The Perfect Score (Brian Robbins, MTV Films, 2004)

    Here’s a movie I’m glad I don’t have to watch twice. It’s hardly a movie about school at all. It’s not even a movie mostly about testing. No, the score in the title isn’t just the 1600 on the SAT but the hoped-for result of the heist that takes up most of the plot. The six New Jersey high schoolers are motivated to break into the headquarters of ETS so they can get a copy of the SAT before they need to retake it again. Each has their own reason for wanting to do well on the test. More accurately, each of them needs to do well to get into the college of their choice: Cornell, Maryland, St. John’s, and Brown. Yes, that means two of the characters have no post-secondary ambitions. Scarlett Johannson’s Francesca and Leonardo Nam’s Roy are just along for the ride. The latter because he accidentally overheard friends Kyle and Matty detailing their plan in what they thought was an empty school bathroom. The former is involved because her dad owns the building where ETS has its offices, so she can help the crew get into the facility itself.

    The details of the plot are less germane to my discussion of what this film has to say about teaching and learning. From the start, Roy’s obnoxious voiceover tells us that SAT may stand for “suck ass test” because it’s a source of stress for so many students. It’s the task that stands between hundreds of thousands of high schoolers and their futures and it reduces them to numbers. OK, nothing revolutionary in this commentary. Nothing wrong either. We soon see Kyle and Matty together at work in a package-sorting facility where Kyle explains to Matty (and us) the history of the meaning of the letters in SAT. It was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, and now the three letters mean nothing. Again, correct, but not very insightful.

    It’s at this point that the other movie I watched last week provided a helpful context for these teenage testing frustrations. In Valerie Veatch’s recent documentary Ghost in the Machine, the history of measuring intelligence and its close relationship to eugenics are explored in the context of programming generative artificial intelligence systems. When advocates for these systems refer to metrics such as “Ph.D. level intelligence” or even intelligence as a quantity, they are taking for faith the idea that tests such as the SAT are valid measurements. If your only idea of what makes someone intelligent is how well they can do on a multiple-choice test, you are going to have a skewed idea of what it means to learn, let alone to live. I know I’m asking too much for a 2004 movie by MTV Films to go into an exegesis of the eugenicist underpinnings of so much of schooling in the United States. What would be cool is an update of The Perfect Score that explores these ideas and the purpose of education itself.

    But I digress.

    Kyle proves to be fairly critical of the political economy of the SAT when he says “the College Board made millions last year” in fees from students taking the test. He seems to be angry that someone is making money from the process and that he didn’t think of that idea first. He appears less annoyed about what that means for access to post-secondary education for families that are facing financial hardship. He’s also frustrated that his mom, a first-grade teacher, tells him that the kids in her class have to learn to “bubble in” on worksheets rather than spend time reading. Again, there’s the beginning of what could be a fruitful critique of what counts as literacy learning in the early elementary years. I doubt anyone involved in this film is familiar with Bond and Dykstra’s First-Grade Studies.

    Additional critiques of the test appear courtesy of Erika Christensen’s Emma and then-NBA player Darius Miles’ Desmond. When we first see these two interact, he asks her for help studying. She mentions to him the concept of stereotype vulnerability as a possible explanation for why he may be underperforming on the test. This comment makes her reconsider her initial doubts about helping him. Shortly after, there is a scene where each conspirer explains their motivation for taking part in the heist, Desmond says “I’m here because the SAT is racist.” He elaborates, “Who made the test? Rich white guys. Who scored the highest on the test?” Roy’s witty reply is about another stereotype about who is successful on the test. Deflating Desmond’s criticism with a joke prevents this line of inquiry from going further. Look, I know it wouldn’t be an interesting movie if they sat and had a discussion about why standardized tests exist, but I also don’t think making a heist movie about stealing test answers was super interesting to begin with!

    At least they all seem to learn that cheating is not going to get them what they want. Not because of some kind of moral awakening but because they realize they can get a decent score instead of a perfect score on their SAT and still go on living. The “right school” is the one you get into, even if it’s not your top choice. Quite a wholesome message from a movie with crude sexual stereotypes and trite stoner jokes. I see no reason to watch this again, but I’m glad I saw it at least once. If nothing else, the real-life circumstances of Darius Miles (prep-to-pro basketball star who signed a letter of intent with St. John's) and Mike Jarvis (the actual St. John’s coach who makes a cameo and was fired from that job a month before the movie came out) give the events of the movie weightier implications. There is too much riding on the results of this test, especially for those whose futures or careers depend on teenagers being successful at bubbling in.

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Afterlove EP (Pikselnesia / Fellow Traveler, 2025)

    It’s quite strange to think about a video game character going to therapy. Less so in a text-driven role-playing game, I suppose. Still less strange if the role played is of a young man grieving the simultaneous end of a life and the loss of a relationship. That’s the situation Rama, protagonist of Pikselnesia’s Afterlove EP, finds himself in as the game begins. As Rama, you have to get the band back together and try to write songs for an EP that’ll be released at a gig at the end of the month. The narrative picks up one year after his girlfriend Cinta’s unexpected death from an unspecified health complication.

    In grief, Rama has coped by having Cinta’s voice in his head at all times. It may not be just her voice actually. Her words are vivid enough for Rama that he can hold one-on-one conversations with her. Other characters cannot hear Cinta’s voice, so Rama’s sudden comments or replies seem a little out of the blue when he’s trying to have an in-person conversation with friends and also managing an internal dialogue with Cinta. They’ll call him out on it, but he remains oblivious to his condition. 

    All of the conversations with these characters happen through on-screen text. Cinta is the only character whose text is supplemented with voice acting. You are essentially getting to hear the voice in Rama’s head as he grieves his loss. This choice is very effective in drawing the player into Rama’s perspective while also not completely sharing it. As a player, you’re aware of the conversation Cinta and Rama are having even as Rama discusses other topics with whoever is with him in real life. You can sense the confusion he’s feeling and may even share the frustration of his friends when they cannot parse his seemingly random contributions to their discussions.

    Two of those friends, Adit and Tasya, play with him in the incredibly named SIGMUND FEUD. Their three-piece approach to slacker-y, pop-leaning shoegaze is soundtracked by L’ALPHALPHA, an actual band from Jakarta, Indonesia. Rama’s the principal songwriter and lyricist, so his lost year of catatonic depression has made it difficult for the band to continue. Practices are tense and both Tasya and Adit question their own interest in continuing the band beyond the scheduled gig at the end of the month. Even if the band members aren’t getting along super well, it’s still fun to practice with them. There’s a light rhythm game element to working through songs in the practice space or going over them alone in your room. Thankfully, there are no consequences for missing notes. Had there been, I think Tasya would have threatened to quit even earlier than she did in the plot!

    Most of your days as Rama are spent shuffling around Jakarta. You’re a minor celebrity, so you will get rockignized when you stop by the cafe, record store, ramen shop, or therapist’s office. The locations are spread out enough that you will occasionally make use of fast travel (via your phone’s map app; if only real life were so simple!), but it is relaxing to walk around the neighborhood and check in on the regulars who are waiting for their bus or trying to get up the courage to ask out their crush. You will also have a chance to try your hand at romance with one of three possible partners. I was either so devoted to being a good band member or was just as oblivious as Rama that I didn’t end up in a relationship at the end of the game. I guess the Rama I was playing was still carrying a torch for Cinta. Something about playing a noncommittal slacker in his 20s must have really hit home for me.

    Unlike mid-20s me, Rama understands the value of therapy. In his sessions, he works to understand why he is still able to have conversations with Cinta and also how those conversations might be getting in the way of his continued growth. These sessions are entirely optional, though the game gives you reminders to check in with your therapist every few days. One of my favorite minor characters is the receptionist in the office who brings up her Christian metal fandom repeatedly. It would have been hilarious if Rama could recruit her to join his band and completely alienate Adit and Tasya into quitting music entirely. He’s already speaking aloud to the voices in his head, so it’s easy to imagine a new version of SIGMUND FEUD that involves Rama speaking in tongues over some ripping thrash riffs while the demure receptionist hammers blast beats for Jesus. Maybe that’ll be the sequel—the Afterlife EP. 

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Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, Touchstone Pictures, 1989)

    Now here is a movie about education or based in a school that stands firmly on its own as a film. There is so much to praise and discuss with Dead Poets Society that I will not be covering in this post. I’ll be focusing on what comes to mind in terms of how Mr. Keating and his students interact as a community of learners.

    It’s so wonderful to see a movie dedicated to the full-throated support of the humanities, specifically poetry. It is earnest in its argument for making the examined life worth living. There is a catch, though. All students deserve this caliber of education. Yet, the opening convocation features the headmaster telling the students and their families that “75 percent” of the young men who attend Welton will eventually enroll in an Ivy League institution. That’s remarkable and is also a reminder that this is fiction. The implication is that the curriculum is so robust that these boys cannot fail. Less evident is whether this elite prep school is the kind of place where the old-monied or legacy-admitted may send their kids in the first place. Getting to the why behind that statement could make for an equally interesting, but also much less inspiring, film. A deeply cynical look at the kind of students and families involved in the Varsity Blues scandal could be a modern take on that idea.

    Robin Williams as John Keating is magnetic and magnificent. I have had teachers whose unorthodox methods must have been inspired by Keating’s approach. As a viewer, it’s easy to be taken in by the gimmicks he uses and then draw the conclusion that all teaching should be like that. Jumping off desks, marching through the courtyard, tearing pages from textbooks, inspiring clandestine poetry recitals… these are not pedagogical models just because of their shape. Keating has an evident, deep love for the written word and observation. He’s also seen enough of the world to know what these boys haven’t, and he knows how to play with that gap in their experience constructively. It’s certainly dramatic and attention getting to ask students to climb on their desks to get a new view of the world, or to offer a muscular repudiation of staid interpretations of poetry. The motions themselves are incidental, even though they make for exciting on-screen action.

    The film’s iconic final scene reveals that it wasn’t the mere appreciation of poetry that he was teaching. He was showing the way for these 17-year-olds to avoid the narrow, gilded path their parents and society forced them down. To have these genteel, patrician sons understand that there is a life outside of being a banker, lawyer, or doctor is a huge undertaking. Keating opens their eyes to the idea that there is a conflict between conformity and integrity that they have to resolve. He never tells them to take "the path less traveled by" but that they should know it exists and make an informed choice about where to go.

    Neil Perry’s pathetic complaint “can’t I even enjoy it for a little while?” is revelatory in this regard. He says these words in response to his roommate’s quick emphasis on the logistics involved in concealing his participation in a local performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this scene, Anderson doesn’t see the point in Neil honoring his own interest in acting; all he can consider is how pissed Perry’s old man will be when he finds out. Perry is rightfully upset with Anderson’s response because he did not need another reminder of how constrained his choices are. It’s always on his mind. Keating showed him a looser way of looking at the world and it’s not the way he thought it had been. Perry is unable to escape the conformity and authority of his father’s dreams.

    Anderson and the others who stand for their captain in the final scene do so not because they love poetry or the written word or because they hate their replacement teacher. Those who move do so because they know there is a world out there larger than the one they’ve known until this point. They are acknowledging the lesson of needing a different view on the world that Keating had taught them earlier. They love him for how he opened their minds.

    Although there are boys of various ages at Welton, it’s not clear whether Keating or the other teachers are responsible for all grade levels with their subject. We never see Keating teaching other classes nor is there evidence of younger students having reading, writing, literature, or English classes. This situation raises the question of whether Keating has only one prep. If so, then that is one hell of a position. What little we know of his life outside the classroom is that he has a love interest who is in London and that he has taught similar courses in England before coming to Welton. It would be nice to know whether he has only this one class because that information could explain his teaching methods. If he has all day to plan, then it makes sense that he would come up with some out of the box ideas and that he would have the patience to adjust them when they do not work the first time. As before, all students (not just those in cloistered academies) deserve teachers who can give this much time and attention to their subject and their students.

    It’s worth noting that the only women and girls in the movie have extremely minor roles. The few times we see the students’ parents, their mothers are simply appendages of their fathers. The domineering Mr. Perry has hundreds more words that Mrs. Perry. The boys’ love interests are similarly one-dimensional. The boys have three girls who are peers and they exist solely as subjects of arousal. Even Keating argues that the purpose of language is to “woo women.” If that’s what he has to say about gender roles, I’m terrified of how he would explain the whiteness of Welton. He graduated from the institution, so he may be unable to see its whiteness as problematic. The fish is the last to notice the water and all that. It’s far too generous of an interpretation of the film to think that it does not directly say anything about gender or race because it is attempting to show just how sheltered the lives of these people are.

    That’s the one thought that bugs me still about this otherwise extraordinary film. No one text can do everything, so maybe I’m expecting too much of a movie from 1989 to have thoughtful commentary on race and gender in addition to its convincing argument in support of a liberal arts education. The tensions of social class are readily apparent in the characters’ interactions with the local public high schoolers and with Mr. Perry’s repeated comments about the sacrifices he has made to get Neil into Welton. It’s entirely possible that there is nothing interesting to say about the maleness or whiteness of Welton: it is white and masculine because that is its raison d’être. The exclusion is the point.

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Times and Seasons: The Rise and Fall and Rise of The ZOMBIES (Robin Platts, HoZac Books, 2025)

    Jesus Christ, The fucking ZOMBIES!

    What a great band. They’re a bunch of school friends in England in the 1960s who won a battle of the bands competition and got signed to Decca Records and whose first single, “She’s Not There,” was an overnight sensation. That would be an interesting enough story on its own. But, as Robin Platts covers in the 350-plus pages of this extensive biography of the band and its members, there is so much more to the story. Even more than their other two most famous singles (“Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season”) as well as their magnificent second album.

    The core members of Rod Argent (songwriter and organist), Chris White (songwriter and bassist), and Colin Blunstone (vocalist) are the ones whose lives and experiences comprise most of the text. I learned more about Argent’s and Blunstone’s solo careers than I thought possible because nearly a third of the book is dedicated to the years-in-between, when The ZOMBIES broke up and before these core members began to play together again on a regular basis. The subtitle of the book is not merely clever phrasing. Those years of “the fall” were much longer than the initial career of the band or their subsequent reunion. I am keen to explore some of the work these men did during this time, but it was a bit much to get through without having prior knowledge. If you are a fan of either one’s solo careers, I can’t imagine there could be a better or more meticulously researched resource than this book.

    For me, though, thoughts of The ZOMBIES mean the conversation turns to “Odessey and Oracle.” It’s the best album of the 1960s. Better than “Black Monk Time,” and “Forever Changes.” Of course better than “Revolver,” “Let it Bleed,” and “Pet Sounds.” Better, too, than “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake”, “SF Sorrow,” and, yes, even “Village Green Preservation Society” and “Arthur.” I haven’t revisited this opinion in 18 years and I’m sure it still holds up… It’s important to have thoughts like these because it shows you’re a serious music fanatic… There’s no need to expand your horizons, Rob…

    To learn more about the recording of that album is a pure delight. Even when I got my mom a copy of the CD reissue in 2004, I didn’t know all of the ins and outs of its recording. They were the next band to go into Abbey Road Studios after The BEATLES had finished “Sgt. Pepper” and benefitted directly from some of the recording set-ups that the Fab Four had used. As there were no eight-track recording consoles in England at the time, it was kind of a big deal that engineers Geoff Emerick and Phil MacDonald had daisy-chained multiple four-tracks together to achieve the illusion of eight-tracks of mixing, generation loss on the tapes be damned. The ZOMBIES insisted on keeping the set-up, even though it was a pain to work with for the recording staff. If they hadn’t come into the room at that time, before the equipment had been disassembled, it’s unlikely that the vocal harmonies and instrumental complexity of certain passages of “Odessey and Oracle” would have sounded so lush and delightful. It’s really something to learn that The ZOMBIES were able to piggyback off of The BEATLES in this way, even before “Sgt. Pepper” began to make waves.

    If not for the recording quality, the compositions of tracks such as “Friends of Mine” could have easily made the album worthwhile. As a friend of a friend of mine once put it, it’s a unique song because it’s about being happy for other people who are in love. He pointed out that there are plenty of songs about being in love, or no longer being in love, or being envious of those in love because you are single. There’s not many songs about this particular perspective. As the liner notes of that 2004 reissue indicate, only one of the named couples in the chorus stuck together for the long term. Ah well.

    Turns out “Changes,” the first track on the second side of the album, is the only song where all five members of The ZOMBIES sing together. Deep down, I already knew this to be true. It was extremely validating to have it confirmed in the text, though. You see, there is a moment after the second chorus where the instruments drop out and the vocals are all you can hear. It is in this precise moment that you can hear at least one, if not all five, of The ZOMBIES smack their lips in unison to sing the next line. You may have to turn your stereo up quite loud to hear it, and then immediately back down to not blow out your speakers or your ears when the song begins again. This one moment is the quintessence of being a Friday Night Part. It sounds like a frog being born. I absolutely love it. Maybe you do, too?

    In all seriousness, this book is an excellent overview of the career of The ZOMBIES. Their tentative comeback around the turn of the millennium wasn’t some kind of cash-in on their name. Except for drummer Hugh Grundy, all members had continued to be involved with music whether as writers, performers, or promoters. (Turns out guitarist Paul Atkinson is the A&R guy who got JUDAS PRIEST signed to CBS; I am so glad there is a connection between these bands!) So, when Argent and Blunstone began to write together again in the late 1990s, they were pleasantly surprised to learn that “Odessey and Oracle” had developed a cult following since its 1968 release. Instead of resting on the laurels of doing the front-to-back, album-in-its-entirety tour forever (they did do so for a time), they have put out new music. Platts makes their constant writing and touring—for musicians in their 60s and 70s—seem necessary, unavoidable. There was no cataclysmic split in the band’s original run. They all were on the same page about calling it quits, even before they bestowed us with the majesty of “Odessey and Oracle.” There were never any competing factions vying for the rights to the band’s name. Well, not within their camp, at least; Platts recounts the grifters who took advantage of the name recognition of the band after they split and “Time of the Season” became a surprise hit in the U.S. in 1969. It’s the kind of scam that would be unimaginable now—trying to pass off a couple of bearded schlubs from Michigan as a British Invasion band. The surviving members have continued to enjoy each other’s company enough to keep the band going in some form or another after 30 years apart. It seems the genuine awe of feeling so good about seeing friends of theirs so in love represented a deep way of connecting with others that would eventually give The ZOMBIES eternal life.

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Mr. Holland’s Opus (Stephen Herek, Hollywood Pictures, 1995)

    This movie is so saccharine that it contains a week’s worth of sugar content for the average American. Good thing I’m not looking at movies like this one as an example of cinema qua cinema. Let’s be clear that there’s not a whole lot to be gleaned from it in terms of teaching and learning, either.

    One wonders about the motivating factors behind writing a screenplay for a movie like Mr. Holland’s Opus. After a casual watch, it’s clear that Stephen Herek likes his warmed-over ’60s nostalgia as much as he likes hero narratives and cheerleading for music education. Something like American Graffiti, a tepid drama, and The Miracle Worker mashed together. Those pieces don’t fit. There’s too much happening and it takes way too long to happen, which is a dreadful combination.

    You’re not here to hear me crab about bad movies, so let’s get to what the movie is saying about or doing with the educational setting. Richard Dreyfuss’ Glenn Holland is of a type: the second-career teacher who thinks the job is a “fall-back position” that he can just walk into. His principal correctly chides him for thinking that way as she walks him to his class on the first day. I’d love to know what the interview process looks like for a position of music director in a public high school. It’s evident that his first passion is music composition and not anything to do with education. He begins his first class with a closed, known-answer question: What is music? The students do not know what you think music is or how you define it—that is why you are there! Give them ideas to consider and then explain to them how to critique those ideas, at a minimum. His principal has a similarly limited view of teaching. She thinks it involves the filling of young minds with information and then giving them a compass to navigate the world. She suggests Holland does not have a compass, but is just filling their heads with information. Fair. I’m reminded of a comment the director of my grad program in teacher training made early in our coursework. We were aspiring high school English teachers in our early 20s. She made it clear that we should not get into teaching high school English if we wanted to share a love of literature, of Shakespeare, with our students because that is not what the daily life of a teacher is about. Her comment was a bit overstated, but it does capture the vision of teaching and learning that Holland holds. He thinks his passion will carry the day with teenagers, at least, at first.

    One student in particular provides him with a learning opportunity that he eventually capitalizes on, though it’s not clear whether he applies this learning in later years. Gertrude Lang, a clarinetist in the school’s band, can’t form notes with her instrument without squeaking. He tries to teach her directly with private lessons before school, but her frustration mounts. She is ready to quit the instrument when he tells her that music is more than notes on a page. He knows that she knows the music “in her head, her heart, and her fingers” but needs her to develop the self-trust to perform it fluently. She, of course, excels once he gives her the chance to mediate her thinking by reflecting on what she already knows about her skills. He’s becoming aware that his students’ emotional lives and their motivations matter as much as their “pure music” knowledge.

    The other student who we are meant to have feel-good moments about is Louie Russ, one of the only Black characters in the film, and the only one who gets a name. The football coach tells Holland that Russ is academically ineligible for football, but that he could make the wrestling team with the academic credit that Holland’s music class could offer. As the coach tells Holland, Russ has “got nothing else,” so he needs Holland to do this favor. (In return, coach will help Holland’s scrappy group of instrumentalists learn to march in formation so they can perform during football games.) Just so we’re on the same page, it’s 1965 and the only thing a Black student has going for him is sports because he is “not a school kind of person” but he “can work hard.” This is reductive stereotyping at its racist worst. The movie is from 1995, so maybe we are meant to think that these white teachers’ views of this student are retrograde with the passing of 30 years. I don’t think so. When Holland works with Russ, he learns that Russ isn’t able to keep a beat on the drum. In a montage, we see Holland trying to get Russ to clap along with him, tap his feet with him, and bang his drum with him. Here are some of the only moments of physical humiliation in the film. Holland is so fed up with Russ’ lack of progress at toe-tapping that he begins to tap on Russ’ foot forcefully. Is this feedback meant to tell Russ to press down when Holland presses down, or is it meant to tell Russ to stop pressing down and keep his foot still at that moment? I guess his intent is clearer when he grabs the laces of Russ’ Chuck Taylors and jerks his foot up and down in frustration. Worse yet, Holland has Russ don a football helmet while sitting to play his bass drum. Holland then pounds on Russ’ head with a mallet in time with the song. Oh, but it’s OK because “Mr. Russ has found the beat” by the end of the sequence. This result would be heart-warming if it weren’t so revolting. Russ later dies in Vietnam, just to reinforce that he is disposable as a character.

    Those moments should have been enough for this film, really. The principal who hired him retires and kisses him goodbye because he’s her favorite. Gross for a few reasons. Then, she gives him a compass, as if it weren’t obvious enough that he has “found his way” as a teacher. Too much. When that scene faded to black, I was glad because I was sure there was nothing more to cover. But, of course it went on. There’s an even more cloying moment still to come when Holland sings and signs JOHN LENNON’s “Beautiful Boy” to his son who has 90 percent hearing loss.

    Despite all of the changes Holland and his students have been through over the 30 years of time that the movie encapsulates, the board still eliminates his position along with all of the other art programs at school. Here is where the most real part of the movie happens. A despondent Holland is talking with his football coach teacher friend and he observes that it would be the end of Western civilization if a high school cut its sports budget. His buddy reassures Holland that “they’ll miss [him]” when he’s gone. Holland counters that he feels “expendable.” That’s a succinct summation of what teaching feels like. Some may remember you, or how you made them feel, but you are still a line item on the budget of an institution that cannot love you back, no matter what trinkets it provides you with. A triumphant exit with a supportive crowd at your back does not take away from the fact that teaching is more than just a deeply emotional labor. Recognizing and managing those emotions is necessary, but it is not enough. Beyond respect, teachers deserve much higher levels of the kind of compensation that goes into gas tanks, grocery tills, and mortgage accounts.

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Teachers

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 20th Century Fox, 1969)

    Miss Jean Brodie is quite a character. A leader, if not just a teacher. She says as much when speaking with the headmistress at Marcia Blaine’s School for Girls. where she teaches 12-year-olds. The headmistress is unhappy with Brodie for taking girls to the theater and the museum on weekends. Brodie defends herself by saying that the root of educate is the Latin educere, meaning “to lead out.” As in, she is leading the girls out of the darkness and into the light. Her headmistress counters that surely there should be some “putting in” happening as well. Brodie has read well, knows her etymology, and replies that that would be an intrusion, from the Latin “to thrust into,” which she does not capture how she sees her role as a teacher.

    It’s these word games that give Miss Jean Brodie a sheen of unassailability. She seems to float through the school, dispensing pithy observations about culture and the proper way to live. She is “in [her] prime,” don’t you see? That teaching girls is “[her] vocation” must mean that her pedagogical methods are beyond reproach. She just wants her kids to prize “goodness, truth, and beauty” in artwork and poetry. Sounds pretty good to me. Parents would love for their children to have a teacher who is so dedicated to her calling.

    The problem Brodie creates in focusing on the rearing of her “brood,” as she calls it, is that her ideals are those of the Fascisti in Italy. It’s 1936 and they are in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s far enough away from the front that Brodie’s ideas about what makes for skilled pedagogy never come into direct contact with the realities of war or the effects of fascist ideology. On a walk with her students, she sees a bag of trash on the ground and uses the moment to praise Il Duce himself, saying, “In Italy, Mussolini has put an end to litter!” She says this without a thought of its accuracy or implications. Suddenly, her prior praise of Robert Burns and Giotto di Bondone seems a little less like mere eccentricity and more like cultural supremacy. The late Maggie Smith does a commanding job of keeping our attention on the force of Brodie’s personality throughout many scenes like these. She really sells the idea that Brodie is a misunderstood intellectual who is trying hard to lead her students into a more cultured world, even if they are not ready for it.

    It’s not only Brodie who takes the “leading” part of education too far. One of her colleagues forces her into a bathroom in an early scene and forcibly kisses her. They had had a consenting relationship before, but that kind of behavior is obviously inexcusable. Worse still, this teacher later forces himself on one of Brodie’s students while she is in his art studio and later paints her in the nude, even though she’s a child.

    Brodie later comments that “A mature man can find love in a young girl,” which is the kind of sentence that repulses me to even type. It’s not taken as a wild idea, either. The lack of reaction to it makes the apparent ordinariness of the observation all the more appalling. Whether we are meant to think of this comment as par for the course in 1932 or even 1969 is unclear. Set against Brodie’s other seemingly benign cultural observations, it’s easier to see the non-response to this comment as further indication of the rot in her mind wrought by fascism.

    Her ultimate fate is the result of her misplaced faith in her brood, which is a delightful consequence for such a flawed character. As a teacher, I want to see her survive to stick it to the board and the headmistress. She’s going to go down fighting! That rules! But, what she’s fighting for is based on her reputation in the community, which is in tatters. Although it’s the implication of an affair that the board sees as uncouth, the final betrayal is from Sandy, one of her former pupils. Sandy is disgusted with Brodie because her desire to see her students “serve, suffer, and sacrifice” has led to one of their deaths in the war. Her rhetoric finally has real-world consequences. Even more humiliating for Brodie, she learns that this girl’s brother, who she had assumed was fighting on the side of the Fascisti is actually a Republican. Meaning, this student of hers has died for nothing.

    So, what responsibility do teachers have for their students once they leave their care for the day or for the year? Is education “leading out,” or is it the intrusion of new ideas? What can we actually learn about teaching in 2026 from a movie based in 1936 and filmed in 1969 about the impact of a pathologically dedicated, and yes, Fascist, teacher? As with Jim McAllister in Election, Jean Brodie is a good reminder of how not to conduct oneself in the classroom. I admire her ability to sneak her own ideas into the curriculum, right in front of the administration’s faces. It’s a shame that those ideas are so poisonous. Getting kids to think that your teaching “makes history seem like the cinema” is a true gift. What she calls the “leading out” of education turns out to be nothing more than the intrusion of Fascist ideals into her charges’ minds.

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Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan by Max Ward

Al Llorens, 1952-2025

Adolescence

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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Reponse to Chicago Tribune's Charlie Kirk Editorial

All Her Fault

Negative Space by Gillian Linden

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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Adolescence

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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