All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Later Capitalism: A note on Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’

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This is not a review. Please go elsewhere for more rigorous evaluation. Instead, I am still struck by two problems a year and a half after reading and enjoying All Fours.

First, background: All Fours is the second novel by writer, artist, filmmaker Miranda July, which was published in 2024. I had been aware of July for years but never read her work or seen her films. Aside from her multimedia proficiency, she retains a genius for publicity. However, I never got around to doing the reading in part because of my allergy to wide-eyed whimsy, which seemed to me at the time to be the primary mode of July’s work.

Time passed and then I bought All Fours in an airport bookstore in Orlando, Florida, of all places. I found it quite good: funny, persuasive in its protagonist’s artistic and marital desperation, and productively frank in sexual matters that actually explored new metaphorical ground. Is it the first great, serious novel of perimenopause?

Parasocial note: since publication, July has begun a Substack where she chronicles her life as a newly non-married mother and sexual free agent, much in the way of the narrator of All Fours. I am hopelessly bored by ferreting out autobiographical connections between works of purported fiction and an author’s real life. However, post publication there were several trend pieces hailing the novel as an inspiration for perimenopausal women in various stages of bourgeois coupledom to “blow up their marriages.” The Substack functions as a coda to this parasocial connection and trend, which seems a bit cringe, as the kids say.

But back to the work. My first problem is money. How does the narrator make money? I know that she takes her trip, which ends at the motel where the first half of the novel takes place, using twenty grand she earns licensing a snippet of her writing to a whiskey company. But what about for the rest of the novel before she sells the book within the book at the end? I know that she’s married to Harris, a record producer, and while the decoupling from Harris is clear on the sexual consequences of the loosening of their marital obligations, it’s blurry on the economic consequences. Basically, who’s paying for what? I don’t disagree with the narrator’s groovy lifestyle. As mentioned above, I found her desperation, her frustration, her hunger entirely believable. But the novel ignores the money question as the plot progresses and is weaker for it. It never talks about the mortgage.

I’m not trying to be hopelessly middle-aged here, but it seems to me that modern marriage is a thick stew of interdependent obligations; it ain’t just about the libido. There is the mutual care-taking aspect, which of course accelerates as partners age. But even in a healthy middle-aged marriage, there is a division of labor, even if it’s not as rigidly gendered as in previous eras. What also strikes me is how un-jealous the narrator seems to be when Harris quickly and efficiently couples with a new lady and replicates a type of bourgeois hetero stability. I realize that the narrator’s desires have changed, but I don’t think that precludes becoming insanely jealous and wildly lonely — suddenly sentenced to one’s own self-reliance. The break up is very, very clean. And I just don’t quite believe it, even in liberated Berkley, California.

And then still the money, the mutual financial support, the who’s-paying-for-the-school-field-trip, the itemized deductions of family life. What’s Harris still paying for? And what does Harris’s new long-term girlfriend think of what Harris is still paying for?

To be sure, all of this mess would result in a wildly different novel, but it’s these amputated tentacles of complication that send out phantom questions through the second half of the book. No novel can be about everything, but the vision can sometimes narrow too aggressively and become too rosy.

Which brings me to the ending. The book goes on too long. We witness the narrator’s liberation and artistic rebirth, and then after that circle is completed, we accompany her on a trip to New York for her book tour, where she sees Davey one last time performing a duo dance performance, evidence of his artistic rebirth. I don’t think we need this in terms of feeling like the story has been completed. (Its true ending is on p. 310.) Also, it leads to a long descriptive scene of the dance performance, which seems to represent in movement the dual rebirth of both Davey and the narrator as artists, which is neat metaphorically, but is unconvincing to read. Or at least it was unconvincing to this reader. It’s hard to make a long passage of dance interesting in prose. I admit that I think dance, as an artform, is mostly overrated. (Sorry, dancers! I know y’all are working hard.) But trying to capture the import of this moment for Davey and the narrator is supremely difficult. July’s least persuasive scene is the one at the very end of the novel.

And then, our narrator walks out of the venue and strolls off into the sunset. Here is the ending:

“Gratitude came like a punch in the gut and because it’s always such a relief not to be an asshole after all, tears streamed down my cheeks. The person sitting net to me was also wet-faced and we smiled a little bashfully at each other because ecstasy has a kind of built-in ridiculousness. And it wasn’t just us. I looked out at the the circle of faces and saw that every single audience member was going through some version of my revelation, some reckoning with the self they had been carrying around until now. I had not even been the only one knotted in miserly pain; that was part of the ride. Resistance, then giving in. [Davey] was no longer ascending; he reached the apex and quickly fell.

Outside it was early evening. There was plenty of time. I decided to walk.

The sun was just beginning to set.

Golden light everywhere.”

The golden light imagery echoes the color in the room during the dance performance, which itself harkens back to the re-designed motel room that was the site of the narrator and Davey’s almost affair, and more important, the site of the womb-like cave she created and guards and is reborn within. The discovery, here at the end of the novel during Davey’s performance, is that the womb-room can be expanded, and its feeling of innocence and potential can spread everywhere — “gilding the whole neighborhood, the whole city.”

So the narrator is walking off into the sunset, yes, but also into this multiplied potential universal benevolence, and my problem is that life is not like that. At some point wishful thinking slides into delusion. This is one of those lapses in taste or authorial judgment that calls into question the entire aesthetic success of the proceeding 321 pages. Even the writing goes slack here: “punch in the gut”? “Tears streamed”? And everyone in the room is having some kind of dance-triggered epiphany? It’s really that good? Really? Far be it from me to suggest that man’s fundamental nature is one of intractable misunderstanding and loneliness, broken only briefly via found moments of harmony, but I could use a little more adult-level irony here. Cue the “there’s nothing like New York in the spring” clip from 30 Rock.

What actually happens next in the world of the novel is that the narrator has to keep on living, and living — as this novel has successfully taught us — only grows exponentially more complicated. The sunset is a bankrupt gesture that turns the novel into a fantasy, turns it into a cartoon. And the rest of the novel is many things, but despite July’s own sometimes too-wide eyes, it isn’t a cartoon.

Old people shouldn’t text

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“Yes, but when do you become old?” My friend said this as soon as I uttered my headline above. Usually he just rolls his eyes at my proclamations. 

But here me out: I’ve told my kids there will come a day in the hopefully distant future when they will need to sit me down and say, “Dad, it’s really dangerous out there, and it’s time that we took some of your privileges away. This is for your own good and the well-being of perfect strangers.” Of course I am talking about my car keys. This prophylactic move is itself an outdated gesture, since everyone driving now has half an eye on the road and the rest of their eyes on their devices, so that even a legally blind but fully committed driver is probably safer, actuarially speaking. But now I might have to have the same conversation with them about my phone, specifically its ability to receive and send texts to large groups of people. 

Basically, it’s too fast. There is not enough friction, physical or monetary. It’s too easy to send out decontextualized language to your friends and family and internet friends and probable strangers. I’m not really talking about the unconsciously racist uncle post, though sure, that too. The whole problem with frictionless near-instant global communication is that people have terrible thoughts, expressed terribly, encountered at the worst possible time. It’s the future! 

What I mean is simpler: at some point, texting should be disabled on old people’s phones. For the sake of this idea, old people are defined as people much older than me. You know ’em when you see ’em. The technology is too powerful, like using a light saber to floss your teeth. It’s barely wielded safely by the youths out there. It’s no wonder those of us post-30 are endangered by these devices. 

This is most easily witnessed in the group chat, the noise rock of modern networked communication. The first problem with the group chat is that it’s bad qua communication. I don’t need seventeen thumbs-up emojis to clock everyone’s agreement. Text is faster than a phone call, but then it leaves all this shrapnel in its wake. And then someone wakes up and responds as if the chat is a one-to-one communication and the jokes go sideways fast. Or worst offense: the responder starts riffing unknowingly on another person in the chat. A group chat can be a wonderful thing. But negotiating the rhetorical demands of the chat can be like trying to pull an eyelash out of a drawer full of knives. When I am compelled to respond to large group chats, my answers are fully denuded of flair, a single Y or N to questions, as if I had actually fulfilled that promise to myself and gone back to flip phone land. It’s like throwing a party; if you didn’t write up the guest list, you don’t really know who’s there. Proceed accordingly.

A young person’s response to an older person sounding off unawares in the group chat tends to take two silent directions. First, there is the Michael Jackson-eating-popcorn-gif response. I wish I were this mature and/or callous. The second response, my response, is to emotionally absorb and project all the potential social ramifications of this faux pas, which when given the number of group chats that I am in — even as a non-popular person who is not young — generates a lot of psychic stress. Call it something catchy like “emotional labor.”

And honestly, maybe that’s the real problem. Maybe the old person who needs to have his texting taken away is me. I am mostly okay with the sending of the texts. But receiving them wears me out. It’s just so much language. And there is no hierarchy to it. Reminders from my dentist come at the same emotional volume as kid school notifications or cries for help from family members. There’s a riot in my pocket, and I’m terrible at prioritizing. 

Have you thought about turning off your notifications? Yes, thank you, I have. The only notifications I receive are calls or texts. The people who allow notifications from anything else strike me as bent, or just much stronger than I will ever be. I’ve even silenced my phone completely, so that texts only vibrate, which has lead to missing actually important communication, thus strengthening my already substantial paranoia about giving and receiving and missing all types of messages. All networked communication has the seasick whir of the slot machine: the next one could always be big money.  

Perhaps the problem is similar to my email problem: I can’t stand to see any number of unread messages. I have to clear them out. I remember in the third grade when we got mailboxes at school and the utter thrill of discovering I had notes to read. It’s the same feeling, now split across actual physical mail (always junk), personal email (almost always junk), work email (90% junk, 5% need-to-know, and 5% act-on-immediately), and texts (5% junk, 30% unnecessary responses, 54% memes, 10% logistical negotiations, and 1% emergencies). Phone calls are now almost exclusively the arena of situations that need immediate attention. My family has been conditioned by my personality, so that when they call me their first words are “Don’t panic. I’m alright.” They don’t even say hello. In their defense, neither do I. My first words are “What’s wrong?” 

There are doldrums during the week when I don’t get texts, and then I find myself lonely and bored, and I start texting people, just to gin up some conversation. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t get quite enough texts. If I got a little bit more, there would be too many for me to deal with, and my need to liquify that little red bubble would wear down out of exhaustion. I often have the same idea regarding travel. I travel just enough to see how terrible I am at travel. But if I travelled more, then I would streamline. Or I should stop travelling altogether and go in peace. 

Which is what I think of texting. Perhaps I am the old person. Perhaps I am on the cusp of talking trash about someone on a group chat accidentally and hurting people’s feelings. Perhaps my kids should knock my phone out of my hand. I know that I don’t need all this communication to function in the world, but once it’s available, once it becomes a habit of communication, it’s difficult to imagine life without it. It feels like missing out, because it is missing out. The constant parsing of overwhelming noise is the bounty of a full and active life. If it’s too loud, you’re too old.

On William Langewiesche

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I suppose hearing about your heroes dying is just a part of growing older, but I don’t like it one goddamned bit. 

This feeling is prompted by news of the recent death of William Langewiesche at 70 from prostate cancer. Langewiesche was known for his reportage in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in the 90s. As a former pilot he wrote frequently about airplane crashes, and more generally about disasters that were somehow the result of human ingenuity, technology, and hubris. I don’t know how to pronounce his name either. 

I first read Langewiesche in a graduate school creative nonfiction workshop. The book was Sahara Unveiled. The bit that got me was when Langewiesche is stranded in the Sahara, and slowly interweaves his predicament with a methodical explanation of how people die in the desert. At what point do they start drinking their own urine? Etc. The prose is in the Hemingway vein, focused on concrete and physical particulars, withheld emotion, friction and complexity created by juxtaposition. We aren’t ever directly informed of Langewiesche’s feelings, but we still have feelings reading him. He invokes them rather than performs them. 

Langewiesche became one of those writers whose essays I’d stalk in the newstands, and a summer or so later, when his long articles about the post-9/11 cleanup of the World Trade Center appeared, I would greedily consume each installment as soon as it became available. That was one of those fortuitous intersections of modern journalism and my tastes at the time. I didn’t know I wanted to read thousands of words about how to clean up the destruction from that event, but once Langewiesche’s first article came out, I couldn’t envision anyone better for the task.

I still have those Atlantic issues somewhere in my files. Those essays, which eventually became the book American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, were some of the key texts for me in those grad-school years after 9/11 — bits of nonfiction that were written almost immediately after the attacks and stuck with me. The others were “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in Rolling Stone, and a paragraph from Susan Sontag, which appeared in a round robin of regular writers in the New Yorker immediately after the attacks. Sontag notoriously wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” 

She was vilified for this paragraph, and this game of mutual provocation, the endless pickle ball tournament of statement and mock outrage counterstatement, was my introduction to the world of American discourse. It’s been downhill ever since for mutual understanding and my mental health. I’d read Against Interpretation the year before and felt like a gigantic redneck, but not an uninterested redneck. That is, I didn’t feel stupid, like I did whenever I tried to read, for instance, Foucault or Derrida; I just felt uncultured, like I was living way out in the sticks. The next book of hers I read was On Photography, which I adored, and from which I quoted sloppily for the rest of grad school. I did not get invited to many parties. 

I admired Wallace’s writing so much that I now regard his influence as a kind of persistent infection, latent but always ready to strike if I don’t watch my diet. I still have his issue of the Atlantic, too.

Obviously these three writers are quite different. I can only imagine their awkward dinner conversation, or the MFA thesis defense where they all sit stiffly on the same couch. They would never hang out together. They would smirk at the mention of the others’ names. And yet they each presented viable modes, worthy models. Langewiesche was exemplary of a certain tradition. He presented a way to be a masculine writer that wasn’t chauvinistic or corny or deliberately retrograde. It feels weird talking about this in hyper-enlightened 2025, but these feelings existed then. One could argue that the Hemingway mode, both the prose and the attitude it embodied, moved from American short fiction into nonfiction reportage — the male figure caught in extremis, a kind of staged adventure. The masculine tendency to get oneself into physical scrapes, often involving the wilderness or complex machinery, or if one’s lucky both, moved almost entirely into the journalism-adjacent slick magazine-financed world in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 80s you had your Raymond Carvers, your Richard Fords. Then came your Tom Bissells, your Wells Towers. Your Hampton Sides and your John Jeremiah Sullivans. All these dudes had great names. This manly short story to slick magazine reportage crossover enabled not just some financial stability, but also an escape hatch from the self-awareness constraints that plagued ambitious contemporary American fiction. That is, everyone knew fiction was artificial, a barker tent full of scams and devices and tricks. It was clearly emotionally and intellectually manipulative. But that conceptual baggage did not exist for narrative nonfiction, at least not back then. Postscript: these dudes now just write for TV. Man’s gotta eat. 

All of which is to say that Langewiesche represented a distinct path, clearly allied with a tradition while not trapped inside its castle. He discovered new places, and drug them back to us with his sentences. I will miss them. 

Product Review: The Manhasset Music Stand

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Manhasset. The name itself comes from primordial America. It’s like something chanted out of Whitman. I could attempt to provide a potted history of the Manhasset corporation, but you’ve got Wikipedia, and besides, that stuff is boring. 

Suffice to say, if you’ve been in a school concert band program within the past 50 years, you have encountered the Manhasset. It is the black metal music stand of your dreams and/or nightmares, timeless, perfected, the music stand in its ideal form, the standard by which all others are measured. It’s the Nike of music stands. It’s so ubiquitous and quietly functional that you’ve probably not even noticed the name, an aboriginal utterance quietly embossed on its surface. 

I have owned two Manhassets in my life. The first was somehow lifted from the school bandhall and followed me through life until shortly after the pandemic, when it lost its ability to maintain its rigor when telescoped out. It especially lost the ability to hold the thick three-ring binders I preferred at that point in my semi-pro, AA-ball type music side career. I rescued this ambiguously stolen object from my parents house when I moved back home and started to cart it around to gigs. Up until its failure due to age, it succeeded at its primary task, though it was a beast to transport. This mostly comes from its heavy metal construction. It’s not a single piece of molded metal but it presents that way. The tripartite base is particularly claw-like and dangerous to car interiors, unprotected ankles, and smaller petlife. It doesn’t collapse. It doesn’t have a case. It’s a belligerent metal sculpture. You have to adapt to it. 

But because of its somewhat destructive presence in my car, I started down the consumerist road of collapsible or foldable or otherwise more easily transportable music stands. This is one of Satan’s rabbit holes. If the Manhasset is the music stand perfected, all of the more easily transportable music stands are essentially garbage, if we define garbage as that which fails at its primary task and also quickly breaks. One might actually be grateful for the quick and easy breakage of these stands given how terrible they are, but still, frustrating. 

The worst offender here is the kind where the platform that ostensibly holds the sheet music itself folds up like a kind of fan. The construction is flimsy. What gives out before anything is the gripability of the various wing nuts. I have been told that I am a bit too aggressive with my bolt/nut/pickle jar tightening. This comes from being the child of a drummer, where the Grip of Death is the one true path. But even if I’m being rather gentle, they just don’t hold up to any serious tightening over time. And then there is the music platform itself, which somehow fails at holding single sheets of music as well as binders or anything with any kind of heft. Plus if you sneeze in their direction the whole thing comes crashing down. I’ve seen child-made Lego contraptions with more structural integrity than these things. 

After going through more than one, each time getting more and more robust in my purchases, I have settled on a two-part music stand, where the music sheet platform itself is one solid piece of detachable metal. This allows the base itself to be a larger metal tube tripod to support that weight. It’s more robust all around, and so far I have not broken it. But it barely satisfies my transportation needs. True, since the base is a foldable tripod I’m not sending dachshunds to the pet ER anymore, but now it’s the metal platter, like an alien TV tray, lying in wait to maim. I’ve got a scar still on my ankle from a midnight tumble. Also, as the platter falls it doesn’t just dent but seems to sharpen, so I’m inadvertently creating a kind of postmodern, primitive weapon. The shield that cuts. 

I got a second Manhasset to keep at the house. There’s nothing as satisfying as its quiet mastery of the simple act of holding sheet music where you can read it. It’s as good as the old one, though I do notice that the metal is not as heavy. It’s somehow less dense. I’ve heard people complain (okay, old dudes) that the metal used today in products is not the same quality as “old metal.” I usually disregard this. Obviously there is some metaphorical narcissism happening. Plus I don’t really care. If the metal has changed, there’s probably a reason. For instance, they don’t finish guitars with nitrocellulose lacquer anymore. The guitar companies use polyurethane. Of course all the old dudes like the old way, because it looks cooler, it ages in ways we like, and the wood sounds better. It — ahem — breathes better. Is this last part BS? Probably. Unverifiable nostalgia, the worst kind. I’m not trying to be that way with respect to Manhasset metal, but it does feel different, less grandfatherly strong, more like millennial strong. But it works. And nothing quite stays the same, despite our wishes. Perhaps this means it wouldn’t tear up the inside of my car as aggressively, but I’m not willing to try it out. I’ll keep my modern sculpture inside the house, thank you. 

The days of wine and roses

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In general I find the “Days” that cycle through the calendar to be overwrought, commercialized, too much but not enough. Along with occasions for commerce and brunch, they seem to be occasions for disappointment. If you love someone, nothing you do on Valentine’s Day will ever be commensurate with that love. Likewise, if you appreciate your mother or your father, no amount of cards ever does them justice. Perhaps the notion of doing justice, that kind of rigorous accounting, is a foolish idea. I shouldn’t be so literal. It’s the gesture that’s important. It’s a synecdoche for all that gratitude, a gesture toward their storm of support and devotion, roiling constantly over the plains. 

For the record, I do still give and receive cards and flowers, etc. I am not that much of a bummer. I’m just working through some ideas. 

Parenthood is one of those totalizing experiences that’s hard to appreciate until you’ve entered it, and even then it’s mystifying. All my pre-parenthood thoughts on what it must be like seem inadequate for the actual lived experience, its mixture of obligation and emotion. The grip and slog of it, Raymond Carver called it. “Slog” is a little harsh and doesn’t apply universally, except for perhaps daily school lunch prep. I imagine that parenthood is like war; you don’t know what it’s like, and how you’ll handle it, until you’re actually in it. I say this as someone who has never served in war, would likely draft dodge as fast as humanly possible, and failing this, get shot within a half an hour of combat. Welcome home, kids!

There are two pertinent parenthood related statements that I think are useful to keep in mind. The first is from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series, here rendered in project-appropriate all caps: 

FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE

I didn’t read this statement until I was already a father of several years, and I was chastened. It’s one of those statements I’ve thought of Sharpieing onto my forearm for daily reference. 

My internet friend Tom MacWright has created a site where you can download these Truisms to use as iPhone backgrounds. Plus, it’s a great resource to scroll through Holzer’s series of provocative statements. 

The second statement was something I overheard. I don’t remember the source. “What all parents want for their children is safety and happiness — in that order.”

I repeat this to my children often. I don’t mean to imply that all parent/child conflict springs from this chronology, but it’s surely the source of most of it. 

Finally, you’re a parent every day. It’s nice to have a day of rest and relaxation, of communal appreciation, but the condition is permanent. There are no days off. That’s what makes it so difficult, so different. What constitutes actual good parenting or bad parenting is too diffuse and complicated to think about here, and besides, everyone’s family is different. What strikes some people as charmingly eccentric might strike me as threateningly unstable. In between the peaks and valleys, the manias and doldrums, is the glue of the mundane, footsteps through the hall, how one comes into the house after work, the emotional temperature of the soccer commute, humming in the kitchen, the homework of domesticity. Like glue, it’s invisible when dry, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, holding everything together. I feel — at least today I feel — that this glue is what truly defines parenthood, in both directions, coming and going.

That’s the other bit about becoming a parent: you step into the river.

Are these statements a kind of advice? I’m afraid so. I am a father after all. If you talk with me long enough, even if you’re a grown-up stranger, I’ll nudge a plate of vegetables in your direction and check the reliability of your seatbelt. See, once you cross over, there’s no going back. 

How to use a microphone

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First, speak into the microphone. Don’t speak in the general neighborhood of the microphone. Get up on that thing. Eat the microphone. It is not a snake. Yes, true, there is a phenomenon called the “proximity effect” so that when you get closer to the microphone there is more bass to whatever is going into the microphone, but this is higher math and not our concern. Perhaps it’s because I sound like a tin can when I talk/sing, but I always enjoy the proximity effect. I need it. I relish it. But still, if this is something you’re worried about, then you’re a more advanced student. Proceed to the honors class and let us know how you did on that AP exam at the end of the year. 

The reason that you want to get up on that thing is because it’s a lot easier to amplify a strong signal. It’s a matter of how strong the signal is going in, how high the gain is set on the microphone, and how loud the volume is leaving the mains. I realize I am mixing some terms here so I will try to clarify. The signal here is your voice, duh. Gain is a concept I don’t fully understand, still at this late date, but the best way I know how to describe it is the hotness of the front end. How hot the mic is, basically. The trick is to use as much gain as you can stand before feedback, a term we will address momentarily. Volume is just volume, but the sound coming out the back end, or the true end, or the speakers pointed to the audience. These are your “mains” in your public address system. And that leads me to . . . 

Figure out where the sound is coming out. There is going to be at least one place where the sound of your voice comes out, the primary speaker or speakers that point at the audience, those mains mentioned above. It helps to know where the sound is coming out because you need to listen to your voice as it’s amplified, because it’s going to change. It’s going to sound different at the other end of the portal. One key lesson is that whenever you amplify an acoustic phenomenon, its attributes change. Sorry. It’s a pain but this is reality. An acoustic guitar is a good example. Amplify it how you will, a magnetic soundhole pickup, a piezo bridgeplate transducer, a Neumann KM84 at the neck joint, it’s not going to sound the same out front. It might sound better! But probably not. Sure, there are people on the internet who have the solution, which they will sell you or at least lecture you about in the comments. More power to them. I am going to grant their expertise, but they ain’t on my gig and are of little use to me when the sweat hits. 

The other place your voice could be coming out, depending on the circumstances, is through one or more of the monitors. These exist so that you can hear yourself better. A couple of my favs rather famously don’t use monitors (Leo Kottke, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings). You only need enough monitor to hear yourself. There is a whole internet cult out there of in-ear monitors — headphones, basically — but I treat these people like Scientologists. They are advanced and evangelical, and I am just a poor lapsed protestant from the south and thus sticking to the old-fashioned brimstone I understand. 

Have a soundcheck. If you’re giving a speech, you probably don’t have time for an actual sound check, so instead use a word or phrase. “Good evening” is a good one. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Don’t say, “Is this thing on?” Don’t be a goober. Don’t slap the mic. Don’t say “testing” if you aren’t literally doing a pre-show sound check test. Just say something innocuously introductory and if you can’t hear yourself or if people can’t hear you, it will become apparent. Adjust accordingly. See above re speaking into the mic. But the point is to listen to how you sound as an amplified voice. Taste that cake you’re baking. 

Stay behind the mains. General audio reinforcement ignorance and cheeseball preachers everywhere have convinced innocent everyday people that when speaking into a microphone they can walk anywhere they want with impunity. This is a mistake. That speaker is somewhere, and you need to know where it is. This is also brought about by the invention of the wireless and/or headset microphone. Like automatically dispensing paper towels in the airport, these seem like a good idea, but they don’t work. They just make a mess of everything. Stay behind the podium where you belong. Get your steps in some other way.

Understand feedback. It’s not something you get in your one-on-one. It’s not something you get from your therapist or your partner. I hate how “feedback” has gone from the audio sphere to the interpersonal relationship sphere because now no one knows what it actually is, so when the squealing starts everyone acts all surprised. Feedback is when the signal (your voice, that guitar chord, whatever) comes out of one of the speakers and gets back into the microphone. The portal forms a loop; the sound feeds back into the transducer. It’s when sound becomes postmodern, when it becomes recursive, when the mold starts growing on mold, and what it sounds like often is a high-pitched industrial keening and everyone in the audience immediately clutches their ears and assumes the tornado position. 

True, there are many different types of feedback and some can be musical, but I am not Hendrix and neither are you, and besides we’re talking about microphones, and feedback here is not your friend. When it feeds back it means you’re too loud. So the question is where are you too loud and what speaker is getting frisky with the microphones. This is why you only need your monitors loud enough so that you can hear yourself clearly, not so the grandparents three blocks away can hear you, and it’s why you need your mains to be in front of the microphones. 

Practice what you are going to say. My minimal but still valuable experience suggests that there is no such thing in life as improvisation; it’s all just accrued practice. If it’s difficult to speak extemporaneously to a small group of close friends, it’s even more so in a roomful of slightly inebriated strangers. Have a plan. Practice what you’re going to say. Remember that brevity is your friend. Everyone you’ve ever seen who talked into a microphone and sounded spontaneous and at ease practiced that speech beforehand. I realize it’s tedious, but it’s the only move that works. No amount of positive visualization will suffice. Actually say out loud what you plan to say later on the mic. Do it more than once. No one is born just knowing how to do a backflip. 

The other thing is that a microphone amplifies more than just the volume of your voice. Any hesitation, stutter, lisp, gargle, bungled word, mispronounced name, voice crack, vocal fry, tongue tie, sudden loss of vocabulary, spontaneous stormfront of uncertainty — any type of friction, like the smallest loose grains of spilt salt on a granite countertop, become magnified in that microphone. Plus your own voice sounds weird. Who is this hick overhead? It’s you, friend. 

People get weird on microphones. There is the kind of person, often drunk, who thinks they are god’s gift to microphones, and if they get on one during or after your gig, say a prayer and cut the power. These people often curse on the mic. It’s my conservative belief that unless you are a stand-up comedian doing a show where people have paid to hear you talk, don’t curse on the microphone. It’s not that I disagree with cursing, I enjoy a well-deployed profanity, it’s that it doesn’t work. It’s not usually effective as a means of emphasis. It’s like lighting a candle with a bazooka. But everyone attempts it now. Just last week I was playing a birthday party and some dude got on the mic to give a toast and out came the big ducks. Fellas, no one wants to hear you strain like that. 

And ladies, no one wants to hear you scream. Or, if you prefer, go wooo!

What is this thing called lunch?

essays, ,

I am in an abusive relationship with a food truck. Okay, that’s not completely true. It’s not fully abusive. I don’t want to cheapen that word, but what is it when you are in a relationship, and you have a good thing going, and the food truck simply will not text you back? What is going on with the food truck? Doesn’t the food truck recognize that you have something special? 

I am of course referring to the El Peyo food truck that exists sometimes at the entrance of a decommissioned car wash behind the Valero gas station, approximately two klicks from my office. At some point in T’s relentless campaign of doom he warned that if Biden got elected we would have food trucks on every corner. I am still awaiting that horrible, wonderful prediction. 

First, some service journalism: if you’re driving through the Land of Progress and need the specific intersection of said food truck, hit me up. 

Moving on, the food is wonderful. Obviously? Twelve dollars and the best burrito in town since that place next to the Mazda dealership closed. What makes this burrito special is that they fry it just a little bit after wrapping everything up in its little portable poncho, so that the exterior gets wonderfully crisp. This is combined with their sinus-clearing orange salsa and a little side of sliced cucumbers. So innocent! So refreshing! 

But they’re not always there. After becoming slightly infatuated (I am not obsessed), I have finally learned that they aren’t there on Mondays. Fine. My doctor says I need a burrito break anyway. But sometimes they aren’t there on Tuesdays. And then, one day they weren’t there on a Friday, and then last Wednesday evening when I drove by on a lark because the kids were gone and I needed a quick bite, so why not treat myself? Not there. The unpredictability is what makes it so psychologically damaging. Sometimes they are there and open, and it’s wonderful, but randomly they are not, and I am left to U-turn in the parking lot and come up with a Plan B, which is another word for disappointment. I suppose I could just ask them when they’re open and when they’re not, if there is any kind of schedule, but that seems pushy, and when they are open, we have such a lovely time. I pay in cash and they call me “boss.” One lesson of middle age is that I love it when strangers, out of a sense of politeness or joie de vivre, call me “boss.” I had a lady call me “sugar” last week for no reason at all. I mean, I was about to buy a pizza, but “sir” or “mister” or “jackass” or whatever would have been fine. But sugar? Good lord. I would have changed that lady’s tires.

This reminds me of the classic “hon,” which is how the waitresses at the Elite often addressed customers. The Elite was itself a classic Land of Progress restaurant downtown, now closed and boarded up, another victim of the progress. Back in the glory days men would line up on the street in their shirt sleeves to get at those rolls. Sometimes a change is not an improvement. 

Plus I think part of the problem is that the food truck isn’t simply closed. Shut. Whatever. It’s that the black-paneled trailer is completely gone. But you have to pull into the Valero gas station and wheel around the dispensers to discover that it’s not there. There’s only the pitiful remnants of the car wash and the reticulated tracks that lead your car inside, Pied Piper-like, rusted from disuse. 

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day but lunch is the happiest. I live for lunch. I’ve already done a few hours of work. I have somewhat justified my existence. The kids are off at school. I am free briefly to pig out. And it comes without the theatrical complications of dinner. Dinner has to be made, or chosen, or you have to go to the restaurant and sit through the tiresome theater of it all. Dinner is work. Lunch is a holiday. Dinner is marriage. Lunch is a fling. I can have lunch with a friend, or I can go solo and try to catch up on all these goddamned Substacks. I can read my Henry James or listen to a podcast. Note: the burrito obsession does not comport well with Henry James. 

There are no drinks at lunch, no appetizers to decision tree, no dessert foolishness. If it’s quick, fine. Sometimes I have to get back to work. Sometimes my lunch buddy has other stuff to do. Sometimes it goes long, it’s a Friday, we’re playing hooky, we can lounge on the patio and make fun of the pick-up trucks. Dinner is getting everyone fed, but lunch is civilization. For a while whenever I proposed going to lunch with a friend I did it with the name of some jazz standard, but I would substitute the word “lunch” for “love.” So a friend would get texts such as: 

A lunch supreme? 
I can give you anything but lunch? 
There is no greater lunch? 
I fall in lunch too easily? 

This began as a way to be a smart ass over text. For some reason it pains me to communicate straight. But as time went on and I ran out of standards I realized I did find lunch to be a form of love, comradeship, communion, the mutual breaking of bread, pick your Platonic euphemism. But of course, we don’t acknowledge that. If we did, it would break the spell. It’s nothing special. It’s just lunch. The important exchanges are like turtles, startled into the creek if confronted head on. We must lunch with our gaze averted. 

Now I’m hungry. But it’s a Monday, and I know my lover isn’t there.

Does the short story live in disguise?

literary lint, short stories, ,

The Republic of Letters published two pieces this week about the short story. In the first, Clancy Steadwell argues that Substack is the perfect environment for the short story to thrive and even grow in popularity. I appreciate his optimism but I found it naive. Writers have been arguing my whole life that “now” is the true moment for the short story because of shorter attention spans. This seems to be wishful thinking.

In the second, Naomi Kanakia argues that the short story is a dead form, and if you see any leftover zombie tales wandering around the internet or your bookshelf, you should promptly kill them. Her essay bothered me so much I spat out a little contradictory Substack note:

Everyone’s worried about AI, but this right here is actual artificial intelligence: trolling in place of argument, “vibes” instead of thinking. At least B.R. Myers, in his Atlantic screeds of yesteryear, had the decency to quote from the writing he was disparaging. The corrosive populist spite on display here is stunning. It seeps into the argumentative gears, and the whole engine of coherence breaks down.

It’s essentially arguing that the only art forms that should exist are the ones that are currently popular and can fund themselves. In effect, there should be no more ballet classes for the kiddos out there, because ballet isn’t a popular activity anymore and I don’t like it. And it shouldn’t be included in university education anymore either because that’s a waste of good old taxpayer money. God forbid the institutions that were built to study and preserve all the valuable stuff that the dead people made actually devote one little basement office somewhere to let the currently alive students make art themselves.

There’s an interesting idea in here — that the short story lives in disguise, that we are surrounded by short narratives but they are presented without the costuming of the traditional short story, whatever that actually is. But along the way Kanakia walks around the block to kick the shins of The Missouri Review. What? Yeah, Speer Morgan was just cackling to himself on his way to the bank for all those years. Fleecing the American people with short fiction! Those rubes, who thought they were supporting art. And those chump kids, who believed in it.

There’s more to say here, but in a calmer register. Kanakia recommends the advice letters in Slate as more rewarding literature than the “literary short story.” Her argument is that these letters are most likely actually fictional, and that we are surrounded by short narratives that are truly popular and are not shackled by the chains of tradition and obsolescent gesture.

I agree with her that we are surrounded by short narratives, but it’s much more complicated than she lets on. I take her point that many of them are likely fictional or at least highly embellished. I think there’s an important distinction between writing that is presented to be rigorously factual, writing that is presented to be completely fictional, and a sort of gray area, a demilitarized zone of Tall Tales, which all the adults can admit that there’s a perhaps a little bit of editorial fibbing occurring. I’m not totally naive. Also, it’s worth noting that Slate, as a going concern, seems to survive on this chum-like content, faux-confession exploitation. At some point it turned into a site that primarily consists of advice letters and sex tips.

I would argue that the reader approaches a non-fictional piece differently than a fictional piece. For instance, you watch a movie to empathize with the characters; you watch a reality show in order to judge the characters. Even if you understand that a reality show is highly edited and manipulated, there is something about the people presenting themselves as themselves that invites judgment rather than empathy. I don’t know why that is. Phoebe Maltz Bovy has written eloquently on this question.

So while the advice letters in Slate or the AITA posts on Reddit are shaped as first-person narratives, they are presented as real, not as fictional, even though their veracity is unprovable and highly suspect. Since they are presented as factual, readers don’t approach them as art as Kanakia claims to do. They approach them as entertainment. This is not a bad thing. It’s just a different mode. Perhaps, decades hence, Houghton Mifflin will publish a Best American collection of AITA posts. Perhaps their artistic merit will be discovered by the scholars of the future.

So if the short story lives in disguise, it’s disguised so well that it’s become something entirely different. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps it’s impossible to know what will be worth preserving in the future, so writing to some old masterwork criteria is a lost cause. What we call literature is a library of exceptions, the texts that persisted.

Kanakia ends her post making a point about Chekhov and how he published some 300 humorous pieces before he wrote his famous short stories. It’s a useful reminder, but still, we don’t read those. We read his short stories.

Forty years in the Phish cult

literary lint, Music,

I stayed up late the other night reading the long profile of Phish in the New Yorker by Amanda Petrusich. I’d been anticipating this piece. It had been mentioned in a podcast interview with the author and she had posted photographs of attending a couple of Phish concerts on her Instagram. I have been listening to Phish off and on with fluctuating levels of enthusiasm myself for 30 years, so I was primed.

But I went to bed disappointed. It was long, it was detailed, it was exhaustively researched, but there wasn’t enough matter there, not enough new information to warrant the length, not enough analysis of why the band and its fanbase has persisted so relentlessly through the decades. It wasn’t the definitive New Yorker analysis I craved. I am not a Phish super fan by any means, but even I knew about 95% of the information already: their scrappy beginnings in college towns in Vermont; their gradual creation of / flourishing in the “jam band” scene in the 90s; their succession in the travelling hippie consciousness and budget after the death of Jerry Garcia and the restructuring of the organization formerly known at The Grateful Dead; their leadership through the manic productivity and vision of their singer, guitar player, and boyish frontman, Trey Anastasio; their early millennial interruptions brought on by band exhaustion in general and Anastasio’s drug use in particular; their rebirth post-Anastasio sobriety and their flourishing as corporate fun machine in the two decades since.

What it told me I didn’t know: that they played an early show with fIREHOSE, Fishbone, and the Beastie Boys; that Ian MacKaye of Fugazi gives them props; that they have a full time archivist, though that last detail is not surprising; that “Fluffhead” is the quintessential Phish song. I didn’t know that Phans shushed one another for talking during the jams or “chomping.” You can’t make this stuff up.

I already knew that they never had a hit but stumbled upon something greater, the impassioned fans who not only support them with their repeated attendance, but actually attend to the band, somehow create the energy requisite for the full Phish experience. They don’t just enjoy Phish. They believe in Phish. There is a religious element to being a Phish fan, a parallel that Petrusich explicitly brings up several times but doesn’t (for my taste) do enough with. The title of her piece is “The Portal Opens,” and she writes about how band and audience alike enter a trance-like state of symbiotic consciousness during these long musical improvisations (i.e., jams). The band stumbles upon a kind of shared intuition that the audience partakes in. It’s a little woo woo, but I am here for it.

I myself have only been to one Phish concert (Mid-South Coliseum, Memphis, TN, November 18, 1996), a so-so show. I have watched lots of live clips and have several bootlegs, somehow. But I am not a Phan. I am not part of the cult. I find the attendance at multi-day outdoor concerts to be too much like camping. I don’t begrudge my fellow citizens their innocent pleasure, but I don’t understand the appeal. Plus, I don’t want my live musical entertainment attendance to be turned into an extreme sporting event. A lot of the fandom strikes me as like sports for music nerds. Kids who used to collect baseball cards now collect setlists. But also, I have never been to a multi-day Phish fest, so I am not completely sure on just what I am missing.

Just what am I missing? I kept think-screaming at the article. There are many details on all the various activities and installations and artifacts at a festival such as Mondegreen, which Petrusich attended, but again, How is it fun? Make me feel the fun. There is a curious lack of commitment in this piece of reportage. There is neither enough stench from the crowd nor is there enough chin stroking about what it all means. It doesn’t push hard enough on the subject.

There have been a raft of articles about the band as it has approached and now surpasses the forty year mark. Justin Taylor’s piece in The Baffler is to me the best thus far, getting close to the actual experience of attendance. There was also a good article in GQ. It’s becoming the music journalist version of the “cruise ship essay,” a totalizing experience that seemingly requires immersive reportage but about which basically everything has already been said. There was gold in them thar hills.

Did I imagine other, previous music critics harrumphing in the margins? I did. I envisioned a pre-sobriety Sasha Frere-Jones, dressed in all black, sweating terribly, and frowning. One wonders what that sensibility would have made of this subject. Or Geoff Dyer: someone send that man to a Phish fest.

Is it a cult? It sure seems like a cult. I understand the collaborative moment of musical transcendence idea, but what about all of the supportive paraphernalia, the way some people devote their lives to the band, the way they are analyzed and dissected. When she visits the archives and gets to see Anastasio’s undergraduate honors thesis, a sort of C.S. Lewis-ian tale that created several early and enduring Phish songs, she jokes that it feels like she’s looking at the Gutenberg Bible. And the archivist says, “You are.” She’s opening the Ark of the Covenant, but no one’s face gets melted off.

What happens when one of the members dies? What happens when Anastasio dies? Where does the energy go? Is the Phish cult sui generis or is it a manifestation of a larger American impulse to congregate but separate, dance around the maypole and grab a burrito? What would Hawthorne make of all this?

And what of Anastasio’s insane work ethic? I remember reading somewhere about Anastasio’s preternatural ability to tune out distraction and get his work done, and I wanted more insight into that, into the relentless efficiency of the fun machine. There is a fleeting glimpse of his personality when something is off at soundcheck and he is momentarily critical — “Whatever was just in my ears was not remotely the mix, and that is sad” — but this hyper-management of the band experience is left mostly unexplored. Am I wrong in thinking that Anastasio has a Steve Jobs-ian power to realize his vision? I already learned about his sobriety journey on the CBS Sunday Morning show years ago. Give me something new. But now I am yearning, a close cousin to whining, but such are the feelings of a fan, even one who sticks to the shallows.

Links:
– Petrusich’s article in the New Yorker. Interestingly, in the time it took me to write this post, it seems that the title of the piece has changed online to “After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution.” I guess they regularly change the names of the articles online?

– Justin Taylor in The Baffler

– The GQ Phish article

– The setlist for the Phish concert I saw back in college

Compared to What

Music, Publicity, ,

My instrumental group The Metrocenter has a new tune out, but this one is different: a cover with vocals, the classic soul jazz protest song “Compared to What.”

Here it is on Bandcamp. Here it is on Spotify. My staff tells me it’s on the other streamers, too.

Previously, I knew of three versions of this song. The one that came to me first was the weirdest, a cover by Col. Bruce Hampton (ret.) and his band the Aquarium Rescue Unit. I got big into Bruce during high school and college, and this is on their live album from 1992.1

The second version is the classic: Les McCann and Eddie Harris from the live album Swiss Movement, a veritable Maxell cassette experience if there ever were one. McCann’s vocals are unimprovable. The album also contains the great Harris tune “Cold Duck Time.”

The third version was one I didn’t even know about until we started discussing this song as a possible project — Roberta Flack, who recently passed away. This is the arrangement we mimic the closest in this Metrocenter recording. Here the rage is served chilled, bemused.

Credits:
Denny Burkes: drums, production, vision
Jakob Clark: bass and background vocals
Drew McKercher: guitar and mastering
Maya Kyles: vocals
Me: Wurlitzer electric piano2

  1. A ridiculous line-up of musicians, but whatever happened to the mandolin player, Matt Mundy? I remember that name because of the excellent mandolin playing but also because Bruce chants out the name at some point during the album. To this day, when I think mandolin, I think Matt Mundy. ↩︎
  2. Specifically the Wurlitzer 120 that belonged to my late father, a beige, paint-flaking, rectangle spinet-looking device that existed in only moderately playable condition for most of my childhood and then in a state of total malfunction for most of my adulthood. This is the Ray Charles model, for you true heads out there. I think the paint color name is technically Zolatone. What a great name for a band. The piano was something we always needed to get fixed. The keys rattled against each other like loose teeth and would not reliably strike the tines. At some point the tube amplifier contained inside the piano died. In 2023, I finally connected with Tony, local Wurlitzer repair wizard, who worked on the keys one afternoon while I shivered in his garage. And then after years of aimless googling, I found Jimmy, who must be able to fix anything electronic. He brought the amplifier back to life and made some upgrades, such as a three-pronged power cord and a line out. Finally in the fall of 2024 it was fully alive again. I mean, it’s still old and rickety. Tony: “Don’t gig that thing.” But it’s back home and it works. It makes sound, music even. I remember my father and I first hauling it down to Morrison Brothers to have them look at fixing it back in the late 80s, middle school days. The fact that this instrument is now preserved on this track, even with my meager playing, is quietly gratifying. I fully confess that I am a sentimental, middle-aged fool when it comes to musical instruments, but some mechanisms, with enough money, time, and expert help, can be brought back to life, if just briefly. I’ll take whatever resurrections I can get. ↩︎