Cat Cafe Manager (Roost / Freedom, 2022)

    Of course I had to play a game that focuses on running a cat cafe. That’s a no-brainer. The gameplay is simple and the story doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. The writing can be funny at times, which goes a fairly long way in a game that can be quite repetitive. I can see playing it again to experiment more with the various style and decor options that are available for customizing your cafe. But first, cats!

    You start with the inheritance of some land in a small town where your grandmother once lived. She was a cat lover and you are in charge of creating a cafe that caters to cats and also humans as a way of honoring her memory. Also, a grimalkin appears in a cat shrine near town and asks you to help restore this sacred clearing to its former glory. There are four statues in the shrine and if you thought maybe each of these would correspond to an area of the cafe that you can improve, you would be correct. When you earn “delight” points for meeting your customers’ needs, you can improve your cafe’s furniture, staffing level, menu, or style and decor. You can switch freely between these branching skill paths at any time, which allows for a great deal of customization as you work to make your grandma proud.

    How you please your customers is simple: serve them the food or drink they want, talk to them, and allow them to play with certain cats. Each type of person has a different stereotyped personality and diet. The vagabonds enjoy water and sandwiches, the artists enjoy coffee and sweets, the punks like milkshakes and vegetables, the witches like tea and platters, the fisherfolk like cola and soups, and the tech bros like their fancy coffee drinks and complicated sandwiches. There’s more variety than that, but you get the point. Some cats appeal to these personalities more than others, so when the cats appear as strays by your front door, you can decide which ones to adopt.

    At first, you’ll only have enough money to acquire a sink and serve water to vagabonds, but as the days go by and word of mouth spreads, you will be able to get a variety of appliances and ingredients to attract a wider variety of customers. Somehow, there’s no need for a dish machine… I said money above, but it’s a variety of objects that you trade to shop-owners in town. Each store takes a different kind of currency and each type of customer rewards you with one of those currencies. Gold, gems, materials, fish, and timber rule everything around me.

    What it means for you as a proprietor is that you will have to direct your attention to punks if you want to expand the physical footprint of your cafe because they are the ones who pay in construction materials. Want to improve your menu? Better advertise to the witches who will pay you in gems that you can pay to the fisherman who runs the dry goods store so you have the recipes and ingredients you’ll need. There’s a constant process of seeking to balance the needs of the different customer types with your overall goals for your cafe. There were definitely times when I stopped advertising to some of my clientele because I didn’t need any more of their form of payment. I needed more recipes and more furniture, so it was all witches and tech bros for a good while in the mid-game.

    You’ll be chasing the feeling of stasis every few days when it seems like you’ve struck equilibrium between the size of your cafe, the customers who arrive, the cats you have, the food you offer, and the workers you manage. In this way, the game has a compelling cycle. The game-days fly by quickly and any feeling of letting down your customers will soon pass. Each day, you can see your customers’ satisfaction levels, conveyed by a smiley face. You’ll also get a letter grade ranking based on what I am assuming is an average of their overall satisfaction.

    If this process all sounds rather faceless and plain, then you need to consider that the larger point of the game is that you can adopt cats. I mean it’s right there in the title, so I don’t want to belabor it. You can eventually have up to nine different cats in your cafe at once. You may also have had others pass through on their way to a forever home out in the community. I think I fostered close to 15 cats in my time with the game. As mentioned previously, each cat has its own traits and skills (playfulness, bladder control, messiness, etc.) that will make it a good fit (or not) for what you are trying to achieve in your cafe. Late in the game, you will get certain lures to place in the strays’ food bowl that will attract special cats with unique attributes. I had a hard time deciding whether to keep these clearly beneficial bonus cats or part with the first few cats I’d adopted (and named after some of the actual cats in my life).

    Unfortunately, these cats cannot talk to you. Only the grimalkin speaks, and only at specified points in the narrative. Otherwise, you can see how the story of the small town (and your cafe’s role in it) plays out by interacting with a few regulars. There are five specific visitors who are special enough to get a name and an avatar. As you get to know Bonner and Arwel and Mateo and Carla-lala and Finley, you will see how they may already have existing relationships that you are joining. Some of the fun in the writing shows up here. You get to choose how to support Finley in her music career and how to advise Bonner in a conflict (based on a simple misunderstanding) with his husband. Finley has a great line in comparing music to sauce that goes on the rice that is your brain. Music is amazing in that way, and it’s nice to share that moment with Finley. Arwel has a brusque personality fitting his punk personality but can also quip Dad jokes with the best of them, such as when he asks, “Which smart-ass decided the word litter should refer both to the thing they poop in and their kids?” I laughed.

    I’ll be coming back to this game again for sure. I was so focused on foods in my original playthrough that I didn’t do a lot of intentional decorating. I am thinking of making different sections or rooms for each kind of customer, just to see how that goes. If there are any updates to the game, it would be nice to give your employees a place to sleep. You can purchase cat beds, litter boxes, and food bowls that your cats can use throughout the day and night. But, each night at 7:00 when the customers leave, your workers just stand around with vacant stares. They should be allowed to go home and rest! Or, if this is some kind of cult-like cat cafe where they spend the night at work after their shift, I will need to obtain beds for them. They can already make use of the food they prepare or the toilets I’ve installed. If the developer’s goal was to highlight the exploitation of restaurant work, then they certainly succeeded. Somehow I don’t think it was, and that nagging thought took me out of the pure joy of building a cute place for cats and humans to socialize each other.

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Das Lehrerzimmer [The Teachers’ Lounge] (İlker Çatak, if... Productions, 2023)

    Here we have a fascinating film about teachers, students, schools, learning, and the truth.

    When I started this project about teachers or teaching on the silver screen, I never wanted to cast judgments on a film for being closer to reality than another. That would be boring. I am mostly reacting to whatever elements of the film make me think about my experiences as a teacher and how the teacher appears as a full human being in the film. The shortsightedness of focusing on how closely the onscreen events adhere to my experiences would be most evident in a film such as Das Lehrerzimmer because of its German setting. Of course teaching in a different country would give rise to practices that I might not be familiar with. What a tedious analysis it would be if I just ran down the differences or departures from what I expected based on U.S. schooling. Hell, that wouldn’t even be analysis but cataloging. Boring either way.

    Thankfully for both of us, this film addresses issues beyond education through the use of a school setting. The publisher’s description on the back of the box would have you think the film is about an idealistic, young teacher trying to find the culprit of a recent theft in her classroom. That’s only the beginning of the plot. There is a much bigger meditation here on what it means to reason from incomplete information. We’re first exposed to that idea in the daily warm-up that Frau Nowak (played by Leonie Benesch) gives to her students. She’s asking them to prove that 0.333… + 0.333… + 0.333… is equal to 1. One student points out that the solution is something like 0.999… and thus it never becomes 1. Another student disagrees by offering that 0.333… is equal to ⅓, so three of that number is equal to 1.

    The question Frau Nowak asks her class after these competing perspectives clash on the chalkboard is key: Is this a proof or an assumption? The class doesn’t have the time to fully respond to that question. They seem confused by their teacher’s choice of terms, if not the math itself. I’ll note that I was confused about the age of the students at this point because this question seemed quite advanced for the apparent age of the students; we learn later that they are 11 or 12. This feeling of searching confusion continues through the rest of the film as the characters continue to contest what counts as evidence and the ethics of collecting it in the first place.

    See, it’s not just the initial theft in Carla Nowak’s classroom that is at issue. After the administration botches an investigation into the theft of one student’s cash, Carla gets the idea that maybe it’s one of her colleagues who has sticky fingers. There’s a communal pay-what-you-can jar near the coffee machine in the teachers’ lounge and she sees another teacher shaking some coins out of it. She suspects foul play, so she sets up her wallet to be plainly visible on the back of her chair when she steps out of the lounge. She has also set her work laptop’s camera to record its field of vision, including the chair. Although the camera records the distinctive sleeve of an arm that reaches into her purse, Carla did not obtain the consent of anyone to record in the lounge.

    The fallout from this (also) botched investigation contaminates relationships among the staff, especially when the nonconsensual nature of the recording becomes apparent. Carla had initially seemed to be a sympathetic victim, but now she seems to have entrapped another professional with her misguided scheme. Even though her evidence is clear about the thief’s identity, her method of obtaining it was unethical. This situation puts everyone in a difficult position, not the least of which is the child of the apparent thief who is also a student in Carla’s class. It’s not clear how to adequately resolve this issue as it escalates throughout the film.

    We eventually learn that not only is Carla in her first year in the school, but also she is from Poland. Her lack of experience and outsider status causes other teachers to reprimand her for not involving the faculty union in the first place. She was too ambitious with her investigation and too trusting of her own students, they think. This aspect of Carla’s character is compelling as well. How schools absorb new teachers (regardless of their age or experience) is a fraught process. Everyone comes with their own hang-ups and ideas about what school is and how to do it. An organization like a union or faculty committee can try to mold a semblance of coherence around a process that can be challenging to navigate, but it is hard to have adults agree on a common vision for something as complex as schooling.

    As with investigating a classroom theft, there is not always a simple approach to take. The delicate nature of interrogating children about their peers’ behavior can lead adults to lean into the power imbalance inherent in teaching. Sometimes adults might find it easier to create scapegoats or trust gut instincts when a more careful approach is needed. How to wrangle the truth in such situations is difficult and exposes the assumptions we all have about how the world should work from our vantage point. With Das Lehrerzimmer, İlker Çatak has done an excellent job of depicting the less-than-ideal circumstances we find ourselves in when negotiating proofs and assumptions in service of trying to reach the truth.

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Steve (Tim Mielants, Big Things Films, 2025)

    Why I chose to watch this movie on the first day of my spring break is a mystery to me, too. I have been asking colleagues and friends about movies that center teachers’ daily lives (as laborers and as people) and one of them suggested Steve. It’s got Cillian Murphy, she said. He’s the headmaster, she said. It’s about a reform school for boys in England, she said. The boys have behavioral and emotional problems, she said. The look on her face as she said these words communicated that it would not be an easy, gentle watch. It was not.

    I’d either misheard her or she did not say that the film is set in 1996. I had hoped a movie made in 2025 about teaching would have been set in that era, or at least one touched by the pandemic. Even so, its chaotic camerawork and pacing reflects plenty of what a teacher’s day is like, even if it doesn’t involve older adolescents who are in a boarding school setting. They do add a great deal of tension and excitement to the 24-hour period shown episodically in the film.

    There are glimpses of what these boys could be like if they were featured in the fuller narrative of a short series based on the same source material (the novel Shy by Max Porter). The half-dozen of them who get enough screen time to be named have established beefs with each other and society at large. They each have an understanding with Steve (no last name is given, so he’s never Mr. Surname) as a more knowledgeable other in their lives. They are sick of him and his go-to phrases and prompts for reassuring or disciplining them in turn. There’s a comfort revealed in these interactions that could have been interesting if it were fleshed out across multiple days or weeks of time. For the purposes of communicating the sturm und drang of the boys’ lives and their resonating effects on their teachers, a short burst is enough.

    Even so, there is still more going on in the day of the film that adds even more detail (i.e., stress) to the narrative. Our first view of Steve is from an interlaced video taken in the confessional format so familiar to documentaries and mockumentary sitcoms. The producers are trying to get him to speak about his job, yet his mind is elsewhere. Turns out there is a news crew at Stanton Wood that is creating a short segment on the school. Their program, Points West, runs as a packaged segment at the end of the nightly news. Initially, the camera people, producer, and presenter are trying to do their best to make an honest look at the school and the troubles its staff and students are facing. This does not remain the case, as they end up disregarding the requests from Steve and the other staffers to not film in certain areas or during certain times of day. They’re more of a nuisance than anything. Their presence helps break up he scenes and give more context for the boys and the staff; the confessional segments with “give me three words that describe you” or “what would 1996 you say to 1990 you?” prompts are interspersed between the classes and conflicts of the day in question.

    Because this is a single film and not a series, there’s never a grand reveal where the viewers or the characters see the completed Points West segment. It’s simply more background noise for all involved at Stanton Wood. It’s “just one more thing” that is contributing to Steve’s on-the-job chemical abuse. The same goes for the conversation the staff has with two people who appear to be the managers of the trust that owns the property where the school is located. Turns out they are selling the land, so the school will shut down in December 1996, which is a few short months away. The immediate effects on Steve and the other staffers are uniformly negative, but we are never sure how the boys might have reacted to this news. One gets the feeling that it is simply too heavy a burden for the adults to bear, so they need time to process that trauma before sharing the news with the students. Again, this is “just one more thing,” but it is the sort of all-encompassing “thing” that makes going through the motions of teaching children into a soul-draining exercise for reasons that have nothing to do with the children at all (see also teaching during the polycrisis). Urie Bronfenbrenner might have said that this property sale is an example of a change in the exo-system affecting the meso-system and micro-systems for those in this school.

    Steve is the title character, so he gets the most screen time, but his colleagues Amanda, Shola, Owen, and Jenny all play a role in each others’ lives. As expected, Tracey Ullman’s Amanda does the emotional labor for the staff during meetings, making sure that Steve is emotionally and physically regulated when they gather. As an aside, it seems like a blessing and a curse to have meetings that do not involve agenda items prepared in advance. There is a lot of planning that goes into making an effective meeting happen, but being so busy dealing with so many issues means there is not time to cobble together line items to discuss. Everyone is just in survival mode. Steve reveals this existential exasperation when he speaks voice memos into a personal voice recorder. He’s addressing himself in the third person and being quite hard on himself about all the things he has plans to do during the day. Anyone keeping track of all of these tasks will easily see that he falls short of his intentions, even as he takes the day as it comes.

    Those voice memos and his negotiation of how best to address each new eventuality as it unfolds during the day are both very effective in reflecting how day-to-day concerns can easily overwhelm the executive functioning abilities of teachers. Students, of course, are still beginning to develop executive functioning at this age, so having a more knowledgeable other be not the most helpful model of managing actions, emotions, and thoughts makes for a challenging learning environment. Sometimes surviving the day is all you can do. There’s an effective scene toward the end of the film where Steve returns home to his wife and daughters and his wife (she is not named) rhetorically asks him “Another tough one?” as he is covered in dried mud and has dead, exhausted eyes.

    Steve represents a telling case, if not a representative one. Most teachers are not dealing with all of the overlapping layers of stress and pressure that we see in the film. This seems to have been a particularly bad day for us to have seen Steve at work. Even if Bronfenbrenner’s layers of structure are not visible or made manifest all the time, they are nevertheless part of teachers’ and students’ lives. In the days, the moments, when we have to reckon with the existence of these structures, the compounding stress brought on by that awareness can be debilitating. Steve does an excellent job of making those structures visible and, in this particular case, apparently immutable.

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Election (Alexander Payne, MTV Productions, 1999)

    After considering the idea for a few years, I figured I’d execute it. This entry is part of what I hope will be a long-running series of reviews of movies that are set at schools and focus on teachers as characters instead of caricatures. The source of this idea is a comment from one of my high school teachers who referenced Election as a rare example of a movie that examines the humanity or complexity of a teacher’s inner life instead of reducing them to a mere punchline. If this introduction sounds familiar, it’s because I referenced it when writing about Teachers in late 2024.

    The difference between watching Teachers for the first time and watching Election for the first time is that the latter was just a movie I saw when I was in high school, while Teachers was an off-hand suggestion from a professor in my English Education graduate program. I came to Teachers with the intention of learning from it how not to conduct myself as an educator. For Election, I was just a dumb teenager looking for a funny movie.

    Now that I’ve watched it at least three times, and have spent most of my working life in schools or other settings related to K-12 education in the United States, I feel more informed about addressing how it depicts a teacher’s daily life.

    The beginning of the movie involves a repulsive comment from one of the teachers about the student he is sexually abusing. It’s said in an extreme close-up shot with each word enunciated sickeningly. This comment and the wider plot arc it is part of is meant to establish the importance of morals (or is it ethics?) in a one’s life. That teacher is fired after the the administration learns about his behavior. The rest of the film focuses on the student (Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon) running for student body president while a friend of the abuser (Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick) attempts to sabotage her campaign because he finds her persistent try-hard persona annoying.

    Look, I never said this kind of movie had to make teachers into exemplar human beings. I am not holding up either of the white male teachers (and yes most of the characters in the film are white) as models of pedagogical or personal renown. The actions of Flick’s abuser are reprehensible and both McAllister and the principal deal with them appropriately and swiftly, without much of any guilt over punishing a colleague they’ve been friendly with to that point. McAllister’s turn toward vindictiveness is a little harder to understand, which is why he is not a character that is a source of our sympathy. Surely, a more enlightened way of assisting a student in Flick’s position would be to support her emotionally, academically, and socially as she processes her trauma. Given that those elements are an afterthought, Election is a time capsule of how trivially society treated child sexual abuse in the ‘90s. One would think a similar movie set in 2026 would be more invested in exploring Flick’s perspective instead of focusing on the various ways McAllister destroys his life.

    As this movie is about McAllister as much as it is Flick, his misdeeds are the focus of most of our time. We see Flick at home with her mother a few times, but all we get of her inner life is that she appears to be as dedicated to scholastic greatness as McAllister suspects. Her father is dead and she wants to achieve all that she can in high school and beyond. McAllister, positioned as the more reasonable or relatable teacher, in contrast to Flick’s abuser, is a little more entertaining to watch unravel. He’s unable to conceive a child with his wife, Diane (played by Molly Hagan) and starts to lust after his former colleague’s recently divorced wife (Linda Novotny, played by Delaney Driscoll). These desires spiral out of control in a darkly comic fashion, complete with a swollen eye from a bee sting that helps McAllister to appear all the more pathetic. When he returns home after the next school day, Diane and Linda are there on the couch waiting for him to realize the gravity of the mistake he made. He’s left to spend the night alone at the hotel where he’d once planned an afternoon tryst with Linda before his misdeeds caught up with him.

    The framing of McAllister as the protagonist is delightful when his world collapses. He’s so self-centered at undermining Flick that he doesn’t see how all the threads of his life are connected. Teachers learn that their capacity for with-it-ness (basically executive functioning) is an important part of their success in the classroom. We see very little of McAllister’s actual teaching, so it’s not possible to give a fair assessment of his with-it-ness in the classroom. However, it is very clear that he is unaware of how other people may have actions or agency that conflict with his own. The janitor who sees him miss the trash can when throwing away an old box of Chinese food ends up being his undoing. He bluntly suggests that Linda and he get a hotel room, so when she later plays along with the offer, he takes it at face value. He sees his colleague destroy his career and a child’s life through sexual violence but thinks he’s not going to have the same problem with his own schemes. It may not be the point of film, but a message that comes through loud and clear is that McAllister is oblivious to the lives and intentions of everyone else he meets. He gets his deserved consequences (job loss, divorce, relocation), but he might never realize he is the one that caused all of those problems. One hopes that actual teachers are not so clueless and careless about their conduct in the real world. We at least have one more example we can point to of what we don’t want to be like.

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Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Max Ward, Duke University Press, 2019)

    Before I get to a review of Max Ward's book Thought Crime, I thought it would make sense to offer a prologue in the form of a reflection I wrote about one of his bands (SCHOLASTIC DETH) for additional context. Both that write-up and the subesequent review are lightly edited versions of what originally appeared on facing pages of issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.

X X X

    Although I never really got into a lot of the bandana thrash revival bands aside from TEAR IT UP (they count?) or LIFE’S HALT (they count), I really fell hard for SCHOLASTIC DETH when I first heard about them. They were a band that sang about being a nerd and I was in my first year of college. How could I not love them? I recognized art on the cover of “Shackle Me Not” from my older brother’s skate tape collection. I think it was H-Street’s Hokus Pokus video? I mostly remember the part of that video where the kid dips his head in the gnarly sludge bucket for money. Seeing something like that as a child leaves an impression.

    SCHOLASTIC DETH has also left an impression on me. They’re a rare band that was active while I was involved in the scene that I’ve never seen yet still listen to or think about regularly. That first part is the crucial distinction. I find it hard to hold on to records of HC bands I could have seen, but didn’t, because there’s no memory to attach to their music. For all other genres or for HC from before I was involved in the scene, the same metric doesn’t apply. So, there’s something special about this band. Beyond thinking about them, I’ve also held on to their three 7”s and CD discography for the past 20 or so years. I had a few of the comps they were on, but when weighing the storage volume of one CD versus a few records with only a couple good songs on them it’s clear that the compact part of CD makes a strong argument. I see they have an LP version of the discography out now and I have to say it’s not appealing to me at all. First of all, a CD discography is such a wonderful collection when there are short songs. A 39-song LP just seems silly, but a 50-song CD makes perfect sense. I can’t really say why. The 11 songs exclusive to the CD are the KZSU radio set. That’s Stanford’s radio station, in case you needed any more proof of these dudes’ nerd-dom. The title of the CD version is “Final Examiner,” which references SYSTEMATIC DEATH. They rip off the “Final Insider” art on the CD tray as well. The LP discography is “Book Attack,” which is OK, but doesn’t reflect anything more than a title of one of their songs. There’s also a video available on the CD that I don’t think is even usable with modern video players. Most of all, the CD discography is worth having because of the layout. A band about books wants you to have a modified version of all its releases on a single piece of plastic… what else is a CD discography but Cliff’s Notes for a band? Very clever, but I would expect nothing else from a band whose members studied for the GRE during their final recording session. The style of the Cliff’s Notes isn’t just the cover, either. They nailed the overall vibe of it the whole way through the packaging. My copy has been beaten up enough that its case is cracked and I’ve taped it back together, which is something I can’t say for any other broken CD case I’ve dealt with over the years. So, like I said, there’s something special about this music.

    Part of what makes them so accessible is their liner notes. One of the notes that caught my attention back then was Max’s comment in regard to “Book Attack” that he spent more on books than records in the past year: “This past year was the first time that I spent more money on books than records. My bookshelves are bursting at the seams with books that I have yet to read, or ones that I'm keeping on the shelf for reference purposes. There is not enough time in the day for me to get as much reading in as I want. And I still go to the independent bookstores to browse… I’m like a kid in a toy store. One day I'll win the lottery so I can sit and read books at a rate that I want to. And I'll give some of my winnings to Chris and Josh so they can write more songs with guitar solos.” This was years before tsundoku as a practice came to be discussed widely in various hifalutin papers, magazines, and journals. They were ahead of their time in so many ways. The practice of buying records (or books) is a different practice from listening to records (or reading books), and they wrote a couple songs about this all-too-human foible.

    The music is extremely acceptable—it’s fast without turning into a blur. Some songs have moshable moments. The part of the sonic blur that is most useful for their longevity is Max’s vocals. They’re the kid-on-helium style of high-spirited cheer that makes the vocalist sound eternally youthful. I also love the complete saturation of the recording sessions with feedback—the guitar squeals leading into each song give the sense that these songs were all recorded in six-or-seven song bursts in whatever studio they used. The predetermined endpoint for the band due to their academic commitments gave them a sense of urgency that still resonates and reverberates two decades later.

    A casual survey of music created since they broke up in 2002 makes it clear that a new movement of punk bands that are pro-reading hasn’t caught on. Basically, straight edge but for books. No TV, No social media, No venture capitalists. Something like that. They articulated a pro-literacy philosophy as clearly as MINOR THREAT did with a pro-sobriety philosophy, yet they didn’t have the lasting impact of straight edge. MINOR THREAT had good marketing going on, you know what I mean? Maybe if SCHOLASTIC DETH could have toured more extensively. In an alternate reality, Ward et al. could have flexed 625 to focus on a bookstore core movement that disdained screen time, social media, dot-com boomers, and Silicon Valley in general in favor of printed matter, academic achievement, and coffee. They had songs about the effect of the dot-com bust on their skate habits and work choices… the cusp of a social movement in response to Bush II’s bungling, belligerent idiocracy is right there, but something was missing. These guys should have been huge… They even had a member break up the band because he got accepted at Northwestern—just like MINOR THREAT. They have a solid discography CD—just like MINOR THREAT. (They are not as good as MINOR THREAT.) If there are any bands trying to ape their sound and style (mostly the bookish part) in the same way youth crew and OC HC bands did in the late ‘80s with MINOR THREAT, you need to let me know.

X X X

    It’s great that a professor at Middlebury closes the Acknowledgments section of his book published by Duke University Press with the phrase “up the punks.” Could this have been true 20 years ago? Probably not. I bought this book specifically to write this review.

    This book chiefly concerns the Japanese government’s efforts in the years between the first two World Wars to re-educate members of the Japanese Communist Party into citizens full of national spirit. As I am not conversant with Japanese history in any kind of way, I was mostly out of my depth with this book. It winds down as the beginning of WWII approaches, so Ward describes how the Japanese government was learning how to police members of its society who were out of line. Where did they learn this but through classes taught by U.S. police officers.

    It does give a lot to think about with regard to nationalism and what it means to believe in a country. Is a country’s identity forged by thousands of years of history? If so, what does it mean when that identity has to change? (Can it?) Is a country’s identity formed through the creation of documents outlining its rules, policies, and procedures? If so, what does it mean when those documents have to change? (Who decides?) Finishing it as I did on the day the US Supreme Court heard a case about the independent state legislature theory, these questions seem quite relevant. 

    Throughout the book, Ward traces the development of a law that is meant to rehabilitate riff raff into Imperial Japanese Subjects. The concepts in the text that may be relevant to people living in the US are how ideas about a national identity are taken up by governments and put into process through laws and the other apparatuses of the state that act upon the people living in those nations. What it means to be Japanese and what it means to be American are informed by these things and I think about them every time I think about why children in the United States need to recite the pledge at the start of a school day.

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Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics (Bill Peel, Repeater, 2023)

    Black metal and Communism aren’t usually spoken of in the same breath. For those who know anything about black metal, it’s probably the violence and the anti-Christian themes that stand out the most. The average person likely doesn’t have much familiarity with blast beats, raspy vocals, and tremolo picking. Just the same, what people (at least in the U.S.) might know about Communism is limited to caricatures of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea.

    Peel’s book might seem at first glance to be about a counternarrative for black metal. Those who know a little more of the genre are aware that some of its most influential groups have connections to right-wing or openly fascist politics. They are known as National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) for short. Peel addresses this aspect of the scene early on in the text, explaining the Asgardsrei festival in Ukraine as an annual meeting of current black metal bands with explicit white supremacist messages (p. 3). Shortly thereafter, he clarifies that this book is not meant to be a catalog of bands that are socialist, feminist, antiracist, or otherwise inclusive of gender and sexual identities and orientation. That’s because a book about the “Red and Anarchist Black Metal (RABM)” scene “would be a very short book” (p. 8). Even though the anarchists might be outnumber the Nazis, there’s still not enough of them to document in a book-length rundown. (For the record, some of the RABM bands Peel cites are TRESPASSER, ISKRA, and SKAGOS.)

    Instead, Peel focuses on the elements of black metal as a genre that might provide affordances for socialists to consider including in their worldview. The five chapters cover the ideas of distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy. Each includes an explanation of the term as it relates to black metal, certain bands or songs or movements in the genre that exemplify the term, and discussion of ways socialists might interpret these same ideas for their own ends. In a sense, a reader does not need to have any familiarity with the music of the scenes Peel covers. A more engaged stance on this book would leave a reader with ideas of how to rethink their engagement with socialist politics. If you wanted to learn more about RABM bands, you’ll be let down; however, you might learn a little more about Deleuze & Guattari, Nietzsche, and Marx as you read.

    The chapter on decay was interesting in that it reframed the usual way that black metal bands look at decay. They see it as a form of death or a long for a return to a “supposedly ancient, traditional moment” (p. 69). In this way, the yearning for decay is a desire for the world as it is to be undone. To accelerate the downfall of society so that we can live more simply once more. You know, RETVRN type shit. That’s gross (culturally). What’s also gross (well, also, culturally, but in a different sense) is that decaying fungi can be a source of new life, mutation (p. 64). The idea of flourishing. The possibility of life’s construction.

    Intriguing ideas abound in the chapter on coldness. A cursory thought about this topic as it relates to black metal might call to mind the wintry climate of Norway, or Scandinavia in general. It might also call to mind the idea of growing “cold inside” or dead to the world in some way. To Peel’s credit, he expands his analysis beyond such simplicity. Because this is a book ostensibly about Communism, the importance of heat power to the Industrial Revolution comprises a great deal of this chapter. In his retelling, the success of coal-derived power was not due to its superior output. Rather, the old-fashioned water mills were more than capable of producing the power needed for most uses. The catch is that its hard to monetize the water flowing in a river because it is part of the commons. The “sluice gates and reservoirs” that could be built to manage that flow did not turn into profitable ventures because it was too difficult to determine whether it was better to spend money on setting up the gate or operating it (p. 97). So, coal power won the day because it reflected the individualist ethos necessary for capital accumulation. Dig the coal out of the ground and it's yours. Power your own steam engine with the coal and you can do what you want with the profits and the products.

    What does that mean for black metal, though?

    The coldness of the genre is reflected in the inability to do work or the disinterest in the world at large. Rather that combusting with kinetic energy like thrash metal or speed metal, black metal makes a point of displaying its power, its “puissance,” through inaction or stillness or coldness (p. 123). If still waters run deep, then imagine the everflowing stream frozen. There is a lot of power there (as distinct from energy) but it lies still. Black metal band members are “dominating capitalism by freezing its flows. They work by remaining useless, non-productive, insufficiently profitable. We should ask ourselves what has been gained through our supposedly productive activism, and if we shouldn’t join black metal instead, by turning towards non-productivity” (p. 123). Allowing ourselves to lay fallow and become useless might lead to new growth in our decay that helps to bring a new world into being.

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The KNIFE “Heartbeats” (Rabid, 2002)

    Do you have a favorite song? Do you remember the first time you heard it? Does it count if it wasn’t immediately obvious to you that it would be your favorite song? Does it make sense to have a “favorite” “song” at all? Don’t your opinions and tastes and interests change over time like your palate, eyesight, and flexibility? Isn’t it kinda cringe to think that you have to keep holding a torch for a song just because it was super important to you at one point in your life? Don’t you ever grow up? Isn’t this just a Boomerified nostalgia trap? How late is too late to acquire a “new” favorite song? Do you have to know every fact about a song to make it your favorite?

    One nice thing about living before smartphones and internet connections could be taken for granted was the ability to develop patience. I am sure people can still boost that stat organically, but now there are so many ways to cut short the process of knowing and waiting. It seems quaint now to think that I used to keep scrap paper and a pen in my car so I could write down small parts of lyrics to songs that I heard on the radio so I could search them up later online. Missing the DJ’s rundown of what you’re about to hear or had just heard is as torturous as any ancient curse.

    A different kind of curse is the roommate who will not stop playing the same goddamned song over and over and over again. It gets so bad that you have to kick his door down to tell him to stop because that song is good but he doesn’t need to play it for two days straight.

    You’ll forget about this incident and the song itself for almost a year. Then, as you dine alone, you’ll hear its last few measures while you are finding your seat. There are no lyrics you can make out but you know that synth part like it’s your own heartbeat. You spend the rest of the night wondering whether that was a song you heard as a child that you’ve heard again for the first time in decades or maybe just a song you heard the other day. It is of its time and ahead of its time at the same time.

    You try to tell your friends about it and ask around about that one song you heard that you can’t hum or sing or mumble any part of because it’s like trying to make oxygen visible. You resign yourself to the fate that you’ll remember it eventually and can take someone by the shoulders and shake them back and forth while yelling, “What song is this? It’s so good!”

    Months later, you’ll be working an office job that has a building-wide intranet where other nerds can share the MP3s they have added to their work computers. You can only seed five listeners at a time, so if you have a cool music library, others need to call dibs on it fast or they will be unable to share your bounty. Most users have created screen names, but others keep the generic First Name Last Name’s Library as their identity. You can learn a lot about a person through what they’re willing to share of their music collection publicly. You’ll get a warning when you are signing off for the day that will let you know you are cutting someone off if you close your connection while a user is still active. We’ve all been on the other side of that disconnection. Given that these files are from various sources, you’ll get the usual improperly tagged metadata during your searches. You would never be so careless with your own files. That annoyance won’t stop you from checking out “Track 01” by The KNIFE on a colleague’s account one morning in the summer.

    Your world will slow down, invert, zoom in, and dazzle with color as your neurons pulse information from axons to dendrites. Before you can form a conscious thought, your cells, your veins, your soul, your self realizes that this is the song. At long last, you have an artist name and an album name. Your life is never again the same. You spend the rest of the morning listening to that song on repeat and then place an order for the CD at the local music shop down the street from your apartment.

    That night is the usual night of the week where you play pick-up basketball on public courts with a group of dudes who are there more for the spirit of youth and the social aspects of the team sport than cut-throat competitiveness. Usually, you won’t want to “run full” with other groups of players because you’re content to play half-court games of two-on-two or three-on-three with your social circle. Sometimes, the nights are so full of energy that you can’t just claim your own part of the court for your good vibes only and you do have to play against these folks.

    They choose you first because you’re the tallest one there, even though if they’d watched you play for the past 15 minutes, they would know better. Your knees are losing their spring even though you’re hardly past 24. The game starts and you are facing off against your own friends and also a couple of dudes who might have been four-year varsity starters in high school. The vibe usually sucks.

    Tonight, though, you have Karin Dreijer’s vocals and Olof Dreijer’s synths in your mind and in your heart and you are unstoppable. You have never played basketball this well in your life. You aren’t just making shots, you’re causing turnovers, stealing passes, and dishing assists. It’s like the game is in slo-mo but you are at regular speed. This is all thanks to the power of music. A song you’ve heard dozens of times already and will hear hundreds of times in the years to come. At the end of the night, it’s not pure dominance that reigns over the court. It’s a gentle, but fierce feeling of peace as you get the twinge of realization that you are a more complete human being only because of music and the ways it connects you to other people.

    You connect with music through files over the intranet or through plastic and vinyl at shops or under hoops after games. You realize “Heartbeats” isn’t just a song; it’s a symbol of how each of us can become a better person than we are through patiently waiting through new experiences and trials that life shows us. Then, at the perfect time, as regular as a heartbeat, a song will come into your life and reveal this truth to you once again.

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Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile (Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaon Naparstek; Thesis; 2025)

    I know from having worked in publishing that the choice of cover art or design is not always up to the authors. Sometimes what is marketable is in conflict with an author’s artistic vision or idea of what might look best. In the case of Life After Cars, I don’t know how Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek feel about Joel Holland’s illustration and design choices for the book’s cover, but I love it. Just like Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, the image riffs on a road sign. In Grabar’s case, the red-and-white cover resembles a No Parking sign on a city street in the United States. For Life After Cars, the choice of yellow as a framing color with black text on a white background recalls a road sign announcing the speed limit near a school or a pedestrian crossing up ahead. The real beauty of this design choice and how it relates to the book’s argument is the art within the sign’s image. There’s a four-way traffic signal that is overgrown with vines and flowers. Had you never seen such an object before, you might think it was intentionally designed to be a place for flowers to grow.

    Turning over to the back cover, there’s a white sedan that has been completely overtaken with flowers and stems. One of the branching parts of this overgrowth reveals a flower that has grown through an orange traffic cone. This image isn’t accidental. In the final chapter of the third part of the book, there’s a section on street-level DIY methods for making streets safer for people who are biking or walking. Tactical urbanism, as the authors deem it, involves taking existing traffic cones and putting flowers in them (or just using small flowerpots from a garden store) to visually mark a bike lane that has only paint separating it from the rushing motor vehicles that are next to it. A related version of that approach involves covering the wooden handle of plungers with electrical tape and leaving them suction-side down in the street. As jarring as that image is, it wouldn’t have made for the prettiest image on the inside back flap of the dust jacket.

    Between the flaps, there is much to enjoy and even more to lament about the presence of cars in our lives. The authors hail from New York City, but they spend plenty of pages discussing the problems cars cause for people all over the world. It’s not just a world city problem, either. Car pollution and production affects all of us quite negatively. Even electric cars or hybrids aren’t the solution either. These cars are still cars at the end of the day, so all of the attendant problems they pose are still relevant. “No one who was ever hit by the driver of an electric car thought to themselves, ‘Sure, I’m severely injured, but at least the driver cares about climate change.’” (p. 227). I mean, there might be someone out there but you get the point. Cars cause more problems than are solved by the electrification of all gas guzzlers. Traffic still happens; crashes are abundant.

    I use crash here purposefully, as do the authors. The euphemism of a “traffic accident” instead of a “car crash” removes the violence of the action and also makes it seem like it’s just one of those things that happens, like spilled milk. Nothing worth getting upset about. Happens all the time. The intent of using crash rather than accident is to illuminate the decisions that went into making the crash happen, whether “the driver did something wrong, or that better road design might have prevented tragedy, or that multiple factors—all of which could be addressed—stacked up to contribute to the outcome” (p. 13). It doesn’t have to be this way and we can do something about it. The smallest thing you can do is to change the way you talk about these violent collisions of metal, plastic, and flesh. A crash has a cause, an accident does not.

    In between this language shift and the DIY approach of tactical urbanism comes the development of laws, policies, and procedures for making the world safer for everyone. There are stories of Vision Zero campaigns, the Dutch Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murder) movement, and the creation of bike buses (community chaperoned packs of kids going to school on their bicycles) that all give a strong sense of hopefulness for the future in a world after cars.

    To shake that sense of what Ian Walker calls motonormativity, which is the idea that driving has completely overtaken our moral view of the world (p. 124), it might help to think back to how societies received the integration of cars over one hundred years ago. The book begins with a tale of life before cars. It stars Superman! In Action Comics #6, he decries the “homicidal drivers” who are causing mass death in Metropolis. He even tells an automotive executive that the choice to chase “profits at the cost of human lives” is socially undesirable (p. 4). I’m as sick of seeing ads for superhero movies as anyone but this element of Superman’s origin story could seriously use a reboot or reappraisal. I suppose that’s as likely to happen as a Super Bowl commercial that exalts the importance of taking the bus or walking to a destination, which the authors discuss in a section on bikelash, the eternal complaint of many drivers when they are faced with the prospect of integrating a few bike lanes into local streets or roads (p. 43). We are so used to giving pride of literal place to motor vehicles that even the suggestion that there are alternatives is beyond the comprehension of many drivers.

    My first knowledge of this book happened during my commute while I was listening to an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us that featured Goodyear and Gordon. One of the critiques they advanced in that appearance was that cars make drivers adversarial. Everyone is going to the same place or in the same general direction, so driving becomes a competition for scarce resources. As I merged with the car next to me when the road went from three lanes to two, I realized the wisdom of their words. Commuting in a car is miserable. Bringing that misery into a place of work or into the home pollutes the remainder of the day. I wanted to avoid that stress, so I looked up bus routes from home to work. I can drive to work in 25-30 minutes, but it would take at least two hours to get there via bus, and that includes over an hour of walking. It would also involve leaving my house before 5:00 A.M. instead of just after 7:00 A.M. That’s untenable. It is one more reason that life after cars will be better for us all. Instead of thousands of people taking their “$75,000 living room” (p. 90) from point A to point B and back each day, we could have expanded existing transit systems to make the motonormative era as baffling as the era of smoking on airplanes and in restaurants.

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None of This Rocks: A Memoir (Joe Trohman, Hachette, 2022)

    The last time I saw Joe Trohman in person was at the Fireside Bowl at a THROWDOWN / BLEEDING THROUGH / NO WARNING show in December 2001 when he gave me the CDR of the new band he was doing with Pete Wentz. He said they made the name three words so Matt Groening wouldn’t sue them. In the two or three years prior to that, we spent a lot of time hanging out at shows, listening to music, and playing video games. He was one of only a few friends at my school who were straight edge and actively involved in a scene beyond our suburbs. We had bonded so much that my mom felt the need to intervene with a passive aggressive note. 

[image removed to save myself from embarrassment.]

    I wish I had other mementoes from our friendship. Given that cameras were yet to become ubiquitous, so we don’t have random candid photos, and that we lived in the same area, so we didn’t exchange letters, there’s not much else to show from our time together. Even his signature in my yearbook was of the nickname some of the older Chicago dudes gave him instead of his given name.

[image removed to preserve some mystique.]

    We were only one grade level apart, but he was chronologically more than a year younger than me. This age gap makes no difference these days, but reading his account of his pre-FALL OUT BOY days in this book makes me scratch my head at times. Was he really only 15 when he scabbed for ARMA ANGELUS? He would have been 15 until September 2000, so the story of Pete Wentz convincing Joe’s mom to let him go on that tour would have happened in March of 2000. This was a time when we were hanging out pretty frequently and I don’t remember him ever talking about it, so I don’t know what to think about the credibility of this anecdote. It seems a little more likely that he would have scabbed for them in the summer of 2001 on the tour with 7 ANGELS 7 PLAGUES, when he would have been 16 and starting his senior year in the fall. In the end, the accuracy of this detail has zero impact on his subsequent musical success and on my life in general, but engaging in the performance of being correct after the fact in this review sure made me feel good for about five minutes.

    I selfishly read the book for the possibility that my name or a vague recollection of an older, taller friend would grace the page. It was not to be. I supposed that makes me one of the vapid and faceless moonlighters from high school who were not long for the scene, as he tells it. He does recall the kids who were a grade above me treating him with kindness before brutally telling him that not one of them actually liked him as a friend. Which one of these guys do you think best matches his description of being the “portly, pig-nosed, Buzz McCallister look-alike” who delivered that line?

[images removed for privacy and the presumption of innocence.]

    It was hard to read that part, given that I remember how he looked up to those guys and how they seemed to welcome him just the same. That ease with making friends seemed to have served him well with connecting with the scene elders in the city as he was putting together the idea for FALL OUT BOY. He was the one who introduced himself to me at the RACE TRAITOR / BURN IT DOWN / GOOD CLEAN FUN / BROTHER’S KEEPER / The JUDAS FACTOR show on March 6, 1999 at the Fireside. (Let me know if you have the flyer for this show.)

    Later that year, he was doing an online zine called A Helping Hand and he interviewed CLUBBER LANG and FIGURE FOUR over email. I was supposed to help with the zine in some way by doing show reviews but I never did. I think he gave me the nickname of the Angry Green Giant and used a picture of Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z as my avatar. He also put his own spin on Adele Collins’ mainstay question from I Stand Alone by asking both bands “When was the last time you made someone cry?” If you’re not familiar, all of the interviews in ISA featured the questions “When was the last time you cried?” and “Pick a scar and tell a story about it.” Steve Wiltse memorably used them in his interview with The A-TEAM in Town of Hardcore #6. In light of the way he was so clearly driven to do more than fuck around in the suburbs and go off to college, it makes sense that he wouldn’t include these experiences in his memoir. They probably don’t register because they were just part of him finding his way.

    As for the content related to the band that made him famous, the book is informative without being boring. Some of the writing probably sounds better in an audiobook or stand-up performance because the jokes don’t quite land in print. The reference to a bat mitzvah being a good deed involving purchasing his father one of Hank Aaron’s bats is indeed hilarious (i.e., it's a mitzvah related to a bat, not a bat mitzvah in the sense of a Jewish girl reaching religious maturity). The fact that his mom later gave the bat to a contractor who was admiring it while working on their house tells you a lot about how she navigated the world and caused problems for their family.

    Rock memoirs aren’t a genre I read extensively, but it is really interesting to hear him explain how dissatisfied he was with the band’s last two albums because they featured so little in the way of guitars. That and his candid discussion of struggles with chemical dependency are honest without being gratuitously depraved. As he says in the title, none of this experience rocks. He has not always enjoyed the road to fame but it seems like he has at least found some kind of comfort in it.

(This is a lightly edited version of a review that originally appeared in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.)

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Unpacking (Witch Beam / Humble Bundle, 2021)

    Like many undergraduates in training to become a teacher, I read and reread and discussed and wrote about Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” It was a pivotal text in my cohort of mostly white students who aspired to be secondary English teachers. A few years and a master’s degree later, I thought I knew better than my past self and anyone who would bring it up as a relevant critique of the world as it was then. We had a Black president at the time! Hadn’t a lot changed in the U.S. with regard to race relations by 2009? I was colorblind, so everyone else must have been, too… right?

    Man, being in your mid-twenties and living in your own apartment for the first time leads to some pretty foolish conclusions. As the saying goes, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I even went so far as to proclaim the surely-we-have-moved-on argument on a message board for the local punk scene. I should have been ostracized immediately. We are all for the better that I have grown and matured since then. I have as much to pack as almost anyone—just about every privilege imaginable.

XXX

    When our family bought our OLED Switch, my kid was unfamiliar with playing console games, but just the right age to be interested in them. I wanted to share the joy that games could bring, so I searched up lists of games that would be good for a young-ish child to play on the Switch. Literacy wasn’t an obstacle, but reaction time and challenge were. One of the lists I’d found mentioned the recently released Unpacking by Witch Beam as an option. The description of a “zen puzzle game” seemed like it would work for me even if it didn’t for my intended audience. There was no reason for me to have had any concern, though, as the controls are intuitive, the pace is chill, the music delightful, and the sound design exquisite. It’s a game with a low barrier to entry and a high level of polish.

    Really, what could be easier than opening boxes and putting away one’s personal effects? There’s very little that needs to be explained in the game itself. The low amount of text is not just a positive aspect of the game’s accessibility, it allows for the narrative to proceed through what I’ve often heard called environmental storytelling. That is, when the programmer doesn’t use dialogue, voiceover, or vignettes to explain that “hey, something important has happened here,” or “this cause has many effects.” In a game where the action is the repetitively calming process of opening a box, assessing its contents, and placing them in a logical location, the storytelling happens through the objects themselves and the nature of the rooms and buildings the character occupies. Which objects will appear throughout the eight levels (representing 21 years of time) you spend unpacking? What does it mean if certain objects obtain wear-and-tear befitting their use? Why do certain objects get pride of place in some homes but not others? What does your character do for a living? What are her interests outside of work? Who is important to her? What happens if you try to put the toaster in the empty sink (just-for-a-second-I-swear-I’ll-put-it-somewhere-else-it’s-just-so-cramped-in-here)?

    You’ll have time to ponder these questions as you meditatively open each box, select each item, and consider its placement. Although you begin in your childhood bedroom, you’ll soon have a larger place to inhabit, with roommates or significant others sharing the space. Most of the time, your packing job is logical: the boxes that appear in the bathroom mostly have toiletries. Not always. There will be times that you wonder why a book or a kitchen utensil is in with the soap and shampoo. Sometimes, the objects are difficult to identify. These moments are where the game can be most enjoyable. When I was faced with an unknown object, I would place it on different surfaces and listen closely to the sound it made. That’s right—the foley, the sound design in this game is beyond belief. A pair of nail clippers will make different sounds depending on whether you place them on the bathroom sink, the medicine cabinet, the bathmat, a couch, the stove, or the kitchen cabinet. These subtle sound clues are often enough to give a hint of the true identity of the object you’re placing. If not, then the game indicates when you’ve misplaced an item, but only when you have unpacked all of the boxes in the level. There are definitely some objects I still can’t identify, but I know to place them in the kitchen or the living room whenever they appear in my virtual hands.

    In addition to playing as a woman whose minoritized faith and sexuality are revealed further into the game, Unpacking also stands against common video game features such as high scores, leveling up, and time trials. Attempting to speedrun this game would defeat its purpose entirely. (There are achievements to unlock but they aren’t the main point of the game; they’re fun little extras.) Carly Kocurek refers to these kinds of accomplishments as demonstrations of technomasculinity. In this construct, the only kind of gamer is young, intelligent, and white. Any mistakes a person like this makes are just forgivable whoopsies! These are the kind of people that are expected, allowed, to fail upward endlessly.

    Although Unpacking has an end state, there is no way to dominate, conquer, or defeat it. You are tying together the threads of various narratives over time. In fact, there is arguably a point where a relationship with a technomasculine boyfriend (hello, XBOX) fails because he is too insecure for the character to display her college diploma on the wall and so she has to hide it under her bed. That’s as close as you’ll get to a final boss. All of it is said without words, but through clues and cues that imply something about the life the character is unpacking.

XXX

    I wonder. Would someone who had access to the packing lists and boxes that I have used over the past 21 years also be able to trace the development that I think I’ve made in that time? Would they see my change from a wide-eyed undergrad who is eager to learn about and explore his privilege before needlessly hardening against the world in an attempt at maturity a few years later? When that shell of a second, stunted adolescence cracked, would they see a different person in 42-year-old me, or would I be just as twisted up as I was at the boundary of independent adulthood? I think I know the answer, but the truth lies somewhere in between my self-concept and the way others perceive how I’ve been able to unpack my invisible knapsack.

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Collegiate Dictionary (12th Edition) (Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2025)

    The iconic image associated with Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything… is that of John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler. He’s holding up a boombox, a portable stereo, playing a cassette of PETER GABRIEL’s “In Your Eyes” so that Ione Skye’s Diane Court, his ex-girlfriend, can hear it through her open bedroom window. The song played during one of their intimate moments earlier in the movie, and Lloyd apparently thinks that the sounds of the “really good song” will be enough to change Diane’s mind about breaking up with him.

    As someone who first learned of the movie in high school and then modeled my personality after Lloyd Dobler’s, I can relate to this scene. I mean, I’ve never done something so demonstrative or possessive—and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a The CLASH shirt—but the way this scene feels is resonant with teenage me. (Teenage me is still a big part of me.)

    There’s a smaller moment earlier in the film that ended up being much more of a life-imitates-art inspiration for me. When Diane’s getting ready for a date, Lloyd peruses the effects in her room. One of which is “a mother dictionary.” It appears to be Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, first published in 1961. Diane tells Lloyd that she “used to have a thing of marking the words she looked up.” Lloyd then flips through pages annotated with an excess of x’s. I have done a similar thing with the dictionaries I’ve owned over the years, including one of my two copies of the Third.

    Maybe it’s unsurprising then that I was eager to get my hands on the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I’ve already got a copy of the 10th edition at work, among many other dictionaries from various publishers and years. I’ve also got the company’s app on my phone, where I pay an annual premium for ad-free access to the same words. This same information is also available for “free” online. So, why acquire a hard-copy of a dictionary in 2026? The main reason is guide words.

    Let me explain.

    A couple of jobs ago, I had a copy of the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary in my cubicle. During slow times when I was waiting for pages to edit, I would flip through it to check definitions of certain words. This was company property, so I wasn’t about to mark it up. But, I did learn quite a bit about syllabication, pronunciation, and etymology in the process. One of the most memorable elements of the book was the set of guide words on page 304. Atop the page were the words cue, as in an actor’s signal, and cumber, as in to get in someone’s way or make their life harder. Do you get it? It says cue•cumber. Yes, cucumber. The vegetable! That’s hilarious! Even better, the final word in bold is cumbering, an inflected form of cumber in the headword’s definition. In my mind, this pair of guide words was an intentional error. Instead of having the header read cue•cumbering, some editor had ensured it would read cue•cumber. This was purposeful. I was sure of it! I wrote a letter explaining my thought process and complimenting the editor who had put that funny joke into the guide words. 

    I sent my letter on December 27, 2006; I received a reply on January 5, 2007.

    In the reply, Susan L. Brady explained to me that I had misinterpreted the guide word rules and that I could find more information about them in my dictionary’s front matter. Basically, using cumbering as the second guide word on page 304 would make the use of cumber as the first guide word on 305 a mistake. So, for consistency’s sake, the guide words across the top of the spread need to be in alphabetical order themselves. There went my case. The banality of style guides and alphabetical order had made my supposed discovery nothing more than a little coincidence. Still, I was excited to have received a reply, especially because it came quickly (and during a week that contained New Year’s Eve, no less!).

    You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by this point.

    A few months later, I noticed that on page 1239 of the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary appeared another humorous guide word pairing. This time, it was strut•stuff. I knew immediately who needed to know this information: Susan L. Brady. Knowing that my original letter featured a naïve misunderstanding of how editors chose guide words, I decided to change things up. I reprinted my original letter and treated it as a first pass of a page I was editing. So, I changed 304 to 1239, cue to cumber, strut to stuff. I deleted the whole paragraph about the guide words being some kind of intentional joke and inserted text that explained what I had learned about guide word selection from the previous letter. Not wanting to have this letter be a mere copy of the original, I thought of the importance of the idiom “strut your stuff.” I figured why not ask for a chance to “strut my stuff” in a job interview for an editorial position? Remember, this is not a new letter. It is a marked up copy of my original message. The number of changes I made to it had turned it into a palimpsestic mess. I was sure I’d be put on some kind of DO NOT CONTACT list or maybe sent a cease and desist. This feeling only grew as the days passed. What had I done?

    Three weeks later, Susan L. Brady replied once again. I could tell the letter was different this time. It still bore the Merriam-Webster heading, complete with the slogan “From the Inkwell to the Internet.” The letter was shorter. Whereas the first letter’s body text had filled the middle third of the folded letter, this reply’s heading, body text, closing, and signature all fit within that middle third with room to spare. My heart sank to my stomach. I took a breath and read the letter.

    “Thank you for your recent letter and for sharing your latest guide word discovery. The dictionary can be so much fun, don’t you think?”

    That’s it. That’s all it was. That’s all I needed.

    There was no need to write another letter, even if I ever found a fun guide word pairing. Forget the idea of working for a major publisher as a dictionary editor. I learned an important lesson and had a deeply fulfilling experience. Someone else out there knew, just as I did, and as you may, that the dictionary can be so much fun. It still is.

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100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life (Dick Van Dyke, Grand Central, 2025)

    Look, I’m as surprised as you that a guy with the nickname “The Human Waterfall” has lived to be 100 years old. If you’re known for falling down, even gracefully, longevity does not seem like it would be part of your destiny. Maybe the everflowing stream that is Dick Van Dyke’s life isn’t one of those harrowing, acrophobia-inducing falls like Niagara. Maybe it’s more like a purling brook in a secluded wood with a few stair-step drops marking the water’s descent. Risky to cross, but not fatal if you slip. Van Dyke knows the importance of falling, though. The fourth chapter in the book is “Learn to fall,” and he uses it to relate the story of how he sought out Buster Keaton to learn how to tuck and roll safely. Keaton told him he’d broken most of the bones in his body, including his neck, over the years. Van Dyke doesn’t share the number of bones he’s broken, so it’s likely that Keaton’s advice proved helpful.

    So I mentioned that the fourth chapter, or rule, in the book is “learn to fall,” but I only know that because it shows up early in the text and I could count to it without losing track. You’d think a book like this one would have numbered chapters or at least a Table of Contents that would make it easy for a reader to find a particular rule. Not so fast. Chapter two is “Make your own rules.” He takes his own advice and tells us that if we are to count all of the rules in the book, we will come up short of 100. See, he’s making his own rules, even if they violate the promise made by the book’s title. For the record, there are 75 rules in the book. You will not feel shortchanged in the least.

    You also won’t be subject to relentless positive affirmations, despite the book’s subtitle. I was a little worried that “an optimist’s guide to a happy life” would be dull and trite. Like, of course a celebrity is an optimist. (I know that’s an oversimplification.) My misgivings have more to do with the fact that self-help or self-improvement books are not my cup of tea. What could I possibly learn from a beloved actor that I couldn’t learn from someone in my day-to-day life? Plenty, it seems. The advice, rules, and suggestions in the book are not for everyone, but there were more than a few times that I felt myself thinking “Wow, that’s actually interesting / helpful / clarifying.” Plus, it’s not like Van Dyke was born into fame. He tells of shoveling coal into the furnace in the basement of his house in Danville, Illinois, as a child so his baby brother and his mom could enjoy the heat. Not too many TV or movie stars had to grow up with that kind of grunt work as part of their daily routine, which means that there are many lessons Van Dyke has learned that are not dependent upon his role as a household name.

    Beyond its genuinely helpful moments, there are also many funny stories to be found in these pages. Prior to taking on the role of Rob Petrie, Van Dyke was traveling with his wife and two children in the car for a vacation. He explains how they would change their children’s diapers while in the car. Imagine the scene. Van Dyke is driving, holding up the legs of one of his kids while his wife changes the diaper. The risk alone makes this story wild. He makes it sound like this was a common occurrence. That’s not the point of the story, though. One time, while in the desert, the diaper’s stench was too much for those in the car to bear. So, thinking of the quickest possible solution, Van Dyke chucks the offending receptacle out his window. Much to his surprise, there was another car on the road even though they were in the middle of the desert. Yes, the car was trying to pass them on the left. Yes, the full diaper hit the windshield dead center at a high velocity. Yes, the other car screeched to a halt. No, Van Dyke did not. “I froze for a second and thought: Should I stop? Instead, I floorboarded it and just kept going” (p. 50). Diabolical. There’s someone out there who was on the receiving end of a soiled diaper that a pre-fame Dick Van Dyke threw out of a car window in the middle of the desert and they never knew he was the culprit. The rule here? “Don’t litter: Tips for safety and hygiene on family road trips in the 1950s.”

    Fast forward a couple decades and Van Dyke tells us of how his current wife, Arlene, helps him organize his days. He says she got him an iPad but he never uses it. She helps to coordinate his daily life, along with his assistant Jimmy. Careful readers will notice before Van Dyke points it out that Jimmy uses they/them pronouns. When Van Dyke directly addresses this aspect of Jimmy’s identity, he admits that it took a little bit of getting used to, and that “these kids keep us on their toes, don’t they?” (p. 211). That’s all. No big deal. If someone born in 1925 can understand queerness and transness that easily, then there’s no excuse for the bigotry behind getting upset over someone’s pronouns or identity. In addition to the wisdom he’s accrued with age, Van Dyke also prides himself on not using his iPad to “text or shop or browse for hours on end. Think of all the dopamine I’ve stored up!” (p. 12) So maybe there is something to be said for unplugging from devices to help keep our minds sharp and our hearts open as we age.

    There are sweet moments, too. I learned from the dust jacket that Van Dyke is an Oscar short of EGOT status, so I puzzled over the “Win an Oscar” chapter. He explains that the cast of Mary Poppins created a scrap metal award statuette for his contributions to the film. It’s not much to look at, but it means a lot coming from the cast and crew of that show. It’s dear enough to him that it is given first priority when he has to evacuate his Malibu home due to wildfires. And, as special as it is that Julie Andrews won one for her role in that film, “eighty-six actors and seventy-nine actresses have that exact same one. Mine is one of a kind” (p. 90).

    Other parts that made me laugh included the chapter where he tells the story of his appearance on The Masked Singer. The story itself is fine, but it’s in his relating of Arlene trying to convince him to do the show that I burst out laughing. She runs down the outfits that Gladys Knight and three of the Brady boys wore. And, “according to Arlene, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols (don’t ask me who that is) wore a horned, tartan ‘jester’ outfit that could have spawned a horror franchise” (p. 259). I’m sorry but that aside is the funniest part of this book. Imagine that you are 97 years old, it is 2023 and your wife is telling you about The SEX PISTOLS in an offhand way like you should know who Johnny Rotten is. How aware was Van Dyke of punk when the first wave hit in the ‘70s? He would have already been in his late fifties. There’s no reason to think he would have been interested in contemporary music, given that he loves show tunes and jazz. The idea of him being unaware for over 40 years of a band with the name of The SEX PISTOLS and then having to process that information in the context of his wife selling him on appearing on a show where celebrities dress up in elaborate costumes to sing to a panel of judges… it’s incredible.

    The advice I’ll take to heart is to “Write it down” (189). In this chapter, Van Dyke explains how Marge Mullen, the script supervisor of The Dick Van Dyke Show, kept a notebook titled “SOS,” which stood for “some other show.” Ideas the writers had that couldn’t quite work or needed more polish or might have been too small for a full episode were stashed in this notebook for later. Their time wasn’t right, but they weren’t worth discarding either. Most people don’t write scripts for successful sitcoms, but we can still learn better habits of keeping our fleeting thoughts from escaping forever. Being better at more consistently recording those thoughts is reason enough for me to feel optimistic at this point in the year.

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Jim: A Rubino’s Pizza Short Documentary (Noah Abrams, A-Team Films, 2025)

    Man, Rubino’s Pizza totally rules. It’s likely you’ve never had pizza with a crust so thin. Imagine a saltine, cut in half horizontally and dusted with cornmeal on the bottom. Physics dictates that there can’t be much added to a slice so slight, so the sweet sauce and small blobs of mozzarella don’t add much weight to the pizza. You know it’s gonna be crispy given its low profile. When you order it to-go, it comes in a bag. A bag. It’s a crime that I’m not eating some right now…

    I promise that will be it with my attempts to describe the quality of the pizza because this documentary on Jim Marchese, the current proprietor of Rubino’s Pizza in Bexley, Ohio, doesn’t focus as much on the pizza as it does the institution, the man, the spot. A pizza place that can survive 70 years of changes around it must be doing something right with its food and its vibe. It has never expanded, never franchised, never relocated. Jim recalls a moment when a woman opened the door and inhaled deeply, then left. She “just wanted to smell Rubino’s.” To me, that sounds like torture, but it says something about the quality of the place that a single sense memory can be so powerful. 

    Early in the film, we learn that the original concept of Rubino’s came from founder Ruben Cohen who thought maybe his name might not give an indication of authentic Italian food. Thus, Ruben became Rubino’s for the sake of marketing and there’s never been a reason to doubt the quality of the product. Jim’s father bought the business when the original owner retired and Jim helped his dad run it and has been the man in charge ever since.

    The film is a tribute to him as he grows closer to aging out of the ability to run the shop. He’s got stage four kidney cancer, which has returned after being in remission 15 years ago. His daughter, Julie, is ready to step up when the time comes. Working in a family business is often a way for managers to easily manipulate and exploit those closest to them. That doesn’t seem to be the situation at Rubino’s. There’s a moment when Julie has to take a breath and step outside because things are getting a little hectic behind the counter. It’s not like that is a situation unique to family-run foodservice. Julie’s candor in her responses and her work ethic both indicate that she will do an excellent job of running the show when its her turn at the reins. 

    That attitude, surliness, or “jive,” is part of the appeal of going to Rubino’s in the first place. Yeah, the food is excellent, but Jim’s demeanor is an attraction in itself. The film does an excellent job of expressing this trait of his. It’s subtle, but there’s a shot where he answers the phone (there is only one phone at Rubino’s) by pounding the receiver with the fat of his fist so it flips into his hand. It’s so slick. Stay at Rubino’s long enough on a night when they’re slammed and you can be treated to the sight of Jim hitting the counter itself hard enough to launch the receiver into his hand. The coordination required to pull that off is remarkable.

    Despite the gruff way he comes off in the film and in real life, Jim is a sweetheart. Julie explains how he has quietly helped customers’ families with college payments or medical bills over the years. That kind of support to people who have patronized this business for decades is why people get misty-eyed when thinking of local small-business owners. Jim represents the apotheosis of that type of dude running that kind of shop, and as Abrams reveals in Jim, the secret recipe is “40% pizza, 60% bullshit.” So, the pizza gets you in the door but the bullshit keeps you coming back over and over again.

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