Reader Q&A

U.S. Touring, Recent Reads, Aesthetics and Solid Pranks

This is the first of our Reader Q&As, in which we respond to questions posed by our dear paid subscribers. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can ask us a question in the chat here, or use this anonymous form. We’ll do these responses every two weeks or so. If you’ve already submitted a question and it didn’t get answered today — fear not. It’s still in the running for next time. If you are a free subscriber and you read this and decide, fuck, I *need* to submit a question to these idiots — no problem! You can upgrade your subscription using this button:

Renee Barrera asks, “When are we getting those US tour dates?”

CHRIS: A good, important question, that deserves a better answer than this: PRETTY VERY SOON!

I would guess in the next two weeks, realistically. Can’t imagine it going longer than that. But who knows, really… we do like to dawdle.

How about, in place of an actual list of dates — which is boring and obvious and the kind of thing “normal” (creatively dead) bands would do — we give you instead a few details that convey the gist of what’s happening? A clever reader with some experience in concert calendars will be able to assemble a pretty accurate picture using just these tidbits.

• This tour will run from 11/6 to 12/8 (U.S. date format, obvs).

• This tour includes several stops we haven’t made in a very long time: Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Carrboro (NC).

• This tour has us spending Thanksgiving (a “no show” day) in San Francisco, California.

• This tour features more than one DOUBLE DRIVE DAY (defined as two consecutive days with no performances, typically inserted between shows that are really far apart).

What else do you need???! Grab a map and a sextant and solve the puzzle!

Hey, let’s make the challenge official: The first person to correctly predict our U.S. tour routing (all cities, all dates) gets a pair of tickets to whichever show they’d like to attend. (The prize tickets can be to a show outside the U.S.; festivals may not be included, but we’re happy to try!) To clarify, the first show is on 11/6, and the last show is on 12/8, and — one last hint — there are 22 total shows. (Okay, one last final final hint: this routing does not include NYC or Philadelphia, which will be tagged on a week or so later.)

Drop guesses in the comments! Thanks for the question, Renee.

Dan Buckingham wonders, or at least typed, “What are you reading at the moment?”

KEITH: I’m currently making my way through the fairly disappointing Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, punctuating that with dessert readings of The Wheel Of Doll, the second in the delightful “Happy Doll, Private Detective” series. The first book, A Man Called Doll, was a recommendation from Chris, who knows how much I like stories that involve detective work and/or people falling from balconies. I’d had pretty strong reservations about author Jonathan Ames before I’d read it, although my prejudices were largely uninformed. I’d found his TV show Bored To Death treacly and twee and glib and assumed it must be the work of a guy without much real affection for detective fiction, so I watched like an episode and a half before bailing. The film adaptation of You Were Never Really Here (I haven’t read the source novel) is pretty much the opposite of treacly and twee and glib, though, so I should have given him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, the protagonist of the series, Happy “Hank” Doll is a winningly lovable loser who adores booze and his dog and who gets into knife fights, so he’s a-okay by me.

It’s funny that I’m simultaneously reading two authors about whom I’d harbored strong preconceptions based on mostly peripheral knowledge. Ames has benefited from further investigation, while Gay has not.

Those are both being consumed as ebooks, which is my preferred mode mostly because my wife gets mad when I’m awake with the lights on and hooting over a particularly delicious knife fight at 4am. Sitting like ancient artifacts waiting for me to read them at noon are a couple of other promising physical books. Jared Kobek’s Motor Spirit (a birthday gift from Keith Carne) investigates the dark, crumbling final years of the Summer of Love in Northern California — supposedly, there are a load of hippie murders and Hells Angels beatings, and of course lots of chilling Zodiac killer content. I’ve also dipped a bit into Jeff Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean, a beautifully-designed anthropological argument that the development of rum was fundamental to the awful European zeal over exploiting that region in the early days of its colonization. So far, there have been plenty of drunken pirates and soused Mayans and members of the British Navy falling off of boats due to the intemperate consumption of grog. The book includes loads of obscure recipes, as well, including one for a five-hundred year old “cure” for syphilis made from fermented wood shavings, which includes the step, “Scoop all scum off surface, reserving scum.” Obviously, I’m enthusiastic about this one.

CHRIS: Oh, man! That’s news to me, that you’re supposed to reserve the scum. The moment I screw the lid off a batch of fermented wood shavings, all that effervescing wood roe goes straight down the hatch! 😋 (Is it possible that is why, to this day, I have almost NO syphilis?)

Anyway, let me countersign Keith’s take on the Happy Doll books — funny, soulful, well written, POW. I can also say that Ames’s You Were Never Really Here is a better read than the film is a watch. (Feel free to disagree with me in the comments, but make sure to start with, “Joaquin Phoenix is my cousin, and he pays for my kid’s fancy summer camp, so this may not be entirely objective, but…”)

For nearly two months, I’ve been inching through Cyrus Console’s Romanian Notebook, fixating on every dextrous sentence, every delightful non sequitur. Dude delivers philosophical gut punches with the insouciance of a movie kung fu master dancing through a scrum of thugs. This book is tiny — 159 pages, with an extra space after every paragraph — but dense like poetry. Which isn’t to say that the prose doesn’t flow, but there are two rhythms at play: the elegant music of the diction, which will spirit you along at a clip if you let it, and the mountain range of thought that spreads out underneath. You think you can walk a mountain range quickly?! Do so and you’ll go stumbling down a ravine like this:

The uncanny swiftness of years, the ghostly silence said to characterize the experience of pilots in the fastest spy plane, positioned as they are in front of their own report, the beautiful name of a rapid eye movement, “saccade,” the so-called stopped-clock illusion, chronostasis, familiar from earliest school days, which I remember mostly in terms of awaiting dismissal, the thousands of incidents of my seeing the red second hand twitch, so it seems, backward at the moment of my consulting the austere slave clock that graces the front wall of every classroom like a seal.

The plot of Romanian Notebook winds through the author’s summer trip to Romania, where he’ll spend several weeks with his wife’s family. This coincides with an excruciating wait for test results that concern the couple’s unborn child. Sounds gloomy, yes, but like all great art, and the scum at the top of a jar of fermented wood, the writing is so original and alive that mood is a secondary quality. I am saying that you can safely give this book as a gift. (Maybe not at a baby shower.)

SPEAKING OF POETRY, which I did a couple of paragraphs back (is that too long to keep a segue on ice?), I recently discovered Alice Fulton (for myself — someone else, an agent or a magazine editor, surely, hoisted her up for the world at large, although maybe her name was simply picked out of a hat on a game show??) She’s an American who has been publishing poetry since the early 1980’s. I read her early collection Palladium (1986) and really liked it, and now Sensual Math (1995) is air-frying my brain. Animal rights are not at all the main theme, but here’s an excerpt from a poem called “Some Cool,” which consists in part of stories from the poet’s cousin who works in a pig slaughterhouse:

… somehow a pig got loose. A sow
fuzzed with white like a soybean’s husk.
It was August and she found some cool
under the truck. When he gave her a Fig Newton
her nose was delicacy itself,
ticklish as a lettuce pushed whole into his hand.

All kinds of bad shit is happening to pigs elsewhere in the poem, but this scene really hits me — an escapee having her appetite for a Fig Newton used against her, to lure her away from safety, and that she’s so gentle accepting the food from her killer… 😭😭😭. Guys, I’ve “stopped” eating pork a couple times in the past, and it’s never lasted, but “Some Cool” has me taking the vow again. Maybe my brain will be able to retain the sense horror for good this time. (No better place to test my resolve than in Portugal this week…😬!)

Finally, I read this piece in The New Yorker by Lucinda Rosenfeld about an affair she had as a 19-year-old college student with a much older professor. It’s a riveting memoir in the #metoo mode, and I was intrigued to learn that the same events, lightly fictionalized, appear in Rosenfeld’s 2007 novel, “What She Saw…”. So I checked that out from the library and read it, and boy oh boy. First of all: highly readable, very well-written. But also: DARRRRRRRRK. If the Cyrus Console book and the Alice Fulton book sounded gloomy, they really aren’t. The word-smithing is so active that your main takeaway is exhilaration — “Oh, language can do THAT?”

Lucinda Rosenfeld isn’t trying to make that kind of point. What she’s doing, harrowingly, is depicting a version of life (one I’d imagine to be unique to women) that’s essentially characterized (meaning at its very essence) by a tense, mistrustful, permanently unsatisfying interconnection with men. I hadn’t really imagined people living this way — simply missing the capacity to generate their own joy, or really even to effectively pursue it. Phoebe, the protagonist, who superficially seems to have most things going for her — loving family, middle class upbringing with excellent education, good looks, good health — is nevertheless a harrowingly fucked individual, constantly desperate for male approval, always unhappy when she receives it. She’s the pig AND the killer from “Some Cool.” Yeah… I’m still processing this one. Terribly sad, yet believable and not at all performative in the way recent books along similar lines can sometimes feel (I’m thinking of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, I guess, both of whom I do quite like, but who tend to transfer to me the excitement of a writer doing cool things rather than the despair of a protagonist in pain).

I brought two books on my Kindle to Portugal: “Mating,” by Norman Rush, which Becca Rothfeld claims to love and is off to a rock solid start (Becca Rothfeld writes my favorite weekly book column and a very fine substack); and “The Recovering,” by Lisa Doolittle, which yes is about recovering from alcoholism, but also looks to offer plenty of dish on the boozy declines of several famous authors — Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, etc, etc., plenty to choose from. But “What She Saw…” is haunting me — if anyone has read it and knows the mixed-up, tummy-sick feeling I’ve got in my brain right now, and has suggestions for where to go from here book-wise, divulge. (I’m wondering about maybe Susan Taubes…)

Lou Tisley is asking the big questions: “I have a movie question. I’m wondering, in your opinion, what makes a film good or bad. In my head it’s tied up with enjoyment and quality but I’m not quite sure exactly where they both sit. I know there are many films that I’ve really enjoyed that I wouldn’t be totally comfortable describing as good, and there are many well-crafted films that I haven’t liked at all. Can that make a film bad? Do you have to have enjoyed it to describe it as good? Not sure where I stand so, as cinephiles, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.”

CHRIS: Hey, I’ll start by rejecting your opening premise: this is not a movie question! Replace the word “film” with meal, book, painting, haircut, We Are Scientists tune — we’re still headed to the same place. You’re asking what people mean when they say “good.” This is an old problem, an old and tenacious one. Philosophers have fought over it for millennia. Welsh people fight over it in the streets of Cardiff NIGHTLY. But if Slow Descent Into Radness won’t tackle humanity’s most intractable riddles, who’s gonna?? Let’s jump in.

Okay, so right off the bat (that’s a cricket reference, not baseball), let’s acknowledge that there is no correct answer. But let’s not stop typing. Instead let’s drop a couple of very impressive names: Immanuel Kant and Johnny Hegel. Okay, I don’t know Hegel’s first name. Let’s look it up.

🤯 … yeah, so, I’m definitely not the only person who doesn’t remember Hegel’s first name: it’s “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,” which is why everyone just calls him “Hegel,” I guess. Probably even his parents just called him “Hegel.” One point for Kant!

No but so let’s get real: both these guys were interested in aesthetics, among other things, and although neither said a damn word about movies (not even Nostradamus did, I don’t think!), we can be pretty sure where they’d both land on your question, and where they’d land is, punching each other. That is because Kant, stodgy, meticulous Kant, wanted an emphasis on the formal qualities of an artwork, for therein lurked its aesthetic value — sez Kant! But G.W.F. Hegel thought Kant had shit for brains. G.W.F. Hegel was all about historical and cultural context; he thought art was a product of its time, reflecting the spirit of its age (“Geist,” he wrote, because he was German). And importantly, he thought the form was important only insofar as it affected the content. Yes, G.W.F. Hegel said art was one important way a culture expresses its values, and then comes to understand them (and deal with what a shitty culture they are, in the case of some cultures! let’s be real!). “BULLSHIT,” cries Kant, who was really hung up on the idea of “disinterestedness” in aesthetic evaluations, and while that sounds fairly clear, rest assured that he could and did write many, many substacks about it, building it into a complex beast of a concept, so let’s just take the part that will maybe make this substack most readable: Kant was essentially (or so I, a bass player, will now claim) inventing “the intentional fallacy,” which some literary theorists finally wrote down and branded in the 20th century, and which says that an artist’s intentions shouldn’t play a role in our evaluation of her art. Instead, a work should be assessed on its own merits — its formal qualities. (GIANT PARAGRAPH WARNING‼️) Now, it’s all well and good to say we should ignore context, but what about our own context? Surely our exactingly forged evaluations of an artwork’s formal qualities, sweated over and carefully protected from the taint of the artist’s lame interview in The Guardian, will nevertheless be affected by our own stupid experiences, right? Of course! This “disinterestedness” wall that Kant wants to put up, it is not waterproof; it is not a sea wall. In fact, you can feel a breeze through it. It’s really more of a screen, or perhaps a row of bushes. (What do we call a row of bushes…? Oh yeah, a hedge.) But look, that’s where Kant wanted his hedge. You have to decide where to put your hedge. Personally, I think a film’s “goodness” can be judged by artistic quality, another nebulous suitcase term that I would pack with words like “storytelling,” “cinematography,” “acting,” and “thematic depth.” Craftsmanship. I’d even allow “realization of a vision,” which yes, probably starts to imply a pesky artist attached to the pristine artwork. (Could break the paragraph here, but what the hell…) But none of that stuff guarantees enjoyment. Enjoyment is subjective. It depends on your tastes, your preferences, whether you’re hungry, whether your brother died in the war that backgrounds the movie. Food is probably a simpler case, and instructive: you can cut a steak in half and see that it was well-cooked, and a quick bite will tell you it was expertly aged and seasoned, and the elegant way it’s plated and the waiter’s assured delivery can be praised, but if you think steak is gross, you’re not gonna enjoy that steak. If you liked steak this morning, but during the appetizer course your husband pulled out his phone and showed you a video of beef cows being inhumanely slaughtered— which is a dick move considering he knows what you ordered— you’re gonna enjoy that steak a little less. Context.

Instead of allowing Kant and Hegel to wrestle each other in our brains, as they are doing in Hell right now — wrestling and scratching, shin-kicking — let us embrace the dual nature of aesthetic judgment. There is the form of the thing — the lightbulb, the care and accuracy with which it is machined and assembled, the clarity of its glass. And then there is its effect on us — the light, how it lands, what it illuminates, all dependent on what happens to be in the room.

Remember, even though Maverick is a perfect film, Keith Murray thinks it sucks. 🤷‍♂️

Last one for today, from Shelby: “Will we ever get an apology for that awful April Fools “joke?” Come on, own up, whose idea was it? 🤔”

Listen, Shelby. Did your mom apologize when she said you couldn’t jump off the roof just because you had a cape on? Did Gary Horbach apologize when, in answer to your stammering invitation to prom, he muttered “Ew,” and walked away? Did the cops apologize when they planted a baggie of coke in your glove compartment because according to their captain they needed to make a goddamn bust or find new jobs, ideally something that would allow them to sit on their asses all day?

It’s a tough world, Shelby. A harsh and difficult world, where snow blows into your eyes when you walk down the sidewalk, and companies go out of business, and race car drivers crash into walls. We were just trying to make you understand that. Thanks are probably in order. This was all done in the interest of HELPING you. Sometimes helping hurts, and hurting — simple Shelby — feels good.

These guys got a THIRST.

Oi! Mate… McGuin, mate, oi! You saved our skins, mate. First of all, your name may not be “McGuin” — it may be “McGuind.” That is because everything we know about your name comes from your email address: mcguindp@[doesn’t matter]. So is it “Pachyderm McGuind,” or “Polywog Diamond McGuin”? Or maybe even neither of these. We don’t know. What we do know, McG, is that you flat saved our asses yesterday. You see, Keith and I (this is Chris typing) were apart yesterday (we still are today), Keith down in the south of Portugal, among the hot sands, and I up here in the north, among the river mist. And when this sort of thing happens — this… separation — boy do we need the booze. Thanks be to you, then, McGuin(d), that we were able to afford a round. Yes, your subscriber fees paid for a couple of beauts. In Keith’s case, it was a bracing vinho verde, straight from the soil of Portugal; in mine, a German-style pilsner, but made by Portuguese hands, in a Portuguese brewery, next to a Portuguese car dealership (no, I don’t know where the brewery is). These were cold comforts in the absence of companionship, McGuin(d), but by god, sometimes cold comfort is the very best kind.

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Thanks for looking at this page for so long, even if in the end none of the words made sense.

🌅,

Keith & Chris