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The Splinter Fraction: On the Joys of Karaoke, Communal Song as Social Solvent

Note: This is the third and for now final position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our final position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. We are entirely serious.

We affirm karaoke as one of the last remaining civic rituals in which strangers meet without preconditions and leave with fewer barriers than they arrived with. A microphone passed between an office worker, an American traveler, an Indian engineer, an older Japanese gentleman, a young woman finding her voice again — this is not entertainment alone. It is a brief suspension of hierarchy, suspicion, and self-protection. In these small rooms people remember how easy it is to be together.

Karaoke is not mandatory, nor do we idealize it. We simply encourage every citizen — once in a while, or for the first time — to step into a space where age, gender, profession, and political commitments dissolve for the length of a verse. It is a civic practice hiding in plain sight: a low-cost, low-risk release valve healthier than most vices and far more generous in its returns.

Society is fraying at the edges. But give people one Tom Petty track, one “What’s Up” howl, one chance to sing badly but sincerely, and cohesion begins again — not through policy, but through the ordinary bravery of shared song. The Splinter Fraction supports public encouragement and, where possible, public subsidy of these communal singing rooms, as engines of ease and democratic belonging.

Karaoke will not fix the world. But it will bring us back into easy congress with one another, which is more than most programs can claim.

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On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

So, for the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties.” This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on I was drinking, I was dancing, packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station at 42nd Street into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.

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Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)

I used to be free/ I used to be seventeen

Sharon Van Etten

Never said a word, I never had to/ it was my attitude/ that you thought was rude

The Replacements

Long may you run

Neil Young

Note: This is the last in our series about Saint George’s, the school I attended from Grade 1 through Grade 12. You can find the other parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Thank you to everyone who read this series.

Senior Year II, and After:

It’s time to wrap up the Scenes from St. George’s series, as I’ve said most of what I want to say about that time and place. Before I finish, I want to write a bit about the very end of senior year and the summer after graduation as well as the first winter vacation back from college, and add a short coda.

After a number of us seniors got busted for drinking on our senior trip, things were pretty much winding down. Because we were a smallish class, everyone pretty much got along and there weren’t many cliques, however it is true that the two or three-season athletes, myself included, lived in a slightly different world than those students who mostly didn’t play sports. After baseball season of senior year whatever remaining barriers between classmates crumbled, and sometime around here I finally got a driver’s license. As a result, I spent a bit of time out at Dyche Alsaker’s house. Dyche and I were not all that close, but I liked him for a couple of reasons. One was, although his family certainly had more money than mine, and a bigger house, he never acted like some kind of alpha, which was cool. He just seemed happy to have people over (his parents never seemed to be home) and to go with the flow. I was as well. Dyche’s house was in “the valley” (do all towns have a valley?), which was really just the open space between Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. Most of the real rich folks at St. George’s lived on the South Hill, so maybe there was something about the Valley that was a little more “beta” than the South Hill. At that point in time, as now, I was more than happy to hang with some beta-males, or at least in a circumstance where such ridiculous distinctions no longer obtained.

Dyche loved the band the Replacements and their lead singer Paul Westerberg, and I caught onto his passion for this band. Actually, I may have discovered them on my own first, as their single “Merry Go Round” played a lot on VH1 and at that time I was a regular viewer of their music video program. “Merry Go Round” is the lead off track on the band’s final record All Shook Down, which was released in 1990 and is still by far my favorite “Mats” album. I bought the record and played it over and over in my room as “rock music” was kind of verboten in the main part of the house for reasons passing understanding. I remember one specific day where we drove out to a lake, probably in Idaho, and Dyche boated us around while drinking and listening to Westerberg’s first solo record 14 Songs. 14 Songs is pretty good and has a catchy single “Knocking’ on Mine,” but it’s no All Shook Down. As for drunk boating, while not advisable, it is somewhat preferable to drunk driving because there is simply more space, and Westerberg made the perfect companion for such an outing.

Although I was already into a lot of music at the time, including Dylan, R.E.M., Fine Young Cannibals, and Dire Straits (this list holds up pretty well actually), I was impressed with Dyche’s deeper level of fandom and aspired to know more about my favorite bands. By the time I got to university I had a better idea of what it meant to be a music fan, and this was in no small part because of Dyche. Out at Dyche’s house, there was a predictable amount of drinking and hooking up; the first interested me a little, the second more, although I was still having a bit of a tough time getting anything going in that area. Drinking was easier. One night I drank most of a bottle of whiskey in the hot tub there, and people came to think I had a high tolerance, which wasn’t really true. I also remember commandeering a bed at his house one night when a classmate came in with a girl I did not know. Can we have the bed, they asked–we are stuck on the trampoline. This was not my problem I felt, however they persisted and I gave way. I suppose they needed it more than I did.

As I mentioned, there didn’t seem to be much parental presence at Dyche’s house, which was a positive, but things never got too crazy. People came over, enjoyed the trampoline and the hot tub, and stayed the night instead of driving impaired. It was, all in all, a reasonably healthy developmental zone. This action lasted for a few weeks after graduation, and then kicked off again during the first winter after we went off to college. During that break there was a party at another classmate’s house–similar vibe, no parents, booze, and hooking up. I attended, and the next morning found myself with a girlfriend of sorts. This was a positive. What I recall about that night was, I watched the film The Graduate, walked away with a girlfriend, and smoked a cigar. Decent action, good action, bad action. Two out of three ain’t bad, baby.

Like all scenes of this sort, it didn’t last, nor did my girlfriend. I didn’t really know how to have a girlfriend, so to speak, and although we wrote letters from our respective colleges that spring the relationship had faded by summer. Nonetheless, the whole period, bisected by a few semesters of college, stands out as a crucial, if brief, interlude between high school and “real life.”

Coda:

Disclaimer: This section is pieced together from things I know and things I think probably happened. This is not meant to serve as a strict historical record of events that, for whatever reason, my parents have barely shared with me–and even if they had, this would only be one side of the story. Thus, in historical terms, this is kind of a reconstruction, so take it for what it’s worth.

St. George’s at this point should have been in the rear view mirror, and it mostly was. I came back as an alum, hung around a little, and moved on to the next thing, which turned out to be Japan. However, it was not entirely behind me because my parents still worked there, and my father, after I left, got sucked deeper and deeper into school politics. I wish to tread lightly here because there is so much about this murky period that I still don’t totally understand, however the basic facts as I know them are as follows:

i) After George Swope, who had a cameo in Part VI of this series, St. George’s had a new principal called Jonathan Slater. My father had wanted the job, and didn’t get it.

ii) At first, my father and Slater were fast friends, but I think this was a mutually cynical political relationship in a sense. My father was the head teacher and a power in the school, and Slater would have come in knowing this. They bonded under the auspices that Slater would give way at some point to my father, but this was never going to happen. I knew this, even if my parents did not. At first Slater would invite my family to Thanksgiving and such, and my father praised him to the skies. That changed however, and the two men became bitter enemies. This enmity led eventually to my father leaving the school.

Now St. George’s was an interesting place, and it was pretty much run by the rich folks that sent their kids there. There was some kind of board that pushed the principals around, and this was mostly made up of folks from the South Hill, who tended to be a little on the stuck up side–not terribly in most instances, but somewhat for sure. Also, by the time in question here Dyche’s father was on it, as I understand. I guess Dyche’s dad was the token Vallyer on the basically South Hill board, but then the school got a big donation from the Gates Foundation and I think Bill Gates’ sister came onto the board, or at least into the zone. In essence this was Western Washington doing a little light colonization of Eastern Washington, the red-headed stepchild of that state. Eastern and Western Washington are divided by the Cascades mountains, where Twin Peaks is set. Twin Peaks is in this piece.

Now I don’t know much about Bill Gates, but I suspect he’s not a great guy. In fact, I think he’s pedophile-adjacent. But I know that Bill Gates is not a force for good in the world for a different reason, which has to do with my struggles with my Skype password a few years back. Back before Zoom came along and ate Skype’s lunch six ways to Sunday, I used the service and had a password for it which worked fine. Then Microsoft took it over or something and all the sudden I had to provide a Microsoft password to “get through” to Skype for some reason. This was terrible, because I try to avoid Microsoft at all costs and I didn’t even know if I had a Microsoft password. Certainly I didn’t want one.

But for weeks I could not get anywhere near Skype because of this password issue, and it was driving me nuts. I needed Skype for work and it just wasn’t coming through. In marketing terms, this is a “process” issue. Process is one of the 7 Ps of the marketing mix in business, and basically it refers to how easy, or hard, it is for the customer to access your good or service. Amazon’s one-click check-out is an example of good process. Microsoft’s multi-step, super frustrating, password labyrinth is the opposite. I got so fed up with this whole situation, and by extension Gates, that I even ranted about it and him on the short lived, but awesome, Periscope platform–which Twitter later bought and then killed.

So like I say, Microsoft sucks, Periscope rocks, Skype sucks and deserves its fate, and Bill Gates, in my opinion, also sucks. I don’t know anything about his sister, but her arrival was, I think, the catalyst for my father’s removal.

(By the way, the Skype password issue reminds me of the soft-water issue. When I was a teenager I would frequently see soft-water trucks driving around, and I wondered what in the world soft-water was. I am basically a huge fan of the prefix “soft” and wrote about it here. The only soft-prefixed phrase I don’t like is soft-water. That’s because, trucks and aggressive marketing aside, soft-water is terrible. It’s marketed as some kind of improvement over “hard-water,” which I guess is supposed to be full of minerals or something. However, soft-water is completely terrible. The absence of minerals means that it is totally ineffective at getting soap off your skin, so after a soft-water shower you walk around all day with a patina of soap residue stuck to you. Soft-water is awful and a total scam, just like orthodontists. There is no real connection between Microsoft passwords and soft-water, except both totally suck. I bet you Bill Gates is a big soft-water guy–he does look a little soapy.)

In any case, my father was friendly with the rich folks on the South Hill, and as a result we spent a lot of time at their various big houses. I was less enamored with the South Hill crowd as a whole, as I have made clear, although I did have friends who lived there, however my father was political so he kind of had to suck up a bit. But I don’t think he really loved this sort of hobnobbing–he never seemed really at home in these settings. My overall sense is that at St. George’s my father was mostly on the right side of history, but his shortcomings as a politician were his Achilles Heel.

So, the relationship with Slater was going south for a while, and then the principal’s little predilections started to become basically public knowledge. I don’t know if Slater is still alive–if he is he’d be pretty old, but I think it is a matter of record that if George Edwards liked him some beach babes, Jonathan Slater there was more interested in babes in the cradle, so to speak. Again, just something I’ve heard, but I’ve been hearing it more and more these days. The rumor was that Slater would spend time in, I guess they were, basically sex clubs in downtown Spokane, and his tastes ran as young as possible, staying, perhaps, just this side of legal. Spokane is not that big of a city, and with something of that nature, well word does get around.

So let’s use a little Occam’s Razor on this situation. Just looking at it, here’s what I guess happened. This dude Jonathan Slater was principal for a while and was good at raising money. He was also, like Bill Gates, pedophile-adjacent and Spokane is a small town. While his money raising skills gave him space to engage in some borderline bad action there in downtown Spokane and to cover for a few bad actor friends of his on campus for a while, over time tongues talked and whispers became louder and Slater had to go. My father (who is named Ross) ran point on this effort from within in terms of rallying the teachers to oppose Slater, and at the same time Ross was perhaps positioning himself to get nominated as principal, but I’m not really sure. However, the board didn’t want Ross to be principal because they recognized that he would be a “teacher’s principal” (like a player’s coach in a sense). Board opposition to Ross probably had a few aspects, some more flattering to the board, some less.

One aspect was probably that the board as a whole (I don’t mean any one board member individually, but as a collective over time) had covered for Slater a bit even when his little peccadillos were, or should have been, becoming apparent, and when they came to the conclusion finally that he had to go they wanted to do it quietly. Ross’ involvement was making that difficult. This aspect of the situation is not in the board’s favor. A second aspect is perhaps that the board realized that not only did Slater have to go but the school as a whole, the teaching staff and the administration, needed more accountability and standards, and having a teacher’s principal in place would, in their view, not advance this goal. This is more in the board’s favor.

I am not suggesting that Ross was anti-standards, quite the opposite in many respects, however it is true, in my view, that he was very much driven by personal relationships and by who was on his team. In this sense he approached school administration like he did coaching. And while there are positive aspects to this approach to administration, there are also drawbacks, which the board must have been aware of. Another factor here is that for someone who had serious political aspirations within education for several decades, Ross was in many ways still a limited politician. Although he associated with the wealthy class that ran the school, attended their parties, ate their food, and, at times, flattered them, he was, as I mentioned, at heart not comfortable in these spaces and indexed this in multiple ways. His other weakness, in my opinion, was a tendency to vilification, which as I say started with Slater a while before all the action came to a head. In this case though, I think the vilification was justified. All in all, in the immortal words of The Mendoza Line, mistakes were made.

Somehow the Gates sister got deep in the mix, and the board summarily fired Ross’ best-friend and right hand man. Ostensibly this was, I believe, for not updating his teaching credential, and/or for being habitually late for work (which he was), but in actuality this was a shot at Ross, whom they felt they could not fire. Ross did not take the firing well, and started to raise holy hell, using the Slater business as leverage. There was some kind of teacher revolt that was shut down, and then Ross was pushed out–fired, or left, I’m still not quite sure. Then, Ross sued the school (again, I heard this but my parents never really told me about any of it, but I believe they did eventually get some money), and the Slater business may have made the papers. The Spokane papers don’t have great archives (unlike the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), so I don’t know this for sure, but the basic narrative is along these lines, I believe.

With Slater and Ross both gone, the school moved on and probably the Gates sister installed her own puppet, and that was that for my family’s association with the school. Ross’ relationship with the South Hillers was pretty much shattered, and for some reason he took special issue with the role of Dyche’s dad (who he never had had a relationship with). I didn’t really know Dyche’s dad much, and when I did meet him he seemed pretty chill, so I’m guessing there might have been a bit of projection there. In any case, all those doors closed.

Years later however, one of the rich families who Ross used to be close with must have thought that having Ross back in the fold would be a good idea, and they decided to use me in a roundabout way to try and re-open the door. I was already pretty well along in my IB career here in Asia, and St. George’s was in the process of, or had become, an IB school as well. I got a message asking me if I wanted to come and consult with the school, and although I could totally handle a little consulting, this was a bit odd because I was based in Asia and surely they could get someone more local to give advice. I got the feeling that what was really going on though was the consulting gig was being dangled as a way get to Ross, but maybe it was in good faith, in which case cool. I told my parents about the offer and my mother was horrified that I would even consider it. That’s how bad matters were left with the school. But consider it I did, because if someone wants to fly me somewhere and pay me for my time, I’m probably gonna take it.

The offer fell through though, I’m guessing because the powers-that-were figured out that whatever they were angling for Ross to do wasn’t going to happen and they never really wanted me to consult anyway. I felt a little used, but not really–it was just politics.

Ross moved on to become principal of a Catholic school in Oregon, and was able to implement his team-based approach there and I think he did a great job. He is, I believe, a retired principal in good standing there, and he was widely liked, except by those that he let go. My father is a good man, and a moral one, but he was also a little tough and if he didn’t like the way things were going with a staff member he’d cut the cord. I understand this, and sometimes you gotta do it, but myself take a little longer term view of trying to get people to pull their weight. People are different.

The epigraph for this piece is from the Replacements, of course, from the song “Attitude” off All Shook Down. My two favorite songs on the record are “Someone Take the Wheel” (“I see we’re fighting again/ in some fucking land/ aw throw in another tape man,”) and “Attitude.” All in all I think I’m an alright fellow much of the time, but some people have said I have a little attitude myself. Well, if so I probably picked it up from the Mats.

And Mr. St. George’s, if your IB program is dragging a little or if you are looking for a little consultation in pretty much any area, hit me up. I’ll be there and it won’t even cost you that much. After all, I’ve always been a cheap date.

Dedication: For Dyche. Getting to know you was way more interesting than any subsequent politics. Thanks for the Mats. And for my father. Long may you run.