Crusader of Centy (Nextech / Atlus, 1995)

    I didn’t catch it when it premiered, but Chris Kohler’s episode of Complete in Box that focused on Secret of Mana is the place where I first heard of Crusader of Centy. In the comments on the original article, he was naming a desire to play other 16-bit action RPGs, and someone chimed in with this game and Beyond Oasis. Both games appeared on the Nintendo Classics service in 2023, but it took me until this month to play them both. It’s a forced comparison because of that comment section and the release date of both games but Crusader is much better than Oasis.

    For another forced comparison, I would say that this game feels like it shares DNA with both Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. There’s a simplified version of the combat and action that reminds me of the latter game, while the action-focused nature of the combat and puzzling recalls the former. I do appreciate the way the overworld is simply a map (à la Mystic Quest) because that cuts down on a lot of traversal that would have otherwise been annoying. There are minimal interactive moments in it, too, such as when you activate a switch deep in a dungeon or cause a cyclone to appear on the map. So, it’s not the same look the entire time.

    The action plays out with you as the hero, swinging and throwing a sword as you explore various climes in the world around your hometown. You’ve got mountains, beaches, volcanoes, glaciers, deserts, and towers. All the locations you are used to seeing in games. The cool twist on all of this action is that you get animal companions throughout the game. You can have up to two of them on screen with you at any given time. They do things like attack enemies, turn into platforms, give you fire or ice powers for your sword, transport you to safety, make you run faster, make you swing your sword faster, or let your sword ricochet off of walls. Because you can have two at a time, some of these effects can be combined. It’s a lot of fun exploring the different combinations to see how to best or most easily pass through a given dungeon. Some even have interaction effects when working together that give you more than just the combined powers of each animal. As a plus, they are also cute.

    You eat apples to regain health, which means your hero probably has awful tummy troubles during the adventure. Let’s not dwell on that. There are cool boss battles that help you become more powerful by increasing your hit points. So, leveling up is gated behind these specific encounters, which means you can’t get overpowered at all. Except for a few mild platforming moments, there’s not many times where hit points become an issue (though if I was playing more conservatively because I didn’t have access to rewind or save states, maybe I’d think differently).

    So, what distinguishes Crusader of Centy from Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest or the other game it’s commonly compared to, A Link to the Past? For one, the music is incongruous and great. The songs are catchy and memorable but belong in a mascot platformer or much simpler and less serious adventure game. I say less serious because in addition to that music, the story itself is interesting. As you might expect, there are monsters on the loose in the game world and you have to figure out what the deal is. Turns out the monsters were there to help all along and it is humans who were the evil ones that slaughtered these creatures needlessly. A nice twist on the expectation I had of there being an evil sorcerer or mad king behind all of it. 

    It’s in a weird spot where it’s popular enough to be preserved via Nintendo’s emulation service but not to have been subject to a retranslation or other text edit via fan-made hacks. The dialogue formatting and misspellings throughout are consistently bad. This game is not perfect by any means, but it is entirely serviceable and worth 5-10 hours of your time.

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NIKKI NAIR Violence is the Answer (Future Classic, 2025)

    Hey so I try to show that I have wide-ranging, even eclectic tastes in music and maybe even pop culture more generally through my reviews in this blog. It’s a way of capturing my thinking at this point in time. That means that sometimes I’ll speak from a place of authority on the book, album, single, movie, or episode I’m reviewing. Sometimes, I just want to record my reaction to one of those cultural artifacts and share it because I’m excited about engaging with it more than passively. This NIKKI NAIR EP is something I’m excited about but don’t have a lot of authority to discuss. I know I’ll find it helpful to wrestle with why I like it as I continue this review. Maybe you’ll find it interesting to read as I grapple with it, too.

    At this point in my life, I should know better than to declare that I don’t know the history or style of a genre of music. All of it is at my fingertips. I can learn about scenes and trends with the greatest of ease. Yet, I still don’t know much about what I usually term dance or electronic music. Let’s blame the Spin article from 1996 that popularized the term electronica for people living in the U.S. I can already tell that some of you reading this are having a conniption fit because I am lumping together disparate sounds such as jungle, house, techno, drum & bass, trance, electronic body music, intelligent dance music, etc. into a single mass. I’m sure I would be just as annoyed with someone who reviewed a punk record but couldn’t tell the difference between hardcore, youth crew, powerviolence, d-beat, emo, crossover, and NYHC. Given that I have spent most of my life listening to guitar-forward music, anything that doesn’t feature live players of instruments working together in person falls into the catchall term of electronic. So be it.

    You can probably tell that I didn’t hear about NIKKI NAIR from my usual means of learning about music. Admittedly, I have slowed way down over the years in terms of how frequently I keep up with music scenes or new sounds. At the same time, I can’t let myself be someone whose musical tastes are stuck in my teens or my 20s or even my early 30s. That feels gross. Luckily for all of us, Hearing Things exists. Just like Defector arose from the ashes of Deadspin and Aftermath came from Kotaku, Hearing Things is a worker-owned music website that pulls together writers formerly of Pitchfork, Spin, The Fader, and Jezebel, and other sites and zines. It’s an incredible resource and you should support it. I do.

    In his review of this EP’s “Smooth,” Ryan Dombal focuses on the title track, with its hook “my brain gets smooth when I think about you.” There’s more to the song than that line, but I think it’s incredible, so let’s hyperfixate on it for a minute. The idea of the smooth brain meme is that one is unable to think about anything in any depth, for any length of time. Scientists and people who have passed high school biology will tell you that the size of the brain is less important than the number of folds or wrinkles it has. So, the common understanding is that a person with a smooth brain has no worries; they are pure id. In reality, it’s less cheerful, but let’s focus on the literary implication here. NIKKI NAIR is saying that thinking about his beloved is enough of a comfort that he has no bad feelings. No bad vibes. Good vibes only. Good wife only. Good wife. Goody. Goody gumdrops. Good, good things. Good. It’s romantic in a childish way. As Homer Simpson once told Marge after a dark night of the soul, the one thing that only he can give her is “complete and utter dependence.” Marge replies, “that’s not a good thing.” It’s not at all. Still, NIKKI NAIR captures that fleeting feeling of pure joy that comes along with contemplating one’s beloved and giving yourself over to them in total devotion.

    In a much more mature sense, “IRS Love” speaks of a deeper commitment in a completely absurd way. For most of the song, you hear “I know that you want me / You know that I want you, too / Baby, I just wanna file my taxes with you.” The vocal effects make the chant sound much more childish than it is. Think about some of the other songs you know that have to do with “just wanting” someone or something. Most of those songs are by four dudes from Queens who really liked bubblegum pop. This accidental RAMONES song is incredible. Think about it. Instead of wanting to sniff glue or be someone’s boyfriend, Nair wants to have a stable enough relationship with someone that they’d file taxes together. It’s hardly romantic, but speaks to the kind of closeness and communication that is part of a lasting relationship. Unlike with “Smooth,” there’s a sense that the feelings are reciprocated. As he continues to repeat “just wanna file my taxes with you,” he layers in the lines “going to work I want to walk right into traffic / But I know if I did that then you’d have to file alone.” He’s saying he knows his partner also wants to file taxes with him. It’s mutual. You need the smooth brain moments and the roughness that creates the rough brained wrinkles to make a relationship last. The grooves that NIKKI NAIR puts down on this EP’s tracks are enough to deepen the ones that already exist in your brain, even if you sometimes wish it would just stay smooth.

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Stranger Things, Season 5, Episodes 1-4 (The Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2025)

    Up until the final minutes of episode four, this season of Stranger Things seemed to lack a reason for existence beyond serving up more ‘80s nostalgia. What it was saying with its cultural references throughout the seasons seemed to be that nerds and other outcasts make their way through and beyond adolescence with texts and practices that are opaque to adults and other peers. Socializing through playing Dungeons and Dragons or reading fantasy novels and watching sci-fi movies with friends is an alternative to small-town heroics involving athletic prowess or being part of a steady couple that practices husband-and-wife roles. This message would have been fine, even if it is a bit pedestrian.

    Instead, Will’s ability to reconcile his feelings for Mike with his own identity development as a young adolescent is what makes him truly Will the Wise. He avoids becoming a villain like Vecna / 001 / Henry Creel because he is able to integrate his desires into his persona. The evilness that led Creel to become Vecna was the rejection of any tendency toward (social or sexual? we’ll find out soon enough…) difference that might have been developing in his young heart and mind. His inability to resist social mores led him to want to destroy anyone else who would challenge those same norms. He’s not OK with being weird, so he wants no one else to be weird ever again.

    If nothing else, the scene where Will is able to prevent three demogorgons from harming his friends makes the entire series more intriguing than a mere coming-of-age tale. The tension is high between the characters in these first few episodes. Dustin is alone in his grief for Eddie, which costs him dearly in the form of physical pain. Lucas and Mike and Will are trying to just get along with each other and their peers in high school. Steve and Robin are working at the radio station (an upgrade from the scoop shop and the video store) to play music and spread the word about the latest raids happening in The Upside Down. Joyce, Jane, and Hopper are trying to make things work in their own way with those raids. Everyone still gets along and smiles, but with gritted teeth. They’ve been through a lot of shared trauma and no one has the sense to call a therapist. The feeling of “here we go again” comes through strongly. They are going through the motions and the show seemed like it was as well.

    A key moment occurs when Will is at the hospital where Vickie, Robin’s partner, works. He spies them kissing and then runs off when they noticed that he noticed. He speaks to Robin about it later and they discuss how she was able to come to terms with her attraction to Vickie. Robyn tells Will that it took a moment of self-reflection for her to realize she was denying the truth about who she was. A bit of artifact-mediated recall in the form of re-watching a home movie featuring her younger self is what allowed her to realize it’s more important to be honest with herself about her feelings for other girls than try to fit into society’s mold. Will isn’t explicitly asking her for advice about how to come out but she gives him the roadmap anyway. In that climactic scene of episode four, we see that he has a similar moment of accessing faint memories of his earliest interactions with Mike.

    Through the years, Will’s desire to be more than just friends with Mike has been difficult for him to put into words. When Will brought it up indirectly to Jonathan, his older brother seemed to understand, but did not have any pearls of wisdom for him. Will haltingly brought up the same feelings to Mike directly, yet Mike remained oblivious. Only through Robin’s words of support was he able to envision a different future for himself that did not compromise any parts of his identity for anyone else’s comfort. By being able to integrate his social and sexual identities into the cognitive, emotional, physical, and psychological developmental changes he’s also experiencing, he can tame the literal demons that are plaguing his town. That is a more interesting explanation for the monsters’ existence than an evil government or corrupt corporation that is trying to control minds for unstated purposes. I’m excited to see how they’ll handle the explanation and impact of this moment of self-realization for Will in the episodes to come.

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The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana Michael Azerrad (HarperOne, 2023)

    Although you and I might be familiar with the main beats of the NIRVANA story, we can still learn from this version of the book because it brings to the table nearly 30 years’ worth of additional analysis and perspective. I did not read the original version of this book. Those new elements are interwoven with the original text and set in a contrasting font, so the whole thing reads fluidly. There are some spreads where all the text is precisely that new writing and it serves to give a fuller context for the events in the original narrative. For example, Azerrad claimed in the initial version that no NIRVANA songs end with a fade-out and the annotation reminds us that “Negative Creep” ends with one. This fact isn’t important in itself, but by calling attention to the mistake, it gives the reader a moment to reconsider the initial claim—how cool of an idea it is for all of a band’s songs to end so emphatically.

    On a related note (i.e., complete tangent), the best thing about WOUND UP is that all their songs begin without stick clicks but with all instruments and vocals hitting at once. That is fucking cool. Props to Mike from The CATBURGLARS (I think it was him) for pointing that out on the Chicago Hardcore message board years ago. Another cool tangent this book led me down was the January 1994 interview Nardwuar did with Kurt. It’s interesting to see a young Nardwuar for sure, but the fact that he mentions the fucking NEOS at one point is utterly mind-blowing. It’s taken for granted at this point that Nardwuar is talented at asking these kinds of questions about band members’ influences and past experiences, and of course, there’s nothing of the sound of The NEOS in NIRVANA’s music, but it’s still incredible that he brings up that band in this interview.

    Reading through some of the smaller moments in the text also gave me the space to recall memories of my experience with NIRVANA before I’d actually started listening to them. A few months after Kurt died, a couple kids at my school had come up with a song about it to the tune of the Notre Dame fight song. The first line was “Cheer cheer for old Kurt Cobain / he shot himself while high on cocaine.” It sucks that there’s no such thing as an Internet search for my memories because I wish I could remember more of the song. My first experience with them as a fan and not just someone who was vaguely aware of them is from reading glossy magazines like Hit Parader or Circus and some probably European import that was a special issue all about them. I say probably Euro because there were guillemets instead of quotation marks.

    Though this is the definitive history of the band, there are moments of true insight to go along with the day-by-day descriptions of the band’s life. Even better, these insights travel beyond the band to help us understand what we might like about music more generally. Consider his recent analysis of their most famous song: “When Kurt sings ‘a denial, a denial,’ what does that mean exactly, or have to do with anything? We don’t know but we feel it really deeply. And that’s because of the way words—not just their meaning but their sound and their melody—go with what’s happening musically at that moment. Kurt did this all the time. It’s one of the reasons his songs are so powerful” (p. 345). He gets at the idea that lyrics don’t need to be particularly meaningful to be powerful. It’s kinda like how I pump my fist and sing along when Alec MacKaye sings “permission granted / permission denied” on the HAMMERED HULLS record. Kurt absolutely had a way with words and not in the deep-insight-on-current-affairs way or even the trenchant-insight-about-human-foibles way either. He knew how to put cool sounding words and chords together and that was enough, until it wasn’t.

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

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All Her Fault (Megan Gallagher, Peacock, 2025)

    When a young adolescent plays contact or collision sports, there is a risk of serious injury or death. Boys playing middle school football or girls playing travel soccer are liable to get concussions that will result in life-long disabling conditions. In such cases, who is most responsible for the injury? The child may feel the need to “play through the pain” to support their team, so if they continue to play and then get hurt, it must be the player’s fault. Another kid may have caused the injury, so it must be the opponent’s fault. The coach may not have benched a player who had already taken a few hard hits or falls, so it’s the coaching staff’s fault. Parents or guardians signed their child up for the league, so it must be their fault. The league or organization didn’t have concussion or injury protocols, so it must be the organization’s fault. The equipment manufacturer did not create products safe enough for children to use, so it must be the company’s fault. Pro sports broadcasts often replay sequences that lead to injury or otherwise valorize “tough” playmaking, so it’s the broadcasters’ and big leagues’ faults.

    There are many parties to consider blaming when things go wrong. In All Her Fault, Megan Gallagher’s mystery series about a missing five-year-old boy, the pronoun in the show’s title can apply to a number of the characters who might be most responsible for Milo Irvine’s kidnapping. See, he’s just a little guy at daycare. One day, he’s supposed to go home with his buddy Jacob Kaminski, and his nanny, Carrie Finch, so the boys can have a playdate the Kaminski household while all of the parents are working. These are busy, dual-income, high-striving suburban parents on Chicago’s North Shore, you see, so the families don’t know each other or each other’s nannies very well. Turns out that the playdate with Jacob never happened and the address that Marissa Irvine has in her phone from the Kaminski’s nanny is incorrect. She meets a flummoxed Esther Bauer at the house, who tries to talk her through the difficult situation of realizing a child his missing. No one can reach Carrie and neither of Jacob’s parents had ever set up the playdate in the first place. Oh, and the Irvine’s usual nanny, Ana Garcia, is off that week and will be leaving the country the next day…

    So, whose fault is it? Ana, for taking a week off and conveniently planning to leave the country? Jacob’s mom, Jenny, for hiring a nanny without doing a robust enough background check? Marissa Irvine, for scheduling a playdate via text with someone she’s never contacted through that number and whose house she’s never visited? Carrie Finch for apparently kidnapping Milo and dropping off the face of the planet? The daycare, for not having stricter pick-up protocols for parents? There are many women who might be to blame here.

    As the plot unfolds and the mystery deepens, we meet even more characters who could possibly be responsible for Milo’s abduction. One close associate of the family has a gambling addiction and may need the quick money that a ransom payment could provide. Another family member struggles with prescription pill abuse and could be chasing the money needed for another fix. Some of the parents are as awful and entitled as the most privileged people you could imagine, so maybe they resent Milo’s parents for the pettiest of reasons. (One of these reasons is that as a mom of an only child, certain moms such as Marissa and Jenny must have more time to give through volunteering for school fundraisers and events.) Maybe the parents are just faking it for attention, or even a book deal. After all, they are wildly successful people who know movers and shakers in the publishing industry who could get them a lucrative contract. Thankfully, not all of these people are women or femme-presenting, so the her in the show’s title does not seem as prescriptive and limiting as it might at first. Men and society blame women enough as it is.

    The mystery of Milo’s disappearance and its eventual resolution involves parsing who knew or did what and when. There are many cases of lies of omission. Characters sometimes conceal what they know, even when questioned by a sympathetically cast lead detective who does not have the moral code he initially seems to possess. They aren’t deliberately telling an untruth, which is lying by commission. They are simply leaving out key details in their responses while not saying anything factually inaccurate. Part of it is a little sneaky, but as with most understandings in human interaction, the import of a small detail might not seem as significant the first time we consider it. It’s rewarding to see Detective Alcaras pursue these leads and details to learn information the audience might already know, or might be learning along with him. He provides helpful think-alouds with his detective buddy to keep us in the loop. As with any good mystery or gossip story, we enjoy trying to guess where these leads and clues will take us and deciding whom to trust.

    A key element of the series is that these characters are busy with demanding jobs in publishing, wealth management, finance, teaching, and plenty of other jobs that seem to require in-person labor. They’re busy. The dads leverage that busyness or their business to beg out of responsibilities for childcare. A tale as old as time. If I were married to a man who would text and call me about the location of our child’s water bottle when I was trying to close a book deal with an important client, I would divorce him via Bitmoji in no time flat. Yes, this bumbling intrusion happens, and no, it’s not the deal-breaker that it should have been. If they’re not inept and passive aggressive, the high-achieving dads in this show must act as “protector” over their house, their wife, their siblings, their employees to maintain control of everything they touch. If you’re thinking this dynamic would result in gaslighting, you are absolutely correct. I can’t tell if it’s a weird streaming / buffering glitch or something with a green screen (if they even used it), but there were multiple episodes where it looked like the backgrounds were a mirage. One scene I chalked up to the steam rising from a teakettle between the characters, but the other scenes had no reason for this strange, wobbly background distortion to appear. It’s probably just digital artifacts from something in the way the show was filmed, but it still added to the atmosphere like the crackles and pops on a beloved album pressed to vinyl.

    Given that the characters are so wealthy and powerful, it is worth considering how they use their money and power. A missing white child from an affluent area is a surefire way to get attention from the media. Leading up to the hiccup at a press conference where reporters accuse the Irvines of faking their son’s kidnapping, they take pains to present themselves as sympathetic. They know that their existing social media photos of drunken nights out or of lavish lifestyles will not endear them to the public. Their campaign to find Milo also involves a canvassing effort in the city. The level of organization needed for this undertaking seems huge, but all we see is a quick conversation between Marissa and her friend and colleague Colin Dobbs. He tells her he’ll take care of it and then hundreds of people show up. The labor that makes that whole effort happen is completely invisible to the viewer in the same way it is to the characters. In a later episode the missing rungs of the social ladder are apparent through two wildly different outcomes of drug distribution charges. A character who has little and is desperate for money to support a family gets arrested and imprisoned, while a well-to-do son of a private school dean can make a deal with someone who needs something from the school in order to get this fortunate son’s record expunged expediently. It’s not just that the rich avoid a consequence; their second chance comes at the expense of the career and integrity of a person in a lower social class. There’s a lot going on with this show!

    If this review seems rushed, that’s because it is. Mrs. Tall Rob and I started watching last Wednesday. We got through one episode that night, another Friday, five more on Saturday, and finished it on Sunday afternoon. We usually pace ourselves with our television watching, but that all went out the window with All Her Fault. The premise is great and the many twists and turns and reveals (especially inter-family squabbling) make it a blast to watch. Even better, it contains a feminist critique of capitalism in that women receive blame for problems that are beyond their control (and are usually the fault of a mediocre white dude). Women are needed to be the care-giver and expected to be a provider while also managing their adult spouse’s social calendars, health needs, and emotional problems. The idea of “having it all” comes at a steep cost because even though one woman is not responsible for society’s shortcomings—or even her own—we’ll still think it is all her fault.

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Shifting Earth (Cecil Castellucci, Flavia Bondi, & Fabiana Mascolo; Dark Horse Comics; 2022)

    That feeling of being marketed to is gross. The feeling of “discovering” a book because you read about it on social media or through a friend’s recommendation in real life can’t be beat. It’s the latter that brought Shifting Earth into my life. A reposted Bluesky comment from Shifting Earth’s author, Cecil Castellucci, drew me in.

    In the post on October 25th, she wrote, “It’s my birthday! I’d like world peace, a functioning democracy, and to continue to be a working writer! So my big wish is that you buy, borrow, or boost one of my books today!” One of the books along with the image was Shifting Earth. I placed a hold on it at the library and waited a little while for it to come in. (All the others were already checked out, system-wide!)

    You might glean from the title of the book that we are dealing with parallel worlds and you would be correct. In addition to that, there are parallel narratives. Not all of these elements are immediately apparent from the start, which gives you a chance to deal with some disorientation as you get going.

    Calling Maeve Lindholm the protagonist feels strange with all those competing plot lines, but she’s who we meet first, so let’s go with it. She’s a scientist who is trying to preserve plant life and seeds in the event of inevitable climate disaster. Sound familiar? She’s widowed (or at least her partner is dead) and she has a rival who works on similar grounds but from a corporate or industry perspective. There’s plenty of tension between their competing desires for each other and for their visions of different futures.

    In a clever use of panels and gutters, the literal parallel story of astronomy researcher Zuzi Reed unfolds. She is trying to get attention and funding from an academy that seems more interested in terrestrial matters than those of different planets. The refrain of “let’s solve the problems of Earth before we explore the stars” that can stand in the way of making any kind of progress on any planet. Her partner is a geologist who is supportive of Zuzi’s work at the expense of using some of her own project’s funding.

    Things turn upside down for everyone when a coronal mass ejection sends Maeve to an actual parallel world where a man who appears to be her deceased ex-lover is still alive. He plays an important role in a world that is structured around an entirely different set of values. Maeve sees “steam-powered walkways, solar panels, rainwater recycling, green architecture… the green dream realized” (p. 35). For all its benefits, there are some glaring drawbacks that its residents aren’t able to comprehend. In a bit of explanation that sounds similar to The Community in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, it is important for people in this parallel society to be “of use,” otherwise, well… It’s said that animals who are of no use are “sacrificed and returned,” which is why there are livestock corpses floating in a river. Gruesome, indeed.

    To help Maeve better understand the world she’s entered, Ben (not Ben) takes Maeve to a play that retells the creation myth of the sun and twin moons of his world. This scene is only a spread long, but it does something really cool—it makes the parallel world seem more real by giving it a unique history and mythology. The costumes and speech patterns (represented via distinctly different lettering by Steve Wands) reveal that a lot of care went into what is only a small bit of in-universe explanation of “how things work” for Maeve. It provides a sense of wonder that a simple, illustrated dialogue exchange between the Maeve and Ben (not Ben) would  not have achieved. Better still, it ends with a box of inner dialogue that sums up the story-within-the-story and the nature of storytelling itself quite well. “We all make up stories to make sense of the world. Like the one I’m telling you now” (p. 74). Now that I’ve read Castellucci’s Shifting Earth, I’m eager to read Soupy Leaves Home and The Plain Janes, as well as some of their other made up stories that help make sense of our shared world.

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PULP More. (Rough Trade, 2025)

    If you’ve never listened to PULP, I feel sorry for you. Give “Spike Island” a listen to see what you’re getting into. Jarvis Cocker tells us, “I was born to perform / It’s a calling / I exist to do this / shouting and pointing,” which could have been a lyric to any PULP song over the past 40-or-so years. The upbeat, danceable groove they lock into feels just like it did in the end of the last century. The vinyl sounds fine, though I didn’t spring for the 2xLP on 45 RPM. The mini’ed images on the cover look to be the four core band members in black and white from the “Different Class” cover, while the back has a fuller complement of PULP in a slightly larger scale. You’re not surprised they put a lot of care into the design of the album.

    In September 2024, Mrs. Tall Rob and I saw PULP at the Aragon in Chicago. It was their first time in the city in nearly 30 years. They were without Russell Senior and Steve Mackey (RIP). They were playing a slightly bigger club than the Brixton Academy, but we’d be fools to miss them. The set was as magical and wonderful as ever, but snuck in there was a new song, “Spike Island.” Jarvis introduced it as being possibly part of a new album. Being at a gig is not always the best time to hear a new song from a band as lushly arranged as PULP, but I wasn’t about to turn up my nose at the new sonic offering. It didn’t sound too different from the rest of the set, for better or worse.

    We’d seen them on the 2011 reunion tour in Brixton as part of our honeymoon and the show was excellent. They had done a summer of European festival gigs and closed out the year with two shows at clubs in London. Notably, they said the reunion was only a tour and not an indication of a new creative instinct brewing within the remaining members. That’s fine. I got to see a band I’d only learned about in 2007 in a small club. I never thought I’d have a chance to see them. No new music? Fine!

    It’s kind of wild that this record exists. The past few years have seen new albums from British bands such as The CURE and IRON MAIDEN that also formed in the 1970s. Those two bands’ most recent efforts came at a slow, but expected pace. Neither of those bands had broken up or gone on hiatus. PULP, on the other hand, has been on and off the reunion cycle since their long hiatus in 2001, and have only released a single track, “After You” in 2012. As a leftover from the “We Love Life” sessions, it seemed like that would be it for Jarvis Cocker et al.

    We all should be so glad that “After You” wasn’t the last we’d heard from them. The promo material with the record explains that it’s been nearly 24 years since the last PULP album. Given the hiatus and other projects they’d been involved in, it really was a surprise to find out they had an album’s worth of material to share. Jarvis explains that it is “the shortest amount of time a PULP album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.” That is a really cool way of putting it. They’d had the time off to let some old ideas simmer and new ones bubble up; the result is as delectable as anything they served up at the height of their notoriety.

    Do you remember the first time? Do I need to tell you what PULP sounds like? (Are you sure?) This album works as an entry point if you’re not familiar. They hit all the usual defining features of their sound: powerful, disco-y arrangements that make you want to shake your moneymaker; too, too close to the mic spoken word parts; lyrical concepts and phrasings that are just on the right side of being too clever for their own good; and songs about sex.

    If you’re lucky, you get all of those in a single song, such as “My Sex.” I laughed in spite of myself at the line “I haven’t got an agenda / I haven’t even got a gender.” That’s just the kind of cleverness I mean. In the next song, you’ve got the line that “without love / you’re just jerking off inside someone else.” There you go. A disgusting way of phrasing of an idea that is fundamental to a healthy relationship. You really do have “Got to Have Love.”

    (As a treat, Jarvis will “spell it for you, yeah, it goes L-O-V-E,” so you’ll have a pleasant memory of “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.” toward the end of the song.)

    There’s times when I don’t want to listen to “We Love Life” because the ornate instrumentation is too much for me. The velvet-gloved slap of “Different Class” is unbeatable. Moments like “Farmers Market” recall the excesses of “We Love Life,” yet the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There are many parts and many contributions to this record. Pictured in the insert are Jarvis Cocker, Nick Banks, Mark Webber, and Candida Doyle. There are no songs with just the four of them; Andrew McKinney plays bass in place of the late Steve Mackey. At a minimum, there are credits for strings, percussion, and electronics on the songs. So, nothing entirely unexpected, and that’s fine by me. There’s a taste of some of the darkness of “This is Hardcore” on “The Hymn of the North,” which has a recurring chord progression that evokes plenty of sadness. That feeling goes over the top with the eventual imploring request to “please stay in touch with me / in this contactless society.” Feeling bad can feel so good. The whole b-side to the record feels like a journey through the phases of a relationship, from that moment when “Something Changed” to the eventual result of “Babies” who will grow into adults who leave home to start it all again.

    As the liner notes indicate, “This is best that we can do.” and there’s no shame in trying when you know you’ve given your all.

    Let’s finish with the observation that “We Love Life” ended with “Sunrise” and “More” ends with “A Sunset.”

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You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip (Kelsey McKinney, Grand Central, 2025)

    Spend enough time in the library stacks and you’ll begin to absorb the organizing principles of the Dewey Decimal System. Reading a history book means you’ll be in the 900s. You like books about musicians or movies or video games? Check the 700s. Maybe you’re enough of a savant that you don’t need the catalog at all and can use the system without a reference. I’m not quite there yet, but I was also kind of surprised to see that Kelsey McKinney’s text bore the number 296.3 in my local library. The 200s? What the hell kind of book is in that section? A good one, certainly, even though this is a section I’ve apparently not read from much.

    All I know about 200s is from what I read in Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. In a footnote, she gives a more-than-adequate criticism of Dewey as a person and as the creator of a system. “While all systems are inevitably biased, making more space for some elements and overlooking others, Dewey’s was particularly so, and has proved troublesome in the modern world. Being based on Baconian hierarchies, it is predisposed to an Anglo-centric worldview. More, it is almost laughably Christian-centric: religion, allocated the 200s in Dewey’s system, sees 200-289 devoted to Christianity, while all of Islam is contained in just 297. Women, meanwhile, are patronizingly categorized alongside etiquette. (Dewey himself had chronic woman trouble, or, rather, women had chronic trouble with Dewey: he was forced to resign from the American Library Association after no fewer than four women complained that he had assaulted them in a single ten-day period in 1905. He was, in addition, a notable anti-Semite and racist, even for those notably anti-Semitic and racist times, also being requested to stand down from his position as librarian for New York State owing to his endorsement of clubs that operated on Christian-whites-only policies.)” (p. 217). That is one hell of a footnote! It is prompting me to think about checking out a number of books and to leave open many browser tabs for months.

    What’s relevant about Flanders’ footnote with regard to McKinney’s book is that my local-ish library (and maybe yours, too) has classified it in the 200s, which means it is considered a text about Religion. According to the Dewey Decimal System, 296 is reserved for texts on Judaism. More specifically, the number 296.3 is a subsection titled “Theology, ethics, views of social issues.” What the fuck? Like, what the actual fuck? Does this library branch think that only practitioners of Judaism have an ability to or an interest in gossip? Or that gossiping is the sole purview of members of the Jewish faith? Flanders’ commentary makes it plain that Dewey was antisemitic. Guess that goes for a few librarians using his system in 2025, too.

    For what it’s worth, every other branch in the library consortium where I got this book has it classified as 302.24, which is Social Sciences > Social Interaction > Communication. That is a lot more reasonable.

    All that misclassification aside, this book is excellent. I was late to listen to Normal Gossip, but I have grown to love it. It has survived without McKinney, which proves that it is strong as a concept. People like knowing “anonymized morsels of gossip” about people they’ll never meet. This book is a worthy companion to the podcast in that it reviews some of the literature on the topic of gossip and features relevant autobiographical details from McKinney that help to explain her history with gossip. There are also the tiniest little amuse-bouches of gossip at the beginning of each section just to make the whole book that much more fun. I say this all with the caveat that I do not know McKinney. As she explains in a section on parasocial relationships, “Researchers have found that listening with headphones is a superconductor for creating a feeling of emotional connection, because it sounds like the person’s voice is inside your head” (p. 114). I think the truth of that comment rings even more loudly when the podcast is about gossip. It’s like you’re listening to two of your friends or coworkers tell you about something that you all share. I’m sure in a few decades I will misremember something like the Bunco cheating story as an event that happened to someone in my life, or their friend, all because I listened to it on the way to and from work one week.

    A benefit of listening to Normal Gossip so much is that it has helped me process social interactions better. Typically during an episode, McKinney pauses and asks the guest “So, whose side are you on?” at a pivotal point. This was a good check for me because it let me see whether I was “getting it” in terms of the social rules or norms that were being violated or contested. I’m self-aware enough to know that social interactions are not my strong suit (and now I have a psych eval to prove it, lol), so it was helpful to have a chance to practice thinking about other people’s perspectives while listening along to a gossip story each week. McKinney comes back to this topic in the book, writing, “We are teaching our peer group how we want to behave and how we want them to behave” when we are dealing with gossip (p. 51). The idea is that the stories we choose to tell about other people are revelatory of what we find to be important or valuable. If something goes unremarked upon, it’s not even worth noticing, let alone talking about. You can learn a lot just by hearing what other people find distasteful or rude or funny. Gossip is key part of participating in a society because it teaches you about norms and behaviors that might otherwise go unstated. It’s kind of like an ad-hoc instruction manual for how to live.

    In my 20s, I engaged in plenty of behaviors that seemed like good enough ideas at the time. One of them is that I thought it was an interesting topic of conversation to declare I wasn’t going to read fiction ever again because—are you ready?—it’s fake. That was my argument. I held forth on it at parties and other gatherings, not realizing how alienating I was being at the time. I would ask people to recommend me a novel to read because I was only going to read five more of them. I was engaging in “debate me, bro” conversational patterns without even realizing it. I sure hope some of my friends talked about me behind my back about this phase because I know it must have been excruciating. I was an English major, for crying out loud.

    At the time, I was too emotionally stunted to realize that the emotions I was feeling in response to fiction were proof of my humanity. McKinney knows this is a line of criticism that gossip-haters will maintain; they’ll focus on the capital-T Truth of the matter and want to know every fact about a situation before passing judgment. The world isn’t so clean. As she says about gossip and its relation to fiction, “Many people balk when forced to acknowledge that fiction can make them feel something even if it is not real” (p. 96). That’s just it. I was unwilling to accept that a “fake” story could make me feel real emotions. I thought I was weak or easily manipulated instead of recognizing that I was a human and that those emotions were normal. If you’d asked me at the time, I’m sure I would have thought gossip was beneath me and a waste of time. I would have probably hit you with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote that McKinney cites early on about how “small minds discuss people” (p. 4) and felt confident that I had put you in your place. I’m wiser now that I recognize the power (and fun!) involved in gossip, and I have McKinney and everyone else involved in Normal Gossip to thank for that.

    In each episode of the show, McKinney (and now Rachelle Hampton) asks about the guest’s relationship to gossip. The range of responses across the episodes reveals the utility of gossip beyond mere self improvement. It’s not idle chatter that helps us pass time. It can serve a vital role about keeping in check those who have broken social conventions or engaged in maladaptive behaviors. These whisper networks benefit from anonymity, because to put a face and a name and an address with certain gossip could be dangerous for the one sharing it. Dominant perspectives on sex, money, and power may not withstand anonymous gossip. “When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it. Anonymity gives people without power an opportunity to grab a little bit as their own” (p. 83). The cloak of anonymity is not fabricated of cowardice. There are reasons to use care when sharing information about powerful people. No one willingly gives up power, but the embarrassment or shame that gossip engenders might help make it hard for the powerful to save face if a critical mass of people keep spreading it publicly. Do your part: keep talking about weird dudes.

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Neo Cab (Chance Agency / Fellow Traveler, 2019)

    Maybe you’re like me in that you don’t enjoy the feeling of being marketed to. You don’t like feeling that you have been targeted by an ad campaign or that your behavior is susceptible to suggestion so easily. Or maybe that’s just my hang-up.

    You want to feel that you are an individual with discernment and refined tastes. Your interests cannot be cataloged into a spreadsheet and compared with existing data to create a profile of your behavior. You are unpredictable and that makes you interesting, and human. You have a personality. You are not a number, you are a free person!

    I hear you. Let me also tell you that I had a marketing situation that worked on me a few weeks back. See, I’d played both Citizen Sleeper games this year and last year, so I got myself on the publisher’s mailing list. Among the updates and announcements, I’d sometimes see info on other games they’d published. One of them was Neo Cab, which was coming to iOS for free. The promo blurb intrigued me enough that I decided to spend actual money on it for my Switch, not realizing it wasn’t a new game at all.

    A few breezy hours of gameplay later, I was glad I made the purchase. Neo Cab is a visual novel where you play the role of the only human cab driver in Los Ojos, a fictional city that sure seems like it’s in California. As Lina, you drive only at night, which adds to the isolating atmosphere. (The alternately propulsive and chill soundtrack by OBFUSC was good enough that I bought it on Bandcamp shortly after finishing the game; it also helps set the mood of driving a cab through a big, empty city at night.) The only person she knows in the city is her old friend, Savy, who has agreed to let you move in with her. Gameplay occurs through conversations with your passengers, most of whom are surprised to learn that you are a human being. Each night, you are responsible for taking a few passengers around the city and keeping them occupied while in the car. Just like a gig worker in real life, you have to worry about your car’s fuel level, your passengers’ ratings of your driving, and your emotions’ impact on your ability to make conversation. Each of these elements plays a role in the type of passenger you can pick up and how far you can go to get them. You also need to find a spot to stay each night to rest and recharge. As the nights go on, you realize that the friend you had planned to move in with is a bit cagey. Even after she’s in your cab for a quick ride, you still feel that she’s hiding something and that she may even be in serious trouble.

    In a simpler world, you could just connect with her again and rest at her place for the night before figuring out how to make the next steps in your move to the big city. That wouldn’t be much of a game, though, so the factor motivating your action as Lina is trying to solve a mystery of what is happening with Savy when she disappears suddenly one night. Now, the conversations you’ve had with passengers aren’t just in service of getting a better rating and more pay. Each person who rides with you has information that might be useful in helping locate Savy. You’ll also learn about the troubles and issues your passengers are facing, some of whom would despise each other if they ever met. You might even get so wrapped up in their needs that the idea of finding or helping Savy seems less interesting. The game will eventually push you toward a resolution, but you can play it out in a variety of ways.

    The combination of autosaves and manual saves makes it possible to retry certain parts of the story in order to get a desired outcome. I got worried a few days into the game when I was low on money, far from charging stations, and unable to pick up passengers who only ride with drivers with high ratings. I was sure I’d get stuck and have to re-load a save from a few rides before. In a very clever twist, I had to use Lina’s phone to train an in-game AI program by solving puzzles and answering questions. I eventually got so annoyed at it that I was able to force quit the program by repeatedly giving it wrong answers. Still got paid, though. This was a really interesting way to emphasize the human hands behind all of the automation in the game (and in real life). Regarding artificial intelligence, it’s humans all the way down. Having to engaged in microwork to train AI to get a pittance that can be used to charge an electric car that is used for the gig economy is a dystopian level of labor exploitation. All of these exact conditions may not exist for a single person at the moment, but each part of the process is currently happening somewhere on the planet. By having players engage with microwork in this way, Neo Cab presents a critique of artificial intelligence and automation while reminding players of the importance of human labor and interpersonal skills.

    To be fair, that critique is apparent early in the game. Picking up your first passenger yields a conversation that results in Lina commenting on Capra, the company that operates the fleet of autonomous cabs. She calls the cabs “soulless capsules of glass and plastic” then realizes “but hey, those things don’t need health insurance.” Too true. Companies will do anything to keep from having to pay workers a living wage. I enjoyed this anti-tech messaging throughout the game as much as I did trying to solve the mystery of where Savy went and what was going on with the gang of bike punks. (There are bike punks.) Turns out it was a good thing for me to be susceptible to marketing after all. Well, at least, the kind of marketing that results from an independent publisher asking me to opt in to a mailing list about games similar to ones I’ve already been enjoying. I’m human, which means I’m a little predictable, despite my desire to be seen as unique and interesting.

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The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Scribner, 2024)

    Sure do wish more people were talking about this book instead of the one focused solely on abundance that came out recently. Said differently: it’s the reciprocity, stupid! The existence of abundance is meaningless without reciprocity as a means of dealing with it. Kimmerer writes that “recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always encouraging us to consume more” (p. 27). This “enoughness” exists not just in terms of food, but also wealth and security. She helpfully calls those who hoard the excess Darren, after Darren Woods, who has been the CEO of ExxonMobil since 2017. One hopes that this name becomes genericized as shorthand for insatiably capitalistic white dudes.

    The serviceberry is one of the models Kimmerer uses to explain how reciprocity operates. As a member of Potawatomi Nation, one of the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes region, she shares that the etymologies of gift and berry in Potawatomi are remarkably similar (pp. 19-20). So the berries are a gift from Earth to us, and they can be a gift from one person to another. She compares two exchanges that might result in her receiving berries. In one case, she can go to the market and buy them. She exchanges money for goods and that’s the end of the relationship. In another case, she goes to the field and picks the berries herself, then shares them with a neighbor or friend. The relationship doesn’t end there, as her friend might have a great recipe for berry pies that she can share with Kimmerer (or others). They can also have a conversation later on about the quality of the berries they shared or the deliciousness of the pie. Kimmerer contrasts this exchange with the hypothetical discussion of berry pie or jam recipes with the clerk at the store a week after completing the financial transaction. Although it wouldn’t be the most unusual thing to discuss, the clerk has a different relationship to the berries because money and labor are involved. What reciprocity means in this kind of relationship is unclear. A system that alienates workers from their labor also alienates the workers from each other.

    Instead of reviewing ambitious technosolutions that support her position on the importance of reciprocity as a means of distributing abundance, Kimmerer looks to nature as a model for how we can get along better with each other and the world. An instructive story comes from an anthropologist seeking to understand how one member of a hunter-gatherer community dealt with excess meat from a recent kill. Given that such a great deal of food might be hard to come by again, the researcher is shocked that the hunter doesn’t save any for later. Instead of scarcity, the hunter turns to community and hosts a feast for the neighbors. The researcher still can’t help it and asks wouldn’t it be better to store the extra meat in a freezer or in salt for a later date. “I store the meat in the belly of my brother” is the bewildered reply (p. 56). Why, even when there is scarcity, should we keep our gains from everyone else? Sharing them means we will be likely to receive shared goods in the future. Seems so simple.

    There’s not a grand proposal for how this gift economy might replace our mixed economy, but it does help us think about different ways of being. I appreciated imagining along with her the idea of an “Empathetic Mutualist Human” as a response to Adam Smith’s “Rational Economic Man” (p.73). There is plenty to critique about traditional economic models, and this reframing of one of the basic tenets of economics is a strong start. She continues this critique by explaining how a focus on scarcity (instead of abundance) means that the “rational economic man” wants to hoard wealth, food, security and opportunity. In a time of crisis, the hoarders “would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance. Hoarding won’t save us either. It won’t even save Darren. All flourishing is mutual” (p. 111).  Although we might be conditioned to think that hoarding abundance will protect us, the abundance is useless if we cannot share it with others. The implicit critique here is that there is no one to help you make use of or partake in the abundance. Because “all flourishing is mutual,” we need to give in order to grow. There’s no way to have accumulated abundance without having taken it in the first place. It’s not just a moral act to share; it is vital for our survival as a species.

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TAYLOR SWIFT The Life of a Showgirl (Republic Records, 2025)

    Now that New Music Tuesday is New Music Friday, I need to discuss Friday Night Parts with you. These are parts of songs that hook into the brain and take on a disproportionate level of importance. They are Friday Night Parts because they exist to be anticipated all week and savored during a focused listening session on a Friday Night after a long week of work. No matter what happens, the music will be there for you. Specifically, these parts of these songs will be there. You can hold them in memory, sure, but nothing beats the real thing. One such Friday Night Part is the line “feel the deadly cold freeze you from inside” on SLAYER’s “At Dawn They Sleep.” Specifically, it’s the effect on Tom Araya’s vocals when he sings “freeze you from inside.” It’s sick. His voice sounds like it’s being frozen in the middle of the line. There’s no other such vocal treatment on the album, which makes it stand out even more. It’s not a detail that requires repeated listens to elicit—it’s right there in your face the first time you hear it. There are many cool parts in the rest of that song, but the key element of a Friday Night Part is that it is brief and not necessarily the “best” part of a song. It’s just a part that stands out for a possibly inarticulable reason. Mine may not be yours.

    Other Friday Night Parts of note include the final chorus to KELLY CLARKSON’s “Since U Been Gone,” specifically the descending vocalization on “want.” There’s many things happening at this part in the song. Fight to focus on this part and you will be rewarded with happiness. In a similar fashion, there’s a drum roll at the end of The RONETTES’ “Be My Baby” that seems like a throwaway moment but is actually really cool. When someone from the Wrecking Crew does a quick tom fill (at ~2:16), you’d better listen up. Finally, there is a funny Friday Night Part in ROXY MUSIC’s “Re-Make/Re-Model” where each instrument gets a chance to do a little improv measure. It’s a few silly noises right in a row, as if to introduce the band members via sonic signature, and it’s the kind of moment you look forward to hearing all week. Then you hear it and you can go on with living.

    What do Friday Night Parts have to do with the new TAYLOR SWIFT album? Well, when the music industry decides to move album releases to Fridays, it is signaling that Friday is a great day for listening to music. You are off work or done with school and have the night or weekend to focus fully on your passions and interests. The industry is telling you to identify Friday Night Parts by releasing music on Fridays. It’s as simple as that. When I was at work on Friday, a few colleagues asked if I’d heard any of “The Life of a Showgirl.” Of course I hadn’t. I was waiting for Friday night! Sheesh.

    The wait was not worth it. I even had the house to myself. I sprawled on the couch as the compact disc played on my home stereo. There’s a little drum fill at the start of “The Life of Ophelia” that got me excited. I was certain this was a winking nod to a variety of Friday Night Parts still to come. They never arrived. “Opalite” is the standout track, but that’s not saying much. The album was meant to be a no-frills affair compared to its predecessor. More fun, more straightforward, not overwrought. Only one of those things is true: a 42-minute pop album is quite straightforward. It fits easily on to one side of a 90-minute cassette, leaving you free to dub another album for your friend on the b-side. That sounds anachronistic because it is. Releasing an album on a major label in 2025 is anachronistic, too. I lean into it. For the fourth time since 2022, I bought the “new” TAYLOR SWIFT CD on my lunch break and picked up a Pumpkin Spice Latte along with it. (Well once it was just a flat white but I digress.)

    As luck would have it, there’s another long-running country music solo artist who just released an album. Too bad AMANDA SHIRES’ “Nobody’s Girl” is too long to fit on the other side of that tape. It would deserve the a-side, anyway. Swift and Shires don’t need a forced comparison to establish their value; their records can stand on their own. That lesson came through to me in 1996 in the letters section of Hit Parader. A subscriber’s letter dismissed METALLICA’s “Load" by writing, “The new PANTERA is heavier than the new METALLICA” and the editor replied, “Yes, and the new INTERNAL BLEEDING is heavier than the new SOUNDGARDEN. So what?” The point of these temporal comparisons is just to stoke argument, not to validly claim that one album is better than another. Even if “Nobody’s Girl” hadn’t just come out, “The Life of a Showgirl” would still be mid.

    Maybe I’m being too harsh in saying that. I know that I’m usually underwhelmed by new LADY GAGA (my modern pop North Star) singles at first. More often than not, they grow on me and I end up changing my opinion on them. I’ve listened to “The Life of a Showgirl” three times but I don’t think it will grow on me at all. The instrumentation is dull and the lyrics are trite. “You’re just now noticing this about TAYLOR SWIFT, Rob? Really?” Well, yeah. I was underwhelmed by “The Tortured Poets Department,” which I chalked up to being an attempt at some kind if literary sensibility or credibility. It feels silly of me to have thought a shorter, more accessible album would have led to a sea change in her approach. Quite the opposite! An album this brief needs to have powerful tracks and deadly hooks to pull in the listener. There’s hardly a memorable element to be found on these 12 songs. There’s not a lot of depth of sound or thought here. The timbre of the synths and keys, not to mention the bass and guitars, is thin as compared to something like “1989” or “Red.”

    The lyrics are appalling. To claim the mantle of “English teacher” in a wedding announcement and then write these words is a little much. (Rhyming kitty with pretty with witty with city with legitly… come on now!) It dawned on me while listening to this album that Swift is still stuck in the same references she was making in high school. A lot has changed in the 18 years since she was a teenager; kids today are more easily in touch with a variety of musical and cultural traditions from around the globe. Swift has the acumen of an A student in an exurban school district who excels at multiple-choice tests but cannot generate an interesting thought when faced with an open-ended writing prompt. She has mastered writing to the test but stumbles into original thinking only by accident. Why else would Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Hollywood’s Elizabeth Taylor appear in the first two songs? These are hardly the most interesting or obscure references. They fit comfortably in the milieu of a suburban high school. Same goes for the ham-handed similes… “like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse.” I’d wager Swift is also carrying around a set of Barron’s SAT Flashcards, given her use of protégé, discretion, exoneration, and kismet.

    It’s not clear what she has to say with this album. What is the point of “Father Figure” or “Eldest Daughter”? (Is everybody “so punk on the Internet,” and why does that matter?) We get that she’s bragging about her fiancé on “Wood” and “Wi$h Li$t” and “Honey.” Good for her but it doesn’t even sound like an interesting relationship. I think it was on Twitter because I can’t find it now, but Tressie McMillan Cottom once advanced the argument that Swift is different from BEYONCÉ and ADELE because she is not a wife or a mom but she is past the age of 30. McMillan Cottom maintained that that combination of factors breaks people’s brains. Swift is engaged now. Maybe there’s something to settling down that has made her less interesting as an artist. The picture she paints in “Wi$h Li$t” sounds a lot like suburban midwestern anonymity. It could also be a version of Erich Fromm’s “égoïsme à deux” (a concept that I learned about in my suburban high school, lol) that she’s describing in that song. If so, a further inward retreat may reveal that the corners of her character have been rounded off and nothing else interesting remains.

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Al Llorens (1952-2025)

    The last email many teachers in Illinois may have received from Illinois Education Association President Al Llorens arrived on Monday, September 15th. The subject line read “Exercise caution on social media.” In it, he referred to “an aggressive effort underway - nationwide and in Illinois - to target individual educators based on their speech. This targeting has included calls for discipline or termination, and even violent threats to school campuses. We are aware of protests being planned at some school board meetings, schools and district administrative offices.” It is understandable, but also somehow beyond belief that this email existed. It’s a sign of just how frayed the social fabric is that a public union’s leader needs to urge restraint on protected speech from members of that union. That fabric tore a little bit more on Friday afternoon with the news that Al Llorens had died on Thursday in Springfield.

    Rest in Peace, Al.

    Just about a year ago, I met Al for the first time. In the middle of September 2024, IEA emailed its members to announce that it had “partnered with a group called Operation Swing State to help connect our members with Harris/Walz election efforts in Wisconsin and Michigan. On Friday, the IEA Board of Directors voted to concur with the NEA’s decision to recommend Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice president in the upcoming election. As you probably know, most believe the decision on who succeeds President Joe Biden in the oval office will come down to seven swing states – Wisconsin and Michigan are two of the seven. If you’d like to help in the effort, IEA and Operation Swing State will be providing buses to bring volunteers to Wisconsin and Michigan to knock on the doors of fellow likely voters and encourage them to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket.” A few weeks later, I was with teachers and IEA leaders, including Al, on a bus to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Local organizers re-routed us to Battle Creek due to a large number of volunteers in and around Kalamazoo (a.k.a. Kamalazoo) that day. We got our assignment and spent the afternoon canvassing a residential area in twos and threes. When we’d finished, the group enlisted my long arms for a group photo before boarding the bus for the trip back to Illinois. Al and I bracket the group, who were all worn from walking for a few hours on an unseasonably warm October day. By the time we were back in Matteson, Al had taken the time to thank each of us on the bus for our time, effort, and energy that day. Only after getting back to my car did I realize that the card he’d given me showed that his title was “IEA President.” It felt cool and special to have it, even if I’d never need to use it.

    I spent the next few weekends on buses or in cars with like-minded folks knocking on doors in Wisconsin and Michigan. It broke my fucking heart when Harris and Walz lost.

    Coincidentally, there was an effort underway to fix public pensions in Illinois and IEA was once again chartering buses from all over the state for a rally in Springfield during a special session about the pension reform. Al was one of the first people I saw when I got off the bus. He recognized me immediately from canvassing efforts in Michigan and welcomed me to Springfield for the rally. I realize it had only been a few weeks and that I was one of the tallest people on the bus each time. Still, it felt good to be remembered and seen.

    As with the presidential election, the pension reform effort fell short of expectations. Al continued to send encouraging emails and to remind educators of the stakes of the reform. In all cases, it was clear that educators have a voice as part of a collective bargaining unit and that we should be unafraid to use it. His final email is not an indictment of his judgment or a cowardly change of heart. It is a reflection of how much the United States has changed in the past 12 months. I can think of no better way to honor his memory than to use your voice to speak back against the creeping and creepy fascism we are facing in this country. If you’re not already protected by a labor union, what can you do to organize one near you?

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Final Fantasy IX

Teachers

The Payback (Kashana Cauley, Atria Books, 2025)

    The conventional wisdom of graduate school has it that a doctoral candidate’s dissertation needs to do one of two things to be considered successful in its field. It can either pose a thought-provoking question or it can use a unique methodology to approach an issue. There’s minimal chance it will do both. Kashana Cauley’s The Payback is a novel that also does two different things very well. It has a thoughtful premise and it is also well-written and really, really funny. This combination means that it is worth celebrating at length.

    The premise sold me on the book immediately. What if a group of Black women in the middle of their careers still had endless amounts of student loan debt to pay back? What if they wanted to get payback on the predatory lenders instead? And, in doing so, what if they were able to eliminate student loan debt from all borrowers? You’d celebrate them as heroes if this were real life. Sadly, the United States is hellbent on making former college students as miserable as possible through these loans. Even when Biden could have fully canceled them, he didn’t. Trump has threatened to reinstate them, which is pure lunacy. We turn to fiction to live out the fantasies we can’t have in real life. It feels really good to read this book about three Black women willing to brave the waters with the federal student-loan sharks.

    Maybe people living outside the U.S. won’t be able to relate to the idea of seeking vengeance on federal payment processors. Going to college for free means they can’t enjoy this book as deeply as I did. Their loss, I guess. Even so, there are plenty of ways that faceless organizations across the globe prevent people from living their lives because of bureaucratic stiff-arming. So there are likely ways it is relevant to a wider audience.

    For those fortunate enough to not live with some kind of crippling debt, there are still plenty of cool parts in this book. Let’s think about the characters for a minute. Our narrator, Jada, had a glamorous past in costume design for a Hollywood studio. An event known for most of the book as only “the incident” changed her fortune and she now works in a clothing store in a tony mall near Los Angeles. Her two co-workers and eventual heist-mates are Audrey and Lanae. Like Jada, Audrey flamed out of a promising career under difficult circumstances. Lanae fronts a punk band known as The DONNER PARTY. Maybe it’s clear to you now that none of them have what you could call a comfortable standard of living, and that’s before you consider the turquoise-epauletted Debt Police who are there to make sure women like Jada, Lanae, and Audrey do not take advantage of their university educations. You’ll have to read the book to learn more about those fucks…

    What’s fun about this group of colleagues turned something like friends is how Jada mercilessly rips on Audrey. Or, I should say, Cauley has her savage Audrey’s character throughout the early pages of the book. Audrey, in Jada’s telling, “never made hand gestures when she talked” (p. 51) and, when done ringing up customers at the register, “flip[s] back to her default dull self as neatly as a window blind snapping shut” (p. 72). There are plenty of other great descriptive phrases like those that give you the indication that Audrey suffers from the terminal affliction of being born without a personality. (I can relate.) Also clever are the explanations behind the movies and shows Jada used to work on in her earlier career—Appeal and Ride or Die being two highlights whose set-ups I won’t spoil. Each one had me dropping the book to the floor in laughter.

    So you’ve got the intriguing premise from the start and plenty of interesting descriptions to carry you through the moments between the action. That’s good enough right there for me to recommend it and I haven’t even mentioned the way Cauley works in pop culture references such as PETER GABRIEL’s “Melt,” a few characters at a party who are “a pack of Lisa Bonets of different heights and weights but with the same telltale long, curly wig” (p. 47), and a  reference to eating zucchini that would be “as smooth as a SADE album” (p. 121). Oh, that’s right. Jada takes on a job eating food on camera for the sake of the internet after her retail career ends. I don’t want to do any research into the descriptions of this type of money making, but Cauley again does an excellent job of making Jada’s eating episodes seem believably, uh, stimulating.

    There are plenty more examples of enjoyable wordplay and exciting plot twists in the rest of the book, so I’ll just leave you with one moment that wasn’t just “good” in a literary sense, but made me rethink how I contextualize what I consume. Most of the first part of the book takes place in the mall where Jada et al. work. On her way into the clothing shop, Jada reflects on how “People say a good restaurant has terroir, and so does a mall. Its cinnamon rolls don’t taste the same in an airport, or at home. They taste right in the mall” (p. 60). Damn. Damn right, they do! A partygoer in college once remarked similarly that “Combos taste better when you’re rolling.” He meant in the car sense, not the inebriation sense, but the truth of the fact remains. Cauley makes a strong case here for the importance of context and all its tangibles and intangibles that make something as pleasant as a cinnamon roll taste just right only in a mall. As I’ve said repeatedly, this kind of close analysis and clear description of our shared reality is evidence of excellent writing. Enjoy The Payback for Cauley’s word choice and for the unique and thrilling ways that its characters engage in the most worthwhile heist possible.

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Response to Chicago Tribune's Charlie Kirk Editorial

September 11, 2025 at 9:42 PM

Dear Chicago Tribune Editorial Board:

    The editorial regarding Charlie Kirk’s legacy paints too rosy a picture of a man whose main goal in life was relentless antagonism of undergraduates and their professors. His horrific murder was inexcusable. The issue with the editorial is that it frames his contribution to the cultural conversation as “debate.” This is a charitable interpretation of his campus visits.

    There is no form of debate where keeping a running watchlist of allegedly left-wing professors would be an appropriate strategy. To claim that a discredited, racist conspiracy “is not a theory, it’s a reality” demonstrates an intellectual incuriosity that has nothing to do with finding a reasonable answer through discussion. Likewise, believing that the United States is “a Christian state” is a woefully uninformed position.

    These are just a few of Kirk’s beliefs. They are intentionally inflammatory. They do not stand up to scrutiny. Notably, the Tribune’s editorial does not directly quote nor hyperlink to any of the many public appearances where Kirk used these words. The use of paraphrase throughout the editorial elides the harm of Kirk’s words, as well as their consequences for minoritized populations.

    Truly, that harm is the true legacy of Kirk. He thought a better argument was the result of snappy one-liners and a firm grasp of what he considered to be facts. Those strategies may win a debate and convince listeners that the speaker is correct for having won. The truth, let alone the most reasonable answer, remains elusive in such a setting. Kirk excelled not at debate or argumentation, but in disputational talk. His words were loud; his ideas, quiet. 

My best,

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

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DEVO (Chris Smith, Library Films / VICE Studios, 2024)

    I lived in central Ohio for 15 years, so I should probably have a stronger take on DEVO than “I like them and they are cool.” Alas, I never took the deep dive into being a DEVOtee (that’s what their fans call themselves, right?). This documentary had me thinking I had the wrong idea the whole time and should have probably picked up their albums while flipping through the bins at Used Kids Records. Those radio station promo copies of AGNOSTIC FRONT’s “Cause for Alarm” and LEEWAY’s “Born to Expire” from WKCO for $2.50 apiece were more my speed at age 19, so “Q: Are We Not Men?” and “Duty Now for the Future” didn’t warrant a second look. Too bad for past me.

    In my time in Ohio, I picked up a stray fact about DEVO here and there through breathing in the atmosphere. Their mascot is Booji Boy instead of Boogie Boy because they ran out of g in the font they were using. There’s a release called “Hardcore DEVO, Vol. 1” that has “the stuff you’ll like” if HC punk is more your speed. They did an Obama 2008 campaign event in Akron and made a version of his O logo wearing the flowerpot hat. I replied to each of these nuggets of information with a disaffected “oh, cool” and moved on with my life. Who cares what that one-hit wonder band did? So much for me being open-minded about music.

    Even though I wrote them off as a novelty band for “Whip It,” at least I didn’t think that song was some kind of celebration of a certain kind of old-fashioned roughneck masculinity. That’s the apparent takeaway many people had from that song’s video on MTV. The “you’ve got the wrong idea” refrain comes up a lot during the documentary. (Just last month the Memories feature on my computer’s Photos app soundtracked a nice montage of my kid’s earliest years to “Beautiful World,” which is such a dreadful misreading of that song that I had to laugh.) They position themselves as, if not intellectuals or nerds, then people who know more than the average folks. Making a brand (or a band!) out of the idea of being “the smartest guys in the room” is dangerous territory. Worse still, positioning yourselves as the ones who decry the de-evolution of humanity means that you must have something special about yourself that makes you able to make that pronouncement, especially when you have a song titled “Mongoloid.” "Trust me, dude. We are the chosen ones and everyone else knows nothing..." (Or something like that.) The inherent disdain that comes along with thinking you’re so clever and above the fray of the general public’s tastes can result in a variety of outcomes. Thankfully, the members of DEVO are oddballs at heart and they channeled that disdain into a creative pursuit. The story of Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale meeting through mutual friends at Kent State bears this out. They were just weird guys that found each other moving in the same elliptical social orbits; they were not trying to start a band or “make it” or do anything like that.

    The fact that they were university educated is just one part of what made them outliers in the music scene at the time. They leaned into their braininess, but their weirdness seems to have had a stronger pull on their collective vision of social critique. What I’m trying to say is that if they were any good at being public intellectuals, then they would have become pundits (ugh) or authors of general interest subject area books or even professors. As one of my professors further down I-71 once said, “if academics could write, then they’d have been novelists.” Just the same, it seems from this documentary that the members of DEVO did not have the constitution for punditry or other forms of public intellectualism. That’s a good thing, mind you! We’d rather have the music.

    It’s clear they knew how to handle the limelight, if only from the many television appearances that are part of the documentary. They know how to play the media game. They’re media literate not because they are keeping up with the news (they were) but because they knew what was expected of bands on programs like American Bandstand or whatever. Dick Clark saying “Oh, now I know what kind of interview this is going to be” when they gave him an oblique response to a canned question is a perfect example of that. They were aware of their weirdness but it didn’t come off as a shtick; they are just how they are. They wanted you to feel as uncomfortable as they did about the whole spectacle.

    One thing I really appreciated about the documentary was the lack of typical talking head features throughout its runtime. Yes, band members and managers and people in the DEVO universe do appear with their name and credit at the bottom of the screen. But, there are no critics, journalists, fans, or contemporaries in the mix. I’d imagine there is no shortage of people who fall into those categories who could talk about DEVO for days. Instead, what you get is just the people central to the project. Others’ views, such as those of Dick Clark, are present in archival format as part of an existing broadcast or media moment. Just as they did during their career, they presented themselves in this documentary fully on their own terms. Oh, and the early live footage is beyond belief. There are people who saw DEVO at a bar after their shift at Goodyear or Firestone in 1976. They likely wanted to hear someone covering “More Than a Feeling” or “Afternoon Delight” and instead they got “Jocko Homo” and “Mongoloid” played by the guys who were dedicated and desperate about spreading the message of de-evolution regardless of what anyone else wanted to hear.

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