Puddles of Myself

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Bill Hader as J.P. Spamley in Ralph Breaks the Internet

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 23:17:00 -0500

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

I saw a lot of movies in 2018, more than I probably have in my entire life. This is because of two factors: Moviepass and the fact that I am in love with someone who enjoys going to the movies. And because I have seen so many movies this year, I have been thinking about performances and how to write about and judge them.

Wesley Morris wrote about the best performances of the year for the New York Times. Amanda Dobbins and Andrew Gruttadaro also wrote about the best performances of the year for The Ringer. Both of these lists took an expansive view on what constitutes a performance—and it is one I happen to agree with.

For instance, Morris’s list (and is there a more astute cultural critic alive than Morris, leaving aside his review of Mama Mia 2?) includes both Beyonce’s Coachella Performance and the Shredding Banksy (aka Love is in the Bin) alongside Lucas Hedges and his big year and Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer for Killing Eve.

Dobbins and Gruttadaro, in line with the Ringer’s overall approach, take a slightly more playful approach alongside their deep intelligence and earnestness. Their list includes The Central Park Duck and Fergie’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the NBA All-Star game next to more standard entries like Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born and Yalitza Aparicio in Roma.

These are both good lists, but they left off my two favorite performances of the year: Emma Stone in The Favourite and Bill Hader in Ralph Breaks the Internet. In the interest of time, I will explain my love of Stone’s performance as succinctly as possible. In The Favourite, it seemed, to me, that for the first time Stone put all of her gifts as an actress together to play Abigail Hill. She uses her big eyes to be at turns both sexy, conniving, and completely undone. Stone has proven herself to be a strong comedic actress as a host on Saturday Night Live, Easy A, and in her big break in Superbad and in The Favourite she plays slapstick well (any scene with her “love interest” Masham or in her hallway encounters with Harley) as well as well-timed dialogue and set pieces, specifically in her scenes with Rachel Weisz. With her delicate features and big lips, she plays both childish and ladylike; she balances being petulant and then repentant. The Favourite made me a believer in Emma Stone.

But my favorite performance of the year was Bill Hader as J.P. Spamley in Ralph Breaks the Internet. As I have previously written when discussing Phil Hartman, I am sucker for small performances, parts in sketches or films that could easily be throwaways if not for the actor inhabiting the role. Hartman was a master of this kind of acting. Stephen Root is another master, as witnessed in the second tale in the Coen Brothers’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Bill Hader has become one as well.

Hader has received plenty of acclaim and has made his way onto many “Best of” lists this year due to his HBO show Barry. I have not watched Barry in its entirety, but I have scene Ralph Breaks the Internet and thought long and hard about his performance as J.P Spamley, which consists of maybe 7 minutes of screen time in total.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is the sequel to Wreck it Ralph, which I did not see. Wreck it Ralph is about the lives of arcade game characters behind the screens of their games. Ralph Breaks the Internet is about what happens when those characters chase something of a macguffin into the actual world of the internet. The film is full of clever visualizations and characterizations of all the things we love and hate about the internet—the actions and movements of the avatars for actual internet users within the world of the internet are genius.

As part of this world, Hader plays J.P. Spamley who is the embodiment of a SPAM bot or pop-up ad. Hader plays the role as though he were Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Jimmy Cagney. Using his rubber band of a voice, Hader layers on World War II-era pleasantries and a hard to place “city” accent. Spamley is all well-meaning scams and slightly soiled digital clothes.

Spamley is a character that shouldn’t register alongside much broader and larger performances like John C. Reilly’s Ralph or Sarah Silverman’s Vanellope or even Taraji P. Henson’s Yesss, but somehow it does. The reason he does is because Hader wills him to matter. Hader’s choices are so specific—Spamley is a high-class, or at least high-mannered, huckster, not a sleazeball.

Hader even brings a small, somewhat throwaway, bit to great heights. Spamley has an odd sidekick named Gord. Gord is a short, bug-eyed...creature (it is unclear what he is, but the Disney Wikia lists him as a worm)...in a sweater who follows Spamley wherever he goes, but who seems to easily disappear. Whenever Spamley realizes he’s lost sight of Gord, he shouts in a piercing voice, “Gord!” and then Gord himself will appear. This is a bit that should run pretty thin, but somehow Hader puts enough desperation or abrupt exasperation into each line read that instead of becoming predictable, the bit becomes increasingly bizarre.

Late in the film, Ralph and Vanellope have gotten into a fight and Ralph has entered the “dark night of the soul” phase of the plot—he is at his lowest point. He is wandering around the main thoroughfare of the internet as it is depicted in the film and he comes across J.P. Spamley. Upon greeting Ralph, Spamley says, “Hey, where’s your little chum?” in reference to Vanellope. The way Hader delivered the line in the film, fully embodying this personification of a pop-up ad made me lose it with laughter and also struck me with a sense of awe. I don’t know if “chum” was written into the script, and for the purposes of this post I am going to assume it wasn’t. And so Hader’s decision to use that word and to deliver it in earnest as if he were J.P. Spamley was a piece of performative genius.

Bill Hader’s performance as J.P. Spamley is a small part of a larger animated movie that was successful both commercially and critically. I don’t want to make it sound like I am searching for a unique angle on my favorite performance of the year. There were plenty of other great performances in 2018: Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, Jason Bateman in Game Night, Patricia Clarkson in Sharp Objects, and many others (don’t get me started on the performances in Roma).

But if there’s one hard lesson I’ve struggled to learn through my entire life, it is to appreciate small moments and pieces of joy when you stumble across them. Bill Hader’s performance as J.P. Spamley was a small piece of joy for me in 2018 and when I think of him and his entire career I will remember is ability to make a character like that stand out, which is a true sign of greatness.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Adam Sandler's Netflix Special "100% Fresh"

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Mon, 3 Dec 2018 09:45:00 -0500

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

When I think of Adam Sandler, I think of the beginning of the 2009 Judd Apatow movie Funny People. The movie starts with home video footage that Apatow took when he and Sandler were roommates in the early 1990s. The film quality resembles any movie that my friends or family took in the ’90s or early 2000s. The color gradient ranges from greyish whites to greyish blacks with only a stray shot of a pink or peach-colored carpet breaking through. There are glimpses of a square, bulky, landline telephone and answering machine.

In the clip, Sandler is about 24 or 25 years old and is making prank phone calls. He’s still on his way to stardom, but basically still a kid. In the prank phone calls, he first pretends to be an old woman who loses her credit card. Sandler shrieks in what has now become one of his trademark voices and tells the woman on the other end of the line that “her” name is “Helen Easaphone...E-A-S-A-phone” before cracking up. Later, still pretending to be an old woman, he calls a restaurant complaining that their roast beef makes her sick, but she can’t help but eat it because she loves roast beef so much. The camera pans over to the audience in the room, which consists of Janeane Garofalo and Ben Stiller, who participates in the call with some of his classic unhinged yelling as the old woman’s frustrated son. The footage ends with Sandler, Stiller, and Garofolo erupting in laughter and the camera dropping to the floor, its view holding steady on the landline phone and answering machine.

When I first saw this footage in the theater at the start of Funny People it made my heart hurt, just as it does now. Seeing impossibly famous people like Sandler, Stiller, and Garafolo as young adults getting a kick out of prank phone calls is reassuring in some way and also moving. When I first watched the footage, it showed me that anyone can start off in a barely-decorated apartment bedroom with a mattress and phone on the floor and ascend to stardom or fame. It showed me that even though prank phone calls are eternally dumb and juvenile, they are funny as hell and always will be. When we’re young and with our friends (even friends who will become famous comedians) the jokes are at their dumbest and at their funniest. Now that I am no longer truly young or on my way to any kind of stardom or fame, I view the footage as a stand-in for all the stupid jokes, long nights, and idle afternoons I spent with my friends in my early twenties.

In October, Adam Sandler released his 100% Fresh special on Netflix. It came after the release of four original films that ranged from somewhat decent to offensive. Since 100% Fresh came out, I have watched it seven and a half times. I’m currently watching it, so that count will soon be at seven and a half. There is something soothing and endlessly appealing about the special, which is stitched together from various performances Sandler did at small and large venues to practice both his jokes and the vast number of songs that comprise the bulk of this latest act.

Like any good American male of the ’90s, I grew up on Sandler sketches, movies, and songs. I was too young to actively watch him for most of his time on SNL, but nearly every guy in my middle school and high school became fluent in Sandler’s SNL sketches thanks to reruns that played on Comedy Central in the afternoons, late at night, or on the weekends. Like many men who are now in their thirties, in my adolescence, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer, and even Big Dady were more than movies, they were how you communicated with your friends and classmates. If you picked the right line to reference from a Sandler movie at a party, you suddenly could become a kid’s best friend.

I never memorized Sandler’s albums though. For a lot of my friends from college, songs like “At a Medium Pace” or sketches like “Toll Booth Willie” and “Do It For Your Mama” didn’t mean the same thing to me the way they did for other people. I just really knew “The Hanukkah Song” and “The Thanksgiving Song” like everyone else who listened to Z100.

But 100% Fresh is full of songs, and a lot of them are really good! The songs were written by Sandler and L.A. comedian Dan Bulla and they vary from capital-C classic Sandler (“Bar Mitzvah Boy”) to pure juvenile Sandler (“Uber Driver”) to baffling (“Cotton Candy”) to homages to the Bee Gees/early Harry Nilsson (“Mr. Slo-Mo” and “We All Know a Guy”) and Paul Simon (“Electric Car”). There’s a song that I particularly love that’s based around the simple concept of a guy jumping up on a runaway plane, train, and then performing the heimlich, and acting as a hero but who then messes everything up because he doesn’t know what he is doing. Every song is a miniature study in genre and pastiche that is at times kind of staggering in a way—or at least reminiscent of Ween.

Much has been made of the tribute song to Chris Farley that comes close to the very end of the special (in which Sandler plays an impressive guitar solo) as well as the fact that there is a sentimentality to the special that hasn’t been present in Sandler’s film career—outside of Wedding Singer and his part in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. To me, the Farley song is certainly touching and as a song it is directly in Sandler’s wheelhouse. But it is the theme of broader, unabashed sentimentality that strikes me as closer to what makes me so fascinated with this special.

As I have thought more about it, the Sandler in 100% Fresh reminds me of (as so many things do) solo Paul McCartney. Sandler had no group, no Beatles to leave or move on from. But he did have a “peak” run of movies in the mid-1990s that it seems he can no longer reach. Every so often, he may make a movie that has parts that might remind you of the movies from his peak, but really he’s just doing what he wants to, what he thinks is funny, and very often that’s something easy and juvenile. 100% Fresh is no different in that regard. “Uber Driver” is just a song making fun of an Uber Driver who smells bad until the narrator of the song realizes that the smell is actually coming from him because he shit his pants. Just typing that description makes me laugh, but also makes me kind of amazed (not with awe) that a 52 year old man like Sandler would be making a joke like that in a song. But that kind of joke sits next an almost Syd Barrett like nursery rhyme where Sandler sings about attempting to read a book, but getting distracted by TV because “TV good. Reading bad.” It also sits next to a bit about dick pics that builds to a surreal, recurring joke about a ghost.

In 100% Fresh, Sandler isn’t trying to be anything than what he is—and what he is, is a successful comedian with a pretty immature sensibility, a 52-year-old man with reverence for the types of music genres he heard on the FM and AM dials when he was growing up, a man who is comfortable being a rich celebrity dad in corduroys, and a guy who kind of misses being in his 20s and partying and making prank phone calls with his friends.

I’ve been watching those Sandler prank phone call videos because I’ve been watching 100% Fresh so much. And watching those prank phone call videos makes me wistful for a time that I knew: a time of landlines and answering machines, bulky mac monitors that were grey and slow, stacks of VHS tapes, and thick suburban carpets. I don’t necessarily miss those things, but I know they are disappearing and are far away from me and from when my life or the life I lived was more immediate and made more sense.

The Adam Sandler in 100% Fresh shows that he hasn’t really changed from the Sandler of the early 1990s. That is, Sandler the comedian seems to be exactly the same. The man singing these songs—at one point making a joke about eating an ice cream woman’s pussy—seems as if he would be just as comfortable making prank phone calls about eating too much roast beef at a restaurant and then making a mess in the bathroom. I don’t know if Adam Sandler the man has changed; I imagine he has, but what the hell do I know?

But as a comedian, as an artist, Sandler has more or less remained the same. And in a way, that kind of makes him the modern day Rodney Dangerfield. There are slight tweaks, but the general joke, the general feel of what you get from “The Sandman” is the same as it ever was and the same as it ever will be. That fact is what makes 100% Fresh so appealing for me: it is Adam Sandler the performer just as you remembered him, just as you’d expect. Without the trappings or even poorly constructed framework of a movie, it’s just a stage and Sandler and his bits and his songs and his unassuming charisma.

That’s the Sandler that I and so many other people of my generation grew up with. Watching 100% Fresh makes me realize, perhaps more than anything else, just how much time has passed. It’s been nearly 10 years since I first saw that prank phone call footage for the first time at the beginning of Funny People. That cell phone footage is nearly 30 years old. I’m 33 years old. Adam Sandler is 52 years old. I wonder sometimes if he thinks about those prank phone calls and misses them at all. He probably doesn’t; he probably likes having a wife and kids and being rich a lot better than living in a bare room with a mattress on the floor. But, again, what the hell do I know?

In many ways, the world seems like it has passed Adam Sandler by. But yet, so many of us grew up with him and he really doesn’t mean much harm so we should probably just cut him some slack. He just wants to make us laugh. Maybe that’s OK, right? Because it gets tiring trying to be a better and smarter person each day. So then watching two grown men, two old friends like Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider, sing a song about giving each other blow jobs in space makes you laugh and almost comes as a relief—even if it is sophomoric. And you shake your head and say, “I can’t believe they are still doing this shit.” And you are impressed and you can’t quite understand why and so you watch again.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: A 2010 William Goldman Interview and Brian Koppelman Vines

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 10:11:00 -0500

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

In addition to eating turkey, side dishes (specifically the best sweet potato recipe I have ever had in my life), pies, jogging in the freezing and then suddenly mild weather, I spent my Thanksgiving weekend watching about a half an hour’s worth of Vines every evening and listening to William Goldman interviews. I’ll get to explaining that last bit.

Before I do, let me say that I will not remember 2018 fondly. This has been as turbulent a year as I have been alive for. (Though I do feel as if we say that every year except that now in the Trump era that feeling or designation tends to get accelerated and amplified.) I am afraid of what is going to happen to this country—and I say that not as a liberal or a conservative but as someone who is genuinely uncertain about how all of this gets better, how this country changes from its current state without some sort of larger conflict or confrontation, as grim as that sounds. Public figures have used old platforms, new platforms, emerging platforms, and the rhetoric has been spun every way but there are two different sets of realities in this country and, increasingly, the world. And if you are born into one, its becoming harder and harder to see the point of view of the other side. All of that scares me.

I’m afraid of what is going to happen to this planet. And this is a larger and more crippling concern. Something needs to change, but I am not sure that with all of the other turmoil going on in our government and in the world at the moment that “long term survival” is going to be a sexy enough topic. People have jobs to keep, investors to make happy, stockholders to please, and those demands are all usually met with short term thinking.

Selfishly, though, since I am nothing if not selfish, this has been one of the lowest years for me as a writer. I have not been able to secure a byline anywhere. I feel more lost as a fiction writer than I ever have in my life. I have now been working on revisions for a novel manuscript for 10 years and I am not certain if any changes or re-writes I make are of any value or if there is any improvement to my writing at all. What I am saying is that as a “creative person,” in 2018 I have felt more discouraged and more lost than at any other time in my life.

When William Goldman died on November 16th, I wasn’t terribly sad nor did I rush to read the obituaries or in memoriam thinkpieces. That’s because I wasn’t really a William Goldman fan. I think Princess Bride is a fine movie, but I never really understood its everlasting appeal to devotees. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a great movie (with an amazing soundtrack) but I don’t feel the need to rewatch it. All the President’s Men is a great movie as well, but it does kind of lag in spots—at least in my opinion. In all honesty, I mainly knew William Goldman as a guest on Bill Simmons’s podcast and a constant reference in his columns.

And it was through Bill Simmons’s “Remembering William Goldman” episode of his podcast released on November 20th that I truly understood how great William Goldman really was, how great his body of work truly is. But before I get to appreciating William Goldman, we need to talk about some Vines.

In the “Remembering William Goldman” episode of Bill Simmons’s podcast, Brian Koppelman, another longtime guest and friend of Bill’s, calls in to talk about his relationship and appreciation for William Goldman. Brian Koppelman wrote Rounders, created the TV show Billions and has either written or directed or been involved with a lot of other movies (including the excellent 30 for 30 on Jimmy Connors, This is What They Want). I’ve generally liked Koppelman’s appearances on Bill Simmons’s podcast and I used to listen to his podcast, The Moment, back when it was part of the Grantland network. Hearing him discuss his early time as a screenwriter and how William Goldman served as a mentor made me look back casually at Koppelman’s career.

In doing this research I learned that, from 2013 to 2016, Koppelman had created a Vine series called “Six Second Screenwriting Screenwriting Lessons.” Somehow, I had totally missed this. Overall, Koppelman created about ~450 of these Vines. The title of the series is slightly misleading as they are all not directly about screenwriting, the “lessons” or advice are really more directed at anyone pursuing a creative endeavor. In one installment from May 27, 2014, Koppelman states directly that the Vine isn’t a screenwriting tip but instead relays the advice to, “Find someone who needs you to be kind to them and be kind to them.”

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I binged almost every single one of Koppelman’s Vines late each evening before I would try to continue work on the latest round of revisions to my novel manuscript. What I currently lack the most as a writer is a good sense of routine. I am easily distracted and prone to procrastination more than in any other time in my life. I make excuses not to write in small windows during the week and then spend the wide open windows I have on the weekends, ones I have tried hard to secure, reading articles online or distracting myself with a million other things (e.g. Twitter) until I only have about an hour left to make any progress on my work.

But watching Koppelman’s Vines each evening during the long holiday weekend became an unlikely source of energy and focus. In each small moving screen, here was a voice telling me not to be lazy or to come up with excuses, here was a voice encouraging me to write every day even if it is only for an hour and even if I don’t necessarily get a lot done. There is something surreal about moving a cursor and then hearing Koppelman’s blunt but surprisingly elastic New York voice spring to life consistently and in six second increments for nearly a half an hour. There is also something oddly soothing and fascinating about watching him move on the streets of New York, through seasons, and across years while doling out advice. In some Vines his naturally long, hound-doggish face is clean shaven and especially pronounced; in others, specifically from 2014, he sports a tight, grey beard; in the 2015 and 2016 Vines the beard is longer, slightly curling, and white.

I sat in my childhood bedroom watching these Vines and was able to find a level of focus each evening that I hadn’t had in some time. Or in any case, I found a way to stop thinking about everything else I could be writing or the other ways my career or life could be turning and instead just work on the piece of work that was the most important to me at that moment, which just happened to be a manuscript I have re-written and revised for 10 years.

This leads me back to William Goldman. After repeatedly watching Koppelman’s Vines, persisting with my own work, and relistening to Bill Simmons’s “Remembering William Goldman” podcast episode multiple times, I decided that I wanted to learn more about William Goldman. So this weekend, I did some light reading on his biography, read old interviews, and watched old interviews. There is a particularly riveting interview he did with the Writer’s Guild Foundation in 2010. In the interview, among many other things, Goldman explains his mantra (coined in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade) “nobody knows anything” and gives the ins and outs of how his career developed in Hollywood while sharing anecdotes about his favorite stars (Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood) and films (Gunga Din).

There are two remarkable parts of the interview. One is when Goldman is describing his childhood and describes how his father descended into alcoholism, committed suicide with a gun, and then how Goldman, as a 15-year-old boy, found him. In the interview, Goldman is an 80 year old man and he says, “It was a fucked up childhood.” There is a graveness, a sense of finality to the way that Goldman says that phrase that strongly intimates, “no follow up questions.” The other remarkable moment, to me, is when Goldman is describing the fact that he has “been a writer for half a century or more” at the time of the interview and how that fact is “insane to [him.]” He consistently references that fact that he showed no signs of talent as a writer and then goes on to say that he hates his own writing, that he has no style, but has a good sense of story and an ear for dialogue. He says the only good things he’s done are The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

What is also striking about the interview is the way that Goldman curses. He says “fuck” and “fuckin’” as if he were 28 and 29 years old and not 80 years old. There is a vibrancy to the way he curses—he’s not an old man calling a lawnmower a “fuckin’ piece of shit” because it doesn’t work, he’s still a young man saying, “that movie fuckin’ sucked.” He also calls movies flicks, sometimes correcting himself when he is about to call a movie a film. At another point he refers to a movie as a “turd.”

Goldman’s catchphrase, “nobody knows anything,” refers to Hollywood and the film industry, but really what it is, is a way to free yourself as an artist from falling into decision-fatigue or from finding new ways to avoid working. When nobody knows anything, a principle that goes all the way back to Socrates, there’s no reason why your story can’t be good, can’t find an audience. And in some way that’s how Goldman carries himself. He is self-deprecating about his work, because he knows that even by giving advice or saying “nobody knows anything” he is claiming to know something. So what he does instead (at least in the way he carries himself in this interview) is couch all his advice and posturing in a kind of world-weary, but still impassioned perspective that transmits the following feeling: Life itself is fuckin’ crazy. Since I had no talent and still became who I am, and nobody knows anything, who is to say that I am right about anything—and who is to say anybody else is write about anything. So just fuckin’ write what you want to write. Sometimes it will be a turd and sometimes it will be genius but people will tell you it’s a turd because nobody fuckin’ knows anything so just do what you want to do, but know that it’s hard and it might not work out.

Now that I have spent a long weekend immersed in William Goldman’s biography, his catchphrases, and the high and low points of his career; have spent a weekend listening to Brian Koppelman’s six-second koans of creative advice, I can’t say that my outlook on my writing or my future as a creative person looks any rosier than before the weekend started. If anything, looking back at this past weekend I may just see that it served only as a brief respite from my own self-doubt and self-hate.

And, if I listen enough to William Goldman, I might just finally give myself over to the fact that all that matters is the work because nobody knows anything and sometimes what you think is great might not work; and what you think is terrible might be great; and maybe just once both of those things fall into place and then you have something you enjoy and the world enjoys. But that miraculous alignment still won’t change the fact that you know you’re a phony. And it’s that feeling, that battle, that you live with at the end of the day. That’s the fight that can impact your family. And that’s the thing no interview or Vine can help you figure out.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: "Amelia" by Joni Mitchell

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:20:00 -0500

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

My girlfriend periodically accuses me of not liking or listening to female singers. While this isn’t true, there is a certain element of truth to it. I am sexist in my listening habits. This is because I am a white male and have historically favored listening to white males (whether as solo artists, bandleaders, or in bands) sing.

However, I will listen to anyone or anything that moves me as much or as often as possible. “PRIDE.” from Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN was probably one of the most underrated songs from 2017. Frank Ocean’s “Nikes” is my favorite song of the last 10 years. The album that has moved me the most recently is Julia Holter’s Aviary, but it will take me a lot longer to write about the record in any coherent way.

But I am not hiding anything. If you look at my Spotify search history, if you look at my “Your Top Songs 2017” playlist you will see exactly the kind of person I am. Listening habits, routines, and rhythms are hard to break. The canon of rock music was built pretty much on narrow listening habits, outdated ideas about what is marketable, and also insufficient hiring practices. And I am guilty and complicit in devouring and participating in the canon’s status quo. We are only now thinking about how to revisit or revise that canon.

I say all this because I actually do listen and love female singers. I just don’t listen to them as much as I should. For instance: Joni Mitchell. I barely or rarely listen to Joni Mitchell. Even when her health was failing and her life seemed in danger, I didn’t dive into her catalogue. “Free Man in Paris” is probably my favorite Joni Mitchell song, which again says a lot about me.

But recently, I spent several October evenings hypnotized by a single Joni Mitchell song: “Amelia” from her 1976 album Hejira. I stumbled on the song after being served it as part of Spotify’s algorithm. I can’t even remember what album I had been listening to before the song came on and it doesn’t matter anymore—it was probably an album I’d listened to a million times.

The album Hejira was released after and inspired by several road trips Joni Mitchell had taken across the U.S. at the end of 1975 and the beginning of 1976. It was also partly inspired by her breakup with drummer (and backing band member) John Guerin. Mitchell selected the title is an allusion to the Arabic word hijrah, which translates to “journey” and refers, very often, in specific to Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D. after a divine direction.

“Amelia” is a delicate highway song. The first line begins with “I was driving across the burning desert” and immediately places you in the mode or mood of travel. Later, there is a line that reads “as the road leads cursed and charmed.” And in the last verse there is the striking, simple lines that go “I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel / to shower off the dust / and I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust.” And when you listen to the track, you can see dust on a hood, the smatter of bug guts on the windshield, the glint of sun through the upper left corner of the windshield. You feel like driving, you feel as if you have just driven, or as though you are about to. Maybe I’m biased because I am American, but that sensation, of wanting to drive, of having just pulled off the road, or as if you are on the cusp of a long drive, strikes me as one of the most singularly American sensations.

The song is about both literal and figurative flight as well. The Amelia of the title is Amelia Earhart, the legendary American pilot who disappeared over Howland Island in the middle (quite literally, just look at a map) of the Pacific Ocean. And in the first verse Mitchell introduces “six jet planes, leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain.” Mitchell (or the narrator of the song, however you want to listen or interpret) compares herself with Earhart and how they each wanted to fly “like Icarus on beautiful foolish arms.” Near the end of the song, Mitchell resigns herself to or laments the fact that “Maybe I’ve never really loved / I guess that is the truth / I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude.”

In a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mitchell described the inspiration or intent behind the song as, “I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another, . . . sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.” This theme of flight tracks neatly from the album title, to the song title, and to Mitchell’s biography. But the theme wouldn’t mean anything if it weren’t for some of those exquisitely written lines as well as the performances on the track itself.

I’ve already listed out some of my favorite lines from the song so I won’t reiterate them. But just look at the way those lines “Maybe I’ve never really loved / I guess that is the truth / I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude” scan and fall without music. You don’t need to hear Mitchell’s voice or any backing track or know anything outside of just those three lines to feel moved, to feel as something important is going on behind each of those words.

As a piece of music, “Amelia” has such resonance because, or so I am told, it moves constantly between two different keys: F major and G major without resolving. I can’t explain to you what that actually means in terms of composition or music theory, but I can tell you what it feels like. Listening to this song feels like watching a calm body of water at sunset, as the red, orange, and pink light ripples across the surface with just slight flashes of gold. You look at the water and want to dive in—and you could if you wanted to, but there’s also a part of you that wants to stay dry because there are things you need to do, you can’t submerge, no, not now. So maybe you’ll walk up to the edge, you’ll kneel down, take your shoes and socks off and let the small waves lap your toes. Maybe you’ll reach your hands in and cup the water, and then just a splash across the cheek or along the forehead; a trail of water meandering slowly down off your chin, to fall gently on the neck of your shirt. A damp spot for a moment that will soon, and very quickly dry.

That’s one way the song makes me feel, it also makes me remember when I drove across the country with my friends when I was only 19 years old. Before we left for the trip, our parents told us that it was good we were going on this trip because we may never be able to do it again. My friends and I told our parents they were crazy—we were only 19 years old, there were plenty of cross country trips in our future. But they were right: while there have been road trips scattered here and there, and brief visits, the three of us have never been together in such close quarters that way again. And I think about the way we searched for campsites in the dark, in the rain, the way we wore rain jackets and ponchos, and drank gin and cranberry juice with lanterns placed on tree stumps or picnic tables; I think of how we lay next to each other in sleeping bags in our tent, sometimes listening to wildlife walk by outdoors; I think about the way we bathed in streams with Dr. Bronner’s; I think of how we bundled up as the desert night grew dark just outside of the Grand Canyon; I think of the way we fought of the one speeding ticket we were given in Wyoming; I think of the girls we loved then, the cigarettes and mouth tobacco I used. I think of who we love now, who we are now, and what roads our lives are on now, where they are heading as we all sit firmly in our thirty-third year of life, more than thirteen years removed from that trip.

“Amelia” is just slightly over six minutes long. It is hypnotic. Joni Mitchell plays an electric rhythm guitar, Larry Carlton plays lead guitar, and Victor Feldman plays vibraphone. The only misstep on the song is when there is an emphasized strum from Mitchell (I think) when she sings the line “it was the strings of my guitar.” Otherwise, every note, every bit of playing is done tastefully. As a vocal performance, it is perhaps my favorite vocal performance of all time, maybe even surpassing John Lennon’s performance on the song “God.” Mitchell doesn’t do anything more than she has to, she lets the lyrics lead her vocal in a way that seems conversational, but not in the way that singing or lyrics are usually described as conversational, which to me always suggests some level of contrivance. Here, it feels as if I am listening to someone who has thought very deeply about a subject speak to me directly and purposefully.

In the Rolling Stone review of the album from 1977, Ariel Swartley describes the conflict within Mitchell’s music as “often her songs seem intent only on making private sense of her own experience. On the other hand, as a public performer, Mitchell wants to be heard and even enjoyed.” Maybe I am too generous, or maybe I just lack an ability to truly think critically, but I feel as though that conflict exists in us all, no matter what we do. Even in writing this blog post as a means to practice writing, I feel as if I am balancing an attempt to make sense of my own experience with a desire to be heard and enjoyed.

For “Amelia,” because it remains musically unresolved, makes me think of all the selfish things I am capable of. The song touches a dark place deep inside of me, where vanity and fear rule, where nothing I have is satisfactory or good enough. And it makes me think of the friends I should have, the fame and recognition I should have, the beauty I deserve. It makes me think of the fact that at any given moment in a day, there is a part of me that wants to destroy everything in my life and escape. I don’t own a car, but I want to drive, I want to have driven, I want to be getting ready to leave. Because if I am moving then there is nothing to be accountable for, there is nothing to be lacking. Even if I am alone, I am alone by choice.

I’m not entirely sure what Mitchell meant when she described the creation of “Amelia” as “addressing it from one solo pilot to another, . . . sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.” I don’t know what the cost of being a woman means. I won’t pretend to. When I watch my girlfriend remove makeup or describe all the processes that go into presenting herself as a woman to the world each day, I feel shame. Men have the luxury of not having to think about all the small things that women have to just to walk out of their doors each day.

Instead, we think, like I do, of escape and of turning our backs on our current lives in favor for something better as if there is a dark romance to it. We think of destruction as something seductive, something a man has to do. But women want to destroy too. And women have a much better reason to. Because white men like me have wanted so much of the glory of history to ourselves. That’s not over yet, but I think one day it will be.

Until then, I’ll keep listening to “Amelia” and wondering what the “cost of being a woman” means. Maybe I’ll understand eventually, even if I don’t listen to female singers as much as I should.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: "The Nylon Curtain" by Billy Joel

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 23:42:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

Is Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain a good album? This is a question I have found myself asking over the past month or so.

My relationship with Billy Joel and his music has evolved over the years: as a teenager I hated his music; when I was in college I didn’t listen to it at all, in my early twenties I “liked” his songs like “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” or “Still Rock n’ Roll To Me” ironically; in my mid- to late-twenties, I realized that albums like 52nd Street and Glass Houses actually had some lyrical and musical merits to them and that even an album like The Stranger warranted some attention beyond the hits. Now, in my thirties, I can honestly say that I actually like Billy Joel and his songs. I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.

The way I feel about Billy Joel songs, the way I have come to appreciate them, in some ways resembles the way I have come to appreciate sentimentality in art and in life. Crazy Rich Asians was, by many accounts, not a great Film with a capital “f.” But it did its job as a major studio movie giving non-traditional (e.g. non-white) lead actors a chance to shine and hopefully encouraging more diversity in popular filmmaking. It also did its job as a pure romantic comedy. I cried during parts of Crazy Rich Asians when I went to see it with my girlfriend and her friends.

If Crazy Rich Asians were a Billy Joel song, it would probably be “Vienna” from The Stranger—it’s slick, romantic, and feels slightly emotionally manipulative (in a good way!). In the rare instance that I am paying attention to anything these days, I can tear up listening to “Vienna.”

But I also find myself near tears if I see kids playing on the sidewalks or the streets. The other evening, I walked by a young girl and boy (a sister and her younger brother) playing a modified game of soccer with a big roll of blue painter’s tape. The little boy kicked the tape and it began to roll toward the street, the boy followed. But his sister sprang into action and held him back. I stopped the tape with my foot and knocked it back to them, letting their game continue. They smiled and started playing again. Their father, sitting nearby on the sidewalk and dressed in painter’s pants and shirt, waved his hand and said thank you. I felt a sense of weak pride and then walked on. As I reached the corner, I looked back at their group of three and felt as if I could stop and cry. There was something about the way they all orbited each other, the way the little girl immediately put her body in front of her brother as he began to go after the tape, the way in that moment they were only what they were.

What I am saying is that I have gotten older, my brain has gotten softer and less focused. Billy Joel songs don’t sound so bad to me anymore. The emotions their melodies aim to manipulate feel soothing to me: emotions like vague remorse, vague longing, and vague romance seem like a reward after working and living for a day. Turn out the light, don’t try to save me.

I had never listened to The Nylon Curtain before I read Chuck Klosterman’s essay “Every Dog Must Have It’s Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink” in his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which I had never read until my girlfriend and I found it in a give-away box in the hallway of her apartment building. The essay is about Billy Joel, but spends a good deal of time focusing on The Nylon Curtain, which Joel released in 1982 after his successful Glass Houses album.

In this essay, Klosterman makes the argument that Billy Joel’s greatness lies in the fact that “there are no conditions for appreciating Billy Joel.” He explains that Billy Joel is great: “[H]e’s not great because he’s uncool, nor is he great because he ‘doesn’t worry about being cool’ (because I think he kind of does). No, he’s great in the same way that your dead grandfather is great. Because unlike 99 percent of pop artists, there is absolutely no relationship between Joel’s greatness and Joel’s coolness.”

He then goes on discuss The Nylon Curtain and specifically two songs: “Where’s the Orchestra” and “Laura.” He analyzes why he believes they are two of Billy Joel’s best songs for a variety of reasons (you should go read the essay). Klosterman moves his discussion of these songs into an observation about how The Nylon Curtain is actually in some way addressing what he calls the “New Depression” of the 1980s, a time when, he says, “there just seemed to be this overwhelming public consensus that being depressed was the most normal thing anyone could be. In fact, being depressed sort of meant you were smart.”

I can’t speak to how people felt about depression in the early 1980s because I wasn’t alive then. And this isn’t the direct reason why I like The Nylon Curtain. But there is a certain feeling the album has that leads me to understand what Klosterman is talking about.

The Nylon Curtain was meant to be Billy Joel’s ode to the Beatles. There are some accounts that the sound and approach were influenced by the assassination of Joel’s idol, John Lennon, in 1980. According to AllMusic, it is a “song cycle about Baby Boomers living in the Reagan era.” The lead song, “Allentown,” is probably the best known track on the album (it went gold). It is a song about Baby Boomers who don’t want to stay in Allentown, Pennsylvania anymore, mainly because there are no jobs but also because “the restlessness is handed down.” The song “Goodnight Saigon” is about the friends the narrator lost in Vietnam.

“Pressure” is about facing the fact that you are getting older and settling down in, I presume, Long Island suburbia. Strange lines like “All your life is Channel 13 / Sesame Street / What does it mean?” stand out from frenzied piano playing. This song, and the whole album really, makes me think of Long Island and how just because I grew up there I am obsessed with it. And that no matter how hard I try, I don’t think I’ll ever really be able to write about it or capture it the way I’ve seen it and the people who cross back and forth on its length by slow-moving highway, or along its coasts by Sound or Ocean, for cycles and cycles of years without end, in my life.

I also often think about the very late 1970s and early 1980s. I’m not really sure why. There is something compelling to me about the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. Speaking in unfortunate generalities: A generation had already been disillusioned by the end of the 1960s and the lack of any real, substantive change in the country, the Vietnam War divided the country and families, the same goes for Richard Nixon. I didn’t live through it, so I can only imagine what all of that must have felt like. The way I imagine it, that era feels like a continuous cloudy fall day—the summer is over, it’s not yet cold, but it seems like something good, something easy is definitely over. Maybe it’s just that the late 1970s and early 1980s was the last whole-hearted analogue gasp before the rise of the internet and the world we live in now. Maybe it was that New Depression that Klosterman was talking about.

In any case, when I hear the synths on “Surprises” I feel something—I am put in a time and place that I recognize but that feels foreign. I want to learn more, but that would only involve me reading history books and learning the facts—what I want to learn is how it felt, actualyl felt to live at that time. I don’t mean in a Midnight in Paris sort of way. I mean physically and mentally understanding what life in America at that time was like. And that is, of course, impossible. It is also a futile thought exercise and, most likely, a futile sensation to entertain.

Listening to The Nylon Curtain makes me feel sad. When I hear the narrator of “Allentown” say, “Well I’m living here in Allentown,” I think about where I am in fact living and what my circumstances are. My life and circumstances are not terrible and yet each day I feel unsatisfied or as though I am lacking purpose. I could be more politically involved; I could volunteer more of my time; I could have a better job; I could write more; I could pay more attention to the news; I could be smarter about what news I pay attention to; I could be saving more money; I could be buying a house; I could escape from the life I have now; I could stop wanting more and be happy.

What I think The Nylon Curtain does when I listen to it, is make me feel melancholy, but melancholy in a way that makes me feel sorry for myself. And there is no place for a white man’s self-pity in the world now. I think what The Nylon Curtain does is make me aware of my blatant whiteness, my privilege, my lack of curiosity, and the part of me that always wants to look backwards. And, so, when I listen to it, I feel weak and so I feel sad. I lean into the easy emotions—the small sensations we can drum up, the things we can think about to make ourselves cry.

In Klosterman’s essay, he says the song “Where’s the Orchestra” is Billy Joel singing about the emptiness of his own life. The lyrics certainly seem to back that up. I wouldn’t classify my life as empty—what is lacking is simply my ability to engage with and enjoy what I do have. And I wonder if that isn’t some kind of New New Depression. Or maybe if that’s just always been the problem.

So, is The Nylon Curtain a good album? Well, I like “Allentown” and “Laura” is a pretty spot-on Beatles homage. “Surprises” isn’t for everyone, but it certainly is for me. If you don’t like Billy Joel, you might like The Nylon Curtain. But also, if you don’t like Billy Joel, you’ll probably hate The Nylon Curtain.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Phil Hartman on David Letterman in the 1990s

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 22:40:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

Phil Hartman would have been 70 years old today. I learned that fact from the Pee Wee Herman Twitter account. I would say that I learned it from Pee Wee Herman’s Twitter account, but I can’t easily verify if Pee Wee (Paul Reubens) actually runs the account.

Back in the 1970s, Phil Hartman performed with Paul Reubens in the Groundlings in Los Angeles. Hartman and Reubens worked together to develop the Pee Wee Herman character. As Reubens gained more fame as Pee Wee Herman, he continued his collaboration with Phil Hartman: first during Pee Wee’s HBO show, then for the full-length, Tim Burton-directed film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and then for Pee Wee’s Playhouse on CBS. Each of those projects was intended for a different audience, but the constant throughout was the collaboration between Reubens and Hartman.

Back in 2014, during a Thanksgiving weekend I spent in Maine on a ski trip with my family, I read Mike Thomas’s biography of Phil Hartman, You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman. Thomas’s biography is good, not great. It is filled with strange passages, such as this one, describing a teenage Hartman’s car: “Phil jazzed up his mean machine with strips of window fringe called ‘dingle balls’ and adorned its exterior with tiny moons. A chick magnet if ever there was one—not that he needed such bait.” It’s nice to know that Phil Hartman was good with women, and I suppose this is a funny detail—but these kinds of asides pop up throughout the entire book.

In the biography, Thomas covers the close creative partnership Reubens and Hartman shared. As much as they collaborated, they also fought and grew apart. I can’t recall the details without paging through Thomas’s book once again, but I remember bits and pieces of Hartman’s jealousy at Reubens’s fame and Reubens’s paranoia at Hartman’s good looks and natural comedic skills.

Phil Hartman is one of my favorite comedians. I think about him almost every day. When I was actively doing sketch comedy a few years ago, whenever I would get lines or a part in a sketch, I would always think about how I could approach my performance in the same way that I imagined Phil Hartman did: even if a character only has a single line, think of an entire backstory for that character and put that backstory and personality into even that single line. It sounds pretentious, and I surely didn’t do that every time, but I genuinely believe that Hartman did that for every part and truly believed in the importance of that principal. And many accounts back me up.

Earlier this summer, my girlfriend was traveling with her family. Like I normally do when she is away, I got drunk by myself and went down comedy and music rabbit holes on YouTube. On one particular night, I decided to go down a Phil Hartman rabbit hole, specifically his appearances on late night talk shows.

There are two particular appearances that Phil Hartman made on The Late Show with David Letterman in the early 1990s that particularly fascinated me. In one, from 1993, Hartman seems shy, almost reserved. At one point during his interview with Letterman, Dave tests Hartman on the different voices he can do. At one point, Hartman does an impersonation of Charles Grodin, who at the time had just made the hit children’s movie Beethoven, which is about a messy, lovable St. Bernard who wins the affection of an orderly, hard-working family man. Hartman does a solid, surprisingly amusing imitation of Grodin (if there is a more specific imitation or less-interesting one to reference in 2018, I don’t know what it is). Letterman, then suggests that Hartman must be able to do a Jack Benny impersonation because there is a similarity in tone. Hartman agrees and then launches into his much more polished Jack Benny imitation. Letterman and Hartman then wax poetic about the genius of Jack Benny—this all took place on a late night talk show in 1993. Jack Benny had been dead for nearly 20 years at that time.

Hartman’s appearance in 1994 is far more lively. He appears on the show with his hair slicked back, a cigarette in his mouth, and with a clearly fake mustache above his lip. Hartman greets Letterman in a put-on show biz voice from the 1930s or 1940s. Dave says to him: “You look a little different. You have something—you have a little magic marker on your lip there.” Hartman responds, immediately and confidently, beaming into the camera: “It’s a drawn on mustache, Dave.” Letterman cracks up and the two banter for a moment. Dave then asks Phil, “Do you want a light for your cigarette?” To which Hartman responds, “No, I’m a non-smoker, Dave.” Hartman then launches into a bit about how he is the first non-smoking spokesperson for the American Tobacco Grower’s Association complete with a tale about how the “industry is in a slump” and how at the “big summit meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina” that the new strategy was to get non-smokers involved in their marketing. Hartman then goes on to enumerate the ways in which a non-smoker can enjoy a cigarette. When I tell you that every moment is filled with a joke or small acting tic that somehow becomes a joke, you have to believe me.

As the interview goes on, Hartman tells Letterman about how, as a child, he and his siblings invented a language called Egg Latin, where they inserted the syllable “egg” after a consonant and before a vowel in a given word. Hartman then proceeds to speak Egg Latin at length, giving examples of how he and his siblings would hide curse words under their invented language. The interview concludes with Hartman plugging and showing a clip from the 1994 comedy, Greedy, featuring Kirk Douglas and Michael J. Fox. Hartman plays the villain in the film. On Letterman, Hartman describes his excitement at the film by saying, strangely, but earnestly, that it was “seven weeks work.”

These late night talk show appearances are nothing special. They are simply part of the circuit that Hartman made at the time to promote a new piece of work. Hartman was never as famous or accomplished as he wanted to be. But his committed performances on average episodes of David Letterman’s CBS iteration of his talk show somehow still remain as entertaining as anything he ever did—at least to me.

Phil Hartman would have been 70 years old today. He’s been dead for 20 years, just like Jack Benny was in 1994. I still think about him all the time.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Chase Utley

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Thu, 6 Sep 2018 09:23:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

I don’t think about Chase Utley as much as I should.

If you asked me on my deathbed if I was a Phillies fan, I would probably say, “Yeah, sure.” I grew up outside of Philadelphia in Bucks County. But I moved to Long Island before I turned 10. And anyone who has spent anytime living in or around Philadelphia knows that the Eagles are far and away the most important team in that city. It was the same way for me—most of my conscious life has been spent riding the agony and the ecstasy of being an Eagles fan. Behind the Eagles, because I love basketball so much, the Sixers were my second Philly team.

I don’t really like baseball that much, so the Phillies always lagged behind. Besides the magical 1993 team that lost in painful, painful fashion to the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series, there really wasn’t that much to cheer for as a Phillies fan for most of my life. However, when I started this blog nearly 10 years ago, the Phillies were on the cusp of winning the World Series. Then, they won it. And I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Chase Utley was one of the most important players on that team. Utley is retiring at the end of this baseball season. He’s only appeared in 73 games this year, all of them in a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform, just as he has since 2015 when the Phillies traded him. He’s been injured or unproductive for most of the season. It is time for him to retire.

In his career, Chase Utley has been a hero, a villain, a force of nature, and a piece of shit. He might end up in the Hall of Fame. If Chase Utley isn’t playing for your team, you hate him. If he is playing for your team, you think he’s one of the best second basemen that ever lived, that he represents the essence of baseball. If he plays or has played for your team, some part of you wants to buy him a beer.

But I haven’t really thought about Chase Utley in about two years. I didn’t even realize he was retiring until about a month ago. He is probably one of my favorite baseball players ever. He’s my favorite Phillie ever, at the very least. However, during the peak of his career, when the Phillies were arguably the best team in baseball every year from 2008-2011, he was maybe not even the best player on his own team. During some of those years, it was Jimmy Rollins; in others it was the late, great Roy Halladay. On the 2008 team, you could make the argument for Cole Hamels or Ryan Howard (just kidding, despite all the home runs, no one ever thought Ryan Howard was the best player on those Phillies team). Throughout it all, though, the player you always believed in, the one you trusted in the biggest moments, was always Chase Utley.

Since his career is coming to an end after 16 seasons, I’ve of course been reminiscing about Utley’s career and the time he has been in my life as a sports fan. As with all great players, you don’t remember all of the fine points of his career. For instance, I don’t remember that he batted .167 in the 2008 World Series. I only remember that he hit two huge home runs and that he made one of the best defensive plays in World Series history. I don’t remember that he went 2 for 11 in the 2007 NLDS against the Rockies as the Phillies were swept. I remember that he hit 5 home runs in the 2009 World Series, even as the Phillies lost 4-2 to the Yankees in a series they should have won.

Looking back at Utley’s career highlights, his arc in Philadelphia has a certain balance to it. In 2003, Utley’s first Major League hit was a grand slam. As the ball sails over the outfield fence, you can see that the bleachers in the now-demolished Veterans Stadium are basically empty. The Phillies went an unremarkable 86-76 and finished 15 games out of first place. In 2014, the stands are empty again (this time in the new Citizens Bank Park) when Utley hits a walk-off, two-run home run in the 14th inning against the Miami Marlins. The Phillies finished 73-89 that year, 23 games out of first place and last in their division. The next year, he was traded in the middle of the season to the Dodgers. In the middle of that 12 year stretch, the Phillies won the NL East for five straight seasons, they won one World Series, lost another, lost in the NLCS, and lost twice in the NLDS. Utley made the All-Star team 6 times. If you asked any Phillies fan, if they were being honest, he was their favorite player.

Utley has had a nice late-career run with the Dodgers, albeit a controversial one. In the 2015 NLDS he infamously slid right into New York Mets shortstop Reuben Tejada to break up a double play. He broke Tejada’s fibula. He was suspended for two games, but appealed the suspension as was able to continue to play. The MLB later dropped the suspension outright. The incident caused, rightly, a lot of controversy and drew, rightly, the ire of Mets fans. The MLB changed their rules on sliding.

The last time Utley was the center of attention was earlier this year as part of a feel-good, viral video. Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager, set up a meeting with Utley and a pitcher named Devin Smeltzer in the Dodgers’s minor league system. The pitcher was a cancer survivor and he had a real chance of making it to the majors. The twist was that the pitcher had grown up as a Phillies fan and that when he was a kid, Utley had met him and signed a baseball for him. The two embraced in the Dodgers clubhouse in front of the rest of the team—Utley greying (one of his nicknames is “Silver Fox”), at the end of his career and the young pitcher inches away, trying desperately to make it as a professional baseball player. Chase Utley is a hero. Chase Utley is a piece of shit. Chase Utley is a legend. Chase Utley is a villain. Chase Utley’s nicknames, on the record, are “The Man” and “Silver Fox.”

Like with all great athletes, or most of them at least, Utley’s legacy and career are complex. He wasn’t perfect. He played hard—and he clearly played dirty at times. To someone who rooted for him, he appeared to fit the mold of “baseball player.” If I was asked to draw a baseball player, I would probably end up drawing someone who resembled Chase Utley.

If I’m being honest, Jimmy Rollins was probably the best player on those tremendous Phillies teams. And he came up in big moments just as many times as Chase Utley did. But Chase Utley was my favorite player. He was the most important player. He’s the one I’ll remember the most from that era of the Phillies.

But I probably won’t think about him that much after today. My memories of him will come unexpectedly. One random fall evening in the future though, I’ll suddenly remember that he absolutely destroyed C.C. Sabbathia in the 2009 World Series. And I’ll smile. The Phillies lost that series. That kind of bittersweet memory seems fitting for a Philadelphia fan like me. But they won the World Series the year before. They can’t take that away.

Chase Utley was a hero. Chase Utley was a piece of shit. Even though I’ll forget him for periods at a time, I’ll never forget how much I loved watching him play.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Lester Freamon's Stakeout Scene in Season 5 of The Wire

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 23:36:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

The fifth season of The Wire is usually regarded as the weakest of the show’s entire run. This argument isn’t without merit. The manufactured serial killer story arc and McNulty’s famous line, “We have to kill again,” feel tonally off with the rest of the show. As does McNulty once again veering into self-destruction in a way that doesn’t feel revelatory—the same way Don Draper’s late-season indiscretions in Mad Men were more redundant than revealing. For some viewers, the newspaper storyline also came off as a bit too moralistic, too on the nose. Scott Templeton was very clearly a creep and not in the compelling or, at the very least, interesting way that Tommy Carcetti was.

However, the fifth season of The Wire is the one that I always find myself drawn back to. Part of the appeal is wanting to dig deeper and find the potential hidden merits in the episodes and the development of the individual characters. Another part of it is the fact that I am a sucker for following and appreciating a saga in full. Sure, the Star Wars prequels were terrible, but they were part of the larger story and canon, so I had to appreciate them in some way.

Mainly, though, I am drawn to the fifth season of The Wire because of the newspaper storyline. The scenes in the Baltimore Sun newsroom, more than any other depiction of journalism or publishing onscreen, remind me of the office experiences I have had in my career of vague journalism. But I’ll get into that all another time, especially the character of Augustus “Gus” Haynes, the city desk editor.

In rewatching Season Five recently, though, a specific scene stuck out to me in a way that it hadn’t before. That is one of the joys of watching a season of a television series you have already watched in its entirety nine times an additional tenth time. The scene I am referring to comes in the season’s second episode, “Unconfirmed Reports.”

I am a poor fiction writer and a bad critical reader, but I do enjoy reading novels and I do enjoy the idea of trying to understand or comprehend the basic mechanics of what make a good novel work, as well as looking for those same mechanics in other forms of media.

In his book How Fiction Works, the star literary critic James Wood devotes two chapters to focusing on and dissecting the influence of Gustave Flaubert. In one of those chapters, “Flaubert and Modern Narrative,” Wood analyzes the way Flaubert introduced a manner of conveying multiple objects and subjects operating at the same moment or what Wood describes as a tool where “the awful and the regular will be noticed at the same time.”

Wood uses an example from Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education to illustrate this point. The below translation that I found accessible online differs from the translation that Wood uses in his book:

He plunged at random into the Latin Quarter, usually so noisy, but deserted at this particular time, for the students had gone back to join their families. The huge walls of the colleges, which the silence seemed to lengthen, wore a still more melancholy aspect. All sorts of peaceful sounds could be heard—the flapping of wings in cages, the noise made by the turning of a lathe, or the strokes of a cobbler's hammer; and the old-clothes men, standing in the middle of the street, looked up at each house fruitlessly. In the interior of a solitary café the barmaid was yawning between her two full decanters. The newspapers were left undisturbed on the tables of reading-rooms. In the ironing establishments linen quivered under the puffs of tepid wind. From time to time he stopped to look at the window of a second-hand book-shop; an omnibus which grazed the footpath as it came rumbling along made him turn round; and, when he found himself before the Luxembourg, he went no further.

Wood tells us that in a scene description like this, Flaubert introduced a conscious noticing into his narratives, one that Wood compares to the effect of film. Wood explains that we as readers notice that what Flaubert has chosen to include is “not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each details is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness.”

In the “Unconfirmed Reports” episode of The Wire, the scene that fascinated me featured this very basic concept of the modern novel in full effect. In the scene, the character of Lester Freamon is sitting in his car on a stakeout. He is in the middle of two major investigations: one is an investigation of the highly corrupt, but highly entertaining, state senator Clay Davis; the other is into Marlo Stanfield’s drug organization. Here, Lester Freamon—the wily, smooth, and insistent detective—is staking out Stanfield’s crew.

Freamon waits in his car, eating a bag of chips. On the stereo, a version of “Piece of My Heart” by Erma Franklin plays. Freamon sings and hums along, crunching and chewing on chips, his eyes peering out the window. The street he is parked on glows orange, the brick row houses behind him appear a maroonish brown. The camera starts close on Freamon’s face, then slowly pulls back. A car alarm goes off. The music is overtaken by the sound of a woman, a mother, yelling at someone. She emerges on camera pulling her young son by the hand, while a young black woman walks beside her. She tells the son, “You ain’t doing nothing but aggravating me. Now get up on in this house before I beat the black off your ass. Get on up in here fool, c’mon!” She pulls her son up the stone steps—the camera pulling back still a bit more to capture the action and so that we notice Freamon turn and watch her from his car—and opens the door to their row house building, pushing her son inside. The young woman keeps walking. The mother’s attention moves to her and she looks down the street: “Trina,” she says. “Trina, wait for me, I’ma come back out.” The woman turns back to the young boy, closes the iron-grate door behind her and says, “Stay here, fool.” As she walks away, the camera inches back closer so that we see the son’s small, shadowed form standing in the doorway, his small hands gripping the iron-grated door. Freamon gazes at him for a moment, then turns back out his window, his attention drawn back to the stakeout. The camera zooms just a bit closer and moves toward Freamon so that his face is in center-frame. Then, it’s over.

Just as in Flaubert, every detail in this scene is perfectly selected. Freamon is chewing on chips on a stakeout, a form of easy nourishment while on the case. The mother and her son enter the frame and become the focus for just a moment. Then, for a brief moment both the boy, left alone, and Freamon observing from his car are both the center of attention. In the end, the camera returns us to Freamon. An investigation into a major crime, a mother chiding her son, that same mother following her daughter or her friend down the street, and a son left alone, all of these things are occurring simultaneously and carry with them their own universes and weight.

And, of course, you can add to all this context from having watched the rest of The Wire—the scene just before the one described above is in the Baltimore Sun office where the executive editor is explaining why they need to do an investigative series on the schools; the fourth season of The Wire focused on the problems with the school system and how kids in Baltimore have little chance to escape a life of crime or drugs; the child that Freamon watches, but knows he can’t help is one of those kids—but that doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the scene, the way the action is captured so clearly so that they are “frozen in [their] gel of chosenness” that you can almost narrate or relay the action in your head while you are watching it.

At least that’s how the scene made me feel when it jumped out at me upon my tenth viewing of the episode. And now there’s yet another blog post comparing The Wire to literature out in the world.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: The Last 68 Seconds of "Rock Show" by Paul McCartney

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:45:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

Listening to Paul McCartney is a lifetime task. By my count—and when it comes to Paul McCartney there is truly so much music available that it really does, in some way, come down to what you can personally account for or fathom as physically possible to listen to—there are 36 or 37 (depending on if you include Yellow Submarine or not) canonical studio albums to listen to between the Beatles, Wings, and his solo releases.

I’ve been listening to Paul McCartney in some form or another for about 20 years. I listen to and care about his canon far more than anyone I directly know. (For instance, I’ve listened to the song “C Moon” so many times, that I had forgotten it existed until I just remembered the other week. And that’s not even a well-known Paul McCartney song.) And I have only barely scratched the surface of listening to and appreciating his entire output. To be frank, I’ve only really listened to a fraction of it, probably closer to a third than a full half. For every “Seaside Woman” or Thrillington that I know, there’s an Off the Ground that I’ve never even come near.

The joy of listening to Paul McCartney, like any truly great pop craftsman, is in the details. For instance, take the song “Ram On (Reprise)” from Paul’s wildly influential 1971 album Ram. “Ram On (Reprise)” is itself a return to the song “Ram On” earlier in the album. Each track is a bit of homespun, studio-pop wizardry, full of whistles, handclaps, overdubbed vocals, ukulele, and humming keyboards. At the end of “Ram On (Reprise),” though, McCartney throws in an additional melody. This was something the Beatles did frequently throughout their career, from “Ticket to Ride” to “Cry Baby Cry.” However, after listening to the song dozens of times and progressing through his discography, you realize that this little melody soon became a full song on his 1973 album Red Rose Speedway with Wings—a song called “Big Barn Bed.”

Or take for instance the song “Suicide.” It’s been reported that Paul first wrote the music for the song when he was 14. It was then recorded as part of the Get Back sessions in 1969 but never used. Paul recorded the song again for his McCartney album in 1970. The song, by many accounts (including from Paul himself), was meant to be given to Frank Sinatra to cover. Sinatra never covered it. But Paul included a snippet of the song as part of the outro to a song called “Hot as Sun/Glasses” on McCartney.

Those are just two examples of the small, minute, melodic details you can follow throughout Paul McCartney’s career. Some may say that this borders on obsessive. Why the hell would you care so much about some fragments from minor compositions within a major artist’s long career? But if you love something as much as I love the feeling of and the idea of Paul McCartney’s music—the idea that at any moment you could possibly sit down at a piano and compose a tune that is not only pleasing to the ear in the tradition of pure pop music, but also endlessly fascinating and intellectually stimulating and do so in a way that appears from the outside to be easy—you give a shit about things like this.

One of these little details that I think about a lot is the ending of the song “Rock Show” from Venus and Mars, Paul’s 1974 album with Wings.

Venus and Mars is usually overlooked in Paul’s career. There’s good reason for that: a lot of the songs are cheesy, a lot of them are very ’70s, the other members of Wings are given space to sing lead too frequently, and overall the album lacks a sense of even vague depth. That being said, I actually have grown to really love the album. Even the melodramatic “Treat Her Gently-Lonely Old People.” And “Magneto and Titanium Man” may have the most trite lyrics of any McCartney song, but I dare you not to be entertained by the melody and shifts in tempo—as well as Paul’s sincere commitment to the vocals on a song about superheroes.

“Rock Show,” though, is part of an opening 1-2 punch that kicks off the album. The album starts with “Venus and Mars,” which is a strummy, ostensibly contemplative, opener about getting ready to see a big concert. The lyrics are so on the nose that you almost groan and there are synthesizer sounds that at the time probably seemed cool, then over the next thirty years seemed impossibly dated, but which now actually seem like they would fit into a certain kind of contemporary pop song again.

“Venus and Mars” segues from its soft-rock overtures into “Rock Show,” which is a by the numbers 1970s rocker. The song is, you guessed it, all about a rock concert. Paul throws his voice into the song with a conviction that he is only capable of. It is a vocal performance where, because he shifts the level and tone of his delivery so frequently, you can only assume that the tissue that his vocal chords and throat are composed of is simply different—like, from another species different—and better than yours. There’s mentions of “glimpsing an axe,” of “scoring an ounce,” of “Madison Square” and the “Hollywood Bowl.” The whole thing would be utterly unremarkable if not for the final 68 seconds.

Just when you think the song is about to fade out completely, Paul pulls it back with an incredibly funky ending. It is lead by an undeniable piano part that is mimicked my a riffing guitar, as well as booming drums that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Funkadelic record. You could describe the tempo and feel as reggae, but that would be wrong—and also an insult to reggae. Once the high-pitched synthesizer kicks in, the song takes on a texture that is almost prog-rock, but even though it’s weird and overblown, it’s not that weird and overblown.

Over all of this, Paul scats, hums, and moans about going to a rock show and tells his baby to “not be late,” to place her “wig on straight,” and that they “can’t be late.”

In all honesty, what it sounds like is the first draft of the theme from Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. or “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis & the News—only better than either of those songs. In just over a minute, Paul manages to build a melody and hook that ended up sustaining full-length tracks of two separate artists and one entire film franchise. But as part of his canon, it is simply a weird ending to an otherwise forgettable rocker from 1974.

In writing this, I’ve listened to the 68 seconds that conclude “Rock Show” almost two dozen times. That certainly says something about me, but it also says something about Paul McCartney as well. Just wait till you hear what I have to say about the first three seconds of “Backwards Traveller” from London Town.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Mamma Mia 2

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 23:20:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

The plot structure of Mamma Mia 2 is in many ways exactly like the plot structure of The Godfather Part II—though without the Shakespearean tragedy and calculated murders.

What I mean is that both movies balance an “origin story” of a major character in the previous film, a character who has died and looms large in legacy, with the present day story of that character’s child in some way filling their shoes or stepping into their footsteps. In The Godfather Part II, flashbacks to Vito Corleone’s life as an immigrant from Italian living in New York are countered with Michael Corleone's rise to power and isolation in 1950s Nevada. In Mamma Mia 2, flashbacks to Donna Sheridan’s travels and romantic encounters as a recent college graduate on her way to opening up a hotel on a Greek Island are balanced with her daughter Sophie’s present-day attempt to renovate her mother’s hotel and throw a party for the grand opening.

I love The Godfather Part II. In fact, it might be my favorite movie of all time. Watching Michael Corleone’s accumulation of power and his slow descent into paranoia and complete and utter isolation from everyone he loves is perhaps the most riveting and heartbreaking character arc delivered on film. In Mamma Mia 2, the main plot point is that Sophie Sheridan wants to throw a party, there’s a storm, and she’s worried that some people might not show up. However, Mamma Mia 2 is perhaps just as good of a film as The Godfather Part II—if we judge it in its own right.

I saw Mamma Mia 2 on a rainy evening in early August. I was exhausted both mentally and emotionally from work. I went into the movie with no expectations. In fact, I had no recollection of what even happened in the first Mama Mia even though I’d seen it, or parts of it, several different times on cable. My girlfriend and I had decided to see Mamma Mia 2 instead of the critically acclaimed Eighth Grade because we wanted a movie that would just be fun.

As soon as the movie started, we realized that we were sitting behind two boys who were there own their own. The boys were each maybe 12 years old. One of them talked through nearly every scene—and he was hilarious! He questioned every plot hole, complained about every Abba song that the cast performed a choreographed dance to, explained to his friend what a cameo was by using Stan Lee’s cameos in the Marvel movies as an example. At one point in the movie, a fringe character jumps into the ocean wearing a wedding dress and he said, “There’s no way you jump into the water in a dress like that and don’t die.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that the entire theater broke out into hysterical laughter. There was something genius about this kid.

But I watched as slowly, the audience turned on him. He talked too much, tried to make too many jokes. The whole atmosphere of the theater turned. Even my girlfriend, who had been laughing as much as anyone began to shake her head in irritation. Under my breath I muttered, “Pace yourself, kid. Know your audience,” as if I was some kind of comedy manager. I remained on his side even as a woman sitting in front of him told him to be quiet. And he persisted. Eventually, he won some of the audience back, while the rest just started to ignore him. When the movie ended, he and his friend tried to run out of the theater so no one would see them, but one of them dropped their raincoat and they stumbled trying to awkwardly pick it up before they bolted through the aisle and out of the theater.

The movie itself was so ridiculous that you could only marvel at the fact that it was even made. Because the first Mamma Mia had featured all the top shelf Abba tracks, the sequel had to dig into the deep tracks. But who can resist an on the nose scene on Donna’s graduation day set to “When I Kissed the Teacher”? And who cares if they brought back lip-synced versions of “Waterloo,” “Dancing Queen,” and “Mamma Mia”? We should all probably listen to those songs every day. Have you listened to some of the chord changes in “Dancing Queen” lately? They are so strange for a song that achieves what it achieves.

There’s a scene where Stellan Skarsgård’s character, Bill Anderson, is reintroduced that starts with a bizarre sight gag. Bill is at a sailing award dinner of some kind and he looks noticeably fatter. You can tell that Skarsgård is wearing a really bad fat suit and face makeup. First you wonder why the movie is even bothering to show that he’s aged so poorly and become obese. Then, its revealed that Bill has sent his brother Kurt to the award dinner in his place because he has to go to Greece to attend the opening of his “daughter” Sophie’s hotel. The scene ends with Kurt, Bill’s brother, starting to tell a story about a goat to the audience at the sailing award dinner. It doesn’t make any sense!

The movie also features a recurring character called Alexio who appears in both the flashback scenes to young Donna’s adventures as well in the present day. In each timeline, the actor who plays Alexio is visibly acting so hard that it made me sincerely wish that I had gone to acting school, struggled to get parts in ads as well as single line speaking parts in sitcoms or dramas, then have my work dry up so I contemplate killing myself or quitting the business, but then get a lucky break to land an audition for the part of Alexio in Mamma Mia 2 just so I could have landed that role and tried to play it the same way the actors did in each timeline.

One of the better recurring jokes in Mamma Mia 2 is about a ferry toll booth attendee who is obsessed with people’s hairlines! I am not making that up–it’s actually a bit and it works phenomenally! The fact that the character is so committed to that point-of-view (commenting with deep discernment on the hairlines of both men and women) is so unexpected and the jokes come at exactly the right times.

We can’t forget the scenes with all of the “Dads” in the movie: Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, and Colin Firth. Each one of these actors performs, whether in an actual scene or a musical number, as if they couldn’t be happier to be in the movie. This might not be true, but it also seems like in every scene the Dads are in together, the film always blocks them in the same way—in a jagged line and as if they have each just turned toward the camera from looking somewhere else. I call this “The Dad Shot.”

But the whole movie, for me, is really made by two scenes: Cher’s arrival (she is Sophie’s grandmother and Donna’s mother, much has already been written about this) and the lead-up to the reveal that she is the lost love of Andy Garcia, whose name is Fernando, which then leads her to sing “Fernando”; and the choreographed sing-a-long during the ending credits set to “Super Trouper.”

I could devote a lot of time talking about Cher’s performance in this movie and Cher in general, but I’ll try to keep it brief. First of all, Cher’s screen presence in all of her scenes feels as if she were placed within the movie via CGI. Even when she is dancing with Andy Garcia, it appears as though in reality that she was dancing against a green screen in some production warehouse in L.A. with a short man wearing a Panama hat who is dressed in one of those suits that Andy Serkis always wears. The fact that there is any passion at all in her scenes is because Andy Garcia acts the hell out of his role. He plays the brooding and kind caretaker of the hotel who seems as though he has a secret. Everything he says always sounds forlorn, but filled with patient and well-won wisdom. And we learn that he is so forlorn because he and Cher were separated a long time ago and that she is the love of his life. The fact that this plot point was obviously included just to have Cher sing “Fernando” first feels like a slap in the face, but then you hear “Fernando” play you say, “Sure, why the hell not? I’ll listen to Cher sing Fernando.”

The final sing-a-long to “Super Trouper” is a tour de force. This is mainly because “Super Trouper” is Abba’s best song. When you hear Frida Lyngstad sing, “I was sick and tired of everything / When I called you last night from Glasgow,” elongating “Glasgow” so that it becomes “Glaahasgow” and sounds so incredibly melancholy, you want to lie down immediately wherever you are and think about something you lost or something that feels so far away from you. Then, once ABBA layer in the “Soup-pa-pas” and “Troup-pa-pas” you curse them for being so trite, but also so diabolically genius in their understanding of pop. And in Mamma Mia 2 this song plays while the entire cast dances and sings along. All of the actors who play young versions of the characters in the 1979 timeline dance alongside the actors who play the older versions of the same characters in the present day timeline. Pierce Brosnan overacts and air mics his way through “Soup-pa-pas” and “Troup-pa-pas” alongside his younger self. In an odd way, its moving: time can age you, but with a song you can still exist alongside a younger version of yourself, a version who was maybe less risk averse, who made bad decisions, who more freely expressed how he felt, and who followed his heart too frequently but left himself more open to being hurt than he ever would now.

Oh, and both Meryl Streep and "The Most Interesting Man in the World" guy from the Dos Equis commercials both make a cameo—that’s what the funny kid in front of me was explaining to his friend.

After the movie, my girlfriend and I left the theater and walked out into the quiet, damp, and humid night. It was almost 11 o’clock. We went to a nearby restaurant to have a burger and a drink. I was tired, but in a great mood. I had forgotten whatever it was that was bothering me before I had seen Mamma Mia 2. Or, if I hadn’t forgotten, I certainly didn’t care anymore—the movie made it all seem so much more manageable.

The Godfather Part II and Mamma Mia 2 are structured the same, but they are in no way the same movie. They don’t do the same thing. One is a masterpiece of dramatic filmmaking, with an arc on par with anything in Shakespeare’s plays. The other movie basically climaxes with Cher singing “Fernando.”

But The Godfather Part II has never made me feel the way I did after watching Mamma Mia 2.

Puddles of What I'm Enjoying: Moby Dick

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 23:07:00 -0400

In a new sporadic series, Matt Domino shares a brief look at a bit of pop culture, entertainment, or literature he is enjoying.

Last weekend, I went to Martha’s Vineyard for the first time. For someone who grew up on Long Island, spent the majority of his life (thirty-three years to be exact) living in the Northeast, and who enjoys nothing more than to spend time sitting on the shore, looking out at the ocean and drinking beer or a hastily mixed drink, this is both surprising and unsurprising.

It is surprising because surely someone in my social circle must have had access to or offered some kind of chance trip to Martha’s Vineyard; surely some whim or lack of good sense would have led me to rent a house I couldn’t afford there for a weekend or a week one summer; and surely some bit of imagination would have driven me to figure out if there was a way to camp on the beaches there for an economy vacation.

It also makes sense that I would have never been to Martha’s Vineyard. This is because that when you grow up in an area that has its own beaches, you become territorial, possessive, and proud of the beaches you know best. No matter how exotic, remote, or glamorous a beach I am shown, some part of me will always think that a little stretch of rocky shore near where I grew up, a beach called Crane Neck Beach, is the best beach in the world. And in close second will be the stretch of beach between Amagansett and Montauk called Napeague. If you asked me what my third favorite beach is, I’d most likely say, “Fire Island.” With so many favored beaches, so familiar and so close, why the hell would I ever need to go to Martha’s Vineyard.

But I went last weekend. I took the high-powered SeaStreak ferry from East 35th Street in Manhattan at 4:00 PM all the way to Vineyard Haven in Martha’s Vineyard. I could talk more specifically about the 5-hour ride—of which I spent the majority sitting on the top deck drinking gin with seltzer and lime while watching the North Shore of Long Island pass and disappear—but that would be a digression and I’ve already digressed enough.

The weather in Martha’s Vineyard was strange for August. The clouds hung heavy in the sky and the water was a gray-green. It seemed at all times like there was a threat of rain while also simultaneously like the sun was going to break through the clouds and turn the sand and the air unbearably hot and humid. The air and the water were close enough in temperature that it made swimming easy. But there wasn’t nearly enough sun to encourage you to sprawl out on the sand all day. So most of my time was spent lounging in the house I was staying at: snacking, playing games, drinking (though lightly because I was a first-time guest), and reading.

The house I was staying at had two copies of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I picked up the newer one. I’d read Moby Dick two times before I recently embarked on a third go-round. Once, when I was a child and was given an illustrated version that was most certainly way above my head. And a second time when I was teaching at a private school in New Hampshire during the summer after I graduated college and I had nothing to do in my ample free time than to read books from the school library.

Being in Martha’s Vineyard gave me the incredibly strong urge to read Melville’s masterpiece again. In my mind, I felt that only the mood and atmosphere of Ishmael’s voyage on Ahab’s Pequod would satisfy me while I was staying up against the water of the Northern Atlantic. I wanted to be immersed in the whaling industry of the 19th century. I wanted to feel the extreme conditions of being on a large wooden whale ship in the middle of the two hundred years ago sea. As soon as I began reading the legendary first pages, I knew that my instincts had been right.

Books are incredibly strange. At certain times in your life, you aren’t ready for a book, whether because of the style, the difficulty, or your specific taste in topics at that time. But right now, Moby Dick seems to be the perfect book for me. I love the strangeness of the punctuation; I love how funny Ishmael can be; I can see the traces of Shakespeare everywhere (the idiomatic turns of phrases, the soliloquies, the quips within the dialogue) much clearer than I probably could have at any other time in my life.

I’m still making my way through it, but one brief section that has implanted itself in my brain is from Chapter 11, which is called “Nightgown.” In this chapter, Ishmael and Queequeg are in their shared room at the Spouter-Inn and starting to become friends. They are sitting in bed together talking. Ishmael describes how “very nice and snug” they are, because ”it was so chilly out of doors.” He then goes on to ruminate on the nature of what it means to be warm and how one can feel truly warm in bed only when it is very cold everywhere else:

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

To me, this short, odd, simple excerpt is beautiful. The main reason is because it strikes me as incredibly true and exactly the way I feel about sleeping, especially during the winter.

Last summer, there was a Letter of Recommendation in the New York Times about taking cold showers. In it, the author described how he took cold showers in order to explore his feelings of “Liking” and “Disliking.” The author wanted to overcome each of those extreme urges to explore what exactly an unagreeable sensation will feel like. In this way, we get over our primal urge for comfort or eschewing discomfort and open ourselves up to experiences simply as they are.

That is all admirable, but there’s nothing I like more than to know that when I am tucked in bed during the winter and the rest of my apartment and the rest of the world is cold, that I am in a pocket of warmth amidst all that.

When my girlfriend and I first started dating, I was in the early stages of moving out of my apartment. By early stages, I mean that my lease was up in about four months and I hadn’t started looking for apartments at all, nor was I absolutely sure I was moving. It was just the start of winter and the radiators in my apartment didn’t work. I’m lazy by nature and didn’t seek to have them fixed. Instead, I would take joy in the warmth of being in my bed under the covers with her, while the rest of the apartment, the wooden floorboards, the worn white tile of the bathroom, were cold to the touch. My girlfriend on the other hand, wanted heat in the apartment. I moved out and my new apartment is heated just fine during the winter. She still makes fun of me and the way I didn’t seek out to have the heat fixed.

But some part of me misses that experience. That’s because part of me will always agree with Ishmael.

In any case, Moby Dick is an awe-inspiring book that grips your imagination and makes you feel as though creating anything new or interesting through language is impossible. You should read it. There’s also documentaries and podcasts about it if you like that kind of thing.

Failed Letter of Recommendation: Let it Be (The Movie)

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 21:42:00 -0400

For some reason, Matt Domino writes an essay about the Beatles documentary "Let it Be."

Editor's Note: My latest tilt at windmills has led me to pitch and write pieces to publish in the "Letter of Recommendation" column in the New York Times Magazine. As I fail, I'll post the efforts here.

Like any devoted Beatles fan, I cycle through their extended catalogue multiple times every year. What I hadn’t done until recently was revisit their 1970 documentary film Let It Be. There are a variety of reasons for this, among them the fact that there is simply too much Beatle source material and other detritus to sift through at any given time. But the main reason was that I didn’t remember the film being any good.

As with so much of the Beatles mythology, the story behind Let it Be’s conception and production is well-known. After the acrimonious 1968 recording sessions for The Beatles (aka the White Album), Paul McCartney wanted the band to return to their roots and make a new album. The idea was to record a live performance and capture the band without the extensive studio wizardry they had mastered since 1965.

The Beatles began rehearsals in January of 1969, at Twickenham studios (known as the Get Back sessions), where director Michael Lindsay Hogg recorded their progress on new material. From there, things went from bad to worse. John Lennon was disinterested. He was deep in the throes of heroin addiction and the honeymoon phase of his relationship to Yoko Ono. Paul, continuing his role as de facto leader in the wake of Brian Epstein’s death in 1967, grates on the other members; specifically George Harrison who briefly quit the band during the production. In perhaps the film’s most famous scene, the two argue about a guitar part on the song “Two of Us” leading George to utter the famous lines, “I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

They moved from Twickenham back to London to record at Apple headquarters. The full live concert was scrapped and instead they decided to play a short live set of their new songs on roof of the Apple building. The recordings and film were deemed too dark and too rough and were tabled. It wasn’t until May 1970 that the film and the album were released under the title of Let it Be. By then, the band had publicly and controversially broken up.

At the time of its release, Let it Be was widely panned by critics. It was described by the London newspaper The Observer as “a bore” and that it was “[s]hot without any design, clumsily edited, uninformative and naive, it would have destroyed a lesser group.” Today, the movie retains its legacy as the document of a band breaking up. And it is mostly known for the iconic rooftop concert, with each Beatle trying to stay warm as they play their new songs in the frigid London weather.

But in watching the film this year, it didn’t strike me at all as terrible. Aside from his scene bickering with Paul, George doesn’t seem moody or put-out. There is a specifically heartwarming scene where John and George exchange loose vocals on “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” and George can’t escape from smiling and losing himself in the cover. John is engaged and witty throughout the rehearsals and performances, specifically when the band is jamming on “Dig It” while Linda McCartney’s (then Linda Eastman) daughter Heather dances around the studio. Paul, as ever, is Paul—finding the camera, smiling, talking in that charming cadence that is equal parts door-to-door salesman and pop entertainer. But he doesn’t feel overbearing, more like an earnest, overworked middle-manager trying to get his team excited about a new project.

What really stands out are two scenes centered around Paul and John. In the first, Paul is explaining how he’s just watched home videos of the Beatles when they were in India studying transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh. Paul says to John, “It’s incredible just to see us...There’s a long shot of you walking with [Maharishi] and it’s not you, you know—it’s sort of like, “Tell me, Old Master.’” John is off-camera but the film captures Paul laughing at him and knowingly saying, “Yeah, yeah!” Then Paul continues, “It’s like that thing you told me the other night, about going up in the helicopter: you thought he might slip you the answer.” Paul laughs and you can see the pure joy in his face as he recounts John’s quip. It’s a joke he would go on to retell in The Beatles Anthology and in other countless interviews.

During the second scene, Paul is discussing the logistics of putting together the concert for the film and going over some of the band’s objections. His back is to the camera and the shot only captures John’s face. As Paul continues talking, John shifts uneasily, smoking a cigarette. His eyes glaze over and he stares as if he doesn’t recognize the person in front of him. Or, more bluntly, as if he couldn’t care less if he saw this person again.

What I realized is that Let it Be isn’t really the document of a band breaking up, but actually a movie about a very famous group of friends growing up and growing apart. At the time Let it Be was filmed, the Beatles were aged between 25 and 28. They were each either married or soon-to-be married to their soul mates. John and Ringo had children. Paul was about to be a step-father and a biological father. Whether you are in the most famous band in the world or just work an office job, your life begins to change as you near 30. Friends become less essential. You enjoy spending more time on your own, with your significant other, or your kids. And sometimes if you haven’t seen friends in a while, they can seem like strangers before you remember the jokes you’ve shared—the ones you sometimes also share with other people when you tell them about your friends.

You don’t need to be a Beatle to understand that what that feels like. But it helps watching them go through it just like you.

Failed Letter of Recommendation: The Pipe Organ

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Sat, 1 Apr 2017 00:35:00 -0400

For some reason, Matt Domino writes an essay about the pipe organ.

Editor's Note: My latest tilt at windmills has led me to pitch and write pieces to publish in the "Letter of Recommendation" column in the New York Times Magazine. As I fail, I'll post the efforts here.

The realization that you’ve been thinking about pipe organs for most of your life sinks in slowly. It took me 31 years to realize it. But, yet, it happened to me this past Christmas as I was sitting at midnight mass with my family. We were in the Roman Catholic Church on Long Island where I spent many Sundays as a kid, yawning, mumbling through the Nicene Creed, pretending to sing along with hymns, and looking around for girls from my school. At the front of the church, next to the altar, beside the choir, the organist sat earnestly playing “O’ Come All Ye Faithful.”

As the choir and the church constituents sang, my mind, as always, focused on the sound of the organ. Its notes pitched through the open church air, hanging like ice from the side of an exposed stone in a hillside. Sitting in the church, listening to the pipe organ, the well-trod song gained resonance. It felt like it meant something, even if, based on lyrics and historical and religious meaning alone, it didn’t ring true to me at all.

I’m a bad Catholic and have always been one. But the church pipe organ is in my blood. I love its overpowering sound, how it instills whatever musical phrase played on its keys with a newfound poignancy. And I love its sheer shape and size—the seemingly hundreds of keys, those tall, towering silver and gold pipes. As a child, when I’d visit different Long Island churches for various family holidays, I’d always look for the pipe organ at the front (or back) of the church.

The origins of the pipe organ can be traced back to the 3rd century B.C. Its earliest form was known as the hyrdaulis. Widely credited as the invention of Ctesbius of Alexandria, a Greek physicist, the hydraulis was a water organ where air was forced through pipes via the weight of water. The hydraulis was used at outdoor events at the time and known for its “loud and penetrating” sound. By the 2nd century A.D., the water system was modified to include a series of flexible bags, very often made of leather, known as “bellows,” and the bellows organ became the model for the continued innovation of the instrument.

By the Baroque period, organs had become works of art in themselves. Organ builders such as Arp Schnitger of Germany, crafted, ornate complex organs—the pipes draped with gold and framed in wood. Schnitger was also known for his acute and economical business sense. Through cost-efficiency, he was able to replicate his designs so that they could be purchased and installed in smaller towns and villages throughout Germany, further spreading the pipe organ’s presence.

Decades later, in the Romantic period, Mozart proclaimed the organ “the king of instruments.” The average person’s idea of the pipe organ—likely tied in some way to an image of the Phantom of the Opera strewn across its massive keyboard, its pipes extended upward from the subterranean belly of an opera house—more often than not stems from the pipe organs of this period.

Today, the largest pipe organ in the world is located at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Built by the Midmer-Losh Organ company the organ was largely inoperational after damage in the 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane. However, after the initial stages of a restoration project by the Historic Organ Restoration Committee, the organ is now estimated to be 10 to 15 percent operational. By 2023, the HORC hopes the landmark organ will be once again fully operational.

The pipe organ provided some of the musical “hits” of my childhood. Songs like “Take and Eat” or “This is the Day the Lord Has Made” were stamped in my mind at a young age, before I gained an appreciation for any kind of popular music. Because of that familiarity, and their association with church, I never thought about them in the way I did any other kind of music.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found those songs, specifically when played on pipe organ, are nothing short of well-crafted melodies. There are times when I am sitting in church at Easter or Christmas—yes, I’m one of those Catholics—and I’ll hear in the hymns strains of The Band, Rubber Soul-era Beatles, or Carole King. This shouldn’t be surprising as gospel music factored heavily into much of the early rock and pop canon. And mammoth acts of the peak rock era like Led Zeppelin (on “Your Time is Gonna Come”) and Prince (on “Let’s Go Crazy”) used both the Hammond organ and synthesizers to mimic both the sound and feel of the pipe organ playing in spacious church or cathedral.

After all these years, for me, the appeal of the pipe organ is obvious: when simple melodies are played on a pipe organ, there is a bluntness, a direct expression of sound filling open space, that brings those links into full focus, at least to my primitive mind. And it serves as a reminder that a good melody can matter more than genre, setting, or spiritual belief. Even if you don’t believe in God, Jesus Christ, or transubstantiation, the pipe organ can make you feel clean and holy—make you feel the way the devoted say faith is supposed to make you feel.

As I sat with my family at midnight mass, listening to “O Come All Ye Faithful,” the organ droned and my eyes fell on a man in the pew in front of us. He was middle-aged, wore a brown tweed coat, and alone. His salt and pepper hair was frayed and moppish. On his face, he wore a grim expression. And I wondered what his pain was, what besides the holiday had brought him to church that night. Where was his family? Where were the people who loved him? In this man, I saw one possible fate for myself—to be middle-aged and alone. Things would have to go horribly wrong for me to end up that way, I thought. But as Robert Penn Warren once wrote, “life is strange and ever changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that barely scuffles the willow.” In other words: anything could happen.

And so at that moment, it didn’t matter that “O Come All Ye Faithful” was playing—all that mattered was the sound of the organ, the hanging sound of a simple melody, and the sight of a fragile, solitary, human being.

Procol Harum's "A Salty Dog" and an Ode to AOR

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 20:48:00 -0400

Matt Domino pens an ode to Procol Harum's lost masterpiece.

Editor's Note: This piece was written a month ago. No one wanted to publish it, so I published it here.

This past winter, when David Bowie died, I was listening to Procol Harum. Not, like, when he actually died, but in general. Specifically, their 1969 album, A Salty Dog. An album that is, in my estimation, one of the great tossed aside records in the canon of 1960s rock n’ roll.

I’m a boring person by nature, especially as I get older. Though I still look for new music, new bands, new albums to appreciate and enjoy, my idle mind will fall back on the pleasures it knows best: well-recorded drums, albums with vintage from 1967-1981 (maybe 1987 on a very lucky day), a singer that is English and sounds extremely white while he is attempting to sound black. My domain of expertise has become, half-wittingly, dad-rock.

And what band could better define dad-rock than Procol Harum? If you close your eyes, you can almost hear that classical, empty-church, organ melody. You can hear the faux-soulful voice warbling about, “one of sixteen vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast.” Venture further into those tight-lidded visions, and you’ll uncover the face of a young William Hurt, slightly doughy and boyish with hayhair. To your left is bony Glenn Close in the midst of her beguiling run of 1980s sexiness, all sharp edges and frizzed hair. And there is Mary Kay Place, round-cheeked and button-eyed with an air of permanent country about her. Jeff Goldblum smokes marijuana in the corner as the organ swells unbearably for the millionth time. Yes, it sure is The Big Chill all right.

Other than the fact that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was one of the biggest songs of 1967, put the “baroque” in “baroque pop,” and was used in the most iconic Baby Boomer film of all-time, what do you truly know about Procol Harum? For some reason, that was the question I asked myself this past winter as I decided to take a scan through their discography.

It turns out, like most people, I knew nothing about Procol Harum. But what I found was a band with a series of solidly made AOR records and who took a strong lean into progressive rock. Like any music nerd, I have a cautious appreciation for prog rock: My heart instinctively admires and embraces its ambition, while my brain tells me most of it is bad, un-self-edited shit.

A Salty Dog is described as prog-rock, but it’s really not—unless you call Abbey Road or Bridge over Troubled Water prog-rock (both released within a year of A Salty Dog, by the way). It’s also described as a concept album, but it’s even less of a concept album than Sgt. Pepper’s. They both share an opening, theme-setting, titular song, but Procol Harum don’t even segue into a vaguely connected follow-up, and there sure as hell isn’t a reprise to be found anywhere. Instead, what A Salty Dog is, is a finely made record, one that lacks filler or fat; an album that stands up with the towering achievements of its release year. It’s a record that feels adventurous, even if it isn’t. It’s a work of art that is of its time, but still sounds fresh today. A Salty Dog isn’t an overlooked work of genius, but rather it bears more of a similarity to a well-written novel that was appreciated just enough in its day, but whose craft couldn’t save it from the greater forces of time and history—its craft couldn’t make it canon. It is similar to how a twentysomething would react to discovering a Thomas McGuane or James Crumley novel.

Oh, but what craft there is to enjoy! The title track starts off ominous and pretentious. There are sounds of sea gulls, you dumbly try to picture a 19th century schooner and think you can smell seawater. But then the first drum fill hits your speakers and you are on board (no pun intended!) all the way. If the drums sound that good, then surely the album has to be good.

The second song, “The Milk of Human Kindness,” (I know, the title screams prog, but I swear it’s not!) sounds as if The Band invited Jethro Tull to Big Pink, told Ian Anderson to ditch the flute and instead tied his hands behind his back, taped his mouth and let Garth and Richard lead the way on organ and piano. The melody has an undeniable swing and a home-spun chorus that’ll put you at ease immediately. It’ll make you want to reach for a whiskey. Who cares if it’s not American-made.

Up next is “Too Much Between Us,” and this track screams, “sequencing!” It is a classic third song move. You start off with the anthemic, thesis statement track, follow that up with an enjoyable song that relies on the goodwill of its groove, and then ease into the first slow song on the record to show off the contemplative side. As I’ve said, A Salty Dog sounds of its time and this is a song that could have appeared on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s self-titled debut. At moments, you might even mistake Gary Brooker for Graham Nash. Plus, this song gets credit for bringing the “sea” back into its lyrics to try and keep the conceptual thread.

“The Devil Came from Kansas” marks the centerpiece rocker. It’s a blues-rocker that the Pretty Things would have approved of and sounds the way a tornado on the horizon looks. Listen to it while you approach a shitty bar that you’ve been to a million times with your friends and you will feel inspired somehow.

“Boredom” and “Juicy John Pink” are perhaps the definitive “deep cuts” on an album that is a deep cut in and of itself. “Boredom” is the type of song that could’ve only been made in 1969-1971. With its mixture of cheery jingle bells, xylophone, strummed guitar, and recorder, it sounds like a subtler version of Three Dog Night’s “Shambala” or a looser, more unhinged version of anything Simon and Garfunkel were doing from 1968-1970. As for “Juicy John Pink,” well every 60s rock album had to have a slow, traditional blues song—the Stones showed us that.

The last four songs on the album are inarguably the high point of A Salty Dog. “The Wreck of the Hesperus” brings the “concept” back into focus. It starts with a tom hit that sounds like a slammed door before a continuous, haunting, rolling piano line takes over and drives the entire song. Amid caught lines like, “we’ll hoist a hand or drown amidst a stormy sea” and “I fear a mighty wave is threatening me” an orchestra swells, broken by horn flourishes and staccatos. The song takes its name from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem and it is the only song that truly conjures the 19th century—and by 19th century I mean Moby Dick. “The Wreck of the Hesperus” eventually ends with building strings, the horns turn mournful. Wind and storm sound effects enter. One can almost see a bad stage production of The Tempest unfold. But no matter what, in the end you are left moved and wondering why the phrase, “I fear a mighty wave is threatening me” resonates, even while you are walking along the streets of New York City in the middle of January.

“All This and More” is a slightly menacing, mid-tempo rocker. Gary Brooker sings the lyrics with venom and the song develops edges and elbows as it picks up momentum through its verses and choruses. The guitar is distorted just enough and the sustained notes fall on the right side of cheesy. If Brooker were a more distinctive singer, this one would be a classic. Sometimes I think what it would sound like if John Lennon had done a version. Sometimes

history has a way of speaking for itself.

The penultimate song, “Crucifiction Lane,” (yes, that is spelled correctly) is a slow-burning, 1:00 AM blues track in the vein of “I Got the Blues” by the Rolling Stones, which they recorded a year later. The difference being that this one lacks the soulful flourishes that the horns bring to the Stones song. And also, while the Stones song title is generic in the most perfect way possible, the name “Crucifiction Lane” is too dramatic and on the nose for the song’s mood and tremendous singing to hold the resonance they deserve. But this song does get points for also bringing back the sea imagery with lines like, “tell the helmsman to veer to starboard, bring the ship around to port/And if the sea was not so salty, I could sink instead of walk.” Maybe Procol Harum deserve more credit for holding the concept than I give them.

A Salty Dog’s last track, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is also its best one. It starts with a haunting, communion-hymn organ part on the Hammond organ. The drumming is slow and steady. The melody and tempo give the song the immediate feel of an album closer, an art that has very often been lost or missing on a majority of records throughout the last sixty years. After about three minutes in, the melody comes to a conclusion, before an entirely different tempo and melody rises. A striking piano enters, so too do brisk, shuffling drums. Vocal “chicks,” syncopated hand claps and wood blocks hit and an ethereal, unspoken refrain of “Oooh” floats above the arrangement as the entire song builds and builds before slowly fading out. By that time, you’re also hearing the clanging of a church bell and you feel as if you’ve just finished something important—and odd longing and emptiness—even if it’s just an album by Procol Harum.

I was listening to A Salty Dog non-stop when David Bowie died. I continued to listen to it after he died as well. And I was listening to it regularly when Prince died in April. Those two figures tower above music history—that goes without saying—and I listen to their records with awe and joy time and time again. But that is to be expected. David Bowie and Prince are part of the canon. Procol Harum are too, in their own, small, confused way thanks to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and its own, small, confused legacy. Most of the time, history and time have a way of sorting out what’s important and what’s not—what lasts. And for art (or even our own memories) that is usually because the stuff that lasts is what is done best, what contains the most truth—the things we can’t forget.

But it’s nice to have a moment when you find something lost in time and can dig it up and regard it in the light for yourself, whether it’s a forgotten memory, friend or an album you never knew to give a damn about. Sometimes you wonder why you feel so good when you stumble upon those obscure artifacts or memories. And you wonder if that good feeling is simply because you found the thing, or if because there is truly a merit, an admirable quality to what you’ve discovered that makes it worth holding onto. Either way, I’m holding onto A Salty Dog now—and probably will forever.

This summer, I’m staying with friends at the ocean. A Salty Dog is about the sea. But I probably won’t put it on while I’m there, while I can smell the salt water and sand scatters across a rented wood floor. Instead, I’ll save it for the middle of winter. That’s when I’ll probably need it the most.

More of a WIP

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Fri, 8 Jul 2016 00:13:00 -0400

It's summer, and Matt Domino thinks its a good idea to share some writing. Why? No one knows. Especially not these words. This is just sub-hed text.

Hello again, my Puddlers,

Not much of an update needed this time around—you already got the long and short of it last time around. With my days as busy as they are, I'm trying to get back in the habit of being a somewhat active participant on the Internet. Though I'm helping publish great work on a daily basis at Artsy, writing and performing in sketches, and writing fiction in short bursts longhand and then typing it up on the weekends, I haven't been in my old habit of writing something each day and seeing how it comes out on a glowing screen in front of me.

Maybe it's better off.

But then why do I feel a certain emptiness without posting?

I don't know.

(Sorry, pulled a Knausgaard there. I just can't wait until Volume 6!)

In any event, it's hot out (and its hot too). Outside my window, there's summer and plenty of it. So I'm writing and trying to get better at it and I've decided I'll keep sharing little bits here. Maybe the fiction will turn into something. Or maybe it won't. Or maybe I'll get back in that rhythm of banging out essays and think pieces again.

While you wait in suspense to find out what conclusion I come to. Here's a scene of fiction.

EXCERPT:

In the living room, heavy maroon light came from the corner lamp. Peter sat in his chair, with his feet up on a flowered ottoman. The pattern was dark, intricate, there were sweeps of petals, curls of buds, stiff, dark-hued stems. He folded the newspaper and set it down on his lap. He reached for the glass next to him. It was a short, rounded high-ball. He took of drink of his Spanish brandy. It was all he drank now. There was something about the sweetness of it, something vanilla but also hard and bitter as well. He loved dessert. As he’d gotten older, he’d developed an insatiable sweet tooth. In fact, it took the greatest self-discipline for him to not sneak some kind of chocolate or cookie during each day. The struggle for him to cut out his nightly dessert had been gargantuan.

Though he’d always been thin, he had to watch his weight. And he had to watch his blood sugar as well. Diabetes ran on his mother’s side. There was a chance he could develop it late in life as his Aunt once had. Since he couldn’t eat sweets, instead he drank his brandy, admiring the warm brown color, its reddish glow, the way it looked like syrup poured healthily in a glass. As he drank and felt the warmth of the liquor in the back of his throat, his eyes returned to the story he was reading in Newsday. There was a fire in Brentwood. A house had burned down. An entire family had burned alive—a mother, father, three children. There was a small square photo of the wreckage. A charred doorframe stood in the bottom corner. The photo was grey and unclear. He felt the hollowness in his stomach that he always felt when he read about a tragedy in the paper or saw it on CNN. First, empathy ran through him, from his gut, up into his chest. Then his shoulders tingled, goose bumps rising and falling down the slowly wrinkling flesh of his upper arm. And after that, his mind wandered. He thought first of the family and what their final moments might have been like. The heat of the flames, the smoke, the burning, the dire knowledge of knowing there was no escape. His mind danced around these gruesome images, stepping forward entranced, before retreating. And he then began to wonder what would happen in the wake of the fire. What people or parties would account for the family’s property: their home insurance, their taxes, their mortgage, all of the lost items. Who would take control of the property? The Town of Brentwood? Once he dismissed these petty, insignificant thoughts about money and paperwork, he felt a general emptiness and confusion over why the world continued to be so terrible day after day. His mind was cloudy—from the brandy, from his increasing age, from tiredness and from the fact that perhaps he just wasn’t very intelligent.

He sifted through the paper, his eyes darting from headline to headline. Justin had gotten him a subscription to the Times for his iPad, but he didn’t care to read anything on the screen. The white of the page was too bright; when he scrolled, he lost track of where he was reading too easily. Justin had told him there were things he could do to adjust the reading experience. There were settings, apps, all kinds of small inventions, each with their own small, clipped, catchy name and incandescent logo. Justin even offered to show how to install these things, to tweak settings so that he could use his device to the fullest. But Peter didn’t have the energy or the patience for it. Not that he didn’t appreciate Justin’s efforts. He was a good son. He offered his time without complaint or motive. When they talked on the phone or sat in this room together, Justin would ask him question about being a father: the methods Peter had used for getting he and Sonja to sleep through the night, or to eat vegetables, or to potty train. Justin asked him for financial advice even though Peter was no expert. He’d saved money conservatively and invested without flash or aggression and things had worked out just fine. There were Roth IRAs, small trusts, savings and a general money market account—all accounts accrued modestly. Peter did impart whatever wisdom he had gained over years of routine, of worry and of living life practically. He watched as Justin listened intently, his round cheeks and low-hung jaw would quiver and tighten with focus, the light veins along his temple would emerge. Peter often marveled at the fact that he had a son whose face physically altered itself when he was thinking. People always furrowed their brow or said they were thinking, but for Justin it almost appeared to be a physical act. In so many ways, he and Sonja could not have been more different.

And it wasn’t that he hated electronics or had no use for them. He loved his iPad or, at least, he admired it. He admired the look of it, the flatness, its solidness, the sheen of the dark surface like a volcanic stone, the way it looked laying in contrast on a couch or chair that seemed to say, yes, this is the future right here in front of you, this is the future, alive and multitudinous, in this small, shimmering rectangle. He couldn’t remember feeling that way about any television or VCR or DVD player or even a computer. But despite all that, he preferred reading on paper. The constant folding of a newspaper, the breaking in of a spine, the burdensome weight of carrying books and magazines in the carry-on bag for a flight. He knew it made him something of a Luddite, not to mention stubborn and probably impractical when it came to maximizing packing space and his own personal comfort, but he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t a crafty or tool-savvy man, so he had to savor the tactile where he could.

After sifting through the paper from front to back once more, he neatly creased it and placed it on the floor. He couldn’t focus on anything—not local Long Island news, not the Mets, Yankees or Knicks, not Obama or Syria or Russia. He lay back in his chair and took up the glass of brandy again. The shade was drawn next to him, but the bottom of the window was visible. He saw his neighbor’s back porchlight shining against the pane. Drops of rain clung at odd angles, their edges silver. Peter pulled at his shirt, touching the round, contained paunch of his belly. He palmed it like a worn, deflated basketball. He was tired and he’d been tired for some time. No matter what he’d tried to do to shake it, he couldn’t knock the malaise off. More vitamins, more sleep, less coffee. Nothing worked. He’d started running more. His doctor had given him the name of a sports medicine specialist who he’d been seeing for more advice on how to stay fit, to keep his legs and hips and back in better shape. Peter had become a runner later in life and wanted to continue on as long as he could. Hip bursitis had nagged him for the last five years and sometimes it overtook him. And he knew that if he wasn’t careful that at some point he’d have to get a hip replacement. That would be the end of it. The operation would relieve the pain, but made you stiff. Didn’t make you the same person you once were. He didn’t want that. He wanted to keep all his original parts.

It would be easy to say that his malaise was due to Sonja leaving the East coast, to the fact that they rarely spoke anymore. And he wouldn’t fault anyone or having that theory. Their closeness was the treasure in his life. It was embarrassing in a way how much he had wanted to do nothing more than impress her. Especially as she got older, it became to odd to him, discomforting. At times he felt like a teenage boy trying to impress a crush. And it was his own daughter! But she was intelligent. She had a voracious appetite for books, for knowledge of all kinds. She was a natural musician as well. It had started with the clarinet at age eight. Each grade had a certain allocation of instruments. No one had wanted to pick the clarinet. For girls, it wasn’t the flute; for boys, it wasn’t the saxophone. So Sonja had picked it. She said she liked it anyway. It wasn’t as obvious as the gold of the saxophone and as delicate as the flute. She said she liked the black and silver—it reminded her of a zebra’s leg or queen’s scepter. She picked it up right away. They moved her to the sixth grade band. Her little head barely popping above the music stand as she sat next to red-faced adolescent boys and long-necked twelve-year-old girls.

That was only the beginning. At twelve, she wanted a guitar. He couldn’t say no. he got her a used, cherrywood Cort. She’d come home from school and practice every day. First it was songs on the radio. Spice Girls. Oasis. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Then as she grew up, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan. Then it was REM and Pavement. Chiming, wordy, intelligent music. And she started a band with her friends when she was fifteen. They needed a bass player. She learned how to play bass; she bought it from her friend’s brother, along with an amp, for $100. When Peter asked her if she cared that she couldn’t play guitar, she said she didn’t mind. Paul McCartney did the same thing. She’d loved his songs the most. The guitar isn’t the best part of “My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The bass is. He’d been surprised and pleased to hear that. She was fifteen and if felt like she was teaching him a lesson. It was one of those unexpected moments a child will spring on you that makes you pause and smile involuntarily. And, at the time, he went back and listened to the song. And she was right.

The sound of the garage door opener buzzed through the walls. Nancy was home. He waited a few moments. Heard her shuffling steps in the garage and then metallic opening of the door into the house. Levon’s collar rattled and he trotted down the hall, his brown and white spotted tail wagging. He nosed up to Peter. Peter leaned forward, he gave Levon his hand. The dog licked it and then curled his haunch up to be scratched. Nancy emerged down the hall. Her hair was pulled in a pony tail behind her head. Her glasses were on, but tilted slightly. Peter noticed that her hair was a lighter color than it had been in the morning. She’d had a hair appointment today—he’d forgotten.

“How were the ladies?” Peter asked.

Nancy walked in and sat on the couch facing him. She slipped off her thin, short boots and rested her feet on the glass coffee table. “Business as usual,” she said. “Darcy can’t get Michelle to lose weight. Stephanie takes an eternity to show pictures of her grandson on her phone. Caroline drinks all the wine.”

Peter looked at her and smiled. “It seems like you may have helped her out.”

“I only had a little.”

“Don’t you drive our dog around drunk.”

“How dare you insinuate such a thing. Come here, Levon,” she said. Levon curled his lip and half-walked, half-bounded over to her. His rear bouncing from side to side, his haunches sheen and shining in the sleepy maroon light.

“And how was class?”

Peter waved his hand. He pointed at her. “Your hair looks nice.”

Nancy put her free hand up to her head and closed her eyes. With her free hand, she scratched Levon around his drooping jowls. She looked girlish and embarrassed, a schoolgirl who’d been asked out by the wrong boy. When she had any alcohol, her adolescent tendencies rose in her like the flush to her cheeks. She had vitality and she was still spirited. She was her daughter’s mother.

“Oh, she did a terrible job.”

“That’s why you have it pulled up.”

Nancy nodded. She leaned her face down to the top of Levon’s head. One dogseye peeked above the table. It looked first longingly, then contentedly over at Peter.

“She did a fine job,” Peter said. “It looks like maize.”

“Maize?” Nancy stuck out her tongue. “Please, Peter. Is that the best you can do?”

He took a drink of his brandy. There was just a drop left now. He wanted a little more, just one more innocent pour before bed. He could taste the last sweetness, the caramel burn, leaving the edge of his parched tongue.

“You didn’t answer me,” Nancy said.

“Answer what?”

“How was class?”

He finished the last of the brandy and held his glass on his stomach. A sigh escaped his lips. It surprised him when he heard the sound in the air.

“That bad?”

Peter shook his head. “I don’t know why I sighed like that.” He got up from his chair and felt a twinge in his right hip. He was used to it now. The pads in his shoes were wearing out. He’d need to replace them and then the soles as well. Really, he should be using that roller to stretch out his thighs and hamstring, but it was easy to forget. Another thing to do, another bit of maintenance. He retrieved the bottle of brandy from within the squat liquor cabinet at the back of the room. Nancy watched as he poured just a splash into his glass. In the silence Levon panted, yawned, panted.

“Class was nothing special,” he said, sitting. “It was one of those nights where for the first twenty minutes I thought I’d have them the whole time.” His waxy, flushed cheeks were like two rounded halves of apples. He swirled the brandy. “But after that, I got the usual questions. Why did so many sad things happen to Jane Eyre? Did it have to be so long? And, of course, one student had gotten confused and read the Sparknotes to Emma and referred to all the wrong characters.”

Nancy took off her glasses. She folded them and leaned forward on the couch. “That’s just how certain classes can be,” she said. “You should be used to it by now.”

“Its still frustrating.”

“Then retire,” she said.

“Just because you did?”

“Yes!” Nancy said. “Not teaching trigonometry to sixteen year olds has made me a younger woman.”

“And keeping my books is better?”

“There’s less profanity working for you.”

Peter laughed. He sat straight up and bent one leg toward him. He put pressure on his knee joint, stretching his hip. “I don’t know, Nancy,” he said. “I just don’t think anyone wants to learn anything anymore. They just want to know.”

“How many have you had?”

“I’m serious.”

Nancy lay down on the couch. She placed her feet on the arm. They looked tiny from across the room. She massaged her toes in their black stockings.

“Don’t just complain,” she said. “Tell me about it.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” Peter said. “But with all these devices, all anyone does is look up answers. If they don’t know something, they can just look it up. No one remembers or learns anything. No one goes through the work.” Peter wiped his mouth. He knew he sounded old and irrational. Nothing was ever any one way. People never did only one thing. Somewhere in the world at that moment, a student at MIT or Harvard or, hell, even some state university in Nebraska or Idaho was sitting up trying to learn—to truly study biochemistry or politics, computer science or law. Computers or iPads or iPhones weren’t crutches, they were tools. It was obvious. He knew it. But it didn’t stop him from feeling the way he did. He was tired.

“That’s one way to look at it,” Nancy said.

“I had to drive a student home tonight,” Peter said.

“Was that his iPad’s fault too?”

Peter laughed in the middle of a sip of brandy. He almost spat out the liquor but kept it down. It burned sharply in his throat. “No,” he said, his voice squeaking. “Just classic car problems.”

“Who was it?”

“This kid, Jonathan. One of those boys that just seems kind of lost.”

“Drugs?”

Peter shrugged. “Maybe. He just said he’d messed up a lot. That can mean a lot of things though.” He was quiet for a moment and thought of Jonathan Pomerantz’s white doughy face, how it was almost porcelain in complexion. “He’s a nice enough kid. Not very bright.”

“Did you have to drive far?” Nancy fought through a yawn.

“No. He actually lives off Wireless. Near where Melissa Murphy used to live.”

“Oh, Melissa,” Nancy said. Her voice was soft; she almost sang the words. And he could see his wife’s own memory of the girl, as if it filled the room.

“You know its been seven years since Sonja moved out west. Seven years exactly today.”

Nancy clicked her tongue. “Peter, you’ll lose your mind keeping track of time that way.”

“Maybe I’ve already lost it.”

“No,” Nancy said. “You’re not casual enough to be crazy.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy said. She yawned again.

Peter stared at his glass. He felt the sweetness of the brandy coating his back teeth. He rubbed his tongue along the broad edge of his molar. “She hasn’t called you or anything has she?”

Nancy sat up and looked at him. Her eyes were small without her glasses on, but she stared at him intently. “Don’t you think I’d tell you that?”

“Sometimes you haven’t in the past. And she’d be more likely to call you than to call me.”

“Children go through phases.”

“She’s almost thirty. This isn’t a phase.”

“Well, then, people also go through phases.” Nancy turned her legs and feet off the couch. She leaned forward, locking her hands together. There was a practice to her movements. So much poise and control had been ingrained in her from years of posturing before her students, in front of competitive and cynical teachers, in front of worried, hovering parents. “You know your daughter better than anyone. She wants what she wants.”

“But I don’t understand why she wants this,” Peter said. “Why she wants to cut me out.”

“She loves Lee. And she wants to live her life with him out there.”

“At this point its more than that.”

“Maybe she thinks you expect too much of her.”

“Did she say that?”

Nancy shook her head. “No, but don’t you think it might be true?”

Peter tightened his mouth. His lips were dry and he felt the ends of his chapped skin. He wanted to picture what his daughter looked like, but he couldn’t. She didn’t have Facebook, there was no online presence he could find. The extent of his searching was limited to typing her name in Google and then clicking through a few pages of results before he got anxious and gave up. The last time he’d heard from her was an email about six months earlier. It had been brief and professional as usual. Her written sentences were pointed and sharp—they’d always been that way. And he’d admired it. When she wrote a letter or a note, she said things plainly and clearly. But nothing seemed labored. Her thoughts weren’t pored over or revised, her thoughts came fully-formed and she had no problem laying them bare. It was odd. She was a passionate person, she was nimble, fiery, a shade to the right of mercurial. But her words were cold and dispassionate, colored only black and white, letters on a screen.

“Only she knows what she wants,” Peter said.

Nancy stood up from the couch and walked across the room. She crossed her arms and held her neck high. It gave her a thoughtful look, as if she were surveying a painting alone in a museum. Levon lifted his head to inspect that everything was as it should be. Seeing that it was, he dropped out of sight behind the coffee table and let out a sigh. Nancy stepped behind Peter and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Don’t sound so defeated,” she said. “Its spring. Life can change.”

Peter was tempted to put his hand on hers. He could feel her warmth through the back of the chair, along his shoulders and neck. But he was tired and maybe drunk. There was work to do tomorrow at the office and then there was class to teach in the evening. His weeks were regimented and they had a habit of dragging.

“Life is what it is,” Peter said. “It will never be anything else.” He felt Nancy’s hands lift from his shoulders. She stepped around the chair and began walking to the hallway.

“On that note,” she said. “I’m going to sleep. Don’t stay up too late wallowing.”

He watched her leave the room. Her small upper body turning into wide, downturned hips, which then shrunk to her thin, stockinged legs. Levon begrudgingly pulled himself off the floor and trotted after her. He never let her out of his sight. Peter shook his head and finished the brandy. He muttered, shit, for some reason. The room felt warm and pleasant, the dimness, the maroon light felt like a barricade, a refuge from the damp night. The ache in his hip throbbed, but he stood anyway. Blood rushed to his head, making him confused and dizzy for a moment. Life is what it is. It will never be anything else. Did he believe that? And was it true? Sometimes he said things just to see what Nancy would do. He’d done it for years—he didn’t know why. More and more it seemed as though he didn’t truly know anything. He left his glass on the small round table next to the chair. He went to the window and looked out. Fog and mist were visible through the backyard. He stared at the porch light against his neighbor’s home. Tree branches still bare in early spring dripped with slow rolls of water. After a moment, his neighbor’s light switched off. He felt like going to sleep.

When he’d had a glass of water, brushed his teeth, relieved himself, stretched his hips, undressed, and put on his white pajamas with dark blue trim, he lay beneath the covers next to Nancy. The scent of his toothpaste filled the air immediately around him. Nancy rolled on her side. He could make out the outline of her face in the dark. Her cheekbones and skin, slightly loose, silver and slightly liquid without light.

“I know this is hard for you,” she said. He didn’t know she was awake. “It is for me too.”

He reached down and grabbed her unseen hand. It was warm. And in a few moments he fell asleep. Levon was lying on the floor.

Work in Progress

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 21:13:00 -0400

Matt Domino provides a brief update and some speculative fiction.

Hello, my Puddlers!

I come to you on this first Sunday of the summer of 2016, to provide a slight update.

As you know by now, this blog is now nothing more than a place for me to periodically provide my thoughts on music or to post some fiction that I can't get published. But I haven't fallen into laziness or disrepair. My days are busy and mostly provide me with fulfillment. I'm not pitching articles or writing essays as much as I used to.

The majority of my time is helping smart people (smarter than myself) write, edit and publish stories over at Artsy Editorial (it goes without saying that they are also better writers and editors than I am as well). We're building something, that I think, is very exciting. Its an environment I've always wanted to be a part of in my relatively short career in publishing. I'm working with people who are passionate, sharp, and who pursue what they love without ego. Every day is truly a joy. When you have some time, check it out.

For now, though, I bring you a little bit of fiction that I've been working on. This is a small section of a larger novel manuscript that I find myself fully invested in at the moment. Probably I should be spending my time working on a new batch of short stories to hone, refine and submit, but I've never been sensible when it comes to my writing, so why start now?

Until next time,

Domino

A working excerpt:

If she could ride a train forever, she thought she might be happy. There was a directness to it. You boarded and were promised safe delivery at another point. Like all things, she knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Amtraks crashed. They crashed and killed people just as planes did. But there wasn’t the same feeling of helplessness. When you boarded a plane, you in some way gave yourself up to God. The wheels rolled down the runway. The wings cut through the air. Only then, as the entire lumbering cabin began urging at full speed did you notice the chipped metal on the wing out your window. And then the whole thing, the whole notion of flight struck you as folly. Each day screws fell out of machines all over the world. Things broke. Mail was delivered to the wrong house. Paperwork in cavernous, bureaucratic government buildings was misfiled or lost. People made mistakes. With each day came an infinite amount of things that went wrong. So flight was an act of recognizing that. Trapped 30,000 feet in the air, you were vulnerable, and in some way had to accept the notion of death. Not picturing yourself dying in a fiery crash became exhausting or, at the very least, boring after so many loops. That was direct, violent and obvious. Instead, it was the emptying of yourself that appealed to her, feeling transience, opening yourself to death, to the notion that if something went wrong you’d soon be once again part of the universe—back from whence you came. It was that part of flying that she was drawn to in its own perverse way. Everything else about it was second rate.

By train you were both transient and still present. You could watch the world unfold before you while receding into the oblivion of travel—especially when you were alone. Thick brushes, tall trees, open plains with peaked, taunting mountains in the distance drew your eye. The slow continued hum of the car, the wheels rolling, the track silent beneath you, uncoiling or veering slightly through impossible nooks and waterside stretches, or lying flat and inseparable from a wide expanse of plain or desert, a metal prayer in the middle of nowhere. Life existed out a train window. Light fell in different shades. Shadows, gold tipped beams, the off-again, on-again of buildings all came through the broad panes of glass. It wasn’t just endless cloud mass, bright, too-bright, stratospheric blue. On a train you were part of the landscape, whatever it might be that both rushed by and seemed to hover just feet from your vantage point.

And there you were most like a passenger. You sat, making stops in different towns. At each one you increasingly became a stranger to those sitting in the car around you and those who entered. On a plane, there was always the same unspoken agreement, the same collective holding of breath until the vessel landed. You looked around the cabin and thought, are these the people that I’ll die with? On a train everyone was just a passenger moving from one point to another. It felt ancient and true. It gave her a sense of peace. If she sat and was quiet, the train might continue on forever. It might take her to somewhere she hadn’t expected. When this fantasy crossed her mind, she could never think of the place where she’d want to end up. And that made her happy because it didn’t matter. It was part of the allure, part of being in the world and, by being in constant motion, removed from it at the same time. You were a spirit, you were nobody and whenever the train stopped, where the line ended, you were there. And once you were there, then you could be whoever you were going to be in that place. You’d have to be. You’d have to figure out who you were in order to continue on, to figure out what to do next, where to go next. Because even if you were nobody, even if the travel was able to remove you from your body in some way so that you just became a moving consciousness on a train in the middle of a mass of land, you were still somebody.

She knew it all too well. The train only moved so fast. There was only so much track before you hit ocean and could go no further. And there is where your past, your personality, your life caught up and collided and merged back with your body, with the body of nobody, the body of the traveler. And even though she was free, now, she’d still be a girl from Long Island with a bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts college, who rented an apartment and paid bills in San Francisco; who had a California driver’s license in her purse. Once the train stopped, she’d be Sonja again. She knew it now, sitting, watching squares of golden grain fields stretch out beside her, and she’d know it all too well once the train finally stopped. Once she knew it was time to get off and stay off.

They were in the middle of Iowa. She’d been gone for four days. Even though she tried not to, she kept count. It was natural to her. Thick yellow afternoon sun filled the train car. The dull maroon upholstery of the rows of cushioned seats were given a shine, a sepia tint that made them seem much more substantial than they were—man-manufactured seats careening across the continent for countless body shapes and personalities to sit and recline in. Across the row, a mother and daughter that had gotten on at Denver were sitting, both of their heads bowed over an iPad watching a movie. The little girl had long, stringy brown hair. Her limbs were lined with small muscles visible from the cuffs of her shorts and t-shirt. Every so often, the girl would lift her head and chin from the perch of her mother’s arm and she’d readjust her compact body on the seat. It was an elaborate dance. She’d stand one foot on the seat, one knee resting. Then her arms would flash up, stretching. Then she’d curl her standing foot under her, which helped her tilt her body forward—almost on top of her mother’s shoulder—for a better look at the screen. For a moment she would hold this pose before getting bored or realizing it was uncomfortable and then return her knobbed knees, her tiny feet in small white sandals, to their cross-legged position. She’d conclude by propping her chin once more on her mother’s thin sweatered shoulder. The whole time, her mother never moved, other than the occasional glance out the window. And in that brief moment the sun would splash against her brown complexion and turn the hair along her temples a bright gold, make her skin completely smooth. Then she’d return her gaze, drowsily, to the small screen in her lap. It was public, but intimate. As if Sonja were watching a mother zebra and her young calf finding a comfortable spot in the shade at some penned in prairie at the zoo.

Sonja turned her head out the window. The endless fields continued with only the odd silo or ramshackle farm compound breaking up the expanse. She stared out at what spread before her and tried to find something inside that related to this rural landscape and life. The bounty that myth said resided at the heart of the country. She also tried to imagine what the mother across the aisle felt when she looked out the window. Did she look out and wistfully think of a world where she didn’t have a daughter? A reality when she was once again unencumbered as she had once been as a girl in Boulder or Fort Collins or Colorado Springs or whatever non-Denver adolescent existence she had come from. The world of wide-open Colorado skies; impossible blues and high-hanging white clouds. When her nights were purple and filled with drives to an old quarry or swimming hole for night swims. The thrilling click and flame of a lighter at the edge of twilight, the smell of pot in the air. The handing out of beer, the smell of dirt. And maybe she hadn’t planned to have this daughter but instead wanted to be a liberal senator, or a WNBA player, or an attorney, or the owner of a fancy restaurant in Denver. And maybe she wanted to just get the hell out of Colorado and go to L.A. or New York City to become famous. Or maybe, just actually, she’d fallen in love with a man, they’d worked, gotten married and decided to have a daughter.

The landscape said nothing to Sonja. It just enforced the thrill she had of disappearing intro travel. Nothing about it gave her any insight into who she was or what she was doing. Because what she was doing was so very clear in it’s own confused way. She was on the run. Streaking away on a silver train from a life she couldn’t recognize as her own anymore. A life that wasn’t any more familiar to her than any scenario she imagined for the mother across the aisle. Or for the families living in farms and houses out her passenger’s window. It was a hiatus from the last ten years of her life. How long it could or would continue was another question. How long could it last?

From the pouch in front of her, she pulled out her iPhone. The temptation to turn it on, to reconnect had been strong. The urge for information, for the ability to reach out to someone and let them know she was all right. None of this was fair. She wasn’t self-absorbed enough to deny that fact. People would fear the worst. And she could just turn on the phone, send an e-mail to Kirsten or Jess or her mother and tell them what she’d done. She could lay it out very clear and directly.

I have decided to leave San Francisco and Lee for an indefinite amount of time. At this point, I can’t be sure how long this period will last. Fundamentally, though, I need some time away. Some time to myself to figure out what it is that I am looking for in life. I will remain in contact as frequently as I can. While I understand this is selfish and perhaps short sighted of me, I hope you can understand.

There wouldn’t have to be much more to it than that. The message could perhaps be simpler, though, the motivation articulated more directly. But she wouldn’t throw Lee under the bus. She wouldn’t divulge any of the details of their relationship. An email wasn’t the place for that. And it wasn’t in her nature to let people in that way. There were certain glimpses of yourself and your private life you gave to other people. And understanding what they were and how to do it, very often said what kind of person you were.

She placed the phone back in the seat’s pouch and removed her bottle of water. Behind her came the low conversation of a couple that had been on the train since the start at Emeryville. Jeremy and Amanda Grant. They were in their late forties. She’d eaten dinner with them the first night. They were from Albany and had flown to California to spend a week before taking the train back. They’d always wanted to do it. It was for their twentieth wedding anniversary. They’d met right out of college at the government offices in Albany: he in the Housing Authority, she in the Mayor’s Office. The vacation time was plentiful for state workers. They joked they had so much time off that they didn’t think they’d ever be able to use it all. Over steaks—Jeremy had read a travel blog that said the food on Amtrak’s cross-country train service was surprisingly trustworthy—they talked. Sonja was hungry and after two beers and polishing off her steak, she drowsily asked them about being married for twenty years.

“To be honest, it kind of snuck up on me,” Jeremy said. He rubbed his thin black beard. Amanda poked him in the arm.

“What he means,” Amanda said, “is that after a while, you don’t think about it so much anymore. Being married just becomes part of your reality.”

“Right,” Jeremy said. He removed his glasses and cleaned them.

“But that doesn’t mean you can take it for granted.”

Jeremy shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

“So what do you guys do?” Sonja asked. “Travel like this? Remember to keep the romance alive? Sorry that sounds like something out of a magazine.”

Amanda laughed. She took a drink from her plastic cup of beer and looked out the window. The sun was setting over a stretch of Nevada desert. Outside the sky and land were the same vivid shade of dark pink. It looked as though you could walk to the horizon through the low dotted brush, across the sand, to the mountains in the distance and then somehow proceed vertically up into the sky, as if it were all continuous and contained.

“Well we don’t have kids. That’s for one thing. Kids change everything.”

Jeremy leaned back on the stiff dining seat. He rested his hand on his stomach. He was handsome in a way. A large chin, long wolfish smile. But at the same time he was undeniably professorial. That same slight bored and baffled air that her father carried with him. “Don’t get me wrong, we’ve thought about it. I love kids.”

“So do I,” Amanda said. “I’m a three-time godmother.”

“We just understood that we liked other people’s kids. You have to know that about yourself.”

“That makes sense,” Sonja said. She finished the last of her beer. The cabin was beginning to dim. The seats, the aisles, the Windex-smelling table they had eaten from, all were covered in the fine remains of the fading pink light. “Did all of your friends change when they had kids?”

“Yes,” Jeremy said. “They had to.”

“It’s not like they’re strangers or anything,” Amanda said, giving him an incredulous look. “Some of them still have nights where they drink too much and act like they did when we were twenty-two. But there are kids to answer to in the morning now. At every waking moment. That’s just more important.”

She looked back out the window again. The skin of her cheeks was still firm. She had a slight overbite that made her seem adolescent in a way, like a woman who is constantly an assistant and never in charge. But her lips, her chin, something gave her face a downcast look. Sonja could almost sense the sadness coming from her, a sadness she felt that every woman who doesn’t have a child must have somewhere within them, no matter how happy she may truly be, how grand and accomplished her life, no matter how firm in her decision to stay child-free. It was hormones. It was nature. But it was also that more powerful thing. The remorse, the wondering of what could have been. That crippling, powerful sway the imagination has when it begins to pull at, unravel and retie the strands of time.

“But what are you asking us all about this for?” Jeremy said. “You’re twenty-five. Jesus, we’d both kill to be twenty-five again.”

She’d lied to them about her age. She’d shaved four years off, hardly an exaggeration. It felt natural to lie. She’d given them her real name, so it wasn’t that she was pretending to be someone else or that she necessarily wanted to be someone else. Being twenty-five made the trip, this escape, make more sense. It was something she should have done when she was actually twenty-five. And she should have done it without Lee. And that was at the heart of it. She wanted to pretend, to see what life, what a trip without him would have been like when she was younger, even just a few years younger.

She’d excused herself from dinner and went back down to her seat to read and sleep. Now listening to Jeremy and Amanda talk behind her, with Iowa rolling by, she understood that pretending to be another age meant she did want to be another person. Wanting to know what a trip without Lee would be like was the same thing as taking another identity. Four years wasn’t a long time. You both changed and didn’t change in four years. Like in college. She came to school as a musician. Someone who defined herself by what she was listening to, by the fact that she could play guitar, bass, piano and even banjo if she really sat down and faked it. When she set foot on campus, she brought with her the identity she’d taken on through her teenage years—she was a girl who could impress, who didn’t need friends and who didn’t care about being liked or understood. By the end of college, she was still that same girl, but she’d modified slightly. She didn’t play in bands anymore, but she still listened to music religiously, still treated her CDs and vinyls with reckless abandon. They were her prized possessions but somehow the only part of her life that she approached with complete disorganization. Even rare records like The Beatles’ Asher Demos she’d picked up at a record store in town, her bootleg version of SMiLE! Bobby Charles’ self-titled record. Al Kooper’s I Stand Alone. Music was like air. You cherished it by not thinking twice about it. Because it was a part of you. It was what gave you life in the morning, what picked you up when your energy and body failed you, what pressed you to stay up all night because you had to listen to one more song or, what the hell the whole album, or no, this album isn’t enough, let me put on another one. You mixed and matched until you found the song, the record that fit your mood and then, only then, could you sleep easy. She was still that girl. She still didn’t care about having close friends. Nothing bored her more than sitting around with girls in her dorm—from Bedford or Brooklyn Heights or Newton or Madison—and listening to them talk about boys they while drinking cheap wine or pretended to like bourbon.

But by the end of four years, she’d come to rely on Lee. To need him in a way that was completely foreign to her, but which had become her entire life. It had happened so rapidly and completely, sustained for so long that she wasn’t quite sure how to press back to the surface, to regain some clarity she once had on who she was and what she wanted out of life. At one point, life was going to bend to her. She forgot what that felt like. Maybe that was natural, the way you were supposed to lose parts of yourself and your adolescent ego as you grew older. That was life. There wasn’t anything else. It was inevitable. Like the tide drawing in on shore, waves crashing closer and closer to you until you had no choice but to abandon where you sat or otherwise get pummeled and absorbed by the water, salt, rocks, sand and foam. There was a kernel left. It glimmered within her. But it only came when she listened to music. Either a new song she’d never heard before—an overlooked song or record from decades ago or some remarkable new track by an artist she appreciated, but didn’t love—or an old song she knew well, but had forgotten the immediacy and beauty of. A few months ago, “All The Young Dudes” had come on a Spotify playlist while she walked home from work. It was a song she’d heard so much when she was younger that she’d actually forgotten the song existed. But, for some reason, it now struck her as beautiful. The piano part in the third refrain was so clear, so alive, played and produced so well. The melody and the swelling organ. The chorus didn’t mean anything, but yet it added up to something, it was powerful. She’d looked around her at San Francisco. The light above the city orange at sunset. The wind cold, but never bitter. The incessant multi-colored homes changed hue in the orange light and she turned her head up, down, behind her in confusion. Her steps stuttered with energy and she could feel herself want to cry. Not out of sadness—how stupid to cry to Mott the Hoople!—not out of feeling trapped in her life, but because there was some story of her life remaining to be told. That she would wake up the next day and more would happen. More would happen and she’d have a say in it. But the song ended. She continued walking home. She returned to her apartment, to Lee.

What it was she’d first loved about him, she couldn’t remember. The details, the phases of love had cycled so much that her feelings, even the original ones, were no longer clear in her mind. There was the fact that he was a musician of course, and that he treated it as seriously as she did. He knew more about music than she did. Knew who played what instruments on what records and then what records those sidemen made on their own. He tossed around names like David Fripp, John Simon, Dennis Linde, Jesse Ed David, and countless others like they were in everybody’s collection, as if everyone should have spent their high school years connecting obscure dots from records across decades. That thirst he had to find every secret song. The vastness of his universe attracted her. He could write a melody better than she could, but she was a better player. Songwriting, taming and working out a melody was never her strong suit. Everything meandered when she set out to write a song herself. No matter how much she listened to Ram or even Band on the Run she could never find the root of the melodicism at the heart of the most fluid bass playing, the structure of the best written songs. She couldn’t bear to sing or play any of the choruses she wrote. Lee saw how the parts fit. He knew how to build a pre-chorus. He knew about truck driver modulation. He was as concerned with a B section as he was with a chorus or a verse. And still he knew that whatever he wrote wasn’t good enough. He would take his guitar and sit on the green alone at night working over a melody. He would listen to Lee Hazelwood, Harry Nilsson, Jimmy Webb over and over and over again. Years later, after they’d graduated, when his love of songwriting began to fade, when he focused on mood, rhythm, wordless composition, she was almost relieved. She couldn’t match that original intensity, which had shocked her. Because she’d known herself as the most intense person—the one with the sharp edges and the propensity to withdraw. But he had another level of introspection. Another level of self-absorption and self-hate.

But that’s what also made him vulnerable. More than anything, it was the fact that his very posture, the way he walked and lived, called out for care that eventually drew her in. It was his long, stringy hair, his frail wet dog’s chest, the chain-smoking. She’d never considered herself overly feminine or nurturing, but his very presence called up something in her. She wanted to hold him, to tell him that it was all right, that it didn’t matter if he ever made some critically acclaimed album, or if he never wrote (or even ghost wrote) a hit song. Life could be more than artistic achievement. She knew on some level she was foolish. Some days she laughed at herself and how she was just another girl falling for a boy who thought he was an undiscovered genius. And she was smarter than that, better at avoiding clichés than that. Except he never got angry then. He never blamed anyone but himself. He worked hard at his songs and he was focused. That attracted her as well. She knew that if she could hold his attention as much at the guitar and his writing could, then she was doing something right. It was its own accomplishment, its own form of power.

It scared her even then how mixed up her feelings were. At some moments her love was all consuming. It was passion. Quick sex at any moment. Sweaty, never completely comfortable. One of them standing or half-standing while they did it on bad furniture. At other times, her love was deeper, warmer. He was irresistible, but she had a sense of removal. She wanted to be as close to him as possible but without fucking. She wanted to admire his body, take pride in him, in his music, in the way that he existed in the world beside her. That part terrified her. But she felt it deep within her every day. It was a path. She saw it. But back then, all paths were short ones. You could retreat. Nothing said you had to see it through, that you had to follow it to its conclusion. And she knew that now—her back resting at one moment comfortably, at another in pain against the armrest of an Amtrak two-seat. You could retreat. Pride no longer mattered. But somehow she had gone so far. If this was a retreat, then what were the consequences? What did that mean? And was it a retreat at all? Maybe her love for Lee, her submission to that life had been the retreat. Perhaps what she was doing now, this journey across the country—West to East, the opposite of American Destiny—was the course correction. She’d been on the right path for the first half of her life, but she’d shied away from that path at the most critical juncture. Now she’d found herself lost in a wood because she’d run back, because she’d retreated. It was time to forge ahead. She felt it was true. But there was never any way to know.

The sound of Jeremy and Amanda’s conversation continued. His voice slower, slightly nasal; hers looser, each word sounding as if she worked her whole mouth to get it out. Sonja adjusted herself in her seat. She propped her pillow against the window. The coolness of the glass seeped through the cushion and thin white case. She looked across at the mother and daughter again. The mother had fallen asleep while the daughter sat rapt with attention staring at the iPad. Every now and then she would glance up at her mother, stare for a second, and look back down at the screen. Sonja’s eyes began to droop. The thought of coffee crossed her mind. She wanted to take in each part of the trip as much as she possibly could. The morning she left, she had seen the fog roll in from the city out over the bay and ensconce the entire train in thick grey. In Utah she’d watched the sun rise slowly through the desert and spread faint lavender light across dozens of shades of orange and peach on buttes and mesas. Through Colorado she stared at the choppy mud water of the state’s river, its banks giving way to bright green brush, kayakers moving along white swells in the wake of rapids. Then into the Great Plains, still somehow five thousand miles above sea level. The sky an impenetrable light blue. And then into Denver on a clear afternoon, the sun shining in beams that she swore were visible. The high rises of the city reflecting the sky’s blue so that they almost disappeared. The romance of it all struck her as maudlin and naïve. It was an idea of America she had laughed at on the one hand, but on the other had secretly hoped existed. That traveling across vast landscapes on either a wide-open highway or on a fast train could mean something to you, no matter how dim or imperceptible the feeling. The idea had been beaten to death, the gospel of God Bless America, but because it had been beaten to death, part of her knew that there had to be a reality buried within. It wasn’t so much that America was great, it was that life was great—life was vast, unknowable, and always changing. Each landscape was a planet. When she saw the grey rock and crevasses in Colorado canyons, her mind drifted to the character of America. The idea that all Americans are outlaws or immigrants in some way. Each one with a weirdness, with rough edges passed down through generations and characters over time: fur traders, frontiersmen, gold rushers, watch dangling moguls, snot-nosed and suspendered dock workers. Each one out to define what this country would mean. All of it came back to her in small squares of memory, glossy photos and prints of paintings from ten-pound textbooks she’d toted in her backpack or stacked in a metallic blue locker. It came back to her and made her feel empty, but slightly melancholy. How was it that she had been a student at one time? That these histories and myths had been taught to her? That she’d taken textbooks home and sat and read them? That each chapter, each with its neat subsections and bolded fonts was just as important as the bent bindings, just as important as the names of the students who had carried the books before her. Each with their name printed in fading pen or nearly invisible pencil on neat, tabled lines on the inside cover, a year marking their ownership: ’89, ’93, ’99, ’02. All of that history, both the local and the national, contained within a large brick building where she had passed her days, where she had thrived as a creative person. Where she had relished being different and had desired to escape. That was America too. But not just America, that was life. That was what happened no matter where you were—longing, history, escape, remorse. The streets of her town began to unroll in her head. She saw Old Town Road bending up to her high school. The neighborhoods were fuzzy, road names became confused. Was it Lynx lane? Or, no, was it Woodchuck? Did you turn right or left onto Gnarled Hollow? She began to drift off, the road to her house was clear in her mind.

When she awoke, the sun was beginning its descent and the cabin was full of honeyed, amber light. They were approaching Chicago. She’d have to get off the Zephyr and transfer to a new train for the last leg of the trip to New York. She looked out the window and saw the city in the distance. She would get off. She would spend the night. Maybe two. Or maybe three. Her rail pass was good for another ten days.

Puddles of My Fiction: "Death of a Son"

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Sun, 6 Mar 2016 23:01:00 -0500

Matt Domino shares a short story for some reason.

Hello my Puddlers.

I'm throwing a slight missive out on this Sunday evening while listening to Procol Harum's 1969 album, A Salty Dog, which I am very soon going to write a lengthy essay on, an essay filled with fleeting memories and far-fetched theories (what other kind of essay is there?!), because it is shockingly fantastic.

But, because I haven't published any kind of article or essay or blog post in awhile, I don't want anyone out there in the world thinking that I've dried up or forgotten about what I love. I've been writing and performing sketches (still, yes...), and pitching around the manuscript From Here to The Last Mound of Dirt for a final round. If that doesn't work out, I'll probably hang that one up and keep working on another novel manuscript I've started.

This third (yep, I'm going to see if I can fail at writing a novel for the THIRD time) one came from a lengthy digression in a previous version of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt. It's about a man who teaches English at a community college and runs a limousine service. His daughter has moved across the country to live with her boyfriend for seven years and they've become estranged. Now, when the boyfriend contacts the man to tell him that his daughter has run away, the two must come together to find her. This ain't some mystery story, though—you get the daughter's perspective and inner thoughts. She didn't get kidnapped or anything nefarious like that, she's just confused like the rest of us and looking to figure out what her heart is telling her.

But, since none of my fiction has seen the light of day in awhile, and all of the stuff I'm saying here sounds like wild and far-fetched plans and dreaming (what else is new?), I'm including a short story at the bottom. This one has been kicking around for a bit. It's quiet and nothing much really happens in it like most of my stories. So, to quote my friend (and talented musician), Erik Gundel, read it "if you like that kind of thing."

Yours truly,

Domino

DEATH OF A SON

It was a shock to hear that Lynn Colosi’s son had killed himself. Martin had always been an upstanding boy. Though he’d been a little artistic, a little outside-the-box, there was never anything dark or sinister about him. In fact, growing up, most of the kids had said he was one of the kindest boys in school. Everyone agreed it was a terrible tragedy to fall upon any mother, but especially Lynn.

Cold, heavy mist lay across the harbor as Cynthia Wolf and Mrs. Schwartz eased down the final descent of Sand Street’s hill and into the village. The women were silent, each looking out the windows at the thick mass that covered the marshes and abandoned boats. Earlier, they had both commented that the weather was certainly fitting for a funeral.

Mrs. Schwartz drove the champagne sedan past the wood-sided storefronts of the village. Driving a low car again had been an adjustment after all the years of chauffeuring her kids around in an SUV. Her two daughters were now married and her son, Josh, lived in Vermont and worked as a ski instructor. Josh and Martin Colosi hadn’t been extremely close, but they had been friends in elementary school, which was how Mrs. Schwartz had come to know Lynn for so many years.

They pulled into the parking lot of the Inn and, passing one of the rows of cars, Cynthia Wolf limply raised her hand and thin arm.

“There’s Ellen’s car. And I see Linda’s too.”

“They must have missed all the lights,” Mrs. Schwartz said.

“Park further away. We can get a little exercise.”

Cynthia Wolf was a taut woman. She and her husband Ron had come to Long Island for work after they had graduated from Ohio State. They were Midwesterners through and through: both fit and almost supernaturally healthy with three sons who were all excellent athletes. Ron was prone to drink, but he was a gentle man with a loud laugh and no one really worried about it. Cynthia was typically reserved, but whenever the women got together, she displayed her sharp tongue. Her middle son, Aaron, a standout baseball player, had been one of Martin Colosi’s best friends.

As they stepped away from her car, avoiding puddles and small potholes, Mrs. Schwartz tried again to remember the last time she had even seen Martin Colosi in person. It must have been at some point when the boys were all in college. She specifically recalled that his hair had been short, which surprised her since he’d had long hair and a decidedly shaggy appearance during high school. Even though he played baseball and basketball, all the mothers and fathers in town accused him of dealing marijuana. Mrs. Schwartz couldn’t piece together her last memory of seeing Martin, but came to the conclusion that it must have been eight or ten years earlier. She was getting old.

They entered the front door of the Inn—which was nothing more than an old, converted colonial home—stepped through the “mud room” and into the warmth of the main dining room of the restaurant. The hostess greeted the two women and walked them to their table. Mrs. Schwartz swore she was somebody’s sister.

Their party was already at the table, sitting somberly in black or other dark shades of grey and navy. Linda Gibert, Ellen O’Rourke, and Robin Andrews were all sitting next to each other at the round table. Each woman already had a glass of white or red wine standing in front of her. Mrs. Schwartz and Cynthia Wolf sat down at the end of the table across from Linda, leaving just one empty chair. Linda was wearing a trim black sweater and white pearls. Her sharp nose and cheekbones lent her an Eastern European air (her family was from the Czech Republic or Croatia, Mrs. Schwartz couldn’t remember which). Linda’s hair was cropped and shorter than it used to be and the blonde was slowly being overtaken by complete grey. It appeared that she was letting herself age gracefully. Linda was a notorious organizer and had been the head of the PTA when all of their kids were in school.

“We’re waiting for Jeanette,” Linda Gibert said. “She had to pick up her dog.”

Mrs. Schwartz ordered a white wine while Cynthia Wolf asked for a martini. The late, grey winter light was fading over the harbor and Cynthia said that the cocktail would help warm her spirits. The rest of the women quietly laughed and took deliberate sips of their wine.

“It’s a shame that this is how we all get together now,” Robin Andrews said, adjusting one side of her thick, brown hair. She had raised three sons and one daughter, who had just graduated college and was living at home. Robin’s grey was starting to show in streaks along her temple, but she remained in good shape. She’d been a dance teacher for years. “We used to do this kind of thing all the time.”

They all nodded in agreement.

“At least everyone looks great,” Linda said.

The women looked around, smiled and assented. The waiter brought Mrs. Schwartz and Cynthia Wolf their drinks and all the women toasted to the departed Martin Colosi.

“He was such a nice boy,” Ellen O’Rourke said. “He used to come over for a while there right when they started high school. I think he and Jessica were ‘dating’ at that point.”

“That’s what everyone thought,” Mrs. Schwartz said.

“That they were dating?” Ellen O’ Rourke asked.

“No, that Martin was a nice boy,” Mrs. Schwartz said.

“Oh, yes,” nodded Ellen O’Rourke. Round and somewhat mousy, she taught fifth grade at an elementary school in a neighboring district for almost thirty years. At the thirty-year mark, she would receive a substantial raise in pay, so she was patiently waiting to reach that milestone before retiring. Inevitably, the subject of her impending retirement came up in all of her conversations.

“Lynn was holding up well,” Linda Gibert said. “I don’t know how.”

“I can’t even imagine what it must be like,” said Ellen O’Rourke, shaking her head.

“If you can’t imagine it, then don’t,” Cynthia Wolf said.

Robin Andrews laughed, “You’re still so tough, Cynthia.”

Cynthia Wolf tapped a finger on her chin. “I didn’t mean it to be harsh,” she said. “I just personally believe that.”

“What is that?” Ellen O’Rourke asked.

“That if you can’t fully comprehend something—a tragedy—then its better not to try and empathize. It doesn’t come off well.”

Mrs. Schwartz adjusted her dangling silver wristwatch and took a drink.

“I don’t know, Cynthia,” Linda Gibert said. “It’s just an expression. I think it’s all right.”

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; especially in these cases,” Cynthia Wolf said.

“How are all the boys, though?” Linda Gibert asked. “Aaron looked very handsome. He said he flew in from Germany?”

“He probably told you more about his life than he tells me,” Cynthia Wolf said.

“Justin is like that with me too,” Linda Gibert said.

“How is he?” Mrs. Schwartz asked. “I saw that photo on Facebook of you with him and his fiancée. She’s very pretty.”

“He’s working long hours at the firm, but he likes the partners and he was able to buy her a beautiful ring. Even I was impressed!”

All the women laughed.

“No, but she’s a sweet girl. We love her. The parents are a little overbearing when it comes to the wedding plans.”

“I know how that is,” Ellen O’Rourke said. “Jessica’s mother-in-law had to be consulted on every little decision. And yet, her husband wasn’t really opening his wallet. I mean we paid for almost everything!”

“It’s amazing that all these kids are starting to get married,” Robin Andrews said.

“Speak for yourself,” said Cynthia Wolf. “I don’t know when my boys will ever settle down.”

“And it’s all old hat for you, Eileen,” Linda Gibert said, turning toward Mrs. Schwartz. She flashed a smile that matched her pearls and Mrs. Schwartz wondered if she had gotten cap work done. “You’ve been through it with your daughters. I don’t know how Alan is still standing.”

“Well, he doesn’t do much around the house.”

They all laughed, took drinks and commented on what their husbands did or didn’t do around their own homes.

“No, but for all the stress or whatever little disagreements you have with the in-laws, its all so beautiful and memorable. I’ll never forget those wedding days.”

“It’s true,” said Ellen O’Rourke. “And at least Lynn still has her daughter.”

“Let’s toast to her,” said Linda Gibert.

“Who? Lynn’s daughter?” Ellen O’Rourke asked.

“No,” said Linda Gibert. “To Lynn.”

“Should we wait for Jeanette?” Robin Andrews asked.

“No,” Cynthia Wolf said flatly.

Everyone raised his or her glasses to Lynn Colosi in respect for the profound loss she was going through. Mrs. Schwartz held her glass in her hand and felt for a moment like crying. Lynn had been a good friend to her for twenty years. Lynn was extremely social and throughout their friendship had always pushed Mrs. Schwartz to attend PTA meetings, ladies nights and jewelry parties. For a long time, they had a standing date to go walking every Saturday morning by the water. So it was difficult seeing her at the funeral and trying to comprehend what kind of pain she must have been feeling. But Lynn stood there in her black dress and persisted with her positive attitude, asking about Josh and the girls and remembering some bad joke that Alan had made years ago. She stood there with her impossibly welcoming smile, her gently curling copper hair, and her small eyes that had such an odd, childlike quality to them even as she approached sixty.

The waiter, noticing the commotion, came over and asked the women if they were ready to order. Linda Gibert told him that they were still waiting for one more, but that everyone might want another drink. She scanned the table and all of the women agreed another drink would be fine.

“It really is a shame,” Ellen O’Rourke said. “Their grade had such a bond.”

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Schwartz. “Even though Josh and Martin ran with different crowds when they got older, Josh always said they could talk at parties or if they had classes together. And even when they were back on breaks from college.”

Linda Gibert nodded. “There was something special about that year. I think we deserve partial credit.”

“I’m not holding my breath,” Cynthia Wolf said.

The waiter came back and distributed the drinks around the table.

“Lynn’s husband must be devastated,” Robin Andrews said. “I knew they were very close.”

“They were,” Mrs. Schwartz said.

“It seemed like he’d lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw him,” Ellen O’Rourke said.

Robin Andrews grabbed Mrs. O’Rourke’s forearm. “I know. I ran into him at the Starbucks a month or so ago and couldn’t believe it.”

“What was his name again?” Ellen O’Rourke asked.

“Charles,” Cynthia Wolf said quietly. Mrs. Schwartz could tell that she was biting her tongue.

“He was always a bit quiet,” Linda Gibert said.

“You had to get to know him,” Mrs. Schwartz said. “Cynthia, Lynn and I used to all go out together with our husbands two or three times a year and we always had a lot of fun.”

“What does he do?” Ellen O’Rourke asked.

“He owned a sunroom business. All Seasons Sunrooms. They put sunrooms in houses all over the Island,” said Mrs. Schwartz.

“Charles used to send Martin out with the crews during the summers when they were in high school,” Cynthia Wolf leaned back in her chair, balancing her drink. “Aaron helped him for one whole summer.”

“That’s right. I remember now,” Ellen O’Rourke said. “He wasn’t very talkative.”

Around the table, the women looked at their drinks.

“I think we should order dinner,” Linda Gibert said.

“Little early to eat,” Cynthia Wolf said, looking at Mrs. Schwartz. “It’s not Florida.”

The women stifled their laughter. Linda Gibert ignored the comment and surveyed. “What do you all think?”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Jeannette?” asked Robin Andrews.

“She can order something when she gets here,” Linda Gibert said. She took a drink of her wine, turning her head slightly. It was dark outside over the harbor and her nose pointed sharply in the growing dining room light. Mrs. Schwartz remembered sitting across from her at other gatherings like this, or watching her hold court over the evening PTA meetings in the cafeteria, the floors freshly waxed from a day’s worth of dust and smashed lunch food. Mrs. Schwartz could still recall the damp, stale smell of the school and the buzzing of the lights in the quiet halls at that hour of the night. For the most part, she did not miss that era of her life, but the fact that the memories felt so far away—even though some of the sensations remained with her—caused a profound and unwanted sense of longing to grow in her chest.

The next time the waiter passed, Linda Gibert caught his attention. He disappeared and returned with menus. The women looked over the choices and discussed what dietary limitations they were on. Robin Andrews did not eat carbs. Cynthia Wolf had already had her carbs for the day. Linda had been a vegetarian for two years, while Mrs. Schwartz and Ellen O’Rourke just tried to be smart about what they ate. They all agreed that it was lucky none of them had the inconvenience of being, or deciding to be, gluten-free. Once they were ready, Linda again caught the waiter’s attention and they each placed their order. He vanished once more and then reappeared with a basket of assorted warm breads.

Mrs. Schwartz grabbed a small pumpernickel roll and began buttering it. “I was hungrier than I realized.”

“See,” Mrs. Gibert said, also reaching for bread. “And it’s amazing what they’ve done to this place over the past year or so.”

“I couldn’t believe the renovations the first time I came back,” Ellen O’Rourke said, adjusting herself from side to side in her chair.

“Still overpriced,” said Cynthia Wolf.

Linda Gibert shrugged and buttered, her pearl necklace slightly moving along her chest.

“I hate to broach the subject,” Robin Andrews said, taking a sip of wine. She leaned into the table. “But does anyone know what really happened?”

Mrs. Schwartz glanced over to Cynthia Wolf who was looking, distantly, off to her right. She moved her eyes across the table to Linda Gibert who held her glass up in front of her as though she had found a stain.

“Yes,” said Ellen O’Rourke, “I don’t know anything at all. Had he been depressed?”

Mrs. Schwartz cleared her throat as if she were preparing to speak. She didn’t intend to say anything, but she hoped that one of the women might take it as a cue. It didn’t seem right to be talking about Martin so soon after they had paid their respects to him—and to Lynn.

“No,” Linda Gibert said. “He hadn’t been.”

The women all looked at Linda Gibert. Mrs. Schwartz felt her pulse beating in her temple. She took a sip of her wine and eased back into her chair.

“Then what was it?”

Linda Gibert looked around the table. “That’s it. No one really knows.”

“Not even the friends?” Robin Andrews asked. “I mean, Cynthia, Aaron didn’t even know?”

“No,” said Cynthia Wolf. “He wouldn’t have told me anyway.”

“It’s hard to believe there were no signs,” Robin Andrews said.

“I still talk with Lynn fairly frequently,” Linda Gibert said expertly. “And she said that Martin hadn’t shown any signs of depression. He shared a lot of his personal life with Lynn and never said anything about that kind of thing. You all know he was trying to be an actor, well he was having trouble with it and was becoming discouraged, but she said that he still ran almost every day, still went out with his friends.”

“Did he have a girlfriend or anything?” asked Ellen O’Rourke.

“No,” said Linda Gibert. “He never really had a serious girlfriend. Lynn said he didn’t like to talk about his dating life”

“He was always a unique kid,” said Robin Andrews.

“Do you think he could have been gay?” asked Ellen O’Rourke.

Mrs. Schwartz took a drink of her wine. As she brought the glass to her lips, she could see Cynthia Wolf discreetly roll her eyes.

“No,” said Linda Gibert. “I don’t think it was anything like that, or at least Lynn doesn’t. He was just very smart and I think he put too much pressure on himself. Lynn said he was living a very ascetic lifestyle the last time they had visited his apartment.”

“Ascetic?” Ellen O’Rourke said.

“Yes, you know—bare-bones.”

“What? Was he poor?” asked Ellen O’Rourke. “Why would he jump in front of a subway just because he was poor? I’m sure Lynn and her husband would have helped him.”

“No,” Cynthia Wolf interjected. “He wasn’t poor, and being ascetic is more than just being ‘bare-bones.’ I think maybe we should change the subject.”

“I’m sorry, Cynthia,” said Linda Gibert. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s fine, Linda. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to be talking about right now.”

“Right,” Linda Gibert said. “What should we talk about then?”

Cynthia Wolf shrugged and she motioned for the waiter. “I’ll have another martini. Anybody else want anything?”

“Well,” said Robin Andrews, “what else is new with you, Eileen? I didn’t even know that both of your daughters had gotten married until Linda told me earlier.”

“Oh, things are fine,” Mrs. Schwartz said. “We’re just keeping our fingers crossed that Josh doesn’t get hurt up at the mountain. He’s been lucky so far. Truthfully, Alan isn’t happy that he’s still working there. He was hoping it would only be a temporary thing for Josh, but it’s been about six years now.”

“What do you think about it?” Robin Andrews asked.

“I don’t know. He seems happy. He’s been seriously dating one of the other instructors for awhile, so I figure that he’ll propose sooner or later.”

“That’ll be cute,” said Ellen O’Rourke. “A ski wedding.”

“I’m not pressuring him, though,” said Mrs. Schwartz.

“Jeannette just texted me,” Linda said, “She’s not going to make it. She had to meet her husband for dinner.”

“Oh well,” said Cynthia Wolf.

The waiter brought their dishes to the table and the women began to eat. They talked about the economy. Robin Andrews’ daughter was finding it impossible to land any kind of job that was worthwhile. Robin was very worried that her daughter might have to live at home with her indefinitely and miss out on the independence of post-graduate life. Linda Gibert unfortunately agreed and said that it was lucky that the majority of their kids had found decent jobs right out of college and, in the case of Mrs. Schwartz’s daughters and Ellen O’Rourke’s daughter, married people with on secure, upward swinging career paths. Though they all realized that even a lawyer or an investment banker could lose their job overnight. Mrs. O’Rourke said that once she hit her thirty-year mark, that she and her husband were both going to retire in Florida and were looking forward to it, regardless of Cynthia’s remark. Cynthia Wolf nodded and said that kind of life just wasn’t the thing for her.

They finished dinner and decided to pass on dessert. It had been a long day and they all wanted to get back home to their husbands and get into comfortable clothes. So they left the table carrying their leftovers and headed toward the door.

“I’m going to quickly stop off at the restroom,” Cynthia Wolf said to Mrs. Schwartz. “The rest of you ladies all take care.”

The women hugged and wished each other well and they promised that they would try to get together in the same way, though under better circumstances, at least once a year. As Linda Gibert was heading out the door with the other women, Mrs. Schwartz stopped her.

“Can I ask you something, Linda?”

“Sure, Eileen,” Linda said, holding her coat to her chest.

“Did Lynn really tell you all that about Martin?”

“Yes, she did.”

“How often do you guys talk?”

“I don’t know. About once or twice a week. Sometimes we get dinner with our husbands.”

“I haven’t talked to her or seen her as often as we used to,” Mrs. Schwartz paused and glanced at the hostess who was playing with her phone. “As you know, she and I were close for a long time.”

Linda Gibert sighed. “It’s tough when the kids are out of the picture, but its good to have friends and stay in touch with everyone. It gives you something to do.”

Mrs. Schwartz nodded, but she felt as though Linda were lecturing her. It was the same tone Linda had used at PTA meetings or other gatherings when she tried to push her agenda for what was best for the kids, what was the best way to use the budget. She was always holding some kind of fact or personal knowledge over your head. Whether it was a piece of business jargon she had picked up from her financial analyst husband, or some intimate secret another person had told her. Mrs. Schwartz looked at Linda Gibert: the slim, stylish black sweater, the immaculate pearls, the perfect, almost artificial balance of grey to natural color in her hair; she was still very beautiful to look at. She would probably continue to age well until the day that she died. Yet, everything about Linda Gibert seemed so unnatural, so forced. Mrs. Schwartz felt her face grow flush. She had to say something now—if not for Lynn Colosi, then for her own sanity.

“Don’t you think you should’ve maybe kept that information about Martin private?”

“What?” Linda Gibert said.

“I’m serious.”

“It’s not anything scandalous, Eileen. I’m Lynn’s friend and it’s going to become common knowledge eventually. Martin killed himself. It was a terrible way to lose a child but no one knows why he did it. Not even Lynn.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to talk about it.”

“It doesn’t mean we don’t have to.”

Mrs. Schwartz didn’t say anything. She just looked at the pine wreaths that were wrapped around the Inn’s doorway.

“I’m going to go, Eileen,” said Linda Gibert. “I’m sorry if I offended you. Maybe if you stayed in touch with Lynn you wouldn’t feel so hurt.”

Linda Gibert flashed a small, almost cruel smile, slipped on her on her long, black wool coat and turned towards the door.

“Maybe Lynn didn’t even want to tell you the truth,” said Mrs. Schwartz. She could hear her pulse in her temple. “Because she knew you would talk about it to everyone right away.”

“Goodbye, Eileen.”

Linda Gibert walked out the Inn door, its bell jangling as it closed. Cynthia Wolf emerged from the bathroom and looked at Mrs. Schwartz’s red face.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

The two left the Inn and walked back across the parking lot in the damp, cold night. They got into Mrs. Schwartz’s car and drove through the village, passing the glowing electric lanterns and the darkened storefronts. As they proceeded up the hill away from the hub, Cynthia Wolf said: “I’m glad you let Linda have it a little bit.”

“You heard that?”

“She deserved it,” Cynthia said, gazing out the passenger window.

“I don’t know what got into me.”

“It’s true, though. Everyone talks.”

“I know.”

“Everyone talks and everyone gets old and everyone loses touch with one another.”

Mrs. Schwartz shook her head. “How can you be so blunt about it?”

“Well, I’m not moving to Florida.”

Mrs. Schwartz laughed. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help it. They reached the top of the hill and continued to move through the dark streets, passing underneath the bare, stretching branches of trees. They drove by homes with their living rooms and dining rooms lit and shining white; homes with candles still twinkling from second floor windowsills; homes with blinding spotlights perched above their garage doors. She dropped Cynthia Wolf off at her home.

As Cynthia was getting out of the car, she looked, somewhat sadly, over the large collar of her black and grey-checkered coat and said, “I feel terribly for Martin.”

“I do too,” Mrs. Schwartz said.

Cynthia closed the door gently behind her and began walking toward her garage, her shoes mashing against the gravel. Mrs. Schwartz waited until she disappeared into her house—a habit that had stuck with her from dropping the kids off—and pulled out from the driveway. She began to feel guilty about what she had said to Linda. Cynthia Wolf was right: everyone talked. She shouldn’t have lost her composure. She shouldn’t have felt the need to protect Lynn’s honor—if that was what she was even protecting. No, it was more that she was trying to protect the memory of her friendship with Lynn, a friendship that had undoubtedly cooled in the past decade or so since the kids had all moved on and gone away.

At a nearby stop sign, Mrs. Schwartz watched as a sedan, with its headlights beaming, turned into a small, stone-lined driveway. The car’s lights illuminated the side of a blue colonial home. She looked at the clock. It was almost eight. Perhaps the driver of the car was a husband just arriving home from work, tired and preparing to greet his family; or maybe it was a mother bringing her sons back from basketball practice, or her daughter back from a winter recital or after school hangout with friends. She imagined that the home contained a family in the peak of their activity, a family with a full and chaotic schedule—arguing, laughing, taking vacations, fighting, showing the smallest acts of kindness and cruelty. She didn’t know anything about their lives, but she was jealous of them all. None of them knew what they had, and for the first time in her life she was overcome with the desire to do anything possible to get that all back. No one needed to her to pick them; no one needed her to drive them anywhere. The headlights from the car shut off and the driveway was filled with winter darkness once more.

Mrs. Schwartz resumed driving and wondered what she and her husband were going to do that weekend. There was always so much time to kill.

My Top Ten Albums of 2015 (and other years)

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 17:40:00 -0500

Matt Domino provides you with his favorite albums of 2015 or any other year.

Hello, my Puddlers.

Another year is coming to an end. It’s been a wild one for me. I got out of a dead end job and into one that challenges me on a daily basis and where I work with some of the best people I’ve ever known. My sketch comedy group performed at least one show a month from April to December and I think I got a real future in this thing! SNL, Hollywood, Broadway, I don’t care which one it is—I just wanna be famous!

I still continue to write fiction badly, but it is the one thing I truly enjoy doing more than anything else. Maybe someday I’ll be good at it and you might be able to read something that I’ve done that’s worth reading. This blog continues to remain a relic of my misguided and dreamy 20s. But, hey, at least you can read a lot about Mad Men and the NBA!

And, ah yes, Mad Men came to a close this year. I certainly felt a sense of loss after the series finale. It’s difficult to truly describe why that show affected me so much, but I still think about its themes, lessons and characters every day as I try to accept love and give love to others; as I attempt to allow myself to be one with the rest of my fellow man and embrace them for all of their faults and understand that my faults are manifest as well and that it is all right.

But, as is my custom at the end of every year, here is a long list of albums I loved and listened to this year. That doesn’t mean they all came out in 2015 (though a great majority of them did)—it just means I listened to each of these albums obsessively for some portion of this odd, disturbing, and certainly dark year. But with darkness comes light, and with light, comes light sabers and The Force Awakens. So, as before, we step both boldly and with reservation into the oncoming new year, as if it were a cold, rushing stream, running through two sun-covered banks.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Gemma – As Ever (2015)

So what if one of my best friends is one of the minds behind this fantastic record of electro-R&B, this one has to be on the list. The title track has one of the most grin-inducing melodies of the year and my boy, Erik Gundel, can’t hide his love of Max Tundra even in the deepest soul beats he lays out here.

Tobias Jesso Jr. – Goon (2015)

The resurgence of 60s and 70s Laurel Canyon pop was in full effect in 2015 and Tobias Jesso Jr.’s record was at the front of the pack. A mixture of Harry Nilsson, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman and Graham Nash, this record has sadsack pop pleasures all over it.

Viet Cong – Viet Cong (2015)

Normally I’m not a fan of industrial, self-serious rock, but I liked this one! There is no denying the insistent groove on “March of Progress” and the unbridled energy on “Pointless Experience” comes close to Bowie at his late 70s best.

Link Wray – Link Wray (1971)

This is one of those records lost to time, but thankfully I found it this year. “La De Da” is worth the price of admission alone, with its haggard McCartneyesque melody and bass playing. Homespun swamp-rock with a sense of classic pop.

BONUS RECORDS:

George Harrison – Extra Texture (1975)

OK, so George hit a rough patch in the mid-70s and this isn’t one of his better efforts by a long stretch. Still, that still doesn’t make it bad. “You” (a leftover from the All Things Must Pass sessions is perhaps the fifth best song of his solo career) is a hidden gem. And “His Name Is Legs (Ladies And Gentleman)” is one of George’s strangest, but hardest rockers.

Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (2015)

After four solo albums and ten Animal Collective albums (not counting their great EPs), there are people who are sick of Panda Bear’s “thing.” I actually forgot about Person Pitch existed for a few years. Then I listened to Panda Bear Meets the Grim Repaer and fell in love all over again. From the otherworldly choiring in “Sequential Circuits” to the bouncy “Principe Real” and the banging (yes, banging) “Boys Latin” it’s an album that you can simmer in. Its not something to listen to all the time, but it’s a record to put on when you have to make a complicated meal.

Jeff Lynne – Armchair Theater (1990)

There comes a time in your life when you are listening to a Jeff Lynne solo album from 1990 and you think, “What the hell happened to me?” But then you remember that from 1985-1990, Lynne helped produce five hit records (Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever, Cloud Nine by George Harrison, Mystery Girl by Roy Orbison, and both Traveling Wilbury’s albums). And that, hey, ELO had some undeniable hits. But Armchair Theater is a strangely affecting record full of songs with melancholy (“What Would It Take” and “Don’t Say Goodbye”) and triumph (“Lift Me Up”) that, if sung by Petty or Harrison, would have been canonical.

Low Cut Connie – Hi Honey (2015)

There are some of us out there who never get tired of the Stones or the Faces, who can’t get enough of well done boogie rock. And then there are those who think it is redundant and boring. I am most certainly in the former camp and this album hits all the right notes, from the tinkling piano and distant background shouts, to the “Brown Sugar” slide guitar. You won’t find a more fun listen than the 3:24 of “Me N Annie” anywhere else in 2015.

Natalie Prass – Natalie Prass (2015)

This record led the charge for “best of the year” when it came out in January and it still holds up almost 12 months later. There was a lot to like about this album: the hard struggle to see its release, Prass’ beautiful voice, and the Dusty Goes to Memphis style production. Prass’ self-titled debut is as solid as they come, full of rich sounds, melodic twists and turns and memorable songs. “My Baby Don’t Understand Me” goes up there as one of the best album openers in recent years. The piano on “Never Over You” was quite possibly my favorite recorded sound in 2015. And at 39:06 you can’t go wrong with giving it a spin.

Led Zeppelin – In Through the Out Door (1979)

I’ve written my fair share on Led Zeppelin and what they mean to nearly every male currently over the age of fifteen, so I’m not going to dive deep into Zep lore. All I’m going to do is make a simple plea for their least loved album.

It could’ve been one long night of drinking or it could just be that my tastes have slowly eroded over time, but In Through the Out Door hit me hard this summer. “In the Evening” has always been one of my favorite Zeppelin songs. When you have the benefit of looking back at their entire career as a whole entity, it’s a song that sounds like the end. Plant’s voice is strained and drenched in reverb, Page’s riffs are the musical equivalent (sorry, Ennio) of a gunslinger heading to his last showdown, and underneath the fading bravura there is an undeniable tone of melancholy. “Fool in the Rain” is better once you’ve stopped hearing it on classic rock radio and “All of My Love” is maudlin, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad.

There are definitely songs that only a mother (or insane person like me) could love. “Hot Dog” is a silly, random country number that no one wanted Zeppelin to do. “Carouselambra” is overblown, features at least four different movements and perhaps the most unintentionally funny synthesizer sound on record. (P.S. I love this song.) “I’m Gonna Crawl” aims for an air of stately burden, but doesn’t find it.

And then there is “South Bound Suarez,” which is probably the lost gem of later day Zep. Bonzo is locked in and Page’s guitar playing is as peppy and jubilant (more George Harrison than “Bring it on Home”) as it ever was and John Paul Jones’ piano playing is a treat. Sure, it’s got their worst album cover and is basically the thesis statement for why punk had to exist, but this record deserves a shot!

___________________________________________________________

10. Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

A lot of rock-writer hard-ons were raised upon this album’s release at the beginning of the year, but I couldn’t say the same for myself. My reaction was more, “Did everyone flip out over Sheryl Crowe this much in the early 90’s?”

Now, just because I didn’t pitch a tent doesn’t mean that I didn’t like this record. Courtney Barnett can write a song and her singing cadence creates a world unto itself. This is a record with 11 songs that fit snugly into the rock canon and that’s nothing to shrug your shoulders at. “Character Operator” and “Pedestrian at Best” provide a potent 1-2 punch—a shot and beer special in track sequence form. The melody on “Debbie Downer” is fantastic right down to the Go-Go’s keyboards.

But, for me, few tracks got better this year than “Dead Fox.” Sure, the Sheryl Crowe parallels are on full display, but so are the Lou Reed ones. It’s difficult to create a tone of nonchalance in a song while managing to avoid cool detachment. On “Dead Fox,” Barnett takes her nonchalance and marries it to real paranoia as she worries about making decisions among the minutia of all of the information provided to us daily in modern life. This makes the song more than an amiable rocker with great swirling guitars, but something to hold onto.

9. Ducktails – St. Catherine (2015)

The Real Estate empire spread far and wide in 2015 with releases by both Ducktails and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks—each led by members of the band. Though I’ve never been a supporter of Real Estate (for no other reason than laziness), sometimes you need a little bit of dreamy psych-pop in your life. St. Catherine amps up the mellotron in a way that would make the Moody Blues proud, while managing to find a place to add a bit of Feelies-style melodicism.

Where Tame Impala, on Currents, took the joys of their powerful psychedelia and tried to marry it to perhaps too many different styles, Ducktails are content to marinate in the afterglow of a trip—and that experience usually comes with a shimmering feeling that is found on songs like “The Disney Afternoon,” the strange surges of energy on “Medieval,” and (depending on where you drop) soaring moments of pastoral beauty that are found on “Into the Sky.”

Tame Impala have made psychedelia prominent (as prominent as you can be in rock now) again through the unabashed power, explosiveness and uncanny Beatlesque hooks on their records. On St. Catherine, Ducktails prove that psychedelia is still enjoyable in more mellow doses.

8. George Harrison – 33 1/3 (1976)

This isn’t necessarily a good album, but I enjoy the hell out of it in a, “well, things could be a whole lot worse than an all-time great songwriter creating an MOR album with light spiritual undertones and an ode to Smoky Robinson on it” kind of way.

Perhaps I’ve read too may of Richard Ford’s Bascombe novels, but one of the things I appreciate in music is when an artist finds a snug spot in middle age and cranks out an easygoing listen—an album that people were lukewarm towards when it was first released because their expectations were sky high for a legend, but has aged gracefully because of its craft. Maybe I’m just getting older and sometimes I just enjoy mellower sounds and masterful slide guitar washing on my brain.

There’s no reason not to expect greatness from your favorite artists, but I think maybe now I’m at a point in life where I appreciate just how hard it is to be consistently great. And an album with the Stevie Wonder funk of “Woman Don’t You Cry For Me,” the surging organ work and ephemeral light of “Dear One,” the 70s game show rock of “This Song,” the synthesized gospel of, “See Yourself,” the guilty hooks of “Pure Smoky,” and the masterful off-the-cuff pop of “Crackerbox Palace” (one of George’s best) is still pretty damn great.

7. Colleen Green – I Want to Grow Up (2015)

2015 was a fantastic year for female artists. Taylor ruled the charts with 1989 until Adele swept in with 25 full of her amazing voice and boring songs. Beyonce lurked in the ether. Miley Cyrus was weird, unsettling and made you wish that she’d eventually find the right adult material (not like THAT) to match her voice. Missy came back. Chastity Belt made heavy, echoey rock. Courtney Barnett (we covered her) was hanging around. Sleater Kinney reunited. There was a lot to like.

But there was perhaps no more blissful listening experience in 2015 than Colleen Green’s breakout I Want to Grow Up. With its bright pink cover and image of the cool-looking (and quite cute!) Green in a dunce cap/party hat and sunglasses, the record announced itself as smart, sharp and very funny, no-frills rock. Songs like “Things That Are Bad For Me (Part I)” with its unstoppable power chords and shifting backbeat make you wonder why rock n’ roll ever has to become complicated. Green sings with a bright monotone and shades her cadence which just the right amount of character (a falsetto here, a vague growl there).

In recent years there’s been a very safe trend back towards the grunge rock of the early 90s (hey, its been 20 years…lets revisit!), but Green channels (no pun intended) Green Day at their best on I Want to Grow Up. There are plenty of bands and songwriters who would kill for that.

6. Wilco – Star Wars (2015)

Look, this is my list, so if a Wilco album comes out during a given year, it’s going to make my top ten. I’m a die-hard Wilco homer and will forever be one.

My bias towards Chicago’s finest aside, Star Wars was truly a fantastic album—concise, energetic, melodic and experimental. On “More…” during the chorus, Tweedy manages to reach a new level of Lennon-esque populism in his melodies. The song builds to a powerful coda that merges the fizzy pop found on The Whole Love with some of the more wonky angles that were all over last year’s Sukirae.

“Random Name Generator” is something that would’ve come out of the A Ghost is Born sessions (think “I’m a Wheel”) or fit nicely on Loose Fur’s Born Again in the USA (still one of my all-time favorite albums). “You Satellite” is ferocious and, despite Wilco’s long history of playing around with noise and extended feedback, still manages to add a higher aspect of craft to the way they manipulate sound into melody. “Taste the Ceiling” could have been a Sky Blue Sky outtake, which shows you how vastly underrated that album is. “Where Do I Begin” has a surprising coda that gets me every time. And “King of You” has their crunchiest riff since “Kingpin.”

The album closer, “Magnetized,” is one of those songs that Tweedy pulls out from time to time that manages to tread on so many Beatles style tricks (the rolling Ringo drums, the haunting, but poppy White Album piano, strange studio noises that seem to have no earthly origin), but still remains uniquely Wilco.

I know I say this every time they release a new record, but its my favorite thing they’ve ever done.

5. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)

I’m not going to try and contextualize all of the rage and the messages about race and poverty in America that are on this record and have already been written about at large over the course of the year. All I want to talk about is the record itself. It’s obviously a heavy and densely packed album, but it is probably the most musical record released this year. I mean, there is just so much music on every track.

Whether it’s the amplified P-Funk of the opening track, “Wesley’s Theory,” or the gritty, angry, disco funk of “King Kunta,” every second of every song has some detail or sound to pay close attention to. Who else would even make “Institutionalized” in 2015? And “Hood Politics” shifts from its opening Bill Withers keyboards to the bending rubberband synthesizers of its second half when Kendrick is yelling, “shit is boo boo”—which is probably my favorite vocal hook of the year.

And I don’t think there are ten more compelling performances put on record than what Kendrick does on “u.” The second half of the song, when he steps into character as a distraught, clearly drunk man, nearly transcends music and turns into actual dramatic theater. There’s off-kilter saxophone, drifting voices—its like someone lying on a made bed, barely able to stay conscious after drinking so much and listening to someone play the saxophone from down the hall. It’s simultaneously unsettling and awe-inspiring and like nothing I’ve ever heard on record before.

4. Kurt Vile - b’lieve i’m goin down… (2015)

Kurt Vile records are like seeing an old friend after a few years. You may not have stayed in touch for a bit, but after shooting the shit for a bit, its like no time has passed at all, you step back into a world that is familiar to you both. With the opening, circular riffs of “Pretty Pimpin” you know that nobody other than Kurt Vile could have made b’lieve i’m going down… There’s a downtrodden aspect to Vile’s songs, strange things happen, people get punched in the face, fall down, seem to be frequently confused but manage to laugh at everything that happens to them. There is a certain, quiet beatitude to all of the subjects in Vile’s songs.

If you’ve read anything about this album, you know the main points are that Kurt added keyboards, banjos and pianos instead of his normal expressive guitar playing. But the guitar is still absolutely at the center here. “Dust Bunnies” has riffs and a rhythm that is distinctly Kurt Vile. Whereas “Shame Chamber” and “Girl Called Alex” seemed to be the central, musical points of view on Walkin On A Pretty Daze, here the central tracks are “Wheelhouse” and “That’s Life, tho (almost hate to say)” two downer tunes that deliver up some of the less appealing realities in life (“But you gotta be alone to figure things out sometimes/Be alone sometimes even in a crowd of friends” and “When I go out I take pills to take the edge off or to just take a chillax man and forget about/Just a certified bad ass out for a night on the town”). But all that gives way eventually to “Lost my Head there,” which is perhaps is most poppy and traditional song to date.

Vile’s records are long. He meanders through his songs and lyrics, but there is something hypnotic about the music he makes. With each successive release, he becomes increasingly fascinating.

3. The City – Now That Everything’s Been Said (1968)

We all know that Carole King is a national treasure (I’m an unabashed Gilmore Girls fan, so I definitely know), but not all of us knew that she made this record. Recorded after King left New York and moved to Laurel Canyon and only re-released this year, this album serves as the bridge between her Goffen/King days and her Tapestry era. And, look, if you don’t like 60s pop, you’re not going to like this record; but if you do, then this is an absolute treasure.

The opening track, “Snow Queen,” is a classic late-60s melody full of lightly-psychedelic guitar, piano, symbols and Mamas and the Papas style harmonies. Next up is King’s version of “I Wasn’t Born to Follow,” a song she gave to the Byrds. I have always loved the Byrds version, but I now believe this to be the definitive rendition. King’s piano playing is stately, the drumming is deep and rhythmic there are flourishes of organ and picked guitar that are straight from Big Pink. In other words, it’s a show-stopper.

“Paradise Alley,” is a track that Todd Rundgren spent is entire career trying to write. King’s supernatural ability to create a hooky chorus is on full display. There are even odd detailed lyrics like, “The mail was late arriving / the pills were all for me.” That track gives way to “Man Without a Dream,” which is sung by Danny Kortchmar. It’s a tune that is more Neil Young than Carole King, with a lazy, shuffling melody that slowly picks up steam. The piano playing a drumming are in lock-step creating a powerful rhythm that still manages to remain bittersweet.

The album closes with “All My Time,” which starts with a crash of cymbals and King singing, “The world exploded / And all the funny people who were with me flew away.” The music isn’t overly psychedelic, but it is King at her most trippy, especially during the propulsive chorus. With its variety of melodies and tempos, “All My Time” seems like King’s attempt at an “A Day in the Life” style album closer—and she comes damn close.

2. Liam Hayes – Slurrup (2015)

I’ll take the heat for this one. Slurrup is the latest album by Liam Hayes (aka Plush) who has had a long career as a craftsman of fully wrought pop in the classic sense. Slurrup opens with the title track which consists of studio chatter that gives way to a psych-rock soundscape featuring 1965 guitars, weird late-70s keyboards and wonky background noises, which places it firmly in the vein of Todd Rundgren in 1973-1974—and of course I love that.

Slurrup is the sound of a professional pop songwriter playing fast and loose, touching on the genre’s hallmarks without sounding too redundant. He’s not swinging for the fences, but simply making a cohesive 13 song album with no tracks over 4:30. It’s a fun, engaging listen from start to finish, from the Something/Anything progressions and changes on “Nothing Wrong,” to Help-era Beatles ballading on “Get it Right,” to the very Super Furry Animals-ish “Greenfield,” and the positively grooving, “Keys to Heaven,” which Phil Lynott would’ve had a field day covering.

As an old guy smoking a slow-burning, expensive cigarette in a brown wool coat and a hefty, long grey scarf probably once said, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

1. Julia Holter – Have You in My Wilderness (201)

In the interest of full disclosure, the reason this album is my favorite of the year may have a little something to do with recency bias. The record came out in September, but I only just got around to listening to it over the past month. However, not a day has gone by where I have not listened to it. Doesn’t that have to count for something? Though I can understand if this undermines whatever credibility I have left as a person who writes about music periodically.

Look, A LOT of music comes out during the course of a year and there are plenty of records to fall in and out of love with during that time span. When you add the fact that you are never truly the same person throughout the course of 365 days (the person I was in April or May is most certainly not the same person I am, now, in December), the whole thing becomes incredibly complicated.

All of that philosophical musing about the nature of identity and the passing of time doesn’t change the fact that this album is a stunner. It has all the basic fundamentals of a classic: a cover with a fantastic photo and a well-chosen font that could easily become iconic, a poetically vague but substantial-feeling title, and songs that leave you both emotionally drained and humming their hooks every morning in your stumble to the shower. Great albums, whether they are obsessed over in their conception or merely the result of loose-playing lightning in a bottle, leave the listener with the perception that each detail is in exactly the right place. On “Vasquez,” every busy, shuffling snare hit feels essential; every psychedelic run of violin rises at exactly the right time. After the majesty of its initial harpsichord notes and the hooks of its opening verse, “Sea Calls Me Home” leads you through an unrelenting march that eventually ends with a breathy, but dynamic ending that leave you off-balance. Along the way you have odd runs of round bass, perfect melancholy lyrics like, “It’s no wonder they’re shipping all my clothes,” stand out and strangely sung words like “mirror” seem to be a signal of something larger. There is a break with melodic whistling, but within that whistling you can hear Holter straining, some whistles stall.

It is an impossibly beautiful record— I could write another 1,000 words simply on how the verses of “Silhouette” may have the most stirring melody that I have heard on a record released in the past fifteen years. But between its moments of breathy vulnerability and steadfast determination, it is nothing if not human. At a time in my life when I find myself simultaneously paralyzed by all of the atrocities in the world, driven to stillness simply by the sheer scale of horrible things that happen to people each day, while also being numbed to that fundamental and visceral aspect of life due to the fact that the bad news is delivered to me in steams of information on platforms that come with their own little sets of bracketed numbers ( Inbox (1) ) or red notifications that tell my brain that I am wanted by someone in some way—that my online behavior has been approved in some way based on the normative behavior that any subset of people who know me a certain way, in a certain role, recognizes—being reminded of the basic grace of being human through 45 minutes of music is important. It’s a small bit of solace and joy.

Puddles of My Podcast: Season 2, Episode 5 - Athletes

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 08:22:00 -0400

After a multi-year hiatus, Matt Domino, Erik Gundel and David Stern are back with another podcast.

My Puddlers!

Yes, that's right, this isn't a dream. We are bringing you a brand new podcast today. You see, I entered a deep depression after the Mad Men series finale, a depression so deep that I didn't think I'd get out of it. It was bad: using containers of 0% Fage Yougurt (still full of yogurt) as shoes, growing a patchy beard that even Paul Pierce was disgusted by, listening to Boz Scaggs entire catalog from start to finish twice each day, and eating raw meat Rosemary Woodhouse style, and buying entire 8 packs of Entenmann's chocolate frosted donuts and THROWING THEM AWAY UNOPENED. See what I mean? Things were so dark that listening to a supermix of Red Rose Speedway, Ram, London Town, Wild Life, McCartney and the soundtrack to the cartoon film Rupert couldn't cheer me up.

But then, my ol' pal David Stern dropped in from Los Angeles. He got on the horn and said, "Domino, get the band back together and let's throw out a 'cast!" So we did! Well, kind of.

David, Erik Gundel and myself got together for a podcast reunion to discuss our favorite athletes, but unfortunately, things took an ugly turn and the reunion was cut short. And that was only the beginning.

But I'm not going to sit here and explain it. Why don't you sit back, relax and listen to a long-awaited installment of Puddles of My Podcast to find out what happened.

Mad Men Season 8: "Person to Person"

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Mon, 18 May 2015 21:43:00 -0400

Yes, it is the end of an era.

Well, I was wrong about so many things.

I didn’t expect Matthew Weiner to provide us with further resolution for each of his characters.

When Joan left McCann with her $250,000 dollars, we didn’t know what exactly was going to happen to her, but she got part of the money she always wanted, had an intriguing new love interest, and was heading into a future that was wide open with possibility.

Pete got his high-profile job at Lear Jet, reconciled with Trudy and was preparing to move to Wichita. Most likely, he was going to become bored in Wichita. His jet setting position would provide him with plenty of opportunities to stray from Trudy once again. Perhaps he’d make the same mistakes; or maybe, just maybe, he would have gained knowledge and perspective from his indiscretions and learned how to be a better husband and father.

For me, the end of Roger’s story actually occurred when he kissed Don goodbye at the bar in “Time & Life.” Roger has undergone the least amount of change since the series began; he’s constantly coasted on his wit and privilege, with a few attempts at emotional and psychological (i.e. LSD and therapy) along the way. We knew Roger Sterling would continue to live the way he always had.

Betty was diagnosed with lung cancer and given six months to live. We heard her farewell letter to Sally; and we saw how Sally was going to assume a role of leadership in her family since her actual father is unreliable and her step-father wouldn’t be able to handle the grief and added responsibility of being a widower.

When we saw Peggy strut down the hall—hung-over, wearing sunglasses—I thought that was our last glimpse into her world. How could you possibly top a moment like that for one of the most important characters on your show? As a viewer (or reader of the text) you have all of the information about Peggy to know what is going to happen from that moment on. She’s going to struggle at work, continue to strive professionally and learn to become a better manager—all while figuring out if there is a way to find some kind of happiness in her personal life.

All that being said, I was more than happy to have a chance to spend time with each of these characters again; to get even more amazingly written, true human moments—both big and small. Sure, there were plenty of fan service moments. Like the tease of Peggy and Joan going into business together; of Ken Cosgrove’s amazing assessment of his son (“He’s a little weird. I actually think there might be something wrong with him.”); Joan saying that Greg is “just a terrible person”; Roger giving Kevin part of his fortune in one last gesture of love toward Joan; Joan starting the Holloway Harris production business; and, of course, Peggy and Stan realizing that they were in love in a scene that only peak Nora Ephron could have matched for both sentimentality and earned character development. Many people either cringed or cried in joy over Stan and Peggy’s kiss. No matter how you look at it, the writing, from Stan’s introduction until last night, validated that moment happening. You can argue that we didn’t need to actually see it to know that it was true and there all along, but I am not upset that it happened.

I predicted that, with nowhere left to go on the road, the only place for Don to do his true soul searching was to return to his family. That notion was pushed aside immediately when the episode opened with him breaking speed records in Utah. He speaks to Sally on the phone, trying to brag about his adventures, while Sally is stuck on the East Coast trying her best to be an adult. Don, as always, wants to do things his way, but Sally knows what is best. Sally can see that Betty’s post-mortem wishes are not in the best interest of her brothers and she wants Don to convince Betty of the same. However, Betty will not be convinced otherwise, she believes that her kids need the stability of some kind of nuclear family. Don’s presence will only disrupt that and, besides, how long will Don remain interested in his children anyway, no matter what his intent may be?

And, though it was emotionally excruciating (but phenomenally acted), the goodbye between Don and Betty over the phone was another bit of fan service for those who believed that Betty and Don belonged together all along. “Birdie…” “I know.” Those two small lines of dialogue were earned over seven seasons of turmoil.

Instead of ending up back in New York, Don wound up at a New Age retreat in California. He remained separated from all of the important people in his life and found that, having stripped himself of everything material that made up the Don Draper identity, he was left with nothing. Stephanie leaves him behind. She tells him that he’s not her family. She asks what is wrong with him. When Don tries to make his classic Draper pitch about moving forward (the one that forged his deeper connection to Peggy back in Season 2), she tells him that he’s wrong, that he’s “not right about that.”

Don is left at the New Age retreat alone. He can’t leave or run. In one of the group exercises, an elderly woman expresses herself physically toward Don by pushing him away. Later, in a panic, Don calls Peggy. She tells him that people were worried when he disappeared. She asks him what he’s been doing. Don says he has no idea—an admission that all of his running and traveling are no match for truly looking inward and finding what truly makes him happy and give him meaning in life, instead of what can simply distract him from death—and confesses all of the things he’s done wrong. Peggy tries to bring him back from the edge, but he’s too far into his own depression and isolation. He is despondent and it truly seemed like he might kill himself.

Until the Leonard Moment. In the group meeting, a regular, self-admitted, uninteresting man named Leonard explains the loneliness and lack of love he feels from his family and from the entire world. When describing his family, Leonard says, “They should love me. Maybe they do. But I don’t even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you, then you realize, they’re trying, and you don’t even know what it is.” He then describes his dream about being trapped in a refrigerator, which causes Don to completely break down. He steps across the room, embraces Leonard and cries.

Then, we have that final moment. Don sitting in a meditation session, listening to one of the New Age instructors says, “A new day, new ideas. A new you.” Don, his eyes closed, breathes in and out and chants, “Om.” A bell dings and the Coke commercial begins.

Many people have dissected that final moment for meaning. My take is that it can mean anything you want it to. I know that sounds like a cop out, but its true. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Don looked inward, had a cathartic moment—recognized that in his search for love he had turned his back on people who did genuinely love him—and found a sense of inner peace. That sense of inner peace allowed him to see that the one thing that made him happy was advertising.

Maybe the bell ringing was the sound of an idea. Don had internalized the experience of bottoming out, spending time at the New Age retreat completely alone and turned that into the Coke campaign. If he did, that strikes me as true to the character; that strikes me as something honest and earned. Stan told Peggy she was good at advertising, that she didn’t need to write scripts for industrial films with Joan. Don’s wandering across the country, his reluctant confrontation with his loneliness and inability to receive love made him realize that the one thing he was good at was creating ads; was using commerce to tell people that they are not alone.

To me, the more important thing was that the show was telling us, yes, everything is marketable—everything, even moments of enlightenment and healing, can be turned into a commodity. The Sixties have long been a product that we can buy. Anything you do, anything you believe is essential to your identity can turn into a BuzzFeed listicle, can be boiled down into a stat that is then collected and used to tell a beer, a soda, a detergent, a television series or political candidate.

“You weren’t raised with Jesus. You don’t know what happens when people believe in something,” Don tells Stephanie. Institutions bring people together, but they only exist to survive and expand. There is an element of every institution, every product that attempts to make you feel a part of something—“Take it. Break It. Share It. Love It.”—but that sense of community can be false or dangerous. Products are meant to provide us with a distraction from death, we want to feel the same feeling we felt upon our first purchase, our first sip or hit. Religion, with all of the positive virtues each system of belief contains, has historically been a means of controlling those that are afraid of death, of being alone in the universe and bringing them into a community. But that community, that fear, that system of belief is often perverted in the service of selling something else. I don’t want to push my personal beliefs any further, but that is what I took from the end of the show.

You may think that sounds cynical, but I don’t believe it is. Because the reason why I truly loved the show was the fact that I connected so deeply with its presentation of loneliness; of being suspicious of love; of feeling alienated from the world. In “The Mountain King”, Don told Anna Draper that he is watching his life. “I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can’t.” Later in the episode, Anna is flipping tarot cards and she and Don have the following exchange.

Anna Draper: [points to the World card] This is the one.

Don/Dick Whitman: Who’s she?

Anna Draper: She’s the soul of the world. She’s in a very important spot here. This is you; what you are bringing to the reading. She says you are part of the world. Air, water, every living thing is connected to you.

Don/Dick Whitman: It’s a nice thought.

Anna Draper: It is.

Don/Dick Whitman: What does it mean?

Anna Draper: It means the only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone.

In the pilot episode, Don hits the high notes of his “It’s Toasted” pitch to Lucky Strike with the following bit of classic Draper poetry: “A sign on the side of the road screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay. You are okay.” I didn’t realize it until recently, but in “Time & Life” when Roger kisses Don at the end of their bar stool banter, he says to him, “You are okay.” Products can do that for you; sex, drugs and alcohol can do that for you. You can look around and say, this is how I should be because this what other people are doing are buying. But in the end, you won’t truly be all right until you accept the fact that all you have is yourself and that you have to be all right with that to truly embrace another person; to have a person to person existence in this world.

That theme has most resonated with me throughout Mad Men’s run. Perhaps it is the same connection many of you have, but for me it felt deeply personal. My own alienation from and inability to accept love from the people that actually love me was reflected back in this work of fiction. I started watching the show at 22 years old. My friends and I would watch the show every Sunday night in a sweaty apartment. Of course, I first used Don as a fantasy. I wanted to be as handsome and as good with women as he was. But I eventually realized that there was something much more important going on. People said he was a cipher of a character, but I saw in him a fundamental problem in myself (without the sex and alcohol addiction)—that ability to accept the fact that “you are okay.”

I am almost thirty now and I watched the finale alone in my studio apartment. The years have passed and I’ve tried to improve myself in a variety of ways: in accepting my friends and family for who they are; in understanding that your day job will never define you, that in a tough professional situation all you can do is take a breath and do your best work no matter how fucked up things are and no matter how much you want to change them for the better; for appreciating the value in the process of creative work regardless of the results; in understanding that an achievement or another person isn’t going to make me entirely happy—that only I can do that. And no matter what, happiness is only a fleeting feeling anyway; something that men try to bottle and sell in different forms.

Mad Men has been there the entire way. I thrilled when I recognized the show mirroring a professional dynamic I saw at work; I laughed at the masterful use of irony, comedic timing and the economical way the writers set up scenes to start on a joke (see the “Pig Latin” joke from the finale). I learned how to hear good dialogue and recognize when a character’s voice came off as stilted. Most of all, I just wanted to know what happened next. For someone like me who can only seem to write fiction that doubles down on mood, slow pacing and quiet moments, that was hugely important.

So, in the closing moments of “Person to Person,” when Roger Sterling made a joke in French about Marie Calvet being his mother, I laughed hysterically in a hot empty room. And then I began to cry uncontrollably. The television show that I have loved and will most likely love more than any other in my entire life was coming to an end. It was hilarious and sad, cynical and hopeful. It meant everything to me. Just like real life.

Mad Men Season 8: The Milk and Honey Route

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Wed, 13 May 2015 12:18:00 -0400

Mad Men's penultimate episode was a master class in the short story form.

Just think about that episode for a moment. Just break it down into its individual parts.

A man, who has left his successful career and millions of dollars behind, winds up at a motel in Kansas when his car breaks down. He is invited to a fundraiser at the local VFW Hall where he gets drunk and shares war stories with the men. After the event, he is woken up, accused of stealing the fundraiser money and beaten with a phone book. The next day he realizes the housekeeping boy at the motel framed him. The man makes the boy return the money, gives the boy a ride to the bus station and then hands him the keys to his car so he can continue his wandering lifestyle.

A beautiful, twice-married mother is diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer. She refuses treatment, which angers her husband. In a last ditch effort to save his wife, her husband fetches the woman’s independent and rebellious daughter from boarding school because he knows his wife will listen to her. When the girl returns home, the mother knows exactly what her husband is trying to do and refuses to go along with his plan. The woman explains to her daughter that she is choosing to give up the fight on her terms, which is a virtue she has learned over time: after watching her own mother die, after fighting through a failed first marriage. She leaves her daughter a letter. The daughter is to read the letter upon her mother’s death. The daughter reads the letter as soon as she returns to school sees how much her mother has grown to love and respect her and cries.

A divorced, overly ambitious man with an excellent job at a prestigious company is approached by an old business associate who needs a favor. The business associate wants the ambitious man to have dinner with a potential client. At the dinner, both the ambitious man and the potential client realize that the business associate has lied to them about the arrangement. They bond and the potential client offers the ambitious man a job. The ambitious man is unsure. Finally, at the pleading of his old business associate, he decides to take the new position and all of the perks that have been added due to the ambitious man playing hard to get. The ambitious man runs to his ex-wife’s home and finally confesses his undying love for her and his regret at ever treating her poorly. The ex-wife, after years of keeping him at a distance and refusing to look back, relents to his newfound vulnerability. The two kiss. The man tells his wife that he wants to have dinner with his wife and their young daughter that weekend as a family. He leaves the house telling his wife, “Good morning.”

Please take that all in for a moment. Each of those plotlines in “The Milk and Honey Route” would have made an amazing short story—and they were all tied seamlessly together in one FREAKING episode. Seriously, just think about that for a moment and remember that Mad Men is ending next week. There will be no greater show.

Reducing each story to its bare essentials obviously takes away all of the added emotional weight and depth that was on display in last night’s episode; emotional weight and depth that have been added and accrued over our years of investment in these characters*. We mourn for Betty because even though she was a difficult character to embrace, very often a bad mother, and emotionally cold; she was also a complex woman who did fight to make her life a certain way—to be treated the way she believed she deserved to be treated. Was she spoiled? Yes. Was she raised by a mother who had an extremely restrictive idea of what a woman could and should be? Yes. Was she prone to drama? Yes. Did she become a devoted mother and supportive wife during her second marriage? Yes. Did she have to endure the inexplicable whims and emotional tyranny of her first husband? Yes. When a woman like that is diagnosed with lung cancer, you cry. You cry because maybe, just maybe, things could have been different for her; she could have lived longer, continued to improve—or maybe, just maybe, if she had been raised differently she could have become an entirely different woman all together. But that’s not the way things go, is it?

*Duck’s role in “The Milk and Honey Route” was a perfect example of Mad Men’s mastery over its own history. Duck was rendered as a full, rich and complex character in his limited screen time. We’ve only seen him at sporadic moments since Season 2, but we know him incredibly well. We detest him, but we are never told to detest him by the author. He is presented objectively and is open to be hated and also empathized with. His confused look back and forth down the hotel hallway after Pete threw him out of his room, was an astonishing detail—a detail that no other show would pull off. Yes, not even The Wire.

Likewise, Pete has been an easy character to hate. He’s entitled, unctuous and spiteful. Yet, he’s always been good at his work, devoted to his company and constantly forward-thinking. He is perhaps one of the best drawn characters in the history of television as well as in fiction of the past fifty years. I am willing to make that claim. Just thinking about the way Pete has grown, yet stayed true to his core characteristics over the years, makes me insanely jealous. To have a staff of writers (and, of course, a showrunner) that understood how to remain true to a character the way they did for Pete, that is what writing and creating fiction is all about.

And I do believe Pete telling Trudy, “Good morning,” is the last we’ll see of him on Mad Men. However, I don’t see his story as a “happy ending” as many people seem to believe. I see his new life with Trudy failing just as his old one did. Pete will try to change, but I don’t think he can just completely alter who he is. Life in Wichita will eventually become mundane; he’ll feel trapped. Pete did finally realize what he gave up when he cheated on Trudy, but there is a certain thrill in reconciliation that runs dry. The declarations of undying love that he and Trudy made for each other moved me, because I have done the same thing. Not to a woman to whom I was married or had created a child with, but I experienced that openness of stating that you never stopped loving someone and that pretending you did was the hardest thing you’d ever had to do. But after that moment, neither the girl nor I were chemically altered by some alchemy of true love—we were both the same stubborn, ambitious and flawed people. And so is Pete Campbell. And so is Trudy Campbell.

But let’s give Trudy her due. Though she was off-screen far more often than she was onscreen during the past three or four seasons, Trudy was perhaps the best female character on Mad Men. She always stood up for herself, knew how to put Pete in his place and never settled for anything less than the human dignity she treated other with and respected to be treated the same way. Sure, her father spoiled her and, at times, she was a master of manipulating the matrimonial puppet strings, but overall she was a strong and principled woman. She just happened to fall in love with Pete.

Then, of course, as always, there is Don. The man who likes to play the stranger returned completely to his Hobo Code roots. As Margaret Lyons pointed out on Vulture earlier this week, “The Milk and Honey Route” was full of direct allusions to the sixth episode of Season One. When I ruminated about Don traveling to California in my recap last week, I really should have been thinking about “The Hobo Code.” Of course Matthew Weiner would reach back to the themes and signposts he laid out—quite literally in the case of the hobo in Don’s flashback from that episode—and return them to front and center.

In “The Hobo Code,” the hobo tells Young Don Draper, “What's at home? I had a family once: a wife, a job, a mortgage. I couldn't sleep at night tied to all those things. ... Now I sleep like a stone: sometimes under the stars, the rain, the roof of a barn. But I sleep like a stone.” Don’s smile at the end of “The Milk and Honey Route” suggests that he is happy now that he has stripped himself of all of his possessions: his wife, his job, his home and even his car. However, how long can the road and a life without identity last? We all believe we can strip ourselves of our egos, that its possible to be a true non-entity in this world—to simply exist and see where fate takes us. John Lennon tried it during the height of the Beatles when he famously took so much acid that he lost his ego. He then had to build his ego back up piece by piece.

What I am trying to say is that we inevitably falter. We want to be good, humble people and not care about our stance or position in the universe; to just be a part of time and its infinite passing. But we are humans. We are born into the material world and we toil in the material world, losing ourselves in objects, passions, addictions and our own identities. Don is attempting to strip himself of all those trappings, but something tells me that he’ll eventually have to return home.

He imparted wisdom onto Andy, another would-be hobo; another would be “Don Draper.” He divulged one of his most important secrets—about killing his CO—to the men at the VFW Hall. He’s already explained his upbringing in a whorehouse at the Hershey pitch meeting. He has tried to improve himself, to try and find who he really is. He is not Dick Whitman, nor is he Don Draper anymore. Like most of us, he now is trying to build an identity that comes solely out of searching within yourself, searching your soul for what you really want; not what it seems like you should want. Not what the world advertises to you as an acceptable or desirable identity—whether that’s a successful Ad-man, a beatnik, a hippy, or a politician.

Don, like the rest of us, is trying to build an identity for himself the hard way. Part of that building comes with understanding your place within your family; with accepting your family for whom and what they are. Something tells me we’re going to see Don do that in the series finale.

But, like everyone else, I have no idea what’s going to happen. And that is the beauty of Mad Men. Anything could happen. Nothing could happen. Either way, it would be an artistic depiction of the truth.

Time and Horizons

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Tue, 5 May 2015 13:46:00 -0400

Riffing on both "Time & Life" and "The Lost Horizon."

Maybe because “Time & Life” and “The Lost Horizon” are the two best episodes of this season of Mad Men thus far, it feels like they tie together in a nice way. Or maybe its because I had no time to write a recap of “Time & Life” last week so I have to tie the two episodes together here. Either way, I believe there is some kind of thematic unity.

This Season 8 (or back half of Season 7, whichever you prefer) has focused on stripping Don’s life away to the bare essentials. Betty and the kids have all moved on (Sally to boarding school, “coming and going as she pleases*”, Betty to her master’s program in psychology, and the Draper boys to Cub Scouts and baseball). Megan has a million dollars of Don’s money, his furniture, and her freedom from his moody, narcissistic, self-hating orbit. Don’s apartment was sold to a young couple. And, at the end of Time & Life, his agency and his professional freedom were taken away from him as well.

* Don described Conrad Hilton in the same way in “Shut the Door, Have a Seat” and I swear Betty has said the same thing about Don before. I just need to find the episode.

By the time “The Lost Horizon” wrapped up to the halting drum kicks of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Don’s actual professional role had been rendered obsolete and redundant. His latest love infatuation was deemed not worth the trouble. As Don drove West toward Minneapolis with his hippie hitchhiker, I couldn’t help but wonder if “California” would be taken away from Don too.

In “Time & Life,” while Don and Ted are trying to save the agency one more time, they ruminate on Ted’s failed stint in California, which only happened thanks to a moment of kindness from Don. Ted says to Don, “I know you’re attached to California. I don’t know what it means to you, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.” To which Don replies, “It does mean something to me.” In the Mad Men world, California has represented freedom to Don; it has represented comfort; brief windows of time when he can be himself, when he can be happy. Anna’s house was a sanctuary for Don, but that sanctuary has long been removed. His trip to Disneyland with Megan and the kids, was a shot of unexpected joy and passion. But that beginning faded to nothing but drunken, bitter boredom and resentment.

If Don is indeed heading West to try and claim the last aspect of his life that has meaning, perhaps he will be disappointed there as well. Perhaps even the idea of “California” will no longer be something he can fantasize about or grasp in his hand. When even that metaphorical meaning—that symbol—is taken away from Don, what will he be left with?

Both “Time & Life” and “The Lost Horizon” played with history in different but equally affecting ways. Mad Men’s greatest strength is using the interpersonal relationships and histories between its characters to create drama and that virtue was on great display in the past two weeks.

“In Time & Life” we got Peggy and Pete both ruminating on the child they could have had together. Pete sees Peggy with the child actors and, remembering for an instant the connection they once shared, decides to tell her about SCDP being absorbed by McCann.

Meanwhile, Peggy has a deeper visit from history when she gets into an argument with the parent of a child actor. When the mother tells Peggy that she can raise her kids however the hell she wants, Peggy is once again confronted with the child and life she chose to give up. She confesses that fact to Stan in one of the best one-on-one scenes in Mad Men’s entire run. Peggy and Stan share their own complicated history—one that is arguably as complex as Peggy’s relationship with Don. At turns they have been enemies, best friends, simpatico co-workers, resentful boss and colleague, reluctant crushes, and mistimed lovers.

In “The Lost Horizon,” we were treated to the epic Roger andPeggy empty office scene. What any good work of fiction does is set up characters and scenes that are loaded with meaning just based on which two characters are together. As a reader or viewer, you are on the edge of your seat because you don’t know what information will be relayed, what topics discussed or what plot devices put into motion based on the fact that two characters have been brought together. Peggy and Roger never share one-one-one screen time, so when we all saw the two of them together, we knew we were in for something special. This isn’t fan service, its well-written fiction.

Besides all the roller-skating, organ playing and vermouth drinking, Roger and Peggy had perhaps the best exchange of the entire episode. Peggy tells Roger, “You know I need to make men feel at ease.” And Roger replies, “Who told you that!?” Look, I’m no Peggy. I’m not a woman and I don’t command the respect she does in her professional environment. But, since as a man I am feminine (in the way thatJames Salter used the word), I know what is like to feel like you have to make other men feel at ease. I’m a people pleaser by nature, but living your life that way is misguided. It’s true for a guy like me in 2015 and it was even truer for a woman like Peggy in 1970.

Because Peggy and Joan are both up against the terrible forces of misogyny and sexism that are on full display at McCann Erickson. Many people have already written much more articulately (and with more knowledge) about Joan’s showdown with Jim Hobart this week. However, what I want to focus on is a moment of brilliant acting from Christina Hendricks.

Joan and Dennis get into an argument after his insensitive comments to the wheelchair bound Avon executive over the phone. When Dennis says to Joan, “Who told you you got to get pissed off?” Joan has the slightest look of hurt on her face. You can actually see her cycle through wanting to cry, wanting to scream, hopeless frustration and finally access her otherworldly composure (the professional demeanor she has honed over years of professional mistreatment) in the span of about two or three seconds. It is astonishing moment and one of the most truthful pieces of acting I have seen on television—maybe ever.

In the end, Joan is eventually pushed into a corner by Jim Hobart. She goes toe-to-toe with him and loses. Roger (history again!) begs her to take Jim’s offer of buying her out at 50 cents on the dollar and Joan agrees to accept. Its not the victory she wants or that she knows she deserves. But at this point in her life, tragically, Joan realizes that she will never get what she wants; that she will never be treated the way she wants to, or deserves to be treated. We know things haven’t changed—that there are women all over the world who feel the same hopelessness. But Joan is leaving McCann with some of her money instead of fighting an expensive court battle. Money is no solace. However, in the world of Mad Men, what does count as solace?

Don drives through the night and hallucinates the ghost of Bert Cooper. Bert and Don talk about On The Road. Bert muses about “the ghost of America in a shiny car at night.” Does that fleeting moment of freedom count as solace? Kerouac found out thatthere was nothing to be gained in traveling back and forth across America. He discovered that there was nothing but loneliness wherever you turned; that youth turned to age and that all the spiritual searching (whether Buddhist or Catholic) in the world was no match for family and truly giving yourself up to another person. And Kerouac never truly figured that out; because he drank himself to death in his mother’s home.

As Bert says, “Don likes to play the stranger.” Don wants to go to Racine to find “some waitress that doesn’t care” about him. What Don cares about is distracting himself before death. And he does it all in the name of some kind of spiritual searching, some romantic longing for another time and place; some beginning that he fell from. As Don once told Peggy, “There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. Then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is…gone.” But that sounds like a fool’s errand to me (and I would know). We all remember what happened to Jay Gatsby.

Maybe solace comes in the form of Peggy’s now infamous strut through the offices of McCann, sunglasses on her face, her colorful dress moving through a sea of gray and Cooper’s octopus cunnilingus paining under her arm. Solace rarely lasts—existence is constant sadness and distress. We need other people to help us bridge the gap. But maybe if Peggy can accept who she is, then she can figure out how to keep that moment in her pocket for the darker times ahead. Maybe she can keep that moment in her pocket and allow other people in.

Mad Men Season 8: The Forecast

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 11:00:00 -0400

What does the future hold for you if you can't figure out what you truly want?

“I’ve put off a lot of things; but now I’m free as a bird.”

“I just got the job I’ve always wanted.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want—about what I’ve always wanted. Two weeks ago, a girl asked me where I’d live if I had all the money in the world and could live anywhere. This sounds like a generic question one might ask on a first or second date, but I took it to heart; I took it to heart because I didn’t know how to answer it.

Even more recently, I was riding a train upstate with two friends of mine. One of them was talking about how he wanted to change his career; he wanted to get out of New York, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life working in an office. He was bent out of shape: he didn’t know where he wanted to live or what, exactly, he wanted to do. And I sat there and told him that it is important to stop and ask yourself, “What do you really want?” I felt like an idiot, even though it was just a simple word of encouragement, a piece of small-talk advice.

The thing is, I believe in that dumb piece of advice I gave me friend. Without calibrating yourself from time to time, it’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to forget who you were, who you are; what you wanted and what you currently want. For instance, if I told the seventeen year old version of myself that I would be nearing thirty, working at a book review in New York, writing regularly, getting paid a small amount for some of it, and working on a second unpublished novel, he might say that seems about right. But, very often, when I look at my current position in life, I can see nothing but ruin. I get caught up in what I should be doing or wanting and forget to ask myself what I really want.

At the end of “The Strategy,” Don sits around a table with Sally and her friends at a Chinese restaurant. He goes around the table and asks all the girls what they want to do. Sally says she is tired of being asked that question. Don tells her that when she figures it out that she should write it down on a piece of paper, because she’ll forget what it was when she gets older. Sally breaks out a tiny, begrudging grin. And, of course, Don ruins that small moment with his daughter by then entertaining the flirtations tossed at him by Sally’s friend.

As Don is putting Sally on the bus with her friends, she tears into Don. She tells him that she does know what she wants when she grows up: she wants to get on a bus and get away from Don and Betty and hopefully end up nothing like them. Don is upset and he tells Sally that she is like Don and Betty—she is beautiful. But then, composing himself, he tells her that she can be more than that if she chooses to be.

Throughout the episode, Don is told at various points, and very directly, the following things: that his apartment oozes failure, that he shits on other people’s dreams, and that he has no character, just his good looks. No matter where Don turns, there is evidence to show that all of the attributes he once used to get ahead are no longer relevant or useful. His time is coming to an end.

Joan’s storyline provides a mirror to Don’s. When she is in Los Angeles, Joan meets and falls in love with a stranger—Richard Berghoff. Upon spending the night together, Richard tells Joan that he’s made a lot of money building things, but that by doing so he put off a lot of other things in his life. Now, however, he’s now free to do whatever he wants. Joan tells Richard that she has to work because she finally got the job she always wanted. Joan and her guy eventually fight when she tells him that she has a son. Richard doesn’t want to be fettered by children, his have already grown and he made a plan to have no plans—he truly wants to be unfettered, to travel the world, to see the pyramids. The two eventually reconcile when Richard admits he is a “heel” (still one of my favorite terms—my love of wrestling aside) and says that he doesn’t want to be rigid because being rigid makes you old.

Meanwhile, the mirroring continues when Peggy enters Don’s office and asks him to give her a progress report. Don asks Peggy what she sees for the future and Peggy lays out a very clear plan: become the first female creative director, land a big account, craft a famous catchphrase, and then create something of lasting value. Don scoffs at the idea that she would be able to do that in advertising. Don, like Richard, is free in many ways to do what he wants. Earlier, he lamented to Ted Chaogh that he had less actual work to do, but more to worry about. There are endless possibilities for Don, but he doesn’t even have a plan. So, in his existential pondering, he inadvertently (and selfishly) “shits all over” Peggy’s dreams (just like Richard did to Joan)—a fact that he instantly recognizes in a bit of amazing, subtle acting by Jon Hamm. That classic Draper “gentle twitch of the forehead combined with a remorseful bulging of the eyes” is what I will perhaps miss the most when this show is over.

In Peggy’s case, having a plan is good—it gives her life meaning and purpose. Though, it may be what also causes her to seem older than she is. In Richard’s case, having a plan makes him seem rigid. Without a plan, Don doesn’t seem flexible or open-minded (he shoots down the more creative Peter Pan pitch for the more traditional one); he just seems lost.

At the end of the episode, he has entered an agreement of sale for his apartment, but instead of being excited to start again, he seems bewildered. “New Business” covered how difficult it is to start again. Does Don have the imagination to start over? Did he ever? What does his future look like and what does he want? These are the questions Don needs to ask himself. And they are the questions we have to constantly ask ourselves. We are afraid of being trapped in a life we don’t want, but very often we’re even more afraid of being given the complete freedom to go after what it is we truly desire.

Without periodically checking in with what do desire, it’s easy to become lost and miserable. And from there, it’s even easier to become rigid and old.

Domino and Theoharides 2014-2015 NBA Season Recap and Playoff Predictions, Part Two

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 19:25:00 -0400

Matt Domino and Alex Theoharides hand out awards and make NBA Playoff predictions.

To catch up, read Part One of the conversation here.

OK, now let’s do some rapid fire awards predictions followed by Playoff predictions. Just give me your winner and a quick two or three sentences why. Those two or three sentences can also be substituted with jokes where applicable.

So...MVP. Who you got?

THEO: I’m going with an unpopular choice: LeBron James is the MVP. Why? Last year, the Cavs won 33 games. This year, they’re second in the East and the favorite to make the Finals. No other player did more to influence the success of his team.

DOMINO: I’ve gone back and forth on this a million times. Just last week I was convinced it was Harden. But then, while I was making my argument for why it was Harden, I realized that if you were looking back on the 2014-2015 season, you’d remember Steph Curry the most. The best player on the best (read: an historically dominant) team—and capable of changing the complexion of a game with just a few flicks of his wrist.

OK, we both know Rookie of the Year is Wiggins right?

THEO: Yep.

DOMINO: How about Defensive Player of the Year? Are you all on board the Draymond Green bandwagon?

THEO: My only problem with Green is that he’s not even the best defensive player on the Warriors. That honor goes to Andrew Bogut. I almost wish they would just make it a team award. But I guess I’d have to say Green because Bogut’s minutes have been limited? He’s also the best example of a modern, small ball, post defender.

Really, I wish I could give the award to the Most Interesting Very Very Tall Man Since Yao Ming: The Stifle Tower himself, Mr. Rudy Gobert. But he’s only been a factor since the Jazz traded Enes Canter. You agree?

DOMINO: It’s going to be Draymond. He won the media over and that counts for a ton. Imean, look at this.

THEO: I think we can skip the tedium of the two NBA Awards no one wants to win: 6th Man and Most Improved Player and jump into the playoffs. Give me some bold predictions.

DOMINO: What? Why not? For Sixth Man I’m going Isaiah Thomas. The Celtics are a feel good story and are peaking at the right time. His toughest competition would probably be Lou Williams in Toronto and the Raptors are falling apart.

For Rookie of the Year...OK, fine, we know its Wiggins.

Now for Playoff Predictions! Let’s get the East out of the way first since that’ll be easy.

EASTERN CONFERENCE FIRST ROUND

#1 Atlanta Hawks vs. #8 Brooklyn Nets

The Nets are an absolute abomination. They picked up steam over the past month or so behind Brook Lopez coming alive in March (20.9 ppg, 9.1 rpg) and April (20.2 ppg and 9.2 rpg), but basically fell ass backwards into the Playoffs. Does anyone on this team excite you? Jarrett Jack? Deron Williams? Joe Johnson? Seriously, I live down the block and wanted the best for this team, but I’d rather see them go the route of the Sixers than continue on this way: Watching the Twitter peanut gallery tear apart Lionel Hollins’ baffling coaching decisions over the past week.

Even with all of the Thabo Sefolosha/Pero Antic/NYPD turmoil going on, the Hawks should sweep this series based on their system, Horford & Millsap, and Budenholzer’s superior coaching. Hawks win 4-0.

THEO: Agreed. But here’s a few thoughts. 1) Does Thabo go ahead and sue the NYPD? Or does the NBA persuade him to drop any potential lawsuits? 2) Can you explain the malaise that is the Nets to me? It seemed like such a perfect move when they left Jersey for Brooklyn. Yet, somehow, I’m even more bored by the Nets now than I was when they were finals fodder for the Lakers and Spurs.

DOMINO: I’m not sure what the best play is for Thabo/the NBA when dealing with the NYPD. The video evidence is pretty damningagainst the NYPD, but we still haven’t found out what exactly happened in that club. Chris Copeland was stabbed, but Pero Antic was adamant that he and Thabo didn’t even know he was there. I believe them about that, but if there was something going on that club that led to a stabbing, I mean, who knows what else is going on. Silver (like Stern) is a former attorney and the NBA offices are in New York. I imagine he’s going to exercise patience on this matter.

As for the Nets, there’s not much to explain other than bad personnel moves. They took a risk on Deron Williams and he turned out to be, if not a complete stiff, then fairly close. Joe Johnson seems like a nice guy, but he may be one of the least charismatic or interesting players ever. And he’s not THAT talented to make up for it. Lopez is nice, but oft-injured. And guys like Jarrett Jack just aren’t doing it for anyone. I mean, you could argue that their most exciting player was Mirza Teletovic before he was sidelined with those terrifying blood clots in his lungs. When Mirza Teletovic is in play for your most interesting player, your franchise is in trouble.

#2 Cleveland Cavaliers vs. #7 Boston Celtics

This is actually in the running for my favorite first round series. The Celtics have sneakily put together the second best record since the All-Star Break and Brad Stevens is one of the five or six best head coaches in the entire league. They have terriers like Marcus Smart and Avery Bradley to sic on Kyrie Irving. Hell, Smart will probably even be chomping at the bit to take a swipe at LeBron when Jae Crowder’s not trying to slow the King down. Tyler Zeller’s undderrated post moves and Olynk’s outside shooting could cause some problems for Tristan Thompson and Timofey Mozgov. Kevin Love has never played in the postseason. Shumpert’s overrated and despite J.R. Smith’s recent turn as a veteran NBA sage, I still don’t trust them.

Look, I’m not drinking the Simmons Kool-Aid, but I really like this Celtics team. It will be 1-1 going back to Boston and the media’s questioning of the Cavs’ playoff resolve in the leadup to Game 3 will be unbearable. I’m going to say this series goes to SIX GAMES! Cavs win 4-2.

THEO: I’d feel better about the Celtics’ chances if they had a reasonable rim protector. I think the Celts steal one game at home but lose 4-1. LeBron and Kyrie are too good at getting to the rim and there is going to be at least one stretch each game when the Cavs go on a ridiculous scoring run. As much as I’d like this to be a series, I’d expect a ton of blowouts.

Speaking of Stevens, I love how much Simmons promotes him. At his best, Simmons writes and speaks (podcasts?) from the perspective of a fan. I understand the appeal of Stevens in the context of the modern NBA game and there is a very good chance he becomes one of the top coaches in the league. However, I’m not ready to christen Stevens a top 10 coach until we see what he does in the postseason. I mean, we have to take everything he’s done with grain of salt that the Celtics play in the East and didn’t even have a winning record, right?

Here are my top 10 current coaches: Pop, Carlisle, Erik Spoelstra, Doc Rivers (although he’s an atrocious GM), Thibs, Stan Van Gundy, Terry Stotts, Kevin McHale (doesn’t get enough credit for Houston’s success), Dave Joerger, and George Karl (if only for his Seattle days). Stevens could join the list but right now I’m keeping him in the wait & see group with Kerr, Budenholzer, Quin Snyder, Dwane Casey, and Brett Brown. One of these guys will become the next generation’s Phil Jackson or Pop. My money is on Kerr.

#3 Chicago Bulls vs. #6 Milwaukee Bucks

DOMINO: Clearly, Part One of this conversation exhibited the fact that I love the Bucks.

As for the Bulls, Pau Gasol has been a revelation for Chicago this year, maintaining a steady presence down low while Rose, Noah, Butler and Dunleavy have been in and out of the lineup with a variety of injuries. Meanwhile, Thibodeau managed to drag the team to 50 wins...and yet there are rumors of him getting fired after this season.

But back to the Bucks. Look, I want to believe they can beat the Bulls the same way the Wizards did last year. However, this year’s Bulls team is better. The Bucks’ length will give the Bulls (who already have trouble scoring) some problems. I do think the absence of Brandon Knight will actually be a huge factor in this series. Michael Carter Williams is going to be a huge liability on offense and defense. Butler, Pau, Mirotic and even a depleted Rose are going to be too much for Milwaukee.

Since I like this Bucks team so much (as well as their amazing new logo designs!) and I want to see the Greek Freak as much as possible, I’m saying Bulls in SEVEN! Bulls win 4-3.

THEO: Can we just talk about the Bucks redesign for a second? Young, athletic, and they have an awesome new logo? I’m rooting for them but I’d be surprised if they take more than 1 game from the Bulls.

#4 Toronto Raptors vs. #5 Washington Wizards

DOMINO: This is the honorary NBA TV ROUND 1 MATCHUP!! These two teams deserve to face each other in the first round. Regular fans and NBA insiders had much higher expectations for both the Wizards and the Raptors. Each team came out of the gate strong, but seriously faded down the stretch.

There are a lot of pieces to like on each team, but in each case something is just not gelling. It also doesn’t help that both teams used last year’s Playoff breakthroughs to extend the contracts on a head coaches (Dwayne Casey and Randy Wittman) who aren’t really that good. In Washington’s case, they extended a coach who is actually terrible.

BUT...I like Paul Pierce’s strategy of trying to motivate John Wall and Bradley Beal during his no holds barred interview on ESPN.com. He’s the Truth for a reason. I think Wall (one of my current favorite players) is going to step up to the challenge. I say Wizards in SEVEN even though they lost the season series 0-3.

Wizards win 4-3.

THEO: These teams are so frustrating. They both started the season well and then stumbled into the playoffs. Just to be a contrarian, I’ll say Toronto wins in 7 because the Wizards are saddled with possible the worst coach in the NBA. But I doubt I’ll watch much of this series.

DOMINO: OK, moving on to the Semifinals.

EASTERN CONFERENCE SEMIFINALS

#1 Atlanta vs. #5 Washington

Atlanta absolutely smoked Washington in the regular season, but, again, I believe that Paul Pierce’s recent interview will motivate John Wall and Bradley Beal; even though I have no evidence to show that the Wizards are even capable of putting together even one series of competent basketball. I’m going to say that the Wiz steal Game 1 in Atlanta; barely lose Game 2; get blown out in Game 3 at home; win Game 4 and then lose the next two. Atlanta wins 4-2.

#2 Cleveland Cavaliers vs. #3 Chicago Bulls

If Chicago really shows up in Round 1 and puts a beating on the Bucks, then I could see them digging in and possibly upsetting the Cavs. Butler plays LeBron tough; Rose can put pressure on Kyrie on the defensive end even if he isn’t the force he once was; Pau and Love basically negate each other and Noah and Gibson have an edge over Mozgov and Tristan Thompson. It comes down the additional weapons and Cleveland just has more. I do think its going to be a tougher battle than many think. I’m going to say Cleveland in seven! Cleveland wins 4-3.

EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS

#1 Atlanta Hawks vs. #2 Cleveland Cavaliers

Everyone knows that the Cavaliers are defensively challenged, so the Hawks may just be able to space them out and pick them apart. But the Cavaliers have been one of the best offensive teams in the last half of the season. Atlanta plays a sound, switching defensive scheme, but when you have LeBron and Kyrie taking turns driving right at you, it’s going to be hard to withstand that attack over a seven game series.

In the end, the Cavaliers have three of the best five players in the series and that kind of math usually seems to work out in the Playoffs. As much as it pains me to say, the Cavaliers are going to win this one in six. Cleveland wins 4-2.

THEO: What can I say. I agree with all of it. The only must watch series will be Chicago - Cleveland. It will be interesting to see how Love, Irving, and Mozgov respond to the physicality Chicago brings. Chicago best hope is that they get into LeBron’s head by sending multiple defenders at him and none of the other Cavs step up. I wouldn’t bet on it, but there’s a small chance Chicago squeaks out a series win--especially, if Pau has a dominant series.

Before you lay out the West, lets run through who has the most at stake in the playoffs this year.

5. Pop, Duncan, Manu, and Parker have a real chance to win another championship this season. In doing so, they would make a strong case for supplanting either Jordan, Pippen, and the Zen Masters’ Bulls; Bird, McHale, and Parish’s Celtics; or Magic and Kareem’s Lakers on the list of dominant modern NBA teams.

4. Steph Curry is almost certainly going to win the MVP this season. Most of his career has been spent as a media darling, but if the Warriors fail to make the NBA Finals, he’ll face an off-season of talking heads saying Steph is the “best regular season player,” “that kind of basketball doesn’t work in the playoffs,” and “he’s overrated.”

3. Doc Rivers has been widely criticized for his work as GM of the Clippers, which has included getting rid of Jared Dudley and signing his son. His most notable work this season has been calling out NBA writers without reading their articles, getting in a war of words with the Warriors Draymond Green, and his non-stop promotion of DeAndre Jordan for Defensive Player of the year. By this point, his charm is beginning to wear a little thin. When Doc came to the Clippers, he made overtures about bringing his “championship culture” with him. So far, it seems like mostly just talk.

2. Chris Paul is, perhaps justifiably, considered by many to be the best “pure” point guard in the league. That metaphysical title doesn’t matter much if he can’t drag the Clippers to the Western Conference finals. Especially, after the mistakes he made last year against OKC.

1. Kevin Love and Rajon Rondo are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Love has had a trying season. Even though LeBron will get much of the blame if the Cavs don’t make it to the NBA Finals, he’s heard it all before and has two rings to shove in any critics faces. Plus, he’s still, quite clearly, the most dominant player in the game. I have been pretty hard on Love in this space, largely because of the plethora of off the court stories swirling around his time in Minneapolis. However, at his best, he is a force of nature on the court, who can overwhelm weaker players on the post and shoot the lights out from deep. If the Cavs don’t make or win the NBA finals, most of the focus will be on how he is being used, how he “fits” (in or out) with LeBron and Kyrie, and on where he’ll go in the off-season.

Meanwhile, Rajon Rondo has gone from leading the Celtics, with one working arm, on miraculous charges through the Eastern Conference playoffs to stinking up the court for the Mavericks. By this point, everyone is sick of hearing how smart he is supposed to be. If the Mavs lose in the first round, he’ll carry most of the blame. Let’s just put it this way: next year, both of them will most likely be wearing purple and gold.

DOMINO: I like how you steered the ship there. It’s not the Playoffs unless we’re talking about legacies! Though, I’d have to say that I would slot Chris Paul at #1. This is perhaps one of the Top Five Point Guards of all-time; an, at times, transcendent player and he hasn’t even come close to sniffing the Finals. Look at this list: every one of those players has reached the NBA Finals besides Chris Paul.

OK, let’s bring it out West. This should be easy!

Oh, wait...its going to be nearly impossible to dissect all of these series. I’m going to go rapid fire through this and do my best at making “predictions.”

#1 Golden State vs. #8 New Orleans Pelicans

The juggernaut Warriors meet the sneakily dangerous Pelicans. New Orleans stole one from the Dubs the other week when Golden State was trying to win. We’ve covered Davis’ brilliance, but Jrue Holiday’s return, Eric Gordon starting to look frisky and an always dangerous Ryan Anderson could make this series tricky. The Pelicans will, of course, be operating from a deficit due to their head coach, Monty Williams, but they are not going to roll over. I anticipate Golden State Going up 2-0; New Orleans stealing Game 3; barely losing Game 4 and then Golden State Pulling away in Game 5. Golden State wins 4-1.

#2 Houston Rockets vs. #7 Dallas Mavericks

The Texas War of Attrition. These teams have plenty of bad blood: whether it’s between Mark Cuban and Daryl Morey, Parsons and his ex-teammates, and Rondo and everybody. Carlisle is a MUCH better coach than McHale and always brings out his bag of tricks for the Playoffs. Dirk is on his last legs and the Mavs’ defense leaves a lot to be desired, but Houston is operating shorthanded without Beverley, Motiejunas, and a still-injured Dwight Howard. I’m saying MAVERICKS in seven! Dallas wins 4-3.

#3 Los Angeles Clippers vs. #6 San Antonio Spurs

As you pointed out above, there are so many legacies on the line here. God, this is going to be an absolutely insane series. So many personalities--from the star players to the head coaches. The Clippers have nothing to offer after their starting lineup (plus sixth man Jamal Crawford), though. The Spurs’ depth is going to help them win out. San Antonio wins 4-2.

#4 Portland Trailblazers vs. #5. Memphis Grizzlies

Thanks to the NBA’s whacky Playoff system, Portland is actually the underdog in this series, despite the seeding. Memphis has been struggling, but they play perfect basketball for the postseason. They will wear down a shorthanded Portland team that has LaMarcus Aldridge playing through injury (which he has been for the second half of the season.) Memphis wins 4-1.

WESTERN CONFERENCE SEMI-FINALS

#1 Golden State Warriors vs. #6. San Antonio Spurs

Holy shit! Worlds are going to burn in this one. These games are going to feature absolutely beautiful basketball. Kerr is going to go up against one of his mentors in Pop. Kawhi is going to embarrass Curry at least once. Curry is going to catch fire at least once. Bogut is going to piss of Tim Duncan multiple times. And I think the Warriors are going to win in an epic. Golden State wins 4-3.

#5 Memphis Grizzlies vs. #7 Dallas Mavericks

After a long series with Houston, its going to be tough for Dallas to withstand the hard-nosed Grizzlies basketball. While Memphis can’t match Dallas’ offense, they should be able to slow Dallas down just enough to win a close series. I don’t feel comfortable about this at all because Dallas has Carlisle—the ultimate secret weapon. Memphis wins 4-2.

WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS

#1 Golden State Warriors vs. #5 Memphis Grizzlies

Unfortunately, our real Western Conference Finals will have occurred during the Warriors/Spurs series. Memphis will put up a solid fight against Golden State, but I think the Grizzlies’ lack of offense will really be on display when they have to contend with the Dubs’ and their top-ranked (in efficiency) defense. I see Golden State winning this series fairly easily. Golden State wins 4-1.

NBA FINALS

#1 Golden State Warriors vs. #2 Cleveland Cavaliers

This is the matchup the NBA wants: The presumptive MVP, Steph Curry, and the 67-win Golden State Warriors going up against The King. What’s on the line? The NBA Title as well as LeBron’s promise to deliver the first championship to the city of Cleveland since 1964. The Cavaliers may have the best player in LeBron James, but they definitely do not have the best team. Golden State wins this one in six games and they deliver the first NBA Title to the Bay Area since 1975. Warriors win 4-2.

THEO: Man, the West is going to be rough. I’d like to say I see Memphis or San Antonio sneak past Golden State (I have an irrational dislike for Golden State based solely on the fact that the Wolves DEFINITELY should have picked Curry over Rubio and Flynn). But I don’t see it happening. Golden State has just been too good this year.

A couple last thoughts. In many ways, this years playoffs could mark the changing of the guard in the NBA. The seemingly endless era of Duncan and Dirk might soon be over. Lebron might be soon supplemented by the Brow in the category of best all around player in the NBA (even though I, for one, think the Brow still has a long way to go to catch Lebron). The Bulls and Thibs looks like they’re going to part ways after this season. And who knows what will happen this offseason to throw everything out of whack. All I know is I’m excited for the first four games to start tomorrow night!

DOMINO: It's insomnia season! The Playoffs!

Domino and Theoharides 2014-2015 NBA Season Recap and Playoff Predictions, Part One

mattdomino@gmail.com (Matt Domino) — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 08:28:00 -0400

Alex Theoharides and Matt Domino reunite to rehash the 2014-2015 NBA Regular Season.

Editor's Note: Each year myself and Alex Theoharides have conducted NBA discussions and contributed NBA related writing to this blog and other websites. This year, neither of us was as productive as we wanted to be in that area of our lives. So, to make up for it, we decided to have a long conversation looking back on the 2014-2015 NBA Regular Season and to look forward to the Playoffs.

DOMINO: Well, Alex, its April. The Northeast is finally thawing out from our brutal (it wasn’t THAT bad) winter, but people are scarred. So much so that I was jogging on a recently VERY mild evening and overheard a woman saying, “ Yeah, it was like over 60 degrees today...supposedly!” No one believes the seasons are actually changing.

But what this all really means is that the NBA Playoffs are staring us in the face. This 2014-2015 season was the first time since 2008 where I didn’t do a lick of basketball writing. Why? Because I’ve kind of reached a crossroads in my writing life/regular life where I have to decide what exactly I need to devote my time to. As much as I love writing about sports, writing about basketball specifically, and writing about things I love—great albums, terrible albums, television, movies (yeah right, I never wrote about movies)—what I actually love most is creating stories. So, when I’m not spending my 50+ hours at my day job each week or writing about food and drink for The Manual (they pay me!), I’ve devoted all my time to making sure my novel, From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt, is as good of a book as possible. I even stooped so low as to hire an editor (don’t worry, not from Craigslist!) to help me ask the questions of my story, my prose and myself that I was no longer to able to ask. I’m not some gun-shy genius fussing over a gem in the dark; I’m getting feedback from agents, but the book isn’t there yet—I want it to be there and that deserves all the time I can give it.

And to lighten all that seriousness, I’ve been writing and performing with my sketch group 301 Views (don’t sleep on our jokes) and practicing with an improv group that will hopefully gel into something substantial over the next few months. I’m tired of tormenting my friends at social functions; so I’m trying to put my inclination to make jokes, act out characters and proclivity towards being an annoying S.O.B to good use. It could all be a waste of time or yet another delusion of an egomaniac, but its the one area in my life where I don’t have ANY expectations other than to try my best to be funny and contribute with some people I’m getting to know and like. That’s gotta count for something.

Basically, what all this means is that life is changing. I need to close some doors in order to keep others as wide open as I want them to. I love the NBA and would love to write about basketball everyday, but, when I lay my head upon my pillow, I feel a whole lot shittier when I don’t write at least 500 words of fiction than I do when I haven’t written about the ongoing chronicles of LeBron James, Steph Curry, James Harden, Anthony Davis, Nerlens Noel (!), The Milwaukee Bucks, and the upstart, they might be fools gold, they might actually have a legitimate future as an NBA contender with some of the most exciting players in the game and I wish I had just made the effort to see them when they game to play the Knicks or Nets; that’s right, I’m talking about your MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES!!

But we’ll get to your thoughts on the Wolves, the best stories and underrated players from this season as well as our Playoff picks. Why don’t you fill me on where life has led you, you married man and homeowner.

THEO: It’s a big question. Where has life led me?

Mainly, I’m devoted to taking my rightful place on the list of All American married, homeowning, tax-paying, basketball-watching, literary buffoons. I write when I can, as much as I can, but not nearly enough to satisfy my writing itch. Like you, I’ve had to make a decision about where to allocate my creative time. My basketball blog has fallen to the wayside, largely because I found that writing incessantly about basketball was ruining my love for the game. Instead of celebrating individual and team achievement, I was focused on interpreting “advanced” stats and I found myself increasingly entrenched in meaningless arguments about why Player X should be playing more minutes as a stretch forward or why Coach Y needed to change the way his team dealt with the pick and roll. I know it’s taboo to complain about advanced stats in the NBA writing community and I do understand their value—particularly for team management—but I’m at the point where I don’t want to care more about understanding the game than I did about enjoying the game. The best basketball writers —Zach Lowe, Jonathan Abrams, Steve McPherson—are able to synthesize the metrics of the game with the human interest stories. However, I’m not sure I have the time, talent, or energy to match their success. I want to write about a million things; I want to love basketball.

I’m impressed by your sticktoitiveness with your novel. Man, the hardest part of writing for me is finishing what I start. I’ve always been fascinated by anecdotes from the lives of successful writers. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Michael Chabon, who spent over five years working on his follow up to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, only to make the ultimate decision that his second novel was going nowhere and he had to abandon it. These types of decisions terrify me as a writer. I have a tendency to get trapped by ideas, to keep beginning the same story, without ever letting it reach its logical conclusion. One of my goals for the next “era” of my writing life is to be open to new ideas, but also to finish the ideas I start.

Beyond writing and basketball, it is spring in Minneapolis, I’m in the process (read: nightmare) of trying to install a basketball backboard on my garage with only my English degree from Skidmore for guidance (Creative Thought Matters unless you’re trying to stand on a ladder with a drill in one hand and a basketball hoop in the other), and all is right with the world.

DOMINO: I feel like we’re on the same page when it comes to sports writing. This is going to kind of sound pathetic, but I was (and still am) exhausted with keeping up with the world of NBA Twitter with all of the ongoing sportswriter narratives, beefs and pet peeves. And that is probably stupid of me and a bit shortsighted, but it truly does take a little bit of enjoyment out of watching the game.

This isn’t a Barkleyian knock against analytics or anything like that. There is so much excellent basketball related CONTENT available on an hourly basis that it is impossible to not learn something new about the game—whether about a specific player, team, position, shot, or type of screen—multiple times a day. But the tone, the incessant snark and “know-it-all-ness” of so many (so many!) of those voices becomes a bit irritating. Sure, its their job and, sure, I should take it all a bit more lightly, but that’s just the way I feel right now. I’m sure it’ll probably pass.

But, we’ve veered away from catching up toward my own vague technology therapy session. Let’s talk about some NBA!

First, let’s rehash about some of our favorite storylines from this year. As a Wolves fan, the development of Andrew Wiggins has got to be #1, right?

THEO: “As a Wolves fan” is an excellent way to preface everything I say in this space.

Basically, I spent the winter watching every single game the Wolves played this year. Why? Because Wiggins is a beast who is just scratching the surface of his potential. At the beginning of the season, his offense was limited to jump shots and awkward post-ups. Now he’s destroying veteran defenders in the post, driving to the rim against defenses geared to stop his penetration, and getting to the foul line at a proficient rate. All of that while playing in an offense run by a 20 year old point guard in Zach LaVine, who hasn’t played point guard since middle school.

Teams tend to take on the personalities of their best players. Last season, the Wolves felt like they had the proverbial weight of the world on their shoulders because Kevin Love basically refused to look any reporters in the eye (like, seriously, ever), was moody to the ball boys, grumbled to the trainers, and was just a real treat to be around by all accounts.

This season? When they weren’t trying to win, and even sometimes when they were trying to win, the Wolves were awful. But then there would be moments when Wiggins would hold his own against LeBron James. Times when he would shut down James Harden on one end and score on him on the other. When he would dunk all over the Stifle Tower, not once, but twice.

Most impressively, he never seems to get rattled by the moment or by any of the stories swirling around him. Just look at what happened to him over the past year: from March to June, talking heads picked apart his faults and debated whether he or Jabari Parker should be selected No. 1 in the draft; from June through August, he had to pretend to be a Cav even though EVERYONE knew he was being traded to the Wolves for Kevin Love, from August up until today, he’s been the face of the Wolves and the favorite to win the Rookie of the Year. Despite all of that, he’s played the second most minutes in the league (behind only MVP candidate James Harden) and hasn’t publicly complained once.

The Wolves took on the calm demeanor of their 20-year-old star all season and it was surprisingly fun to watch.

Obviously, Wiggins is my pick (and he should be everyone’s pick) for Rookie of the Year. But I know you’re a Philly sports guy. How do you feel about their young talent? Noel do anything for you? Any other true rookies (Mirotic doesn’t count) you were impressed by this year?

DOMINO: I definitely have the Wolves as one of my must-watch teams for next year (to be honest, they were even kind of must watch for me this year as well; and when I couldn’t watch, I ALWAYS checked their box scores and day after highlights).

Philly is definitely in an interesting spot. As Bill Simmons pointed out last week, in fifty years, we are going to either look back on Sam Hinkie’s grand scheme as either genius or one of the biggest gaffes in the history of professional sports—though, the latter would certainly fit right in with the sporting history of the city of Philadelphia.

I love Noel’s potential, though. After sitting out a year to recover from injury (with plenty of people wondering about his thin frame and durability as a pro), he’s going to end up playing 75+ games. He really came on in March, where he averaged 14.3 points, 11.2 rebounds and 2.5 steals per game in 33 minutes a game. He’s tailed off in April, but that’s not too bad for a rookie; although you do have to take it with a slight grain of salt seeing as the Sixers are terrible and have no one else on their team who is a reliable scorer—unless you love yourself some Isaiah Canaan, Robert Covington or fleeting glimpses of the ghost of Jason Richardson. But...ON THE OTHER HAND...there’s no one else on the team capable of handling the ball and running a reliable pick and roll with rim runs were Noel can viciously put the ball away with his insane wingspan.

Noel certainly looks like a keeper. He is a modern NBA big man: a guy who is mobile, has insanely quick hands, can anchor a defense and is capable of sucking space by making effective dives to the rim off the pick and roll. Plus, it appears that he has a slight face up game that he will most likely develop over the summer. That would most certainly add to his effectiveness on the offensive end next season.

I honestly don’t know where this Sixers experiment is going, but I love it for the same reason that I loved the Big Three coming together in Miami—its basketball as science. Will Hinkie’s complete “asset” based approach to building team actually work? I’m along for the ride. Plus, it has resulted in some spirited writing over at Liberty Ballers.

But for me, here is how I’d rank my favorite storylines of the season so far.

1. Golden State’s Dominance - They really are one of the most likeable juggernauts in recent memory. I mean, between Kerr’s wit and self-deprecation as a head coach to Curry’s inventiveness and innovation at the point guard (not seen since Playoff Rondo circa 2010-2012), to Klay’s explosiveness, Draymond Green’s swag and hustle, Iguodala’s channeling of Scottie Pippen from 1997-1998, Shawn Livingston’s continued revival, to Marrese Speights existence and Harrison Barnes’ aesthetic of looking like the perfect basketball player (though not playing like it), this team has a little bit of everything. Oh, and how could I forget Bogut, his scraggly beard and his poor man’s 1977-1978 Bill Walton impression?

THEO: Slow clap for the Marrese Speights existence. He is truly one of my favorite random dudes in the NBA.

DOMINO: 2. Wiggins - He was dubbed overhyped and overrated, went through that weird offseason with the Cavaliers before being traded to Minnesota, and then looked completely lost in the first three months of the season. But watching him blossom over the first four months of 2015 has been phenomenal. He’s going to do things next year that amaze us—and he’s already amazed us quite a bit this year. Although, Zach Lowe’s recent breakdown has kind of tempered my optimism just a little bit.

THEO: My Timberwolves-loving heart just blushed at all that praise for one of our* players. I’m not sure we’re ready for nice things yet.

* Despite rumors to the contrary, the Timberwolves would like me to clarify that I’m not actually a member of the team.

DOMINO: 3. The Youth Movement - This is definitely a transition year in the NBA. And I think next year the league landscape is going to be even more interesting. New Orleans (aka Anthony Davis) should be a year better and (hopefully) one terrible head coach lighter. Utah is brimming with young talent between Hayward, Favors, Gobert, Burks, and Exum (I think he’s going to have a great summer and come back next year with more confidence and comfort). Orlando is basically Utah East, but maybe a year or so behind. I mean—Payton, Oladipo, Vucevic, Aaron Gordon and a 2015 Top 10 pick? Sign me up! Plus who knows how this summer is going to shake out for the Sixers, Wolves and Celtics.

4. The Knicks Drama - I really just don’t get it. The Knicks make terrible shortsighted moves for more than a decade and everyone rightly ridicules them. Then when they try to tear the whole team down in favor of some more progressive thinking and team building, they get ripped for it. Jesus Christ, just let one offseason pass before you get pissed at Phil. They’re trying a new approach; that alone should be heartening.

THEO: Count me in on the rip everything and anything the Knicks do bandwagon. As a kid, I LOVED the Knicks. But the decisions they’ve made since the JVG, one-legged Ewing, Camby-man Can, Spree, LJ and Houston team made it to the Finals have been as awful as a smorgasbord of lutefisk, pearl onions and live music by JJ & The Straight Shot.

I hope I’m wrong. My dad (still a die-harder) deserves the Knicks to be good again, but I have a sneaking suspicion they’re going to pull a Cavs and package their top-3 pick/whoever they select for a middle-tier veteran player to play alongside Melo. I mean, Chris Childs isn’t walking through that door anytime soon Knicks. Enough is enough.

DOMINO: 5. Kawhi - He’s becoming a terrifying, emotionless robot (although, since he was the MVP of the 2014 Finals, he kind of already was). It’s really impossible not to like everything he does. If the Spurs held a creative management camp, I swear to God I would sign up in like a second.

THEO: One week with the Spurs and you’d be writing a novel a month, while hosting your own comedy hour on HBO, and finding a way to turn Harry Nilsson Week into a national holiday. Frankly, I’m terrified of Spurs Robot Matt Domino.

DOMINO: 6. The MVP Race - This year’s race is the most wide open it’s been in years, which has opened up all kinds of circular arguments. In fact, GQ ran a great one just last weekend. The best thing about this year’s MVP race is that it perfectly exhibits the depth and nuance with which basketball is now discussed. I mean, even four years ago, when Rose stole the MVP from LeBron, we weren’t haven’t these kinds of widespread conversations. The leap in information and knowledge in the game of basketball from 2011 to 2015 has been astonishing.

7. The Rise of Anthony Davis - He’s a freak of nature. He’s set to run roughshod over the league for the next ten years. But (and I don’t want to be a downer here) he’s really got to stay on the court. I’m just saying: he’s been in the league for three years and hasn’t played 70 games in a season yet. It’s nitpicky—since they’re heading to the Playoffs—bit its true.

THEO: For that matter, he also hasn’t plucked a single eyebrow yet. Direct relationship? I’ll let history be the judge.

DOMINO: 8. The Bucks! - OK, so they should technically be part of #3; and, yes, they have trailed off over the last half of the season, but this is my #1 Must Watch Team for 2015-2016. The Greek Freak, Jabari, MCW (still not sure if he’s good), Henson, Middleton. This team is comprised of freakish athletes. I’m VERY interested in what they do in the Playoffs.

9. Hassan Whatside? - Yeah, that’s right, I’m a Heat fan as long as Dwayne Wade is on the Heat. Whiteside coming out of left field this season was a true delight. I mean his season ranged from awful on-court antics to Bob Cousy comparing him to Bill Russell! In the last few games, his low post moves have looked fluid and legitimate. If he can buy in to the Heat and the way of the Miami Mafia, the Heat could be dangerous next season. Dragic, Wade, Deng, Bosh, Whiteside, 2015 Lottery Pick, McRoberts and Chalmers. That’s not a bad top 8.

THEO: I’m 97% certain Hassan Whatside has appeared in a short-lived role in at least one of the awful NBA-themed novels I’ve written in the past three years. But yes, the Heat are primed to be the 3-seed in the East next season IF Wade and Bosh can stay healthy and Whiteside doesn’t decide to quit basketball to pursue his dream of moving to Paris and becoming the world’s tallest mime (I told you it was an awful novel).

10. The Atlanta Hawks - They would have been higher, but it appears that their streak of good luck is running out—no thanks to the NYPD.

The Hawks played beautiful, smart, selfless basketball for much of the year. Their reliance on a system as well as taking three pointers and high-efficiency shots both displayed why the NBA is great right now and also why it is in danger of becoming homogenized. I’m not saying that homogenization is bad when that means teams are constantly moving the ball, looking for the open man and taking smart shots—its just something I’m keeping an eye on.

300. The Cavaliers - A lot of unnecessary drama. A lot of LeBron exhibiting his worst characteristics. And now it looks like they are getting just the right amount of luck that any NBA Champion needs on their road the title. Ugh.

THEO: Not to blow sunshine up your ass but that was a great list. Especially, since it ended with the Cavs. At least when LeBron went to Miami it created, as you said, a basketball science experiment. Meanwhile, this year’s Cavs team seems content to bring basketball back to the 1-on-1, your turn, my turn, basketball of the early 2000s. At his best, LeBron is one of the most creative, dominant players in NBA history. At his worst, he’s asking waiters to cut his steak for him and quitting on his team for two weeks so he can “rest” in Miami.

Plus, there’s the issue of the A$$hole Formerly Known As Kevin Love. What do you make of his situation? Agree with the popular sentiment that he stays if they win it all, leaves if they don’t?

DOMINO: I honestly don’t know what to make of Kevin Love. This was a bad season for him from a PR perspective. He came off as overly sensitive and moody when complemented against LeBron. LeBron likes to position himself as getting along with everyone, but it has become clear that he and Love certainly don’t jive.

Yet, on the other hand, you kind of have to give Love the benefit of the doubt. Cleveland has not been using him correctly. Even Miami allowed Bosh to be more active in the post and at the elbows. Love has been relegated to a spot up shooter, which is certainly good for spacing in many respects, but is that really how you want to alter the playing style of a guy who was one of the Top 10 players in the league last year? By turning him into a specialist, rather than asking him to make certain sacrifices, but still finding moments and ways to play to his strengths?

I think if the Cavaliers win the title, he stays. I think if they lose in the Conference Finals or Finals with him prominently involved in all aspects of the series, he stays. If they lose and he underperforms or seems uninvolved, then he’s heading to Los Angeles.

To be continued in Part Two where we give our picks for the End of Season Awards and Playoff predictions.