Ken Chamlee’s poetry collection The Best Material for the Artist in the World (2023) reveals the secret life of the American frontier. Early on in the book, which won “Best Poetry Book” at the Western Heritage Awards this year, the narrator observes that “mutable truths and spectacle sell.”

The Best Material reveals the secret life of the American frontier.

Chamlee transforms each page of the book into a canvas, full of ranging nature and commodification. These dynamic polarities combine with Western grandeur to tell the story of 19th-century German-American painter Albert Bierstadt — this is literally a biography in poems.

Bierstadt trekked into the West, painted what he saw, and then returned to the east coast to reveal the beauty and grandeur of the American frontier. His paintings became “immensely popular lures to immigrants and settlers to the promise of the American West, but it also reflects the complex legacy of the effects of Manifest Destiny.”

Adding to the complexity of this pursuit, these are poems about art as a form of communication, with attention to various individual works of art — Albert Bierstadt has a lot of them.

In the first section, “A Poised Brush,” we witness some of Albert’s earliest memories, his artistic birth, and his journey through Europe.

The passages that detail nature are slightly different here than they are later in the book. They’re breathtaking. But their temperature is lower.

A four-part exercise in raw and triumphant survival and mesmerizing enormity, The Best Material evinces Hans-Georg Gadamer’s insistence that “the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.”

This humanistic reality appears throughout the book, with plenty of space for drama — divorce out of secret love, fame followed by collapse, wealth made by painting nature, and lost by succumbing to social realities.

The psychological drama of Albert’s blossoming growth, too, is presaged in “Fire”

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He will learn that it’s one thing  
to pretty the world, another to purpose it. 

Chamlee does a great job of giving us a hero who starts with nothing but dreams, evoking images of paucity, like young Albert’s hope for “a crumb of money.”

Through the remaining three sections, Chamlee unfolds the broader arc of Albert’s life. To do this, he pairs two of his favorite art forms: Nature photography and landscape art.

Although he inevitably abandons film, Albert observes that a camera is “a type of truth / but stereographs cannot convey / like bold sketches.”

Or Albert’s response, in “Fire,” when “the boys” show Albert Bierstadt a camera that’s “on its prop of three legs thick as musket stocks.” They

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raised the black 
drape above the glass for me to bend and see 
But I would not. I have seen the world upside 
down, in darkness, and could not look again.

Then, shoved into the sudden transition of a nimble poet, Albert asks, “What is a blessing?”

Ken Chamlee fell in love with poetry and nature all at once.

The Best Material for the Artist in the World: A Biography in Poems is much different than Chamlee’s previous collections.

His first chapbook, Absolute Faith (1999) offers lyrical poetry in three parts over the course of 32 pages, while Logic of the Lost (2001), begins to take us to nature’s total openness, but stops short of a full submersion.

Decades later, his first full collection, If Not These Things (2022) contains electric verses like:

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Seventy degrees yesterday, and a sky as blank 
as the green screen behind a weatherman, 
figures ghosted on a small monitor, 
every forecast an illusion.

Chamlee caught some attention with If Not These Things. But “The Best Material” offers a far more intricate and multiform experience.

His range—from simplicity to complexity—pairs with the countryside to capture a poetic spirit found in the early work of William Carlos William, as well as W.S. Merwin, who loved nature, perhaps excessively, but often wound up expressing its darkest outcomes, like his call to “let my words find their own / places in the silence after the animals.”

An extreme version of this emerges in “What Not to Paint,” which I won’t give away.

Or the vibrant excitement alive in “The Best Material” constantly threatens to burst violently, with shrapnel of the American joy and liveliness found in the poems of Mary Oliver, only with a more realistic set of characters, like the “muleteer” desperate to

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cave [Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s] skull 
with a cold skillet and fry his brains, 
hear the fat words sizzle as smooth oil 
pools, then spoon it to a tin.

He pulls off an approach to free-verse that reminds me of W.S Merwin’s apostrophe-less run-ons. This open-world tactic allows the reader to find the cadence and syntactical anatomy on their own.

Or you have a poem like “Limitations of Landscape Painting,” which evinces a wildness with enjambment and visual style that matches that of Charles Wright’s.

Poetry is language at its most edifying and playful, the lustration of ordinary talk heightened to verity. Sometimes just barely out of reach. Other times, so far away that all we can do is barely suspect its existence, like reverberation. The Best Material achieves this repeatedly.

I’ve given you a glimpse of this at work in The Best Material, but don’t assume I’ve handed the story away. This isn’t really possible, given the collection’s elusivity, its tendency to offer scenes that are boldly unique, fitted and thriving with gorgeous language, tailspins of phrases that make you slump a little.

Perspectives shift without warning, although not without hints and demarcations. The poem “Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s Impressions of the Plains,” for instance, employs an entirely different voice, syntax, vocabulary, and pace, with a tone that is markedly academic. Elsewhere, letters and notes speak the language appropriate to them.

Another poem is a critic’s review of the Bierstadt Mansion. There are several moments like this, with gentle humor, but also creative approaches to include characters.

But Chamlee’s greatest success is that, amid this chorus of personalities, Albert Bierstadt’s voice always stands out. In all the collage work of historical evidence, we learn the sound of our protagonist’s thoughts, talk, and laughter.

But this is by no means a distraction, rather, it’s a glimpse at modern poetry itself.

In “Compositions,” Chamlee asks, “Where’s truth then, in rigor or in rave? / Ensemble is not pastiche, by God.”

This reveals a portrait of an artist wrestling with his own success.

These poems evoke a distinct feeling, a sensation you experience during creative work: the ineradicable burst of an effusion, that sudden, engrossing, hopeful perplexity, interposed between chaos and beauty, screaming out in all its potential, that inscrutable nag from within you, deep down, bonded with your thoughts, your voice, your very desires, and the concomitant anxiety of knowing the creative force will disappear at any moment, with its habit of vanishing suddenly, before you can get to know it properly: “This is mortality,” writes Marianne Moore. “This is eternity.”

The book's title poem blows this story open wide. Such an intermingling of the moral and the eternal appears when we get an unfiltered look into Albert Bierstadt’s mind, as he navigates the untamed West:

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Everything in me is tingling now — 
my hands are forks of Kansas lightning, 
my brush galvanized with the power 
to suspend antelope in swift chase, 
hold deer wart to a storm’s menace.

We get his most visceral and immediate reactions: “As I paint the West / I feel — limitless, unreckoned, new.”

He announces these radicalizations using a spontaneity found in Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End, but without all the irony-jockeying.

Because, by the third section of The Best Material, all the components — art, nature, poetry, the West — have begun to melt into one structure:

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Waterfalls in the middle, mountains  
to the rear, a warrant poets learn  
in the posing of a sonnet: lake  
rhyming sky, rugged cliffs pairing trees,  
mountains measured into stanzas, then  
a gemmed couplet of granite and ice.

The enormity of the American continent is head-spinning. As Albert tells us “I may run / out of millboard and oils but not scenes.”

He balks that, even the depictions of the West must be enormous:

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Polite frames will not suffice — I need   
easels hewn from seasoned oak hefting   
canvases wide as a wagon’s span!

Chamlee accomplishes this without succumbing to the manic wonder of Whitman’s early masterpieces, but not without his capacity to name the earthen objects that state back at him, named and titled with the wild creativity found in Louise Glück’s Wild Iris, proof of Walter Pater’s assertion that beauty must be understood through the objects it reflects.

But, lovely and depressing as Glück’s flower poetry is, Chamlee’s imagery holds to the same poetic realism that shakes Albert Bierstadt’s paintings to life. Like the poem about “Fitz Hugh Ludlow” and its intense description of the physical and emotional agony of being stuck on an overland Stage for hours on end.

The book is full of these moments. Approaching the Chicago lakes, after watching a scout kill a bull “the size of a wagon” and gasping his way through prairie heat, Albert feels the cold air that America can offer:

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Sleet needles past my fastened collar 
as we rise into the house of rain … 
My blood is gelid, 
fingers numb beyond recovery.

Glimpses of civilization only make the vastness of the frontier even more desirable, like the torched ruin of Cañon Station, where Albert witnesses “six mutilated men / and a dozen butchered stud, all the hay burned, water fouled.”

Meanwhile, characters inside the greater society express disbelief in Albert’s eagerness to explore the wilds:

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I want to live in a home, not a realm, not 
an acme of unreachable ice, even if my name 
flags the pinnacle in resplendent light.

The Best Material for the Artist in the World charts the contagion of domestication, the ringworm of civilization that slowly mutates into a monster of propriety and culture.

Then there’s the especially devastating vignette that captures Chief Rocky Bear’s reaction to the painting “The Last of the Buffalo” as a showing in Paris, 1889, a spectacle mutated into myth, producing

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a nation so 
united to majesty they reject 
their own.

But these scenes are only devastating because The Best Material for the Artist in the World does such a brilliant job of capturing the enormity of the Wild West.

One line from the bare yet unapologetic poem “Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies,” about a painting of the same name by Albert Bierstadt, demands:

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How do you measure a measureless land, 
a land empty of everything but wind and grit?

Elsewhere, Chamlee’s protagonist announces:

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Now, westward, each wearing mile reveals 
a stark distinction — America 
is as raw as a poorly-shod foot.

But for every one of these somewhat crude summarizations, the America that Chamlee reveals is neither empty nor raw, although there is plenty of commotion, but also “light so sweet and clear you could / pour it on your paper like Vermont syrup.”

It’s a wild and blood-tinged land, lined with frozen lakes and enormous sequoias, captured from the warped seats of a stagecoach to Nebraska, as “coyotes yammer at a blanched moon.”

The book’s title comes from a letter that Bierstadt wrote in 1859: “For the most part, the weather has been delightful, and such beautiful cloud formations, such fine effects of light and shade, and play of clouds and shadows across the hills, such golden sunsets, I have never seen before. Our own country has the best material for the artist in the world.”

This is a book of lightning and fire, two images that recur subtly.

What else can explain the images that Albert Bierstadt captured in paint? Scenes so beautiful and gigantic that the settlers back east often accused Bierstadt of fabricating them.

But these were no fabrications:

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See how 
the near lake mirrors the breaking storm 
with light as fine as milkweed fluff, that one 
pearled peak soft as the edge of heaven!

We stood in a 1st-century village built from scratch on Methodist land. A gift, Derral Eves told us, on the condition that the property would always be used as a tool to spread the Gospel.

Eves is the executive producer and marketing mind behind The Chosen, the global television phenomenon that has drawn millions of viewers and pushed Christian storytelling into new creative territory.

From every angle, the show seems blessed, a living testimony to the artistic Presence of the Holy Spirit. How else can a short video on Facebook transform into the largest media crowdfunding campaign of all time?

As Eves guided us—my parish priest drove down for the occasion, and brought his friend—through the dusty set, he described the story behind the series, a story of miracles.

Eves speaks in long arcs, his thoughts often returning to a moment of vision or a conviction formed years before. The first miracle, he said, came in Israel. He and Dallas Jenkins, The Chosen’s creator/director/writer/executive producer, had gone to Galilee to pray and record a pitch video for the series.

“We were standing where the Sermon on the Mount may have been preached,” he told me. “Our guide, a Messianic rabbi named Jason Sobel, was with us. And just then, a first-century fishing boat floated by. He'd been to the region 11, 12 times a year for 18 years and never seen one.”

Then, a fisherman threw out a first-century net. Sobel quoted Jesus’ parable of the net and the fish—and prophesied: “The Chosen will be a global net that gathers all to Jesus.”

Eves believed him. “That was it for me,” he said. “I told Dallas, I don’t care what my role is—I’ll hold the lights if that’s what it takes. I just wanted to be part of it.”

Dallas Jenkins, the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, author of the Left Behind series, wanted to make movies, but he didn’t want to make Christian movies.

He felt certain that there was no such thing as good Christian films.

So he ventured to Hollywood, gained success, and slowly began change, migrating towards faith content.

Then, he failed, recoiled, and went back home, to his church, and began his mission to create good Christian art.

After various projects, Jenkins created a short film called “The Shepherd,” which depicts the birth of Jesus from the perspective of a shepherd. (Jenkins made it on a friend’s farm in Illinois, for almost nothing, then posted it kn Facebook.)

Eves saw it and was struck by a particular scene: a young shepherd, rejected for offering a blemished lamb, quietly offers water to a weary couple—Mary and Joseph, just before the birth of Christ.

“He gives water to the woman who’s about to bring the living water into the world,” Eves said. “That’s when I knew. This wasn’t just content. This was a calling.”

From there, he and Jenkins set out to fund the show in an unorthodox way. “We had zero followers, zero money. But we had the vision. And we believed there were others like us who wanted this kind of content.”

They started releasing behind-the-scenes content before the show even existed. It aired online for free using a Pay-It-Forward model. An app for The Chosen skyrocketed in popularity on both iOS and Android.

The Chosen has grown exponentially. From streaming on YouTube and Facebook to ranking fourth in shows searched on Roku. Before long, it had about half a billion episode views from around the world.

It got picked up by NBC’s Peacock and Prime Video. And earlier this year, it was added to Netflix. Season three debuted last month in over two thousand theaters worldwide. Soon, it will be dubbed into 100 languages and subtitled into 500. And there are still three seasons left.

Inexplicably, even Mark Wahlberg is involved now, through his work with Hallow alongside Jonathan Roumie, who plays quite possibly the most masculine Jesus Christ ever depicted.

Season one of The Chosen was mostly filmed about forty miles west of Fort Worth, at Capernaum Studios in Poolville — a replica of a first-century village, well-known to church groups and live biblical productions.

By the end of season two, the team packed up from Utah and settled here in Midlothian, just southwest of Dallas, at Camp Hoblitzelle, a 1,200-acre property owned by the Salvation Army.

Construction is already underway on a full-scale studio campus, where the show’s creators plan to shoot the remaining seasons and other faith-based projects.

The site will also open to the public, offering a biblical tourist experience, complete with first-century recreations like a ritual bath and a functioning olive press.

When the crew was about to begin filming at Camp Hoblitzelle, for an especially watery season, they ran into a problem.

“This reservoir right here,” Eves said, gesturing toward the water, “started to shrink.”

A drought had hit Texas hard, and the water level was dropping fast. When they started investigating, they discovered there was a hole somewhere, but no one could pinpoint exactly where.

Worse yet, water restrictions made it impossible to pump more in.

For Eves, it felt like what he called a “Red Sea moment” — the kind of situation The Chosen often referenced behind the scenes. “Moses left Egypt with the children of Israel, and they went to the Red Sea,” he said. “God commanded them to go there, but then the Egyptian army is behind them and the sea is right in front of them. They just needed a miracle. And that’s where we were. We just needed a miracle.”

Then, as Eves tells it, they got one.

“I kid you not,” he said, “just right over there, water started to gush out of the ground.”

They capped it, and the new spring filled the entire reservoir, more than enough water to walk on.

Eves, whose background is in marketing and audience development, credits the show's success to a mix of providence and persistence. And YouTube.

“It’s not our job to multiply,” he said. “It’s our job to bring our offering and give it to God. Let Him multiply it.”

He told me about a time he was scouting a set in Texas. A woman, on a nudge from the Spirit, had built a replica of Capernaum in her backyard. The set was perfect. While Eves was there, he got a DM from a 19-year-old YouTuber—Jimmy Donaldson, now known as MrBeast.

“I asked him, ‘What do you really want to do?’ He said, ‘Be the biggest YouTuber of all time—so I can inspire people.’” Eves helped him get there. “I’d been praying for someone to mentor, someone who could be the gold standard of content—good content. That was him.”

Eves draws a line between The Chosen and the best of YouTube. “They both have to speak to real people. If the algorithm is about people, then content that changes lives is what will ultimately rise.”

When Eves talks about The Chosen, he often returns to the idea of disruption.

“Jesus was the greatest disrupter of all time,” he said. “Who declares their divinity to a Samaritan woman? A woman cast out, unclean, from the enemy tribe? That’s how the ministry began.”

The show’s creative vision mirrors that impulse. Dallas Jenkins, who studied The Bible in college, insists on accuracy but avoids theological jargon: They aren’t making sermons. They’re making stories.

“When I asked Dallas what kind of show he wanted this to be, he said The Wire and Breaking Bad,” Eves told us with a smile. “He wanted real character development. Real people, with real flaws, encountering the Son of God.”

This has led to plenty of scandal, from believers irked by the Extrabiblical aspects of the show to critics baffled by the notion that a Christian series could enter the Coliseum reserved for high art like The Sopranos.

This cinematic mindset fuels the show’s most impressive and nuanced dynamic: opposites that turn out to be selfsame.

Compare this to The Wire: As the show unfolds, law enforcement reveal a deep criminality that leads to anarchy while the criminals adhere to a rigorously organized hierarchy full of higher order.

This is the literary dynamic of the evil twin and the good twin— Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, the brothers from Antigone who die at literally the same moment.

Only, in The Chosen, this dynamic plays out between the Romans and the Pharisees, two political institutions that seem like opposites but become identical twins.

The Chosen takes this battle even farther than any HBO series ever has. Amidst all the human pettiness, we get our hero. An unprecedented hero.

Because he willingly — and peacefully — becomes a scapegoat for the evil men, for evil itself.

True to The Gospels, The Chosen tells this story with compassion for the victim, not mania from the crowd. So that, ultimately, the point of The Chosen’s venture isn’t entertainment, it’s redemption.

“I mean, think of Peter,” Eves said. “Hot-tempered. Impulsive. Is that the best version of Peter? Or did Jesus see something better in him, something he could shape?”

Writers decided to portray the Apostle Matthew as autistic. And haven’t you ever wondered what Jesus’ laugh sounds like?

Narratively, the show is creative with its timeline. Its writers avoid the strict chronological approach, without devolving into relentless collage.

The fictional stories never interfere with the reality established in the Gospels. The sets, the scenery, the characters’ clothing are all meticulously genuine.

Any suppositional narrative must get the approval of a huddle of scholars, experts, and faith leaders.

The writers tiptoe this line between fiction and Scripture, employing an approach similar to the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Hamlet, with lots of time offstage. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead inverts this dynamic, making them the protagonists, as Hamlet unfolds around them.

They always land on their mark, so that there’s no interference. Same with The Chosen: it tells the backstory without sacrificing the main event. We have a character like Nicodemus, who only appears in John, and only three times. Jenkins and the other writers use these few but incredibly significant appearances to create a living person.

When Derral was 12, his grandfather, a World War II vet and Scoutmaster, woke him up before dawn, walked him to a lake, and skipped a stone across the surface.

“He asked me: ‘What kind of impact are you going to have on the world? Good or bad?’ Then he walked away.”

That question, Eves said, shaped his life. “I want to inspire creators to make good content. Net positive content. The kind that leaves a mark.”

The Chosen has touched a young audience in unexpected ways. Eves shared a story from a Gen Z girl in Barcelona who convinced her atheist sister to watch one episode, “Jesus with the Children.” The sister binge-watched the entire season, got baptized, and is now leading others to faith.

“You know you’re onto something,” Eves said, “when great-grandmas and grandsons are watching the same show. And it’s not corny. It’s not sanitized. It’s real.”

I asked him about Jesus—the actor Jonathan Roumie, the portrayal of strength and gentleness. “Jonathan’s a method actor,” Eves said. “He lives it. The weight of the role—playing God—but he brings both masculinity and tenderness.”

Another source of chatter is the show’s depiction of Judas. “We want to humanize him,” Eves said. “Jesus loved the ones he called—including Judas. We forget that sometimes.”

As we neared the end of the tour, we stepped into Tent City, a large open set that had been rebuilt after a rainstorm flattened it. “If you watch the episode, you’d never know,” he said. “A miracle, honestly.”

To be happy, we need friends.

Friendship holds society together. A certain kind of friendship. Virtuous, rooted in good, not utility or pleasure. Aristotle calls friends “the greatest of external goods.” His definition involves someone who wishes and does good for you, someone who wishes you to live for your own sake, someone who grieves and celebrates with you. These are all signs of a healthy relationship with ourselves. A friend is another version of ourselves, friendship is based on self-love. Friendship makes us better people —individuals.

In 2015, I met Eric Nishimoto, the soft-spoken, ukulele-playing artist-author who taught me about storytelling.

I was attending graduate school at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. He finished the program a couple of years earlier and was teaching the graduate-level feature-writing class, Mayborn Magazine, with profiles from that year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. At the time, the event drew practically every major nonfiction figure in the country — editors, feature writers, podcasters, authors. The magazine offered graduate students the chance to spend time with big-league journalists. Eric edited my profiles of Michael Graff and Jason Fagone.

Eric was a version of our magazine’s owner, with editorial guidance. He was the first nonfiction editor I worked with. As an editor, he guides you to the heart of the story, especially when it’s not the one you began with.

In 2013, he was a Mayborn Biography Fellow. He won a Texas Associated Press Community Service Award for his Denton Record-Chronicle article on healthcare reform. His writing style is lithe and sturdy, almost minimalist, but not in a way that draws attention to that fact. He’s talented across a wide spread, with awards and nominations for feature writing, reporting, illustration, public relations, commercial art, video production. He’s methodical in his craft, like a beekeeper, but also intentional and precise, like a harpist.

“Nishimoto” (西本) translates to “western origin,” typically indicating that a family comes from the west coast of Japan. But this takes on a new meaning in Eric’s story, a Japanese lineage guided by American loyalties and Western values. His first name, Eric, for instance, has Nordic roots, with ties to the Vikings and Erik the Red, the intrepid Norse explorer who named Greenland. (This East-West coalition recalls Haruki Murakami’s “Tony Takitani,” a brilliant little short story.)

Eric Nishimoto loves Westerns. He’s Christian. One time, Eric and his wife took my wife and me to a Hawaiian Barbecue restaurant in Dallas and introduced me to POG (Passion Orange Guava) juice and SPAM Musubi, which is SPAM on sushi rice wrapped in seaweed. And he’s spent the last decade or so writing a book about his uncle.

He was halfway through the interviews for his book before he understood that the uncle did not actually want a book about glory. He wanted a book about citizenship. He wanted Eric to write down what it means to be an American and what an American owes to his country. At the end of his life, he was still giving speeches at high schools.

Eric is a third-generation Japanese-American, born in Hawaii, raised in the San Fernando Valley, back when the Valley was still the kind of place you would swear you would never leave.

He is glad he left.

He went to UCLA undergrad, then UCLA Law, and then dropped out of UCLA Law halfway through because he did not want to be a lawyer, which broke his parents’ hearts. He went back to UCLA later for an MFA-adjacent program in the fine arts, learning Photoshop and animation in the early days of digital art, and when he graduated, he met an art director for Star Trek on the Paramount lot. The man looked at Eric’s work, said encouraging things, and then told him he needed to dye his hair.

In our business, the man said, if you look like you’re over thirty, you will not get a job—ironically, Eric is incredibly young-looking anyway. The art director — a man with Emmys on his shelf — was himself a member of a Hollywood support group for creatives over forty. The group, Eric was told, had Emmy winners, Oscar winners, Grammy winners. None of them could get hired anymore.

Then Eric took a job as media spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department instead. This is the part of his life he describes as one of the great honors of it. He says this with an awareness that it is also the second-best thing to military service—he had promised his mother in college that he would not enlist. She would later not remember asking him to promise this. He kept the promise anyway. He carries the cost of having kept it.

He ran briefings for the international press at the wreckage of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 — two encampments of media outlets, eight hundred reporters in all, the world having decided that a commercial airliner crash off the Channel Islands was the story of the week. He worked on President Reagan’s memorial events. He handled the press swarms following the La Conchita mudslides, the California firestorms, several of the most photogenic natural disasters of his generation, and a string of internationally reported homicides.

He could walk into a room with four hundred reporters, take a fifteen-minute briefing, and hold an hour-long press conference without notes. He says he cannot do this anymore. He says it the way men say they cannot run a sub-six-minute-mile anymore.

He became a father somewhere in there.

Then he moved to Texas, briefly took a county government job, and discovered the unique kind of inefficiency that obtains in a state that has decided it does not need to be in any particular hurry to be efficient. Then his wife Pamela noticed that the University of North Texas had a graduate journalism program in Denton, and that the program ran a writers’ workshop in Archer City — the dusty north-Texas town where Larry McMurtry kept his bookstore — and that the Mayborn Conference, in those years, was the kind of conference writers flew across the country to attend. He went. He was vetted, against his expectations, by George Getschow, who I have also been lucky enough to call a mentor. He got in. He came home and enrolled.

He was, at the time, fifty-something. I remember him as the most put-together person in the program, and I assumed, like most of the students, that he was in his thirties. Other students would learn his actual age in the hallway and look at him sideways and say things like “your kids are older than me,” and he would say thank you very much.

He pegged me as a reporter, which I was not, and as a writer, which I sort of was, and put the latter to work on the former. He has the gift for what he calls following up — listening hard enough to a person that you notice the moment they accidentally drop the actual story into the middle of one of their less interesting paragraphs.

This isn’t a profile, although Eric deserves one. It’s a really fancy description for our interview, which stands on its own. If only because you get to listen to two friends, two colleagues, talking about things worth hearing.

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Once upon a time, some muck dreamt it was a rose and wiggled toward China. It spent a billion years in the ocean as bacteria before learning to produce energy using sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. When it exhaled, it produced oxygen. This breathable air altered the environment, and a billion years later, the sea-born life-form clung to rock-face and became hairy green algae—which, we ought to assume, was overjoyed and hopeful.

This grass stain eventually formed a vascular system. Now able to disperse water and nutrients to its various parts, it gave birth to its own body.

Each advancement made it stronger, and eventually, it was ready for its migration onto land. A slow pilgrimage across Asia, spewing seeds along its route.

Certain plants, like roses, developed flowers or fruit, which attracted animals who ate them, spilled them, carried them, defecated them. With each outcome, the flora grew as a species. Their thorns protect the plant from herbivores. Plants offered food in exchange for pollination and seed dispersal—which accelerated reproduction, which brought more flowers, and more flowers brought greater diversity: roses appeared simultaneously on three other continents, including North America, far away on its own.

Roses belong to the same family as apples, strawberries, and cherries—which makes sense. There’s something special about each of them, prestigious, with a similar red glow. The perfume of roses is a communication system aimed at insects, who transfer pollen from male parts of the flower to female parts. The leaves handle most gas exchange through small pores called stomata, which open and close to regulate water loss and carbon dioxide intake.

Over a million years, wild roses transformed into stronger, more capable flowers. Eventually, humans came along. For 5,000 years, civilizations throughout the world have bred them. Today, most modern roses are hybrids that don’t appear in nature.

In De Anima, Aristotle offers a theory of the soul—a hierarchy of Being, beginning with the soul of strictly nutritive beings, up to the human life-force.

He argues that a body displaying life necessarily contains a soul. The most basic fabric of being is Substance, of three types: matter, form, and the composite of these. Natural bodies—plants, animals, the human body—if imbued with life via self-nourishment, growth, and decay, are substantive. Composed of matter, they are objective and therefore potential.

The soul is also substantive, but it is the Form to a body rather than a body itself—a substance of its own kind. One of its functions is to drive the organs. The soul does not make the body, nor is it made by the body; it serves as the force which propels, authenticates, and enlivens it. The body is an appearance; the soul is its essence. It is the first actuality of a natural body endowed with organs—”the first actuality of a natural body which potentially has life.”

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Another way to approach the soul-body agreement is to examine the move from being capable of life to actually having life. The difference between only being capable of functions and actually performing them. Matter is particular, Form is universal. “For if the eye was an animal, then sight would be its soul”—not the activity of seeing, but the ability. “[I]f some tool, say an axe, were a natural body, its substance would be being an axe, and this then would be its soul.”

A soul belongs to a living body—plant, animal, or human. Aristotle ranks levels of Being according to faculties: nutritive, perceptive, desiderative, locomotive, and intellective. Plants occupy the first level, capable only of the nutritive faculty. Animals embody perception and motivation as well. Humans occupy the third level, with our political, cultural, and intellectual prowess.

Rationality separates us from plants and animals. To have rationality is to be capable of thought; to think is to meaningfully exist. Through rationality, we experience the perceptive and nutritive and reproductive faculties—and understand what each of them means, capture their significance, perceive our unique act of living.

Assuming an immaterial form exists within the body insofar as it is living, and that it neither perishes with nor remains because of that body’s death—what is left of its life when the soul departs? The soul seems capable of a separate existence beyond matter. Life itself, our animating force, is almost entirely invisible.

Each of us exists in tandem with ourselves, daily, constantly—always thinking and speaking and dreaming, so remarkably adept at understanding the flourish of images flooding our minds that it can be easily forgotten that our very existence is an act of imagination. Creation must be first imagined. Humans live in two distinct worlds simultaneously: the one inside our head and the one outside. The trick to cultivating a soul is to connect the two. This requires above all others the imaginative faculty. To be aware of your imagination is to feel.

We migrate while on this earth, seeking—most of us—a presence that explains, that embodies an answer like the answer we contain but cannot decode. The awareness that we each contain an infinite gravitation of depthless Being, as we launch ourselves toward a solution, a way through the reality that this infinite spirit is the joy beneath our finite, time-held casing. We look in mirrors and see thoughts trailing across our eyes—the feelings of each lingered memory—and our pulse, riveted, demands a serious and true answer: Our body is ours for this instant. It responds to the huge spirit we don’t understand. Time berates us, despite the joys of living. So we wander—mind, sense, and body—searching for the labyrinth’s exit sign.

What we’re scouring each moment for is a cure. And wherever it is, there must be, by dint of univocality, a wholeness—a rotating ideal, the spur of a perfect form—which leads us to some new realm, holding our hand. We can feel its presence, carrying us through the assault of a blizzard, humbled by the white impact and blinded by the whiteness, fast-sinking, the windrows of snow blasting us backwards, a shadowfold of cloudfall, viperous yet rainy, because the struggle to Eden is fraught with bitter cold—kept right and kept alongside ourselves, holding at the edge of transcendence, balancing and balanced, clear as the many whitecaps of noise, as we enter the air and the air has been waiting: a prismatic alignment, so that we become caught in the melodic ascent of angelic voices, where the worlds are pried apart.

Today, somewhere in the world, 35 million years after the birth of the rose, rain spills down from clouds and the earth drinks the spill, and a seed blinks to life. The tiny orb cracks open with roots. Once the tiny strands web deep enough, the rose builds its stems, then its leaves—which sprout through dirt into sunlight. And one of these days, it will sigh its perfume as it reaches toward heaven.

According to the Guinness World Records, “Face with Tears of Joy” 😂 has remained the most popular emoji since 2016, accounting for roughly 5% of all usage.

It won the 2015 Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year, beating out “ad blocker,” “refugee,” “Brexit,” “Dark Web,” “lumbersexual” (a metrosexual lumberjack), “on fleek,” “sharing economy,” and “they.”

In 2017, it picked up the user-favorite award at Emojipedia’s annual World Emoji Awards. That same year, Apple confirmed it was the most-used emoji on macOS and iOS devices.

In April of 2021, it lost its supremacy on Twitter to “Loudly Crying Face” 😭 — and having lived through that time, we get it. But by January 2022, "Face with Tears of Joy" was back on top.

Something about its portrayal of laughter captivates us.

But emojis are far from mere dumb-show. Take Emoji Dick, a full rendition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick written entirely in emojis. A data engineer named Fred Benenson created the emote-covered masterpiece, published in 2009. He originally wanted to translate The Bible into emojis, but settled on the second greatest fishing story ever told.

Smithsonian Magazine called it “the most ambitious (and playful) effort to explore whether emoji itself is becoming a free-standing language.”

The book’s iconic first line — “Call me Ishmael” — is rendered: “☎️ 👨‍🦰 ⛵️ 🐳 👌”

In 2013, Emoji Dick was added to the archives of the Library of Congress.

This collision of high culture and low culture isn’t as bizarre as it initially seems. There’s no shortage of emoji scholarship. A growing body of literature has explored emoji use across cultures—even street gangs.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

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HIGH BROW ISH

America has always been high-brow and low-brow at the same time. Land of sporks and Ivy League. Silicon Valley and foolishly spicy gas-station Cheetos. Eugene O’Neill ensembles and cable news dumb-show.

The emoji is no exception. And like any good American symbol, it comes with competing origin stories and folklore.

Supposedly, in the transcript of an 1862 speech by Abraham Lincoln, the copyist ironically noted the audience response as "applause and laughter ;)." Without audio, there's no way to verify that this wasn’t sarcasm, but this tension between sincerity and irony runs deep in emoji culture today.

Roughly ten years later, the emoticon was officially born. A portmanteau of “emotion” and “icon,” emoticons are the archaic predecessor of emojis. Instead of graphics, they use punctuation and letters to sketch a face.

Emojis, by contrast, are cartoons — bright and unmistakable.

In 1887, writer Ambrose Bierce proposed a “snigger point,” or “note of cachinnation,” to help dull readers pick up on irony.

Eighty years later, just a few months before the Moon landing, controversial Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov furthered this lore. In an interview with the New York Times, Nabokov, then a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday, trash-talked his contemporaries by implying that they need cartoons to understand real literature: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."

This was supposedly one of the first published descriptions of the emoticon smiley. Meaning the guy who wrote Lolita — a gorgeous and depraved novel about an unrepentant pedophile — also played a role in the existence of the poo-poo emoji.

BOX OF CHOCOLATES

Then there’s the Forrest Gump origin story — when our low-IQ protagonist wipes his muddy face on a yellow shirt, leaving behind a perfect smiley face.

Not too far off. The classic smiley debuted in the 1960s: a round yellow head with black eyes and a exaggerated grin. By the 1980s, it was an icon — slapped on buttons, t-shirts, coffee mugs, a pop symbol of American optimism.

Unlike emoticons or emojis, the smiley is a symbol — singular, static, and rarely used in conversation. Emoticons, built from punctuation, are more flexible.

Both predate the emoji’s full visual expressiveness. And then emojis came along and swept them both off the digital stage.

Emojis, considered an evolved form of emoticons, are more advanced in terms of visual richness, speed of use, and ability to express a wide range of emotions and ideas. They have effectively booted emoticons to the digital mud pit.

As for their role in the future of language, they belong to Bifo Berardi’s concept of Futurability, the idea that the present is inscribed with a plurality of outcomes, each full of potential and able to reveal the multidimensionality of the future.

HIEROGLYPHS

As Bifo observes, we find ourselves in “the sphere of disembodied communication,” a battle between private identity and social becoming.

Are emojis abstract info-fractals, an endless flow of symbols coded for disruption? Or do they have a more numerical presence, soothing and restorative? Or neither—are they a recyclable fad in human language?

There are two worlds: The Universe and the human world, and the human world is an act of language itself.

How much more disruption can this environment handle, and do emojis enhance or inhibit this process? And what will happen to our linguistic domain as its occupants squeeze closer into one another, wired to the connective brain?

Will the minimalism of a smiley become the image of the human person?

COOL JAPAN

In 1982, on a Carnegie Mellon message board, computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested using “:-)” to indicate humor. That humble sideways smiley spread like wildfire through digital spaces.

But Fahlman isn’t exactly proud of what came next. He told The Independent that he finds modern emojis “ugly,” and laments how they remove the creativity from pure text-based expression.

Emojis were born of a different vision. The word itself comes from Japanese: e (絵) meaning picture, and moji (文字) meaning character. Originally, the term just meant “pictograph.”

In 1999, Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first set — 176 symbols — to help users convey emotion and information more efficiently on digital platforms.

He wanted to provide a shared visual language. A set of universal icons that could express mood, weather, food, and ideas. Kurita’s work now lives in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

High-brow meets low-brow.

WHAT DO EMOJIS SAY ABOUT YOU?

Emojis can be categorized as positive, negative, or neutral. Most are positive. They capture everything from moods to objects to activities, adding emotion to otherwise flat text.

Whether they succeed depends on two things: context and culture.

Context is the setting: what came before, what’s around it.

Culture is the audience: who’s watching, interpreting, reacting.

Some researchers see emojis as a bridge between cultures — helpful, universal, emotionally resonant. Others argue that they’re confusing, inconsistent, and culturally slippery.

A 2016 study titled "Blissfully Happy or Ready to Fight?" found a “high risk of miscommunication” with emojis. The same face can look different across platforms. A smile in one culture might seem smug to another.

These varying characterizations duke it out in the connective biosphere, the intensifying whirlwind of knowledge and awareness that pulls each of us closer to the secretive part of ourselves, the virtualization of the soul.

TALK TALK

Both sides are right. And wrong.

Emojis offer a new layer of emotional context. But they also introduce ambiguity.

Emoji usage tends to be more consistent among English-speaking countries—like the U.S. and U.K.—but diverges in places like Spain and Italy. Wealthier countries, one study found, use emojis more abstractly. Other cultures may use them more emotionally or directly.

Formal versus informal communication also matters. We use abstract symbols more in professional exchanges. In personal chats, we get louder: crying faces, hearts, muscles, dancing girls.

Beyond everyday conversation, emojis have been useful in education and marketing, influencing how teachers engage with students and how brands connect with consumers.

Smiley faces, frequently featured in ads and packaging, have been found to promote positive emotions and uplift morale. Emojis on product design can sway purchasing decisions, particularly among younger demographics.

In classrooms, emojis can help students grasp complex concepts, enhance understanding, and even foster self-expression.

CONNECTIVE BIOSPHERE

Draw two dots over a parenthesis, and a face appears. Or rather, we make it appear. We choose to see a smile in the curve.

It’s a tiny act of translation. A gesture of creativity.

The simpler the image, the more we project ourselves onto it. We are the smiley face, we imbue the blank circle with our own personality and self-image. Emojis might bring us closer to a universal language — or they might toxify clarity with each update.

Either way, they’re more than just sparkles on a screen. They tell us something about ourselves: how we feel, how we relate, how we want to be seen.

They can make language richer. Or weaker—depending on who you ask. They have already changed the way we talk. And there’s no turning back, unless they get replaced by something stranger.

Anything is possible in the Era of AI, as we fumble our transition from industrial civilization to digital enormity.

EMOJI MOVIE

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud wrote:

“The comics creator asks us to join in a silent dance of the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible.”

Emojis serve as the tap shoes for this routine.

This endeavor becomes mysterious like every other transformational event. And as the world spirals deeper into the unknown of a digital future, we learn a lot about the barrier dividing the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible.

Automation has gulped our intelligence and is heading for our consciousness. Increasingly, networks impose their artifice in exchange for the vibrance of our cognition, our human prowess to think and dream and learn and fear. This process is complicated by what Bifo Berardi calls “info-neural acceleration,” potentially leading to “neuro-totalitarianism.”

Each simplification of life toward an automated existence forces us to examine society in black-and-white terms — high and low, positive and negative, true and delusional.

Then there’s the simplicity of an emoji.

Now more than ever before, according to Bifo, technology has become “not a chain of logical implications, but a field of immanent conflicting possibilities.”

Every word, every drawing, every symbol, every emoji leaves an inscription on the Futurability of human advancement or survival.

Emojis give us a break from the inexpressibility of this storyline, from the burnout caused by speaking. Because code is language in debt, desperate for cohesion.

“Code is a tool for the submission of the future to language, enabled by the inscription of algorithms into the flux of language,” writes Bifo in Chaos and Poetry. “The future is now being written by the algorithmic chain inscribed in techno-linguistic automatisms.”

If you’re still reading, I have a joke for you:

The Emoji Movie has received overwhelmingly negative reviews. Anyone who actually watched it said that they hated the main character. Apparently, he is a real piece of shit.

Face with tears of joy.

There aren’t a lot of hippy poems about nature and robots. Most Haight-Ashbury types didn’t have time for cybernetics. Richard Brautigan might be the only one, certainly the first. With his handlebar mustache and tan felt hat and permanently-stoned grin, he looked like David Crosby, but with lonesome eyes.

He was a radical in the old-fashioned way. Never went to college, skunked through the hashish glow of the Beatniks, dreamt about romance but failed to maintain it, loved other countries (Japan) and distrusted his own (America) but eventually moved to the California seashore, a township off Highway 1, west of the San Andreas Fault. A small, real, still-extant artist refuge that famously tears down its own road signs to keep tourists away.

His politics bordered on performative, the usual tripe of a kind-hearted hippy—feminism is the future, America is doomed, the middle class is vulgar. To this day, he’s a commune hero. But also an icon of postmodern literature.

People usually mention his personal life when they talk about his work. The man was an absolute mess. Depression and booze made him a monster. He was, by most accounts, ugly to women—catastrophic drinking, jealousy, violence on more than one occasion. Beaten as a kid, half-starved, institutionalized at 20 after throwing a rock through a police station window so he’d get fed, but he also got electroshocked.

He’s best known for his novel Trout Fishing in America (1967), a bizarre and lovely book you can (and ought to) read in an afternoon. Like most of his work, it’s playful and dark and puzzling and gorgeous, without the excess you’d expect from someone I’ve just described. His daughter Ianthe wrote You Can’t Catch Death (2000), a memoir of sorts, and an attempt to recover her father. She is the source of much of what we know about the end.

By the late seventies, his books were out of print, the New York reviewers had moved on, the hippy moment that made him had soured. Then, in 1984, after a decade of threatening suicide, he succeeded (nobody noticed he was dead for a month), with a .44 Magnum, at 49 years old, as he gazed out at the Pacific Ocean. He had always had a gift for finding sense in nonsense.

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So many legends loved Brautigan’s work. Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Charles Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk—countercultural madmen who admired his discomfort with society and life. But the joy of Brautigan criticism is that just as many legends don’t see what’s so brilliant about him. Raymond Carver said Brautigan’s poems resemble “little astonishments going off in your hands,” but many others are “so-so.” Roberto Bolaño, in The Savage Detectives, accuses Brautigan of simplistic verse, which, he adds, is inexcusable at best. And he’s not exactly wrong, although also not thoughtful enough to be right.

Brautigan had a gift for grammar and word choice and style—a walking haiku. When asked about his transition from poet to novelist, he quipped, “To be a novelist, you have to write sentences. And, to be a poet, you have to write words: so, all along, it is simply about putting a word down then following it with another.”

Here’s “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” from Brautigan’s 1967 poetry collection by the same name.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

“All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” ran in Brautigan’s 1967 collection of the same name, composed while he was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology. The phrase “machines of loving grace” can be heard as tender or as ominous, and this ambiguity is the point.

Brautigan’s novel In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is the prose companion of “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”: a post-apocalyptic realm, with a commune called iDEATH, a deranged Eden built from sugar and digital amnesia.

Hippies, like academics, have always loved the idea of a leisure society. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner uses “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” to explain the “New Communalists,” described by historian Charles Perry as a post-scarcity realm where “robots will do all the work” in a leisure society.

The idea of a technologically enabled utopia was popular in 1960s California. A new version of this has overtaken Silicon Valley.

In 2024, Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, the frontier AI lab he co-founded with his sister after serving as Vice President of Research at OpenAI — published an essay named after Brautigan’s poem, with the title’s only footnote linking to it. Amodei opens with “How AI Could Transform the World for the Better” and announces he wants to “avoid ‘sci-fi’ baggage” and “avoid grandiosity.” The essay then proceeds to do both, under a hippy poet’s title. His phrase for the section on bodily self-determination — the idea that everyone should be empowered to choose what they want to become — is the engineering translation of Brautigan’s pastoral: humans freed by their machines into a more natural state. Amodei ends on “a thing of transcendent beauty” that people will be “literally moved to tears by.”

Amodei treats the poem as prophecy: Data centers have become the cybernetic meadow.

Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence offers the opposite forecast: an AI that might “tile all of the Earth’s surface with solar panels, nuclear reactors, supercomputing facilities with protruding cooling towers, space rocket launchers, or other installations whereby the AI intends to maximize the long-term cumulative realization of its values.”

This dystopian vision is what Adam Curtis embraces in his documentary. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011), which includes Brautigan’s hippy cybernetic vision as the unwitting founding myth of Silicon Valley, traceable through Ayn Rand, dot-com finance, and the algorithmic dispensation.

We live inside a permanent and intensifying present, detached from past or future. This could lead to a modern kind of person like Paul Virilio’s “technological monk” — the figure who, as media accelerates the world to pure speed, stays physically static while living in a highly active technological state of mind. Isolated in the digital world.

Or maybe technology is an act of revealing. As a species, we tend to reach for things beyond our grasp and overlook the paradise surrounding us. Hans Moravec, roboticist at Carnegie Mellon, imagines “robot bushes” in Mind Children (1990), limbs branching fractally into smaller limbs, ending in molecular-scale manipulators by the billion, capable of feeling bacteria on a surface or reading a book by touching its print: “Its great intelligence, superb coordination, astronomical speed, and enormous sensitivity to its environment would enable it to constantly do something surprising, at the same time maintaining a perpetual gracefulness.”

Kevin Kelly, futurologist and founder of Wired, wrote in The Inevitable: “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines.” Kelly also coined “future-blindness” for our tendency to assume science fiction is right about the apocalypse, when really the future tends to be a sleeker version of the present, full of humans capable of brilliance and idiocy.

“Technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man,” writes Walter Benjamin in an essay about planetariums. “Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his.”

The term “Cybernetics” comes from the Greek for “steersman,” the pilot of a ship. Plato has Socrates say, “Cybernetics saves the souls, bodies, and material possessions from the gravest dangers.” Government, to the Greeks, meant self-government — order to fend off chaos, active steering to keep the ship afloat. The Latin corruption kubernetes gives us governor.

The cybernetic meadow is an environment we created. The perfect community achieves a balance of bare life and political duty, privacy and openness, nature and technology, power and humility, with an eagerness to look into the future. We can live with the wonders of the new world and survive without them, as technological pilgrims.

Dolphins don’t drink water and have belly buttons and sleep with half of their brain active so they can monitor the situation. They occasionally get high (pufferfish). They have “X-ray” vision that allows them to detect metal objects with echolocation. The U.S. Navy recruited them to discover underwater mines. So why wouldn’t they also be Iranian kamikaze operatives?

They experience pain differently than we do, with skin that regrows 9x faster than human skin—spouting back to life after they get bit or trapped in nets or nicked by rudders: They love to bounce along beside ships and do their hunting at night, their graceful slipstream and weave.

Everybody knows about their playful acrobatics, like a family reunion of extroverts at the lake. Gymnasts of the sea, although the males form rape gangs that devour the pod’s baby dolphins in order to eliminate rivalry. And they hunt by “fish whacking,” water polo with some poor dying animal—their advanced taste buds lead to culinary preferences and a flexible diet. They love to play, often torturing lowlier animals for sport. Who doesn’t enjoy a round of “drown the bird and sink its carcass.”

Surely at least one of these warm-blooded ocean-ballerinas witnessed the secretive ocean burial of Osama bin Laden, saw his padlocked bag sinking lower and lower, into a darkness full of ridiculous mutants with lightbulbs on their foreheads and psychedelic teeth.

Their mythology is as universal as their species, and remarkably similar across disconnected regions, always sacred, mystical, auspicious, and metamorphic: In India, they belong to the river goddess of Ganges River. They’re all over Greek mythology the henchmen of Poseidon. Japanese lore deifies shachihoko (dragon-fish) worthy of festivals. In China: Goddess of the Yangtze. Hawaiian folklore portrays them as ancestors who have become deities.

Within Celtic mythology, they were sacralized, the mediators between the human realm and the spiritual realm, guardians of the sacred unknown, “Watchers of the Waters.” This otherworldliness blended with seafarer folklore to produce water nymphs and sirens, the feminine beasts who could save you or bash your head on the rocks. Imagery made its way into Christianity as a symbol of transformation.

Amazonians celebrate the pink Boto Encantado (enchanted dolphin) who belongs to a supernatural civilization deeper than the ocean floor. But if you stare into its eyes you have nightmares for the rest of your life. The Atlantis narrative takes a New Age form in the Dominican Republic. Similar notions of dolphins-as-guardians appear throughout the Caribbean, with some colorful additions. New Zealand, Thailand, Spain,

Throughout Africa—Swahili, Zulu, Credo Mutwa, across the entire continent: Dolphins are sacred, divine messengers. Dolphin Mythos maxes its way even into Christianity as a symbol of transformation.

In nearly every case, the dolphin is an enchanted being mostly outside of our realm. And they aren’t entirely wrong in assuming that dolphins are a version of mermaids, half human, half fish. The word “dolphin” derives from the Greek word “delphus,” meaning ”womb”, to describe the womb-bearing fish. They’ll drown if they don’t get oxygen for more than 10 minutes.

Of the 40 dolphin species—49 if you count porpoises. This includes Orcas. Who are technically dolphins. They’re actually the largest member of the oceanic family. But dolphins are technically whales so who knows.

The majority of dolphins live in the sea. (There are only six extant species of freshwater dolphins.) You can find them all over the world, and while they live among the fish, they’re mammals: after about a year of pregnancy, their little babies spray out into the water, tail-first, unconfined by an egg, and the mothers produce milk, and their skeletons look like dinosaur bones strung up in some museum.

But do they cry? They laugh, after all, so why wouldn’t they wear the mask of tragedy? They also have an advanced emotional intelligence, they experience anguish, even to such an extent that they occasionally commit suicide. Starving themselves. But did they weep at the sight of the Titanic snapping in half?

Well, they don’t cry, not in the “I listen to The Smiths” kind of way, But they do have eyeball lubricators, and eyes that move independently, and their tears are basically windshield fluid. And they don’t have vocal cords—they just whistle and shriek into the air, which becomes cathedral music when padded by sea.

They have lungs and they’re born with a mustache. Hair on their beak. Mammalian body hair. But two stomachs so they can swallow fish whole and they blush. It helps them maintain a steady body temperature. They breathe through the blowhole on the top of their heads and screech in their own language, including elaborate physical gestures.

They might even have unique names. The institution of family is getting wobbly in the human world, but among dolphins, it is coded into their nature. Members of a family often remain with their pod their entire lives. (Coincidentally, dolphin society is matriarchal.) They cultivate friendships, often through shared interests.

They’ve got flippers for arms and five fingers at the tip and a gnarly set of teeth and a half umbrella tail.

They’ve honed this physique over 50 million years underwater. Before that, according to evolutionary theory, they pranced around land on their toes like a hideous mutt, hunch-backed and gigantic. In this past life, their closest relatives were deer and hippos. Their fossils litter the soil of New Zealand.

To this day, their faces are the same. Like Mary Oliver’s poem “One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins on a Summer Day.”

a hundred white-sided dolphins 
on a summer day, 
each one, as God himself 
could not appear more acceptable 
  
a hundred times, 
in a body blue and black threading through 
the sea foam, 
and lifting himself up from the opened 
  
tents of the waves on his fishtail, 
to look 
with the moon of his eye 
into my heart

If it weren’t for chimpanzees, dolphins would rank as the most cognitively advanced animals, an Einstein among even elephants and bees. Excluding humans, of course, because every other species is comically dumber than we are. Although at least dolphins are majestic, the way they launch 15 feet above the watery surface—I once watched a pod skip along the Irish Sea, as the locals tried to convince me that the dolphins were purple.

Secretly, I suspect they were.

THE PRICE OF LOVE

The girl in pink rainboots sang barely quiet sounds you can barely even hear. Green eyes and smile, lavender-float in the breeze. She tends to the brown flowerbed at the base of the stairway, the concrete bump that spits right out into dirt road.

Coyotes yip nearby somewhere.

She glares at the thunderclouds, toward the barbarism of clinical anxiety, and whispers, “I fumbled every catastrophe of his heart.”

The house cabined itself onto a prairie nearly a century ago—you could drive for an hour and not reach the nearest town. This means they bury their dead in a field that bursts into a pale luxury of forest. Their burials follow tradition, a crossword of a guide handed down for a hundred years, since Bavaria.

Her brothers fire shotguns into tree trunks a mile or so away or closer maybe—close. No one could get over her mousy admiration.

“Price of Love” is one of my favorite stories from Sunbather, out now on Amazon.

My first book!

Sunbather is a collection of interconnected short stories. I wrote a lot of them years ago. Two of them ran in (now-defunct) journals. They’ve been workshopped many times, some were even edited by some of my favorite writers. At least thirty other stories (including two failed novels) didn’t make the cut.

I spent years—over a decade—on “Sunbather,” “Isidro, Our Friend,” “Visitations,” and “Marianne.” The scenes, the words, the setting, the characters’ voices and mannerisms: They live in my head like a world of their own. There are also stories, like “Thoughts While Holding The Newborn,” that I wrote after becoming a father, as well as stories, like “Expatriations,” influenced by my journalism career.

All of this fueled the book’s central fight: Mythology versus Gospel. I’ve written in many styles, under different banners, for other people. Sunbather is my most authentic.

I pitched the manuscript many times over the years, in many different forms, to many different publishers, and moved on, but never gave up. I don’t even care if anyone even buys it—I’m just overjoyed to have accomplished a lifelong dream.

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Father Brian O’Brien smiles from the top of the stairs, haloed by a portrait of Pope Leo XIV. Sacred art lines the walls of the century-old Holy Family Classical School. The phrase “20+C+M+B+26” is chalked above each of the building’s doorways as part of the Epiphany Home Blessing, a celebration of the three magi who followed a star to the manger where baby Jesus lay.

The school is adjacent to Holy Family Cathedral, the mother church of the Diocese and my home parish, where Fr. O’Brien serves as Rector. At the stairhead, Fr. O’Brien and I briefly discuss Pope Leo’s visit to a prison in Equatorial Guinea one day earlier, when the Supreme Pontiff was greeted by a parade of orange-clad inmates who sang and danced to celebrate his arrival. American Catholicism is thriving. With the election of a baseball-loving Chicagoan as pope, the country has entered a historic new era. There are more than 60 million Catholics in America. A majority-Catholic Supreme Court. A Catholic Vice President, in a Catholic-filled administration. At this year’s Easter Vigil, Holy Family Cathedral saw 94 people become enter the fold.

Fr. O’Brien leads me to his office, a bright room overlooking Boulder Avenue, at the heart of Tulsa’s Cathedral District. Occasionally, workers’ boots thud overhead—the record-setting Father’s Day storm in 2023 battered the cathedral’s roof and spires, and, for the past six months, construction has encased the cathedral’s neo-Gothic structure in a web of steel walkways and scaffolding.

Fr. O’Brien and I talk about the Eucharist and Confession, a sacrament that mystifies atheists and Protestants: The darkest abyss of your sinfulness is the moment before you step into the confession booth for the first time. Every moment after that is simply an avalanche of rebirth and creation.

“The Scriptures say that we all fall short of the glory of God,” Fr. O’Brien tells me.
”And we do, every single one of us. And so to be able to go to, and to not only receive mercy, receive forgiveness, but then, what we believe is that what the sacraments do is they give grace. The sacraments actually infuse in us God’s life.”

I was inspired to interview Fr. O’Brien while listening to his Easter homily:

Each of us has a checkered past. Maybe some of us more than others. Maybe you’ve been in a lot of trouble. Maybe for a week or a month or a year or a decade or a half a century, you led a sinful life, a checkered past. Maybe you’re kind of still in the middle of it. But yet the Lord Jesus Christ risen from the dead has chosen—yes Peter, yes Paul, yes Mary Magdalene, all of them for this great mission. But he has also chosen you.

Father O’Brien believes in you. He wants to help you—I’ve seen it with my own eyes. He’s blessed my home, and counseled me, and I’m just one of his 1,800 registered parishioners.

It’s miraculous that he has time for each one of us, but that’s exactly how it is: Each of us is his primary concern, like there’s multiple of him for everyone.

“I’ve been a priest for 19 years,” he tells me. “There has not been a single day where I was bored—if we’re talking about trying to make a difference in the world, I mean, my whole job, my whole life is introducing people to Jesus Christ. That’s what I do.”

Fr. O’Brien was born in Syracuse, New York, the youngest of five kids, son of two Boston Irish parents—one grandfather was a fire chief, the other was an electrician from Somerville. When he was little, before he can remember, his parents moved to Northern California. Then his dad’s work in the oil industry brought the family to Kingwood, Texas, a northeast suburb of Houston, the perfect place for a baseball fan like young Brian O’Brien.

When he was a teenager, Fr. O’Brien’s parish priest asked his parishioners to submit suggestions for young men they felt ought to pursue the priesthood. Several of them submitted Fr. O’Brien’s name. He was somewhat baffled at the time, pleasantly baffled.

Little signs piled up along the way. At Kingwood High School, at Boston College, where he earned a double major in Theology and Political Science, he enjoyed politics, even seriously considered is as a career: ”My name is Brian O’Brien—I’d make fun of it and win.”

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Then he began a Master’s in Education through Notre Dame’s Fellowship Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) program, which he describes as “Teach for America for Catholic schools.” As part of the program, he was assigned to a position in Tulsa at Bishop Kelly High School, where he began teaching religion. Along with his classroom duties, he led retreats and coached basketball—supposedly, he can still sink a three-pointer with ease. After completing the ACE program in 2000, he decided to stay for an extra year.

During his time in Tulsa, his priestly imperative truly came to life. And one day, driving home after helping with a retreat, it became unshakable.

He spent the hour-long drive praying.

“All right, Lord,” he said. “I’m going to do this. Unless you stop me.” He paused for a moment, expecting a deer to jet out into the road.

“And then it just took off from there,” he tells me.

He attended St. Meinrad Seminary in southern Indiana, surrounded by a German farming community, founded in the 1860s by monks from Switzerland. In 2004, he finished a Master of Arts in Catholic Social Thought and Life, followed in 2007 by a Master of Divinity.

“So I had a decision to make: what kind of priest do you want to be?”

He spent about a year looking at the Jesuits, looking at the Holy Cross Fathers, who run Notre Dame. The Augustinians here in Tulsa were a big influence on him, including several priests who are actually personal friends of the Pope. He laughs, “It’s kind of a funny, small world.”

And then he looked at an order called the Josephites. They serve primarily black Catholics in inner cities: Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans.

Ultimately, he decided to become a parish priest: “What are often called secular priests, which is a funny name for it, meaning that we’re not in a religious order. And so that’s mostly guys who are in parishes.”

But then he had to decide: Do I go back to Houston, where I grew up? Do I go to Boston, where my family’s from, or do I stay here in Tulsa?

He was ordained by Bishop Edward J. Slattery on May 26th, 2007. He celebrated Mass for the first time the next day, which happened to be Pentecost, the Birthday of the Catholic Church, when—50 days after Christ’s Resurrection—the Holy Spirit rained down from heaven as tongues of fire that imbued Mary and the Apostles with the ability to speak in languages they didn’t know.

His first assignment was as Associate Pastor at Christ the King, on Tulsa’s Cherry Street, across from Kilkenny’s Irish Pub. Then, from 2009 to 2017, he served as President of Bishop Kelly, where he ranks in the school’s Hall of Fame. Then he moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he served as Pastor at St. Francis Xavier for six and a half years. In the summer of 2024, he was assigned his current role.

He smiles his bright smile: “And here I am.”

In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the term “neighbor” pertains to nationality, a fellow citizen. Throughout the New Testament, ”neighbor” denotes unity on an even grander scale, as the cohesion between people as children of God.

When a lawyer asks Christ, “What is the Greatest Commandment?” Jesus replies: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The lawyer’s reaction to Jesus’s answer appears only in the Gospel of Luke, in which the man, “anxious to justify himself,” asks, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus responds with the parable of the good Samaritan, a story about the creative up-building of a fallen neighbor, a moment of self-renunciation, a surrender of ego that, paradoxically, enriches the soul and affirms the inherent dignity of the Other.

As Paul says in Acts of the Apostles: “In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

Fr. Brian O’Brien has based his life on this duty. Calmly. He reminds me of Father “Chuck” O’Malley, Bing Crosby’s character in Going My Way (1944)—a humble, athletic, quietly brilliant and endlessly kind priest, an extrovert who brings humor into his ministry. During his last dinner visit to my house, Fr. O’Brien kept me company while I prodded at steaks on one of my three grills. He smiled at me, pointing to the Weber: “If you’ve got three pairs of sandals, you should give a pair to someone without shoes.”

AAHoly Family Cathedral | 8th & Boulder, Tulsa, OK

You can find Fr. O’Brien on X and Instagram.

One of the funniest postmodern theories is Jean Baudrillard’s argument that Los Angeles is an illusion, while Disneyland is real. We’ve had it backwards all along. The amusement park is presented only as imaginary so that we believe the thing we call reality is possible, when in fact Los Angeles, like America, is a city-sized movie set. It belongs to hyperreality, the order of simulation.

Mythological amusement parks, as unabashed performances of fantasy, ground us. to this instability, while Los Angeles is “a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation—a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.”

Baudrillard is a crazy but fascinating, though excessively French, type of man.

This theory originated in Simulacra and Simulation(1981), which is a simulation of the ideas it contains: The book begins with a verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

But it’s a fabricated quote. A simulation. The word “simulacra” didn’t appear until the 15th century, and was basically a synonym for “simulation” until Baudrillard redefined it to denote: Simulations of simulations, not based on anything real. And even if they have an origin, the thing they’re based on has vanished.

The guys who wrote The Matrix claimed their film is based on a chapter of Simulation and Simulacra. In yet another example of his own theory, Baudrillard complained that the movie completely misunderstood his thesis—that they merely reimagined a simulation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a sci-fi monstrosity. Parroting Platonic Idealism, where you divide existence into two realms: Reality and illusion, red pill and blue pill, then arrive at reality by understanding the illusion. Baudrillard argued that we no longer have access to reality at all, that it likely no longer even exists, and that the system Plato offered collapsed and was forgotten long ago. In a sense, even illusion has vanished into a black hole of origin-deprived copies.

Baudrillard writes: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

At the same time, reality has become hyperreal: The simulations of reality have become more real than reality itself. Baudrillard believed that Western society had entered the fourth phase of hyperreality, where the simulation has replaced the copy of the thing it was based on. In this state, reality is fully gone; it has progressed into simulacra.

“People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that,” writes Baudrillard about California. “They no longer touch each other, but there is “contactotherapy.” They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.”

The only truth is artificiality, copies of copies of an idea of “truth,” so that the things we shrug off as fake are in fact more real than the things we assume to be authentic.

“Americans may have no identity,” he writes, “but they do have wonderful teeth.”

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So much of American culture is recyclable—a departure from the idea that civilizations should be built to last thousands of years, that the place you inhabit ought to contain artistry on the buildings and open spaces that allow for conversation, meditation, contemplation, enjoyment, daydreams. In America, anything can be replaced by anything else—the newer the better. Marx called this a hallmark of capitalist progress: “All that is solid melts in air.”

Baudrillard even points to the California gubernatorial recall election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003 as proof that “we are deep in the masquerade, where politics is only a game of idolatry and marketing.”

He doesn’t see this ending well, warning that “a mental catastrophe, a mental implosion and involution without precedent lies in wait for a system of this kind, whose visible signs would be those of this strange obesity, or the incredible coexistence of the most bizarre theories and practices, which correspond to the improbable coalition of luxury, heaven, and money, to the improbable luxurious materialization of life and to undiscoverable contradictions.”

Having spent two decades in academia and the media—covering politics, no less—I can say that this is mostly true, and thank God it is. Because wouldn’t you rather live in Disneyland than LA? Meaning that, the hyperreality of modern journalism and academia is driven by the pursuit of realities that have no basis in reality—theories like Baudrillard’s, but also the fact that both institutions have become militant in their activism, which undermines and contradicts their age-old purpose: Tell the truth.

“We live in a simulation” used to be an LSD insight or a philosopher’s sugar rush, but now it’s flippant and banal. As a metaphor, it got lost in a never-ending cycle of meta-reflexivity, totally unrelated to its original symbolism: Derived from various Latin words connoting false imitations, sham resemblances. Simulation can never exist independently of the object it imitates.

If life were a simulation, it would in fact prove that there’s a pure form of life somewhere that we’ve been hamstrung into copying. But even if we ignore this relationship and claim that there is a totalized simulation that contains every other simulation, it wouldn’t embody reality without abandoning the definition of the word “simulation” and everything it encompasses.

The online-centered discourse about simulation doesn’t even get this far. One especially lazy modern usage of the theory is as an atheistic rejection, proof that the very notion of God is itself a characteristic of the simulation.

This insistence is a refutation of Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity, the recurring presence of meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained logically but can also never be disproven.

These patterns are reduced to markers of the simulation, when in reality they’re far more significant than that.

The simulation mindset focuses inward, to the glitches of a limited system. The Synchronicity mindset leads us out and up, beyond all limitations, where a universe of celestial kingdoms operates as our starting place—we can’t even begin to imagine the most basic particles of the enormity we can’t see.

Because it’s impossible to disprove infinity with notions about a simulation. You certainly can posit simulations as an atomic figuration of an eternal language. Something like a miracle.

Simulation obedience contains a cynicism towards this kind of ethereal language. Undergirding this is another fallacy: simulation as a means of abandoning personal responsibility. This is a moral issue caused by a trivialization of ethics.

Dreams. We still can’t explain what they are or why they happen. Why are they so immersive and cinematic, yet pliable, in that they can take infinite forms?

No simulation could engineer something as beautiful and unnecessary as dreams. If anything, dreaming is the act of auto-simulating simulation.

Although it would be more accurate to describe them as Inscriptions—spiritual or transcendental authority that inscribes itself onto us.

If we abandon this totalizing force to indulge science-fiction cliffhangers, we become solipsistic.

And the more solipsistic we become—the more obsessed with the idea that 1st Person is the only authentic reality—the more helplessly selfsame we become. A community of isolationists is feckless and rubbery and vulnerable to dumb yet fatal hackery.

Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi details the “interactive grid,” which has “pervaded daily life and is slowly reformatting cognitive activity in the sense of an increasing compliance between mind and the digital network.”

Life is an exercise of unending Nowness. Technological power is merely the ongoing aftermath of our own attempts at creation. Social power is more useful than technology, but still virtually powerless in relation to Good.

In his book Futurability, Bifo writes that “the social organism is behaving like a beheaded body that still retains its physical energies but no longer possesses the ability to steer them in a reasonable direction.”

This is a societal reformatting, one that changes how we communicate, how we think and perceive. Bifo argues that we’re witnessing a radical shift in cognition itself—our perception, memory, language, and even our sense of space and time are being disrupted. Connectivity invades our emotional and cognitive processes, bombarding our nervous systems with info-stimuli, sending us into a state of constant excitement and delayed response.

He terms this upheaval “epigenesis,” likening it to an organism developing outside of its genetic code—constantly exposed to unpredictable events. As we navigate this accelerating change, it becomes clear that we, each of us, are the organism, with no control over the design of our own realities.

Bifo says that what we need is a new rhythm. Because ritual becomes sacred when fused with music and dance, repetition—like the drift of night into day, of summer into autumn into winter into spring. Two lips directing a voice, exhaling, sighs and breeze, connected to an infinite melody. It’s geese across the horizon, porpoises slugging through the ocean, all the miniaturizations of life we don’t see.

We cannot forget that the universe breathes. That it maybe even dreams. But it’s dangerous to consider any of that proof of a simulation. You have to pick a different word.

What Baudrillard’s theory gets wrong is that the realest human experiences are too real for us to understand, but this has nothing to do with reality itself. Instead, they’re so real that they can never be simulated or copied. For many of us, that’s faith or some kind of transcendent belief. But it could be anything that classifies as what Freud called the “oceanic feeling” inside you.

Because what’s more real than the body. Your eyes, your hands, your heart, your voice. The body at its barest is the finest rebuke of superficiality.

This also dispels Baudrillard’s notion that fabricating the unreal from the real is no longer possible.

The most effective pathway out of this stoner’s labyrinth is human contact with someone you love or like or enjoy being near—the intricate elegance of genuine conversation, the kind that snakes you along in directions you never could’ve imagined.

When we find friendship, all the haunted political nonsense goes away, because our new political formation is based on the bond we share with our friends.

So the next time you see footage of some leftoids and rightoids shrieking themselves to death, just remember—life would be easier if we shipped them all to Disneyland and kept Disneyland, and spent our days enriching invisible truths like love and eternity and music, and hung out on the set of a movie about a simulation of somewhere else far away, and broke bread with a guy dressed as an actor who played a character named Chewbacca.

Cannibals prowl the outskirts of a town called Bright Hope, hunting for a murderer named Purvis, played by former WCW Heavyweight Champion David Arquette. This strange dynamic—a conflict between savage troglodytes and the amoral idiot who provoked them—anchors Bone Tomahawk, an arthouse horror Neo-Western that dances in the shadows of fuzzy mayhem.

Reviews of the film are overwhelmingly positive, many capturing its playfully dark tone and B-movie horror aesthetic. Yet critics also accuse the film of cultural insensitivity, specifically for its portrayal of the cannibals.

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The New York Times decried the movie’s “abysmal racial politics.” An AntiFa-adjacent podcast dismissed it as “conservative fantasy.” The Daily Beast took it a step further, branding director S. Craig Zahler as “making movies for the MAGA crowd.” These accusations are thrown out almost casually, as if calling something racist and conservative requires no further explanation. If they said it any other way, they’d have to justify their assumptions and endure scrutiny, a process they tend to avoid at all costs.

To be fair, they are politically brilliant. Despite all their ornamental dishonesty, they have a gift for the culture war as a game, as well as an excellence in their craft, which is rapidly waning but still formidable, driven by an intellectual prowess nearly as impressive as they think.

Bone Tomahawk was filmed in just 21 days on a $1.8 million budget. Clocking in at just over two hours, it could easily have become a Doom-Western masquerading as high art. Instead, it’s a bizarre, compelling blend of dark comedy, romance, camaraderie, and sheer terror. Critics often compare it to Quentin Tarantino’s Westerns: All the violence.

Bone Tomahawk is the goriest film I’ve ever seen. That’s no exaggeration.

The movie opens with Purvis robbing a dying man amid a hellscape of skulls. The buzz of giant flies as bodies rot by sharpened death poles. Then Purvis, in his casual depravity, stabs the man in the throat and quips, “Why do they always wet themselves?” Moments later, he and his accomplice stumble into a cursed burial ground pocked with satanic imagery. An ominous bellow fills the air. Mid-conversation, Purvis’ partner takes an arrow to the throat and gurgles to death. This is just the first five minutes.

Does the film truly “boast abysmal racial politics”? Nope. Although if you work for The New York Times, it might. Which is shocking, given the severity of their accusations.

De Gruyter claims that the film’s “story is informed by one of white America’s oldest and most paranoiac of racist-psychosexual myths: the captivity narrative.” According to this critique, the film’s horror elements amplify racial anxieties by framing the cannibalistic and homocidal savages called troglodytes as “the ultimate Other.” Plenty of lesser-known outlets echoed this sentiment. One called the film “racially repugnant,” while another likened the troglodytes to “Orthodox Jews hoarding money and drinking babies’ blood.”

It’s an absurd charge.

Don’t get me wrong: The film does contain racism. Brooder, played by Matthew Fox, is openly hostile toward Native Americans. He’s unrepentant about hunting them and murders two unarmed Mexicans with chilling indifference. Yet Zahler’s brilliance as a storyteller lies in using Brooder’s racism to enrich his character. We come to understand him, even if we don’t condone his behaviour.

The troglodytes, however, are irredeemably vile. They rape, devour, torture, imprison, and mutilate anyone they encounter. Their totalization as villains unnerves critics, who mistake the film’s depiction of fictional monsters for racial insensitivity.

Zahler has repeatedly dismissed these accusations, reminding audiences that the troglodytes aren’t even Native American. They’re a fictional bloodline—an exaggerated, inhuman threat rejected by actual tribes within the film. As one character, an actual Native-American (who’s a professor, by the way), describes them: “They’re not my kind. They’re a spoiled bloodline of inbred animals who rape and eat their own mothers.”

This line, delivered wryly, underscores the absurdity of taking the troglodytes as a racial construct. The term “troglodyte” is itself intentionally comedic, fitting the film’s B-horror sensibility better than any accusation of harmful stereotyping.

The accusations also miss the symbolic purpose of cannibals in fiction. The idea that depicting a savage tribe as, well, savage, is inherently racist borders on parody.

In reality, cannibal films often critique civilization itself—movies like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) use graphic violence to expose the savagery of so-called modernity. Bone Tomahawk doesn’t go that far (I think). But if you were determined to project racial grievances onto the film, you could argue that the troglodytes are victims—their rampage is triggered by Purvis’ desecration of their burial ground. One review did exactly that, defending the cannibalism as a justified response to “settler colonialism.” This insistence is based on a certain academic obsession, to glorify archaic societies by insisting they’re equally advanced or morally superior—a delusional inversion of reality, strange worship by radicals who use theory like a machete.

Critics often assume that the Western genre is inherently conservative. But this isn’t true. Early Westerns weren’t overtly political at all. They were products—commercial ventures dictated more by profit than ideology. This commercial reality unsettles critics who prefer to see themselves as arbiters of taste and normative clarity.

Critics, by and large, are liberal, and increasingly, there’s no separation between their political convictions and their cultural analysis. (This has damaged creative nonfiction as an art form.) The Western genre’s association with conservatism—deserved or not—has always made it a target for ideological critique among this crowd, who aren’t exactly fond of John Wayne’s America.

What really bothers me is the New York Times’ gripe that “cultural enlightenment” is absent from the Western genre. What they mean is that Westerns don’t cater to their activist worldview. Good art, according to this mindset, must serve politics—preferably progressive politics. This is nonsense. Westerns are complex. They offer universes of redemption, violence, and morality. To dismiss them as bigoted—or worse, to rob them of their life force—is cultural vandalism.

To the sophisticated reviewer, Westerns often appear simple, and simplicity is frequently—and unfairly—associated with right-wing politics. Yet Westerns have always been rich in complexity. They resonate with diverse audiences. Ironically, high society largely dismissed Westerns during their golden age, only to rediscover their artistry once the genre lost mainstream dominance—God forbid they enjoy the commoners’ dumb-show.

It’s insane that this has to be said: Conservatism isn’t inherently linked to racism. A conservative isn’t racist by dint of being a conservative. But this supposition is common among the academic Left writing about culture.

They have also claimed total authority on the matter of racism, the sole judge of what constitutes prejudice and bigotry. In this self-analysis, they found themselves upright and enlightened, determining that anything less than endless racial hyper-focus is bigoted.

They’ve conveniently made exceptions for themselves along the way. Because they have their own special kind of racism—“abolish whiteness,” the discrimination of “equity,” “whiteness is anti-life,” “abolish the white race”—and that it is at the very core of their ideology. But they award themselves titles like “anti-racism” to squash debate. Then insist that minorities can’t be racist because “Racism = Prejudice + Power” and minorities lack power…because of whiteness. Then they assign the label “racist” to anyone still willing to disagree.

This divide is an example of stasis, the Ancient Greek notion of civil war as a political paradigm.

The “everything you consider true is a social construct” people have the audacity to make universal claims rooted in objective truth, a concept they simultaneously mock as nonsense and use as proof that Conservatism is racist.

Culturally—and, to a lesser extent, socially—they have sovereign power. This is what allows them to break their own rules without consequence. Because their slogans don’t need to make sense: Their attack on “racism” is actually a weapon in the political campaign against their enemy, Conservatism and all it stands for. Tradition, order, the rule of law, free-market society, property rights, individualism—all of which also happen to be themes of the Western genre. The authority of institutions: marriage, parenthood, religion, local community, voluntary association. Freedom, rights, due process, privacy, and welfare.

It’s no coincidence that their diagnosis of racism is nearly selfsame. Hence their guilt-free false equivalence. In an admittedly brilliant move, they claim to want political unity, but only so that anyone who disagrees with them will automatically be guilty of extreme hostility, which should be treated as a kind of insurrection, the activity of savages.

The Mink was just outside Montrose, surrounded by halfway houses and homeless shelters. Before it closed in 2011, that shabby grey building was a favorite among the music weirdos in Houston. It had a strange charm, like a cat that only comes out at night.

Most gigs were upstairs, in a dank, slouching room better suited for AA meetings.

There was no real stage. Bands used the fire exit balcony as a dressing area, and the only bathroom was always a tar pit — door smashed in, hinges undone.

But you could get beers for cheap, and the alley in the back was always perfumed with smoke. Nobody cared about anything else at the time. You went for the shows and the camaraderie. And you always felt like you were in the middle of something, and it was almost always something new.

One Sunday night, 10 June 2007, I was restless, and I was 19. So I scanned for shows and recognized the name Dan Deacon, playing that night at The Mink.

I spent my time reading and writing and devouring music. I treated Pitchfork like the daily news back then, and I’d been so enamored of Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, which had come out less than a month earlier, that I hadn’t gotten around to checking out the “Best New Music”-earning album by Dan Deacon.

That summer, after my freshman year at college at Sam Houston State University, I traveled as much as I could. I’d moved into my parents’ house in Katy, Texas, ahead of my disastrous move to Austin, Texas, where I’d see Dan Deacon three times.

Two weeks after the Dan Deacon show at The Mink, I took an Amtrak from Houston to Los Angeles to visit my friend Ed (our shared love for music has always been a huge part of our friendship).

A month later, I attended Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago alone.

Two years later, I quit my job as a receptionist at the local YMCA because they wouldn’t let me off early to see Deacon at The Orange Show—a job I’d kept in order to save money for a trip to Spain, where, before teaching English at an immersion camp in the hills north of Madrid, I attended Primavera Sound, including a set by Dan Deacon. The occasion would mark my 12th Deacon concert.

I would quickly learn that Spider-Man of the Rings, through its mountainous, chaotic, at times peaceful 45-minute span, somehow embodies the spirit of Deacon’s live shows.

From the album’s first moments, Deacon turns pop culture in on itself, as Woody Woodpecker takes on the tape-loop of Steve Reich's “It’ Gonna Rain.” There’s a certain Warholian confidence to giving such a toyish soundbite the perfection of Phillip Glass and Monte Young. From there, the album is a journey, and by the end of it, you’ve evolved.

“Even in listening to absolute music we must ‘understand’ it,” writes Hans-Georg Gadamer. “And only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us. Thus, although absolute music is a pure movement of form as such, a kind of auditory mathematics where there is no content with an objective meaning that we can discern, understanding nevertheless involves entering into a relation with what is meaningful.”

Spider-Man of the Rings was Dan Deacon’s breakthrough, before he got casual emails from Brian Eno and roomed with Val Kilmer at Francis Ford Coppola’s guest house, before he toured with Miley Cyrus.

In the awkward first years after the new millennium, Dan Deacon was this subterranean Santa Claus for grown-ups, and he knew how to lead an audience into cult-like elation. With Spider-Man of the Rings, he was able to spread his message to the world, gathering followers with each listen.

Little did I know, Deacon would forever be known as a mad scientist composer who was so ahead of his time that listening to his music and going to his shows felt cultish. When the album came out, there was an aura of mystery about Deacon.

For one, his instruments were a wacky collection of jury-rigged synthesizers, colorful wires, threadbare effects pedals. Classically trained in electro-acoustic and computer music composition at State University of New York at Purchase’s Conservatory of Music, he studied under renowned Avant-garde composer Dary John Mizelle — a pupil of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the dour father of electronic music — and Grammy-award winning conductor Joel Thome.

At the time, all I knew was that the Deacon album had something to do with Spider-Man. But I remembered the name, and saw that he was playing a show in town that night.

He was halfway through a 42-city summer tour promoting the new album. “Why not,” I said, “I’ll go—I’ll go alone.”

Sometimes alone is what you need, though at that moment it was all I had. So I drove through dark June night toward downtown, not really listening to anything, not really caring or noticing.

Videohippos were the openers. I walked in halfway through their set — I was immediately jolted by the sight of it all: psychedelic visuals, ultraviolet frogs diving into polygons, cascades of neon washing over a two-piece glitch-punk band as they spat into the microphone.

I looked around, there were only ten or so people, a straggle of a crowd, all standing awkwardly in the big dark empty place.

The room stank, and the A.C. was turned off or useless. Without warning, I felt an engulfing strangeness that carried itself from my eyes, down my throat, heavy—and it fell on my shoulders. I gritted my teeth till it passed, a little flustered, but I knew I should stay.

Everybody seemed to have gone to the show alone. I’d never been anywhere so perfectly suited to an audience.

But one guy stood out, with his Looney Toon t-shirt worn into shreds, his neon frame glasses, his caffeinated pace, the way he wove through the crowd. When Videohippos finished, the oddly-stylish man began to assemble a poker table in the middle of the room.

He shoved cords into pedals and fidgeted with synthesizers for a few minutes as the room grew darker. He chattered for a minute or so.

Then, he got serious, with rapid-fire delivery: “Raise your left hand into the air, as high as it can go, as far away from your body, and look up at it, it’s like a forest of curves and circles—focus on a crevice in your palm, you’ll know which one, and stare at it till you find the smallest unique line. That point is the physical embodiment of all your fears, pains, and worries—think about all the anxiety you have, and focus all of your energy on that spot. You are a bear atop a fucking mountain right now. Grip your hand, your sturdy bear paw. Right now, right here, you are able to gather all of the heavy things into one place. Now turn your hand around. Find a hole or pattern or indention on the ceiling. Stare at it: That’s the warm bath, the waterfall, the rainy breeze that is going to take all your pain and anxiety away. Close your eyes. And I want you to shoot all of that stress and anxiety out—shoot it out like your hand is a tree full of light and that spot is a dead leaf and so you take a slow deep breath in, and the air you’re breathing is crystalline and snowy, breathe that bright air through every part of your body. As that stream of pure air moves through you, collect any weight or doubt or sadness, and when exhale deeply the air is all soot and ash and you feel wonderful, you feel weightless. And I want you to go ahead and breathe deeply again, and this time when you exhale, breathe toward that spot on your hand, that dead leaf, and let your breath be the gust that carries it into the ceiling breathe.”

Then, with a motorized squelch, the show began, a manic cascade of synthesized wailing. People moved a little more with each stomping drumbeat.

This was something new. When the melody cascaded into a choir of chipmunks, everyone lost it.

Deacon lifted TRIPPY GREEN SKULL, bright green flashing as the roided-Kraftwerk crashed into Enya and hymns sung by monks. Gregorian chants in cartoon form.

Then Suddenly It’s a Ludacris Cover. Li- li- li- lick you from your head to your toes. The song yanked to a halt and Dan Deacon took off looking for something, found it.

He opened an old gym bag. It stank like rot and mold. “Haven’t washed these in a while,” he muttered. Neon raincoats. Each had a letter: W-H-A-M C-I-T-Y C-H-O-I-R. We had been enlisted.

Everyone grab one of these, he said, holding a stack of paper. They were lyrics. “WHAM CITY,” across the top.

The community that Spider-Man of the Rings itself rose from is an integral part of the album, an integral part of American culture in those foggy days of the early-2000’s.

They were a fiery collective, a thriving community of artists, videographers, comedians, designers, poets, who met at State University of New York at Purchase, and moved into a warehouse in the Station North neighborhood of Baltimore.

They called themselves Wham City, and their national anthem is on Spider-Man of the Rings.

Wham City has more or less disbanded, but for nearly a decade they were an unstoppable movement of glitch and weird, all manic and wild.

Shows at the enormous former-manufacturing warehouse drew hundreds of people every weekend, with then-unknown bands like Future Islands, Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes, and Beach House.

“Wham City” is also the sprawling, intricate centerpiece of Spider-Man of the Rings, driven by a manic choir.

t’s the longest track on the album, twice the length of the second longest track.

There are several distinct sections within the song, like a symphonic piece, with the Krautrock beat driving it along. The lyric sheet included only the choral parts:

At the 7:00 minute mark, the music stopped. The choir was gone, leaving only a single voice, hidden behind a vocoder.

I hope in my heart that we on a whole

Will die and the earth be left alone

Just beast and bee and fish and tree

This hope I wish will someday be

That bacteria will have ate our remains

That all knowledge of us has decayed

Our burden raised the world set free

The earth returns to land and sea

Our buildings burned and highways gone

I love my friends and everyone

but we've had our chance let's move aside

let time wash us out with the tide.”

But then the choir returns, singing “There is a mountain of snow, up past the big glen …”

Both of the Woody Woodpecker samples fit perfectly in time. The first is the more straightforward of the two, playing a hi-hat role. The slowed-down sample is more antagonistic. But it's Reichmann magic, making a choir out of incremental missteps.

Behind us, a xylophone flutter was building.

“Let’s get into focus,” Deacon said. “Close your eyes for a minute and imagine that you’re a cloud, and you’ve just turned into this weightless thing floating in the air. Now gather every bit of light you can like tokens and every time you get another one you grow bigger and stronger. Open your eyes. Your hands are the lightest, softest presence. Put your hand on the person next to you, rest your hand on their shoulder. Now pull away. Pull away. Pull away. Pull away. Spin, spin, spin, go backwards—youre a cloud, remember? You’re a cloud! So float. And the person next to you, they’re floating too. Now come back together, get ready, get ready.”

Then the drums start, and we’re screaming the words. Never seen anything like this anywhere. Maybe at a church where the people speak tongues and fall all over the floor and dance around with bright flags and fully-grown pythons.

Only they are happy as everyone in that room.

I learned how to dance in that moment, how to be bold, how to outshine depression, and I laughed with my eyes closed, laughed as I was crying. I understood everything all at once. Everyone of us gasped forward, laughing how you laugh when you experience a kind of music or art that you’d always assumed was impossible, that you’d never dreamt, let alone heard. Laughing with joy, laughing like you do when you’re a kid and the world is tremendous. A laughter of grateful disbelief. Knowing that what you’re a part of—right now—is truly special.

The last song climbed for ten minutes then everything went quiet and the room went black for a moment then the lights came on.

It was like being yanked out of a deep yoga session and noticing the gritty world all around you. Only now the world had changed.

I walked down the stairs. I felt light, unobscured. Outside, downtown was bare, and the highways were empty, the entire city was peaceful. I drove home with the windows down and the night sky churches violet.

As I rode through humid darkness, I smiled, stunned by music once again.

My father is a drummer, so I grew up around musicians, I learned to walk to 808 State and David Bowie. My whole life, music has been playing, inextricably part of everything. As a kid, I used to lay down on the grass and look up at the sky with a stereo on my chest, listening to Marvin Gaye, thinking, “If music never existed, I’d know it, I’d feel its absence like a breakup.”

Moon conspiracy theories personally annoy me. I get an impression of what culture goblins must pretend to feel: The itch of being offended. I asked Joe Pappalardo for his opinion of people who claim the moon landings never happened. “They are morons. Aside from indie radio and optical observations at the time, international and private observers today can spot the landing sites. Why would India or China lie?”

In 2023, I met Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke. I was a producer for The Glenn Beck Podcast, where I got to meet a lot of incredible people, and with the exception of Bridget Phetasy—who I now work for—Charlie Duke was my favorite. As evinced by my eagerness to get a picture with him, and to get his autograph for my daughters, on my childhood copy of Goodnight Moon, something I usually never do:

We chatted in one of the green rooms at Mercury Studios, just me and a man who had played golf on the Moon. He was soft-voiced and humble, and laughed when I told him that Stage 19—which was used for Barney and Friends—feels like the Moon. Glenn wanted to have Charlie on the podcast as a way to push back against Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories. I wrote the prep for that episode, and the intro, which I’m very proud of:

The Apollo Space Program folded 51 years ago, and nobody has walked on the Moon since. Weirdly, a growing number of people don’t believe the Moon landings really happened. This belief is growing more with each generation.

The list of reasons ranges from bizarre to confusing, and many of the moon hoax landing debunkers have been caught doing some fabricating of their own.

So on this episode of The Glenn Beck Podcast, I’m going to go straight to the source: My guest has literally walked on the Moon. He served in five of the seven Apollo missions dedicated to landing on the Moon.

The BBC called him “One of the most historically important voices in America.” Odds are good that you know what his voice sounds like. As CAPCOM during Apollo 11, he’s the one who talked to Aldrin and Armstrong when they landed on the Moon.

He played a huge role in getting the astronauts of Apollo 13 back home safely.

Only twelve humans have walked on the Moon. Today’s guest was the 10th. He walked on the Moon when he was just 36, making him the youngest person to leave footprints on the lunar surface. He’s one of the four living men to have walked on the Moon.

He made it absolutely fun. He played a big part in the image of an astronaut: cool, intimidatingly smart yet spare with his words, his brilliance tucked into a southern drawl. He saw more in ten days than most people see in ten lifetimes.

Please welcome, a real-life space cowboy, Brigadier General Charlie Duke.

I also wrote this monologue for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing

Charlie’s answer is the best possible answer: “I’m not sure where those other guys were sent, but I went to the Moon.” He’s not defensive about it, but he is irritated, and rightly so. His practical advice: go to NASA.gov, search “Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,” and look at the photographs of every Apollo landing site. You can see the descent stage hardware. You can see the lunar rover. You can see the tracks of everywhere they walked and drove. He calls it irrefutable proof, and he’s right. Beyond the orbiter: 850 pounds of Moon rock collected across six missions.

When I asked Joe Pappalardo about resources, he told me to look into Larry Baysinger, who eavesdropped on the Apollo 11 mission.

One in ten Americans don’t believe the Moon landing happened. The number gets worse, not better, as you go younger: 3% of people over 54 doubt it, 8% of those 35 to 54, and 18% of people 18 to 34. That last number is up from 6% in 1999. This is the wrong direction. The leading reasons given: 41% point to the flag appearing to wave in the footage, and 14% say you can’t leave a footprint in moon dust. Whoopi Goldberg ran with the flag one on The View.

The most persistent of the moon landing conspiracy theories is the one about the waving flag. In the famous footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the American flag on the lunar surface, the flag appears to ripple and wave — and for the conspiracy crowd, this is the smoking gun, since there’s no atmosphere on the moon and therefore no wind to move it. What they’re describing is actually physics working exactly as it should. The flag was mounted on a horizontal rod precisely so it would stay unfurled in a vacuum, and the rippling they point to was caused by the astronauts handling and rotating the pole. Once they let go, the flag continued oscillating briefly — as any object would in a low-gravity, frictionless environment with no air resistance to dampen the motion. It wasn’t waving. It was settling.

Then there are the shadows. Conspiracy theorists have spent an astonishing amount of time scrutinizing the photographs from the Apollo missions and declaring that the shadows fall in inconsistent directions, which they say proves the images were shot under artificial studio lighting with multiple light sources. Any photographer could explain this. The lunar surface is uneven — craters, slopes, and ridges cause shadows to appear to diverge even when cast by a single light source. Combined with the wide-angle lenses used, and the reflective properties of the lunar soil bouncing indirect light back onto subjects, you get exactly the kind of shadow complexity that has sent generations of basement-dwelling skeptics into a frenzy. It’s terrain, not trickery.

Stanley Kubrick supposedly filmed the whole thing. This one has taken on a life of its own, particularly after the 2012 mockumentary Room 237 convinced a certain type of film school dropout that The Shining was a coded confession. The theory holds that Kubrick, fresh off 2001: A Space Odyssey, was recruited by NASA to stage the moon landing footage, and that he hid cryptic admissions throughout his later work as a kind of tortured penance. This is the conspiracy theory as auteur theory, which should tell you everything. Kubrick was a control freak who couldn’t agree with his own crew on a daily basis — the idea that he kept a government secret for decades while simultaneously leaving elaborate cinematic breadcrumbs about it insults both his character and his filmmaking. The man couldn’t finish a film on time. He was not a CIA asset.

A related argument claims the technology simply didn’t exist in 1969 to accomplish what NASA claimed, and that the Van Allen radiation belts alone would have killed the astronauts before they got anywhere near the moon. The Van Allen belts are real, and radiation exposure during the Apollo missions was a genuine engineering concern — one that NASA engineers actually solved. The transit through the belts was fast, the spacecraft shielding was adequate, and the total radiation dose received by the Apollo astronauts was well within survivable limits, comparable in some cases to a modern chest X-ray regimen. The claim that they would have been fried in minutes reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how radiation exposure works and an apparent belief that NASA’s engineers, the best in the world at the time, didn’t think to ask the question.

Some theorists argue that the landing sites have never been independently verified — that no telescope has ever photographed the equipment left behind on the surface. This one is technically dated. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been photographing the moon since 2009, has returned high-resolution images of every Apollo landing site, clearly showing the descent stage hardware, scientific equipment, and even the tracks left by the astronauts and the lunar rover. The Chinese lunar program has independently confirmed surface features consistent with Apollo mission data. Japan’s SELENE spacecraft mapped the landing sites. You can look at the pictures. They’re on the internet, which the conspiracy theorists are also on, somehow without connecting the two.

There is the argument from implausibility — the sheer scale of the cover-up required. The Apollo program employed roughly 400,000 people. It involved contractors, engineers, astronauts, scientists, and technicians spread across dozens of institutions. The Soviet Union, which had every geopolitical incentive imaginable to expose an American hoax at the height of the Cold War, had sophisticated tracking capabilities and monitored every phase of the missions in real time. They said nothing, because there was nothing to say. The physics of keeping 400,000 people quiet about the most audacious fraud in human history, across more than fifty years, involving an adversarial superpower with active surveillance assets — that is a far greater miracle than landing on the moon. And we did that too.

One more reason: For All Mankind (1989), the Brian Eno-soundtracked documentary assembled from NASA footage from the Apollo program. If you haven’t seen it, watch it as soon as you can.

Something is rotten in the Land of Theater Kids. This week, The Telegraph reported that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust wants to “decolonize” buildings in Stratford-upon-Avon, to “create a more inclusive museum experience” of the playwright’s legacy, which they accuse of “benefitting ideas of European and white supremacy.” They argue that some of the archival material includes “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful.” These damned and luxurious mountain goats claim that Shakespeare’s legacy cannot escape the “impact of colonialism.”

This is a continuation of their ongoing “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Policy,” a jargon-loaded screed that has absolutely nothing to do with Romeo and Juliet or King Lear. Although what comes to mind is Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespeare’s Globe, which briefly hosted an annual Race symposium, devoted an entire podcast series to “Shakespeare and Race,” in an effort to make “decolonisation a reality at Shakespeare’s Globe and beyond.”

What they mean is that Shakespeare was white and that hurts their feelings. Meanwhile, 16 generations of humans, from literally every habitable continent, have found refuge and victory in his words and ideas. He has inspired countless African and Asian and Latin American artists, playwrights, directors, poets, novelists, and educators. It’s fair to say that very few Western figures have done less for “white supremacy” than he has.

James Baldwin acknowledged that Shakespeare’s work reconceives notions of power and humanity in a way that is revolutionary for the English language as a whole.

The Swan of Avon never left England in his entire lifetime. Yet he wrote beautifully about the sociology and politics and history of the world—including, by the way, Lebanon (Pericles) and Egypt, for his masterpiece, and my personal favorite, Antony and Cleopatra.

Shakespeare was extremely “inclusive” of black characters in his plays. This wasn’t exactly popular among 16th-century English playwrights, let alone black playwrights (there were literally none). Not only that, but most of Shakespeare’s black characters are written with humanity.

Othello, a courageous black general who is destroyed by racial paranoia weaponized against him, and Cleopatra, who emerges from the script with such majesty, with a beauty “to beggar all description.”

There is, of course, a nauseating body of work devoted to this question, involving Critical Race Theory and the initiative to repurpose Shakespeare as an “anti-racist.”

Modern adaptations of his work have gone out of their way to feature black actors in many of his plays, including a black Hamlet, which is actually more insane than the Harry Potter race-swapping that the left has simultaneously been “no big dealing.”

But why is race unimportant when explicitly white characters are reimagined as another race? Why are the same people who push for nonsensical and unnecessary race-swapping (only to be outraged by the resultant confusion) so eager to attack the legacy of a playwright who went out of his way to include black characters and whose work has been extensively race-swapped?

Because the problem is systemic—of course. One professor argues that the “teaching of Shakespeare in US American schools is often rooted in a logic of white supremacy and how understanding this can reveal that the most celebrated author in the humanities has been consistently used to dehumanize.” So if the people who teach students about the Immortal Bard are “the problem,” why does he need to be culturally shunned?

A recent play titled “Shakespeare is a White Supremacist” took the “white supremacist teachers” accusation to the stage. But notice the false equivalence again: If the play is about the modern-day study and performance of Shakespeare’s plays, why title it in such a misleading way?

This would be like “decolonizing” the Moon because the Ku Klux Klan used to rally at night, then slapping the “white supremacist” label on anyone who questions their mission.

It’s a fallacy of interpretation: When a writer who has been dead for 400 years, and whose work has never, until very recently, been associated with “white supremacy,” how imperative is it that we “de-colonize” his work and legacy? Or better yet, even if he truly did hold odious beliefs that emerge throughout his writing, which then inspired violent and racist hegemony, wouldn’t that be an opportunity to discuss the matter, while also still valuing the historical consensus that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language?

But that’s not even the case. If anything, his work has been entirely abused by the very people who are now demonizing it, as evinced by this politically indulgent attempt at desecration.

Using the Bard’s own words, these hypocrites are “a boil, a plague sore.” And Heaven truly knows that they are “false as hell.” Although they are also “unfit for any place but hell.” Their brains are “as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.” More of their “conversation would infect my brain.”

The “decolonize Shakespeare” movement originated in academia on a small scale: trigger warnings, and accusations of dog whistles and microaggressions. Which led to the “decolonize the curriculum” movement that spread through England’s education system, specifically including Shakespeare. This anti-Shakespearean sentiment has since merged with American leftist dogma, spreading through universities (then public schools) in liberal alcoves along the entire Pacific Coast. In turn, the ideas have inspired real-world action. Largely, symbolic acts, at first, like Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s removal of an 18th-century portrait of the Bard, or cancellations of Shakespeare productions and death threats against officials involved with Shakespeare festivals.

I got my undergrad in English Literature, so I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare’s plays, and even performed in about six public-school versions of them. I’m by no means a ShakesStan, but as a devotee of the English language, I can’t help but let this ruin my day. In fact, without Shakespeare, there would arguably be a much weaker literary fixation on the very notion of “white supremacy” in academia.

This power, culturally, belongs to what conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet calls “clerisy,” a class of public intellectuals, increasingly connected to the secular state, where intellectuals of the past were attached to the Church. They use activism as an evangelizing force to spread a metaphysical and normative gospel of their own design, which is merely the meticulous opposition to each of the traditions and precepts of Western Civilization.

This grift is part of the newest version of equality, which Nisbet described as “a dangerous social egalitarianism.” He sees this revolt as the “rising opposition to the central values of the political community as we have known them for the better part of the past two centuries: freedom, rights, due process, privacy, and welfare.”

Inequality, in his view, forms the essence of the social bond.

The ideological fixation on equity is actually only an inverse of the “hegemonic order” they’re attacking, is rooted in a newfangled social bond—a fresh set of rules for the operation of society. Instead of changing themselves or questioning their own (self-described) radical beliefs, they declare that they are so enlightened that society needs to restructure itself in accordance with their declarations of reality, which are, to them, objectively subjective.

This is partly what Robert Nisbet captures in his description of the triumph of the subjective, “something like a vacuum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people,” where human loyalties, “uprooted from accustomed soil, can be seen tumbling across the landscape with no scheme of larger purpose to fix them.” He adds that this “retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective is commonplace.” Leading to “a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and corruption of culture.”

These same people have gone out of their way to insist, without any historical evidence, that Shakespeare was a BLACK LESBIAN! How can a source of “white supremacy” also (baselessly) be heralded as an icon of black representation?

Other times, they insist that he was actually a gay soy boy and his characters, also without historical evidence, were non-binary. “Queer Shakespeare” has become its own well-funded and lauded academic category. They claim that many of Shakespeare’s political figures are in fact bisexual or non-binary, and his plays should be performed by LGBTQ+ actors. There is a growing body of Marxist literature devoted to the harebrained idea that he should be viewed as an advocate for communism. The Theater-Kid Clerisy has insisted that the Bard was a proto-feminist and model for anti-fascism who was secretly devoted to attacking modern notions of “right-wing extremism.”

As the New York Times proudly announced, the leftist cultural gentry have forcefully used him as “the most-cited provider of metaphors for the Trump era,” specifically that Shakespeare’s villains are actually the prototypical Donald Trump, who they view as the ultimate “white supremacist.” How does a playwright accomplish such radically contradictory tasks?

Because, in their worldview, Shakespeare is a “colonial text that needs to be dismantled.” This reveals their obsession with archaic societies as the actual source of enlightenment, free of the racism and misogyny and all the blah-blah-blah-supremacy that European lineage has cursed humankind with. And that the farther a society is from the West, the purer it becomes. Archaic societies, with their human sacrifice and poor hygiene, contain the solution to patriarchal oppression.

This might explain why the scapegoating of Shakespeare is not all that different from the ritual sacrifices committed by archaic societies. It follows this ancient pattern:

The lynch mob gathers in response to a crisis, in this case, social theories like “white supremacy,” “colonialism,” “homophobia,” etc. Then they hunt for a victim, who is usually innocent or completely unconnected to the crisis. Then they demonize this person. The lynch mob’s goal is to publicly desecrate the victim. Dehumanize them, until violence and expulsion appear to be justified. Then they insist that the only remedy to the crisis—the only way to heal society—is to scapegoat the victim. It’s an instance of a predatory force using evil to expel evil. In reality, the scapegoating process is a diversion from the actual violence that the predators committed, usually as a result of their own guilt or inadequacies, which eventually compels them to repeat the scapegoating cycle.

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On America’s 250th Birthday, it’s worth considering the legends who have made this country wonderful. For America to exist, Europeans left a world of culture and dignity and burrowed into the wilds. Call it a radical generalization, but hostility for perceived elitism is a big reason why Europeans settled on this continent to begin with. Imagine: one minute you’re able to grab an ale on your way to see a Shakespeare play in your city full of shacks and castles, then here you are fighting off bears and scrounging for grain so you don’t go full cannibal, which is also not entirely out of the question.

Anne Bradstreet, America’s first poet, was born in England. In the 1600s, when America was the unexplored New World, a century and a half away from its establishment as a country. Bradstreet lived in Albion until she was 16. Enjoyed a life of great privilege, education, and culture. She was, in other words, an elite.

Then she left all her gentry behind. Endured a three-month pilgrimage on the Arbella, through spindrift and hell, surrounded by death and sickness, to a colony near modern-day Boston. Those were the rough early days of Western Civilization’s westward spread—sickness, hunger, violent weather. A few decades before the Salem Witch Trials. Bradstreet’s life became a constant struggle to survive in a ceaselessly hostile new world, the total opposite of what she’d always known.

She survived. Gave birth to eight children. And went on to become the first published poet in America.

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Many of her poems are quietly subversive. “A Dialogue between Old England and New” is framed as a conversation between a mother and a daughter—the mother represents England, the daughter represents New England, or, for now, America.

The dynamic between the two is an inversion of the typical mother/daughter relationship. The mother is lost and helpless and sullen and antiquated; the daughter is grounded and forward-moving, if not a tad haughty. As the daughter sees it, the world has transformed.

Everything that used to be impressive is no longer. All the old pageantry is for buffoons. Kings and queens. Monarchies. Lords and ladies. Pffffft.

The daughter has the final word, tells her mother to stop crying and embrace the new world:

Farewell, dear mother; Parliament, prevail, And in a while you’ll tell another tale.

Anne Bradstreet’s unabashed truthfulness may very well pack more punch than her reputation. Her dedication to sincerity. Things just seem simpler by her accounts. Simpler and more wholesome. And yet I can’t keep from wondering if this is more a product of her time and place’s lack of need for ever-toppling advancement than an Edenic time now unattainable.

In a less crowded world, would we settle for simplicity?

Bradstreet’s path to redemption isn’t easy. To her, life is mire, a “clay house mold’ring away,” where pilgrims dwell on “earth perplexed / With sins, with cares and sorrows vext,” only to leave behind “a corrupt carcass.”

“Weary Pilgrim” best describes this muddling of averages, the struggles of the pilgrim, and the gift of ascent for those willing to endure life’s savagery.

Before any of this can happen, the pilgrim must be born.

This involves a diametrical wholeness—the house of nativity, where the Lord’s “presence makes it day, his absence night,” where Eden’s ghost battles a Hell it both casts aside and uses as a lesson. Bradstreet’s zeitgeist was more accustomed to the comforts of silence, the closeness to nature.

Our sense of the collective takes the form of a web, an intricate and unfathomable network of labyrinthine connections splintering off without end. Puritanism’s idea of collectiveness was composed of simpler circuitry—a togetherness and unity in a journey that connected them, a union of pilgrims crossing the bridge toward God.

Considering their role in creating the term “witch hunt,” having literally done the kind of finger-pointing that hurled colleagues-in-God straight into a deadly and irreversible Catch-22—wooden stakes meant to sort out the whole matter with troublesome fire—their idea of “togetherness” is highly suspect.

The poetry of Anne Bradstreet nears an openness at odds with this need to escape everyday life, but at the moment of full embrace, straightens into the austerity acknowledged as proper service to the Puritan code. The best representation of these beliefs emerges from the portrayal of life as operated by discordant forces.

Her outlook contains a direct view of Revelation. Her poems battle the evils of temptation and the empowerment of certitude, a battle that rages until the end, when the sinful keep their place and the good are sheathed in the safety of God’s protection, to live forever in joy and purity, reunited with the source of endless Love.

In “The Flesh and the Spirit,” this battle becomes literal, as seen in the passionate discourse between two sisters, two opposites, two foes: “the Flesh one was called, who had her eye / On worldly wealth and vanity / The other Spirit, who did rear / Her thoughts unto a higher sphere.”

Bradstreet’s oft-recurring, almost mathematical worldview—life and all its mechanisms as two incompatible and contradictory forces—is unique partly because of its ambitious aim.

She’s not detailing flowers and birds, or representing opposites with microcosmic workings. Instead, she has made these two sisters the representatives of all mankind and the embodiment of its greatest mistake. Spirit reveals that the two sisters were “by old Adam...begot.” As the children of Adam and Eve fall to temptation, they are slaves of their parents’ ruination.

Midway through Spirit’s attempt to lead Flesh away from the destructiveness they were both born of and afflicted with, it becomes clear that the forces keeping humans in tandem cannot reunite.

Eden has been taken from Earth as punishment.

But like the person between two parallels, the mediator of two reflections, there’s also a confounding harmony—the equilibrium of clatter. A balance that Bradstreet cherishes, while also always looking for a return to paradise, that place of “more heaven than earth...no winter and no night.”

Anyone who embraces this lesson is like the fish Bradstreet observes flittering through the water, which she admires from the cooling shadow of a stately elm—fish “which in this liquid region ‘bide / That for each season have their habitation / ...left to glide / To unknown coasts to give a visitation.”

Like the fish, devout followers of God must think carefully about where to glide and reject the enticements of the serpent, whose temptations wait, hidden in the future—the bite of the snake creeping low through offal and loss, always falling, cast out of heaven, denied the bird’s endless view.

Her description of humans in “Contemplations” has a clarity worth acknowledging—humans are “at best a creature frail and vain / In knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak / subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain.” Defective, sorrowfully torn, lewd and venereal, ignorant and greedy and vain. In dire need of reformation. Or maybe the carnality on earth is just manipulating humanity, and we each hold a modicum of innocence, victims of crossfire.

Bradstreet chooses the grin-and-bear-it crowd. This Stoicism functions as a binding element in her writing, brazenly at times. Her Instructions are clear: “Let malice bite and envy gnaw its fill,” but never resort to profane reaction.

In “For Deliverance from a Fever,” she condenses these enormous ideas. Her fever-induced hallucinations lead her to reflection, and, as if to spite the curse of her fever-wracked body, she praises her God “who hath redeemed her soul from pit.” The most notable example of her Stoic outlook is “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House,” particularly the line she utters as she all but admires the blaze: “For sorrow near I did look.”

Like deliverance from illness, her poetry pulses with meditations on transcendence. Because isn’t the action of allowing yourself to live, of allowing movement, similar to the awakening from a sickness that “beclouds” the soul and causes an “aching head to break”?

In “To My Dear Children,” she explains servitude when she refers to “the mark she is aimed at”—the belief that a human serves as an instrument of God, in this case, a weapon, with little need for strong personality or detailed insight. As if the true battle is for a blankness, a bleak being, whose surrendering-to will benefit you in some distant later.

She never does this stupidly. Like “Contemplations,” when in her carefree admiration of nature she falls to an awareness of a nameless ancient people and their adulation, quickly reminding herself of the foolishness in worshipping the sun, though she does admit, “Had I not better known, alas, the same had I.”

Bradstreet’s use of personification in describing the brightness of her thoughts as “of green, of red, of yellow, mixed blue” reveals her inner world as one that is alive with a need for answers—the intersections within a lithe imagination, enhanced and contrasted by the stark, colorless Puritan reality that exists outside.

By far, it is color that saves her.

Then, in “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” she inverts the dilemma, amounting the two to one. Life and Death are as conflictually singular as husband and wife, as fortune and poverty, as the heavenly and the infernal. Hers is a world where “two are one,” and so it is less than surprising when we encounter the poem’s circular ending—a Zen code, almost—as earnest and structural as a logical proof.

It is an ascent that begins only after the physical self is shed, “fully ripe, as shock of wheat that’s grown / death as a sickle hath timely mown.” This is the “bond, none can discharge but I / Yet paying is not paid until I die.”

The labor of those “pious footsteps” is nothing compared to its rewards.

Immune to the pressing weight of finitude—that “fatal wrack of mortal things”—the crests of redemption, near heaven’s gates, wake the penitent, giving final relief from life’s difficulties.

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breaks down the full story: the 2022 Adams County Sheriff’s raid, the TikTok banger cinematic universe that followed (Lemon Pound Cake, Lickum Lo Lisa, and more), and the defamation lawsuit that just handed Afro Man a second career on a silver platter. Also: NWA, Two Live Crew, the First Amendment, and why this might be the most American story of the year.

I had a great conversation with Alex Kraemer from about the movies that dominated this the 98th Academy Awards, and the movies that should have made the cut. The interview was inspired by his article “Films I enjoyed in 2025.”

Critiques and Musings by Alex

Films I enjoyed in 2025

Better late than ever. I wanted to write about films I enjoyed this year. There will be some films I haven’t seen. Like I haven’t watched No Other Choice or Secret Agent yet. But I am happy that I got to see this much stuff at home and especially in the theater. The fact that I had experiences in decently packed theaters made me happy. Made me realize t…

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8 months ago · 4 likes · 9 comments · Critiques and Musings by Alex

One correction: I mistakenly said that Josh Safdie directed The Smashing Machine and Benny Safdie directed Marty Supreme. It’s the other way around. The full list of movies we discussed is below the interview links.

Directed and written by Ryan Coogler | Warner Bros.

16 Nominations — 4 Wins

Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan)

Best Original Screenplay

Best Cinematography (first woman of color ever to win)

Best Original Score

Set against the 1932 Mississippi Delta, Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror epic follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who return home to open a juke joint, only to confront an ancient evil rooted in the power of the blues.

WHERE TO WATCH - SINNERS

Directed and Written by Paul Thomas Anderson

13 Nominations, 6 Wins

Best Picture · Best Director

Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn)

Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Film Editing

Best Casting (inaugural award)

Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, this epic black comedy action-thriller follows an ex-revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is forced back into his former combative lifestyle when a corrupt, revenge-obsessed military officer (Sean Penn) resurfaces and goes after his daughter.

Directed by Josh Safdie

9 Nominations — 0 Wins

Set in 1950s New York, Marty Supreme stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser — a fast-talking shoe salesman and table tennis hustler loosely inspired by real-life champion Marty Reisman — who goes to extraordinary and darkly comic lengths in pursuit of becoming world champion.

WHERE TO WATCH - MARTY SUPREME

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

0 Nominations, 0 Wins

A 2025 British-set spy thriller in which intelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is assigned to investigate a suspected traitor leaking a destructive cyber weapon — one of whom is his own wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).

WHERE TO WATCH - BLACK BAG

Directed by Akiva Schaffer | Paramount

0 Nominations, 0 Wins

The fourth film in the beloved franchise stars Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., who must follow in his legendary father’s footsteps to prevent the closure of Police Squad while solving a murder case — all with catastrophically clumsy results.

WHERE TO WATCH - THE NAKED GUN

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos | Focus Features / Peacock

4 Nominations, 0 Wins

A dark comedy thriller in which two conspiracy-obsessed men — certain that a powerful pharmaceutical CEO (Emma Stone) is secretly an alien plotting humanity’s destruction — kidnap her and attempt to save the world in increasingly unhinged fashion.

WHERE TO WATCH - BUGONIA

Directed by Wes Anderson | Focus Features / Peacock

0 Nominations, 0 Wins

Set in 1950, the film follows arms dealer and industrialist Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), one of the richest men in Europe, who narrowly survives an assassination attempt and must reconcile with his estranged nun daughter (Mia Threapleton) while completing an ambitious infrastructure project in Phoenicia — all while being hunted by tycoons, terrorists, and assassins

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

Directed & Written by Ari Aster | A24

0 Nominations, 0 Wins

A neo-Western thriller set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, in which a standoff between a small-town New Mexico sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the local mayor (Pedro Pascal) ignites a powder keg of social division, mask-mandate tensions, and political chaos that spirals into devastating violence.

The older I get, the less and less I can stomach incompetence. When that incompetence is paired with authority, I’m nauseous. The tyranny of the small bosses: the airplane attendant, the carpool director, the lunch lady - not exactly a list of the world’s rich and powerful, but with the right mix of sugar, spice, and chemical X, they wield the power to drive people insane.

This was all roided up during Covid when every citizen could quote their favorite pop authority on the subject to manipulate others’ behavior. Cue Jafar: “The power, the absolute power!”

My politics has taken a rough turn into “Leave me the fuck alone.” Elephants/Donkeys, they are all a bunch of asses. Libs (whether -eral or -ibertarian) just let me be. I neither disdain the State, nor adore it.

You don’t know better, admit it. You’re just wielding your puny authority to subjugate the innocent bystander. People think I’m joking when I say that plastic bag bans are my #1 voting issue. I’m not joking. No policy created in my lifetime has affected my life as intimately and consistently as this truly idiotic idea. Order online? Great, they drop it off in the snow without bags!

Besides the immense inconvenience, what really gets me is that it’s absolutely, 100%, useless. It serves ZERO purpose other than to warm the hearts of the high horsemen who invented it.

Climate change, you say? Yeah, that’s not related. The turtles? Oh, you didn’t know that issue gets better by the day, thanks to good ole innovation and elbow grease, not a bunch of tie-wearing clowns in an old building. Besides, driving a tiny state’s residents insane was never gonna save a single turtle, big or small. The ugly truth: It’s turtles all the way down.

The latest one I heard was about the clean streets. That’s interesting, maybe they can pay for the cleanup if they care that much. They seem to have deep pockets for everything, except the ideas that make sense. Boring vanilla sense.

It truly is hard to fathom how enough sheep-clowns could’ve gotten voted in, and coordinated their efforts with straight faces to pass a policy that doesn’t pass the laugh test (aka smell test 2.0).

Another geriatric observation, is that the momentum of the status quo is one of the most powerful forces in human nature. Conservatives embraced it in their name and philosophy; others pretend they want revolution, and maybe some do for better or worse, but the vast majority will defend the status quo against any and all interlocutors.

The question is why? Why is the status quo so enticing? Why do people assume that it was crafted and designed in a thoughtful and planned way by some ineffable force?

In most cases, it is simply the haphazard momentum of time that gets spliced together to create the Frankenstein systems we call our vaunted institutions. Sadly, there was never an ingenious architect. This is in fact not the Matrix, despite what some jocky-influencer says.

Perhaps I am not being fully forthright in my assertions. After all, this is much deeper than an intellectual policy for me. The origin story of the Incompetent Authority started in my own backyard...or my front yard....all the yards in fact. Hard to think of anyone more incompetent than the ultimate authority for the first 18 years of my life. That doesn’t mean they are useless or incapable of following along the rocky road that is life. It means they are extremely poor stewards of children, particularly this child, who they were tasked with introducing to the world and the multitudes it contains.

I always felt like I was from Mars, or maybe from Earth, but everyone else is a martian. Not sure there’s much distinction. It’s not who I am in a vacuum but in comparison to others that seems to carry weight in this world.

Perhaps the following formulation is best: my family from Mars, humans from Earth, and me from Jupiter...where I did not get more stupider despite what you’ve heard. I am an alien observer, a data collector, a synthesizer of seemingly uncorrelated details. It’s charted, graphed, analyzed, and then? Well, that bridge has yet to be crossed.

So perhaps now I have created the permission structure for you to disregard the first half of this rant. Now that you know the dirty secret, my passionate stance on policy and culture stems from a deeply rooted, complex post-traumatic stress disorder that has colored my entire life outlook.

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Or....maybe I am one of the few who is reflective enough to admit. We are all products of our atomic nature/nurture concoction, in which we had no say in the process. All of our outlooks are colored by our lived experience, which I believe to be code for something, or at least the emphasis placed on the phrase does not compute with my incomplete lexicon of homeo sapians.

Apparently, it has a magical component to it. That’s my latest theory, at least, that magical emphasis is not doled out to any ole phrase. But, in my narrative, it is simply the literal words. Life’s experiences color our outlooks. Logic and indignation will always come to our aid for backup. We can’t willfully admit to such a gouache perspective.

How mundane.

So, I respectfully submit, dear reader (if you are indeed reading this, which you are and therefore no confirmation is needed, or you aren’t and this is all for naught, but I digress) that you accept my logic and indignation, not as secondary to my primary life experiences but to treat them as primary and to scrutinize and debate the merits as such.

I’m not asking for special treatment, just for you to admit that all arguments contain a veil with multifaceted emotions behind them, whether others acknowledge it or not. “The unconscious runs deep with this one.” - Yoda (maybe, the guy was over 900 when he died, prolly said a bunch of shit).

So, in conclusion, incompetence is off-putting, authority sometimes necessary, but nary the 2 shall meet. Oh, but they do, and they do almost every day in every corner of the world. Perhaps even the majority of authorities.

The only solution is one of patience, my least favorite of all solutions. The meek, the scared, the risk-averse, need to step up. I have. I am meek, scared, and risk-averse (sometimes), but I stood up. You can too, my friends.

If you heard thunder or drums at 9:00 AM on Sunday morning, you knew Brother John had woken up on time. But if the worship-rock music from the stone-and-wood chapel in Liloc Pasture off Highway 8 melded along into noises from town, then he hadn’t made it out of bed.

Because when he played—especially during solos—the air itself climbed in pulses, swayed like a pendulum or the oceans.

When he played, the aisles flushed with dance and hoot and clap and holler.

Brother John’s instinct for when to launch into a solo was so precise that he needed only to nod toward Patty, the bandleader. And if he felt the stir, the roar and crash began.

Every time he did, the sterile, unriled plainness of the building shook back to life what had fallen into shadow the night before, at whatever smoke-palled bar or backyard club Brother John had played. These gigs ended late, so sometimes he began the morning church set tired, but it never lasted long—no longer than it took someone like him to do something like that.

Each of the four Sunday services started with a thirty-minute set. Then another twenty minutes after Reverend Alfred finished his sermon, as the collection plate made its way around the lumber-ceilinged chapel.

There were two bands—one led by Patty, one led by Steve Shatbang.

Slumping and weak-wristed, Terry Pie was the drummer for the earliest service and the late-night service. Unless Brother John didn’t make it, in which case they gave him only the 9:00 spot.

Nobody came to the first service except for grumps, nuts, and cat-ladies—the later service was mostly recovering addicts, gas station clerks, rehabilitated prostitutes, people-watchers.

Usually, though, it was just empty pews gawking at the stage. Terry rarely made a mark on his drumheads. They mostly bore the black dashes left by Brother John’s sticks. Terry’s were red—same pattern as his fingerless leather gloves.

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