Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Song Prince Hal’s Dirge: Confidence, Reformation, and the Politics of Self-Making

Note: This short essay takes Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” as a lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, focusing on the idea of self-fashioning across time. It reads Hal’s apparent debauchery and later reform not simply as moral transformation, but as a theory of confidence—either consciously staged, in Shakespeare’s version, or more instinctively internalized in Wainwright’s. Moving between text and song, the piece explores how both versions hinge on the same underlying question: what kind of inner structure allows a self to pass through disorder, delay, and social misreading without collapsing, and to reconstitute itself as effective action when the moment arrives.

Epigraph:

Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Loudon Wainwright

This piece takes as its source the song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” by Loudon Wainwright III, itself based on Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal from Henry IV. The figure of Hal is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed political selves: a young man who deliberately inhabits disorder in order to make his eventual reformation into kingship appear all the more legitimate, even necessary.

In Henry IV, Hal openly announces this strategy to Falstaff and the other tavern companions:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

And again:

So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better that my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Hal’s logic is explicit: he will cultivate disorder as a kind of aesthetic and political foil. His apparent immersion in low company is not failure but strategy. Falstaff and the tavern world become, in effect, instruments in the staging of legitimacy.

Paraphrased, Hal is saying: I will live among you for a time, but only in order to abandon you later in a way that maximizes my transformation into kingship. He is a political animal who understands reputation as something staged across time.

Loudon Wainwright III’s “Prince Hal’s Dirge” takes up this same figure, but shifts the emphasis in a revealing way. Wainwright—still best known to many for novelty songs like “Dead Skunk,” though his broader body of work is far more substantial—reimagines Hal less as calculating strategist and more as self-contained performer of confidence within disorder.

The song opens in full immersion in debauchery:

Give me a capon
And some roguish companion,
A wench and a bottle of sack.
Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Here Hal is not yet strategy, but appetite. The political mask is absent; what remains is the world of consumption, drink, sex, and collapse.

But Wainwright then pivots:

My father, he thinks I’m a good for nothing
that I won’t amount to much.
But he’s not aware of my secret weapon.
I can count on myself in the clutch.

This is the key transformation. Shakespeare’s Hal is self-consciously future-oriented: he plans his reformation as spectacle. Wainwright’s Hal, by contrast, carries an interiorized assurance that he will simply “come through.” The emphasis shifts from calculation to instinctive resilience.

This continues in the song’s martial register:

Show me a breach,
I’ll once more unto it.
I’ll be ready for action any day.
I’ll straighten up, and fly most righteous.
In a fracas, I’ll be right in the fray.
I can drink you under twenty-five tables,
Fight and be a ladies man.
But all this will change,
When I’m good and ready,
To become the king of this land.

The phrase “any day” is doing important work here. It carries the rhetoric of readiness without commitment to timing. It suggests immediacy while quietly deferring it indefinitely. The transformation is always available, never enacted.

What emerges is a different psychological structure from Shakespeare’s original. Shakespeare gives us a political actor who consciously engineers perception over time. Wainwright gives us a man who believes in a durable inner core of competence—someone who can be disordered without being undone.

And yet both versions converge on the same underlying mechanism: confidence as political force. Whether staged (Shakespeare) or internalized (Wainwright), Hal’s power rests on the belief that identity can survive its own contradictions and ultimately reorganize them into legitimacy.

Singing “Prince Hal’s Dirge” before work, I find myself struck less by the irony of Hal’s transformation than by the necessity of something like an unbreakable interior core—something sealed enough to survive fluctuation, failure, and delay, but still flexible enough to return to action when required.

That, ultimately, is what both Shakespeare and Wainwright are circling: not morality, not reform, but the strange political psychology of self-belief under time pressure.

Dedication:

For my father, the biggest Shakespeare lover I know.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up various literary works.

On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)
On Raymond Carver’s “Fires”
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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine (Craig Finn’s Miniature Masterpiece)

Epigraph:

Jessamine must have had some dreams/ but she never really said what they were.

Craig Finn

Note: This is the third entry in my little ongoing series on Craig Finn / The Hold Steady songs that take up nightlife, messy adult relationships, and the long shadows cast by fleeting encounters. Part I and Part II are available. I’ve also written at length about what I consider Finn’s two greatest songs: A Bathtub in a Kitchen and It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.

Jessamine is track 8 off of A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s 2022 solo record distributed on his own label, Positive Jam Records. It clocks in at a tight 3 minutes and 25 seconds, and once again I am simply overawed by Finn’s concision and his ability to tell a whole story in just a few words. It is my opinion, and I do not say this lightly, that Finn is the greatest short story writer to have ever lived. 

Jessamine tells the story of a three week relationship between the narrator, who we will continue to call C. for convenience, and a goth girl with a need for speed. A Legacy of Rentals contains at least three excellent songs, the crime caper “The Amarillo Kid,” the gorgeous “The Year We Fell Behind,” and Jessamine. I would love to write about The Year We Fell Behind as well, however Jessamine falls neatly into our conceit of nightlife and adult relationships, although this one seems to depict more of a young person’s relationship. Close enough. 

Jessamine is folky and lilting, of a piece with Finn’s later work which tends toward folk and country as opposed to Lifter Puller’s indie fever dreams and The Hold Steady’s soaring rock anthems. The Finn song that it most closely resembles is “Esther,” from a 2018 EP by The Hold Steady which also depicts an intense and short-lived relationship. “The party ended suddenly, suddenly it’s over/ That left me and Esther all alone and getting older/ All alone and getting older smoking in the street/ Now everything is Esther and it’s been that way all week.”

Jessamine opens thusly:

I met Jessamine in Cherry Hill

Her dress all done in daffodils

The sticker on her skateboard said, “Speed kills”

And yeah, it probably did just what it said

Cherry Hill is in New Jersey, where the song is set. Jessamine is probably a younger woman, and a skater. The first verse foreshadows her ultimate fate. Incidentally, the first time I visited New Jersey was junior year of college with my Asian Art History class. It was also on this trip that I first visited New York City, the most intoxicating place on earth which I have written about relatively extensively. I wrote about my Art professor in my piece on my senior year at Hamilton College, in relation to a girl I had a total crush on, called L. L. was not exactly goth, but she might have been goth-adjacent. And she was totally intense. More on goths in a minute.

Verse II adds a little more context.

I only knew her for like three weeks straight

And the whole time we were wide awake

You know “Trenton Makes, the World Takes?”

She had it spray-painted over her bed

It is my experience that short-term relationships can be, probably are, the most intense and intoxicating type of relationships in a sense. The depth that comes with a true crush, while of a completely different valance from a long-term relationship, is, I believe, without parallel. But then again, I’m an action junkie, as is Finn. I wrote about the power of a crush in my Bad Moves piece where I confessed to a serious crush on their lead singer, Katie Park. I actually sent the piece to the band via Instagram, and they responded saying “Thanks for the write-up.” I don’t know, but I like to believe Katie read, or at least saw, my piece! Unfortunately, Bad Moves are disbanding and are, I believe, on their farewell tour.

The wording “three weeks straight” implies that C. and Jessamine were, temporarily, inseparable, sleep deprived, and deep into each other. Trenton is, of course, also in New Jersey, and though I hadn’t heard of the exact phrase quoted until I listened to the song, it is apparently well known locally and appears in neon on a bridge.

Verses III and IV introduce Jessamine’s death obsession, and to me anyway suggest that she is what I would call a kind of a goth.

We used to hang around her room

Getting off on all the gloom and the doom

Watching cavemen in the cartoons

Playing xylophones made out of bones

She was sexy, but still death-obsessed

She said the bloodshed makes such a mess

But you really don’t even have to market it

Yeah, it pretty much sells itself

Now I am not really into a lot of bones and blood personally, but I do like me some goth girls. In fact, in the course of my life I have sort of quasi-dated a few, and for whatever reason they are just my speed. I find goth girls sexy, like Jessamine, caring, and deeply intriguing. And mysterious, of course. I have a weakness for crazy women; I cannot lie. And already I can totally see Jessamine’s appeal.

Jessamine has a number of semi-chourses, and the first one goes like this: 

I should’ve asked her before she departed

How did all these wars get started?

Why do rival crews show up to the same parties

If they hate each other so much?

It’s like they’re secretly in love

Again, we foresee Jessamine’s demise up front. Why would Jessamine have insight into the origins of global conflicts? I’m not quite sure, however the image of rival gangs being secretly in love is oddly compelling. However, it is with the next verse and chorus that the song really gets going.

Verse V and Chorus II go like this:

She said, “Suspicion isn’t wisdom

And the drones look just like doves”

And there was something laying siege to her kingdom

But she never really said what it was

While the incense turned to ashes

And the sunrise was unsure

Jessamine musta had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

Here we learn that our goth girl heroine has something going on that is unarticulated, or perhaps inarticulable. “Jessamine musta had some dreams/ But she never really said what they were” is such a wonderful and moving line. We all have dreams, I suppose; some come to fruition and some don’t. But Finn is in no way judging Jessamine’s relative inability to describe her dreams; instead this aspect of her character only adds to her obliqueness, her mystery.

The next verse and chorus show that Jessamine in the end, and probably in the beginning, had the upper hand in the relationship.

We kinda ended how we began

With Jessamine meeting a man

And liking that man just a little bit more

Than the boy she had before

I hadn’t even seen her since

I guess this new guy was some kind of prince

I guess his castle was a front for some fence

And then the whole damn city got warm

And they were trying to ride out that storm

Again, Finn is a total master of precision and compression. C. is immature, Jessamine is, to some extent, on the make, her new boyfriend is crime-adjacent (so many of Finn’s songs feature characters on the margins of the legal world), and the whole damn city mirrors Jessamine’s flightiness. The crush is over; C. is dumped and he never sees her again. That’s a weird and kind of almost frightening part of short-lived relationships–while their depths are as intoxicating as anything in life, people will just move on and the moment exists only in memory, burned into the fabric of time, but still fleeting.

The next verse points toward C. getting over Jessamine, and alludes to the idea that what may seem for a time to be a storm will pass; a crush, with all its power, is also somewhat illusory.

‘Cause the rain is inconsistent

And the thunder is insincere

‘Cause it makes a big commotion

But eventually it clears

The next verse and chorus puts a pin in Jessamine’s story, and Finn employs his classic penchant for alliteration along the way. Maybe to get away from the scene, or perhaps for some other reason, C. moves out west, loses his shirt, metaphorically, and literally perhaps, and gets word of Jessamine’s demise.

I went out to San Francisco

And some sailor stole my shirt

I was sitting on the passenger side in a taxi

The first time that I heard

That she was probably speeding

And no one else was hurt

Jessamine must’ve had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

I love the line here “and no one else was hurt.” It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. Finn doesn’t even really register what C.’s reaction is to Jessamine’s death is, he simply repeats the lines about dreams such that she dies as she lived, unknown to herself and unknowable to others.

Overall, Jessamine might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness as a song like A Bathtub in the Kitchen. Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like Jessamine. Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.

I wish her to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated that fact that he liked this “music,” but I have to confess that I could not have cared less. The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. And this is, essentially, because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like Jessamine. I won’t get super political here, however the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate a Jessamine, or Return of the Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, or Come in from the Cold by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me. As implied above, Finn had to live 50 years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to Jessamine. At 3 minutes and 25 seconds it is a mini-masterpiece.

Dedication:

For goth girls everywhere.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy the pieces below, which also cover the singer-songwriter Craig Finn.

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

WAYFARER: A PLAY

Note: This piece is a five-act play based loosely on a week I spent in Oxford in 2018. Unlike my previous narrative essays on the same material, (here, here, and here), this is written as a staged work, with dialogue, silence, and structure doing the heavy lifting. At its core, the play explores the tension between experience and narration—what happens when a person tries to turn a living moment into a story too quickly, and what is gained (and lost) in that process. While grounded in real events, it is not strictly autobiographical; it is a shaped and curated version of those experiences. As with all my work, the hope is that it resonates beyond its immediate context. Thank you for reading.

A Five-Act Play

EPIGRAPH

I can’t believe all the good things that you do for me
Sat back in a chair
Like a princess from a faraway place
Nobody’s nice
When you’re older your heart turns to ice

Mark Kozelek — Have You Forgotten

ACT I — THE WAYFARER

Scene 1 — Registration Desk (Threshold)

Lights: institutional white. Gradual warm shift beneath it, as if memory is already leaking into the space.

Sound: distant conference murmur. A faint, unresolved piano note.

A desk. A GATEKEEPER. A lanyard laid out like an object of passage.

MATT enters. Slightly lost. He has clearly been walking longer than intended.

GATEKEEPER
Name?

MATT hesitates. Reaches for something that is not yet ready.

MATT
Here. I think.

He presents credentials.

Stamp sound. Too loud for the space.

The badge is handed back.

CHORUS (from off, soft, not fully placed in space)
Arrival.
Conference.
Inn.
Story begins again.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside, not heard by others)
I thought I came to learn.

The badge feels heavier than it should.

Lights soften.

Scene 2 — Inn Common Room

Warm, slightly unreal hospitality lighting.

Tables. Cups. A space that feels both public and private but refuses to decide which.

ELODIE is present as if she has always been there.

MATT notices her immediately.

NARRATOR-MATT
Voltage.

ELODIE
Tea?

MATT
Yes. Thank you.

Beat. Nothing rushed.

CHORUS (slightly brighter, almost encouraging)
House lady.
Innkeeper.
Muse—

(a correction, quieter)
No. Person.

ELODIE does not acknowledge the Chorus.

Scene 3 — “Sing for Your Supper”

Sound: faint guitar motif. The room subtly shifts into performance space without fully becoming one.

CHORUS subtly rearranges space like memory editing.

MATT sings quietly:

MATT (singing fragment — The Clientele, “The Violet Hour”)
so that summer came and went
and I became cold
yeah I became cold

ELODIE listens. No visible transformation.

NARRATOR-MATT
Hospitality is not destiny.

The room remains unchanged.

Blackout.

ACT II — THE HOT ZONE

Scene 1 — The Casino

Green felt lighting. Rotating overhead spot.

CROUPIER replaces Gatekeeper.

CROUPIER
Place your bet.

MATT
Meaning.

CHORUS
Luck.
Chance.
Myth begins when odds are misread.

MATT places chip.

Sound: chip hits felt—final, sharp.

Scene 2 — Triptych (Three Trips)

Lighting pulses three times. Distinct beats.

MATT (low, repeating)
Three trips.
No more trips.

CHORUS fractures into three figures: GENIE / GHOST / MESSENGER.

NARRATOR-MATT
Inspiration gone.

GENIE (brief, playful)
First.

GHOST (slow, distant)
Memory.

MESSENGER (clear, neutral)
Transmission.

All fade.

Scene 3 — Jungle Confrontation

Green light. Reduced set. No realism.

MATT
Her.
Leave everything.
Frontman.
Practice.

ELODIE
No.

MATT
What is this?

ELODIE
Not your exorcism.

CHORUS
Brink.

Blackout.

ACT III — NAMING THE PATTERN

Scene 1 — Needy Boys

Two chairs. Neutral white light.

ELODIE
Don’t narrate me.

MATT pauses. This lands fully.

NARRATOR-MATT
I was writing her.

Silence.

Scene 2 — Chapel

Stillness. Breath-level sound only.

CHORUS (barely present)
Meaning.
Destiny.
Story.

NARRATOR-MATT
Room, not revelation.

Silence holds.

Scene 3 — Pattern Recognition

Lighting: subtle timeline shifts—memory flickers, not time travel.

NARRATOR-MATT
Senior year.
Again.

ELODIE
Your pattern is yours.

MATT
I see it.

CHORUS
First choice.

Blackout.

ACT IV — RELEASE

Scene 1 — The Offer

Dusk light.

MATT
Part-time.
Scout.
Not jungle.

ELODIE
Boundaries are kindness.

Scene 2 — The Pivot

Warm domestic light replaces earlier symbolic tones.

MATT
Family.
Music.
Life.

CHORUS
Myth.
Escape.
Hero.

MATT
No.

Silence holds. No response from Chorus.

Scene 3 — Chorus Dissolves

Lighting: references dim one by one.

CHORUS removes masks.

NARRATOR-MATT
The story stayed.
The spell lifted.

Blackout.

ACT V — OXFORD CODE

Scene 1 — Gesture

Morning Oxford grey. Minimal space.

ELODIE
Take care.

MATT
You too.

Beat.

No escalation. No closure ritual.

Scene 2 — Benediction (Chapel Revisited)

Same chapel. Quieter now.

Sound: Arvo Pärt piano. Sparse. Non-declarative.

NARRATOR-MATT
Gratitude.

Silence. Breath.

MATT listens without narrating.

Scene 3 — Train

Sound: distant platform announcement. Train readiness.

Gatekeeper becomes CONDUCTOR.

CONDUCTOR
All aboard.

CHORUS
Run back.
Declare.
Confess.

MATT
No.

MATT boards train.

NARRATOR-MATT
The jungle is real.
The girl is real.
The story remains.

Beat.

NARRATOR-MATT (softer)
You think you’ve finished it. Then it comes back different.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside)
She knew more than I could say.

Train departs.

Lights fade with motion, not blackout.

FIN

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats

Note: This piece takes up the 2008 record The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats as a tightly structured emotional sequence rather than a loose collection of autobiographical songs, tracing how John Darnielle moves from childhood survival through adolescent endurance, imagined justice, outward identification with others’ suffering, and finally a grounded, unsettling encounter with memory and partial reconciliation.

Epigraph:

I leaned my head in close to the little record player on the floor

So this is what the volume knob’s for.

Released in 2005, The Sunset Tree is widely regarded as the defining record by The Mountain Goats and the most directly autobiographical work by John Darnielle. The album centers on his childhood and adolescence under an abusive stepfather, and the long, uneven emotional project of trying—never quite succeeding—to understand or forgive that past. It has become the band’s best-known record, both for its clarity and its force, with songs like This Year and “No Children” forming its core identity in the wider culture.

Dance Music

“Dance Music” opens in a small, specific place—Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo—and immediately establishes the strange clarity of childhood memory: precise details without full understanding. A television hums with the Watergate hearings, a child senses that something is wrong but cannot name it, and a record player becomes an unlikely refuge. From that point, the song moves with quiet precision between moments of violence, escape, and interior unraveling, compressing years of experience into just over two minutes.

What strikes me is how firmly he anchors the song in space and time: Johnson Avenue, San Luis Obispo, five or six years old, Watergate hearings on TV. It’s precise enough to feel real, but not over-described. This isn’t abstraction—it’s memory with edges.

The child doesn’t understand what’s happening, but senses it. That “spidy sense” of something wrong is exactly right. The record player becomes a kind of accidental sanctuary. And then the line about the volume knob—discovering control for the first time—still hits hard. It’s a moment of agency inside chaos.

Cut forward, and nothing has resolved. The same house, the same structure, but now adolescence, relationships, internal damage. The “secret sickness” feels like a slow internalisation of everything that could not be processed earlier. The movement language—twisting roads, cul-de-sacs—suggests trying to find exits that don’t exist, or lead back into themselves.

And then the final image: police, dance music still playing. No resolution, just continuation under pressure. The refusal to close is part of the point.

This Year

If “Dance Music” shows how survival begins, “This Year” shows how it is sustained. Still rooted in the same autobiographical terrain of John Darnielle’s adolescence, the song shifts from memory to immediacy. It is one of the most recognizable songs by The Mountain Goats, defined by urgency, repetition, and forward motion.

This song is about survival and grit. The details—an older car, struggling engine, movement through space—create a physical sense of instability. You can feel the effort of motion.

The repetition is not optimism—it’s insistence. Saying something until it becomes structurally real. “Manifest” is the right word. This is survival being constructed in real time.

The narrative sections imply violence without naming it. Everything is loaded, but never fully articulated. That restraint is what makes it powerful.

And the ending—moving toward a distant, almost mythic place like Jerusalem—carries the sense of escape not as fantasy, but as direction.

Up the Wolves

Placed mid-record, “Up the Wolves” becomes the pivot between endurance and imagination. Where This Year insists on survival and Song for Dennis Brown expands suffering outward, this song introduces the possibility of emotional reordering—of imagining forgiveness, escape, and restructured power.

The key idea here is that damage is not escapable—it follows you. But alongside that is the introduction of imagined relief. The more aggressive imagery is not literal—it’s emotional escalation, the mind testing what justice might feel like if it were unconstrained.

The Roman myth framing matters: origin stories built from violence and absence. It lifts the personal into something archetypal. This is the first time the album seriously considers not just survival, but transformation of structure.

Song for Dennis Brown

At first glance, this appears to be a departure—a tribute song placed late in a deeply personal record. But it functions instead as expansion. The focus shifts from autobiography to shared human conditions of mortality, damage, and endurance.

Dennis Brown died in 1999, widely associated with Rastafari culture and a life shaped by both musical legacy and personal struggle.

This is not just about Dennis Brown—it is identification. The song places him and the speaker inside the same pattern of fragility and consequence.

The world is not paused by death. It continues. That’s the structural point. The imagery of decay alongside innocence creates dissonance—life continuing in spite of damage.

The violent reworking of natural imagery reinforces that nothing remains untouched. This is the album’s outward turn. Not introspection, but scale.

Pale Green Things

As the final track, this returns to specificity. The stepfather is no longer a looming figure of power but a weakened, aging man after a heart attack, still performing small routines at the racetrack. The focus is observational rather than symbolic.

We are grounded in physical detail: racetrack, stopwatch, Racing Form. A man reduced but still engaged with structure The “pale green things” recur as quiet markers of life continuing—small growth, persistence, indifference.

The shift is subtle but crucial: the speaker is now present with him in this space. Not outside it. Memory returns not to violence but to observation. That is the emotional pivot. What remains is not resolution, but recognition. The mind returns to this moment rather than others.

Closing reflection

Across these five songs, The Sunset Tree traces a coherent emotional progression: from childhood survival in “Dance Music,” to adolescent insistence in This Year, to imagined restructuring in Up the Wolves, to outward identification in Song for Dennis Brown, and finally to direct, grounded confrontation in Pale Green Things.

What makes the record so enduring is not that it resolves the question of abuse or forgiveness, but that it refuses to simplify it. Survival is shown as repetition, will, imagination, projection, and finally memory itself. Forgiveness appears not as an endpoint, but as something unstable, partial, and deeply contested.

It is also worth noting—without collapsing interpretation into autobiography—that these questions are not abstract. Many listeners carry their own histories of harm and difficulty in forgiving those histories fully. I would include myself in that broader human category. What makes this record remarkable is not that it answers forgiveness, but that it shows how seriously it must be attempted, even when it remains unresolved.

That is why The Sunset Tree endures: it treats survival and forgiveness not as conclusions, but as ongoing acts of attention.

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Scenes from Hamilton College VI: Junior Year in New Zealand

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

Epigraph:

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

Peter Jefferies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication:

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

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

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

All you ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Big Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to be continued…

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Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

Epigraph:

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…

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

New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.

The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.

Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.

Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:

“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”

In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.

The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.

Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”

We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.

Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.

After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.

Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.

Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:

i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.

ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.

iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.

Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.

I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.

I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.

The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.

If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight

If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight

We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules

Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.

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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

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

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

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

Matt

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships IV: Sixers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sixers” captures that atmosphere perfectly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then comes the hinge of the entire song.

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

With that single line the entire evening collapses.

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

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

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

The next gesture is even more telling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The song ends where it began, with footsteps.

But this time the sound isn’t real.

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

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

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

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

And sometimes getting it slightly wrong.

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

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine