Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery (edited by William Irwin, Blackwell, 2007)

    Last week was a school break, so it’s a good time to spend a sunny day in a university library and read a book from my reading list cover to cover in one sitting because I can’t borrow it from the library. It was also break week for Northwestern, so I basically had the place to myself. For a few hours that day, I was in bibliophile heaven, reading a book in a forgotten corner (well, not really, because the building I was in was roughly circular, but you get the idea) of a research library at a name-brand institution. I was so focused, I didn’t even take a break to get lunch.

    You’re likely familiar with this kind of book even if you haven’t read it. I think the first in the loosely defined series was Seinfeld and Philosophy and I know I read something like The D’oh of Homer: Simpsons and Philosophy when I was trying to understand my own undergraduate philosophy courses a little better. Although I appreciate the approach these books take, they never clicked for me. Sure, I’m a fan of METALLICA and The Simpsons, among other pop culture fare that have been featured in these books, and of course I am a huge nerd, so I’d love to read about the intersection of philosophy with these allegedly low-brow pop culture artifacts. Somehow, the combination of the two things was less than the sum of its parts; they were not two great tastes that taste great together. So, you may understand why I didn’t want to purchase this book when I could read it for free at the library.

    As I previewed the text, I noticed that the series info page tells us “Thinking deeply about TV, movies, and music doesn’t make you a ‘complete idiot.’ In fact it might make you a philosopher, someone who believes the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined cartoon is not worth watching.” That was certainly reassuring. Not that I agree with the idea that pop culture and idiocy go hand-in-hand, mind you. I don’t need to give my favorite bands, books, shows, or movies an academic sheen to consider them worthwhile. It’s nice if I can but it’s kind of like the idea of a guilty pleasure; I’ll interrogate why I like something, but feeling guilty about it is a little weird.

    You can probably imagine that METALLICA has been an important band in my life for quite some time. Basically, I’ve been interested in them since 7th grade. I was aware of them earlier, but I wasn’t ready for them until I was a young adolescent. And, of course, like most young adolescents, I had to express my interest in them through clothing. It seems that at least one of the authors had the same experience as me. In an essay on METALLICA’s message of nonconformity, individuality, and truth, Thomas Nys writes about being 14 years old and how, at the time, he “believed that wearing a METALLICA t-shirt provided the perfect expression of my rebellious nature. Nowadays, I believe wearing the t-shirt provided the perfect excuse for not talking to the beautiful girls I was secretly in love with (girls who would have nothing to do with such a rebel)” (p. 41). If that doesn’t hit home, I don’t know what does. It’s not just the recognition of the attempt at iconoclasm, but the later realization of the metal t-shirt as social kryptonite that resonates here. I’d be lying if I said I still felt the same way about METALLICA as I did when I first heard them, or that I’m even into the same songs after all these years. What’s interesting here instead is using the band as a kind of measuring stick of my own growth. There are different aspects of the band, let alone eras, that have appealed to me at different times in my life. It’s not a linear progression either. It’s like that old saying about not being able to step in the same river twice because the river has changed as much as you have. One change I was not ready for was the transition from hearing METALLICA on modern rock radio as a teenager to hearing them on a throwback or retro-focused station in recent years. As another chapter in this book brutally declares, “Eventually, even METALLICA will find rotation on only the oldies station” (p. 110). Even though I know that to be true and have witnessed it with my own ears, it still stings. When I consider that those words were written as early as 2007 at the latest, I feel the sting even more deeply.

    I could go on about the autobiographical connections I felt to various moments in the chapters of the text, but what really excited me about reading this book were the new insights gained about a band I thought I knew so well. For instance, in a discussion of the importance of the band as community, Rachael Sotos shares how important the collective identity of we was for the band, especially in the early days. She writes, “If we consider in particular the first album, Kill ‘em All, it is truly remarkable how predominant the experience of the ‘we’ is at the beginning of METALLICA’s journey. In the lyrics of this album the word ‘we’ appears more times than on all the other albums combined. It appears and is repeated, again and again announcing the ‘we’ of the newly born speed metal community” (p. 90). That’s an incredible point to make and one that seems so glaringly obvious in retrospect. “Kill ‘em All” stands on its own, while their other albums have certain echoes, connections, or relationships that make them part of an era or music history moment. What Sotos argues here is that in addition to the sonic novelty of a ten-song album that essentially invented thrash metal as a genre, the importance of the album is in the collective nature of its expression. This was a mission statement from a band that saw itself as a crew. In contrast to a hardcore punk band that might have sang about an us-versus-them orientation to being pissed off at society at large, and, in so doing, draw the audience into community with it, METALLICA declares here that they are an unstoppable machine, so you’d best get out of their way. And here I was thinking I couldn’t love “Kill ‘em All” any more than I already do.

    Those familiar with the band’s lineup might be scratching their heads at this point because they know of the infamous lineup changes that have been part of the band over the years. Manuel Bremer and Daniel Cohnitz have got you covered in their chapter on “Is it Still METALLICA? On the Identity of Rock Bands Over Time.” They take on the idea of the Ship-of-Theseus-like recomposition of a band’s lineups over time as they consider what counts as being the true or the original version of the band. Who is that we?, essentially. In their chapter, they offer a thought experiment from involving a “Mave Dustaine” who uses mad scientists to transplant his brain into Kirk Hammett’s body while Kirk is on the tour bus one night. So when Kirk wakes up with “Mave Dustaine’s brain,” the band is astonished that “he has forgotten how to play almost all of his solos, but he can play many songs by a band called Degameth. Is it really Kirk who woke up in Kirk’s bed with Kirk’s body but with Mave’s memories?” (p. ~186). This is a delightful exercise that gets at the idea of band’s identity. It also has the benefit of being hilarious—just try not to laugh when thinking of an alternate reality with someone named Mave Dustaine sings for Degameth, while Hames Jetfield’s band, Temallica (or Metal Mania, if they had chosen that name instead…) is considered the lesser band. Of course Dave Mustaine played a pivotal role in METALLICA’s development, and their choice to unceremoniously kick him out of the band because of his alcohol intake is notorious example of dudes not being able to talk through their problems with each other. They continued to use riffs and songs he’d composed for their first two albums, just as Kirk brought riffs and songs from EXODUS when they recruited him  to replace Dave. Does that mean METALLICA is a revised lineup of EXODUS and MEGADETH a revised version of METALLICA? Not quite, but the argument over who can claim to be the originator of an idea is not merely a question from a compositional royalties standpoint.

    On the topic of “what counts” as a band in terms of their lineup, I deeply appreciated Philip Lindholm’s chapter, entitled “The Struggle Within: Hetfield, Kierkegaard, and the Pursuit of Authenticity.” As lead singer, founding member, and rhythm guitarist, James gets plenty of attention in the band’s history. That said, it was very interesting to read how Lindholm traced Hetfield’s existential journey by way of his lyrics. The most intriguing part of the chapter was footnote, which is exciting in its own right. This one contains an excerpt from a 2001 interview with James from Playboy, where he mentions how his parents’ faith was socially alienating for him. I know they were Christian Scientists because it has been subject of METALLICA songs before. But, the detail that a young James “couldn’t get a physical to play football” (p. 72) when he was in high school makes my mind reel. To think that there’s a version of reality where James becomes a full-on jock and pursues sports instead of music is almost too much to bear. Would he have gone to college? Would he have been less of an outcast? Would he have been as interested in music? Who would Lars have connected with when he put an ad in The Recycler? James’ missed shot at competitive sports glory because of his parent’s religious beliefs eventually made METALLICA possible. It’s staggering to think of what almost wasn’t…

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TRIAL Are These Our Lives? (Equal Vision, 1999)

    It’s time to look back on an album that had a major impact on my life and that I have been returning to again and again over the years. The hosts of Vibe Check, Saeed Jones, Sam Sanders, and Zach Stafford, discuss this idea in terms of “modern scriptures;” those texts that you find yourself revisiting during times of difficulty. In a recent recording, Sam Sanders defined a modern scripture as “a text that you can always come back to when you need it. And sometimes it will mean different things based on the day, based on where you are when you receive it, and based on who says it to you. And these words can be this infinite font of wisdom because the words are the same, but the meaning can change for you.” I’ve been streaming this TRIAL album off and on since the 2024 U.S. election and I figured this was good enough a week to discuss it more fully.

    I want to say up front that this is not my favorite album or anything like that. I have been into it on and off since high school and seeing the band on their tour supporting it is a strong, positive memory. It’s not an album I think about when I think about my favorites nor did it completely overtake my listening when I first heard it. The impact it had was felt and known only in retrospect. There are some albums whose release I awaited with years or months or weeks of anticipation. I don’t remember where or when I bought the CD version of “Are These Our Lives?” but it could have been at the short-lived Raw Records in Evanston. I probably sold it when I was in college or shortly after, when I was culling what I would now call cringey records from my adolescence. Ones that did not stand the test of time but seemed so important at that time, yet still did not have any kind of nostalgic appeal. That stance was short lived, as I downloaded it not too many years after, the digital format doing the release no justice.

    The booklet itself is the key part. Anyone who knows my music listening habits knows that I make a ritual of inspecting the liner notes and other extratextual information of any record, CD, cassette, whatever, before I dive into my first listen. On this album, each song has its own page in the booklet and each song also has an excerpt from an associated text above its lyrics. This was the first time I’d read or even heard about Howard Zinn, Emma Goldman, and Mikhail Bakunin. I mean some of my friends in the Honors class of American Interdisciplinary Studies were reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so I knew of Zinn, but this was from a HC punk band, not a high school teacher. It was different. I was merely in the Advanced section of the same class (so not as rigorous) and we didn’t use that text. So, it seemed like this band had something to teach me. I think that’s still true.

    There were a few interviews with vocalist Greg Bennick in the zines I picked up over the next little while and the erudition (no, I wouldn’t have used that word then) reflected in the lyrics was supported by his responses to the zine editors’ questions. I still think about the pull quote the editor of either Value of Strength or Reflections used for the interview with Greg in an issue. It’s about how the band is his “immortality project” and how he is jealous of the wall that forms the room they are speaking in because it will be there for hundreds of years after they both die.

    For me, the music holds up as well as any brick wall. It’s some of the most melodramatic, passionate, and intense HC punk that I like. You could have heard records or bands like this one described disparagingly as amazingcore by members of certain online communities around 2003 or so. At that time, if a person in a band that I liked criticized another band or genre in that manner, I listened and followed their words like gospel. (Like I mentioned above, I ended up selling the CD around this time.) I was being socialized into feeling ashamed about something I liked because it wasn’t cool anymore. I’m glad I’m not like that now. This rips, still. I don’t give a shit about guilty pleasures or whatever. If I like it, I like it; if you like it, you like it. No guilt necessary. It helped me feel like it was a little bit “cooler” of a record when I saw a label blurb that mentioned the sounds of bands such as BURN, BEYOND, and CRO-MAGS when it was reissued in 2009 or so. That lineage is a bit more fitting sonically and those bands have their place in the canon. But, as a 16-year-old when the record came out, I wouldn’t have known what those bands sounded like. I knew members of CRO-MAGS were to be feared, but that’s about it. It’s funny how the canon evolves over time, not to mention your personal taste.

    My lasting memory of the show I saw them play on the tour supporting the album is that people were moshing to the beginning of “Reflections,” the song after the orchestral instrumental intro. The very first thing that tells you this is a record with punk lineage is the rapid hi-hat flourish for the first maybe ten seconds of the song. People cleared space on the tile floor of the Odum and began windmilling and spin-kicking immediately, even before the pummeling double-bass part kicked in. It was like a bomb went off. 

    Even if the music doesn’t click for you, the ideas still hold up. They sing about the United States as a declining empire and the need to make sense of the world around us by forging connections and community as the world crumbles and falls. One sticking point I have is the inclusion of sample of a Hitler speech, complete with sieg heils, on “Legacy.” If someone overhears you listening to that part of the song, they are going to get the wrong idea. TRIAL, of course, are not Nazis, and include the sample to criticize tepid responses to fascism. How else are we meant to interpret this line? “From 1944 through 1998 / children dead at Birkenau or Tibetans laid to waste / excuses become our legacy.” As you might be able to infer, the answer to the question posed by the album’s title is a deeply bellowed “No!” We do not have to settle for the conditions the world has given us; our lives are worth more than that. Greg reminds us earlier on the title track how “organization can enhance empowerment.” It’s a good idea to keep in mind as the U.S. attorney general is equating suburbanites holding homemade signs outside a failing car company with domestic terrorism. In a moment like this one, it’s good to turn to the tried and true texts from your life. Not for simple comfort, but for the strength to keep on moving, whether alone or in concert with others.

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FUCKED UP “Disabuse” b/w “Self-Driving Man” (Sub Pop, 2025)

    FUCKED UP has done a few April Fool’s Day themed releases that function as sequels to their first few singles (e.g., “Cops” from 2023 is the sequel to “Police,” and 2024’s “Being Annoying” is the sequel to “Baiting the Public”). “Disabuse” has no such jocular tone. Of course, it’s not yet April Fool’s Day, either. Last year, they teased live versions of this song on their three one-day-only Bandcamp downloads from their summer tour. I knew then that this song was something special. In between songs, Damian explained how it was a tribute who his daughter who recently came out as trans. As if I wasn’t sold on the sonics of the song already, hearing that personal testament of a father’s love made it all the sweeter. He gets honest about his shortsightedness when explaining the song’s meaning at those gigs, saying that he thought that simply by enrolling his kid in an alternative school in a major world city that the people his daughter interacts with on a daily basis would be understanding of her gender identity. Turns out that’s not the case, so he lets us know that “This one’s for Dorothy” as the song begins. The flip is just a powerful; Mike’s lyric critiques the automated nature of not just vehicles but our lives in general. A self-driving man is nihilistically self-centered by definition. Maybe you know someone like that.

    The songs themselves are strong enough for me to recommend the record on those merits, but where it truly reveals its depth is in the connections it makes to other records that are important to the band. I’m thinking specifically of the BROTHERHOOD record on Skate Edge and POISON IDEA’s Sub Pop single. I bring up these intentional references because FUCKED UP is a band that prizes the 7” as a format. They have a poster you can buy that has the a-side labels of 56 of their singles on it in neatly arranged rows (and, yes, it already needs to be updated). The point of punk is that on a 7”, you can get a few ideas across in a small amount of time and that there is power in that economic punch. For all their long-playing records and the Zodiac 12” releases, it’s on the singles where FUCKED UP shines the brightest. Don’t just take my word for it, Mike, Damian, and Sandy said just about the same in an interview in issue #2 of Not a Game in 2003. When the zine editor asked why they do singles instead of EPs or LPs, Mike said “When bands put out punk records at the start they were all singles, right? It was weird to have more than two songs on a record. There was a couple of UNDERTONES four-song 45s and shit, but the two-song 7” is the format for that kind of music.” Damian added, “It makes you listen to the song harder and it’s not like eight crappy songs. Plus they feel cooler.” Sandy closed with the observation, “And also you are able to trace the progression because they were each released at different times. Rather than releasing a ton of songs at one point and getting lost.” So, it’s been their plan to have cool singles for a long time. This interview was from when they only had the first three singles out, too. Do you remember?

    Damian blogged about the BROTHERHOOD record in 2009 and said it was the best straight edge record of all time. (TURNING POINT and CONFRONT rounded out the top three.) Of the BROTHERHOOD record, he wrote, “Before Gregg Anderson of SUNN 0))) discovered pot and boring music and before William Goldsmith discovered terrible college rock in SUNNY DAY REAL ESTATE and The FOO FIGHTERS, they were the axe-man and bass-tard in the Greatest Edge band ever. Cool harsh vocals and illest gang vocal part ever: 'More than music... IT'S A WAY OF LIFE!!!'” That record is titled “No Tolerance for Ignorance,” but it’s commonly referred to as the “Fuck Racism” 7” because those words appear in bold, red capital letters in front of a swastika on the cover art. On “Disabuse,” when Damian barks “Still ‘no tolerance for ignorance’ / let them make their recompense / but if not then there’s no debate / this argument has one side / humanity over bigotry / every single time,” he’s calling back to one of his favorite records while updating and recontextualizing its message for his own needs.

    The other single from the Pacific Northwest that is relevant here is the POISON IDEA record on Sub Pop. There are plenty of places where members of FUCKED UP have mentioned the importance of Portland’s longest running HC band (from the music to the records themselves), so I can only imagine how excited they were about the prospect of getting a two-song single on Sub Pop that they could use to pay homage to them. In true record-collectors-are-pretentious-assholes fashion, they created a limited cover that mimics the hand-drawn band portrait on the original record. It’s a nice touch.

    Around the same time that POISON IDEA released their Sub Pop single, they also did a two-song single on their own American Leather Records, “Discontent” b/w “Jailhouse Stomp.” The a-side is memorable for its refrain of “Listen, Nazi, never again” as well as late guitarist Pig Champion’s absolutely brutal guest vocal. It’s easy to see the connection between “Disabuse” and “Discontent,” from the similar titles to the anti-fascist stance to the memorable refrain. Instead of calling out Nazis, Damian repeatedly says “zero fucks left to give” after telling homophobes, xenophobes, and transphobes to fuck off. Well, I should clarify, on this recorded version, the first line of the song is “and by ally, I mean until the day I die / taking out those fascist fucks like it’s 1945.” In the live versions from this summer, he says Nazi instead of fascist. Not sure why the line changed, but either way, the song is a rager. 

    The b-side is a killer track, too. It’s got a similar go-for-the-throat tempo and equally harsh lyric as its partner. The promo blurb from the label references PAINTBOX’s “The Door,” which I don’t hear as a very clear influence. There’s no horn section at the beginning of the song, for instance. But it does have the power and momentum of the faster PAINTBOX tracks. Damian even calls out “Take it, Michael!” as Mike conjures a melodic, Burning Spirits-esque lead that would do Chelsea (RIP) proud. Beyond all of these cool moments, it also has a mosh part that Damian sets off with a “BUST!” It’s silly to try to explain how incredibly happy that made me when I first heard it. You see, I interviewed Damian in May of 2023 for the zine I was doing at that time. Because I am a complete nerd for this band, I asked him why he says “watch out!” instead of “BUST!” on the single version of “Generation.” The original recording of “Generation,” which is from the Toronto Omnibus compilation, features a “BUST!” in all its mosh-call glory. This little callback detail in a record full of neat parts and thoughtful references is what sent me over the top. I just love these songs and it’s incredible how they make me feel like 19-going-on-42. More important than any silly autobiographical connection is the fact that this record contains the fist-in-the-air trans rights anthem that 2025 needs so dearly.

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More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (John Warner, Basic Books, 2025)

    Every time I’ve second-guessed myself about being a “good” writer or explaining to students (whether first-graders, middle schoolers, or undergraduates) how to complete a writing assignment for my feedback, I’ve thought about whether I actually know anything about communicating through the written word. Memories of high school English class follow, with the confusing distinction between citing evidence and explaining it. To a teenager, a quotation from a text is self-evident. If I did the work of dragging it out of the depths of the author’s pages, doesn’t that mean I understand what it means? Doesn’t it speak for itself? Don’t you get it? Marshaling evidence in this manner is enough of a task; asking me to explain what it means to you is silly or condescending or redundant. Eventually, I figured it out well enough to get by in those English classes and go to a large, public university in a Midwestern city. I stayed there long enough to pick up three degrees and learned a lot about myself as a writer in the process. Nothing was more deflating that one of my eventual doctoral advisors telling me my writing was too personal and informal—that it needed to be grounded in existing arguments in the field and to grapple with theoretical framings. I figured out how to do that but I am glad it is not the only way that I can write.

    Books such as Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and other Necessities, The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, and now More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, have been clarifying for me as a writer (and by that he would say thinker) and as an educator. Any doubts I might have expressed about my writing development in the trauma-dumping introduction up there have vanished when I’ve read his books. There are plenty of hifalutin reasons to change the structure of schooling in the United States. Warner’s specific focus in this book on what to do when artificial intelligence interferes with writing instruction is not a wholesale, structural recommendation for change, but it does help us reclaim part of our humanity. As he explains in a critique of model of education that prizes task efficiency, “being ruled by the economic style of thinking has caused us to become detached from the experiences we find most nourishing. We are literally out of touch with our own desires around what it means to live a good life” (p. 246). Basically, what is the purpose of all this ostensibly saved time? The promise of AI and ed tech in general is to make students’ and teachers’ time more valuable by doing away with routine tasks so we can all get to the good stuff. This approach doesn’t work because anyone who has worked for a living knows that if you are able to execute your job responsibilities more quickly than expected, your reward is not more free time, but more work. Warner sees that disconnection clearly when he describes the need for a renewed emphasis on those nourishing desires that make life worth living.

    Some of those very activities came up in a discussion of “cheating” on the most recent episode of Dr. Mél Hogan’s podcast, The Data Fix. In that episode, her guest, Kane Murdoch, reflects on the difficulties of detecting academic misconduct at the university level and points out how “you can't outsource eating, you can't outsource sleeping, you can't outsource exercise, and you cannot outsource learning. They are embodied activities. And the question then becomes, how do we ensure that someone ate?” The discussion then compares the need to watch someone eat to guarantee they have received the nourishment provided by a meal and how that same level of surveilling scrutiny is not feasible or desirable for guaranteeing that someone has learned. This appears especially difficult considering the possibility of using AI for the learning that is meant to be embedded in the act of writing. I imagine Warner’s response to Murdoch’s comment would be that we have turned the embodied activity of writing into a disembodied, routinized, malnourishing husk of a task. At a point later in the text, Warner uses ChatGPT to evaluate whether it can generate a sample of writing that sounds true to his voice as a book critic. The resulting output is “what [he] would sound like if [he] were being held captive and had to write under duress” (p. 217). So, what he would write if he were under some of the same financial, social, and schedule pressures that Murdoch’s students face. Nothing lifelike, essentially. This external, forced compulsion to write stands in contrast to an idea in another text I read recently, Black womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher’s Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit. In part of her reflections on her experience with her lived environment as a child in Indianapolis, she reveals that “It was through writing, I found, that I could express both my wonder and frustration at the world surrounding me” (p. 78). The writing experiences of many students lean more toward the frustration than the wonder, and all its cathartic power, these days.

    In addition to the affirming qualities of Warner’s arguments about the nature of writing as a fundamentally human task, I also appreciate varied insights about other school-related bugbears. He reviews the argument for focusing on handwritten cursive in elementary classrooms and dismisses it with the quip “one of the common laments of the pro-cursive crowd is that students can no longer read the Declaration of Independence in its original documentation, suggesting the power of the document is in the penmanship rather than the ideas” (p. 46). Utterly devastating. I laughed. He identifies this urge to use cursive as being adjacent to the larger forces asking us to return to a supposed ideal past, which is, of course, a fool’s errand.

    Speaking of errands, Warner uses the all-too-ordinary grocery list as an example of how writing is embodied with feeling. He shares the memory of “picking up a dropped list from the grocery store floor once, and among the items was Pop-Tarts CHERRY with CHERRY not only in all caps but underlined several times” (p. 85). He goes on to explain how there is essentially a short story’s worth of background to the existence of this discarded piece of paper. As someone who can be particular about his dessert options, I felt a strong resonance with this anecdote. More than that, it makes me think of the grocery lists that Mrs. Tall Rob puts together each week. She uses sheets of paper torn from a daily calendar that I tuck into my wallet as I walk the aisles of Jewel. I have my routine of walking the store in a certain way that is a reflection of not some optimal path (who cares?) but of the order in which she’s organized the list. The point is that she takes the time to write a paper list of ingredients from recipes found in cookbooks that she has prepared many meals from over the years. This little slip of paper lives a short life but it is vital to keeping our family’s lives in motion. Yes, a text message or shared Notes app list could serve the same purpose, but there’s something special about recognizing my wife’s handwriting on the paper in my pocket when I’m at the store that reminds me of what it means to be human because of the connection we share.

    

    Lest you think my focus on food-related writing is evidence of my current levels of hunger, consider Warner’s comparison of writing to baking in the chapter on writing as a practice. He invokes Paul Hollywood from The Great British Bake Off as an example of a skilled artisan making inferences about the quality of a baked good as a result of ingesting it. In the same way, Warner writes, “The practices of chefs and writers are remarkably similar, something I believe to be flattering to both chefs and writers” (p. 92). As with writing, cooking and baking are skills that do not have a “terminal proficiency,” as Warner argues in the book’s conclusion (p. 279). In contrast, there are a finite number of sounds and letters in the English language, and young adolescents soon reach a rate of reading fluency that peaks around 150 words per minute. Education and psychology professor Scott Paris refers to the phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency components of reading as “constrained skills” because they do have a terminal form. (No matter how much you try, you will not manifest a 27th letter of the English alphabet!) So, Paris argues, the vocabulary and comprehension components of reading are “unconstrained skills,” because we can always learn more words or more information. It seems fair to say that Warner would agree that the practice of writing is at its best when it, too, is free from constraints.

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Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (Jump over the Age / Fellow Traveler, 2025)

    I enjoyed the first game in this series (see my review from last fall here) and am glad I only had to wait a few months to play its sequel. I’m not in a financial pinch, but something told me I should scrape together some money specifically to use in service of purchasing it. So, I sold some N64 games to a local video game shop and a box or so of books to Half-Price Books. I came out with about $30, which was more than enough. I grabbed a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Churn Out the Vote to go along with the game. I was all set. A new game, an indulgent snack, and some wintry weather on the Saturday afternoon of a long weekend. An attempt to carve out some time for myself and cultivate some joy amidst all the harm floating around in the ether.

    As with the original Citizen Sleeper, you play the role of a being formed by the memory of a human that has been installed into an anthropomorphic robot. The difference here is that you are on the run, whereas in the original game, you were just trying to figure out what it meant to exist somewhere between human and machine. This time, you and a human friend have breached a contract and are attempting to elude the corporate stooge who owns you. There is some continuity with the narrative of the first game, but it’s entirely possible to enjoy this game on its own. The main goal is to determine why the system inside of you is failing and to prevent further harm to yourself. Plus, you might learn something about the nature of forming an identity.

    At the start of the game, you can choose between one of three character types: machinist, extractor, and operator. I chose machinist, like I did for the first game, because I felt an affinity for a character who struggles to engage with others. (I have no mechanical abilities, however.) This choice ended up being helpful in that I was able to do a lot of fixing of various devices in the game, though the constant frustration of being unable to interact successfully in certain situations was limiting. Just like in the original, you progress through the game by rolling dice, slotting them into certain tasks based on their value, and choosing who you’d like to help or how you’d like to grow.

    New in this sequel are the ideas of frame stress, glitched dice, and contract work, each of which adds a little bit of variety to the dice rolling, task completing, and dialogue selecting that are the core of the gameplay. In the previous game, if you slotted a die with a low chance of success for a task, the consequence would be that you would not move the task toward completion. You may have also moved a separate, competing task toward failure. Here, both of those outcomes may occur, and also, you might have an additional penalty of stress to your body. Over time, this stress manifests itself in your dice by making them break or glitch. A broken die needs special components to repair and a glitched die needs to be rolled to (as I imagine it) shake off the bad vibes for the next day. Some dice, when fixed with unsatisfactory components, will glitch more easily. So, there is a lasting consequence to being reckless with your dice rolls. Even if there is a time limit on a certain task, I found myself ending the cycles, or days, of my journey early because I had no good dice left. I am not a gambler. There is also a push mechanic where you can make a double-or-nothing choice where you will change one die to a higher value at the consequence of taking on more stress. I rarely used it and did not allot upgrade points to its development. Maybe your risk tolerance is higher than mine. An additional constraint comes in the form of contracts, which are similar to drives (i.e., main quests and side-quests) in the original game, except that they are one-and-done scenarios. If you want to help someone who is stranded on a nearby asteroid, you can do that, but you can’t leave them until the job is completed or you fully give up on it. You cannot try it again. You also cannot use some of the usual recovery methods you are used to, such as eating, sleeping, or fixing dice. The contracts usually last only a few cycles and may result in new crew members or items that are necessary for other drives in the game.

    Oh, that’s right. There are other people in this game that join you on your ship. Your friend, Serafin, acts as a pilot throughout your voyage across The Belt, but you can take on a few other assistants as well. The ability to navigate from planet to debris field to space settlement in a ship is also a departure from the original game, where you spent all your time on a single space station. In the end, I had four crew members on my ship in addition to Serafin, and I had turned down at least one other potential mate who had annoyed me during a contract job. These crewmates mostly add color to the gameplay through their dialogue with you and each other. You can take two of them on a contract with you and they have their own complement of dice and skills. So, there’s a little bit of strategy involved in selecting your crew for these missions because you will not want to send three machinist types on the same task. Better to mix in a crew member with some social skills or the ability to withstand hardship.

    Much, much more importantly that recruiting other people to help you on your quest to rid yourself of the virus-like malware that is corrupting your system is the fact that you can adopt a stray cat. At some point in your travels, you will notice that there is an unusual sound on the ship and that some of your supplies are missing. Through discussions and negotiations with those onboard, you hatch a plan to trap the creature. You can approach the situation with hostility or empathy. When you finally catch the critter, it turns out to be a cat. Although two of my crew members were at odds over whether to take on the darling, gray fluffball, I suffered no such misgivings. When presented with the possibility of selecting a dialogue choice that read “Trust me, cats are worth it,” I assented to it so quickly that I did not even process the possibility of making the alternate choice.

    Despite my lack of hesitation in that moment, there were other places where I had second thoughts about what to say or do. In those instances, I wish there were an alternative to the incessant autosaving in the game. Had I made a truly regrettable choice, I would not have been able to reload from a point a few minutes earlier because there is no manual saving. As annoying as that is, it still works out fine in the end because the game is about 10 to 15 hours long. Any longer and the idea of a second or third playthrough would be too much of an ordeal. That said, the ending underwhelms with its inevitability. There is such a thing as too much closure, too definitive a conclusion.

    There is plenty more I could discuss with this game. I haven’t even touched on the beautiful interplay between the colorful character art and the minimalistic backgrounds of the planets and ships you explore or the gorgeous ambient electronic soundtrack (again by Amos Roddy). Even the little sound effect that goes along with the camera shifting focus from a task to an extended moment of exposition or dialogue is done well. It’s the kind of sound you’ll hear hundreds or thousands of times in a game like this one, and when that little detail is done well, you will ease into playing the game effortlessly. One of those narrative moments that really stuck with me and that sums up one of the game’s themes happens in an area called the Greenbelt. As the name indicates, the area is comprised of greenhouses, but they are in a state of disrepair. Upon delivery of Stepsilk, a hardy plant that can grow in arid conditions, Aki, the manager of the garden says of the plant that “Like us, it projects itself across empty space, pushing out to its new conditions.” You may have heard of this idea before, that of being aphercotropic, or growing away from an obstacle. Think of yourself as a weed growing through a concrete sidewalk; just keep going. You will get there eventually, even if your characteristics or skills are occasionally a hindrance. If they are, then there’s all the more reason to ally with others in pursuit of your larger, shared goals as you engage in the drive for freedom.

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Amy Winehouse: In Her Words (Amy Winehouse, Dey Street, 2023)

    This is at least the fifth book I’ve read about Amy since she died. Each one brings a unique perspective and has some kind of closeness to its subject matter, whether it is her life or her music, that seems free of lurid tabloid concerns. The next most recent one is Beyond Black, which is like the graphic design or couture companion to this text. In Beyond Black, we learn about the influences she took from certain designers, musicians, and writers. It’s notably free of her voice. We hear mostly from her friends who knew her before she was famous or just as she was entering into the worldwide conversation. Some of their stories are alternately heartbreaking and wistful because they humanize her in a way that mass media never could. It’s important to have these stories to help bring out the side of her personality that is mostly hidden when looking in from the top down. Honestly, if you were looking for just one book to understand her, Beyond Black would help greatly. If you want to understand her most powerful testament to the human condition, then Donald Brackett’s Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece does the job.

    The most powerful takeaway I have from this book is the profound sense of loss we all suffered from her death. She simply will not be able to share her insights with us any more. Yes, she “lives on” in reams of unpublished lyrics, but that’s more tantalizing than anything. She was famously unproductive after the success of “Back to Black,” so you have only your imagination to help you fill in the gaps of phrasing and instrumentation that might have accompanied the many lyrical excerpts throughout the years represented in her journals. You get a sense of how strong her sense of conviction in her abilities was when reading even her earliest to-do lists. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine someone so driven wouldn’t have been as successful as she was.

    I can do without the occasional spreads of pull quotes with mismatched fonts. They look like the worst of tumblr or instagram inspirational quotes over hazy landscapes. Even if her words are meaningful, the decision to render them in this way subtracts from their power. It’s also unclear whether the words that appear on these pages are from her journals or from interview responses as they are uncited and do not appear elsewhere in the text. They read more like spoken language than written language and cover topics that might only have come up if someone else prompted her to think of them. Come to think of it, a book collecting her interviews would be an easy purchase for me.

    The bulk of the words in In Her Words are obviously Amy’s, but the framing her parents give throughout the text does not mention Blake Fielder-Civil at all. They mention that fame was hard on her but that’s about as close as they come. Her mother said of her signature beehive hairstyle in Loving Amy: A Mother's Story that it was as much about a tribute to The RONETTES as it was a physical barrier, a form of armor, that she wore to protect herself from the world. That observation rings true in that Amy needed protection from the media only because of how Blake brought her world down. As her father wrote in reference to “Back to Black,” in Amy, My Daughter, “I was blown away, beyond proud. But deep down, I never wanted Amy to write another album like it. The songs are amazing, but she went through hell to write them. I don’t like Back to Black as much as I like Frank; I never really did. And that’s for one reason only: all of the songs on Back to Black, apart from ‘Rehab,’ are about Blake. It occurred to me recently that one of the biggest-selling UK albums of the twenty-first century so far is about the biggest low-life scumbag that God ever put breath into. Quite ironic, isn’t it? Mind you, you don’t get albums written about really good people like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, do you? Good people’s places in Heaven may be assured, but nobody’s going to have a chart-topping album full of songs about someone’s good deeds” (p. 80). Taking her father’s past words about Blake in mind, it’s no surprise that her parents wouldn’t have wanted to focus on him in these pages. Still, did he not figure into her journals at all, or was his presence in there too gruesome for the family to include?

(This review originally appeared in a slightly shorter version in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails us in this Life and Beyond (Tamara Kneese, Yale University Press, 2024)

    When I heard the Tech Won’t Save Us interview with author Tamara Kneese last September, I immediately put this book on my reading list for this year. Her conversation with Paris Marx on that podcast intrigued me with the many examples of how (as the subtitle says), technologically oriented problem-solving can never eliminate the scourge of death. Their discussion of how social media profiles of dead friends have a haunting quality confirmed that I would need to read this book. Having done so in a week that involves another kind of misunderstanding or misapplication of technology as it relates to death (i.e., Elon Musk’s profoundly mistaken idea that over three million dead centenarians are somehow collecting Social Security payments in the United States), I found many relevant ways to connect what Kneese discusses to many aspects of the world of the living.

    In her first chapter, Kneese discusses how social media profiles have become shrines to the dead, but only after some effort by users. It was 2007’s Virginia Tech shooting that changed Facebook’s policy about automatically deleting the profiles of deceased users. Prior to that, the site, like many others, would remove such profiles once an admin could prove a user had passed. The initial form of this digital preservation was simply to allow the profiles to continue existing. Later developments meant that certain users could act as custodians for the profiles of the deceased; posting new content is not permitted, but accepting friend requests or changing profile pictures are allowed. This chapter reminded me of how the MySpace profiles of deceased friends were eventually overtaken with spam in the weeks and months after their deaths. What was once a socially mediated digital gathering space and tribute wall became an untenable mass of corrupted and confusing links due to some of the profiles of my deceased friends having been overtaken by bots. Kneese rightly points out that the creators of social media platforms do not begin building their sites with death in mind. Someone like Zuckerberg, who started Facebook as FaceMash while in college, was not thinking about mortality, but about the relative attractiveness of his collegiate peers (p. 40). So, it only makes sense that the site would struggle with how to grapple with the complexity of death in a social setting.

    While some social media companies and other tech start-ups were not thinking of death at the beginning of their founding, others have made that calculation part of their business plan. Enter Legacy Locker, Eterni.me, and iCroak. These companies promise to be there for users when their time comes by offering the possibility of profile management after death. Everything from email to passwords to makeshift memorials can be part of a loved one’s digital legacy. You can also set up emails to be sent postmortem should you want to get in the last word in an argument with a company like DeathSwitch. (What thrilling pettiness!) But, as you might assume from either never having heard of these companies’ names before, or knowing them only in the past tense, the market for such sites is not stable or large enough to support potential users. In other words, the companies that promise eternal storage and management of a deceased user’s online traces have themselves gone defunct.

    The third chapter works with the idea of “disrupted inheritance,” meaning the times when executing a will or trust is complicated by the involvement of technology. This can mean anything from not having access to the usernames and passwords of the deceased’s financial accounts to the possibility of life’s extension through chatbots or other technology that uses the voice or likeness of the deceased. This stuff, to use a technical term, is icky. I kind of understand the idea of wanting to live forever and to see what the future holds for humanity. But the reality of doing so through the technology that exists today means that someone has to be your digital caretaker. Kneese again returns to the limited perspective of the “straight cisgender white men with finance chops” who create digital preservation services (p. 134). The implication is that the kind of person who conceives of an idea like preserving a digital life after death probably has many assumptions about the kind of person who will do the preserving, which is likely not a straight cisgender white man.

    In this chapter, I also had the nagging question of why anyone would really want a digital simulacrum of their loved one in the first place. It’s trite to say dying is part of life and that’s what makes it meaningful. Marcille from the manga Delicious in Dungeon comes to this realization (spoiler alert) when she becomes the dungeon master late in the narrative. She realizes that being able to outlive your loved ones because only you possess immortality is truly a curse. Having someone else maintain the digital version of you so you can do a compromised version of the same seems even worse.

    Speaking of immortality, the fourth chapter addresses how the smart objects we leave behind can become untamable in our absence. Without regular use or maintenance, they can fall into ruin. Kneese describes a house full of such objects in Provo, Utah, that is meant to be fully self-sufficient for its guests. Of course, caretakers who do not take care will defeat the purpose of such a house, which is what happened when the owner let visitors rent it via AirBnB. The guests did not know how to operate the smart blinds when they stopped functioning, so they remained closed. So, even the property we leave behind as some kind of monument to our existence cannot function without someone else carefully maintaining it.

    In the concluding chapter, Kneese reflects on the search for immortality in many of these forms and mentions the idea that some humans are eager to be like the ocean waves or mountain peaks, lasting well beyond “the collapse of civilization and catastrophic climate change” (p. 185). They want an immortality project—evidence that they lived and so will not be forgotten. This is a fool’s errand; these natural elements of Earth do, in fact, reflect evidence of humanity’s trace. How the waves and mountains have changed are evidence that we have lived, even as we destroy the planet. A book like Death Glitch is an immortality project itself, in that it provides a novel contribution to a field of study. Through these interviews, personal anecdotes, and histories of failed start-ups, Kneese has certainly guaranteed she will be remembered when her time comes.

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