CHAPPELL ROAN “Good Luck, Babe!” b/w “Read & Makeout (Demo)” (Island / Amusement, 2024)

    This is one of those songs that snuck into my life and took it over completely for days on end. In my personal canon, it belongs up there with “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE and “Call Me Maybe” by CARLY RAE JEPSEN as far as songs that I have obsessively consumed. A blog I won’t cite once referred to the latter song by claiming “there are zero songs that are catchy and also bad.” That’s the idea here. If you can make a song that sticks in someone’s head, it’s good. It doesn’t matter if they like it. If it’s in their head, it’s a hit. Living rent free and all that.

    Fortunately for me, this song’s catchiness and greatness are mutually reinforcing. I can’t remember exactly where I was when I first heard it, but I was probably at the gym. I don’t listen to music when I exercise, so I’m at the mercy of whatever playlist the current staffer has chosen. Over the summer, I kept hearing this one song that seemed to blend into the rest until it got to the very end and became really slowed down. I liked that part a lot. I still do. I’d hear it again a few days later and think Is this the song that’s slow at the end? I was always glad when it was. After a few listens I finally Shazam’d it and realized this was the CHAPPELL ROAN I’d heard about. Late in the summer, I added the song to the monstrously undifferentiated playlist on Apple Music I’ve called “AAA Pop,” mostly for alphabetical organization reasons. Whenever it comes on, I have to listen to it at least twice. If I can’t think of another song to listen to when I’m getting in the car to run errands, I’ll listen to it (at least twice). I eventually looked up the lyrics and liked the song even more. I’d caught the “you’re nothing more than his wife” and puzzled over it before realizing she’s chiding a woman for breaking up with her and falling for a man that she’ll eventually marry. Then she says to her, “I hate to say, but I told you so” and rubs it all the way the fuck in. Loving that for her ex-lover.

    Apple Music tells me I’ve listened to this song more than any other in September, October, November, and, now, December. That only counts the times I chose to listen to it via that app, of course. The listens at the gym or on the radio or anywhere else don’t count toward the total but do still imprint it onto my consciousness. There’s also the delightful MTV VMA performance that pulls from entirely (for me) unexpected sources. Setting a castle on fire with a crossbow and dancing around with sword-wielding knights while wearing chain mail and plate armor is literally heroic. I can now add to my list just a few listens of the actual record. In the fickle world of music streaming services, where no one really owns anything, I’m grateful to have my grubby mitts on a copy of “Good Luck, Babe!” b/w “Read & Makeout (Demo)” because it’s all mine. It also sounds really good for a modern vinyl release on a major label and I’m glad it wasn’t pressed by GZ Media. I would have been happy with it being a one-sided record, but throwing a vinyl-exclusive demo track on the b-side makes this an even sweeter purchase. The song itself shows her range as a performer and indicates what might be a more contemplative direction than some of the songs on her first album revealed. I’m here for it, either way. “I just wanna read and make out” is as good a New Year’s Resolution as anything else you might consider tonight.

    That a-side, though. Stunner. Jill Mapes of Hearing Things argued it was “a fever-dream of a hit made possible by the ‘Running Up That Hill’ frenzy of 2022, with an addictive chorus in an octave hardly anyone can reach, that could have been released anytime in the last four decades if it weren’t for its blatant sapphic longing.” That comment covers the sonics and their timelessness about as well as anyone could. The one part I’ll add is that the indelible line “you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling” reminds me of a line from DANZIG’s “Soul on Fire,” in which he tells his lover he’s gonna “make you shake till the world aligns,” a line that I took to mean that he’s going to fuck someone so hard Earth will no longer be tilted 23.5° off its axis. In the same way, CHAPPELL ROAN is telling her ex-woman that alcohol won’t numb the feelings she still harbors for her. The world would have to stop spinning, regardless of its rotational orientation, before her ex’s pangs of regret will subside. She’s telling this woman she’ll have to wait until the heat death of the universe before her passionate longings cease, and then, to cap it off, tells her “good luck, babe!” It’s a reflection of the supreme confidence CHAPPELL ROAN feels about inhabiting her body, her lived experience, her relationship status. That we could all be so bold…

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Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs (Benjamin Herold, Penguin Press, 2024)

    This book caught my eye because one of the five families profiled was from “Chicago’s North Shore.” I was dying to know whether I would be familiar with the suburb in question. I was. I grew up just north of Evanston in Wilmette. So that was enough of a hook to pull me into the book. The other locales are suburban Atlanta, a series of Dallas exurbs, Compton, and Penn Hills, which is just outside of Pittsburgh and is the author’s hometown. So, Benjamin Herold, too, has the personal connection motivating his interest in this topic, and it’s one that his interview participant forces him to reckon with toward the end of the publication process.

    As with other books I’ve read this year, I have that selfish entry point that draws me in but the writer then takes my hand and pulls me further into the pages. The way Herold does it is by weaving together stories from these five families in big and small sections that serve to emphasize the same story of America’s suburbs as told from different perspectives. The first section introduces us to each family, their members, goals, and history, while hinting of directions to come. For the Becker family (with one exception, all names except public figures are pseudonymous, of course), it’s clear that their inexorable march further and further away from Dallas’ inner ring suburbs is motivated by a fear of Black and Latinx families. They never come out and say that but the idea screams off the page in how they corral their children’s teachers for extra help at school, for instance. When they are not able to do that because the same teachers are working with students who have newly moved to the suburb and also need support, the family sets their sights further north into smaller towns with newer construction and smaller schools. That same idea of opportunity hoarding is present in a within-suburb, not between-suburb, context in the Adesina family’s story in Evanston, a town that is segregated just like the city immediately to its south. Truly, the idea of white flight is one of the common threads tying together all the stories, but it plays out differently with each family.

    Where this book contributes to an understanding of white flight beyond opportunity hoarding is what happens to the suburbs after the families who flew have flown. What that means can vary from crumbling infrastructure (as in the sewer system in Penn Hills) to understaffed and underpopulated schools (as in Compton). This is just another version of opportunity hoarding, though. Herold says as much in the preface, arguing “the diversification of suburbia did not lead to a universal American dream, untethered from whiteness and extended equality to all” (p. 7). In other words, Black and Latinx families seeking the safety and security of the suburbs that white people have enjoyed for years are in for a rude awakening if they think they’ll have the same experience. The suburbs are no promised land; there’s nothing magical about their ZIP codes. This is likely most evident in the Hernandez family’s experience in Compton, a suburb of Los Angeles that has not had the stereotypical white wealthy demographic of an American suburb for decades. Although the family’s father has been mostly happy with how his son’s elementary school recognized and rewarded his child’s inquisitiveness and proficiency, he still has doubts about whether to stay in Compton or return to Mexico for a better opportunity.

    The bitter irony of the changing demographics of the suburbs is that for some Black Americans, the suburbs had been a place where they were trying to escape whiteness itself for generations. As Herold explains in the introductory section on the Robinson family (in Gwinnett County, Georgia), “one in six Black people fleeing the Jim Crow South settled on the edge of a city… but by the start of World War II, 20 percent of Black Americans were already suburbanites, largely united in their hope of finally being left alone” (p. 73). It seems difficult to find evidence of this first suburban element in the suburbs today. In fact, the Robinson family later grapples with the legacy of segregation as they move further from Atlanta. The issue of school desegregation had reached the Supreme Court in 1992 and the majority opinion was that it was essentially fine that DeKalb County’s schools had resegregated after the Civil Rights era because hey, the schools tried. So much for Black families hoping to escape the clutches of whiteness.

    It’s not just the courts that have helped to keep some suburbs mostly white either. In telling the Adesina family’s story in Evanston, Herold introduces one of the members of the local PTA. Lauren Adesina, the Ecuadorian single mother who is the focus of this section’s story, meets a white parent who reflects on how the “PTA functioned as a kind of sorority for white stay-at-home moms.” Lauren herself is not interested in joining the PTA because “It seems like Mean Girls for adults” (p. 159). Both of these statements are true and point toward how white women are responsible for the caretaking and maintenance of whiteness in the suburbs. Plenty of other moments in the text reflect this control, from most of the Becker family’s experiences outside of Dallas, as well as the liberal (but not progressive) members of Evanston’s District 65 who attempt to take over the school board when they think the Black superintendent went too far in supporting racial equity work during the initial months of the pandemic.

    Herold himself doesn’t escape criticism, either. Toward the end of the second part of the book, he relates how Bethany Smith, the woman who lived down the street from his childhood home, called him out on the project of this book. Due to the nature and outcome of this interaction, Herold uses her actual name. Her response to Herold’s intrusion into her life is cutting: “I enjoy talking to you, and I’m all for what you’re doing. But there has been a long history of white people telling Black people’s stories and profiting off of it. That right there is what I’m having an issue with” (p. 306). He takes the criticism in stride and they work through the complications of how her life fits into his project. As a result, she pens the epilogue to the book, which functions as both a sign-off to the text itself and a chance for her to provide a different perspective on the story Herold has been telling about her. It reminds me of the work I’ve done with assent and consent when conducting research with human participants. As one of my professors put it, “We make research out of people’s problems.” That’s no argument against doing research, but it does mean academics and journalists should take care to consider their positionality when doing the work. Herold’s text provides an entry point into considering that idea even as it tells a larger story about what is happening throughout suburban America.

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FUCKED UP Someday (Fucked Up, 2024)

    This is the third full-length from FUCKED UP this year. Even vocalist Damian seems struck by this development. At least, that’s the feeling I get from listening to his introductions on his podcast, Turned Out a Punk, when he’s sharing recent band updates. Tellingly, he also says they have one show in December in Toronto and then only one for the first few months of 2025. They’re not a band that tours relentlessly (anymore) but the tone of his voice as he shares that development signals a bit of weariness with matters relating to the band.

    Maybe I’m just reading too much into things. Damian has also alluded to the fact that he’s not as involved in the songwriting or lyric writing with the band as he was even 10 years ago. Or, that’s what I glean from Vish Khanna’s Kreative Kontrol podcast episodes where Mike has been a featured guest. Whatever the case, this is as prolific as the band has ever been in terms of songs and releases in a given year. There was also a digital-only single, a cover song on a comp, and three one-day-only digital live album releases from this year’s summer tour. Like I said, it’s a lot.

    That said, this process seems to be fruitful for them in the sense that it reflects the ways that bands need to be a little creative and out-of-the-box in order to continue making a living playing music. I’m speaking here of their practice (five times this year now) of making an album available on Bandcamp for only 24 hours. For most bands, that process probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surprise dropping albums is one thing; making them ephemeral is another. But that speaks to the touch-and-go (not only in the record label sense!) nature of the sounds that brought the band together. Strike while the iron’s hot because that fire is not going to last.

    This record, of course, is the third in the day cycle, following 2023’s "One Day" and the August 2024 release of "Another Day." At that point, I figured that was it for the cycle. The overriding question of “what could you do with just one day?” expressed with a pre-COVID album and then that same process later on in 2022. So, two variations on the same theme. In my review of “Who’s Got the Time and A Half?,” I figured that was the logical extent of the project. Now, it seems there are at least four parts to it and this is the third. That also means “Who’s Got the Time and a Half?” isn’t part of the same cycle, even if it’s made from similar ingredients. Someday, it’ll all make sense.

    A discerning listener can infer that the fourth album will be entitled "Today" given this lyric from “I Took My Mom to Sleep,” the fourth song on this album. It goes, “One day, you’ll understand, my keepsake / another day, comes after the heartbreak / someday, we’ll be free together / but today, you are my seed in a feather.” I was thinking it would be everyday but what do I know? There’s still time for it to be released this year, too. They marked December’s Bandcamp Friday with the release of “Someday (guitar),” which, as the title indicates, is the base guitar tracks for the album itself—nothing else. It raises the question of whether they’ll eventually go full Trent Reznor and release all of the base tracks from their recordings for their fans to use for remixing purposes. That seems unlikely given that most NIN fans are already interested in the idea of computer software based remixes, while the guitar-centric punk fans in FUCKED UP’s ant army are unlikely to obsess over the elements of the recordings in the same way.

    As for the album itself, the descriptor on Bandcamp calls it psychedelic punk and that’s not too far off the mark. There are repeating cycles of riffs that seem almost hypnotic when listened to on the guitar-only version of the album. It’s fuzzy, buzzy, and busy. The harshness of Damian’s lead vocals take a back seat, as he appears on only two of the songs as the main vocalist. Mike, and other singers with less blood and bile in their throats, makes up the remainder. When Damian shares the mic with Max Williams of RIFLE on “Man without Qualities,” the relentless obnoxiousness of the chorus grates with repeated listens. I was hoping this would be an autobiographical song about Josh Zucker, Mike’s guitar complement, as he has used this pseudonym as a credit previously. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case. Had it been so, it would have fit in with the album’s exploration of personalities and perspectives that are different from those of the band members who usually write the lyrics (i.e., Mike and Damian).

    In that respect, just as “Glass Boys” was mostly about trying to make sense of your life in the punk scene as you grow older within it, “Someday” seems to concern how everyone outside of white punks find their way through a society that has made the idea of kinship and families necessarily fragile and tenuous because of fraying social ties. It’s not about the war atrocities or the heartlessness of those in power but the embodied effects of living through those policies. The lyrics to “In the Company of Sisters” speak to that directly: The same hands you used to hold me / are the ones they use to control me / they want to criminalize our lives / I’m gonna set your world on fire. A song supporting reproductive rights would not have sounded as good from this band had they tried it 15 years ago. That’s not because anything in their politics has changed—their sound is more expansive now and can more easily accommodate a topic like this one. I was also surprised at how hard “Feed Me Your Feathers” would hit me when I read the actual lyrics. “I held my daughter in my arms / so she’d be there for someone else” is a line I couldn’t imagine from this band before now. 

    That ability to inhabit other perspectives and make them believable is a recurring theme on the album. There’s the frightened and alienated shut-in of “City Boy” alongside the refugee child of “Grains of Paradise,” the concerned mother of “Feed Me Your Feathers,” and two sides of the same coin in “Man without Qualities” and “The Court of Miracles.” In that first track, the lyrics describe a latchkey kid in a family that has guns to protect itself against imagined government intrusion. Things go wrong in the last line of the song when the kid left alone fires a shot that “finds a home in another child.” On the next song, the perspective shifts to a bike messenger immigrant to the United States, who knows it’s a place where “everybody can be somebody, but if your skin is dark, be careful who you are.” At the end of this song, the protagonist hears a gunshot near a regular delivery spot. When he cries for help, a resident replies “he’ll call the cops if I don’t get off their property.” There may still be other connections between the characters in these songs but this one stood out as readily apparent and emblematic of the album's idea that we are all connected in ways that might not always seem clear.

    The title track is still throwing me for a loop. For one, there’s what sounds like a mistimed cut-and-paste hiccup at the 1:12 mark. Then, there’s the fact that the song itself is about a baby who is also a grown man making his way through the world. Only the chorus brings me back to reality: someday it’ll all make sense / someday, it’ll all make sense / I’ll find a place where I belong / and stay there until it’s time to come home. The video doesn’t help matters and its use of swapping of the band members’ faces onto babies is also confusing and off-putting. It’s a lot to take in, even as it seems quite simple on its surface. I hope that someday it will make sense. For now, I’m glad to have this record in my life. As the chasing arrows in the o of the album title indicate, it’s easy to let someday become never as time marches on. It’s up to us to make sense of the world we’re given, as confusing, contradictory, and frightening as it may be.

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High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (Marc Masters, University of North Carolina Press, 2023)

    The title of this book is so perfect that I’m shocked it hasn’t been done before. The explanation of it works well, too. As Masters writes, “In the technical lingo of cassette, ‘high bias’ means high quality. The higher the bias, the better the sound. The story of the cassette tape has bias, too. Every person who encounters a tape adds something to that story, whether by listening to it, recording over it, or passing it on” (p. 4). So, right from the jump, you know you’re taking a trip through the world of the varied uses of compact cassette tapes all around the world. It’s not just limited to a celebration of the aesthetics of heartfelt, hand-written j-cards on deeply personal mixtapes exchanged between friends and lovers. As far as historical treatments of musical formats, it’s much more accessible than Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format.

    That said, the third chapter, which is about the long history of international musicians and labels who use tapes as sonic art, is a mess of names, locations, labels, and bands that is hard to follow. It’s like a verbal version of the disorientation of a tape that is decaying and falling apart in your cassette deck. I had trouble making any sense of it really. It seems so purposely disorienting, but that seems like the point—using a cassette to make music is going to result in a lot of time-consuming confusion. So maybe the chapter does work…

    When Masters slows down a bit to reflect on the implications of the cassette tape as a means of sharing music, his insights truly shine. As he explains, “Cassettes can offer a way to avoid corporate streaming services, whose offer of listener freedom is a bit of a mirage, considering the algorithms that push them toward specific artists, gather their personal data, and subject them to advertisements. Cassettes can also provide a more intimate way to share music with others. Giving someone a handmade mixtape is surely more personal than sharing a playlist, whose creation is more akin to data entry and which is usually accessible only through paying for subscriptions or enduring ads” (p. 156). Shortly thereafter, Dave Doyen from the Tabs Out podcast quips “It’s hard to make a CD-R not remind you of Staples or OfficeMax” (p. 165). It’s also hard to argue with their positions. I took the time to listen to a few tapes friends had made me over the years while I was reading the book, and I was surprised at how strongly the music was able to bring me back to where I was when I first heard it. The same goes for the tape I made for myself that has 16 different versions of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on a 60-minute tape—yeesh. I really don’t have the same emotional imprint with playlists or links friends have shared with me, so it only makes sense that having a unique physical artifact that contains the music will be more powerful than a list of letters and numbers in a URL.

    Now, forget everything I wrote in the preceding paragraph and follow these links to access a rip of a cassette I made in 2004 that is nothing but metal riffs (almost no vocals at all) ripped straight from my records, CDs, and tapes. (Side A and Side B) I confess that I used a MiniDisc (where’s the book on that device?) to capture and sequence the riffs, but the way I shared it with my friends was through repeated dubbing of tapes in my bedroom. Early in the lockdowns of 2020, one of the dudes from Negative Insight zine created a Web site dedicated to reminiscences about and postings of old mix tapes and I was lucky enough to be written up on his insta and the site itself. Both are now gone, but, luckily for you, the SoundCloud still exists.

    Friends who received that tape tried to make their own with using cassettes, but they couldn’t get the instantaneous transitions to work. You’d think pressing pause on a cassette would work just fine, but it wasn’t close enough as the digital precision of the MiniDisc format. Listening back to it now, on the MZ-R55 itself, I recall the split-second reflexes it took to stop and start the recordings at just the right moment, and then the further splicing of the captured sounds, all on a display about the size of a postage stamp. Obsessed barely begins to describe that level of intensity. I can’t imagine conjuring it now.

    While I was going through my MiniDiscs this weekend, I was delighted to find that I’d made an attempt at another riff tape. I made about 30 minutes of recordings but had not sequenced them yet. That sequencing is also a crucial part of the process of making the riff tape. Had I used only cassettes, I would have had to switch each album, tape, or disc at just the right moment. Instead, using a MiniDisc allowed me to be listening to an album, think “man, I’ve always loved that riff,” and then run it back and record it for later. I eventually made pages of notes on the sequence I wanted the riffs to take for the final tape. Then began the laborious process of editing the order of the riffs so that it flowed the way I wanted. There are intro parts, main riffs, transitions, bridges, secondary riffs, drum fills, breakdowns, solos, outros, and everything else that goes into a song. All told there are close to 100 different riffs on each side of the tape. The longest is the “Hell Awaits” intro, which is over two minutes. The shortest are from songs I can no longer place and only last for a second or two at most. I no longer own many of these records, having sold about half of my record collection when moving states about eight years ago. I know I could just Shazam the riffs to find out where they are from, but it’s also more fun to think of these two sides of tape as a unique composition from my past self.

    A few years later, the band I was in at the time had a show coming up at a bar with a real sound system. This was unusual for us, being a DIY hardcore punk band that usually played basements, so the idea of recording our set and our new songs for posterity made sense. I was able to plug the MiniDisc into the soundboard and capture our set from that night. Our band put the live recording out as a self-released cassette. I hand-dubbed 42 copies of the recording onto 90-minute Maxell tapes later that month. I’d forgotten that I’d recorded the BLACK DOVE set from that night as well. So, I ripped that to my computer this weekend.

    It’s clear that MiniDisc as a format was a significant, though inconsistent, part of my music-listening life (and I didn’t even mention using it to rip MP3s from my computer or sample audio from television or VHS tapes for mixes). I don’t know enough about how others have used it to say with any authority whether these uses are unique or all too common. I can imagine there are other uses of this format that push boundaries and connect communities the same way that cassettes did. I’d love to hear more about them.

(The first four paragraphs of this review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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Response to Chicago Tribune Editorial Board's CPS Teacher Absenteeism Editorial

This is a lightly edited version of the letter I sent to the Tribune's Editorial Board in response to their editorial about CPS teachers' absenteeism a few days ago. They did not publish my letter, but I present it here for your consideration.

Dear Chicago Tribune Editorial Board:

    As a teacher in a suburban Cook county school district, I take exception to the implication that I should feel jealous of the teachers in the Chicago Teachers’ Union as they engage in collective bargaining for higher salaries. You state that teachers in the union make a median of $95,000, which is above the national median. Although this is true, it elides the fact that Chicago’s cost of living is also above average for the nation. It stands to reason that if teachers are required to live in the city to teach in its public schools, then they should receive a salary commensurate with the cost of living in the city.

    The other part of your argument is that because over 41 percent of teachers were chronically absent, all teachers do not deserve raises as part of collective bargaining. That statistic may be shocking at first blush, but a further investigation into the reasons for teacher absences may be revealing. As the editorial states, this number does not include breaks and holidays. (It shouldn’t, as those are not instructional days.) To suggest that winter break, spring break, and other holidays are somehow enough time off from work for teachers is silly. Reasons for teacher absences can range from personal illness to caregiving for a child, parent, spouse, or other family member to personal days. The board implies that teachers can somehow schedule their illnesses or their obligations to their families around the provided breaks, which is ridiculous.

    More generally, the critique of teacher absences as some kind of symptom of what is wrong with the district misses the point. In her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, Eve L. Ewing, a former CPS teacher and current associate professor at the University of Chicago, argues that “any enterprise dealing with the care and nurturing of children is likely to be inefficient at times, and striving for efficiency often requires sacrificing things like care, patience, and flexibility” (p. 122). Simply put, the corporate cost-cutting model is in conflict with the care work central to educating children. Beyond that, there’s no reason to think denying the CTU’s request for a raise will cause teacher absences to decrease. That claim is unsupported by the evidence and reasoning provided.

In Solidarity,

Tall Rob

(Yes, I used my real name and address in the actual letter; I know the rules!) 

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Teachers (Arthur Hiller, MGM, 1984)

    My high school U.S. History teacher opened a class on a Monday by arguing that Election was the first movie he’d seen in a while that treated teachers as actual people with some kind of inner life. This was in contrast to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Breakfast Club, which, despite being filmed only minutes away from our school, did not depict teachers or school personnel as anything more than caricatures of bumbling authority. A few years later, one of the grad school professors in the program that was gearing me up to be a high school English teacher suggested Teachers was worth watching before beginning student teaching. It also had the distinction of having been filmed in Columbus, Ohio, where I was earning that degree. I think the main reason my prof had suggested it was because of the character of Ditto. He dies in class and none of the students even notice until a few periods go by! In the bleakest sense, his death represents a clear example of strong classroom management despite absolutely abysmal student engagement.

    This weekend marked the third or fourth time I’d watched Teachers. Ditto is still my favorite character, rich inner life or not, but I was struck more by what is different 40 years on. The first thing that stands out is the lack of security structures in the school. The idea that parents or visitors or anyone else can just walk into a school without being stopped or interrogated feels foreign. The sheer chaos of looking at the main office at the start of the movie is overwhelming. The administrators, teachers, staff, students, and others are all going about their business in an open office space. There are vital discussions happening amidst physical conflicts and quotidian conversations. It’s a lot to process and it’s all in the open. Many of those interactions would happen behind closed doors or via emails or chats in 2024, which would make the school much quieter, but no less intense.

    Alex Jurel, the unsympathetic protagonist played by Nick Nolte, is a history teacher who calls off most Mondays due to hangovers and hookups. He’s a letch and a wretch. When Jurel learns from vice principal Roger Rubell, played by Judd Hirsch, that the attorney representing a former student who is suing the school is herself a former student, he thinks back on her time at the school and remarks, “Great ass.” The sexism alone is gross enough but it’s even more revolting to think a teacher was thinking about a teenage student’s body in that way. There’s an attempt at redeeming his character later in the film when he takes Diane Warren, a student played by Laura Dern, to a free clinic to get an abortion because the PE teacher raped her. Even though he did the right thing in that moment, he’s still a creep. He has a rich inner life, but it's nothing I want to know any more about.

    A cursory look at the fragments of reviews on the movie’s Wikipedia page indicate that Teachers is not a strong example of film on its own merits. The writing and characters receive criticism in equal measure for being inconsistent, flat, and contrived. So, yeah, as a film—as a piece of art—it does not hold up 40 years on (if it did at all upon release). The “jarring tonal shifts” might displease the reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes, but these blunt and honest moments reflect the reality of getting through a day of teaching in public schools in this country. I’m thinking of last week in particular, where in the course of a few minutes I de-escalated two kids who were squaring off to fight in the hallway, then helped another open a jammed locker, and then, you know, taught my class. Every day isn’t like that, but for the days that are, I’m glad I can watch Teachers and think how someone who isn’t a teacher sort of understands what it’s like to be one, even if none of the teacher characters are sympathetic or relatable or redeeming.

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Response to the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board's CPS Teacher Absenteeism Editorial

The CURE Songs of a Lost World (Polydor / Fiction, 2024)

    It feels more than a little intimidating to write a review of a record by The CURE. They’ve been around for over 45 years. This is their first album in 16 years. I haven’t heard most of their post-“Wish” output. If I had taken my wife’s maiden name, I would be Robert Smith. I don’t want to be jumping someone else’s train, you know? But, I started this blog to get in the habit of writing regularly, and that means there are times where my expertise is not fully developed. If it were, I’d sticking only to what I know best and anxiously trying to prove my authority with every post. That’s too much. I just want to get some ideas out of my mind and onto the screen because I’m tired of these thoughts having nowhere else to go. I may not be able to give you authority, but I can give you honesty.

    If I’m not an expert at The CURE’s back catalog and career arc, then consider that I am an expert at experiencing the kinds of emotions they engender with their music. I’m really good at feeling bad. There’s a moment in Ordinary People where Conrad Jarrett is struggling with the suicide of a friend and says to his therapist, “I feel bad about this! I feel really, really bad about this! Just let me feel bad about this!” I’m well past the age where I should look to teenage movie protagonists as role models, but there's a black cloud that still hangs over my head sometimes. To wit, when I was first learning about The CURE, I asked my older sister if she had any of their albums around. It was at a point after we’d both moved out of our parents’ home and were back to visit for a summer weekend. She said, “The CURE… you graduated high school, right?” Sure did. Sure still feel like I could use some sonic medicine in the form of The CURE, even now.

    So, it was exciting to me to see on Apple Music (of all places!) that one of the Top Songs in recent weeks was “Alone” by The CURE. This is how I found out they had a new album out. Not a text or conversation or call from a friend. Not an email from a mailing list. Not a news alert on my phone. Not in the music section of a local paper, alt newsweekly, music website, or zine. From the list of songs on this app on my phone, in a section I had never even perused before. I gave it a listen and thought it was pretty fucking great. I was surprised for a minute at the thought that there had not already been a song of theirs with the title “Alone.” It’s a title you would come up with if you wanted to parody them. Thankfully, it’s just as dead serious as the rest of their most maudlin soundscapes. I mean, we get more than three minutes of trudging through the bass, synths, keys, drums, and glacial guitars before the opening line “This is the end / of every song that we sing.” It sounds so stupid to write it out like that but the magic works just like it does for “Plainsong” or “Push” or “The Kiss” or any other song of theirs with that pulls you in and under as it goes through the riff motions. It’s exactly what I expected and I couldn’t be happier. There are at least three other songs on here with these kinds of intros and each casts that same enchanting spell. They know just what they are doing and we can just lie back in wonder.

    Truly, this is a record best experienced while reclining or supine. I can’t tell you how many nights I have drifted away into unconsciousness listening to “Disintegration.” It was most frequent immediately after the end of a relationship in my early 20s, which is a sentiment so clichéd and cringey, I almost don’t want to write it down out of sheer embarrassment. I first owned their 1989 masterpiece on cassette and later upgraded to CD. I eventually found a copy of the LP but did not keep it for long. Even though vinyl is the gold standard for music consumption, it did not work for me. For one, the LP is missing “Last Dance” and “Homesick,” so it’s incomplete in some sense. More importantly, my turntable doesn’t have an auto-shutoff, so falling asleep to the needle hitting the paper doesn’t work. Still, it’s one of only a few albums I ever liked enough to own on all three formats. (Two others that come to mind are BEYOND’s “No Longer at Ease” and METALLICA’s “Master of Puppets.”) Although the days of pumping music throughout my bedroom or apartment on my stereo while lying in bed are long since gone, I anticipate slipping into sleep to the sounds of “Songs of a Lost World” on earbuds in the weeks and months to come.

    I bring up “Disintegration” because it’s obligatory to mention that album when discussing The CURE and because “Songs of a Lost World” also cannot measure up to it. As much as I want to bathe in the sounds of this album, I can’t help but notice the keyboards are a little thin. This holds true for both the streaming sounds and those coming out of the LP through my home stereo’s speakers. I can’t say whether it’s the pressing or something with the recording, but it sometimes feels that what should be a downpour is more of a drizzle. You may remember that the liner notes of “Disintegration” inform you that “This music has been mixed to be played loud so turn it up.” There’s no equivalent phrase here. At 49 minutes, it does seem a little long for a single album. There’s a double-LP version, too, but the comments on Discogs make glad that I have other things to worry about in my life than whether the brand new album I bought is pristinely, flawlessly perfect. I can’t imagine asking for a fucking refund because of shit like that.

    As I mentioned with the opening line to the lead track, the lyrics have no surprises in store. That is fine! It’s what I want. Hearing a line like “oh I know I know / that my world is grown old / and nothing is forever” (from the second song) may have hit me plenty hard 20 or so years ago. It hits even harder now, knowing that the person singing it is 65 years old. There’s some weight behind those words that wasn’t there before. The same could be said for “don’t tell me how you miss me / I could die tonight of a broken heart” from “A Fragile Thing.” That is just the kind of lyric that sounds ridiculous out of context (and even maybe in context) but it still works. Music is magical that way. They work the magic in a rhythmically on “Drone: Nodrone,” which leads off side two. It’s got the funky, distorted bass of “Screw” or “Fight,” lest you think this album’s tone is as monochromatic as its cover. There’s a song about the death of Smith’s brother, which is a new type of heartbreak that rings as true as anything else explored here or on preceding albums. The closer, “Endsong,” (yes, another “song” song!) is, again, exactly what I want and expect. Its sounds wash over you for more than six minutes before the vocals begin. The lyrics are a form of dead reckoning. Where have I been, and what did it mean? “Outside in the dark / left alone with nothing” as the matrix etchings tell us. If this is their endsong, it’s quite a way to go out.

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℞oxy (Neal Shusterman & Jarrod Shusterman, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2021)

    It’s fun to read about ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse civilizations when you’re in sixth grade. It’s fun to pretend that their gods are real and that we, mere mortals, are subject to their divine whims. It’s fun to think that our lives are not our own and that we’re just pawns on their chessboards. What if, the Shusterman brothers ask, those gods were not the forehead-splitting or child-devouring or root-branching of the ancients? What if, instead of eternal beings above, there were tangible and ingestible substances down here? What if drugs are the modern guise of ancient gods? These brothers explore that question in ℞oxy, a book ostensibly for teens, but that has a wider appeal.

    It’s a dark concept, to be sure. The most interesting part of the book is how the authors personify each drug by giving it a name and some basic traits that match its effects. So, Roxy, the title character, embodies oxycontin, and manifests herself when there are people in physical pain, such as one of the sibling protagonists, Isaac. He’s an athlete nursing an ankle injury and gets something to take as needed for pain, only instead of just pills, Roxy is a full-fledged person he can speak to and interact with. Well, because she’s a drug, it’s mostly manipulation. These are meant to be surrogate deities, remember? You’ve also got Addison, the embodiment of Adderall (not to be confused with his cousin, Rita, the embodiment of Ritalin!), who is trying to help Isaac’s older sister, Ivy, focus her life on school after a habit of underachieving and binge-drinking. Each of them has their flaws, as Isaac observes with the crass comment “Everybody’s got a turd somewhere on their lawn. So this is yours” (p. 67). Pearls of wisdom that only a white cishet teenage boy could dispense.

    We know from the first chapter that one of these siblings will not survive, but are left guessing who it will be throughout the remaining pages. These stakes get higher when Roxy and Addison make bet about which one of them will succeed in bringing their charge to “The Party,” which is kind of like drug heaven, or pure addiction. There is constant discussion of who the “plus one” for each drug will be. At The Party, we meet many of Roxy and Addison’s acquaintances from years past. There’s the ever-reliable naturals Al, Mary Jane, and Nico (alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine) as well as newer arrivals, such as Dusty and Charlie (the coke brothers), their friend Crys (crystal meth), and even Phineas (morphine). Up above the party, past Hiro’s (heroin) VIP room and its towering ayahuasca vine, is yet another realm, where fabled names of ‘Lude and Darva hang out. These were once drugs that were ubiquitous, but have fallen out of favor. And, like Prometheus of Greek myth fame, are fated to have their livers eaten each night as they’re each held in place with the twin snakes of the caduceus rod.

    If you can’t tell, I really enjoyed the wordplay involved in naming these characters. There are still more, but I will let you discover them on your own. Maybe you can tell by reading this far that I have zero experience with any of these substances. I didn’t know what Isaac meant when I read that ingesting Roxy made him feel “Like his soul is packed in Bubble Wrap and ready for delivery” (p. 89). I’ve never drank anything stronger than black coffee. I don’t smoke, and I’ve maybe had one contact high in my life. So, I think my lack of experience in these chemical realms is important to note because I might be making these substances sound a lot cooler than they actually are. I have no interest in any kind of recreational substance use. I’d prefer to avoid places that have “All the class of a landfill,” as Ivy describes the living arrangements of one of the most notorious suppliers in the book (p. 126). On the other hand, I have been speaking to my doctor recently about using medication to treat some of the symptoms that five years of therapy haven’t been able to help. So, I hope I don’t end up like the one sibling who takes it too far and never gets to leave The Party. Drugs terrify me, still. A family history of addiction will do that to you. And yet, it’s more than a little hypocritical that I keep medicinal solutions to mental health at an arm’s length when I use various capsules and sprays to keep my allergies at bay every morning. I already use glasses to help me see, so how is this kind of intervention any different? I would gladly accept a cast if I broke my leg, etc. It was a TikTok (of all things!) from a doctor who said something like “there’s no glory in suffering through something that’s preventable” that made me finally open my mind to the idea of getting something to fix my head. I’m not gonna lie—the fictional cautionary tales here give me the slightest bit of pause.

    Although there are plenty of disturbing drug-related episodes throughout the text, the one paragraph that moved me especially deeply this week concerns Isaac and Ivy’s parents discussing their grandmother’s living situation. Their mom explains how the kids’ grandma can’t afford a personal caregiver and that neither parent can afford to stop working to provide that same level of care. In other words, putting grandma in a home is the most affordable choice, even if it’s the one no one wants (p. 136). This comment struck me strongly when I read it because it was this situation that Kamala Harris had made part of her campaign. She was going to let the Trump tax cuts expire and use the revenue generated from those taxes to give families with aging parents a chance to afford in-home health care. That vision is further from the near future and is now on a horizon so distant as to be invisible.

    As readers, we each bring a different understanding of the world to the texts we read. Walter Kintsch argued that we combine that background information with the textbase to create a situation model of what the text means. What we know can change with time and different inquiries. You will probably not get the same lessons from this book that I did. It would be a bit frightening if we all thought the same, anyway. I include this disclaimer about the reading process because I can’t tell whether this book will be a series of triggering events as you page through its narrative. The writing is strong enough that I felt myself getting more and more drawn into the conflicts between the siblings and their drugs of choice. Calling the book addictive is insulting to those experiencing addiction and also inaccurate—I could put it down, even as much as I liked it. Still, a book is worthwhile to me if it makes me learn something about myself, if not the world, and ℞oxy is definitely a more knowledgeable other with much to teach.

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Final Fantasy IX (Squaresoft, 2000)

    There’s plenty to praise about Square’s PlayStation swansong, but one of its finest qualities is a consistent villain in Kuja. He’s taking the dead souls of people on the planet Gaia and turning them into replicas of the black mage character class (pointy hat, blue coat, glowing eyes, no corporeal form) from the first game in this series. These mages have no autonomy and just do his bidding as he seeks to conquer the various kingdoms of Gaia. As the player’s party learns more about his evil deeds, Vivi, a black mage who is not made of the same stuff as the others, explains Kuja’s appeal to these clones with the words, “Everyone knew he was lying… but they still followed him.” Even though harms are evident, we ignore possible negative outcomes and convince ourselves it won’t happen to us or we are smart enough not to be tricked. The truth is that we are all as fallible as these ersatz mages. And, if we as individuals are flawed, that means our systems and societies are as well. I wasn’t thinking this game would make me think much about the election, but it turns out there are some common threads that connect them.

    Upon its release in 2000, I was 17 years old and enjoying my winter break. This meant two-a-day swim practices and a staggering caloric intake. It also meant Al Gore had conceded to George W. Bush. I’d been to a rally with some friends that October in support of Ralph Nader, who had made it onto the ballot in Illinois. I was excited that Studs Terkel, Jello Biafra, and Eddie Vedder were speaking in support of Nader at the rally. It seemed like we were finally going to have a viable third party in the United States. I had wanted to vote for him but I was too young. The idea of swallowing my pride and voting strategically would not cross my mind for years to come. I thought my integrity was the most important thing in the world—consequences be damned. I couldn’t see how my life, my actions fit into a social world. Mashing the square, circle, triangle, and X on my controller as I explored Gaia and Terra with the aim of taking down Kuja helped me add some perspective to my life. Doing the same with A, B, X, and Y this past month has also given me the space to do the same, and to reflect on what this game means for being an individual trying to find or make a place in a society. Truly, many role-playing games deal with this idea of identity formation and villain toppling. Maybe it’s because this, my second playthrough, comes during another anxiety-inducing election season that I’m thinking about these idea with some additional focus.

    The double-barreled question this game seeks to answer is “How do you know who you are, and who decides?” As you seek to answer that question with some staple fantasy characters (thief, knight, princess, black mage, summoner) as well as a dragoon knight rat, a blue mage chef, and a bounty hunting brawler, your adventures with those characters help you answer those questions. If you leave the title screen running, each one of them has a pull quote that displays with a motif related to their character arc. These quotes range from Freya’s “To be forgotten is worse than death” (despair) to Quina’s “I do what I want! You have problem!? [sic]” (indulgence). In each case, the quote reveals something about their character’s personality and what role they hope to fulfill in the adventure. As you can imagine, throwing together virtue, devotion, dilemma, solitude, arrogance, despair, indulgence, and sorrow creates quite a mix of competing goals. The point is these are messy characters, even if they are drawn from reliable fantasy archetypes. (Not everything about a game or story or song needs to be special.) They express as much doubt as conviction about their goals and roles, and in so doing, allow the player to grapple with those same issues. The game also allows you to see what the other characters are doing when you are in control of certain party members. An Active Time Event (ATE) is a reminder that even in a video game, even when you, the player, are controlling the action, others are going about their lives and figuring it all out, just like you are. It's a clever way to deepen our understanding of each character. Deciding on the kind of person you want to be and what that means for the society or situation you find yourself in is a lifelong project. I can certainly say I am glad I am still not the same person I was at 17. I know young Tall Rob (yes, I have been the height I am now since I was 15) would not have been comfortable with canvassing or ballot curing, which are two actions I’ve taken during the past month to do my part to ensure that the person who is lying but still being followed will not have the reins of power again. It wasn’t enough to decide in my head that I was for or against or ambivalent on certain issues. I needed to make my words and actions reflect my character by having other people notice them. We put our identities in motion inside of our minds and everyone else decides who we actually are through what we say and do. I want better for myself and for you, so I know that any identity I form is only worthwhile if it’s legible to others.

    In the very last dungeon of Final Fantasy IX, the party explores Memoria, an imaginary place composed of shards of shared memories from the characters’ lives. In one scene, Quina does not recall Kuja’s destruction of one of Gaia's kingdoms. It’s simply the case that they were not there at the time, so there is no memory to be had. The game is asking us to think about the co-composition of memories with our friends and contemporaries. We all bring different background information to our lived experiences and thus we have different memories to take away from those experiences. I know I have false memories of my friends’ stories because they have told me about them so many times. We all share that. We each take part in creating this world. The beautiful thing about being in a society where we can have the guts to be ourselves is that we end up making and sharing memories with others. I know “hope is not a plan,” so I have taken action in support of my hope that today is a new beginning in this world we are writing together because I also know “we are not going back.” We cannot afford that.

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Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America (Talia Lavin, Legacy Lit, 2024)

    When I picked up Talia Lavin’s first book, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, it was December 2020. A few days later, after January 6th, I moved it to the top of my TBR pile. It would not fall victim to tsundoku! This year, I’m reading Lavin's newest book as we face down the “imperfect messenger” of the Christian nationalists for the third election cycle in a row. It’s all so exhausting. If nothing else, I think these texts are talismans that keep fascism at bay. Just like the deep faith of the Christians she discusses in the book, it doesn’t matter if the books work in this manner. I just have to have faith and then proceed accordingly; the world will fit into my frame, no matter what. So here’s to this text warding off fascist creep and fascist creeps!

    The stomach-turning details begin in the book’s earliest pages, where Lavin recounts a series of Satanic Panic related daycare lawsuits. Having recently read Kyle Riismandel’s Neighborhood of Fear (as you may know), I thought I was ready to gloss over these stories as old news. No, the ludicrous allegations of Satanic possession and demonic rituals levied against the daycare providers in the 1980s and 1990s were not featured in Riismandel’s text. I had never heard of them, either. It’s easy for me to think the Satanic Panic was all an overreaction to greasy teens playing Dungeons & Dragons while listening to IRON MAIDEN or MERCYFUL FATE in their basements. The stories recounted here show a much darker side to that story and presage the rest of the depravity evangelical Christians committed in their shaping of the world that Lavin will cover in the rest of the text. I was hooked.

    I thought of Riismandel’s text again while reading the next chapter, which features a section on the QAnon-amplified fears of child abuction. Riismandel explained in his book how these fears stemmed from Adam Walsh’s kidnapping and murder in 1981, and led millions of parents in the U.S. to be fearful of, well, everything. Lavin picks up that same idea in a modern setting when she breaks down the numbers of supposed child abductions in the U.S. She calculates that by the numbers QAnon followers cite, “a total of just over 8 million per year—or around 10 percent of the entire child population of the United States were kidnapped each year” (p. 51). As she points out, it would be absurd that everyone would just go on living if one in ten kids disappeared each year from this country. It’s one of those “they did the math” moments that reveals just how low the truth value of conspiracists’ claims are.

    But, as she argues throughout the book, even if these radical Christian nationalists are factually wrong, it does not matter because their wild faith will ensure they stop at nothing to dominate society with their version of reality. This idea later appears in reference to Christian nationalists’ ecstasy over the Dobbs decision. Lavin correctly points out that “the contents of [the Bible and the Constitution] are far less important than the act of believing in them: belief shapes things, turns civic texts into Holy Writ, selectively picks passages and rewrites them in letters of fire, wraps the cross in the flag” (p. 111). With that kind of zeal, there’s no need to let the facts get in the way. There is a vision to uphold and enact. It’s like a version of the Marines’ “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out,” but instead it’s “let ‘em die and we’ll find the divine justification later.”

    Lavin spends plenty of time explaining some of the differences between various sects of evangelical or charismatic Christians, but one that stood out to me as particularly egregious at this moment are the Christian Zionists. Having followed news about the war in Palestine over the past year, I have seen plenty of Christians in the U.S. supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. This doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. The Christian Zionists, though, “love Jews like a hungry man loves a chicken wing; it’s an interest born out of need whose end is total consumption” (p. 85). Basically, Christian Zionists want the war to continue and want Israel to lose because that is the first part in fulfilling a prophecy of the Second Coming of Christ. Unhinged barely captures the way I would describe this position. It’s sickening.

    For a version of what that utterly nihilistic orientation to world affairs looks like closer to home, there is a chapter that explains how the Christian Right connected the dots between anti-integration, anti-abortion, and anti-public school ideals. After explaining how right-wing Christians opened segregation academies (i.e., whites-only private schools) in the South as a response to school integration, Lavin argues that “the rise of the Christian Right has its roots in segregationism and has grown to accommodate a generalized backlash against the social changes that accompanied the civil rights era” (p. 102). Really, anything that goes against the idea that white men run the world and that women and children in their lives are their property is anathema to the Christian Right. They have God on their side, after all, so they think they’re never wrong.

    Although the first half of the book is worthy on its own, the true horrors await in its remainder. This section is where Lavin pivots from tracing the Christian Right’s influence on U.S. politics and society into doing a case study on what Christian families look like. She dedicates chapters to roles played by domineering husbands, submissive wives, and fearful children, as well as the long-term effects of authoritarian, punitive, disciplinary parenting on survivors in each of these population categories. The excerpts of interviews that she pieces together to describe the physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse that happens in these homes are nothing short of traumatic. It is absolutely worth reading, given the scope of the problem and the attention she gives it here.

    That said, Lavin knows how to turn a phrase, so when she describes Ron DeSantis as being “a cunning, unscrupulous man who never met a suit that liked him and never met an evangelical who didn’t” (p. 150), I was glad to have a brief moment to laugh. I also couldn’t help myself when, in retelling the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Biblical Garden of Eden, she referred to said fruit as “unspecified, later retconned as an apple” (p. 174). Anyone who knows anything about how the Bible was put together by human hands knows that there are many competing versions and interpretations of any given story. Still the use of retconned in this context implies the sacred texts are nothing more than a serial drama, soap opera, or narrative sequential art. Just delightfully hilarious, even as the rest of this half of the text delves into the hell that adults inflict upon children in the name of total control. That gift, of making the madness of this world somehow appealing to read about, even as she calls you to enraged action, is Lavin’s own. We are lucky to receive it at this crucial time.

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The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates, One World, 2024)

    If nothing else, this book is about the power of storytelling. Coates took some time to write fiction after the one-two punch of “The Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me. Now he’s back to using nonfiction to explain to us why telling stories, whether true, wholly imaginary, or somewhere in between, are crucial to how we form our identities and use them to navigate this world. The process is not so simple as that, though. If only a story could be guaranteed an audience, and if only that audience was required to listen, and if only by listening could that audience be moved to care for the ideas the storyteller conveys. If only life were that simple.

    Early in the first section of the text, which is about a trip to Senegal as an adult that seems to have been in the back of his mind for years, Coates relays a story from his youth about a gruesome football injury he’d learned about from an issue of Sports Illustrated. The purpose of its inclusion here is to establish that there are times, such as when a talented athlete becomes disabled as the result of a routine play, that evil seems to win, despite the efforts of all involved. (As I paraphrase this section of the text, I realize that Coates is implying some kind of equivalence between disability and a ‘bad ending’ that doesn’t quite sit right with me.) He reflects on the fact that this story haunted him as a child because it violated the idea he held about good guys winning and bad guys losing, or at least having a negative consequence of some kind. He later explains how “Books work when no one else is looking” (p. 87) and that seems to be true of any text-based genre a storyteller may use to convey their message (i.e., it’s not just books). The lesson that evil could win is not one that many people may encounter in the stories they read, so that is why it may take time for books to do their work. Reading is a solitary activity, and these private moments of insight may not come as immediately as we would think.

    The purpose of the storyteller, Coates later tells us, is to provide this clarity, even if it is delayed. Again, this clarity need not be concerned with nonfiction. Even inventive stories can help us understand how “the sharpening of our writing is the sharpening of our quality of light” (p. 19). This quotation is one of those that (as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog) made me close the book for a minute and sigh as I stared into space. It seems so easy to understand and so obvious once someone else has put it to you that clearly and cleanly. He goes on to explain throughout the text how the light that these stories bring runs counter to the prevailing narratives that support darkness, in the sense that they are stories that venerate harm. Stories that may serve the existing social order at the expense of the marginalized. 

    The purpose of the storyteller is to shed light on these harms and their perpetrators and to help us imagine a world that does not “root [its] worth in castes and kingdoms,” (p. 35) even if those castes or kingdoms would have the historically marginalized placed at the top of the heap. Simply installing a new ruler from a once-oppressed population does not change the fact that people are being ruled and that a hierarchy exists. He comes back to this idea later in the text, in the section on Israel and Palestine when reflecting on “the incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing” (p. 170). No matter what fate has befallen a marginalized people, there is no kind of overall scorekeeping that could justify using that past mistreatment to perpetrate future harms. This is an idea so large that I know I will still be considering it well after the book has closed. It’s a question that gets to the heart of what justice actually means in practice. It’s a place where pat answers remain unsatisfying and storytellers reveal their utility.

    Those uncomfortable questions about justice and victims occupy a large part of the text. In the second section of the book, Coates tells of the experience he had of joining a teacher in South Carolina who was facing disciplinary action from her school board for having taught from Between the World and Me in her classroom. Toward the end of the discussion of this case, he reflects on the larger picture of the book ban itself and remarks that schools that enact book bans are trying “not just to ensure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked” (p. 111). This comes after a section that discusses Freire’s critique of the banking model of education (i.e., teachers deposit knowledge and students withdraw it on tests or essays). That there exist books that put the lie to this idea of the banking model is threatening to people with power, and so they do not want students or their parents grappling with the uncomfortable, difficult questions about who victims are and what justice looks like.

    He continues his critique by describing how policy change at the local level is a consolidation of a school or village board’s collective imagination about what kinds of worlds are possible. What else informs that imagination but the very books they are trying to ban? If the stories in these books weren’t so powerful, then the powerful wouldn’t want to ban them. The narratives and language that storytellers use are what helps us shape a vision of the world we’d like to have. Policing the worldview of children through books when they have the open internet at their disposal seems less like concern for the children, or (I can’t write this with a straight face) parents’ rights. It’s just about control. Power, plain and simple.

    When he transitions to the final section on Israel and Palestine, he continues to demonstrate the power of storytelling and explicitly how it can be used to “erode claims to power” (p. 140). There can be nothing more terrifying to a colonial power than the witness who calls out its abuses of power. That’s just how he treats his visit to Israel. It seems so easy to see from his perspective as a Black American that Israel functions as an apartheid state. That simple conclusion belies hours and days of thinking, talking, and bearing witness to the abuses of Israel to its Palestinian counterparts. As an American who has neither a Christian, nor Jewish, or Muslim faith, he is able to connect with people across these communities and see what realities they experience in the Middle East as he works through his thoughts and tells his stories.

    He leaves with a clear idea (again, writing sharpens our quality of light!) that he is visiting an apartheid state no better than the Jim Crow United States. He puts it plainly, stating that “race is ultimately a species of power” (p. 126) when considering what his Blackness means when crossing security checkpoints in Israel. Again, the idea of abolishing a hierarchical society screams off the page here. What else could you want from your continued existence? Wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t have to exert so much energy putting systems in place that continue to tell you that you deserve to be at the top of the heap? You would, but you might be too afraid to admit it. Maybe you, too, can learn that lesson from this book when no one else is looking.

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Neighborhood of Fear by Kyle Riismandel

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Blacktop series (LJ Alonge, Grosset & Dunlap, 2016-2017)

    This is maybe the fifth book (series) on basketball I’ve read this year, and the only one that is fiction. It’s also the one that grabbed me the closest as I was reading it. Completing the series didn’t feel like a chore or something that I would kick myself for abandoning later on down the line. It was a treat and it left me wanting to hear more from the characters and their lives and world. I think I finally understand the purpose of fan fiction.

    I first learned of the series when SAMMUS (a.k.a. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) posted a few years ago that her then-boyfriend, now-husband had written a few young adult books on kids who play pick-up basketball on the courts of Oakland, CA, and who may or may not get along when they are off the court. As a kid who grew up reading Matt Christopher sports novels, I was definitely intrigued. One cool thing about the series is that each book focuses on a single character’s perspective. The four title characters (Justin, Janae, Frank, and Toni) each appear in the grand narrative that stretches across the books, but it is not a case of changing narrators each chapter with differing perspectives on the same events. That’s fine as a narrative device, but I really preferred how Alonge kept us focused on the thoughts and feelings of each individual player for an entire book. You get to know them on and off the court and see how each of their lives intersects and informs the others. It’s built for re-reading.

    The main reason I dig this series so much is that what I like about basketball is not the statistical analysis in debates about who is the GOAT, or the attempts to outdo God by chopping reality into instant-replay slices to determine possession. The game is unique and wonderful because it’s one of the only team sports you can practice entirely on your own. Add another person and you can get close to the feeling of a full game by running one-on-one. This series depicts those small moments that make basketball beautiful and that have nothing to do with leagues, whistles, and fans, though there is a brief interlude where the characters do participate in organized sports. It doesn’t go well, but that doesn’t mean the group has failed in any sense. It’s just another moment in their lives and doesn’t dull their love for the game in the long run. 

    Even better is how Justin’s book ends before letting the reader know which team emerged victorious in a pivotal game. It was enough for Justin to get a huge block at a critical moment and to bask in the glory of the few people there to watch, including his teammates. That choice not to Disney up the book with a triumphant win over a heated or hated rival is another aspect of the series that makes it so entertaining to read. It’s not about the wins or losses, but just those little moments that make playing sports special. It gave me space to reconsider meaningful and nearly perfect basketball experiences in my life. They range from seeing Jordan’s first game back at the United Center in 1995 to seeing Northwestern’s Nathan Taphorn pull off a full-court inbounds pass to Dererk Pardon for a layup to defeat Michigan in 2017 to playing two hours of 3-on-3 in the dark after leaving a shitty party on a Friday night in 2002 to driving over an hour to play 2-on-2 with some of those same people in 2015. These moments range in time and place and historical relevance but they inform my perspective on the game regardless. Alonge gets this idea and that's what makes the series so compelling.

    I look forward to revisiting Justin, Janae, Frank, Toni, and Mike (he doesn’t even get his own book) in a few months or years, once I’ve forgotten the details of their hoop dreams. I can’t say the same about When the Game Was War or Pipeline to the Pros, which are meticulously reported analyses of aspects of the game I love so much. The smaller stories in those nonfiction pieces sometimes reveal something interesting and magical about basketball, but the way Alonge explodes some of those same moments into fully realized narratives about fictional characters is even more engrossing.

    Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year comes the closest to getting at this point. For every LeBron who makes it to the league, there are dozens of other almost-made-it cases whose stories aren’t captured in box scores and highlights, so reports of their greatness don’t travel past the city limits. The whispers down the lane and the rumor mill can provide as much excitement or hype as any meticulously crafted game footage could, and with the power of imagination, can make being there to see or hear about it even more memorable. These books convey the excitement of that feeling and that’s why they’re worth savoring.

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Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001 (Kyle Riismandel, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020)

    Picking up a book that covers the years when I came of age in an American suburb, I figured I’d know plenty about what I was getting into. I thought I’d be reading mostly to confirm my own biased view of what it was like to grow up where and when I did. How wrong I was. It is a book like Riismandel’s that helps to give me a new lens on a topic I think I know something about. In this case, it is the idea of productive victimization that shakes me into a new way of looking at the world. Riismandel explains the term, writing “Rather than simply be imperiled, suburbanites responded by leveraging their endangerment through a process I call productive victimization. In actions posed as necessary to defend home, family, and neighborhood against new threats, suburbanites actually increased their control of local spaces and the people in them and further entrenched the suburban family as the paradigm of American values” (pp. 6-7). So, by positioning themselves as victims of society when they don’t get their way, suburban Americans only increase their power and influence. It’s one of those things that makes you sit and think and stop and stare right as you are starting to get into the book. I knew I wouldn’t be able to put this one down because that idea has so much explanatory power.

    Early on, Riismandel discusses the Three-Mile Island meltdown and explains how confusion about what was actually happening in the reactor near Harrisburg led to compounding human errors on the site of the reactor itself. As a result, the competing perspectives of local government officials, company spokespeople, local and national reporters, and expert scientists became jumbled and led to mass confusion about how to best inform the public about a) what had even happened, and b) what they should do to seek safety. People who can operate the machinery involved in a nuclear power plant recognize that its operation requires distributed institutional knowledge that may be difficult to understand in a setting such as news conference. As Riismandel explains, this complexity led to many in the area to express NIMBYism out of fear. Although this response is entirely reasonable, it becomes a problem when the idea of NIMBYism is used as a cudgel to prevent any kind of governmental project to happen. Because the failure of an incredibly complex system, people end up not trusting the government or valuing expertise. You can see how these developments primed the pump for Reagan’s famous quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language. Moreover, Riismandel quotes The New York Times’ William Glaberson on how NIMBYs were strategic in how they would vanish after making their voices heard. In contrast to other kinds of political organizers, suburban NIMBYs come with built-in clout, so they and their concerns are taken seriously from the start, and they don’t need to sustain any kind of momentum once they reach their goal. They can simply fade into the background until the next cause rears its head. In that way, the Three-Mile Island meltdown and its public response provide a clear example of how productive victimization operates.

    In the chapter on the carceral suburb, Riismandel uses the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh to explore how suburban fear grew into the home security industry. One of the most illuminating cases in this chapter comes when Riismandel contrasts the public response to Walsh’s murder with the murder of nearly 30 children in Atlanta only a few years prior. In Walsh’s case, the idea that a neighborhood watch of white adults and cops driving around in the suburbs, peeking into people’s windows was commendable. In Atlanta, the idea that a neighborhood watch of Black teenagers with baseball bats (because the cops wouldn’t come to their neighborhood) was terrifying, and further evidence of urban decay. You can see the racist double standard from a mile away.

    I was glad to see a section on southern California Hardcore in the book. It’s handled well, with all the usual suspects included (MIDDLE CLASS, BLACK FLAG, CIRCLE JERKS, DESCENDENTS, YOUTH BRIGADE, etc.). There’s even discussion of Flipside, Maximum RockNRoll, and The Big Takeover as well. In this section, Riismandel strikes a solid balance between being informative to someone who might not know about these bands and treating the music and scene with a depth of knowledge that shows he knows this information well. This chapter also addresses arcades and malls as places where teens rubbed up against the social norms, including the paradox that mall managers needed teens to be feeding coins into machines in the arcades, but if there were too many teens all at the same time, chaos might ensue. In the eyes of suburbanites, both hardcore punks and coin-op loving mallrats present a threat to the social order merely by wanting to get out of the supposedly safe suburban house to find a community elsewhere. 

    In the final full chapter, Riismandel hits on a powerful idea when discussing the PMRC. Having established that Reagan’s America was deeply distrustful of government solutions, that meant the suburban family needed to be its own problem solvers and the suburban home needed to be the laboratory where those problems were solved. So, no experts in “medicine, science, education, or public policy” could help suburbanites with the problems they faced. It was all down to “proper consumer choices;” in other words, what you could buy is the only thing that could ever save you (p. 145). If nothing else, the folly of trying to purchase your way out of a social or personal or health problem should be the lasting critique of the late 20th century American suburb. There are experts in fields of inquiry for a reason. They have dedicated their lives to studying the issues that make us human. We should listen to them.

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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Henry Grabar, Penguin Press, 2023)

    Beginning my entry into this book on an 'L' platform this summer made me feel so self-conscious about owning a car that I thought I might explode. Grabar introduces early on the idea that people think parking should be free, convenient, and available, but that only two of these three features are usually present for any given parking spot. I had parked my car a few blocks from the end of the line because I didn’t want to pay the cost of parking in the provided lot. So, my parking choice that day was free and available, but moderately inconvenient. Had I parked in the lot itself, it would have been convenient and available, but not free. If I lived in that neighborhood, I could have left my car in my driveway for a spot that is free and convenient, but unavailable to anyone else. 

    Just as I methodically walked you through that simple idea Grabar presented, he carefully explains the kind of truths that seem screamingly self-evident as soon as he reveals them. You think, “how was I not already aware of this issue?” each time he delivers a new consequence of the car-centric U.S. One of the most galling ones begins the book. A woman named Ginger Hitzke wished to convert a city-owned parking lot into an affordable-housing apartment near the ocean in San Diego, but was stymied for years because of locals’ objections to the building due to its lack of parking spaces. That dispute was a proxy for wanting the people who’d live in the building, low-income residents, to not be in the neighborhood. Even though she demonstrated that many of the people who intended to live in the units did not even own cars to begin with, it was not enough for the NIMBYs and she eventually gave up out of years of frustration. It sounds exhausting because it is.

    Another one of those simple ideas that seems so intuitive that you feel silly needing a book to understand it is that parking garages should be cheaper than on-street parking in high-demand areas. The reason I was riding the 'L' is because I had an appointment in Streeterville and needed to get there from the suburbs. It was cheaper to ride the 'L' both ways than to pay at least $15 an hour for a parking spot near my appointment, and that’s without considering the cost of gas. (There is also an entire chapter on the city of Chicago getting fleeced by investment bankers who now have a 75-year contract to service these meters.) The idea is that no one wants to leave their car in a space that charges $15 / hr when meters are closer to $4.75 / hr. What does that mean? It means people will circle the block for 45 minutes because it is literally going to save them about $10 / hr to do so. Stated another way, drivers are incentivized to create more traffic and gridlock in an already popular area by circling the block because if they are lucky enough to get a metered spot, they will save more money even if they lose a little time. So, Grabar presents proposals that would turn that idea on its head. Make the on-street parking spots $15 / hr and the garage $4 / hr. That way people will more frequently leave the on-street spots because they are so pricey, which will reduce traffic because people who would have circled the block will instead go straight to the garage and keep their car there longer. It seems so simple but getting cities and private parking lot owners to agree to this change is also difficult.

    Later on, Grabar discusses parkitecture, the idea that buildings have to be constructed to code based on the number of spots per each unit or per a certain amount of square footage. Buildings that people know and love could not be built now because of laws written based on past ideas of car ownership and parking usage. As you can imagine, there is not a lot of science or history informing the laws about parking minimums that currently exist. Grabar tells of a lawyer in L.A. who leads tours of the “forbidden city,” where such buildings stand, but could not be built today because their lack of parking spaces would violate the city code.

    As an aside, Grabar mentions that the JONI MITCHELL song with the refrain that gives this book its name is the only song about parking itself. I can think at least two songs besides that one that I know are about parking: “Take ‘em Up” by Maumee, Ohio’s NECROS (be advised this song’s conceit is spitefully tasteless) and “Pay” by Bloomington, Indiana’s GIZMOS. I am under no delusions that these songs are anywhere near as known as JONI MITCHELL’s ubiquitous tune but they still exist. Can you think of any others? There are so many songs about loving or hating the act of driving, but none about arriving at the destination. Or even if they are at the destination, it’s about reaching home, not where you leave your vehicle. Sure, the boys are back in town, but where will they park? Surely they don’t want to have to stage another jailbreak if they get arrested for excessive unpaid parking tickets…

    There is some hope, but the feeling I get from finishing this book is that cars are not the way forward (electronic or not). The congestion itself is still there, no matter how the cars run. Similarly, appified solutions such as SpotHero, which Grabar also addresses, will not solve the problem. The idea that there is a massive game of musical chairs happening every day in big cities and small towns means that there are always parking spaces available; you are leaving your spot free every time you leave your house. Consider that malls are built with massive parking lots that may only ever be full during the 10 days before Christmas and you can begin to see how wasteful it is to allocate land in this way. That these lots are taking up space that could be used for housing people is the bigger issue. More public transportation and more public housing will help to right this wrong, but man, there are a lot of obstacles in the way.

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Citizen Sleeper (Jump over the Age / Fellow Traveler, 2022)

    I grew up too late to be socialized into playing Dungeons and Dragons, so Final Fantasy for the NES was my first exposure to role-playing games. Only recently have I thought about exploring the other side of role-playing games for consoles. You know, the one that is more freeform and comes from tabletop RPGs. Citizen Sleeper’s marketing blurb makes the case that the dice-rolling aspect of the game is part of that lineage. So, I can’t comment much on how 'authentic' it is in that regard, but I do love the way the dice-roll mechanic is used as a seamless part of the gameplay here. The bigger constraint on free movement is the cycle, which is essentially the way days are marked on the spaceship where your humanoid character resides. There is only so much you can do with just one day.

    Instead of quests and checkpoints, the game issues you a drive as a motivating event. When you speak to someone, such as a mechanic who first helps you understand how your half-human, half-android body operates, you have a choice to continue working with or for that person or to find someone else to interact with. As you continue to explore The Eye, the ring-shaped space ship where you reside, you’ll eventually have to decide which of these many drives you want to engage with. By using your dice rolls, you can complete certain defined tasks to help progress parts of that storyline and deepen connections with people. Some reward you with currency while others may give you gadgets or items that you can use to help yourself or others. (Lab-grown mushrooms are a big part of The Eye’s economy.) Your movements and options are limited by the number of dice you have, so grinding isn’t really an option. You still need to nourish yourself and take care of your frame as well. Wait too long before doing either and you will be severely limited in terms of how many dice you are permitted to roll and how high the values on those dice can be. Push it even farther and you will temporarily lose certain skills or abilities until you can unlock them again.

    The idea here is that every day, you have to consciously choose which drive to pursue. There is no open-ended exploring. Choosing to engage with one drive may prevent you from doing another because the people you are helping are working at cross purposes or because they have only so much time when they need your help. Getting a “Drive Failed” notification can sting, but only temporarily. The many roles and tasks you take on are meant to mimic the modern gig economy and that is part of what makes the game’s pace exhausting, but in a good way. There is just enough success to be had each cycle that I kept coming back to try again at the same old tasks until I achieved a milestone. It was numbing, but also realistic in that it reflects the monotony of working for a living, especially when your choice of career isn’t entirely wide open. The ambient soundtrack helps to break up the succession of cycles, too. It is gorgeously composed and gives an appropriately contemplative air to the decisions you make as you while away your time on The Eye.

    One idea the game repeatedly pushes is that you can’t do it all. You can’t please everyone and you can’t keep yourself safe all of the time. It’s a good life lesson, quite honestly. If I prioritize certain behaviors or goals in my personal life, other goals or plans I have will die on the vine. If I focus all my energies on building a career, my relationships and friendships will suffer. I started to feel connected to the other residents or transients on The Eye as I continued to play, even the sentient vending machine that I liberated and who helped me deprogram the digital assassin that stalked me when I hacked the ship’s computer mainframe.

    Later on, I had to decide whether to use a ticket (that was not mine) to board a ship headed on a 10-year voyage to an uncertain fate or to give that ticket to its owners, an engineer and his child who had been passed over during other chances they had to leave The Eye. You will face choices like these that ultimately have no consequence on your gameplay. As far as I know, it is impossible to get a Game Over, but you can continue playing after The End, if you would like. The consequences are felt entirely by you, the player, should you have a conscience.

    In the end, I chose an ending that was akin to merging with the lifestream and I was genuinely shocked at how deeply the onscreen text touched me as it recounted my fate. I knew there were still other drives to explore and other tasks to fulfill, but I set my controller down and walked away mouthing “What the fuck?!” a few times before I could bring myself to shut down the game. There is a sequel coming next year and I cannot wait.

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