

Epigraph:

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

Peter Jefferies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication:

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

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Scenes from Hamilton College III: Sophomore Year I (with cameos from Sonic the Hedgehog, Ani DiFranco, and Candle Time)

Note: In Part I and Part II of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton. Part III will take up sophomore year where I lived down the hill in Bundy Dorm.

All you ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Big Star

After freshman year I returned back to Washington State for the summer. I have written glancingly about this period, suffice it to say I was not up to much. Still broke, I did have a short lived girlfriend but she dumped me mid-summer. I spent a few days moping around playing nerf golf at my parents’ house, then got over it. I don’t remember much else from that summer except that I got back in good running shape, and when I got back to campus in the fall I turned out, once again, for the running team.

One thing I neglected to mention in my pieces on freshman year is that I actually competed on the JV running team at Hamilton for a time and ran a few races. I was not in great shape that year, and JV was not that exciting. As I have written, I had other pursuits. Sophomore year, however, I was in better shape and had a shot at making the top five. The only other runner I recall was called Harry. I thought Harry lived in Sig, but Jake tells me he was in a frat called THX, about which I remember nothing. In any case, Jake knew him. Harry was a hardcore runner and scolded me about my lifestyle, wanting me to devote myself to the team. I was not going to do this, but I was able to run with Harry and the first team for a number of practices. In the long run though it didn’t work out–they ran mornings and afternoons, and my summer shape wasn’t going to carry me through a hyper-competitive season. I was a good runner, but I just didn’t have the drive. Sooner or later I left the team, this time for good. I look back fondly on Harry however–he was right; I was lazy and needed a kick in the rear.

As a sophomore I roomed in a double with John Innes (there were two John’s in my friend group, John Innes and John Slack), in a dorm halfway down the hill to Clinton called Bundy. Marc Campbell was also on our floor. Ian was living in his frat, but spent a lot of time in Bundy as he was dating Ann, someone who I became close with over the year as well. Jake was over at Sig and I didn’t see much of him, mostly for geographic reasons.

Bundy was a way different story than North. First, I spent a lot more time in my dorm room with John Innes. Innes would watch the soap opera Days of Our Lives and insist I watched it too. I could have cared less, but watched it to be a good friend. We also played Sega, almost exclusively Sonic the Hedgehog and Sega Hockey, at which John usually beat me (however not in the biggest matches, as I’ll get to later). Innes liked rap music and had a pretty good collection. I could get into some of the rap; I liked Public Enemy, KRS One, De La Soul, and a minor band called Basehead which wasn’t really rap. However I was by then deep into what would today be described as alternative or indie music, so Innes’ taste and mine mostly diverged. We were both good about sharing airtime though, so he got to know my music and I his.

The record I listened to the most, by far, that year was Big Star Third: Sister Lovers from the then mostly forgotten American band Big Star. I loved this record (which was on Rykodisc), and played it endlessly while trying to advance in Sonic the Hedgehog. I stuck my mattress in the closet and hung a tapestry over the door area so I had a little cubby to sleep in. Overall, the whole scene was much more domestic than the pretty chaotic North.

Other than Marc and John Innes, I don’t remember exactly who the other guys who were on our floor, but I’ve been reminded that John Slack was one of them. Ian and Jake were living in frats, and over the year I got to know a new crew of people, including several girls. These included firstly Jenny and Jen, who lived in the female area on our same floor (maybe the second floor? Innes will remember). Innes and I became very close to Jenny and Jen, and spent almost every evening hanging out in their room doing something called “Candle Time.” Candle Time was pretty much exactly what it sounds like–we would turn down the lights, light candles (which was probably against school rules) and talk for hours. We would talk about our days, people and goings on in the dorm, and just life in general. It was really wholesome and again, a major change from North.

Candle Time lasted, in my recollection, for a number of months, but not all through the year. Despite spending so much time together, there was no romantic involvement, although I believe Innes and Jen did get together later, and briefly; I’m not really sure. I think it was supposed by some that I myself had a crush on Jen; however although I liked her a lot this was not the case. I did have a little bit of a crush on Jenny, but she had other people who were interested in her and we all hung out so nothing ever happened. That was fine–it was actually really nice to just have close female friends with no expectations.

Jenny and Jen were both from the upstate New York area, broader Rochester as I recall. My guess is they came from relatively less money than many of our classmates, who came from preppier areas, and schools. I actually visited Jenny’s house once or twice, and I think a bunch of us slept over once and watched the film Glengarry Glen Ross. These included Amy Holland, who was one of the coolest chicks around. She was called “Red,” on account of her red hair, and was totally my speed. Everyone else fell asleep during the movie except Amy and I and as I recall she loved what is, to be fair, a pretty stereotypically male film.

Jenny’s house was nice, but seemed pretty middle-class and maybe that’s part of why we all bonded–the richer kids, although I obviously hung around with them a lot, had their own life ways to some extent. I remember one evening Jenny and I went to see the band The New Dylans on campus. I thought they were a good band, and had found their cassette at the campus radio station where John Innes and I had a sports talk show. Their record has a song I liked called “The Prodigal Son Returns Today.” They sounded kind of like a minor league Big Head Todd and the Monsters or something, and are kind of dated today if I’m honest, but I was excited for the show. At first it was pretty full, but people left little by little and by the end it was just me and Jenny. The band played their hearts out for the two of us, including encores! After the show, I joined them for a cigarette outside and chatted. I told them that I really liked the show and they said thanks and all with no mention of the fact that the venue was totally empty. That’s professionalism, I thought, and I imagined that as a band trying to break through playing small colleges and sending cassettes to radio stations they’d had their share of ups and downs. I doubt they are still around, but if so I’m rooting for you guys!

A bigger star that played Hamilton was Ani DiFranco. I saw Ani several times, both on campus and off, as she was pretty huge in New York State at the time. She had not yet released “Dilate,” which came in 1996 and was her mainstream breakthrough to the extent she ever had one, but she was a star on campus, mostly with the women but with a lot of the guys too. Ani put on a great show, and I totally got the appeal. She was kind of the Jeff Rosenstock of the day I suppose.

Shawn Colvin also came, and I knew some of the people who were assigned to take care of her backstage. They reported that she was a total asshole, asked for coke, and generally threw her weight around big time. Shawn Colvin was OK, but no so great that she could act like a diva I don’t think. Full on divas are acceptable-like Joni Mitchell might be a diva and what are you going to do–but minor league divas pretty much suck.

Anyway, like I say over the year although we still saw each other, I saw less of Jenny and Jen, and more of other people like Ann, Amy, and Matt Thornton. I’m not sure where Matt lived, maybe Bundy and maybe not, and I don’t recall either how or when I met him, but we soon became fast friends. Matt was full speed ahead, and argumentative, but I can handle my own in an argument, and I really liked him. Matt ran with an interesting group of friends, including several Asian-Americans who I believe lived on the Kirkland side of campus. Hamilton used to be a guys’ school and Kirkland was the attached girls’ school. Then at some point they merged, but the Kirkland side and the old Hamilton side always felt distinct to me and were separated by a bridge.

One time we were talking about going to New York and Matt told me about some clubs for Asians that he was interested in. Matt’s friends told him that he (or I) could not go to these clubs because we would get the shit kicked out of us. Had to be at least half-Asian apparently. But I think Matt went to these kinds of clubs anyway and did not get beat up, because he just sort of rolled that way.

Matt and I and Ian did go to New York eventually, and spent a few days uptown at some person’s apartment where I commandeered a prime sleeping space and we ordered pizza three times a day. I believe this was actually after graduation, as Matt transferred before graduating from Hamilton.

As I mentioned in an earlier piece, this was also the year Ian and I went to Boston to see music shows. We went with a fellow called Cale who was a freshman. Cale was cool, and also we liked him because of his name, reminiscent of John Cale, violist for the Velvet Underground who Ian and I were both fans of. With Ian and Cale I felt like I was in good company–we were all very simpatico.

My academic performance sophomore year was just OK. I took more English classes, and also started to take some History classes including some Asian History with Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson was a good professor, but I think he was one of those guys who really saw himself at U. Chicago or Yale or something. A lot of academics are like that. Nevertheless, Tom was good–tough but fair–and pushed me to really deepen my research abilities. Outside of Tom’s class, my effort was a little mixed, and during the dead of winter I skipped some morning classes because the climb up the hill was just too tough. The winters in upstate New York are pretty brutal, and I preferred to stay local down in Bundy a lot of the time.

One more thing I remember from this year is starting, and then dropping, photography class. I had an old camera that barely worked, and was interested in learning how to develop film in a darkroom. However, photography class was really expensive because we had to regularly buy these huge rolls of film which cost like $50 at the school store. A classmate I’ll call C. to protect his identity told me, “just tuck your pants into your socks and drop the film down your pants and walk out. That’s what I do.” But I wasn’t going to steal film all year and there was no way I could pay the outrageous costs. On top of that, I wasn’t all that good–certainly my classmates outclassed me, crappy camera or not. So I dropped it after six weeks or so; however now that I think about it I may well have met Matt Thornton in that exact class. It’s a possibility.

Note: That will do it for Part III. In Part IV I’ll write more about my friendship with Ann as well as the Sports Talk Show we did on the Hamilton radio station.

Dedication: For the whole Bundy dorm, actually. It was a pretty chill year.

to be continued…

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Scenes from Hamilton College I: Meeting Ian and Jake

New Note: It’s been a while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back here as a republication. “Hamilton I” remains one of my favorite entries on the Kyoto Kibbitzer—an early chapter built around friendship, music, and the strange, formative textures of freshman year, especially the central presence of my good friends Ian and Jake, who shaped so much of that time. It’s also one of the more widely read pieces on the site, which I appreciate. Re-reading it now, I’m struck by how much of what came later was already there in embryo: the scenes, the sounds, the late nights, and the people who mattered. As always, thanks for reading.

And I recall the moment
More distant than it seems
When five green queens
On a black bin bag
Meant all the world to me

The Pogues

I attended Hamilton College, and managed to graduate–possibly in linen. At Hamilton I was an English major, and intended to be from when I enrolled. This was a decent choice; however both Hamilton and English were kind of my father’s choices. I also managed to cobble together an Asian Studies minor through the good auspices of my advisor who checked out my credits and told me I could put that together. This was a good call on his part, and even though I kind of stumbled into it, The Asian Studies minor was my choice.

I was pretty unprepared for college. Before going I was asked to fill out a kind of questionnaire to help the college place me with roommates. One of the questions was, are you clean, messy, or in the middle. I chose in the middle, which was sort of a mistake because it turns out men are pigs, and I was cleaner than most. At the same time though it wasn’t a mistake because if I had selected clean I may not have met Ian and Jake. Jake was my roommate, and we lived in a quad. The other two roommates were Brian and Geoff, and although I had a relationship of a sort with both of them freshman year, we were not really on the same page. Jake and I were. Ian was our next door neighbor, and he roomed with Marc Campbell, and two other people. Ian, Jake, and Marc are still in my life.

My parents came with me to upstate New York, and before I moved into the dorm we stayed for a few days in a hotel near campus. I was kind of apprehensive, and spent the days listening to The Pogues and quietly stressing. But when I moved into the quad things were fine. This was mostly because of Jake.

Jake was a bit of a wild character. He was from either New York or Connecticut as I recall, and I think he came from decent money. When I visited his house later that year it was very patrician, for lack of a better word. His father seemed like a super old-school WASP patriarch, and his mother didn’t work I don’t believe. His younger brother held right-wing political views at the time, while Jake was a lefty. This was a point of serious disagreement between the brothers, but other than that the family seemed pretty solid. I believe that his brother has since switched his political views.

I didn’t meet Jake’s family until Thanksgiving however, and got to know him first in the context of the quad. We lived in a dorm called North, on the first floor right by the door. (My buddy John Innes, who joined me at Hamilton from our high school lived in the neighboring dorm Kirkland, and next to that was South.) The door to North would be locked at night, and other dorm folks would regularly misplace their key and crawl through our always open window. Jake and I rarely slept, and I got in the habit of staying up until about five AM. After that I would get a little sleep before first period English class. Then I would attend Geology class, which satisfied some kind of Science graduation credit. For English class I was alert and on top of it, although I was still hand-writing my papers, which changed once I got in the habit of using the computers in the library. English class was small, maybe 12-15 people, whereas Geology was huge and held in a lecture hall. I would go lay down in the back in the aisle and try and sleep. I ended up getting As in almost all my English classes, and a C- in Geology, which was deserved to an extent because of the sleeping. However, the main question on the final was brutal and pretty unfair, which was to draw a seismograph. Literally, draw one, which we had never studied and I did cram for the final. Brutal action. Somehow I still made the honor roll that year, and every year, because of my performance in the humanities.

Jake was an English major as well as far as I recall, I kind of forget, but he knew a lot of the teachers I knew. In any case, we did not bond primarily in the classroom, but in the dorm and then at “Sig,” the frat he was associated with and later pledged. Sig was the alternative frat. I hung out there a bit, but when pledge season started they kind of cracked down on non-pledges attending parties. For Halloween, Jake snuck me in early, and although that night I got a few looks I was good with Jake’s blessing. That night I wore all black with a turtleneck and a paper sign on my back saying “No future for you.” As in the Sex Pistols. I was talking with an older guy, an alum (there were always some alums that hung at the frat parties at Sig) at the party and he said something to the effect of “I like you, but I don’t like your shirt.” OK dude.

That was the same night I believe that inspired the following little ditty I later shared with Jake:

I pissed in the toilet

He pissed in the sink

He said I haven’t got a god above

I haven’t got a drink

Jake later took umbrage with the lines, not the sink part, which was and remains credible, but the god part. I think he is, or was, a believer. In any case, he’s my friend and won’t sue.

I appreciated Jake showing me the ropes at Sig and elsewhere. In the dorm we would play his music–he was into the classics, Beatles and Stones, Kinks, Bowie. We would sing “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and “Come Together,” mostly the former over and over, no doubt to the annoyance of our roommates. Jake also liked The Pogues, and this made me think even more highly of him.

Jake smoked, Marlboro Reds, and I soon started smoking too, the same brand. This was not out of a desire to be a smoker, but rather as a way to keep my hands occupied and look busy at parties, where I had some difficulty mixing. I picked up, or invented, a little trick where I would fold up the flaps of a cigarette pack so they looked like a paper airplane, and then lob the cigs around the room, usually to any girl that wanted one. This got me some attention and some affection, and I kind of became known for the move. It didn’t get me laid, but at least it was something. Jake and I were fast friends, and hung out a lot in the early part of the year, before he began to branch out. Once he started pledging Sig though I saw less of him, naturally enough I guess.

By the time Jake started pledging, and even before, I was spending more time with Ian. Ian was from Boston and his father was a medical doctor. He lived in a nice house in the suburbs–both Jake and Ian had quite a bit more money than I, a common feature at Hamilton where pretty much everyone had money expect me. I was on a pretty decent scholarship, despite my not so impressive high school record, and could not have afforded the school without the scholarship. I visited Ian once or twice I believe in college, and then stayed with his family for a few months in the fall after college, but that’s a story for a future post.

Ian had a massive record collection in his quad, next door to mine as I have said. I liked Jake’s music, especially “Rebel Rebel,” “Come Dancing,” and The Stones, however his selection was somewhat limited. Ian’s was capacious. He was into bands like The Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Ride, and a bunch of other British bands I didn’t know at the time. But he was really into everything. I spent hours in Ian’s room soaking up his music, and my association with him kind of took over where Dyche Alsaker’s left off. I think it was Ian who also introduced me to Luna, who was coming up at the time and is still one of my favorite bands to this day. Later, in senior year I think, Ian and I had a radio show together and one night we got to play records all night long when a few other people canceled suddenly. I would play The Replacements and the Pogues, and Ian would play his music, but I was also getting deep into the 4AD label and bands like Big Star, This Mortal Coil, and a little known band called The Binsey Poplars (who I’m not sure were even on 4AD), named after a Hopkins poem. But my favorite around that time was Nick Drake, who was on Rykodisc.

Drake is now pretty well known, mostly on the back of his song “Pink Moon,” which was featured on a Volkswagen commercial, but back then he was not well known outside serious music circles. I loved his song “Rider on the Wheel,” and was an evangelist for him, telling all and sundry to listen. Most people didn’t, of course, but the whole move was just odd enough to get a little attention, which I was definitely seeking. (Another friend from that time John mentioned to me a few years ago that I would sit on the front steps of his frat in my trench coat and read a book. I don’t really remember this, but if it’s true it was for sure for attention.) I remember one evening Ian had a kind of band that was playing and I “opened” for them. My act was simply talking about Nick Drake, painting him as a forgotten genius, which he was, and pleading with the crowd to listen. It went over pretty well, like I said probably just because it was different.

Later on, mostly the next year I think, Ian and I went to a few shows in Boston, including The Red House Painters, The Fall, and Love Spit Love. Ian would drive, and blast The Pogues with the window down to stay awake on the way home. Before one of these shows we managed to source a little green, which was enjoyable. We would park, illegally, in some lot Ian knew. In the lot, there were rats.

Jake and I were sort of on the same level–both semi-degenerate English majors–but Ian I looked up to. He was definitely the leader in the friendship, although he must have seen something in me because we hung out a fair bit. Ian was also friends with Marc, but he was perhaps closer to another group of guys who lived in two adjacent quads on the third floor. This included John and a guy called Will. I would go up there too, and Will would ask “what Dead do you want to listen to?” I always went with Reckoning because I liked the country-folk sound and the song “It Must Have Been the Roses.” I liked the third floor guys too, especially John.

Next door to Jake and my quad was Adam and Basmo. Adam and Basmo (a nickname) were seniors who for some reason decided to stay in what was basically a freshman dorm. Adam was cool, but pretty grown up. Basmo was still a kid, and loved to get high. Loved to get high. Early on in the year he would come over and ask “anyone want to get stoned and session?” A session, it turned out, was you would smoke, put on The Beatles, and watch Bugs Bunny or something with the sound down. The idea was the music would synch up with the cartoon and it would be hysterical. It totally worked, although I just liked to listen to music and bullshit rather than session. Real heads will remember the session. (Jake told me that sadly Basmo later took his own life as a result of the worsening effects of ef. That was really too bad because Basmo was just a pure open-hearted soul.) So basically we would get stoned when we could, smoke Reds, and stay up all night and listen to music, which was a pretty decent life all in all. Jake and Ian took me in, and made the first part of freshman year so much better in all ways than it would have been if I hadn’t known them.

Dedication: For Ian and Jake, for seeing something in me, and helping make me a little somebody.

to be continued…

Note: If you liked this piece, you may other like the other pieces below in the Hamilton series.

Scenes from Hamilton College III: Sophomore Year I (with cameos from Sonic the Hedgehog, Ani DiFranco, and Candle Time)
Scenes from Hamilton College IV: Sophomore Year II: The Sports Show, Ann, Getting Fired

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On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”

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.

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The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #2 John McAfee

Note: This second installment in The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control) looks at John McAfee, tracing his evolution from software pioneer to global fugitive, crypto evangelist, and online cult figure. The piece emphasizes the improvisational chaos of his later life and contrasts it with more conventional tech figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, arguing that McAfee’s volatility places him in a category of his own. The tone is impressionistic, comparative, and intentionally informal.

Epigraph: 

“I fought the law and the law won…”

— I Fought the Law, The Clash

John McAfee starts in relatively conventional fashion: brilliant programmer, eccentric personality, builds the first widely adopted consumer antivirus software in the late 1980s, and becomes extremely wealthy when McAfee Associates takes off. But even in the early years there’s instability, and a foreshadowing of things to come — drug use, paranoia, erratic business decisions, and a growing anti-authority streak. He sells his stake, drifts through various ventures, and by the late 2000s relocates to Central America, eventually settling in Belize. There he buys beachfront property, hires armed guards, collects dogs, experiments with quasi-scientific projects, and begins acting like a semi-autonomous local strongman. It’s the first fully “outta control” phase: money, isolation, guns, and a man already well inclined toward paranoia.

Then comes the neighbor incident. In 2012, McAfee’s American neighbor, Gregory Faull, is found murdered. McAfee is named a person of interest — never charged — and instead of lying low, he goes fully theatrical. He claims the authorities are targeting him, allegedly evades police by hiding, disguising himself, and moving between safe houses, all while giving interviews and live-tweeting the saga. With girlfriend (later wife) Janice McAfee and various associates in tow, he flees Belize, surfaces in Guatemala, is detained, then ultimately allowed back to the United States. The whole episode is surreal: a tech millionaire allegedly on the run for murder, narrating the chase in real time on social media. It’s not just outta control — it’s performance art.

Back in the U.S., McAfee briefly lands in Florida but quickly re-enters chaos. He promotes cryptocurrencies, launches bizarre tokens, courts publicity, and cultivates a global cult following. He posts paranoid threads about surveillance, claims he lives inside Faraday cages, talks about government plots, and offers wild schemes — including promises to evade arrest by sea, air, or even paragliding into New Mexico to meet with fans! He pops up in unexpected places, from Caribbean boats to European cities, always accompanied by Janice and a rotating cast of loyalists. At one point he tattoos crypto branding onto himself, predicts conspiracies, and positions himself as both fugitive and prophet. The line between performance and belief dissolves completely.

Eventually, legal trouble catches up. U.S. authorities charge him with tax evasion and crypto-related fraud, and he’s arrested in Spain in 2020. From prison he continues tweeting through intermediaries, hinting at conspiracies and insisting he’ll never kill himself. In June 2021, shortly after a Spanish court approves extradition to the United States, McAfee is found dead in his cell — ruled a suicide. His supporters, including Janice, immediately dispute the finding, pointing to earlier posts and tattoos as supposed foreshadowing. The ending is as chaotic as the life: software pioneer turned fugitive, Twitter antihero, crypto evangelist, paranoid showman, and finally a death that only deepened the mythology. Outta control doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Compared to John McAfee, figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates still look almost conventional — even when they drift into odd territory. Musk’s public persona is chaotic in a very modern way: late-night posting, impulsive announcements, awkward humor, and personal-life theatrics. The relationship with Grimes, the bizarre naming of children, and the infamous weekend when Azealia Banks claimed she was stranded at Musk’s house amid talk of LSD and general weirdness all add to the sense of volatility. Then there are the dad-joke moments — hauling a sink into Twitter headquarters and posting “let that sink in,” which is either performance art or just terrible humor. It’s eccentric, sometimes cringe, occasionally outta control — but the companies still run, rockets still launch, and the chaos never fully escapes the bounds of reality.

Gates, by contrast, is a more old-school eccentric. Bill Gates has the reputation of a hyper-competitive young executive who mellowed into a philanthropic technocrat, but the quirks linger. The awkward dancing, the slightly rumpled appearance, the perennial jokes about dandruff — he has always projected a kind of brilliant-but-uncool energy. The later-life turbulence — divorce from Melinda after decades, scrutiny over his contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, and the general aura of a private billionaire navigating public controversy — adds complexity but not chaos. Gates remains structured, Musk volatile, but both operate within functioning systems. McAfee, meanwhile, is something else entirely: not just eccentric but improvisationally unstable, a man who turned paranoia, fugitivity, and spectacle into a lifestyle. Musk may be chaotic, Gates may be awkward, but McAfee is outta control in a different register altogether.

In the end, John McAfee feels more outta control than Keith Raniere, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates — and that’s saying something. Raniere was creepy and manipulative but small; Musk is chaotic but still tethered to real-world outcomes; Gates is eccentric but fundamentally structured. McAfee, by contrast, seemed to live entirely outside normal constraints. Guns, boats, dogs, girlfriends, crypto tokens, Faraday cages, live-tweeting alleged manhunts, promising wild escapes, drifting between countries — the whole thing reads less like a biography and more like a fever dream. He wasn’t just eccentric; he appeared to improvise his life day by day, escalating the spectacle each time. That kind of volatility is rare. It’s also why he became a cult hero: he embodied a fantasy of total freedom, however reckless, however unsustainable.

Years after his death, the mythology hasn’t faded. Supporters still debate the circumstances, quote his tweets, and treat him as a kind of outlaw technologist who refused to play by the rules. Whether you see him as mad genius, performance artist, or cautionary tale, the scale of the chaos is undeniable. There may have been more dangerous figures, more powerful figures, even more tragic figures — but few as consistently, flamboyantly outta control. That’s what makes McAfee a legend. Not admirable, not necessarily likable, but unforgettable. And like all true originals, there probably won’t be another. So RIP, prayers up, and pour one out for a real one, John Motherfucking McAfee.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the other ones in out “You’re Outta Control” series.

On the Most Outta Control People in History (aka You’re Outta Control!): #1 Keith Rainere
The Most Insane People of All Time: #3 Elizabeth Holmes (aka You’re Outta Control!)
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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

Well everyone, today is the day. My first novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea is now available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This one took a while—written in fits and starts, in bars and hotel lobbies here in Kyoto—but it finally found its shape. More than anything, today I just want to thank all the readers of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, wherever you hail from; I’ve always thought of this as an ongoing conversation, and a lot of this book grew out of that exchange.

If you do pick it up, I hope you enjoy the ride—and if it lands for you, a quick review on Amazon would mean a great deal. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Matt

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships IV: Sixers

Note: This short reflection began simply as a reaction to hearing “Sixers” from The Price of Progress by The Hold Steady. Over time, however, it became clear that the song belongs to a larger lineage in Craig Finn’s writing: the quiet, observant songs about adult relationships that never quite come together.

Listeners familiar with Finn’s work will recognize echoes of earlier pieces such as “Spinners,” “Tangletown,” “Esther,” and especially “Jessamine,” where a brief encounter carries emotional weight far beyond its duration. What interests me most about these songs is not romance itself but the fragile moment where two people briefly imagine a connection that may or may not exist.

“Sixers” captures that moment with remarkable economy. Like many of Finn’s best narratives, the drama unfolds not through big revelations but through small gestures, passing observations, and the social physics of an evening that slowly runs out of momentum.

The song feels unmistakably rooted in the atmosphere of the pandemic and its aftermath—a period when many people were cautiously trying to reconnect with the world after long stretches of isolation. In that sense the characters in “Sixers” are not unusual figures but recognizable ones: two lonely people improvising a small pocket of companionship inside a quiet apartment building.

That the connection ultimately proves fleeting is not really the point. The attempt itself—the knock on the door, the drinks, the conversation—is what gives the evening its meaning.

I came to The Hold Steady a little late. Around 2016 I first heard “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis” from the 2008 album Stay Positive—probably through the Spotify algorithm, which occasionally earns its keep. That was the gateway. Even though I had missed the band’s original wave of excitement, I quickly made up for lost time and worked my way through the entire catalog.

A couple years later I went deeper and began listening seriously to the solo records by Craig Finn. That opened another rabbit hole. My early favorite was “Three Drinks,” but over time songs like “A Bathtub in the Kitchen” and “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” began to feel like the real center of gravity in Finn’s songwriting. The solo records are quieter and more novelistic than the Hold Steady albums, and in some ways I’ve come to think they are even stronger.

Around that same time a music-obsessed friend I met at two Hold Steady shows at Brooklyn Bowl told me that if I really wanted to understand Finn’s writing I needed to go back further, to his earlier band Lifter Puller. He was right. Lifter Puller turned out to be a wilder and more manic version of the same storytelling instinct. The songs move faster, the rhymes pile up in breathless clusters, and the characters—people like Nightclub Dwight—feel sketchier and stranger than the ones who would later populate Hold Steady songs about figures like Charlemagne. Tracks like “Nice Nice” and the closing songs on Fiasco are still some of the most exhilarating music Finn ever made.

All of which is to say that Craig Finn has gradually become, for me, the greatest living songwriter—even if I still concede that the all-time crown belongs to Bob Dylan.

What makes Finn particularly fascinating is the emotional terrain he covers. Early Hold Steady songs often dealt with youthful chaos—parties, drugs, Catholic guilt, and the reckless mythology of young adulthood. But over time he has developed another genre that may be even more compelling: songs about messy adult relationships.

These songs usually revolve around people chasing the thrill of a connection even when they suspect, somewhere deep down, that the connection will probably be short-lived. The crush, the fling, the brief dalliance—these impulses are deeply wired into human psychology and deeply embedded in the culture and art we consume. Finn understands that instinct perfectly. His characters repeatedly pursue moments of intimacy that are intense, fleeting, and often slightly ill-advised.

You can hear that theme in songs like Spinners, Tangletown, Esther, and perhaps most perfectly Jessamine. What distinguishes Finn’s writing is the concision with which he captures these emotional situations. Few songwriters are better at compressing an entire relationship dynamic into a handful of lines. In that respect “Jessamine” may be his masterpiece: a small, perfectly observed sketch of longing, timing, and missed possibility.

It is within that lineage that the song “Sixers,” from the 2023 album The Price of Progress, finds its place.

The Price of Progress feels unmistakably like The Hold Steady’s COVID-era record. Finn has described the album as a set of narrative songs about people trying to survive modern life—navigating isolation, economic pressure, technological dependence, and the strange psychological residue of the pandemic years. While the previous album Open Door Policyhad largely been completed before the lockdowns, The Price of Progress was written in the wake of that disrupted period when people were cautiously trying to rebuild their social lives.

“Sixers” captures that atmosphere perfectly.

The entire story unfolds inside an apartment building where two strangers live stacked one above the other. Both are alone. Both are restless. Both are coping with their evenings through small chemical adjustments—beer, pills, and cocktails.

The woman downstairs begins the night with a six-pack from the store down the street and a prescription meant to help her focus her attention. The man upstairs has just returned from another steakhouse dinner with coworkers in asset management, a job that is, as Finn notes dryly, “as thrilling as you’d think.” The two have seen each other before at the mailbox, one of those semi-public urban spaces where strangers develop a faint familiarity without ever truly knowing each other.

The encounter begins with a pretext. She knocks on his door and tells him she thought she heard footsteps upstairs.

The truth, of course, is that she is simply lonely.

Like many Finn songs, the story unfolds in the semi-public spaces of urban life—apartment hallways, mailboxes, shared walls—places where strangers gradually become aware of each other without ever becoming fully connected. Finn has always had the instincts of an urban anthropologist, observing the small rituals and awkward encounters that define city living.

For a while the evening works. They talk about work and school. They discuss how the city has changed. They make drinks in the kitchen—he measures gin while she crushes pills on the counter. At one point he is “muddling the mint,” a beautifully precise detail that captures the strange domestic intimacy that can arise between two people who barely know each other. Soon they are dancing, sending out for takeout, and even sharing inside jokes.

For a few hours the night begins to resemble a small, improvised relationship.

And then comes the hinge of the entire song.

Sunrise into sundown, sending out for takeout, sharing inside jokes now
He finally tries to kiss her and she says that it’s not like that.

With that single line the entire evening collapses.

Everything that seemed like romantic chemistry turns out to have been a misread signal. The connection was real enough to sustain conversation, drinks, dancing, and jokes, but not the kind of connection he thought it was.

One of Finn’s recurring themes is the almost-relationship—encounters where two people briefly imagine a connection that never quite materializes. Songs like Jessamine, Spinners, and Tangletown inhabit that fragile territory. “Sixers” belongs squarely in that tradition.

Finn doesn’t dramatize the moment with an argument or confession. Instead he shows the social physics of awkwardness taking over: everything slows, the conversation falters, and the energy drains from the room.

The next gesture is even more telling.

She cleans off the countertop and says she should probably go.

It is a tiny domestic act, but it carries enormous emotional weight. Cleaning the counter becomes a way of resetting the scene, erasing the traces of the evening before leaving.

Like many Finn songs, “Sixers” tells its story through objects as much as through dialogue. The room fills with small details: the six-pack from the corner store, the pill bottle in the cupboard, the carefully mixed drinks, Sinatra on the stereo, and one quietly devastating observation about the apartment’s décor.

At one point she notices a Nagel poster hanging on the wall in a silver frame and thinks it looks kind of lame.

It’s a perfect Finn detail. In a single line we learn something about the guy’s taste, his slightly square professional aesthetic, and the quiet judgment forming in her mind even while the evening unfolds.

Months later she sees him again in the hallway. This time he is standing with his fiancée, whose name she can’t quite remember—Kelly or Katie.

The moment closes the loop of the story. Whatever possibility once existed between them has long since evaporated. The evening that once felt full of potential turns out to have been only a brief improvisation between two lonely people passing through the same building.

The song ends where it began, with footsteps.

But this time the sound isn’t real.

She thinks she hears footsteps
But now they’re not really there.

The knock on the door that began the story was an attempt at connection. The footsteps at the end are only the ghost of that attempt, echoing in the quiet of her apartment.

Like many of Finn’s best songs about adult relationships, “Sixers” isn’t about catastrophe. Nothing explodes. No one storms out. The drama is smaller and more recognizable than that.

It is simply about lonely people improvising connection in a time of trouble.

And sometimes getting it slightly wrong.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like the essays below which also deal with the singer-songwriter Craig Finn and his band The Hold Steady.

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine
Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties
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On the Other City

Note: This piece grew out of a long fascination of mine with what might be called the “night economy” — the network of bartenders, servers, managers, taxi drivers, and late-shift workers who keep a city alive after most people have gone home. If the daytime city is governed by office hours and commuter rhythms, the nighttime city runs on a different clock entirely.

The two figures mentioned here, Haku and Haru, are part of that world in Kyoto. Haku runs the bar at ING and seems to operate on a schedule that would puzzle most daylight citizens, opening in the evening and closing well into the small hours while somehow producing food, music, and atmosphere in a space not much larger than a good-sized living room. Haru manages a shisha lounge in eastern Gion and moves easily between the daytime and nighttime rhythms of that neighborhood, which has its own distinct ecosystem of bars, touts, and late-night wanderers.

The small bar Ishimaru Shoten, tucked down an alley off Pontocho in the Kiyamachi district, serves in the essay as a kind of neutral ground — one of those places where the various inhabitants of the nocturnal city briefly cross paths once their shifts end.

The central idea is simple enough: most cities contain two cities. The first is the one that tourists and office workers see during the day. The second comes into view only after midnight, when the people who keep the lights on, the drinks pouring, and the plates spinning begin their own quieter rounds.

Epigraph:

Last night, I told a stranger all about you
They smiled patiently with disbelief
I always knew you would succeed no matter what you tried
And I know you did it all
In spite of me

Morphine, In Spite of Me

Most people believe a city goes to sleep around midnight. This is not true. Around that time a city simply changes populations.

The day city winds down: office workers, shopkeepers, commuters heading home, lights switching off floor by floor. But another population wakes up. The bartenders. The shisha managers. The taxi drivers. The people who work the strange hours when the streets are quieter but the human drama is often louder.

This is the other city.

If you spend enough nights wandering around it, you begin to recognize its citizens. They are the people who actually know how the place works after midnight.

One of them is Haku.

Haku runs the bar at ING. He opens around seven in the evening and closes somewhere between three and four in the morning. Prep starts around six. By the time the first customers wander in, the night has already begun for him.

He has long greying hair and rotates through a collection of Rolling Stones T-shirts, something like twenty-eight of them. I have never seen him wear anything else. He smokes constantly, drinks Sapporo if he is drinking at all, and otherwise survives on black coffee.

Somehow he produces a full menu in a kitchen that appears to consist primarily of a Bunsen burner and sheer stubbornness.

Haku’s bar has rules. No Japanese music is the main one. The other rule is that the bar itself is reserved for singles. Groups can sit elsewhere. The bar is for individuals who have come out into the night alone.

But Haku’s real gift is music. He reads the room the way a card player reads a table.

If the crowd is German he might throw on Rammstein. If Scandinavians wander in the speakers might suddenly fill with black metal. Australians get The Saints. If I’m there he might put on My Morning Jacket. The world rotates through the speakers depending on who happens to be occupying the stools that night.

Simply and totally the original man.

Another citizen of the other city is Haru.

Haru manages the shisha lounge in eastern Gion, a part of town where the nightlife becomes a little more ambiguous. The streets there are full of micro-touts, men and women both, gently trying to guide passersby into Thai or Japanese dancer clubs. Small space heaters glow outside doorways and mama-sans smile from behind them like patient spiders.

I never go into those places, though the invitations are often persuasive.

Haru opens the shisha lounge most days at noon sharp. If she is not there, someone named B. or a long-haired young guy handles things until she arrives. She tends the charcoal, mixes my Malibu Milk, and quietly extends the session when the official time runs out.

She knows my habits well enough by now that when I head up the stairs she doesn’t assume I am leaving. She knows I am just stepping outside to smoke.

For a long time she existed in my mind simply as the shisha girl, one of the many figures who keep the other city functioning. But then one night I ran into her somewhere unexpected.

The place was Ishimaru Shoten, a tiny late-night bar down an alley just west of Pontocho in the heart of Kiyamachi. Outside the entrance hang bright red, green, and blue lamps that glow like a small carnival in the dark.

I first discovered the place at four in the morning on a very long night. I was broke that evening, absolutely skint, and there was a very aggressive Japanese guy at the bar who clearly believed the entire establishment belonged to him.

The bar woman, who is about forty-five and still hot as blazes, was batting her eyes at me with what seemed like professional enthusiasm. Meanwhile I realized with growing clarity that I did not actually have the money to pay for the large bottle of beer I had just ordered.

But men are predictable creatures.

I understood immediately that if I played my cards right the territorial guy would buy the drink for me. So I joked with him, gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, made it clear I recognized him as the reigning emperor of the room. He razzed me a little but saw that I was no threat to his throne.

Sure enough, he covered the beer.

I stumbled home to the Royal Park Hotel on Sanjo Street as the sky was turning pale, crashing into bed around five-thirty in the morning.

Weeks later I returned to Ishimaru and found Haru sitting there.

I teased her gently about sometimes opening the shisha lounge five or ten minutes late when she bikes over from home. I suggested she must be hungover. She laughed, not the polite laugh people sometimes use for customers but a bright, real laugh.

She said she was happy to see me.

And that was when I learned her name. Haru.

We talked for a while. I drank a White Russian and ate dashi maki while she sipped something that might have been shochu or nihon-shu. I felt a strange rush of adrenaline the whole time, those goosebumps that run up both arms when the night suddenly opens into possibility.

Not necessarily romantic possibility. Just the larger sense that anything could happen.

Anything can come.

After twenty or thirty minutes she said goodnight and promised we would meet there again sometime. We did run into each other once more about a week and a half later, though the evening remained just as light and brief as the first.

But something had shifted.

She was no longer simply the shisha worker in my mental map of the city. She was Haru, a fellow traveler in the other city.

And that is the thing about the people who live their lives after midnight. They know parts of the city the rest of us never really see. They watch the celebrations and the arguments, the flirtations and the quiet breakdowns. They see who walks home alone and who finds someone to share the long dark streets.

Every city has two maps.

The one everyone uses during the day.

And the other one that only appears after midnight.

Dedication:

For the men and women of the night. Who keep the drinks coming and the plates spinning. It’s a rocky world, and you rock it baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the two essays below, which also feature Kyoto and Osaka nightlife in all it’s beautiful glory.

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl
The Night of Fucking Adam
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On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians II

Note: This is the second piece in our series “On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians.” You can find the first installment here.

The encounters described here span more than thirty years and several cities — from a first arena concert in Pullman, Washington in 1991 to small club shows in Cambridge, Osaka, and Kyoto over the decades that followed. As with many memories of live music, the exact setlists and dates blur, but the rooms themselves — the sounds, the atmosphere, the strange and fleeting meetings between artists and audiences — remain vivid. These sketches attempt to capture a few of those moments as they were experienced at the time.

Epigraph

No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd

In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud

— Dire Straits, “Skateaway”

Live music produces strange meetings. Sometimes you meet the musicians themselves. More often you meet a moment — a room, a sound, a feeling that sticks with you for decades while entire years of ordinary life quietly disappear.

Here are a few such encounters.

I. Initiation

My first real concert was the On Every Street tour in 1991.

The band was Dire Straits, the venue was Pullman, Washington, and the company was the usual Spokane crew: Seth, Innes, Kelly.

I was the biggest fan in the car by far. The others liked the band well enough but I was the one who had studied the records, who knew the guitar parts, who was ready for the moment when the lights dropped and the first notes hit the arena. This was the On Every Street tour, which turned out to be their final record.

They played everything: Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, Sultans of Swing. It was a great show, and one of their last before retirement, though at the time I had no real way to judge such things. It was simply enormous — lights, volume, spectacle. I bought the black and blue tour shirt and wore it for five years.

At the time I thought concerts were supposed to be like that: huge, polished, and far away.

I would later learn otherwise.

II. Revelation

Several years later, during the Hamilton years, I saw Red House Painters at the Middle East in Cambridge.

I went with Ian. The room was small, maybe a few hundred people at most. Nothing about it resembled the arena in Pullman. And then, near the end of the set, Mark Kozelek began playing “Little Drummer Boy.” It lasted nine minutes. You could hear a pin drop in the room.

No spectacle. No lights. Just absolute concentration from everyone present. When the final notes faded the silence lingered for a moment before the applause came.

Afterward Ian and I drove back toward New York through the cold night with the windows cracked open, heaters flying out into the darkness, and Hell’s Ditch blasting through the car stereo to keep us awake.

That was the night I realized concerts could be something else entirely.

III. Chaos

Not every show produces reverence.

I once saw The Fall with Ian as well. The band’s leader, Mark E. Smith, seemed to be operating in his traditional mode of total hostility. The set was short — twenty-eight minutes by my estimate. Ian later checked the official record and insisted it was forty-three. Either way it felt brief and volatile. Smith barked into the microphone, glared at the band, and treated the entire enterprise with the air of someone barely tolerating the existence of the audience.

Which, to be fair, was exactly what many people had come to see.

IV. Theatre

The strangest performance I ever witnessed may have been Cat Power at Club Quattro in Osaka.

The evening began badly. An opening act — a woman in what appeared to be a fairy costume — sat at the piano and played for what felt like an eternity. Forty-five minutes at least. Perhaps longer. By the end of it the audience was openly confused.

Then Cat Power appeared.

Or rather she refused to appear in the conventional sense. Instead of remaining on the stage she wandered through the venue with a handheld microphone, singing and rapping while walking amongst the crowd, occasionally placing an arm around a patron or leaning against the bar.

At one point she came right up to where I was standing near the back rail and sang a line or two before drifting off again into the room.

The entire show felt less like a concert than a piece of improvised theatre.

V. Ritual

A few years later I saw Damo Suzuki at Club Metro in Kyoto. Damo had once fronted the legendary German band CAN, but this night bore no resemblance to those recordings. Nothing recognizable from the catalog appeared. And here he stood, just a few feet away from the audience with long black-and-grey hair flowing, bellowing and chanting over a constantly shifting improvisational band.

It was less a performance than a ritual.

Damo passed away not long ago. RIP and prayers up. I’m grateful I saw him when I did.

VI. Canada Night

Not all memorable shows are mystical.

Sometimes they’re simply loud.

One such evening occurred at Club Quattro in Osaka when Broken Social Scene and Death From Above 1979 came through town.

The Canadian ambassador was present and delivered a brief speech before the set explaining that Death From Above 1979 represented a fine example of Canadian enterprise because they were “only two men making so much noise.”

The room was packed with Canadian expats and the atmosphere was celebratory chaos. The ambassador was probably correct.

VII. Breakdown

Not every concert goes well.

I once saw Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the small Kyoto venue Taku Taku. Something had clearly gone wrong with the lineup. The guitarist appeared to be brand new and could barely navigate the chords.

Will Oldham tried to push through but quickly grew frustrated and began openly calling the guitarist out from the stage. It was uncomfortable for everyone involved.

The show never recovered.

VIII. Redemption

Fortunately the story has a better ending.

Some years later I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy again, this time at the beautiful Kyoto venue Urbanguild and everything worked great. Low benches and tables filled the room, Heartland beer bottles glowed green under the lights, and the band played a relaxed, confident set drawn mostly from the Bonnie “Prince” Billy catalog with a few Palace songs mixed in.

Opening the evening was an instrumental group called Bitchin Bajas whose sound reminded me faintly of early Phosphorescent if Phosphorescent had chosen to make instrumental records. After the show I found myself talking with three members of the band while they drank beer and ate fries. They were humble, friendly, and slightly surprised that anyone in Kyoto knew who they were. We talked for a while about touring and the constant challenge of trying to make a living as working musicians. Eventually the conversation drifted off and the room began to empty.

The music was over. The musicians were just people again, finishing their drinks and preparing to move on to the next city. And that, in the end, may be the most interesting encounter of all

Dedication

For live music fans everywhere. My true people. I love you baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essay below on the four time I met Yo La Tengo. Happy reading!

On the Four Times I Met Yo La Tengo
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Shotgun in Seth’s Ford Explorer

Note: This piece takes place in Spokane, Washington in the fall of 1991, during our senior year at St. George’s School. CDs were still a relatively new luxury item for teenagers, Zip’s runs counted as real excursions across town, and a hunter green Explorer in the school parking lot could serve as the center of an entire small social world.

Epigraph:

Out with the posse on a night run
Girls on the corner, so let’s have some fun
Donald asked one if she was game
Back Alley Sally was her name
She moved on the car and moved fast
On the window pressed her ass
All at once we heard a crash
Donald’s dick had broke the glass

Ice T

Seth drove a green Ford Explorer, which meant two things: he was always the driver, and John Innes almost always called shotgun.

Ours was a class of twenty-eight boys at St. George’s School, which meant the social landscape was less a battlefield than a small archipelago of cliques. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone more or less supported everyone else. Still, there were natural groupings. Seth, Innes, and I spent a good deal of time together, with Kelly sometimes orbiting the car and Richard Barkley frequently around as well.

The Explorer usually lived in the SGS parking lot behind the lower school. During the day it sat there waiting for the moment seniors could leave campus, which we could do whenever we wanted. When that moment came, Seth’s Jeep became a kind of small republic on wheels.

There were rules, or something close to rules. Seth drove. Innes called shotgun. He cared about it the most and therefore usually got it. Occasionally Barkley or I would challenge him, which would inevitably produce an argument about whether the call had been made properly or whether the timing had been unfair. The exact legal framework of shotgun was never fully settled, but the outcomes were usually predictable.

Inside the Explorer there were CDs everywhere. Not in a messy way—Seth kept the car pretty well—but there were dozens of them, probably stored in one of those large CD wallets that seemed to exist in every car in the early nineties. Seth would sometimes come back from Hastings with six or eight discs at a time. I remember watching those purchases with something close to disbelief. I could rarely afford a CD myself, so when I did manage to acquire something like Tindersticks or Billy Bragg’s Spy vs. Spy, it was a very big deal.

The music rotation in the Explorer was remarkably tolerant. Seth tended to favor Judas Priest and Metallica, while Innes leaned toward Ice-T. Joe Tyllia loved Cat Stevens and so Cat Stevens appeared frequently. I personally preferred Dire Straits at the time, which never quite made the regular rotation, so I generally waited for Warren Zevon or Cat Stevens to come back around. Nobody vetoed anyone else’s music. Whatever disc was in play generally stayed there.

The Explorer had a few regular destinations. State B basketball games were one. Another was Zip’s on the north side of town. Seniors could leave campus whenever they liked, and sometimes that meant simply deciding that a run across Spokane for burgers was necessary. Seth’s house was another stop, as was Hastings, where the CD acquisitions occurred.

Occasionally the driving extended further into the South Hill at night. Sometimes we would pass near Manito Park, though I remember doing those wandering drives more often with a slightly different crew—Dyche, Jonah, Karin, and Lisa. Once that group went to a show by They Might Be Giants, and afterward Kelly reported that the band had stiffed the opening act and paid them only ten dollars. Kelly knew this because his cousin was in the opening band.

The one time I ever took shotgun from John Innes without calling it came on the ride home from the state cross-country meet during our senior year. Our team had finished second by a single point, which felt at the time like the most unfair outcome imaginable. James Johnson had been our first runner, Cam Turner second, and I was third.

When we piled into the Explorer for the three-hour drive back to Spokane, I simply grabbed the seat. No call. No discussion. Just took it. And for that ride home I ran the decks.

For a while Seth’s Explorer was simply part of the landscape of our lives. It sat behind the lower school during the day, appeared at the Coleman house west of the South Hill at night, and carried us between games, fast-food runs, music stores, and wherever else we decided to go.

Then, like most small countries of teenage life, it quietly disappeared

Dedication: For my homies.