Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Bobby Fischer, the Greatest Chess Player of All Time

Epigraph:

Why not see a legend while it’s still being made?

The Silver Jews

Introduction:

This essay looks at the life and career of the greatest chess player of all time, Bobby Fischer.

This one is especially meaningful to me because my dad, Ross Thomas, taught me to play chess when I was a little kid. Neither of us has ever been a great player, but we both love the game. Ross still enjoys playing today as do I, and although I don’t follow competitive chess as closely as I once did, I’ve never lost my fascination with its history—or with the remarkable personalities who have shaped it.

Few personalities have ever been as brilliant, complicated, or tragic as Bobby Fischer.

In this essay I explore Fischer’s astonishing rise from Brooklyn prodigy to World Champion, the unforgettable 1972 Match of the Century against Boris Spassky, his extraordinary genius over the board, and the painful decline that followed. Like many towering figures, Fischer left behind a legacy that is impossible to separate from his contradictions.

Whether you’re a lifelong chess player or simply interested in remarkable lives, I hope you’ll enjoy the journey. As always, thank you for reading, commenting, sharing, and making these conversations possible.

I. Brooklyn

There are bogglers, and then there is Bobby Fischer.

History is littered with men who threw away fortunes, marriages, careers, and reputations. Every generation seems to produce a few gifted souls who wake up one morning, look at a perfectly good life, and decide to drive it into a ditch at seventy miles an hour. Howard Hughes belongs in that conversation. John McAfee as well. A handful of Roman emperors deserve honorable mention. But if I had to pick a patron saint of the truly bewildering decision, the gold medal still goes to Bobby Fischer.

Which makes the whole thing even stranger, because Bobby began as almost the opposite of a boggler. He was a skinny kid from Brooklyn who found a chessboard before he found the rest of the world and went on in short order to change the game forever.

I never saw Bobby Fischer play. By the time I was old enough to understand chess, he long gone. The World Championship in Reykjavík belonged to another era, and Bobby himself had already begun drifting into legend. I didn’t discover him through television or newspaper headlines. I discovered him through my father, who loved chess and spoke of Bobby the way baseball fans talk about Willie Mays or boxing fans talk about Muhammad Ali. Bobby wasn’t simply another grandmaster. Bobby was Bobby.

Even if you know almost nothing about chess, you’ve probably heard the name. That’s rare.

Most world champions become famous inside their sport. Bobby transcended the board entirely. For a brief moment in 1972, during the height of the Cold War, a chess player became one of the most recognizable people on the planet. He wasn’t just trying to beat Boris Spassky. Millions of people saw him as the lone American challenging decades of Soviet dominance in the game’s intellectual heartland.

He won.

And then… Well. This is where the boggling really begins.

II. Brooklyn & Chess

Every legend has to begin somewhere. Abraham Lincoln had the log cabin. Muhammad Ali had Louisville. Bob Dylan had Hibbing. Bobby Fischer had a small apartment in Brooklyn, a single mother, and a chessboard.

Not exactly the ingredients from which you would expect history to emerge.

Bobby wasn’t born into wealth or privilege. There was no grandmaster father waiting to pass down generations of chess wisdom. There was no Soviet state pouring unlimited resources into his development. There was just a skinny, bright kid who discovered a game that somehow made more sense to him than almost everything else around him.

The game never let him go.

Neither, apparently, did he ever let go of it.

I never saw Bobby Fischer play.

By the time I was old enough to understand what a chessboard even was, Bobby had already disappeared from competitive chess. I was born in 1974, just two years after Reykjavík, so I missed the whole thing. My Bobby wasn’t the Bobby of television broadcasts and newspaper headlines. My Bobby came secondhand through my father.

Dad loved chess.

He wasn’t a master by any stretch, but he loved the history, the personalities, and above all Bobby Fischer. Long before YouTube breakdowns, Twitch streams, and chess engines stronger than every human being who has ever lived, my father told me stories about this kid from Brooklyn who walked into a game the Soviet Union practically owned and somehow beat them anyway.

To a little kid, that sounded impossible.

And maybe that’s why Bobby has fascinated me ever since.

Not because I became a serious chess player—I didn’t. Not because I memorized openings or dreamed of becoming a grandmaster. I didn’t do that either. Bobby fascinated me because even before I knew the details, he already felt larger than life. Some people become famous. Others become myths. Bobby somehow managed to become both before he was thirty.

There’s another thing I like about Bobby. He wasn’t polished. He wasn’t exactly charming. He wasn’t selling anything.

He didn’t seem remotely interested in being a celebrity. If anything, fame looked like something that had happened to him against his will. He wanted to play chess. The rest of the world insisted on turning him into a symbol.

That’s a dangerous bargain. Especially for someone who already viewed the world with suspicion.

The irony, of course, is that the qualities that made Bobby great at chess were probably the same qualities that made ordinary life so difficult. Absolute concentration. Endless preparation. Refusing to accept conventional wisdom. Seeing threats and possibilities invisible to everyone else. Across sixty-four squares those qualities made him nearly unbeatable. Outside the chessboard, they often made life bewilderingly complicated.

The boy from Brooklyn had found the one place in the world where everything made perfect sense. The trouble began when he had to leave the board.

III. Bobby’s Rise

The funny thing about genius is that it rarely announces itself politely. It doesn’t knock on the door. It kicks the damn thing in.

By the time Bobby Fischer was in his early teens, the whispers had already begun. Chess players who had spent decades studying the game found themselves losing to a kid who wasn’t even old enough to drive. Adults who expected to teach him lessons instead received one themselves. Tournament after tournament, Bobby kept climbing until people slowly stopped asking whether he was unusually talented and began asking a much stranger question:

How good can one human being actually become?

That question haunted the chess world for the next decade.

Remember, this wasn’t today’s chess. There was no internet. No YouTube lectures. No databases containing millions of games. No engines instantly pointing out every mistake with the emotional warmth of a tax auditor. If you wanted to improve, you studied books until they fell apart. You replayed famous games by hand. You stared at positions for hours. Chess was slower, lonelier, and in many ways far more mysterious.

Bobby loved every minute of it.

Or perhaps “loved” isn’t the right word. He consumed it. The game became less a hobby than an ecosystem. Everything else seemed secondary. School. Friends. Ordinary teenage life. Those things existed somewhere off to the side while Bobby disappeared deeper into sixty-four squares.

That kind of obsession usually scares people. Sometimes it should. But every now and then history rewards it.

By the late 1960s Bobby wasn’t merely America’s best player. He had become the only serious obstacle standing between the Soviet Union and permanent ownership of the World Championship. For decades the Soviets had treated chess almost as a national project. They produced champion after champion with an efficiency that bordered on the industrial. To beat one Soviet grandmaster was impressive.

To beat all of them? That sounded ridiculous. Bobby apparently didn’t’ received the memo. What amazes me isn’t simply that he won. It’s how he won. He didn’t scrape through on lucky breaks. He didn’t sneak across the finish line. He flattened people.

Strong grandmasters—men who had dedicated their lives to becoming the best in the world—found themselves losing in ways that almost never happened at that level. His Candidates matches became the stuff of legend. The scores looked less like contests between equals than demonstrations of what happened when somebody operating on a different frequency sat down at the board.

There are athletes who win. There are athletes who dominate. Then there are the rare few who make everyone watching wonder whether the rules somehow stopped applying.

Babe Ruth. Wayne Gretzky. Michael Jordan. Michael Phelps. Usain Bolt. Bobby Fischer belongs in that conversation.

That’s the point people often miss. Bobby’s greatness wasn’t confined to chess enthusiasts. His rise had the unmistakable feeling of witnessing something unprecedented. You didn’t need to understand the Sicilian Defense or the King’s Indian to recognize that this skinny kid from Brooklyn was forcing an entire establishment to panic.

And somewhere along the way, Bobby stopped being just another chess player. He became a symbol. Americans wanted him to humble the Soviets. Journalists wanted a story. Television wanted a star. Sponsors wanted a celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of Bobby Fischer. I’m not sure Bobby wanted any of them.

Looking back now, that’s the first place I can see the seeds of The Greatest Boggler beginning to sprout. Before the paranoia, before the disappearances, before the bizarre interviews and the years wandering from country to country, there was already a young man who seemed profoundly uncomfortable with everything that came attached to success except the game itself.

He wanted chess. The world insisted on giving him everything else. And history has a habit of charging interest on bargains like that.

IV. The Wooden Click

By the summer of 1972, Bobby Fischer had become something no chess player had ever really become before. A global celebrity. That sentence still sounds strange.

Golf has Tiger. Basketball has Jordan. Boxing has Ali. Baseball has Ruth. Tennis has Federer. Even if you’ve never watched them play, you know their names.

Chess? Chess wasn’t supposed to work that way.

Yet for a few extraordinary weeks in Reykjavík, Iceland, it did.

The Cold War had turned sixty-four squares into a battlefield. Bobby Fischer wasn’t simply challenging Boris Spassky for the World Championship. Fairly or unfairly, millions of people saw him as one American standing against an entire Soviet chess machine that had dominated the game for decades.

Every move became news. Every expression became news. Every delay became news. The entire world seemed to be watching a board covered in little carved pieces of wood. Most people would have loved every second of it. Bobby Fischer looked like he wanted to crawl under the table.

Here’s where “The Greatest Boggler” first begins to make sense. Most celebrities worry about bad reviews. Most athletes worry about losing.

Bobby worried about everything. The lights. The cameras. The spectators. The photographers. The chairs. The draft. The conditions. If there was a distraction available, Bobby could find it.

Reading about Reykjavík today, I can’t help but laugh at one recurring image. I picture Bobby sitting at the board convinced there were eyes in his soup. Not literally, of course, but psychologically. Somebody was always watching. Somebody was always listening. Somebody was always trying to gain an advantage.

The walls had ears. The soup had eyes. The room itself felt hostile. To the outside world, this looked ridiculous. To Bobby, I suspect, it felt completely real.

The most famous example has become almost comic. The noise. Specifically…

The little wooden click.

Imagine devoting your entire life to becoming the greatest chess player on Earth. You arrive for the biggest match in the history of the game. Billions of people—well, what feels like billions—are watching. Your opponent reaches for a knight. He places it on the board.

Click.

Bobby couldn’t stand it. Now, I admit, this is where my sympathy and my sense of humor collide. Part of me wants to put an arm around Bobby and say,

“Buddy… it’s a knight.”

“It’s made of wood.”

“It’s going to make a little wooden click.”

“It just is.”

“Have a cup of tea.”

“Take a breath.”

“Let’s play.”

Because the knight isn’t going to stop clicking. It just isn’t. The cameras aren’t going to disappear. The reporters aren’t going to go home. History has arrived. You’re Bobby Fischer. This is the price.

But another part of me wonders what that match must have felt like from inside Bobby’s own head.

Imagine carrying not only your own expectations but those of an entire country. Imagine believing every sound matters. Every movement matters. Every distraction matters. Imagine sitting across from the Soviet World Champion knowing that one lapse in concentration could cost you everything. Suddenly the little wooden click doesn’t seem quite so funny anymore.

It becomes symbolic. The click isn’t really about the knight. It’s about a mind that could never completely switch itself off. That’s Bobby.

The same obsessive concentration that allowed him to discover combinations invisible to everyone else also made ordinary imperfections almost unbearable. His gift and his burden may have been the very same thing. The remarkable thing is that none of it ultimately mattered.

Not the cameras. Not the click. Not the endless negotiations. Not the circus surrounding the match. Bobby won. Against all the noise, all the distractions, all the pressure, he became World Champion. For one shining moment, the kid from Brooklyn stood alone at the top of the chess world. It should have been the beginning of a long reign. Instead, astonishingly, it proved to be the beginning of something else entirely.

The greatest boggler had finally reached the summit. Now he was about to begin climbing back down.

V. The Walk Away

History loves a coronation. It has far less patience for an abdication.

If this were a Hollywood movie, Bobby Fischer wins the World Championship in Reykjavík, returns home a conquering hero, defends the title half a dozen times, writes a bestselling book, gives exhibitions around the world, settles into a comfortable house somewhere in California, and spends old age dispensing colorful stories to admiring grandchildren.

Instead… He walked away. Not immediately. Not dramatically. Just… steadily. Like a man fading into the California sun. That’s the image that stays with me. Not the young genius lifting the crown. The older Bobby, somewhere in Los Angeles, drifting farther and farther from the life everyone assumed he would lead.

People forget just how extraordinary this decision was. Imagine Michael Jordan retiring forever after his first NBA title. Imagine Tiger Woods winning the Masters once and never entering another major. Imagine Bob Dylan releasing Highway 61 Revisited and deciding he’d said everything he needed to say.

That’s the scale of Bobby’s disappearance. He simply stopped defending the thing he had spent his entire life trying to win.

Officially, there were disputes over match conditions, prize funds, and the rules proposed by FIDE. Bobby wanted changes. FIDE accepted some, rejected others, and when agreement couldn’t be reached, he refused to play. In 1975 the title passed to Anatoly Karpov by default.

No final game. No dramatic defeat. Just… Silence.

That, to me, is the first truly monumental boggle. Because Bobby had finally reached the summit. The hard part was over. History was his.

He could have defended the title once, twice, maybe five times. He could have become the elder statesman of American chess. He could have written books, taught children, appeared on television once a year, smiled for the cameras, and lived comfortably for the next forty years.

Instead he disappeared.

The farther Bobby drifted from chess, the farther he seemed to drift from almost everyone else. His relationship with his mother had always been complicated. She had encouraged his early interest in chess but also worried, understandably, that it was consuming his life.

As Bobby became more famous, the distance between them widened. Their relationship fractured, and by adulthood they were largely estranged. There is something deeply sad about that. The person who first helped place a chessboard in his life became someone increasingly absent from it.

Then came the paranoia. Now, I want to tread carefully here. It’s tempting to diagnose people after the fact. Every eccentric becomes “obviously” this or “clearly” that. Real life isn’t that tidy.

What we do know is that Bobby became increasingly distrustful of institutions, governments, journalists, organizers, and eventually whole groups of people. The suspicious streak that had surfaced during Reykjavík seemed to expand until almost nothing escaped it.

The cameras weren’t merely annoying. People weren’t merely mistaken. The soup still had eyes. Everywhere Bobby looked, somebody seemed to be watching. Somebody seemed to be cheating. Somebody seemed to be plotting.

And perhaps the saddest part is that the world kept giving him reasons to feel besieged. Fame invites attention. Attention attracts opportunists. The more Bobby withdrew, the more mysterious he became, and the more mysterious he became, the more people pursued him.

Round and round it went. By the 1980s, he had become almost a ghost.

There were periods when he was reportedly living with remarkably little money. Accounts differ on exactly how precarious his circumstances became, but there were stretches in Southern California when he moved from place to place, staying with acquaintances, in modest accommodations, sometimes even homeless, living a life almost unimaginable for the most famous chess player in the world.

That image boggles my mind. The undisputed World Champion. The man who had conquered the Soviet chess empire. A man without a stable home. How does that happen?

Then there is even a darker chapter. This is has to with Bobby’s antisemitic statements. There is no graceful way around them. They were ugly.

They became more frequent as he grew older, and they permanently damaged his reputation. The bitter irony, of course, is that Fischer had Jewish ancestry through his family background, making his rhetoric all the more bewildering. Whatever mixture of grievance, paranoia, anger, or ideology produced those statements, they caused real harm and deserve neither excuse nor romanticization.

This is where the essay stops being merely funny. Because up until now we’ve been laughing about wooden clicks. About photographers. About impossible demands. About eyes in his soup. Now we’re watching a genuine hero unravel in public. That’s different. It’s heartbreaking.

I keep coming back to the same question. What if Bobby had simply found peace?

Not perfection. Just peace. A little house. A morning walk. A cup of coffee. Chess club on Tuesdays. A few exhibitions every year. Maybe a family, maybe not. Just… enough.

Instead, the world champion kept walking. Farther from chess. Farther from home. Farther, it sometimes seemed, from himself.

And the California sun kept getting lower

VI. The Long Decline

There’s an old saying that every man dies twice. The first time is when his heart stops. The second is the last time someone says his name.

If that’s true, Bobby Fischer may never die.

Even people who couldn’t explain en passant or the Sicilian Defense know who Bobby Fischer was. The tragedy is that millions know him for the wrong reasons. The years after Reykjavík don’t unfold so much as scatter. He’s here. He’s there.

Budapest. The Philippines. Japan. Iceland. Anonymous apartments. Hotel rooms. Friends’ spare bedrooms. Long disappearances.

Then suddenly he’d surface again, as if he’d been underwater for years. The world would remember. Then he’d vanish once more. His life begins to feel almost impossible to narrate because it no longer has a center.

There’s no career. No family life to anchor the story. No steady work. No annual rhythm. Just movement. Always movement.

I’ve known people like that. Not world champions. Just drifters. Men who are always leaving. Always beginning again. Always convinced that the next city, the next apartment, the next job, the next relationship will finally outrun whatever has been chasing them.

It never does.

Because the thing following them is themselves. That’s Bobby’s sadness. No matter where he went, Bobby Fischer came too. There were occasional bursts of hope. Every few years somebody would announce that Bobby was coming back.

Maybe another match. Maybe another appearance. Maybe another interview. Maybe this time everything would settle down. It never quite happened.

Instead, Bobby became almost mythological. People told stories.

“I heard he’s living here…”

“I heard somebody saw him there…”

“I heard he’s working on this…”

Like Elvis or Howard Hughes, the man slowly disappeared while the legend continued multiplying.

The saddest thing about isolation is that eventually it becomes self-reinforcing. If you believe everyone is watching you you stop trusting people. When you stop trusting people you become lonely. Loneliness makes suspicion stronger. Suspicion creates more loneliness.

Round and round it goes. Eventually the circle becomes almost impossible to break. I don’t pretend to know exactly what was happening inside Bobby’s mind. None of us can. It’s easy—far too easy—to diagnose historical figures from the comfort of an armchair decades later.

Life isn’t a psychology textbook. Human beings rarely fit neatly into categories. What we can say is simpler.

Bobby became increasingly isolated. Increasingly angry. Increasingly suspicious. And increasingly difficult for the people who cared about him to reach.

Those are observations. They’re almost enough. The truly heartbreaking part is that flashes of the old Bobby never seemed to disappear. Whenever chess came up, the brilliance was still there. He could still see the board in ways almost nobody else could.

He advocated for Chess960, arguing that modern opening preparation had become too mechanical. Whether or not one agrees, it was another reminder that Bobby never stopped thinking deeply about the game itself. Even after decades away from the championship, his mind was still searching for new possibilities.

That fascinates me.

Because it suggests Bobby never really abandoned chess. He abandoned the world surrounding chess. Those are two very different things. People sometimes ask why geniuses so often end badly. I think that’s the wrong question.

Most geniuses don’t. Most extraordinarily gifted people build long, productive lives. The better question is why some geniuses seem unable to find a place to stand once the applause stops. For Bobby, victory solved the one problem he’d devoted his life to solving. After that…

What remains? You can spend twenty years climbing Everest. You can’t spend the next twenty standing on the summit. Eventually you have to come down. Most people descend into ordinary life. Bobby never really did.

He remained, psychologically, somewhere on that mountain. Still listening. Still watching. Still hearing the tiny wooden click. Still looking for eyes in his soup. And that’s why I keep resisting simple explanations. Was Bobby a hero?

Absolutely. Was he also capable of saying ugly, hateful, indefensible things? Absolutely. Both can be true. History isn’t obligated to give us clean characters. Some lives remain stubbornly contradictory. Perhaps that’s why Bobby still fascinates us more than fifty years after Reykjavík.

Not because he was perfect. Not because he was monstrous. Because he was profoundly, bewilderingly human. Gifted beyond measure. Flawed beyond measure. A man who could see twenty moves ahead on a chessboard and sometimes seemed unable to see the next move in his own life.

Then came one of my favorite Bobby stories.

For years, chess fans traded rumors that Bobby had quietly returned to the internet, anonymously playing blitz games against unsuspecting opponents. The greatest of those stories involved English grandmaster Nigel Short, who later said he believed he’d been playing Fischer himself.

Was it really Bobby? Nobody knows for certain. Maybe yes. Maybe no. That’s almost beside the point. The story sounds like Bobby, so I like to think that it is true.

The greatest chess player in history, hiding behind a screen name somewhere, refusing interviews, refusing publicity, refusing to tell anyone who he was, and simply playing chess because that was still the one language that made sense to him.

Whether it happened exactly that way almost doesn’t matter anymore. It has become mythology. And Bobby, by then, belonged as much to mythology as to history.

VII. Checkmate

Every story has to end somewhere. It’s fitting, I suppose, that Bobby Fischer’s ended in Iceland. Not New York. Not Brooklyn. Not Los Angeles. Not Moscow. Iceland.

The little island where, for one extraordinary summer in 1972, he became the most famous chess player who had ever lived. It was the only country that would still welcome him.

Life has a strange sense of symmetry. After years of drifting through countries and controversies, after the endless rumors, the disappearances, the interviews that shocked the world, the legal battles, the wandering, Iceland quietly opened its doors to him one last time.

In Iceland, at least, Bobby found something resembling peace. Not complete peace. I’m not sure Bobby Fischer was ever built for complete peace. But enough. Enough to walk. Enough to think. Enough to play a little chess. Enough, possibly, to grow old.

He did a couple of interviews just before his death and I have read one or two. In them he sounds, if not exactly becalmed, at least somewhere approaching peace. This is a good note to end on.

Bobby Fischer died in Reykjavik January 2008 at tixty-four years old. A chessboard has sixty-four squares. Just one of those funny coincidences I guess. It’s hard not to smile. The number somehow feels right. When Bobby died, the obituaries arrived almost immediately. Some celebrated the genius. Some dwelled on the paranoia. Some focused almost entirely on the antisemitism and the bitterness of his later years.

All of them were telling part of the truth. None of them were telling all of it.

That’s the difficulty with Bobby Fischer. He refuses to fit inside a headline. He wasn’t simply a genius. He wasn’t simply a crank. He wasn’t simply a hero. He wasn’t simply a tragic figure. He was all of those things. That’s what makes him so fascinating.

Earlier I called Bobby Fischer the greatest boggler who ever lived. I stand by it. Not because he was the strangest. History has produced stranger people.

Not because he was the cruelest. History has produced far crueler men.

But because no one ever stood so close to having everything and then walked away from so much of it.

That’s the boggle.

Not the wooden click. Not the cameras. Not the soup with eyes. Those were symptoms. The real mystery is simpler.

How does a boy from Brooklyn become the greatest chess player on Earth and never really find a place to live in the world outside the board?

I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. Maybe that’s why we’re still talking about him. His chess itself is immortal. The combinations still sparkle. The games are still taught. The brilliancies are still breathtaking.

Young players who weren’t born until decades after Reykjavík still sit in quiet rooms and replay Bobby’s victories, shaking their heads at moves that seem impossible until suddenly they aren’t.

That’s one kind of immortality. The other is stranger. Some people leave behind answers. Bobby Fischer left behind questions.

Questions about genius. Questions about obsession. Questions about loneliness. Questions about the terrible price that brilliance sometimes demands.

Suppose Bobby Fischer were sitting across from us now. No cameras. No reporters. No photographers. No Soviet delegation. No championship. Just a quiet chess club on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

I’d like to think we’d set up the board. He’d reach for his knight. It would land with that tiny…

click.

I’d smile. He probably wouldn’t.

Then we’d play.

And for a little while at least, the world would make perfect sense again.

Dedication:

For Bobby. And for my dad, who taught me everything I know about chess. Dad you are my hero and I love you.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s I: 7/20/26, the Unwritten Libretto.

Author’s Note:

Five days ago, I made what may prove to be the most important professional decision of my life.

For months—years really—I had been thinking about giving up my teaching career and becoming a full-time writer. I have talked to many of my family and friends about this and taken several small steps in this direction. I recently published a novel, have written and published hundreds of essays, and written almost every day for eighteen years. I have hundreds of pages of dream records, journals and letters, some sent and some only in draft form. I am hard at work on the sequel to my first novel, and am currently working on five books with many more in the making.

Over this time I have also become very good at making excuses. School is too busy. Life is complicated. The timing isn’t quite right. Next month. Next term. Next year. One day. It was all true, and yet it barely matters. A few days ago, I finally admitted what had been staring me in the face for a long time: if I wanted to call myself a writer, I had to stop waiting for someone else to make that decision for me. Whether I eventually succeed or fail is almost beside the point. The decision itself changed something in me. I stopped thinking about the life I wished I had and started taking responsibility for the one I actually have.

Today wasn’t the happiest day of my life, nor the saddest. It wasn’t the day I got married, the day my son was born, the day I published my first book, or the day I realized my marriage was ending. Objectively speaking, it was an ordinary Monday in Osaka. I listened to music. I wandered the city. I shared dinner and my bed with a woman whose path happened to cross mine for a couple of hours before diverging forever. By tomorrow morning she would be somewhere else, and so would I. Yet somewhere between checking into a modest hotel, thinking about my future, and sitting alone quietly after she left, something finally clicked. My teaching career is rapidly coming to a close. The marriage that defined most of my adult life is over. The books I dream about haven’t been written yet. The cities I may someday call home are still only possibilities. The people who will matter most over the next twenty years are, at this moment, complete strangers.

For the first time since I was a young man, there is no obvious script. That realization is exhilarating. It is also terrifying. Most of all, it is deeply liberating.

So this seems as good a place as any to begin this series.

Epigraph:

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.

Anonymous

Anything could happen.

Bash and Pop

I: My General Situation As of Today

For the better part of thirty years, my life had possessed a remarkable amount of structure. I graduated from college. I moved to Japan. I found a teaching career almost by accident and stuck with it for a quarter of a century. I got married, and my wife and I bought a house together in Kyoto. We raised a wonderful son together who we both love more than words can say. We have paid bills, argued over groceries, worried about our dear dog Daisy, taken vacations when we could afford to, and slowly accumulated the ordinary rituals that eventually become a life. There were wonderful years and there were difficult ones, but there was almost always a next step waiting patiently in front of me. Whether I liked the script or not, there was a some kind of a script.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, it disappeared.

My marriage ended not with a single dramatic explosion but with the gradual realization that two decent people could simply reach the end of the road together. My teaching career, once the defining feature of my adult identity, began to quietly recede into the background. Friends scattered across countries and continents. My parents grew older. I turned fifty-two without feeling especially old, but with the unmistakable sense that I had entered the second half of whatever story remained.

It is a peculiar thing to discover that freedom and uncertainty are twins. For years I imagined freedom as something uncomplicated. Finish work. Write books. Travel. Meet interesting people. Drink coffee in strange cities. Listen to music until two in the morning. Wake up whenever I pleased. Answer to no one.

There is truth in that fantasy. There is another truth as well.

Freedom also means that no one hands you tomorrow. No institution is waiting to promote you. No family obligation automatically determines your next decision. No invisible current carries you downstream. Every meaningful choice becomes your responsibility. Every success belongs to you. Every failure belongs to you too.

That realization can feel less like opening a door than standing on the edge of a cliff. You can step forward. Or you can spend the rest of your life admiring the view. Five days before the evening you’re about to read about, I decided I was done standing still.

I wasn’t retiring, not yet anyway. I wasn’t exactly reinventing myself. I wasn’t chasing some impossible dream. I was simply acknowledging something that had probably been true for twenty years. I am a writer. I feel like I was born to be one. Whether anyone else eventually agrees is, in many ways, beside the point. The work itself has become the destination. Everything else—the cities, the books, the women, the music, the bars, the victories, the humiliations, the friendships, the failures—is simply material for my work.

This series is an attempt to pay attention to the contours of my daily life, in whatever form the may take. And, perhaps for the first time in my life, to trust that the story doesn’t need an outline before it begins.

II: Osaka

Osaka has always felt different to me than Kyoto.

Kyoto is the city where I built my adult life. It is where I have worked, and lived for more than twenty years with my life and son. It is where the mortgage was paid and our dog was walked, where ordinary afternoons quietly accumulated slowly into decades. I know its rhythms inside and out. I know which coffee shops open early, which bridges are worth crossing at sunset, and where to stand beside the Kamogawa when I need to remember that almost everything eventually passes.

Osaka has always been to me something else entirely.

It has never asked me to be responsible. When I come here, I feel somehow lighter. Less like a teacher. Less like a husband. Less like the man who spent twenty-four years inside the same corporate institution. Osaka has always given me permission to become, if only for a day or two, a slightly different version of myself. Not a better man or a worse one. Just someone with fewer expectations resting on his shoulders.

Perhaps every city we visit has a role to play in our lives. Kyoto has been my home. Tokyo has often been a dream. Singapore has long been my favorite escape. Osaka, though, has become my intermission. A place where I can step off the stage for a little while before the next act begins. A place to just get away.

This Monday afternoon I checked into a small APA Hotel not far from Shinsaibashi Station, which I affectionally call Mr. Shin. Like most APA hotels, it is clean, efficient, and just a little too compact. The room isn’t exactly designed for lingering. It is designed for sleeping, showering, and moving on. My suitcase for neatly against one wall. The desk is barely large enough for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The large television in front of my bed I will barely use. It suits my current mood perfectly.

I took a taxi to the hotel from Shin-Osaka Station and arrived around 7:30 PM. I dropped my overnight bag on the floor, drew the curtains apart, and looked out over another slice of Osaka. Nothing spectacular. Just traffic, apartment buildings, and the quiet machinery of a city getting on with its day.

I remember thinking how strange it felt to have absolutely nowhere I needed to be. No lesson to prepare. No meeting to attend. No papers to grade. No one waiting for me at all.

That realization no longer frightened me the way it once might have. It felt… spacious. There are moments in life when freedom announces itself with fireworks. This wasn’t one of them. It arrived almost silently. Like an empty afternoon. Like a city that has never asked me to explain myself. My hotel room is simple. It is what I can afford.

Outside, Osaka continued exactly as it always had. Inside, almost without me realizing it, the next stage of my life had already begun.

III: Meeting Yuki

I should flash back briefly here to introduce my date for the evening. There are evenings that require months of planning. This was not one of them.

The plan, such as it was, consisted of very little. Conversation. Sex. Cigarettes. Dinner. That was enough. As I stepped out of the taxi, I saw her standing quietly on the street.

She was slightly built, dressed in a simple black skirt, and carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone accustomed to meeting complete strangers. There was no dramatic meeting, no cinematic slow motion, no instant thunderbolt. We smiled, introduced ourselves, and within a minute or two were walking side by side into the hotel through the warm Osaka evening as though we had agreed to meet as old friends rather than someone we had never laid eyes on before.

Her name was Yuki.

We went up to my room and made the sort of awkward conversation that strangers always make at first. Where are you from? Where do you live today? Had I been to Osaka often? Was I enjoying the summer?

Nothing remarkable. Which, in retrospect, was itself remarkable. There is something deeply comforting about ordinary conversation. For a little while, neither of us had to be anything more than two people just getting to know each other.

Eventually, because pretending otherwise would have been absurd, the reason we had met entered the conversation. She is thirty-six and works as an escort. I had hired her for the evening.

There is no point dressing those facts up in prettier language. They are neither the whole story nor something I feel any particular need to defend. They simply belong to it. Human lives are untidy. We make decisions for reasons that are sometimes noble, sometimes lonely, sometimes curious, and sometimes impossible even to explain to ourselves. This was one of mine.

I went into the bathroom to wash up, took my clothes off, and hung them neatly on the hangers on the wall. By the time I came out of the bathroom she was naked too. That was what we were there for. I put on one of my favorite bands Whiskeytown, lay back on the bed for a few minutes, listened hard, and let the sweet sweet sounds of Ryan Adams’ voice wash over me. I was, briefly, in heaven.

Then, inevitably, we began to kiss. She is a smoker and tasted like stale tobacco and faintly like green peas. I am a smoker too so I am sure I tasted the same. She unwrapped one of the condoms that I had bought earlier for occasions just like this and began to pleasure me with her mouth. While I do enjoy oral sex to some extent, it is far from my favorite sexual act and I have never been able to cum this way. Not for lack of trying, I simply find that the women who have performed the act on me can never sufficiently been able to get their teeth out of the way. It is not their fault at all, but it is just that simple.

Soon enough, I asked her to climb on top of me. My penis was already erect and she was slick as well, and I entered her cleanly and easily. After a little while, we flipped around and began to engage in the missionary position. I was on the urge of cumming when I pulled out, turned over on my back, and finished my self off with two hands. Nine times out of ten I finish this way if I finish at all. After all, I know my own equipment better than else, so to speak. Before we began to have sex I put on some porn. I chose very quickly as we were on the clock. I selected some perfectly nun priest porn, totally chalk. Of course we both barely watched it as our eyes were mostly closed. The moment I came I toweled off, shut off the porn, and immediately pressed play on the Whiskeytown video I had paused before sex.

Then a funny thing happened. During sex she had repeatedly asked me to turn down the porn and to shush in general. She said we were at a business hotel and that we were bothering the other guests. Although I love to be babied. I do not like to mothered at all. It is just not my thing, and I have written about this at some length here. I already knew that I would not book Yuki again, and this moment helped crystalize my decision. She is sweet and cool, and I am glad I met her for one night, however she is just not my jam. And also, nobody shushes my boy.

Anyway, she asked me to turn my music down. I just laughed and cranked it. Then she laughed too and the mood lifted and passed. Neither of us was yet in the mood for a shower, mostly because we were on the clock and by this point only had about 40 minutes left in our appointment. I did not feel like a round two, so I suggested we head down to the street to smoke for a smoke and then get a little dinner. Although we had less than an hour left and the hotel restaurant was a little busy, she agreed to have dinner with me.

We finished our cigarette and entered the first floor hotel restaurant. We sat down and briefly consulted the menu. The restaurant specializes in pasta, so I ordered tomato pasta with eggplant and she ordered the zucchini linguine. The food took a while to arrive, so halfway through the meal she asked for a doggie bag. I quickly finished my meal and we went upstairs so she could pack her bag.

The evening had never pretended to be anything it wasn’t. Neither of us confused it with romance. Neither of us imagined it was the beginning of some extraordinary love story. It was simply two lives crossing for a few hours before continuing in different directions. There is something quietly beautiful about that too.

Outside, Osaka was still very much alive. Trains rattled somewhere in the distance. Traffic rolled steadily beneath the hotel windows. Thousands of strangers were beginning nights that had nothing to do with ours. Ours, quietly and without complaint, was coming to an end.

I told her I was going to wash up for a minute. She said through the door that she had to leave. I said goodbye babes and she replied in the same fashion. When I came back out, she was already gone.

And I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.

IV: Coda

For most of my adult life, my future had always arrived with an outline. There was always another semester to teach. Another report to write. Another mortgage payment to make. Another family holiday to plan. Another school year waiting just over the horizon. Even when life became difficult, I almost always had a sense of what would come next. The details may change, but the broad shape of the story had already been sketched.

And now it hadn’t.

As I write this the marriage that defined nearly half my life has come to an end. My teaching career, after almost thirty years, is slowly coming to an end. My son is a grown man, trying his best making his own way in the world and earning his own money. My wife and I are immensely proud of him as well we should be. Our house of 19 years will soon belong to someone else. My life is rapidly becoming quite different and everything that had once seemed permanent has become part of the past.

This all may sound just a bit sad. Some of it may be, sure. It also happens to be exhilarating. Tomorrow I might wake up in Kyoto. Next month I might find myself in Singapore. A year from now I may be living in Osaka. Anything could happen.

Perhaps I’ll write ten more books. Perhaps no one will read them. Perhaps I’ll fall in love again. Perhaps I won’t. There will be close friends I haven’t made yet. There are cities I have not yet wandered. There are songs I haven’t fallen in love with, thank god.

There are mistakes waiting patiently for me. There are joys I cannot yet possibly imagine. For the first time since I was in my early twenties, the next chapter of my life has not yet been written.

As I stood there in that little Osaka hotel room, listening to Whiskeytown waft through the room, I finally understood what life had trying to tell me for days.

My life hadn’t fallen apart. It had, in fact, opened up. And somewhere beyond everything I thought I knew, waiting patiently for me, was the unfinished libretto.

Dedication:

For Yuki. Thanks for a lovely evening. I’ll never see you again, babe. Go with God.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea II CHAPTER 4: The Thin Man’s Great Grandfather in Moscow I

CHAPTER IV — THE ANNEX

Scene One: The Office / The Invitation

The office was already in its late morning rhythm, which meant it had stopped pretending to be anything other than itself. Papers moved in shallow stacks. Ink dried on fingers that did not belong to the men using them. Conversations rose and fell without consequence, like breath in a cold room.

Niko sat at his desk with the quiet concentration of someone trying to stay slightly ahead of his own life. The work was not difficult. It was worse than that—it was repetitive in a way that made thought drift toward other, less supervised subjects.

The Southerner arrived without announcement, as he always did. He never seemed to enter a room so much as appear already inside it, as though the office had quietly agreed to produce him when needed.

He leaned on the edge of Niko’s desk.

“You are still here,” the Southerner said.

“I am paid to be,” Niko replied.

“That is not the same thing,” the Southerner said, smiling faintly. “Come along tonight. There is a place. A bathhouse annex. Dice. People worth meeting. You will find it useful.”

Niko looked up. “Is this work?”

“It is better than work,” the Southerner said. “It is instruction.”

Across the room, the Teutonic Knight cleared his throat with deliberate severity. He approached, holding a single sheet of paper as though it were evidence in a moral trial.

“This document,” the Knight said, “has migrated again.”

Niko glanced at it. “It appears to be in the correct file.”

“It was not there yesterday,” the Knight insisted.

“It is there today,” Niko said.

The Knight stared at him as though the universe had briefly failed to obey.

The Southerner sighed softly. “He is correct, you know. The paper is now where it should be.”

The Knight hesitated, recalibrated his indignation, and finally withdrew with a small, wounded dignity.

When he was gone, the Southerner tapped Niko’s desk twice.

“Seven,” he said. “Be there at seven.”

And then he left, as if the conversation had already been archived.

Scene Two: The Bathhouse Annex / Anya Appears

The bathhouse was warmer than the street in a way that felt almost indecent. Steam softened the edges of everything—voices, money, judgment, time. The annex behind it was not officially part of anything, which made it more important than anything that was.

Dice moved across low tables. Drinks appeared and disappeared, something without accounting. Men spoke in half-sentences that assumed agreement. Somewhere, someone laughed too long at a joke that had already ended. The crowd was a mixture of civil servants, military men, commercial travelers, and the odd semi-criminal element that such places always attract.

The Southerner greeted people as he passed, each nod suggesting a prior history Niko had not yet been invited into.

“Here,” the Southerner said at last, guiding him toward a table where the air felt slightly denser. “Watch first. Then play.”

Niko did not ask questions. He rarely did.

He sat.

The dice were small and worn, softened by use. They looked less like objects than habits. The first roll came quickly. Loss. The second, neutral. The third, unexpectedly favorable.

He felt something loosen in him—not relief exactly, but attention.

That was when she appeared.

Not entering so much as arriving within his field of perception, as though she had been standing just outside his awareness and decided to step in.

Anya did not look at the dice at first. She looked at him. Then she smiled slightly, as if confirming something she had already guessed.

“Buy me a drink,” she said.

It was not a request that demanded urgency. It was a test that did not require refusal. Niko paused just long enough to register the tone, the cost, the structure of the moment.

Then he nodded. “Of course.”

She accepted this as expected behavior.

Later, much later, after the dice had lost their clarity and the room had begun to fold into itself, Niko walked back through the city alone.

His lodging was a narrow stairwell building where the air smelled faintly of coal dust and old wood. He climbed slowly, as if each step were part of a decision he had already made.

In his room, he did not undress properly. He sat on the edge of the bed with his shoes still on, then removed them with deliberate care. Anya remained in the corner of his thoughts, not as a person exactly, but as a continuity.

He imagined a version of the future where she was simply present in it without explanation. Where evenings were not entered alone. Where dice were occasional rather than defining. Where risk could be contained rather than pursued.

He turned onto his back. The ceiling was damp in one corner. He would have to get that looked at, that is if his landlord could ever be located.

He fell asleep thinking, not of winning, but of Anya.

Scene Three: Two Weeks Later / The Restaurant

The restaurant was modest in the way things become modest after expense has been calculated too carefully. The light was steady, neither flattering nor cruel. Anya arrived slightly late, which made her presence feel more intentional when she finally appeared.

Niko stood when she entered, then immediately felt slightly foolish for doing so.

“You didn’t have to wait,” she said.

“I did not wait,” he replied. “I arrived earlier.”

This was technically true and socially irrelevant. They ordered simply. Niko paid without hesitation, though the number at the bottom of the bill lingered in his mind afterward like a minor echo.

Anya watched him over the rim of her glass.

“You are not very careful with money,” she said.

“I am careful in other ways,” he said.

“That is what men always say,” she replied, not unkindly.

There was a pause between them that was not awkward, but not empty either. It held its own structure.

When they left, she took his arm briefly—not as possession, but as orientation. He did not misread it. It was one night.

That would matter later.

Scene Four: The Morning / Anya’s Apartment

Morning arrived without ceremony.

Niko woke to the sound of movement in another room, not hurried, not performative. The ceiling above him was plain. The air smelled faintly of tea and something warm that had been cooked without ambition.

He lay still for a moment, listening to the normality of it. Anya entered carrying a cup of tea. She set it on the table beside the bed without comment.

“You stayed,” she said.

“I did,” Niko replied.

“That is not always how it goes,” she said.

“No,” he said.

She sat at the edge of the bed briefly, as if confirming that the space between them still existed in a usable form. Outside, the city was already functioning. Inside, nothing required immediate adjustment.

Niko took the tea. It was slightly too hot. He did not complain.

Anya watched him drink it, then stood.

“You should go soon,” she said, not unkindly.

“I know,” he said.

He did not move immediately.

And for a short while longer, neither of them tried to name what had already begun to form between them.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Edward Said’s “On Late Style.”

Note: This piece takes up On Late Style, the posthumously published and deliberately unfinished work by Edward Said on what he, following Theodor Adorno, calls “lateness”—not serenity or resolution at the end of a career, but tension, contradiction, and a refusal to reconcile. It’s a short book that opens out into large questions, and this will be less a full treatment than an attempt to think alongside it, particularly around the strange fact that a book about unresolvedness arrives in a form that is itself, in some essential way, unresolved.

Edward Said’s On Late Style is as rich a book as an unfinished work can be.  Published posthumously, On Late Style expands on Theodor Adorno’s concept of “late works.”  Late works are works with fall toward the end of an artist’s career, but not those like The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest which “reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality” (6), but those like Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or Lampedusa’s The Leopard–works which, in Adorno’s words are “devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation,” or, in Said’s phrasing, are “uncoopted by a higher synthesis: they do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved” (12).

Said died in September 2003, before On Late Style was completed.  In the foreward, his wife, Miriam writes of how Said was planning to get to work and get it done: “{In late August} he said to me as we were having breakfast that morning, ‘Today I will write the acknowledgments and preface to Humanism and Democratic Criticism {…} The introduction to From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map I’ll finish by Sunday.  And next week I’ll concentrate on completing On Late Style, which will be finished by December” (vii).  He didn’t make it, and the little quote is a moving reminder that we never know how much time we have left.  But Michael Wood, who arranged the various fragments Said had written on the topic of late style into this nearly seamless finished product, says that he doesn’t believe that Said ever wanted to finish the book: “Or rather, he wanted to finish it but was waiting for a time that would perhaps never have come.  There would have been a time for this book about untimeliness, but this time was always: not quite yet” (xvi-xvii).

What does Adorno, and Said, mean by “late style,” and why would Said perhaps have not wanted to finish his work on this topic?  Again, to understand what the term means we need to understand that late style is not simply synonomous with work accomplished late in life.  Wood puts it this way, the “type of lateness {that Said was interested in} is quite different {…} from the unearthly serenity we find in the last works of Sophocles and Shakespeare.  Oedipus at Colonus, The Tempest, and The Winter Tale are late enough in their way, but they have settled their quarrel with time” (xiii).  In other words, these works are transcendent yet resigned–the author, knowing perhaps that death is coming to claim them, moves to preempt death by surrendering his grasp on reality and moving in the direction of a “higher synthesis,” and in the process attaining “a remarkable holiness and sense of resolution” (6).  Said has nothing against such works at peace with themselves and with time, but these are not his subject.  Lateness here seems to take its raison d’etre from Dylan Thomas; it rages against the dying of the light.  As Said puts it, “Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality” (9) and is “a form of exile” (8).

But if late style finds its power in a righteous rage against resignation, senescence, and serenity, it is at the same time complicit with disintegration and ultimately with death. In other words, an artist can embrace lateness in Said’s conception of the term, but can never be quit of it. Said writes: “For Adorno, lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal; in addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness” (13). Here, we understand why it was the Said, though he worked on the idea of lateness for over a decade, was not able to finish off what at only 160 pages is still a relatively slight work–only death itself can put a period on lateness. Wood writes: “for all his deep interest in lateness {…} Said was not attracted by the idea of a late, dissolving self. {…} Said wanted to continue with the self’s making, and if we divide a life into early middle, and late periods, he was still in the middle when he died at the age of sixty-seven {…} Still a little too early, I think he would have said, for real lateness” (xviii).

Another reason why On Late Style cannot exactly be classified as a “late” work is the urbane depth of its learning and its lightness of touch. Though deeply serious, Said in On Late Style wears his learning lightly, as only a true elitist can. For the fact is that despite its topic the book is oddly comforting; I can open it to any page in the moments before sleep and feel a rush of almost narcotic satisfaction and harmony. This effect is obtained not because Said takes an oppositional stance to his topic but because the extent of his learning is so colossal that it seems to achieve “a remarkable holiness and sense of resolution” based on its own gravitational force, even though acting in opposition to Said’s own thesis.

Thus, although we have only begun to scratch the surface of what Said has to say about lateness, it is already clear that while the relation between late style and classicism must for the moment remain unresolved, On Late Style as a text is a deeply classical enterprise, and this classicism is rooted in the remarkable range and depth of Said’s mind. Wood reminds us that being in opposition need not always mean manning the barricades–and this at least sets up the question raised in an earlier post about the ability of leftism and classicism to co-exist: “It is part of the generosity of Said’s critical imagination that he sees ‘amusement’ as a form of resistance. He can do this because amusement, like pleasure and privacy, does not require reconciliation with a status quo or a dominant regime” (xiv).

So perhaps On Late Style is complete in the only way a book about lateness can be. It circles, it deepens, it resists arriving. Edward Said writes against resolution, and the book quietly enacts that refusal, never quite allowing itself the satisfaction of a final statement. There is something fitting in this. Lateness, as he and Theodor Adorno understand it, is not a stage one passes through and exits, but a condition one can only move further into. Said, still “in the middle” by his own reckoning, never closed the circle. And so the book remains open—not unfinished in the sense of lacking something, but unfinished because its subject will not permit an end.

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships IV: “Soft in the Center”

Note: This piece will take up “Soft in the Center,” track 2 on Heaven is Whenever (Vagrant Records, 2010) by The Hold Steady. This one will be a little different for a couple of reasons. First, Heaven is Whenever was the first Hold Steady record after the departure of their keyboard player Franz Nicolay, and Nicolay was (and is, because he rejoined in 2016) a huge part of the Hold Steady sound. Therefore, I will look briefly at the personal dynamics of the band, insofar as they’ve been made public. Second, I will take up song order, something I intend to return to in future pieces. Third—and maybe most importantly—I am using this piece to set an intention. A serious one.

Epigraph:

You can’t tell people what they want to hear

If you also want to tell the truth

Craig Finn

I want to be a music writer.

I have always wanted to play music, and I remain fascinated with the role of the frontman or frontwoman. There are so many great ones—Finn, Mick Jagger, Bret Michaels (I really just want to perform “Shelter Me”), Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and many others. But I am not, at this moment, a songwriter or a singer, and I am still working on understanding songwriting from the inside.

So my goal is simpler and, in some ways, harder: to be the best music writer that I can be.

I don’t think I can be as good as Chuck Klosterman, who is amazing, and I am not really a reviewer. I don’t write reviews; I write analysis. I’m less interested in telling you whether something is good than in understanding what it is doing—how it works, what it reveals, and what it becomes when placed next to a life.

So I’m not competitive with Klosterman, and I’m not competitive with reviewers generally. But I am competitive with myself, and in a narrower sense, I am competitive with myself to be the best Craig Finn analyst around. Finn has, in my opinion, leveled up his songwriting several times across his career, and I want to level up alongside him as a writer.

That’s the goal. Let’s take up “Soft in the Center.”

The Hold Steady’s on and off again keyboardist Franz Nicolay joined The Hold Steady in 2005, after the release of 2004’s Almost Killed Me. Almost Killed Me may be my personal favorite Hold Steady record, but it is also true that the band’s sound took a major step forward with Nicolay. Some of their most iconic songs depend on his presence as much as on Finn’s voice.

There isn’t a great deal of publicly available detail about Nicolay’s departure in 2010. Compared to famously volatile bands—Jane’s Addiction, The Rolling Stones, Galaxie 500—this one seems almost restrained. Finn described it as amicable. Nicolay described it as a “closed book.” Both statements feel composed, even careful, which in itself tells you something about the people involved.

What matters for our purposes is the effect. Without Nicolay, the band’s sound on Heaven is Whenever is leaner. The keys are still there, but diminished, less central, less cinematic. There is more space, and that space exposes Finn a bit more.

For a long time, I misheard this record. I thought the highlights were the obvious ones—“The Weekenders,” “Sweet Part of the City.” Recent listening corrected that. My favorite, by a ways, is “Soft in the Center,” with “Our Whole Lives” in second place. The latter contains the line, “We’re good guys, but we can’t be good all the time,” which could stand as a thesis for much of Finn’s writing.

The fact that I missed both songs initially is not trivial. It suggests that some of Finn’s best work doesn’t announce itself immediately. It waits.

Which brings us to song order.

“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on the record and one of its most immediate. I tend to favor leading with your strongest statement, and I think there’s a case that it should have opened the album. There is a long tradition of bands doing exactly that—“Janie Jones” by The Clash, “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth, “Rocks Off” by The Rolling Stones. These are not just songs; they are openings that define tone and intent.

Finn has acknowledged that “Soft in the Center” has a certain built-in audience response, particularly around its chorus. He can feel when a line is going to land, when a certain type of listener is going to raise a fist. That’s not calculation so much as familiarity—he understands the emotional economy of his audience because he helped build it.

The song itself unfolds as a conversation, and more specifically, as advice. It is an older voice speaking to a younger one. In that sense, it mirrors earlier Hold Steady material like “Killer Parties,” but from the opposite side. In those earlier songs, Finn is inside the chaos, narrating in real time. Here, he stands outside it, looking back, trying—gently, imperfectly—to intervene.

The opening image is stark: a young man leaving a hospital, returning to a city that has not changed. The implication is clear without being over-explained. Something went wrong—an overdose, an accident, a night that tipped too far. And yet the conditions that produced that moment are all still in place. The city remains. The temptations remain. The system resets.

Finn’s great line—“You can’t tell people what they want to hear / if you also want to tell the truth”—lands here as a kind of thesis. It is a statement about songwriting, but also about mentorship, about friendship, about any attempt to guide someone who is not yet ready to be guided. The truth, in Finn’s world, is rarely what anyone wants to hear in the moment.

When he follows it with a direct address—“I’m just trying to tell the truth, kid”—the dynamic becomes explicit. He is the older figure now. Not removed, not sanctimonious, but positioned. He has been through something. He has survived something. And survival, in Finn’s writing, tends to confer not authority exactly, but a certain obligation to speak.

The chorus distills the advice into something almost disarmingly simple: you can’t have everything; you learn to love what you have. Finn himself has noted that he knows lines like this will hit. They scan as universal, almost cliché at first glance. But in context, they are not glib. They are corrective. They push back against a younger worldview built on accumulation—of experiences, of people, of intensity.

This is one of Finn’s recurring moves: to take a sentiment that could sound obvious and place it in a context that makes it necessary.

The second verse introduces the song’s central metaphor: the frozen lake. Finn, being from Minnesota, grounds it in lived experience—“a place with lots of lakes”—but the image does more than local color. It becomes diagnostic.

On the surface, everything looks stable. Solid. Safe. But “sometimes they get soft in the center,” and that center is “a dangerous place.”

This is the song’s title, and its key. The “center” here is not just the literal middle of the lake; it is the middle of the action, the heart of the scene, the dead center of the city, the place where things feel most alive. It is also the place where the structure is weakest. The danger is not at the edges, where you might expect it, but at the point of maximum immersion.

That is a sophisticated inversion, and it maps cleanly onto the nightlife world Finn has chronicled for years from his albums with his first bands Lifter Puller through to today. The parties, the drugs, the endless nights—they are not dangerous because they are marginal. They are dangerous because they are central, because they feel like the point.

Finn frames the young man’s situation with unusual generosity: “you can probably do anything, if you can get yourself right.” This is not moralizing. It is not even particularly prescriptive. It is conditional. The possibility is there, but it depends on an internal realignment that the speaker cannot perform for the listener.

There is also, quietly, autobiography here. Finn writes in the great song “Most People Are DJs” about his own youthful excess—“I was a Twin Cities trash bin/ I’d jam it all into my system”—and the process of pulling back from that edge. What matters is not just that he got himself right, but that he remembers what it was like not to be.

From there, the song largely reiterates its central ideas, but with increasing insistence. The chorus returns. The advice is repeated. And then comes the bridge: “I know what you’re going through / I had to go through that too.”

This is where the song earns its authority. Not in the cleverness of its lines, or even in the sharpness of its metaphors, but in its identification. Finn is not speaking from above. He is speaking from experience. The distance between the older voice and the younger listener is real, but it is not absolute.

And yet—and this is crucial—that identification does not guarantee transmission. The younger figure may still ignore the advice. He may return to the city, to the center, to the unsafe ice. Finn knows this. The song does not resolve that tension. It simply articulates it.

What makes “Soft in the Center” so effective is its clarity. Finn is not being coy about the theme. He is saying, in essence: the action is real, the lights are bright, and the pull is powerful. You will want to stay in it as long as you can. But there are costs. There are limits. There is time.

You age. You win and lose people. You push your system until it pushes back. You end up in rooms—hospitals, apartments, empty bars—where the energy has drained out and something quieter, and less negotiable, remains.

“Take your time,” the song seems to say, but also: think it through.

That balance—between permission and warning, between empathy and clarity—is where Finn’s later songwriting lives. It is a long way from the breathless immediacy of Lifter Puller, but it is not a rejection of it. It is a reframing. The same world, seen from a different distance.

“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on Heaven is Whenever and one of the strongest in Finn’s catalog. It is direct without being simplistic, reflective without losing momentum, generous without losing edge.

Simply marvelous.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with the songs of Craig Finn.

On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”
On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”
Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Film My Dinner with Andre Part II: Andre in Poland

Note: This is the second in our series on the 1981 Film My Dinner with Andre. An early installment from first blog Classical Sympathies in 2009, this essay takes the Poland episode of My Dinner with Andre as a way into Andre Gregory’s search for “impulse” as a criterion of authenticity, moving carefully through the beehive workshop, Grotowski’s theatrical provocations, and the film’s broader tension between structured performance and lived spontaneity. Reading Andre’s retreat into experimental theatre, ceremony, and liminal group exercises, the piece argues that what appears to be a flight from social form is in fact only possible through highly artificial frames that permit “authentic” behavior to be staged, bracketed, and later resumed as ordinary life. Alongside close attention to the screenplay’s language of impulse, the essay folds in autobiographical reflection to test the boundary between experiment and everyday constraint, ultimately suggesting that Andre’s quest for unmediated action exposes both the appeal and the fundamental instability of authenticity as a lived ideal.

When we left off, Wally was just arriving at the fancy restaurant to which Andre had invited him. While Andre seems quite comfortable in his immediate surroundings throughout the film, he has not been well; in fact it is clear that he has experienced a prolonged period of painful self-questioning. Wally tells us in the voice-over that he re-connected with Andre only after a mutual friend (George Grassfield) found Andre weeping in the street:

George had been out walking his dog in some odd section of town when he had suddenly come upon a solitary man leaning against a crumbling building, sobbing uncontrollably. Well, George was about to walk by rapidly, as one does in New York, when he suddenly realized that the man was Andre {…} Andre explained to him that he’d been watching the Igmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata about twenty-five blocks away, and he’d been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life” (19).

It turns out that a few years previously Andre had lost the ability to “live in his art,” and began to struggle with living his life as well. Wally meets Andre, they embrace (“I remember, when I first started working with Andre’s company, I couldn’t get over the way actors would hug when they greeted people. ‘Now I’m really in the theater’, I thought” (20)) and move to the bar. Wally tells Andre that he looks “terrific” to which Andre responds “Well, thank you. I feel terrible” (20). 

This exchange is a touchstone for the entire film, and also stands as a joke that can only be appreciated after seeing the whole film as the issue between how we read the surface expressions of our friends or lovers and how surface impressions often mask deeper issues and problems pervades the film. The exchange also indicates the shallowness of Wally’s observation of Andre at this point in the film, and his desire to simply get through the evening, even if this requires a reliance on cliche. Wally’s uncertainty about the state of his friendship with Andre and the state of the evening leads him to fall back on his “secret profession” as a private investigator. He begins to question Andre about his experiences and Andre begins his tale, which, from the very beginning, oscillates between profundity and absurdity, and between self-knowledge and self-pity.

About five years previous Andre had been invited to Poland to teach a workshop by a fellow director Jerzy Grotowski. He didn’t want to go “because, really, I had nothing left to teach. I had nothing left to say. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t teach anything. Exercises meant nothing to me anymore. Working on scenes from plays seemed ridiculous. I didn’t know what to do” (22). Grotowski tells Andre to ask for anything he’d like as an attempt to lure him, and Andre responds: “If you could give me forty Jewish women who spoke neither English nor French, either women who have been in the theater for a long time and want to leave it but don’t know why, or young women who love the theater but have never seen a theater they could love, and if these women could play the trumpet or the harp, and if I could work in a forest, I’d come” (22). Grotowski can’t come up with forty Jewish women, but he comes close and finds forty women, plus some men, all of whom are questioning the theater and none of whom speak English. He also finds for Andre a forest which is populated by only “some wild boar and a hermit” (23). Andre agrees to go to Poland.

What we see here is that Andre, unable to live in his life or his art, is looking to get out of his comfort zone; he courts discomfort and discombobulation. He is, in short, a seeker. Once in the forest, Andre is adrift: “technically, of course, technically, the situation was a very interesting one, because if you find yourself in a forest with a group of forty people who don’t speak your language, then all your moorings are gone” (24). This potentially scary situation forces the participants back onto themselves in the absence of familiar structure, organization, hierarchy, or character. Andre likens what occurred in the forest to improvisation, but “in this case you’re the character, so you have no imaginary situation to hide behind. What you’re doing, in fact, is asking those questions that Stanislavski said that the actor should constantly ask himself as a character–Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? and Where am I going?–but instead of applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself” (25-26). 

And indeed the first three quarters of the film is primarily dedicated to the story of Andre’s travels as he tries to answer precisely these questions. The Polish episode, which lasts for several minutes in the film and several pages in the script, has two parts; Andre attends a “beehive” in town and then decamps to the forest with his “workshop”. Grotowski tells Andre about the beehive which Andre decides to attend. Grotowski then asks Andre to lead the beehive: “And I got very nervous, you know, and I said, ‘Well, what is a beehive?’ And he said, ‘Well, a beehive is, at eight o’clock a hundred strangers come into a room.’ And I said, ‘Yes?’ And he said, ‘Yes, and then whatever happens is a beehive” (27).

The beehive begins with a women singing a song of St. Francis and the hundred strangers join in; when this runs its course Andre breaks up the activity. One woman in the group had brought a teddy bear, and Andre uses the bear as a means of breaking the frame of the beehive. The way he describes his action is revealing, and leads us into the main point of this post: “Now there is, of course, as in any improvisation or a performance, an instinct for when it’s going to get boring. So, at a certain point, but I think it may have taken an hour to get there, or an hour and a half, I suddenly grabbed this teddy bear and threw it into the air” (29-30). The singing ends, and the group re-forms into two circles doing a rhythmic dance; the teddy bear flies around the room; Andre “{gives} the teddy bear suck” (31); and a number of people cluster around some candles. “I felt in that moment I could go with my own impulse, you know, and follow my impulse instead of trying to be aware of the whole thing–I saw that Grotowski had his hand right in the flame and was holding it there {…} and I wondered if I could do it” (32-33). Andre succeeds in keeping his left hand, but not his right hand, in the flame, and in due time, the beehive having gone well, Andre wants to wrap it up. Again, he uses the word impulse: “My impulse is that if the show’s been good–get out and leave them laughing” (33). But what differs with this performance is that the participants won’t leave at any determined time, but rather “the farewell took two hours, at least, because nobody left until they had a true impulse to leave” (34). 

In the span of just a few minutes, Andre uses the word “impulse” four separate times. People leave the beehive at their own speed and on their own terms, and for Andre, in retrospect, this seems to have been the point of the exercise: “You see, also we’re talking about trying to find the truthful impulse, to not do what you should do or ought to do or what is expected of you, but trying to find what it is that you really want to do or need to do or have to do” (34).

The whole discussion of Poland, the beehive, and the forest is predicated upon Andre’s insecurity and inability to live either in his art or in his life. Thus, he is seeking some kind of liminal band where art and life meet and in which authentic action can be achieved. The key point here is that this liminal band, this performance space on the margins of art, where art bleeds into life and vice versa, is very much a constructed space. Andre is aware of this, and introduces the beehive explicitly as a type of performance: “I remember watching people preparing for this evening, and of course there was no makeup, there were no costumes, but it was exactly the way people prepare for a performance. You know, people sort of taking off their jewelry and their watches and stowing them away and making sure it’s all secure” (29). Likewise, at the end of the evening “everyone put on their earrings and their wristwatches and went off to the railroad station to drink a lot of beer and have a good dinner” (35). Presumably, over dinner and drinks the beehivers reverted to their “normal,” non-performative selves; after all, they were wearing their jewelry and their watches.

The point here is that although Andre’s account of the beehive suggests something both exciting and moving, the energy required to run the beehive, as well as the freedom required to act on impulse, are only made possible by the very artificiality of the scenario. The shedding of jewelry and watches is an indicator of the intentionality of the evening, a marker that tells us that the normal rules of daily life and human interactions will be suspended. So, while the beehive is not exactly theater, and not exactly performance, for most adults the impulse to throw teddy bears and hold one’s hands in candle flames can only be acted upon under deliberately constructed and constrained conditions. The challenge for Andre throughout his travels is how to “find the truthful impulse” within the context of everyday life.

Throughout the first three-quarters of the film Wally’s input into the conversation is limited almost entirely to “uh-huh,” “ha ha,” “God, really” and “So, what happened then?” We will see in a later post, however, that when Wally does become comfortable enough with the conversation he challenges Andre on exactly this point, asking if it is necessary to travel to the ends of the earth to have an authentic and “real” experience. Indeed, the issue of authenticity arises again and again throughout the film; one way that Andre and his group in Poland attempts to create authenticity is through ceremony. Ceremony, baptisms, mock funerals, sacraments, these are central features of “My Dinner with Andre,” and as Andre and his company prepare to leave the Polish forest his group engages in ceremony in order to celebrate his leadership: “On the final day in the forest the whole group did something so wonderful for me, Wally. They arranged a christening–a baptism–for me. And they filled the castle with flowers. And it was just a miracle of light, because they had set up literally hundreds of candles and torches. I mean, no church could have looked more beautiful” (36). One of the things which strikes me when watching the film is the extent to which Andre in his years of wandering seems to have depended on such ceremonial interludes–it is almost as if simple diurnal existence without explicit indexing of exceptionality and consecrated ceremony was not sufficient to satisfy his longing for authentic, meaningful experience.

So, where does this leave us? Certainly, we can relate to Andre’s desire to forge from ordinary experience a sense of life as sacrament and ceremony, can relate to the urge to transcend the mundanity of the daily grind, whether, as for Andre, this be embodied by “working on scenes” or by the routine of the office and one’s commute. But it is not as easy as all that. At the end of the film, Andre himself admits as much when he says: “I can imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible, monumental creative task–a life in which everybody would just go with their impulses, all day long–they would just be themselves every moment, with others. And we’re not necessarily up to it” (109). But perhaps the problem lies deeper yet, and closer to the bone–the very strictures which Andre seeks to escape, those of form, of structure, of organizational reality, of hierarchy and deference, of repression of impulses and desires, these are what make social life in fact possible in the first place. Read thusly, Andre’s quest has about it an element of fundamental futility, of quixotic insistence on a purity of action that is unsustainable within the context of actual social life.

And yet, this is only one side of the argument. I fully understand the impulse behind the desire to act on impulse, understand as well the urge to create a space where anything goes, a space at once dangerous (in the range of actions that can be sanctioned by a sequestered zone which recognizes the viability of non-normal activity) and safe (in the fact that the other participants are trusted to remain “in-group,” and therefore to “behave” within the broadest definition of the term). When I was in university, some friends and I engineered an evening of “pants down.” Four of us sat around a friend’s dorm room sans trousers etc. and then attempted to act as normal as possible. One of us was gay. The exact rationale for the stunt now escapes me, but the general idea was to test to what degree pants were necessary for normal life to proceed. While nothing particularly memorable was said or done, the evening remains memorable: my primary memory is the initial frisson which accompanied the experiment–it felt like we were putting something on the line. Andre through the film suffers from a similar need to put himself on the line.

The trouble with authenticity and living on impulse is, simply, that one person’s authenticity is another’s callousness; one person’s impulse is another’s betrayal; one person’s honesty is another’s arrogance. Believe me on this last point, dear reader, for I know of what I write. Still, even for the more responsibly minded among us there are moments when the tissue which constrains our behavior within the realm of social acceptability begins to fray, and the liminal zone between life and art, between normality and some version of outre performance, may appear on our event horizon. In “My Dinner with Andre,” Andre moves from the intentional structuring of events in which the barrier between acceptable and bizarre may be broached, to simply ignoring this barrier altogether, and finally back to more class-appropriate activities such as telling tall tales of lost years over fine wines in a Manhattan restaurant. This is not to suggest, however, that Andre’s concerns are rendered in any way passe by the film–indeed the issues which his relentless self-questioning brings to bear haunt one past bedtime, and deep into the night.

* This post deals with pages 19-37 of the screenplay.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Some Older Poems

Note: These four poems come from an early era of my writing life—where satire, associative logic, and linguistic mischief are all still operating at full voltage and without much concern for genre stability. They move freely between cultural detritus, private irritation, and comic metaphysics, as if trying to test how far language can bend before it either collapses into nonsense or reveals a hidden structure underneath it. What holds them together is less any single theme than a consistent tone of alert instability: a mind watching itself generate connections in real time, amused by its own excesses but also half-suspicious of what they might mean. Read together, they sit somewhere between parody, dream-logic, and cognitive overproduction—early signals of a style that treats thought not as expression of meaning, but as an event that happens in language.

Inspired by Robyn Hitchcock

The urge to pen nonsense descending

This seems an appropriate forum

For all my synapses are blending

And my skull has become rather warm

Hurrah for men in long white beards

Kris Kringle and Komani

Who, hypnotized, disclose deep fears

Of the seamstress Miss Delany

‘Cause there’s a mistake with a head-cold

There’s a death-wish with nine lives

There’s a blowpipe with a blindfold

And it’s stalking both your wives

There’s my niece in a wave function

A control freak in a kilt

And they waltz without compunction

On the philosophy you built

When skeletons meet

Bones get up on their feet

For square dancing

The mandibular dreamers

Mirrored a phalanx of femurs

And they all started prancing

Yes, the babe he loves best is his manageress

But she’s frigid

Everytime she comes round

His spirits get down

But he’s rigid 

The houses she owns

Are deliberate clones

Of the suburbs

Lights go on with a clap

Every mouse to its trap

In the cupboards

I found a crème-egg in a fern

It was hatching and snatching in turn

I chose not to come all that close

For fear that it might be verbose

Oh, I wish I could write an acrostic

And that chemicals weren’t so caustic.

I wish that my lunch-trays were blue

Or speckled like they are at the zoo

But quarrels came as quarrels will

Concerning pilfered cherries

When I got up to press a pill

Some bastard thieved my necessaries

A creaking neck, a morbid thought

The story of an evening

We wish we were what we are not

And now I must be leaving

The Paperless Office

The paperless office is dead

It’s long since been put to bed

Though we claim to ‘ave gone green

You must know what I mean

The paperless office’s been stood on it’s head

The paperless office has flipped

The idea was just a blip

We print quite promiscuously

Use A4 insistently

The paperless office papers on at a clip

The paperless office’s defunct

The concept has flat-out flunked

The paradox being

We’re surrounded by screens

But the paperless office is sunk

The Present

a form is filled

money is sent

a conscience is salved

a small difference is made

while somewhere

under the cover of darkness

or in the light of day

the beat down goes on

Limerick

A pious reformer named Mather

was frequently known to blather

about the great judgment hour

but the word from the shower

was that Mather knew his way around lather