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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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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