Can you hear it? It’s the silent airport, the text-only airport, the airport of the future, the airport of your dreams. This is the progress of civilization. Airports shouldn’t be library quiet. They should be completely silent. Abandoned-church-in-the-middle-of-the-night quiet. Welcome.
There are lots of indignities in the modern American airport. The food, both on the ground and in the air, is somehow both overdetermined and bland. TSA is our contemporary theater of the absurd. The process of herding on and off the planes with all our nicely designed luggage puts the idea of human intelligence into question. The overwhelming presence of coordinated sweatsuit sets does not help matters. All of it makes me feel crazy. And yet, I’ll take it everyday. What I want to change is simply the noise in the modern airport.
Here in wonderful 2026, there is no need to have anything but text-based communication in the airport. No public announcements. No announcements from the gate. No more innocuous “welcome to our city” messages by whomever the mayor of Atlanta currently is. (I always seem to hear this while I’m urinating.) No more well-intentioned announcements about child trafficking. There should be signs saying what’s arriving, what’s departing. There should be signs outside the gates showing the same. There should be text messages delivered silently to your phone updating you on the whereabouts of your flight. If you come into the airport, you automatically consent, along with the TSA body search, to receiving silent text messages from the airport. Like with firearms, all audible alerts should be removed once you enter the premises. If we can make AI happen, then we can make this happen. No phone calls. If you need to talk on the phone, there should be private booths where you can conduct your shameful business. (I feel like this used to be a thing historically.) If people can hear you converse from your booth, then they should stare at you and you should feel shame. If you have a problem with your flight that cannot be resolved via text, there should be slightly larger booths where you and an airline official can discuss the matter, far, far away from everyone else.
Part of my beef is that it there are too many sounds. To begin, there is the modern American compulsion to blast pop music from every restaurant, bar, and kiosk, as if we were all trapped in an endless music video directed by Satan. (His theme song is “Mambo No. 5.”) Second, the public announcements don’t work. They’re too difficult to hear and they don’t inform. Airport terminals are too close together for any of the individual terminal announcement systems not to get hopelessly muddled. And then these announcements get preempted by the larger terminal-wide announcements. I’m always trying to parse the noise, trying to figure out what is relevant information. It’s like trying to unweave a rug with my teeth. They should instead install those digital highway signs, those boondoggles that purportedly announce upcoming traffic accidents and road closures but which in the Land Progress mostly sport bad puns related to safe driving. It’s like a modern WPA program for poets. There are worse uses of federal funds, but still.
The announcements that are given at the gate and then on the airplane itself are so rote that many airlines or flight attendants use the occasion to work on their stand-up material. We’ve all witnessed the “humorous flight safety video.” We’ve all been accosted by the flight-attendant doing a bit. It feels like being trapped with an overly enthusiastic football mascot with slightly less fur. I like it when people are funny. I am not a monster. But this is not funny. It’s annoying and desperate. I know the lawyers require the pinned-back-eyelids transmission of the safety video though it seems like this sphere is ripe for innovation. Perhaps take a clue from the endless, unreadable and unread Terms of Service agreements. Let’s get Apple to work on those flight videos. Perhaps travelers can agree to the terms at the same time they agree not to make a peep as soon as they enter the jetbridge, or whatever we’re calling the entrance to the airport now.
While I’m being picky, the planes themselves should be quieter. These machines are too loud inside. All that groaning and gear-shifting. I shouldn’t have to wear my cubicle-grade headphones to shield myself from the Lynchian industrial keening. Perhaps Delta could explore some better insulation technologies or phase cancellation possibilities. Perhaps a collaboration with some outfit like Yeti coolers. I realize that’s a different technology entirely, but man, those coolers really do work. I feel like this could be a mutually beneficial synergistic collab.
And then finally there is my fellow American traveler, equipped now for 18 years at least with a smart phone and yet none the wiser about using it, or at least none the more subtle. The prevalence of taking phone calls on speaker in public shocks me, as if I’m some spinster witnessing white pants after Labor Day. I am not a monster. But honestly, take that call somewhere else and in a way where no one else can hear it, where no one else is subjected to it. It’s a kind of aggressive rudeness, forcing a private conversation into the public sphere. Of course I have heard middle-aged professionals instigate calls while urinating in the public restroom in my office building, so there are really no limits to a lack of decorum. (Perhaps they are calling the mayor of Atlanta.) Video calls on speaker are just a declension of the same psychosis. I admit to not understanding the appeal of video calls in general, much less while I’m walking between terminals. (I’m pretty sure Short Form Video is one of the Seven Seals, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)
Instead, hear it with me. See it. Feel it. Completely quiet. Just the sound of people walking. I don’t want to put anyone in jail or anything. I just think some strategic social shaming is in order. I don’t think people should be cancelled or whatever we’re calling it now. But I do think that the people who take video calls on speaker should be politely led off the premises and banned for six months. I’m not a monster. It’s just that silence is golden. Or if not golden, then a pleasant ocher. And something we should strive to paint together. No one likes travelling. I mean, maybe the super rich do. But I’m talking about actual human beings here.
I’m of course writing this from an airport. I’ve got my ear plugs in but I can still hear the kids shrieking from one direction and the vacuuming from another. I can’t hear the announcements, but I can hear that emergency door alarm, the kind that goes off intermittently and seems engineered to loosen bowels and yet which effectuates no change in behavior from anyone. The door just makes that sound every now and then like some dispeptic animal. I don’t think my prohibition should apply to small children. I’m not a monster. Toddlers are going to be toddlers. But as the kids get older we should teach them that the proper approach to air travel is a funereal respect. A holy silence so that can people can watch their ipad movies in peace. Air travel is an absurd privilege, one we should accept while minimizing human suffering.
Also, grownups: no traveling with a blanket. Have some self-respect.
All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com
The clone wars come home
A couple of weeks ago I received a friendly email from a fellow who lavished me with praise for my one published book, a collection of stories called The Portable Son, published by a small press many moons ago. He wanted to present the book to his book club.
I of course was thrilled to receive any positive commentary from a reader. That’s all I really ever want: unending praise from total strangers. This alone will finally make me feel whole. So I wrote him back and said thank you, but that I was a little confused as to what he needed me to do to effectuate him sharing the book with his book group. It was indeed published moons ago, but it is still purchasable, in handy paperback or ebook form, and if you have trouble with that, you can always email me and I will sell you a copy the old-fashioned way. (That is, PayPal.) He said that he needed my permission and a digital copy of the book, and if that went well, we could discuss further procedures.
And here is where my ears went to a point. I am ripe for random praise from strangers but I am also wary of scams. And I’ve reached the point in my life and in my experience with the internet where I think everything is a scam. The internet itself: one giant, networked scam. I two-factor authenticate my kids when they call, just to be sure they’re who they say they are, the little rascals. And so despite the enormous sinkhole of my own ego, this little email exchange seemed too good to be true.
I’ll send it to my good friend Jim, I thought. He’s good at sniffing out scam behavior. But before I could forward the correspondence onto Jim, I received another email, from another extremely friendly stranger, extolling the virtues of my lonely little short story collection, and wondering if we could collaborate on further promotional ventures and sharing it with his group of readers. So this must be the new scam, I thought.
Then a few days later I received another email from another would-be enthusiast. And this morning I received another. Is this what being famous feels like? Being approached by overly friendly scammers, or what’s more likely, scam robots? The prose in these emails seems real; it has the Sabrina Carpenter effect: it’s almost convincingly lifelike. Is my ego being exploited by artificial intelligence? Well, sure, but see above re: the internet. Isn’t that essentially what has always been happening since I logged on sometime in the late 90s?
I would quote from the emails, but I feel queasy quoting from private correspondence without permission, even correspondence with robots. Yes, I am that old-fashioned. By this point in revising this post, I’ve received nearly ten solicitations from the bots. They’re all remarkably lifelike. They are all just this side of scammy. After the first I have refrained from responding. Apparently I’m on some list, the sucker list.
I am old enough and cynical enough to be unimpressed by artificial intelligence talk. Remember when virtual reality was going to change the world? All world-ending or world-revolutionizing talk seems to spring from some existential insecurity, a longing for the apocalypse. The internet rewards exaggeration. What’s more, I’m embarrassed by my peers who use it for little tasks. I’m not against using technology to save time and effort. I am after all typing this on a laptop. I revere Excel. But asking ChatGPT therapy-adjacent questions feels embarrassing. Using AI to remix old songs for you with new, robot-played instruments is a waste of computing power and your one theoretically precious life. It’s playing in the funhouse mirror. Look how weird my face gets, etc. We must move past the mirror, move through the mirror. Tools must become mundane to become useful.
The internet is a factory of cliches. What are memes but the congealing of a culture’s sensibility. Turns of phrase quickly become commodified. It’s difficult to be online and think for oneself, articulate for oneself. Let’s briefly table whether or not this is ever possible. Being too online makes it well-nigh impossible. What are you asking ChatGPT when you ask it a question? “Give me the average response for everything.” Not the best of what has been thought and said but the normal distribution of what has been thought and said. We came for Orson Welles, and we went home with Mr. Beast.
Anyway, I’ve just decided to let the robot spam sales pitches wash over me. If you are a real live breathing person and want to read my book, you can find it here. Or you can email me and I will sell it to you the old-fashioned way (PayPal). Or even if you are a non-human who wants to read my book. I am capitalist enough to not be completely prejudiced against the robots. But I’m not comping them a copy either. And I’m not going to send $89.99 to some robot to theoretically persuade some invisible robot readership out there to read my delicate little story collection. There’s something that only AI could invent, an audience for my short stories.
I may be desperate for attention, but I’m still redneck enough to fundamentally distrust too much loose praise.
Writing is a form of thinking
No, I don’t want help writing that email.
An artificial intelligence bot has come alive within my Gmail, and I am not inclined to use it. I might be inclined to use the summary function if it’s an email I don’t want to read, that is a text created by an institution rather than a friend. But then, if it’s not an email I want to read, then I just don’t read it. For example, did you know that you don’t have to read all the emails that your child’s school sends you? I learned this just last year when my forever partner told me. (“Duh.”) And while I still feel the slight effervescent breeze of guilt, instant deletion feels even better.
But to actually get help with writing the emails? But I actually like writing — even the tedious stuff. I enjoy writing sentences, and then fitting them together. Even if the revision turns into a kind of endless mental Tetris, and even if the end result has all the charm of re-translated stereo instructions, it’s still me in there, thinking.
And really that’s my main beef, and my main belief: writing is a form of thinking. Are there other forms? Sure. But writing is one of them. What I mean is that when I write, I don’t simply get my thoughts down as a transference mechanism. There is some of that, sure. But what’s more is that in the process of transferring those already thought-through thoughts, I discover more thoughts, or figure out what I really think through the actual process of finding the words and the order they should go in. It’s weird, alchemical, seems tautological, or slightly voodoo-y. By writing down what I think, I actually discover what I think. And then when the act is accomplished, I can go back later and re(a)discover what I thought at that moment.* Have I changed my mind since then? Most likely. But there, however impermanently, is a little word sculpture of my thought process for that day on that subject.
But then also there are the unseen thoughts, the unknown unknowns that one discovers when reading, where you find meaning perhaps where the author didn’t intend. Or you see their gaps, their mistakes, their blind spots, their noise within their signal. This too is part of writing and is part of your own writing. No one writes absolutely cleanly with no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, except for maybe lawyers, but even lawyers make mistakes, which is why we have so many of them. Lawyering is a type of weaponized literary criticism. They are busily arguing over the latent ambiguities that their colleagues have created, recently or historically. It’s a great racket.
What happens when you reread yourself is that you see what you thought back then but also what you were wrong about. You’re able, however slightly, to see yourself as a stranger might, to see your own bald spot, your own exhausted presumptions, and that too is a kind of thought, thought’s echo, thought’s reverb, a reconsideration, perhaps even a regret. So writing becomes thought in stereo, moving through time, a moment generated into being that can be reviewed skeptically for as long as the page lasts or the wifi stays strong.
Why would I want to give that up? Sure, I need help with my spelling and my typing, which seems only to get worse. But the little corrective squiggles is one layer of robot intrusion. When you let the robot take over the structure of the syntax, then you have forfeited the chance to figure out what you really thought about something, and to be reminded of it later. You’ve robbed yourself of the pleasure of thinking for yourself.
*Sorry! Grad school trick.
How to rehearse
Rehearsals should have a goal, an agenda, a rationale, a structure, a limit, a path, a focus, a boss, a point. What’s the point of this rehearsal? is always a pertinent question, if slightly rude.
Perhaps everyone already knows this, but my experience points otherwise.
Is it a rehearsal or is it a hang? A hang is a perfectly good thing, but one should be clear about the goal. If it’s a rehearsal, what is it for? What are you rehearsing? Are you trying to get ready for a specific gig? Are you trying to work out the arrangements of new material, who plays the head, how the groove is going to lay, what happens with the bridge? Are you rehearsing as a proof-of-concept? For instance, a new group of people meeting and running through some stuff to see if it gels, if it’s feasible — if it sounds terrible and everyone wants to punch themselves after an hour. These are all valid reasons for a rehearsal, goals for a rehearsal, but my point is that the goals should be stated and held to. The goals should be explicit. Everyone should show up knowing the stakes.
What a rehearsal is not for is for everyone to practice their soloing. There is no greater corrosion of the spirit than playing a song under the auspices of preparing for a performance while everyone goes through the full Skynyrd. This is an indulgence and a waste of everyone’s time. Solos should be practiced alone at home in the dark. That’s your personal woodshedding time. Like a magic trick, its recipe should never be revealed. I suppose the theater kid analogy would be: learn your lines at home.
A couple of years back there was that Peter Jackson multi-hour documentary of the Beatles, showing them working on Let it Be. I’ve only seen a few clips. (I adore the Beatles, but who has that kind of free time?) Even in those fleeting reels I would notice Ringo sitting behind the kit, arms folded, waiting for his bandmates to get their shit together. It’s the curse of drummers everywhere, sitting quietly while the other band members teach each other the song, or write the song, or simply do work that should have been done beforehand. That’s why Ringo is a great drummer, because he sits there patiently and doesn’t go after Paul and John with a machete. Learn the songs before you get to rehearsal. I am trying not to yell. It’s like a potluck. Don’t show up unless you have a dish ready. Rehearsal is the time for getting individual components together for a performance.
How do you get it together? You practice the intros, the outros, and the head, and you note any special arrangement details. You don’t even need to play the whole song. A song by definition has sections that repeat. You don’t need to play all the verses in rehearsal. If you need practice singing all those verses, do that at home with your soloing practice. You certainly don’t need to let every horn player scrimmage over that spot where the half-diminished chord jumps out of the bushes.
And not to sound all corporate on you, but people shouldn’t cross the threshold without a clear agenda. In this rehearsal we are going to run through the intros and heads to ten songs we need to play tomorrow night. In this rehearsal we are going to work up the arrangements for four new tunes. “Work up” and “run through” are different concepts, demand different metabolisms. Working up a tune is like barn raising: in the morning there was no song, but at the end of the day, there it stood. Run through means the arrangement already exists but the band is going to confirm the details: the tempo, the groove, the key, the order of events.
But sometimes you do want to solo. You want everyone to solo in the seclusion of a non-performance safe space. You want to vibe. But that is not a rehearsal. That is a jam. Another perfectly viable form of musical collaboration, though to be sure one that’s ripe for abuse. I’ve lost count of the number of bands I’ve been in that could jam the afternoon away but could not effectuate a performance. Jamming has no parameters placed upon it, except perhaps the limits of the band members’ bladders or their girlfriends’ patience.
Most important, a rehearsal is not a performance. It’s the preparation for a performance. It’s not even a scrimmage. I knew a singer who would blow out her voice in rehearsal the day before a gig. This defeats the purpose.
Rule of thumb: if there is beer, it’s most likely a hang. Which is fine. I like hanging out with friends. I do have friends! I am trying not to yell. But the point is you should have clear expectations.
Also, as a rule, rehearsals should not last longer than two hours. Really, I think 90 minutes should be the max. It’s hard to stay focused for that long, and people are busy. Plus the restricted time window cuts down on the mayonnaise effect, asking about how everyone’s holiday went, what their kids got, all that. That’s hang talk. You want to visit, then swap spit in the parking lot afterward. Right now, we’re running through the song list. Everything in life could be shorter: movies, meetings, rehearsals, concerts, podcasts, even blog posts.
Another rule of thumb, there should be a boss, whether elected or not. Perhaps it’s just the pushiest person in the room. The bitchy wheel gets the grease, etc. But left without a leader, collective indecision will mutate the rehearsal into a hang. Whoever establishes the agenda is the de facto boss. Embrace being the boss. Tell people what to do. Like dogs, they will be silently grateful. They will thank you with their eyes.
Sometimes you don’t get the gig
Even though you know the material. Even though you know the other players. Even though you have played the same material with the same players successfully before. Even though you have no conflicts on your calendar. Even though you’ve been listening to the material for years, thinking about it, yakking about it, mooning over it. Even though you’ve had actual literal dreams in your sleep about performing on just such a gig playing just such material with players that are these exact players. Even though you are friends with everyone in the band. Even though you’ve done every reasonable non-creepy triangulation one can do to position yourself for the call when the time for the call comes. Sometimes you simply don’t get picked. And it feels terrible. I suppose if you were moving through life with supreme unending confidence and belief in one’s own powers of transformation it wouldn’t feel terrible, but I am not that person, and probably neither are you, and so when you realize that you didn’t get picked, despite all of the above, you feel terrible. You feel rejected. You feel unchosen. You feel bereft. You feel like a loser because in this gig-filling instance where there are only so many spots for musicians and just one specific gig date in question, you are in fact a loser. The loser. I’m not going to lie to you. Sometimes the ego takes a slap.
So what do you do in such a situation? Well, you can spend an adequate amount of time feeling sorry for yourself, the problem here being how to gauge “adequate.” I’m not going to tell you to avoid all self-pity. I am not some manosphere influencer robot person. Self pity — it happens. And on these occasions I wish I could still recommend that people smoke cigarettes. I don’t recommend that. Cigarettes are bad for you; news at 11. However, one does wish one could smoke a single solitary Camel Light out on the back porch while feeling grindingly and wholly covered in shame scabs. That’s about the proper amount of self-pity. One cigarette’s worth. After that you’re just wallowing.
Second, it’s important to keep it to yourself. I am not suggesting that you hop on all of your emotions like Yosemite Sam and never express your feelings. (Y. Sam was actually quite good at expressing his feelings.) But I am saying that self pity, expressed outside the audience of your single solitary Camel Light, is only a feedback squeal of despair. No one cares. No one understands. You’re just making noise. And it just makes you sound whiny. Because that’s how self-pity translates into the world. It wells up inside your brain as poetic, justified self pity, but the tongue can’t translate it without turning it into whining. I’m sorry. I wish this weren’t the case. So keep it to yourself and your cigarette.
p.s. Smoking is bad.
Don’t go complaining to the band leader, or your friends in the band, or your other friends outside the band, or your spouse. For godsakes don’t send passive aggressive texts about it. (“Really interesting lineup y’all ended up with for that bar mitzvah gig, chief.”) Don’t take it to social media and be weird. You probably shouldn’t even write highly sublimated blog posts about it. Feel sorry for yourself. Smoke your one solitary, metaphorical cigarette. And move on.
Productive next steps that don’t include whining: there’s only one: keep practicing. Keep listening. Keep going to gigs. Keep booking other gigs. Life is not fair, and besides you are a poor judge of fairness anyhow. The only thing to do is to be like a shark and keep swimming. There’s still something you don’t know how to play. I can guarantee it. And the world is filled with players who stunted out — at 17, 27, 37, whatever. They got to their point of comfort and all progress ceased. They didn’t learn any new material. They didn’t learn how to solo over changes. They didn’t figure out how to sing harmony. Their record collection never got past 2004. They never wrote any tunes. Don’t be one of those people. Pick some underexplored skill/nook and get after it. That’s the only way to dodge the ineluctable inequities that life throws in your face, those water balloons we are all heir to. Keep moving. Only the dead stay still.
Slang for my father
Now here comes the latest song from my band The Metrocenter. We recorded this as part of the MWB Semi-Live series at their studio in downtown Jackson — Sergio Fernandez’s old studio for the true JXN heads out there. This was nostalgically gratifying for me because the last time I’d been in that space working on music was with Sergio when I was recording a demo of my sensitive little college sophomore tunes. Think Ben Folds without the anger or the piano. Those scratch takes live somewhere on a cassette. But now I’ve come back, armed with equipment and friends, and have done this.
Here’s the tune on Spotify and Bandcamp.
I wrote the tune, which turned out to be a kind of homage or sequel to (or desperate imitation of) the Horace Silver classic “Song for My Father,” which I played a kajillion times with my own father and Scott Turner. For you Steely Dan Quiz Bowl geeks, you will also recognize the Silver original as the prompt for the bass riff in the Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number.”
Liner notes:
Denny Burkes: drums
Jakob Clark: bass and vocals
Drew McKercher: guitar and trombone
Barrett Hathcock: Rhodes and composition
Tyler Kemp: engineering and trumpet
Thanks to TK for engineering. Thanks to John Scanlon for letting me borrow his Fender Twin at a moment’s notice. Thanks to Marc Leffler for having us in his studio. And thanks to Horace Silver.
Sometimes I try to think through what I’m doing in this group, what I’m trying to do writing these tunes, what I’m shooting for. When we put out our first single, I joked that it was like jazz, except without the annoying parts. I still think that’s true basically, and I actually like jazz. I mean, it’s complicated. Jazz is gigantic as a category and historically fraught as a term and also implies a certain approach to the music. Mostly what it means is a commitment to improvisation over a form, if there is a form, variation upon a theme, with the proportion heavily weighted toward variation. What this song doesn’t have, both general for The Metrocenter tunes but also other instrumental tunes I tend to write, is that they don’t have the variation. They don’t have any solos over the form. They’re almost completely theme. Yes, there is some variation, but it’s not the current standard practice of jazz improvisation, which is: some kind of intro, head of the tune, everyone solos over the form, head out. When I see a big jazz band with lots of horns or other instrumentation, it’s exciting, but I also realize: everyone of these fellas is going to take a solo. We’re gonna be here for 15 minutes. It gets boring. I tend to like the heads better than the solos. Are there transcendent solos? Sure. All of these generalizations are wafer thin. I write as if I have any idea what I am doing regarding writing a tune, as if it’s deliberate practice, when in fact I’m driving backwards in the dark, with no cameras, in the fog, hoping I don’t hit anything too substantial.
(Other details I dislike about modern jazz in particular since I’m being honest: Often I can’t tell what the theme even is. The drummer is messing with the time, fracturing it, problematizing the grid, and I can’t tap my foot. The horn players, having explored all available notes in their long solos, resort to exploring the uppermost register of their instrument, also known as kicking the cat. Bands recording yet another version of a jazz standard that’s been done unto death — music for zombies. And finally, the music often feels annoying on purpose.)
Also, part of the reason there aren’t any solos is because I can’t solo on piano. It’s the old aesthetic-choice-by-way-of-personal-limitation path.
Perhaps this is not jazz at all, not as we’ve come to understand it. In a long profile of Khruangbin in the New York Times Magazine last year, David Byrne was quoted describing the band as “instrumental pop,” a long tradition, though now somewhat obscured. I found that phrase clarifyingly unpretentious. I suppose pop music simply means music that’s meant to be enjoyed by people, or the people, music not meant for religious procedures, or as background to some other activity such as a movie or a TikTok, though of course we know that music, once recorded, gets repurposed for all manner of distraction; nor is it music that’s intentionally fenced off via genre, like death metal or bluegrass, speaking primarily to the requirements of its selected category rather than the uninitiated strangers who might encounter it. One of the problems I have with contemporary jazz is that it feels like walking into a higher level math class, both in terms of composition and presentation, a private language clothed in the haughtiness of art. Whereas I suppose pop music is just music to listen to, to enjoy. Music that wants to be liked, perhaps too desperately. That enjoyment is primary over representing the artistic bonafides of the musicians. The late Steve Albini, when asked his opinion of jazz, said he didn’t like it because he found it to be “vain music.” I do like jazz, but I think that’s a challenging adjective. He’s not wrong.
Perhaps the reason I even think of the term jazz when writing these short instrumental tunes is that jazz is synonymous with short form instrumental tunes and also it’s considered artistically superior. I just want to be taken seriously! And also liked! I am fun at parties.
The question then becomes if you’re not going to have solos, if you’re not going to introduce variation that way, then how are you going to keep the songs from being boring. If you’re writing a tune with vocals, then you have different verses. The words, the whole linguistic channel of information, changes the meaning of the song, an arc over time. But if it’s just the sound, then what changes? Do you just repeat yourself forever? You could change the sound, either through texture or through new instrumentation, but I find this dissatisfying. There’s too much emphasis on texture in pop music. Between the synths and the guitar pedals, which really are the same thing, there’s too much sound, and not enough emphasis on changing the rhythm or the harmony. I am mostly against distortion as a goal, which becomes a kind of aural filler. The Yiddish word for the stuffing they put inside coats is schlock.
So far then it seems that the solution is to keep things brief and introduce more themes, more melody. Most jazz standards are AABA form. I find myself searching for C and D and maybe even E sections to keep things interesting. But then again, all of this implies I am in some mode of control. Like I said above, I have no idea what I am actually doing. I did not go to music school. I did not study composition. I am mostly trying to relieve boredom, and whatever else lives deep down below boredom.
Maybe I just want to give up
Maybe I just want to give up and be a poet,
lose the ambition, the thirst for plot, the rebar of meaning,
a conspiracy theory located somewhere under my feet.
Maybe I just have these thoughts, these feelings, intrusive,
half-ripe, with nowhere to put them, an open parentheses,
incomplete embrace, Tupperware without their tops.
Maybe I should regress to singing in the car, Tommy. Can you hear me?
Maybe I want to pack a lunch, place it on this shelf
on the internet, sustenance for tourists
browsing the pantry for something palatable and uninteractive.
Maybe I want to stop making sense,
resolve only to make sentences, little shovels
for digging up whatever substance sleeps underground.
All I ever wanted was to be useful.
The Great Unfinished
As I get older, I abandon more books than I finish. I grow increasingly less interested as the pages pile up. I surrender to distraction. I grow bored. I feel guilty about this, but I still do it, with a willingness that’s beginning to flirt with the cavalier.
I need two ingredients to stay in love enough with a book to keep reading. I am mostly talking about novels. The first is that I need there to be enough plot to pull me through. I respect postmodern metafictional hijinks. I respect the modernist fracturing of linear narrative to better reflect the multifarious and diffuse nature of consciousness, our “reality,” etc. But still I need a little bit of that what-happens-next razzle-dazzle to keep me going. I feel cheap admitting it, but it’s true.
The second ingredient, perhaps even more important than the first, is I must enjoy the sound of the writer’s voice. This is both hard to define or defend. In theory the greatest of novelists could also be the greatest of actors, channeling multiple characters’ voices within one work. Do I have to like all of them equally? No. I just have to like the general grain of the voice, the beat of it, the pulse, the groove. I am grasping toward musical analogies. Perhaps I should switch to radio. I have to pick up their frequency. The signal they’re putting out into the world has to be retrievable by my readerly antenna. I can get through a novel with a strong plot where I don’t like the prose, but it’s difficult.
While my need for plot makes me feel cheap, my need for a certain radio frequency in the prose makes me feel like a snob. Does it have to be “good writing,” beautiful sentences? Well, I mean, it helps, but that’s not it precisely. Good writing is hopelessly contextual. The writing has to have a singular voice that I can hear. I have a friend who won’t listen to certain artists because he doesn’t like their guitar tone, and I think: is it really that important? But to some people, the sound is as important as the substance, is inextricable from the substance, the overall gestalt. This makes me feel slightly better about being a prose snob, if that’s what I am.
I know it’s potentially good for me to finish novels, but if it feels like a chore while not actually being a chore, then I don’t care enough — even if everyone on Substack is talking about it. Perhaps what I am missing in my reading is sufficient peer group pressure to finish that big new novel. Maybe I really should join a book group. I try to give a book a sufficient amount of time to woo me. I try for 100 pages. That feels like enough to get the gist, the vibe, the overall type of radio station that we’re dealing with. But sometimes I just don’t dig it. I can recognize the contours of its ambition, and quite often respect that ambition, but it’s just not for me, not my thing, and there are only so many hours in the day, so many years left in this life. There are books that are a slog but their sloggyness feels worthwhile because of some combination of voice and plot and, on a much more tertiary level, literary importance. Yes, I am obliquely referring to the oeuvre of Uncle Hank.
When I do find a novel where I love the voice and the plot is snapping, and I am fully immersed in the book, it forms a congruent and beneficial atmosphere above my life that nourishes me the handful of days it takes me to finish it. There is almost no better feeling. It’s like a heightened form of being alive, while still secluded within one’s ongoing active life, carrying one’s own private Narnia around town.
Part of this is simply personal idiosyncrasy. I don’t enjoy certain flavors of ice cream. Who cares? And yet it feels reckless to express that level of personal taste with respect to literature. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: annoying as hell. The Violent Bear it Away: I prefer her stories. Paul Auster’s City of Glass: interminable. Perhaps this is all just residual collegiate guilt. I never did get that Ph.D. I never did become that Full Professor, in part because I can’t stand reading stuff I don’t actually like. I realize that part of adult life is making oneself do activities that one doesn’t actually want to do but which one needs to do for some reason. Paradoxically, my early adult failure to succeed in the career I daydreamed about has saved me from having to read a) books I don’t actually want to read and b) student writing. I accidentally freed myself from those two curses. I am no doubt more ignorant because of that refusal/loss of opportunity, but I’ve also read almost strictly for pleasure in the meantime, however I delude myself about my literariness along the way. This means that I’ve read scads of not immediately relevant prose, in terms of the floating decal that we call the Canon, or books that are currently in the discourse, or that otherwise would make me look cool to someone somewhere. For example, I’ve read almost all of the essay collections of David Mamet. Mamet is of course appropriately celebrated for his plays. Does anyone on the planet care about his essays besides me? (This is pre-Right Wing Mamet, mind you. And the plays are great, sure, but give me an obscure collection of miscellany like The Cabin and I’m in pig city.)
Sure there are books I try to read because I feel like I should read them or I am expected to have read them or they represent a blind spot in my education. Or simply books I would like to express an opinion about but feel obligated to read beforehand. I have a paperback copy of Ulysses that I visit every now and then. I do a little recreational paragraph-climbing. World enough and time I will finish it before retirement, but I’m not pushing myself. It delights me for a page, wears out its welcome by page two, bores me senseless by page three. As a sustained reading experience, it seems deliberately anti-pleasureable.
I also don’t review books anymore either. I certainly have thoughts about books, but after a while one loses the patience for homework, much less the clamor of one’s own opinions, much less fitting within the “conversation.” The intuitive reaction to a work of art can give way to the categorical impulse, which is much easier to feed than the creative impulse. All that ranking and filing. Strongly held aesthetic opinions, rigorously expressed, can become a kind of trap. One’s taste can become so refined no first draft can sift through it.
Forcing oneself to finish books that one is not really enjoying is a weird type of personal masochism. Reading becomes just another arena of shame, of wondering what the neighbors think, of — yes — even performative literacy. For the record I have never been approached by anyone as a consequence of my public reading. Just who am I performing for? I guess it’s the thesis committee that lives permanently in my head.
Currently on the nightstand, half-finished, sits Great Expectations. What kind of redneck jerkface won’t finish Great Expectations? Me, perhaps. I don’t know. It’s enjoyable enough. Pip’s relationship with Joe Gargery is terribly moving, though I’ve previously confessed I am a total wimp when it comes to that theme. But otherwise, I feel like I kind of get the outer perimeter of the experience. Do I have to sit through the whole concert? Do I have to eat this entire steak?
Maybe I’m just a hick? Or maybe my capacity for sustained attention has been degraded so much by the internet and the stupid phones that I really can’t hack it anymore. I am the tired and fat soldier of literature, needing to be kicked out of the army by some beardless, tattooed groyper, sent to clean up the house of literature. See, I am too online to even adequately condemn myself for being too online.
But then, what do I know? These thoughts too lie unfinished.
One take after another
Notes on One Battle After Another
The internet is an interconnected garden of human flourishing, and yet we all end up writing about the same things. Yes, I too have seen that new movie. I think it’s pretty good! I love a movie where stuff go boom.
And so but yes it’s true the movie has to do with revolution but it is not in itself a revolutionary movie, if we can table for a moment that I don’t know what a revolutionary movie with a $130 million budget would actually look like. Analyzed politically, the movie is quite conservative. It ends with the daughter driving off to Oakland to take part in a political demonstration, sure, but it also ends with the father and the daughter getting iPhones and snuggling into the warm couch of the techno-corporate-state surveillance apparatus, which they had previously avoided out of a justified fear of persecution. And the movie supports and ends with a reunification of the family as the comprehensible unit — as opposed to the man-made revolutionary tribe as the unit. So while revolution runs through the movie as a theme and plot device, the undercurrent is not revolutionary. Perhaps this is similar to why there aren’t any persuasive anti-war movies. There’s something fundamental to the nature of the medium: stuff blowing up looks cool, so even if the subject depicted is human brutality, and even if the characters eloquently rail against such brutality, it still looks badass when shit go boom, and that’s why even our staunchest anti-war films accidentally and inevitably make war seem kind of neat. I feel like this was an idea articulated in Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried. Yes, war is hell, but it’s also paradoxically the most exciting period in your life. There is no either/or, there is only both, always.
There’s also criticism out there that Perfidia is the most interesting character and when she walks into Mexico at the end of act one, the movie loses much of its mojo, which seems plausible. But also, this criticism springs from the desire for Paul Thomas Anderson to have directed a different type of movie, rather than evaluating the movie he actually created, which is a type of state-power thriller. All that granting the artist his donnée stuff, per Uncle Hank’s timeless advice. The Amazing Adventures of Perfidia Beverly Hills would have been an interesting movie, but an entirely different one.
That being said, I still thought Anderson did interesting things within the action thriller political drama he trapped himself inside. The chase scene at the end, in particular, was nauseous, by design. Lord knows I’ve seen enough car chases in movies to last eight lifetimes, but I’ve never had to look away because I thought I might hurl my recently scarfed peanut M&Ms.
I don’t know nearly enough Pynchon to opine about how this movie relates to his novel Vineland, from which this movie is loosely adapted. I thought the plot was fascinating, though I’ve read enough of Pynchon to know that if I cop a paperback I’m probably going to be frustrated. (I’m firmly on Team DeLillo.) But I did find the tone of the movie interestingly non-standard. That is, it was more satirical and absurd than originally perceived. I tried to go into the movie with as little forefronting of knowledge and interpretation as possible. I saw the preview a couple of weeks ago and was provoked and so I went. I couldn’t help but learn some plot-related and source-related details beforehand. Such are the tentacles of the Hollywood promotional apparatus.
To those critics who argue that Anderson portrays antifa inaccurately, I want to say: this movie is obviously a type of satire. There’s a character named Virgil Throckmorton. The antagonist is named Lockjaw and he sports a rooster-ish, flaccid, grey Mohawk. His racism mingled with repressed interracial lust is, yes, a cliché. One thinks back to American Beauty’s Col. Frank Fitts with his murderously repressed homosexual desire/homophobia for an equivalent filmic character cliché (that still sort of works). It’s too on the nose, but also that’s the point.
Despite all of this I found Sean Penn’s Lockjaw terrifying, still. Something about the veins in his neck and arms, those dilated highways of rage. There is a constipated regimental stiffness to how Lockjaw walks that is at once absurd, cartoonish, chilling, persuasive. When I watch actors I tend to sort them into persuasive or not. Can I go with them anywhere? Penn is a blunt presence, almost metallically abrasive and not someone I would ever have a beer with, but I believe in him. Also, I find Benicio del Toro utterly convincing in this role and every other role I’ve seen him in. I am able to recognize him — oh, it’s him again — while still utterly believing him as this character. This is opposed to someone like Tom Cruise, who is always so relentlessly Tom Cruise, international man of handsome.
The other satirical component I found ridiculous, but also convincing, was the bit about the Christmas Adventurers, the underground network of white collar white nationalists. The hit man they send out to dispatch the miscegenating Lockjaw is wearing a Lacoste sweater for chrissakes, a detail worthy of American Psycho. He even looks like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman.
Some people view the film as a commentary on our current situation, but I think this diminishes the film, as well as Film in general. First, it costs too much money and there are too many people involved for a film, any film, to be an editorial or extremely timely political commentary. The film is a vision, not a commentary. We turn everything into takes now, as if art were primarily concerned with telling us how to live. The movie isn’t so didactic, not so clearly explanatory, thank goodness. Sure, it’s eerily timely. Just this week they sent federal troops into Memphis, a mere 200 miles from the Land of Progress. This gesture, like so many current gestures, feels like a troll, a type of real-life shitposting. Yes, the movie deals with current political angst, but the real test will be in perhaps 15 years when one can rewatch Battle and determine if it’s still worthwhile, if its vision is independent and not contingent on the day’s latest horrors.
Finally, I admit that I am sentimental about all the fatherhood stuff in the movie — the haphazard father searching desperately for his endangered daughter. I have no aesthetic distance when these topics come up. When the tracking devices are introduced and explained early in the movie — the separate devices emit a melody when brought into close proximity with one another — I knew that this detail would recur in perfectly appropriate narrative fashion later on, like Chekhov’s pistolero. But despite being thoroughly calloused, I still had to squelch a yelp of emotion by stuffing the remaining M&Ms into my mouth when the DiCaprio father stumbles along the street at the end, his rifle in one hand, his parent tracker in the other. It starts to sing right on time. At that moment the daughter is prone on a dune with pistol raised, demanding the code words. She’s just shot the Lacoste hit man, who could not produce the appropriate code words. Now she’s demanding them from her father, who she sees but no longer trusts without the two-factor authentication of the exchanged code words, taught to her long ago by this very same father and underlined in their importance by the last several days of running from people who want her dead. At this point I had to cover my eyes, terrified she was about to shoot the father. Appropriately he doesn’t say the code words. He just says it’s me your dad until she relents. Because the code words are the currency of the political network, the tribe. There is no currency in the parent-child network. It’s just a gift economy of mutual attention and affection. (These words mean the same thing.) The father-child bond is one of instant, feral recognition, the singing of the devices. The use of those singing trackers was utterly predictable and absolutely devastatingly effective to this humble viewer. Look, I’m only human. They don’t tell you when you become a father that when they hand over your child at the hospital, freshly wiped down from the viscera of entry, that they also implant a device within your abdomen, a tracking device, and that as you move about your world and life whenever you see your child again, the device will burst into song. It doesn’t matter the occasion. Sitting in an idling car, watching bored pre-teens stumble out of the middle school, you’ll be there scanning, thinking subconsciously not my kid, not my kid, not my kid, and then suddenly there they are, and before you can even form the thought tracking device it will start singing in recognition inside you, singing endlessly, everyday until there’s no more breath left to sing — every time they come out of a school, or stomp down the stairs, or throw themselves into the backseat with a grunt, or lurch zombie-like out of a friend’s house after a sleep over, or stand around with their sequined pals before the pre-dance photo-op like so many well-dressed deer, every time you see them the device inside you will sing mine!
Maybe the actual revolution is the day when the tribe doesn’t kill the family.
Weird Al in Trickster City
He played the Saenger with Puddles Pity Party opening. Puddles is a clown. I discovered this when walking into the theater. Puddles is extremely tall, white-faced, tiny-hatted, with a white clown outfit with black fuzzies on front. Many people get weirded out by clowns but not me. His set consisted mostly of him singing to backing tracks while silent video clips played behind him. Despite that unpromising description, he was excellent. That clown can sing, and his song selection was fascinating. For example, he sang “Come on Up to the House,” a Tom Waits song, somewhat recently covered by Sarah Jarosz. (That’s how I came to the tune. I do it on gigs, for those keeping score.) As soon as he went into the first line, “Well the moon is broken and the sky is cracked,” I wanted to clutch the arms of my sidecar seatmates. He did it appropriately slow, not dirge-slow, but somber, a resigned-and-pleading slow, as appropriate to the gist of the tune. Are all good pop songs subterraneanly religious? Discuss.
I am sentimental about live music performance in general, but I found myself almost getting teary during this performance. I love the song, sure. But also the spirit of the song sang through the surreal performance. It made me think, not for the first time, that good songs are themselves trickster figures, shape-shifting through the culture, able and available to wear all kinds of formal outfits, to hum through all kinds of noise and still be heard. Or maybe I was just in a mood.
He also sang “My Heart Will Go On,” the world-destroying Celine Dion hit from Titanic, a song that I had surgically removed from my brain many years ago. Like a bad part of town, it’s a place I don’t want to go. But yes, even this was effective under the circumstances. During his set, the screen behind Puddles silently played different clips from various Kevin Costner movies. After the third song and third Costner-related movie, a pattern had been established. This culminated with “Heart,” where all the clips were intermingled into an ongoing Costner montage, so that Puddles was singing to Costner. It was such a strange mixing of registers, even if they all flowed from the pop cultural stream of the last thirty years. It felt strange without being deliberately weird, if that makes sense, and funnier because of it. I didn’t realize Costner had been in so many movies. (Bull Durham is still the best movie ever made.)
And yes, I even found myself moved by “Heart.” The operatic emotional overdoneness of it was still there, obviously, but it was leavened by the Costner bits, and by the fact that it was being sung by a clown. So of course it was ridiculous. Its ridiculousness was painted on its face, as it were, but despite the forefronting of ridiculousness or because of this forefronting, the actual song shone through, shorn of its kitsch trappings. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what we call kitsch is actually buried genius, that it takes a kernel of genius to produce kitsch in the first place, and that the Puddles performance re-kitschified the song, or added so much more deliberate kitsch to the mix that the kernel burst forth, through all the intervening corn stalk irony so that one could feel (or I could feel) the transient genius of the tune before the lights dimmed and we were all enclosed again in our protective layers.
Then Weird Al came on stage and the ship exploded.