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On the Periscope Platform and Annie Hardy’s “Band Car”

Epigraph:

“Wake me up before California
Darling boy I’ve never known ya”

— Annie Hardy

1. Periscope (2018): Ambient Human Contact

In the fall of 2018, before TikTok Live and before Instagram learned how to professionalize everything, there was Periscope.

It was a live-video app owned by Twitter, but it never really felt like social media. It felt more like radio—with pictures. You could open it and see who was live anywhere in the world, zoom in on a city, drop into a stream, leave, move on. The scale was small enough that you could more or less take in the entire active population at any given moment. There was no sense of infinite scroll. The world was navigable.

It was also completely unpoliced. People streamed whole songs, movie clips, televisions playing in the background, themselves half-asleep or wandering around or doing nothing at all. No one cared. There were no warnings, no copyright bots, no friction. It was a free-for-all in the literal sense: free time, free speech, free form.

What Periscope allowed—what it uniquely allowed—was time. Long stretches of it. Silence. Repetition. Boredom. People would just sit there and talk, or not talk, or smoke on their porch and complain about their day. That kind of stream simply does not exist on Instagram Live. Instagram demands a reason. Periscope didn’t.

I loved it because it matched my temperament. I wasn’t looking to build anything. I wasn’t trying to grow an audience or perform a version of myself. I liked cursing around on the app, listening, occasionally speaking back. It was ambient human contact: voices moving through time, present but not demanding anything in return.

Most people didn’t want that. Periscope never offered a ladder—no clear path to recognition, no reliable virality, no payoff for effort. It didn’t protect users from themselves, and it didn’t compress experience into highlights. For most people, that felt pointless. For a few of us, it felt like oxygen.

I didn’t think of it as important while it was happening. It was just there, like a short-lived commons where people killed time together. Looking back, I’m amazed it existed at all.

2. Time, Leave, and the Split Feed

From September 2018 through February 2019, I was on leave from my school. The reasons sit elsewhere and don’t need explaining here. What mattered was that, for once, I had time—real time, not time carved out between obligations. I was based in Kyoto, and in October and November I spent long stretches staying in a hotel in Akasaka, moving back and forth between the two cities.

At the same moment Periscope entered my life, I started a new blog, The Kyoto Kibbitzer. The original idea was simple: walk around, notice things, write about bars, art, neighborhoods. Periscope became a sister project—not an escape from writing, but a parallel way of paying attention. One was private and slow; the other was live and provisional. They fed each other.

I quickly settled into two distinct kinds of streams.

During the day, I walked. Downtown Kyoto, north Kyoto, sometimes Tokyo. I talked, observed, played music, responded to comments. I never put my face on camera—not once. The camera always faced outward, toward streets, storefronts, light, movement. I got a simple phone holder so I could film without fuss. The stream wasn’t about me; it was about what I was seeing.

At night, I streamed from my desk in the upstairs room of my house. I usually stood, like a DJ or a lecturer, sitting only when I was reading something. The night streams were almost entirely art: music, films, writing. I’d play songs and talk about them, read long passages from essays or movie reviews, sometimes even play sections of films on my laptop and film the screen. It was all technically a grey area, but Periscope didn’t care, and neither did anyone watching.

Once I read an entire Roger Ebert essay on air—an interview he’d done with Lee Marvin—and laughed out loud the whole way through. “If I want to be an icon I’ll do it my own way, baby,” Marvin said. Mostly, that was the night feed: attention without urgency, commentary without stakes. Occasionally I’d take it back outside to a bar, or, early on, stay up all night wandering and streaming, the phone dying fast enough that I had to carry two battery packs. But those were exceptions. The form settled quickly.

The split mattered. Day feeds faced the world. Night feeds faced ideas. Both were ways of being present without self-display. Together, they created a rhythm that made Periscope feel less like a platform and more like a place of its own.

3. A Small World with Names

The audience was small, but it existed.

A few people watched consistently. My friend Andrew, who lives in Japan but not Kyoto, would sometimes tune in live or catch the replay later. John Innes watched as much as he could, and sometimes his wife, Kristi, would drop in too. When John commented, I’d usually stop whatever I was doing and talk with him at length. Conversation mattered because it was rare.

There were others who hovered at the edges. A French guitarist would sometimes watch silently for long stretches. Later, Mela would too, though I watched her far more than she watched me—mostly because she streamed for even longer than I did. And then there were the Periscope regulars: people who drifted in and out, stayed for a few minutes, disappeared, reappeared weeks later. That was the rhythm.

Periscope allowed replays, which changed the feel of everything. Not all attention was synchronous. A stream could be watched hours later, like a letter someone opened when they had time. It softened the sense of performance. You weren’t always talking to people; sometimes you were just sending something out into the day.

What mattered wasn’t numbers. Most streams—mine included—had only a handful of viewers at any given time. Even the people who seemed central to the platform often streamed to three or four names. The world was small enough that you could recognize it. You learned who was usually awake when you were. You noticed when someone stopped streaming altogether.

Because of that scale, recognition carried weight. When someone you knew appeared in the comments, it felt like a real arrival. The back-and-forth could stretch without interruption. There was no pressure to keep things moving, no sense that you were losing an audience if you paused to respond.

It didn’t feel lonely in the usual way. It felt communal in miniature. A village square that never got crowded enough to become anonymous.

4. Killing Time Together

I was somewhat lonely during that period, and looking for human companionship. Not intensity, not rescue—just being awake with other people. Periscope worked because it was like radio, only you could talk back. You could toggle around the world and find whatever level of interaction you wanted, then move on without consequence.

Some streams were playful and I would play along. There was a beautiful Russian woman who spoke mostly in Russian and replied to my comments in halting English. She’d do things like eat honey off a spoon, theatrically, and I’d type something juvenile and she’d play along too. It sounds silly, and it was, but it was also light. Once we talked longer and she told me she wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t afford it. I’d guess she was in her mid-to-late twenties. After that, I drifted away. The language barrier was real; the connection couldn’t sustain itself. That was normal.

There was a French guitarist I watched early on. He was very good—technically accomplished, friendly—and he seemed to have infinite time. He’d sit in my stream silently for long stretches, just there. Periscope people had time; that was one of the defining traits. After a few weeks I stopped watching him. Not because anything was wrong, but because it was all one thing. Skill without movement. No arc. Attention drifted, and that was allowed.

Other streams were even more minimal. I remember a woman in Oklahoma who would sit on her porch, rip bongs, and talk about her day. That was it. No premise, no performance. Just presence. That kind of stream doesn’t exist on Instagram Live. Periscope tolerated people doing nothing in public.

There was also Max, a trans woman from eastern Canada. She complained about her mother, about being broke. She usually had no viewers. Every time I came into her stream she lit up. Once I sent her fifty dollars for an art commission, and she reacted like she’d won the lottery. It wasn’t about the money. It was about being seen. On Periscope, small gestures carried disproportionate weight because the economy of attention was so thin.

People weren’t looking for transformation. They were killing time. Talking. Waiting. Passing hours together across time zones. The platform allowed that without apology. It was so free-form that it’s hard to explain now without it sounding unreal.

But that was the baseline. That was what “normal” looked like.

5. Mela: Process Recognizes Process

I didn’t find Mela right away. It wasn’t until mid-October that her stream appeared on my map. By then I already knew how Periscope worked—what it rewarded, what it ignored, what kinds of attention lasted.

The first stream I remember, she was just walking around New York City. Not driving. Walking. Taking stairs. Cutting through neighborhoods. Letting the city decide the route. Almost immediately I felt a shock of recognition: she’s me. Not biographically, not emotionally—procedurally. We were using the same method.

She would ask, “left or right?” I’d type “left,” and she’d take a left. That was it. No drama. No explanation. A shared orientation, moment to moment. I’d stay with her for hours, wandering the city together at walking speed.

People who showed up looking for something else—someone conventionally attractive to perform, flirt, deliver a payoff—would drift off. The stream filtered itself. What remained was patient, non-demanding attention. Process over outcome.

She was in her mid-to-late thirties and had worked in film props on sets around New York. At the time she was on sick leave after a back injury, which explained the free time. She streamed from her apartment, sometimes from a friend’s place she was house-sitting, and often from the streets and trains. The life context was legible. Nothing felt invented for the stream.

Eventually we connected on Instagram, but that’s not the story here. What mattered was simpler: real, undemanding, non-sexual attention feels good. In a micro-attention economy, it feels enormous.

Mela mattered because she showed that Periscope could sustain healthy, lateral connection—companionship without escalation, presence without claim. That mattered later, because it proved the platform itself wasn’t the problem. It was capable of holding something gentle and durable.

That made what came next easier to recognize as different.

6. Giant Drag (Came Late, Stayed Forever)

I came to Giant Drag late.

I first heard them sometime around 2015, years after their debut. The song was “Kevin Is Gay,” and I heard it on All Things Considered on NPR. I remember stopping short. It sounded like shoegaze, but with attitude—guitars that rang and crunched at the same time, a voice that was sharp, funny, unsentimental. I thought: who on earth is this woman?

I bought the CD immediately. The record was Hearts and Unicorns. There was “This Isn’t It,” “Slayer,” and a sense that this wasn’t a novelty discovery. It didn’t feel like a phase. It felt like something I’d been missing and had finally caught up to. Ten years later, the music is still with me.

Learning afterward that the album came out in 2005 only clarified things. I hadn’t encountered Giant Drag as part of a moment or a scene. There was no social reinforcement, no sense of being early or late. The music arrived on its own terms and stayed because it deserved to. It became part of my listening life in a quiet, durable way.

That matters here, because when Annie Hardy later appeared on Periscope, she didn’t arrive as a stranger or as “a streamer.” Her voice was already familiar to me. Not biographically, not personally—but aesthetically. I knew the intelligence. I knew the precision. I knew the attitude. What I didn’t expect was where or how I’d encounter it again.

At the time, none of this felt connected. It only looks that way in retrospect. Back then, Giant Drag was just music I loved, and Periscope was just a place people killed time together. I had no reason to think those two tracks would ever overlap.

Then they did.

7. Band Car → Band House

Because the number of active streams was limited, as I have said, I spent a lot of time just cruising around the map. One night in September 2018, I landed on Annie Hardy without looking for her. The stream was called Band Car, which turned out to be exactly what it sounded like.

She was driving. Talking. Rapping. Singing into some kind of vocoder or effects chain. Swearing at other drivers. There was no Giant Drag material, no backstory, no explanation. She’d say, “Give me three words,” and then build a rap off whatever came in. I gave her words. Over and over. It never went stale. The language was filthy—relentlessly so—but also precise. The filth wasn’t sloppy; it landed because it was aimed.

I watched every day. She streamed every day. She had no job and very little money, and she drove for hours, talking, rapping, improvising, stopping occasionally to run into Home Depot or some other errand. I’d wait. Dead air didn’t bother me. This was how Periscope worked.

Sometimes she used gay slurs, and I balked internally. That wasn’t my thing at all. But the space itself was unfiltered by design, and she used every word under the sun. I didn’t intervene or moralize. I noted it and stayed. Admiration and discomfort existed side by side.

I talked about her on my own stream. I told people she was the best thing on Periscope. I couldn’t believe I had such unfettered, generous access to a high-level artist just living inside her process. There were others watching too, but not many. I was probably her biggest fan, or one of a few. In a micro-attention economy, that mattered.

One night, very late in Los Angeles, I’d been with her for hours. The audience thinned until it was just me. She parked the car, got out, and said, almost casually, “Do you want to do band house?” It was a first. I said of course.

She went into her garage, then into a music room. There was a piano. She asked, “What do you want to hear?” I said how about After the Gold Rush. She sat down without ceremony and played the entire song. No sheet music. No warm-up. She hit the high parts cleanly. Musicians have an astonishing memory for songs, and she had it in full.

It was the greatest musical moment of my life, bar none. The only thing that comes close is hearing Spencer Krug play “Julia with Blue Jeans On” at Urbanguild in Kyoto. This was different. This was private, unadvertised, unrepeatable. When she finished, she said, “Okay, that’s band house,” and wrapped it up.

No encore. No processing. Just the sound, then silence.

That was the miracle. And it was already complete.

8. Running Its Course

In December, I used Periscope again in New York and Boston, mostly with Mela. The rhythm was familiar by then—long stretches of time, nothing urgent, companionship without demands. One night in a Boston hotel room, where I was staying to see Phosphorescent and Jay Som, I streamed the entire film Michael Clayton from my laptop. It was a grey area, as everything on Periscope was. She watched the whole thing with me, commenting occasionally—“bad guy, ooh”—the way someone does when they’re present but not trying to perform being present. It was fun. That was enough.

After that, things ended. Not abruptly. Not painfully. Periscope had simply ran its course.

Mela moved to Oklahoma and stopped streaming. I stopped too. The app thinned out. People disappeared. The small world became smaller and then, effectively, gone. There was no sense of loss that needed narrating, no aftermath to dramatize. The conditions that made Periscope feel possible—time, openness, a tolerance for doing nothing in public—shifted. Life resumed its usual density.

Looking back, what remains isn’t a lesson or a warning. It’s a memory of a brief commons where attention wasn’t monetized and presence didn’t have to justify itself. A place where someone could play a song once, perfectly, for one person, and then stop. And that could be enough.

That was Periscope. And then it wasn’t.

Dedication:

For the micro-attention economy. I had a total blast. And for Annie and Mela. Babes I love you both is very much.

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On the Shisha Girls and Shisha Boys of Kyoto: Field Observations

Epigraph: Where is my nurse, my nurse with the pills? — Ryan Adams

When the world is too sharp, too fast, too opinionated, I do not go to bars.
I go underground.

Down the low-lit stairs in Gion — where tourists drift past overhead and never notice the door — there is a basement shisha den that looks closed even when it isn’t. Noon to 3:00 a.m. daily, 5:00 a.m. on weekends. A place you would miss unless you were meant to find it. Shoes off at the threshold. Warm air, low music, no urgency of any kind. Just couches — three of them — a handful of curtained recesses where people lie fully horizontal like monks or patients or dreamers, and a second floor with several cubbies up steep wooden stairs.

I take a couch, the one I always take — long enough to fully stretch out. Because I am a serious regular, the staff will bump me ahead of others in line to make sure I get my couch. I never asked for this privilege; the staff simply decided on my behalf.

Shisha here is not an accessory; it is the medium. A cappuccino-cinnamon-berry bowl — number four, Turkish — smooth draw, no burn, warmed through cassis if I want the smoke heavier on the lungs. One gin and tonic, maybe two over the course of a session and a glass of water. After thirty minutes, I’m steady. After two hours, I am gone — dissolved but aware, body slow, mind open like a lens on long exposure. Six hours is half a day and feels like two minutes.

This is how I work. I write here. I talk on the phone here. Parallel processing is possible here in a way the world never allows — one half of the brain in conversation, the other spilling sentences into the phone notes without friction. Time softens. Thoughts move without edges. I do not come here to escape the world. I come here to metabolize it.

And always — there are Shisha Girls, and occasionally Shisha Boys.

The girls are not bartenders. They are not hostesses. They are ritual nurses, the so-called nurse with the goods.

The first one I met — call her B. — recognized me early as a serious regular. Light build, hair tied back, barefoot, comfortable like someone who lives inside her own body without apology. She bends into the couch alcove, refills the charcoal, and takes two or three tester pulls through the mouthpiece she wears on a lanyard. That detail matters: they share your bowl to tend it properly. Their breath meets your breath. Their lungs judge the temperature. They diagnose by inhalation.

No plastic tips if you don’t want them — the gold mouthpiece direct to mouth, warm, personal, intimate in the way only unspoken trust is intimate.

K. is older — early thirties — and the one who opens at precisely noon. I give her three or four minutes to descend the stairs and switch on the lights. She’s the quiet boss, not by authority, but by ritual competence. She alone recommended berry + cinnamon when I asked for something special. She knows my bowl, my drink, my couch, my tempo. When she works, I settle in with the confidence of someone returning to a familiar bed in a hotel room booked under a different name.

There are Shisha Boys too. One rotates charcoal with the same practiced inhalation, hair slicked back, present but not overly personal. Another is stationed at the front like soft-security — staff-adjacent — always smoking, rarely speaking, cashing out customers with a nod. They do not socialize. They do not pitch stories. They do not extract biography. You might visit for years and never know their names, and this is deliberate.

In bars, the first currency traded is information: What’s your name? Where are you from?What do you do? Identity is the entry ticket; personality is the product.

But shisha does not trade identity. Shisha trades nervous systems.

You don’t bond through story —you bond through shared respiration.

The intimacy is somatic, not verbal. They watch breath, not face. They regulate heat, not conversation. They calibrate you the way a nurse adjusts an IV — quietly, competently, without inserting themselves. Bars escalate. Shisha deepens. Bars push energy outward. Shisha draws it inward like a tide at night. In bars, you hold yourself up. In Shisha, the room holds you.

After three or six hours, only one thing pulls me back to the surface — nicotine. Shisha gives without demanding, but you are not allowed to smoke a cigarette. A single drawback. So I rise, shoes on, payment made, nod to K. or B. or whichever quiet caretaker tended the bowl. I climb the dim stairs and push into daylight or dark, immediately searching for a legal ashtray on the street.

The re-entry cigarette is the punctuation mark. Shisha is the sentence.

Why do I go? Because here I can chill, dissolve, write, speak, breathe. Because every part of the ritual feels earned — the bowl, the gin, the charcoal refreshes taken communally through their own mouthpieces. Because I belong here in a way that requires nothing.

They are not my friends. They are not therapists. They are not bartenders.

They are my extended other family of lungs and smoke, a household without biography, without narrative — only breath.

Dedication: For B. and K., sneaky babes both of them.

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On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl)

Epigraph:

Heather, remind me how this ends

Dolorean

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

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

She and I ended up in the hallway.

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

Her name was Blythe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication


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

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

Mariko

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

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I Have a Crush on Katie Park From Bad Moves

Epigraph:

Could you read between the lines
Or was it just so obvious?

Bad Moves

New Note: This is an older piece, however I am re-releasing it here. I recently shared a longer piece about some aspects of my life, including, quite centrally, music, so this seemed like a good time.

As with anyone’s story, there are layers to mine. One pretty big layer is when in 2018 I traveled to New York/ Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. to see the band Phosphorescent. I saw Phosphorescent four times total on their C’est La Vis tour and they were amazing. I bought a sweatshirt from the merch table and the merch gal told Matthew Houck, the lead singer, about me because I told her I’d come all the way from Japan to see the band. He came down from the stage and gave me a big bearhug, not once but twice at two of the shows. He knew I was going through it, and I needed a hug. He’d been through it too, big time, before and when he was writing Muchacho a few years prior.

As I was seeing Phosphorescent I also took the opportunity to see a few other bands. I saw Yo La Tengo twice at the Borwey Ballroom, Jay Som in Boston, and most memorably The Hold Steady twice at the Brooklyn Bowl where they were playing a three night set. The opener for The Hold Steady was a band called Bad Moves. I had never heard of this band, however, and I don’t say this lightly, they put on a better show than The Hold Steady. Now an opener should try to do just this, to “steal the show,” so to speak. A Bad Moves stole it big time. I was enraptured by their lead singer Katie Park, and met her at the merch table which she was running, which is recounted below. My friend I met at the shows, Austin, pushed me to check out their album Tell No One in depth, which I did, and I loved it. On the train from Washington D.C. back to New York I wrote the first version of this piece, which has been fairly extensively edited since then. This is my sneaky favorite piece, maybe not my best, but you can be the judge. Here it is:

I love live music. More than that, I love live music fans, and music fans in general. This piece is basically about being a music fan, and was inspired when I saw the band Bad Moves open for The Hold Steady in 2018 at the Brooklyn Bowl. They were touring on the back of their first full length, Tell No One. While at the Bad Moves/ Hold Steady show a music geek introduced me to a band called Swearin’. Swearin’ has been around a little longer than Bad Moves, and in 2018 had released Fall Into the Sun. The two bands don’t really sound all that much alike (Bad Moves is basically “Power Pop” and Swearin’ is basically “Indie”) but they write somewhat similarly about matters of love and friendship.

Let’s play a game that we live in a world where a record by a band like Bad Moves or Swearin’ would produce radio hits. I want to live in that world. Or maybe I don’t; maybe it’s better for everyone that bands like these stay a little more on the DL. Let’s first take a look at Fall Into the Sun. (Swearin’s frontwoman is Allison Crutchfield, and the band is mostly her baby.) My pick for the single would be the lead off track, “Big Change.” 

The song opens with this soft-spoken reminiscence — basement shows, empty cans, old romances, long nights of half-drunken idealism. Crutchfield sketches a friendship held together by music, chaos, and the sense that they’d accidentally stumbled into their own mutant little world.

I really like what Crutchfield does here. She is basically writing about a friendship solidified over a shared love of music. Now, I know a lot of people. I also have some friends. When you ask an adult, “How many real friends do you have?” the number will vary widely. A lot of people will say “four or five,” something like that. People in general have surprisingly few real friends. I have ten or fifteen, maybe more, but am only in regular contact with about half that number. A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other. Music, obviously, is another great basis for a friendship.

When Crutchfield sings “no art degree, no conservatory/ just Katie and me,” I’m reminded of the refrain from Don DiLillo’s Underworld: “who’s better than us.” If they can do it, why not us? Fuck ’em. That’s what attitude looks like kids–take notes.

So “Big Change” is my single from Fall Into the Sun. (“My single” here just means the song I would choose as the single. For some records, the single is super obvious, while for other records it’s debatable. Bands and producers, in my opinion, do not always get this right.) A good record will tend to have at least two singles; three is a bonus.

For Fall Into the Sun’s second single I’ll go with “Grow into a Ghost.” It opens with a chugging guitar riff with an almost Krautrock drum line. The song is a perfect 3:10–in and out. Do you know anything about lost love? Swearin’ does.

Midway through the record, she writes to an old love with that drifting, half-in-the-desert melancholy she does so well — remembering who she’d been before they met, watching someone fade into absence until they feel more like a ghost than a memory.

Swearin’ is good, but Bad Moves is better. And the star of Bad Moves is the exquisite Katie Park. (I know they are a collective, but my world is my world baby.) Before their show Katie was at the merch table selling…magic eye! That she made by hand. And what did it say? The magic eye said “Bad Moves.” Obviously. I checked it out and chatted for a few minutes with Katie, trying to play it cool. It was the highlight of my year. 20 minutes later she and the band were on stage, crushing it.

The single here is pretty easy. It’s “Crushed Out.” The band released “Crushed Out,” “Spirit FM” and “Cool Generator” as the singles, all of which are excellent. Maybe “Spirit FM” is catchier than “Crushed Out”? Possible. But “Crushed Out” has more lasting power in my opinion. “Crushed Out” is about exactly what it sounds like. It has a basically perfect power pop structure with a killer hook, a classic bridge, and a theme at once super obvious and super deep–the power of a crush.

The whole song is a tumble of infatuation — that feeling where you can’t focus, can’t think straight, and every look or scribbled message feels like it should be obvious to the other person. It captures the power-pop rush of a crush so clearly it almost stings.

Baby, if you are crush-prone that power never goes away. Bad Moves knows this–it’s kind of what the record is about. Crushing out that way can be pretty obvious–do you think I’m crushing out on Katie at all? Nah, this is just a piece of music appreciation.

Cool Generator is my second favorite song on the album, but my “sneaky favorite” is “Missing You.” A sneaky favorite is just what it sounds like: it’s that song that may fly under most people’s radar but that you have a special soft spot for. My all time sneaky favorite song is “Three Drinks” by Craig Finn of the aforementioned Hold Steady. “Three Drinks” shows up on Finn’s 2016 EP Newmyer’s Roof. It’s nearly acoustic, unlike most Hold Steady songs, and sounds just a little bit country. Three Drinks is about a woman (most great songs are) who may have been a child star once upon a time, and is now a drinker. It is an example of a certain type of song that Finn is amazing at, the deeply empathetic look at adult relationships in all of their gloriously flawed complexity. In this sense, Three Drinks fits in with “Spinners” from The Hold Steady’s 2014’s Teeth Dreams, “Tangletown” from Finn’s 2017 solo record We All Want the Same Things, and “Esther” a Hold Steady single from 2018. Finn’s writing on Three Drinks and Tangletown is at its absolute apex. 

“Three Drinks” delivers Finn at peak empathy. A woman with a messy past drifts through a hotel lobby filled with minor disasters, trying to hold herself together until that magic window — the hour between the third drink and the one that tips the night over the edge. Finn nails that space between fear and transcendence where people feel briefly holy.

The refrain focuses on that magic hour between drinks 3 and 4, when matters begin to move from the slightly anxious first stage of the evening to something entirely other:

So anyway, my sneaky favorite on Tell No One is “Missing You.” The song starts like the others, high-speed power pop, and after two verses switches to a near-spoken word breakdown of the tug-of-war between a crush and the expectations of the world around. Guess which wins?

“Missing You” turns into a spoken-word confession halfway through: the push-and-pull between what the world tells you not to do and the crush that keeps winning anyway. It’s simple rhyming, almost naive, but devastatingly effective.

I officially support these sentiments. .

So that’s my sneaky favorite –doesn’t mean it’s better than “Crushed Out” (it isn’t) it’s just a little sneaky. I’m all about sneaky babes and sneaky favorites, on all levels.

In addition to the Magic Eye, Bad Moves also engage in a little publishing. A little literature. Specifically they publish a pamphlet called “The Virtues of Wearing White.”

Chatting with Katie, she acknowledged more than a passing familiarity with the literature of the Jehovah Witnesses. I love Witness literature. Both Witness and Bad Moves publications have a real “it’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day” vibe. If you know me this is not a secret, but I’m a hardcore closet New Ager. There, secret’s out. I’ve messed around with all kinds of New Age action. Once I attended a Kabbala meetup in Manhattan. There were some hardcore New Agers there too, seriously. Those folks were not in the closet at all. Shining eyes, whatever color they are wearing. Me, I like black because it’s easier to launder, but Bad Moves have me thinking. (One other publication you should take a look at if you are into this kind of thing is the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a serious piece of literature. God is great baby, god is great.)

When I was younger my parents had a friend called Tom Hutchinson, who, predictably, went by “Hutch.” Hutch owned a boutique coffee shop there in town and I drove a delivery van for him for a bit. But that’s another story. Anyway, Hutch was a weird guy and he hated the Witnesses. It was one of his favorite topics. He’d call them the “Witlesses,” and say: “When they come to my house I turn the hose on ’em.” People thought this was pretty funny, but I was not that into Hutch’s attitude to the Witnesses. I mean, he didn’t want anyone trying to convert him on his property, which is fair; however, I felt, and still feel, that if someone wants to come to my door, give me a little literature, and talk about how god loves me I’m gonna let them. I genuinely like the Witnesses. They seem like lovely people. Read more

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On Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil”

This piece takes a look at Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.” The song appears on Kristofferson’s self-titled debut album from 1970 on Monument, which is, by any standard, an astonishingly good record. The album features “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “Just the Other Side of Nowhere,” along with the ol’ Devil. That’s four absolute classics right there for ya.

Sunday Morning features an opening quatrain that most other songwriters would trade their career for:

Well I woke up Sunday morning/ with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt/ and the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad/ so I had one more for dessert

(I could play this game all day—Jason Isbell’s Southeastern features another couple life-work worthy couplets:

The first two lines of “Super 8”:

Don’t wanna die in a super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well

And from “Different Days”:

Time went by and I left and I left again/ Jesus loves a sinner but the highway loves a sin.

If I’d written lines that great I’d call it a career and sip martinis on the house for the duration.)

Sunday Morning and Bobby are probably objectively better songs than To Beat the Devil, yet what I like about this one is that Kristofferson states very clearly a kind of founding intention for his life in song and art, right out of the gate. The only parallel I can think of is Craig Finn’s The Hold Steady, whose first album Almost Killed Me kicks off with “A Positive Jam.”

(Here’s Finn telling it like it is:

I got bored when I didn’t have a band/ so I started a band/ we’re gonna start it with a positive jam/ hold steady.

Rock on Craig baby.)

Anyway, let’s get to the focus of this piece. Kristofferson opens with a spoken intro.:

A couple of years back I come across a great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio. And while he was reciting some poetry to me that he had written, I saw that he was about a step away from dying, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me.

Here the singer is looking up at his idol who is both “great and wasted.” I wasn’t around quite yet in 1970, yet I can easily imagine Ginsberg’s “best minds” line hanging over talented folks across a lot of zones. Klosterman wasn’t quite there either (June 5, 1972–a mid Gemini of course), but he was close, and to indulge not for the last time in a little Klostermania, the zeitgeist seemed to be making people thirsty.

The singer receives some scraps of poetry, shards of shattered inspiration, and a song “occurs” to him. He doesn’t state it directly, however we imagine the song arrives fully formed, like “Pancho and Lefty,” or “Kubla Khan.” Thus, To Beat the Devil is also both an answer and an offer of redemption to his idol, who here is John(ny) Cash.

I’m happy to say he’s no longer wasted, and he’s got him a good woman. And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped showed me how to beat the devil.

The singer takes up the mantle of the master, and in so doing opens a possibility window onto redemption for his senior. This is no exaggeration—Cash also recorded To Beat the Devil in 1970 and we are basically stipulating that Kristofferson’s genius, descended from Cash while also original to himself, helped rescue Cash from addiction and the whole deal there. We won’t be deep diving into the archive on this one—as we said we’re just keeping it local and breaking it down, so you’ll have to take my word on it or search it up your own self.

Here’s the first verse; the words speak for themselves:

It was wintertime in Nashville/ down on Music City Row/ and I was looking for a place/ and to get myself out of the cold/ to warm the frozen feeling that was eating at my soul/ keep the chilly wind off my guitar

A classic down and out in the big city piece of scene-setting. The singer is physiologically and psychologically frozen, a cold wind gusts across his art. The man needs a break.

My thirsty wanted whiskey/ my hungry needed beans/ but it had been a month of paydays/ since I’d heard that eagle scream/ so with a stomach full of empty/ and a pocket full of dreams/ I left my pride and stepped inside a bar

You might think that the operative nouns here would be “thirst” and “hunger,” but no. This is not a man with a thirst; this is a thirsty man. We also hear an echo of a now-ancient American past where a man with an empty stomach would go in search of, of all things, “beans.”

Anyway, he’s got no money, can’t really bring himself to care. So, a singer walks into a bar.

Actually I’d guess you’d call it a tavern/ cigarette smoke to the ceiling
and sawdust on the floor/ friendly shadows/ I saw that there was just one old man sitting at the bar/ and in the mirror I could see him checking me and my guitar/ and he turned and said/ come up here, boy, and show us what you are/ I said I’m dry, and he bought me a beer

The man in the mirror, the devil himself. The singer comes face to face with the man who checks him out and summons him over. Kristofferson then enters into a bargain–offers up the terms of an encounter: a beer on the old man’s tab. Score one for the thirsty man. The singer faces the old man; it’s to be a showdown. He doesn’t have much, but he’s got some “friendly shadows,” traces of an older map perhaps, an older memory.

I can’t help here but engage in a bit of presumption. When I play the song in my head, I want to hear “in the mirror I saw him casing me and my guitar,” (listen to the way he pronounces “guitar” on the track. Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas in ‘36 and behind the laid back folksinger you can here some roots here baby).

If I could make one edit to the song, it would be to replace “checking me,” with “casing me.” What a great verb “to case” is.

Lexical Interlude: “To case the joint”

1. slang To observe a place in order to familiarize oneself with its workings in preparation for some criminal activity (often robbery). Judging from the security footage, those men cased the joint hours before robbing it.

2. slang By extension, to thoroughly examine a place. In this usage, no devious motive is implied. As soon as my kids walking into the hotel room, they started casing the joint, exclaiming about everything from the TV to the mini-fridge.

The seminal use of this verb phrase comes from Bill Callahan, formerly of Smog. Callahan is an odd duck—he is so artificial, so obviously self-created as an entertainer, that he has become almost post-authentic.  Callahan contains multitudes.

My favorite Smog album, well in the top two, is Red Apple Falls, which features “Ex-Con,” on which Callahan sings: 

Jean jacket and tie/ feel like such a lie/ when I go to your house/ I feel like I’m/ casing the joint

Devious motive implied.

=====

He nodded at my guitar and said/ it’s a tough life, ain’t it?/ I just looked at him/ he said “you ain’t making any money, are you?“/ I said, you been reading my mail/ he just smiled and said, let me see that guitar/ I got something you ought to hear/ and then he laid it on me

The devil has a bead on the singer, and he’s not far off.  Yes he’s broke.  Yes he’s down and out.  Whaddaya want?

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Filmic Interlude I: The Long Goodbye

In Robert Altman The Long Goodbye, written by Leigh Brackett, the main character Philip Marlowe gets out of jail somewhere in the first act and heads to a all-purpose pit stop restaurant who’s owner apparently collects Marlowe’s mail. The dialogue is exquisite.

Marlowe: You got any messages for me?

Owner: Believe we’ve got a few over there. As a matter of fact, you’ll find my phone bill in there too.

Marlowe: I wouldn’t worry about that.

When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose. Kristofferson’s got nothing to hide in his mail. Those bills go straight to the wastebasket.

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If you waste your time a talkin’ / to the people who don’t listen/ to the things that you are saying/ who do you thinks gonna hear?/ and if you should die explaining how/ the things that they complain about/ are things they could be changing/ who do you thinks gonna care?

there were other lonely singers/ in a world turned deaf and blind/ who were crucified for what they tried to show/ and their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time/ ‘cause the truth remains that no one wants to know

The devil’s words speak for themselves. The path of the troubadour is a dead end. The world has not ears to hear nor eyes to see. Truth tellers meet a bad end. Whiners gonna whine. It’s a strong opening bet, made, we presume, with his red right hand.

Well the old man was a stranger/ but I’d heard his song before/ back when failure had me locked out/ on the wrong side of the door/ when no one stood behind me/ but my shadow on the floor/ and lonesome was more than a state of mind

The singer is on familiar territory; he’s has been tempted by this cynical incantation, he’s not immune to tuning out his calling when out in the cold. Who is?

You see, the devil haunts a hungry man/ if you don’t want to join him/ you gotta beat him/ I ain’t saying I beat the devil/ but I drank his beer for nothing/ then I stole his song

This is the key verse in our little tale. You see, when we tango with the devil the devil usually gets to lead. That’s just the way it goes. But the thing about the devil is, his game is a bit of a bluff. A couple of low pairs, maybe. You just gotta call.

and you still can hear me singing/ to the people who don’t listen/ to the things that I am saying/ praying someone’s gonna hear/ and I guess I’ll die explaining how/ the things that they complain about/ are things they could be changing/ hoping someone’s gonna care

I was born a lonely singer/ and I’m bound to die the same/ but I’ve gotta feed the hunger in my soul/ and if I never have a nickel/ I won’t ever die ashamed/ ‘cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know

Kristoffeson flips it right around. The devil’s got a point; the singer may die dead broke, that’s fine. Songs are borne on the wind in any case. The thing is to have faith in your audience. To believe someone is out there, heart in their hands and ear to the wind. And to hold this faith as a mantra. That’ll keep ‘em guessing, cause then you’re not playing their game, you’re playing your own.

Overall, To Beat the Devil is a young man’s song. It’s got a confidence, a swagger, even a hubris. So, after drafting most of this piece I wanted to find a recent live version, see how it’s aged. I stumbled on a version from a live set with Lou Reed released in 2017. The set is part of The Bottom Line Archive, and it finds Kristofferson in a Waitsian stage of life. The voice is richer than ever, but he’s not exactly singing. Then again, that’s what they said about Dylan and it’s B.S. The voice is the voice; singing is just a category.

The set is interspersed with short interviews of the two songwriters. Here is Kristofferson’s spoken introduction that precedes To Beat the Devil. It is instructive.

Interviewer: The devil figures in some of your songs, you know there’s that silver tongued devil and he pops up from time to time. Who’s the devil? What’s the devil for you? What are your demons?

K.K.: Well, I, I’ll do that song then. Ahhh…

Interviewer: Is that a metaphor or is that something real for you?

K.K.: Well here’s a song called To Beat the Devil. Maybe it’ll explain it. I can’t.