My Ten Favorite Songs from Springfield, MO

This summer, I watched the Springfield, MO music documentary The Center of Nowhere, which was a lovingly-made bit of boosterism that included some genuinely cool interviews and historical footage. It was pleasant, if a bit sad, to watch it in a year when I can’t get back to Springfield for the usual occasions. I found after watching the film that I was immediately assembling my own list of my favorite songs by Springfield bands. And so, after a few months of hemming, hawing, and typing, I have assembled a list of my ten favorite songs of Springfield, MO. It would be much more fun to drive down to the Ozarks, catch up with friends, and argue about this stuff over a whiskey or four, but I guess a blog post will have to do for now.

The number of years since I moved away from Springfield at age 18 far exceeds the number of years that I lived there when I was growing up. Listening to music from the Ozarks has long been a way to feel connected to a place that still means a lot to me, even if that place seems to the rest of the world like a backwater.

I hope that the following list will be taken in the spirit intended, which is as one music fan’s love letter to the town where he grew up. I have no more authority than anyone else to make such a list, and far less authority than some people. So think of it as a mixtape as much as a ranking. And I always scribbled way too many liner notes on mixtapes.

Okay, some caveats and clarifications:

*I make no claims to this list being definitive. If you care about Springfield music, your mileage will almost certainly vary, and that’s a wonderful thing.  

*I’ve listened to a lot of stuff from Springfield over the years, but as I said, I haven’t actually lived there full-time since 1995. So I don’t necessarily know all the new bands, and what I do know is inflected by the recommendations of friends. Brett Miller and Jenny Edwards in particular have pointed me to a lot of good stuff, though neither of them bear any blame for my deficiencies of taste.

*There’s obviously the question of how to define “songs of Springfield.” I’m defining it to mean songs written and performed by artists associated primarily or exclusively with Springfield or its immediate environs. There are obviously other ways one could do this. A list of nationally known artists who spent some small portion of their career performing or recording in Springfield might lean heavily to Brenda Lee, the Carter Family, or Robbie Fulks; a list of songs written by Springfieldians but made famous by national artists would give you “Danger Zone,” “The Letter,” and “Always on My Mind.” But my list is about songs that are of, by, and to a great extent for Springfieldians.

*I am the age I am, and like anyone I’m partial to the music of my teens and twenties. In my case, this means the 90’s and 00’s. I also have my own genre preferences. I particularly enjoy Americana performed by smartasses and indie rock performed by dorks. I like hooks. I mistrust virtuosity. All of that is reflected here.  

*This is a Springfield list. Not a 417 list. There’s no Branson. No Knobbers. No Shojis. Anything located within five miles of a fucking wax museum is out. That said, I did consider including the “Fire in the Hole” theme song.

*Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing. Here’s my list: The EG Revue’s Ten Favorite Songs of Springfield, MO.

10 (tie). Izabel Crane, “Spring Fed River” (2019); Dragon Inn 3, “Bad Boy” (2018)

Everything else I’m putting on this list is at least ten years old. I really like both of these songs, but I haven’t yet had the chance to burn out on them and then come back later, which is always the biggest test. So, they get placed in a #10 tie, which will probably strike me as far too low or high a few years from now.

Izabel Crane on “Spring Fed River” continues the long tradition of Springfield artists revisiting gospel in other genres. It’s a baptism song of a sort, but a decidedly secular one. I could imagine Isabel Crane gaining an audience beyond Springfield. Certainly anyone who likes Gillian Welch ought to give this a listen.

Dragon Inn 3’s Double Line is one of my favorite albums of the last couple years. Philip Dickey of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin near-fame (more on them later) went out and recruited a band of vocal ringers, and they recorded some synthed-out Crockett-and-Tubbs jams. “Bad Boy” is the best thing the 1980’s have given to Springfield since Charlie Spoonhour.

9. Honky Tonk Chateau, “26 Miles” (2002)

It’s possible that Matt Netzer, who sings on this one, is a good enough friend that I should exclude Honky Tonk Chateau from consideration. But on the other hand, this song’s great, so I’m rolling with it. Also, I didn’t really know Matt yet when this album came out, so I first experienced it as “a thing I bought at CD Warehouse”[1] rather than “a thing I bought at my friend’s album release show,” which seems an important distinction.[2] 

There was plenty of hard-driving grain belt rock coming out of the Show-Me State right around the turn of the century, and this song is a fine example of the form. I’m not entirely sure what the song is about beyond “relationship troubles” and “driving,” but what other topics do you really need?

8. The Skeletons, “Thirty Days in the Workhouse” (1987)

7. Big Smith, “No Sir” (2000)

The subtext of this list is whiteness. This is a very white list of artists, and while some of that is due to the limitations of my own listening interests, it is also a reflection of the fact that Springfield is one of the whitest cities in the US. Springfield was 89 percent white in the 2010 census, and remarkably enough, that means the city is much more diverse than it was when I grew up there during the 80’s and 90’s. The musical genres to which Springfield has made its biggest contributions reflect those demographics: country, rockabilly, folk rock, roots rock, bluegrass, alt-country, indie. We haven’t made a dent on the polka charts, but give it time.

Both of these songs are about white privilege and law enforcement. In “No Sir,” Big Smith’s Mark Bilyeu writes about an anxious traffic stop in Oklahoma, where he definitely doesn’t want his car searched. But in the end, he doesn’t have much to worry about. The fact of the matter is that “The only words in Spanish/ On Highway 44/ Say ‘Checkpoint straight ahead’/ So you know who they’re lookin’ for.” The young white protagonist is able to “wriggle through the net” of the justice system, free to pursue a career performing hillbilly music, well-aware that people who don’t look like him might not have fared so well.  

The Skeletons are even more blunt in their rewrite of a Leadbelly classic: “Thirty days in the workhouse,/ Don’t you shed no tears./ If I’d been a black man/ They’d a’ give me thirty years.” It’s “don’t you shed no tears” that makes this one sting. Lou Whitney was willing to lean into unlikable narrators, and it’s plenty revealing that the speaker assumes we would shed tears for the slap on the wrist given to a white shitheel but not for the thirty years given to a black man. The Skeletons tended to play this song with a manic, unhinged intensity, whereas Big Smith’s take on the same basic topic in “No Sir” is mournful. But perhaps manic and mournful is an appropriate set of responses to an American reality that sits at the intersection of tragedy and insanity.

6. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Sink/Let It Sway” (2010)

SSLYBY is my favorite Springfield band by a pretty wide margin. They were attuned to the blog-rockin’ 00’s in a way that gave them a small-but-devoted audience well beyond Missouri, but they’ve always sounded to me like a band from the Ozarks in the same way that Big Star or REM or the Elephant 6 bands sound like they’re from the South. They don’t play it up, but it’s in there.

“Sink/Let It Sway” is one of Yeltsin’s catchiest songs, and a real showcase for what a great guitar sound they had. And while it’s true that “Best Music Video from Springfield” is a fairly slim category, the Point Break tribute filmed for this song is without rival.

 

5. The Smarties, “He Fixes Things” (1996)

I’ve always remembered this song as a fun little quick-hitter of 90’s alterna-pop, but listening to stuff for this list, it jumps out to me how much “He Fixes Things” sounds like the Skeletons: it’s got driving growly guitars and tight drums, it’s hooky, it’s unafraid of being a little silly, and it’s not a second longer than it needs to be.[3] Much of the best music out of Springfield has been willing to indulge in not just humor but corniness (Springfield ain’t Branson, but it ain’t far from Branson). “He fixes things but he broke my heart” seems at first glance like it ought to be the chorus of an AM country song, but it works delightfully as a 90’s rock song.

This song always reminds me of that era when downtown was nothing but Nonna’s, the antique stores, the DMV, and the weirdos. Every time I get back to Springfield, it seems more and more impossible that such a time ever existed.

4. Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m a Dog” (1957)

It’s fun to imagine the reaction of some University Heights father walking past his daughter’s room, just a few months before she graduates as part of Parkview’s first senior class, and overhearing her listen to this growly rockabilly record. “Linda,” declares the paterfamilias, “if this boy takes these kinds of liberties with English grammar, what other liberties might he take?”

I hope Linda was done being grounded in time to join her fellow Lassies at the sock hop.

“Bop-a-Lena” was a bigger hit for Self (and “I’m Sorry,” which he wrote for Brenda Lee, was a way bigger hit), but to these ears, “Ain’t I’m a Dog” is the A-side.

3. Ozark Mountain Daredevils, “Jackie Blue” (1974) 

Alright, time for some honesty that might anger some Springfieldians: I kinda hate the Daredevils. “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” is boring. “It’ll Shine When It Shines” is saccharine. “Chicken Train” makes me want to go full Belushi on a mouth harp.

But then there’s “Jackie Blue.”

“Jackie Blue” is so good, y’all. “Jackie Blue” sounds like someone raised on Ozarks church music discovering cocaine, malaise, and women who like cocaine.[4] No matter how good your stereo is, “Jackie Blue” always sounds like a tinny speaker nailed to a utility pole at Hydra-Slide. It sounds like denim cutoffs and root beer at the Fair. It sounds like a lifeguard at Fassnight Pool who’s more worried about her tan than her job.

As far as radio airplay is concerned, this is the biggest rock song ever recorded by a Springfield band. And so the Daredevils’ smoothest contribution to the freaky 70’s lands at #3 on this list, which was also its peak position on the Billboard Hot 100.

2. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Think I Wanna Die” (2008)

Back when SSLYBY still played shows it seemed like the crowd mostly got excited about the more anthemic stuff, but for me “Think I Wanna Die” is their greatest hit. Lyrically, it has quite a bit of fun wearing a Morrissey mask. Musically, it’s a sidewinder—it spins and darts and hesitates and builds, hooky as hell the whole time.

The line where they apologize for being twee cracks me up. Most of the music on this list is more than a little chicken-fried, and when SSLYBY came along one of the many delightful things about them was that they were perfectly willing to be the least dangerous band in Springfield. Which in this case extends not just to being twee, but apologizing for it.

1. The Skeletons, “Trans-Am” (1981)

Springfield is the birthplace of Route 66. That isn’t a marketing slogan, by the way. It is literally true that some guys sat down in a hotel in Springfield in the 1920’s to select a number for the Chicago-to-LA highway. And so, the top song on this list almost has to be a car song.

“Trans-Am” is an upbeat song, but there’s also some darkness here. The speaker longs for a Trans-Am, but does not actually have one. The second verse is about the shoddiness of American cars, and the third is about registering for the draft, which adds a note of urgency to what is ultimately a carpe diem song. “Ride around while you still can,” we are told by a band called The Skeletons. And how do you say carpe diem in the Queen City of the Ozarks' English? By emphasizing “car,” of course.

Everybody now: T-R-A-N-S-A-M!!!

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[1] It was disc #20510 in the CD Warehouse file cabinet, per the “Disc at Counter” sticker I still have on my copy.

[2] Speaking of things your friends made, thanks for reading this blog!

[3] Skeletons frontman Lou Whitney has an engineering credit on the album. Of course, he probably has an engineering credit on like 70 percent of the rock albums made in Springfield from 1980 to 2010.

[4] I should note that I have no proof of what substances the Daredevils were actually into. On the other hand, they were a popular rock band in the 70’s. I just opened to a random page in Supe Granda’s autobiography (which actually exists) where he talks about touring with The Steve Miller Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers. On the next page I turned to he talks about transporting “fresh green buds” direct from a farm in the Ozarks to the A&R Department of his record label. I’m done researching.

My Ten Favorite Characters, Roles, or Nations to Play in Board Games

 

1. Swift and Company in City of the Big Shoulders: Chicago 1895

If you are my opponent and we have a cordial business relationship, I shall invite you to the Annual Pork Ball, the social event of the 1895 season. But should you tank my stock...oh sir or madam, you shall be snubbed! Where’s your invitation? At the bottom of the Chicago River, right next to my accountant--that’s where!

2. Luke Skywalker, Rebel Commando in Star Wars Miniatures

I won the 2010 Missouri Regional Tournament with a squad built around this bad boy, so it’s all love. The great skill of this version of Luke is to levitate his allies into combat. That’s not exactly how it worked in the movies, but whatever.

3. Phobolog in Terraforming Mars

This corporation helps you build big stuff in space, and it’s fun to build big stuff in space. Plus your turns end up being really short, so you can go drink while the other players plant trees and build quonset huts on the Martian surface. Also, as Terry Wilson likes to note, you can pretend that your company is a blog about Vietnamese soup.

4. The United Kingdom in Axis and Allies

Playing the UK was lots of fun back in high school when Stefan Zarins played Germany, because he got really into playing Germany. Maybe too into playing Germany? Anyway, you have a lot of options with the Brits. Build aircraft carriers. Bomb Dusseldorf. Industrialize the colonies. Fun for the whole family!

5. The Cursed Pirate in Dice Throne

The Pirate is not the most powerful Dice Throne character. That would be the Shadow Thief, who is too overpowered to be entirely fun. But the Pirate is hilarious. You throw exploding powderkegs at people, your playmat uses words like “aye” and “booty,” and you slowly evolve from a sassy redhead pirate into a rapidly deteriorating skeleton pirate with superpowers. Always fun to drag your opponent down with you into the briny deep.

6. Bards in Dungeons and Dragons

I’ve never gone to the level my brother Nick has where he’s purchased costumes and actual musical instruments for purposes of better portraying a D&D Bard. But he’s absolutely correct that the Bard is the most fun D&D class--they’re highly customizable, you get to talk to NPC’s, and you don’t have to worship some deity that Gary Gygax invented in his basement. 

7. The Thimble in Monopoly

Apparently they recently got rid of the thimble, which is awesome, because it means that I get to boycott Monopoly for the rest of my life.

8. Puck in No Holds Bard

This was a game in development that I played at GenCon once, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Board game fightin’ with Shakespeare characters! I hope the guy who designed it gets somewhere with it. Anyway, Puck was exactly the chaos agent you would want him to be. And yes, his special move is to affix a donkey head to rival characters.

9. The Roman Empire in History of the World

Do I really need to explain why the Roman Empire is awesome in a game called History of the World?

10. Athena in Mythic Battles: Pantheon

Makin’ corpses of Spartans,

Behind the Parthenon

With you, my grey-eyed girl.

Yoooooou myyyyyyyyyyy….grey-eyed girl.

Last Place. Helping Candamir Chop Wood in Candamir

Chop your own wood, you lazy forest bastard.

The Age of Innocence Turns 100

Long, Long Ago, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The 2020’s are going to be a big decade for literary centennials. Over the next few years, hundredth anniversaries will be celebrated by stalwarts of the high school canon, epic modernist masterpieces, foundational African-American poetry, and essential feminist novels. Also Mein Kampf. It seems trite to point out that the literature, art, and culture of the 1920’s had an outsized impact on the century that followed, but get ready to hear that basic point repeated quite a bit in the not-too-distant future.

To my mind, the biggest literary centennial of 2020 belongs to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.[1] It is a fitting kickoff to a decade of big anniversaries, because Wharton’s novel is obsessed with the passage of time. Specifically, Wharton writes about the ways that an era can leave traces on the future even as the specific textures of the present are constantly erased. Time in The Age of Innocence is imagined variously as geological and ephemeral, as characters are weighed down by cumulative layers of tradition while the most important moments of their lives vanish in a glance.

Wharton also thinks about time in a much more obvious way: The Age of Innocence is a period piece. Wharton set her book roughly five decades in the past, and her rendition of the 1870’s is nostalgic, but also exasperated with the styles and strictures of New York high society. Modernity lurks implicitly around every corner of the book, as Wharton can’t resist the occasional knowing quip about impending changes in American life.

Like many a Gen X cinephile, I was introduced to Wharton’s novels through Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. On its surface, this still seems like an incongruous pairing of director and text. But Scorsese at the time pointed out that the novel is filled with “brutality”[2]—it is about a rich, powerful family deciding how to address violations of its codes of behavior. Characters in the book surveil and maneuver behind one another’s backs, and one misspoken sentence can upend a character’s world. Perhaps the transgressor gets shipped to Europe rather than frozen in a shipping container, but the effect is nevertheless chilling.  

In this tense, mannered world, our main character Newland Archer is earnest, oblivious, and a bit of a dork. While his social circle goes to the opera primarily to gossip and be seen, Newland legitimately enjoys the theater. Most of the men in the book share a carefully calibrated omerta regarding one another’s philandering, but Newland idealistically daydreams about life with his bride-to-be May Welland. Even when he develops feelings for another woman—the Countess Ellen Ollenska—it mostly takes the form of an “emotional affair.” There’s a small moment in one dinner party scene where one of the other men in the novel, aware of Newland’s split affections, comments that neither May nor Ellen are particularly good looking. There are a few ways to read this, but one way to take it is that, whatever else you want to say about Newland, he is actually attracted to inner beauty.

And yet. Like most self-understood “nice guys,” Newland is more than a little entitled. Some of this is inevitable—he’s an absurdly rich white man in the nineteenth century whose job is to be his firm’s token attorney from a “good family.” It’s no wonder he’s surprised when the world doesn’t bend to his will. But he also seems to live so thoroughly in his own head that he has trouble empathizing with people. At multiple moments he expects Ellen to drop everything, even sick relatives, to spend time with him. With May, he assumes he’ll be able to transform a society girl with a penchant for horses and tennis into a serious student of poetry. Poor May tries her best—she reads Robert Browning, for God’s sake—but Newland finds her opinions so insipid that he ceases reading any poetry in her presence, lest she decide to ask him about it.

I’m making him sound worse than he is. He is always at least a little myopic, and the innocence mentioned in the title belongs more to him than any other character. But without that innocence, he might lose his genuine curiosity about the world, his aesthetic susceptibility, and his desire to live a life defined by real human connection. In a society of rules, codes, and narrow traditions, he wants to live authentically. His love for his family is deep, but there are moments where it seems that the only way he can be true to himself is to cast them aside. Wharton manages on more than one to occasion to make you root for infidelity in spite of the fact that the wronged spouse is a likable character. As she explores the twists of Newland’s story, Wharton is marvelously attuned to the ways that life can sometimes seem terrifyingly free, only for the shackles of fate to click shut a moment later.

Newland’s desire for freedom is constantly hemmed in by convention, and as such, there’s a good case to be made that the famous characters from other novels who most resemble him are women. The Age of Innocence is a riff on the adulterous love triangle novel, but Newland resembles Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina far more than he does any of the men in those books. Perhaps Wharton’s cleverest expression of male privilege is that Newland is allowed a happier ending than his predecessors.

And it really is one hell of an ending. I won’t spoil it, but the last chapter is a favorite of mine, and it is why I prefer The Age of Innocence to The House of Mirth, a novel which has an indelible protagonist, but also a boatload of third-act problems. The last chapter of The Age of Innocence contains one of the few paragraphs in any book that reliably makes me tear up every time I read it. After a life in which luck, family, and society have so often undermined Newland’s ability to determine his own path, Wharton presents him in the final pages with a choice that is entirely his to make.

The choice he makes tends to infuriate my students, though they sometimes talk themselves into it by the end of the class. It might not be the right ending for every romantic hero, but it’s the right ending for this one.

A hundred years later, The Age of Innocence remains easy to get into simply because Wharton herself was already looking backward when she wrote it. She finds the quaint habits of old New York as charmingly silly as we do, and as she wrote this novel she, like us, was living through a period in history when a story about a quaint, charming era must have seemed like a welcome respite from the present. Anyone old enough to remember the late-twentieth century has probably felt at least a momentary pang of nostalgia for it while living through the escalating calamities of the twenty-first, and in that, our perspective echoes Wharton’s. That said, the novel is also a reminder that nostalgia blinds us. In particular, the lives of many American women were almost certainly fuller and freer in 1920 than they had been in 1870, and Wharton shows quite powerfully that unchecked patriarchy could stifle the development of a man like Newland as well. And so, ironically, the lesson of looking back on Wharton’s brilliant backward glance is that we shouldn’t let ourselves get too seduced by the pleasures of looking back.

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[1] I’m hardly alone in this belief—there’s been lots of good writing in various places on the hundredth anniversary of the novel, including Wharton scholar Sarah Blackwood’s introduction to Penguin’s newest edition of the novel.

[2] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-age-of-innocence-1993

Interview with me at Mr. NYC

 Hey all--if you read my piece on fountains in Kansas City back in June and thought to yourself, "I would like to know even more of Ben's thoughts about fountains," you're in luck! Tony Dunlap, who works in science magazine publishing by day, does the whole husband-and-father thing by night, blogs as Mr. NYC in his spare time, and shared a college apartment with yours truly in a former life, just interviewed me over at his blog. You can read the whole thing here.

A Few More Things: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 5

I have officially run out of gas on my self-appointed task of doing a blog post a day for five days, and so I turn to the last refuge of the lazy writer: a list. It’s a catalog, an odds-and-ends, a deadline listicle...it’s Johnson’s Veritable Miscellany!

So anyway, here’s ten more things I have found vaguely pleasant amidst this (insert your favorite synonym for “bad”) year:

*Dragon Inn 3’s cover of Fountains of Wayne’s “Sink to the Bottom.”

*The fact that the Rutgers tomato plant Ruth bought for our garden is actually producing tomatoes. We buy a Rutgers tomato plant every year, because I love the Knight life, but usually our Rutgers plant does about as well as a drunk freshman trying to hold down his first Fat Darrell. But this year our plant is a suitable tribute to the Garden State.

*Rhea Seahorn’s performance as Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul. 

*Bear Review editor Marcus Myers’ recitations of his favorite poems by Kansas City poets (which he recorded and posted during the late spring). It was a lovely celebration of great writing, and introduced me to a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

*The book came out 30 years ago, so it’s only a 2020 thing for me, but a few weeks ago when I just needed to read a damn novel, I finally got around to reading AS Byatt’s Possession. It’s outstanding—lots of po-mo research/mystery novel stuff a la Nabokov or Pynchon, but put in the service of a more realist and even humanist aesthetic sensibility. I dug it.

*Joshua Weiner’s new translations of Nelly Sachs’ poetry (which appeared in Poetry in April—the full book comes out next year). I wasn’t previously familiar with Sachs, which is kind of embarrassing—she won the Nobel Prize in 1966—but I’m glad to be introduced to her elegiac, formally inventive poems. Anyone who is interested in the modernist literary response to WWII, or in Jewish literature in general, should give her a read.

*The takeout Easter dinner from Pot Pie. Ruth and I got like four meals out of that thing. I flash back to the lamb whenever I need to go to my happy place. Which I guess means I think about the lamb a lot.

*Having friends who bought a house with a pool. Folks, swimming in a pool you do not have to maintain is truly the American Dream.

*My students in the spring semester. I’ll forever be sad that the in-person semester was cut off in the middle, as all of my classes had students who were thinking, saying, and writing interesting things, and I really enjoyed our discussions. That said, I still got to read a lot of very interesting papers my students wrote even after we went virtual. They did good work, and I learned a lot from them.

*Sporting KC signing a competent striker. Who could have guessed that paying for talented attacking players would lead to more goals?

*And finally, this picture of my dad’s quarantine hair:

Christian Pulisic: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 4

Yesterday, when I wrote about the poet Carl Phillips, I quoted the following from his poem “Archery”: “To have timed your arrow/ perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a kind of/ timelessness.”

I very much doubt that Phillips had English soccer even the slightest bit in mind when he wrote those lines, but I’ll admit that when I read them, one of the first things I thought of was this:

Talk about timing your arrow perfectly.

I promise I’m not going to go the full John Updike and pretend that sports are literature. That said, if you’re a fan of either soccer or poetry, you’re deeply familiar with the experience of feeling time grind away as you watch ideas come to nothing and real risk get eschewed for easy, cynical ploys. Trust me: any lover of poetry or soccer who has read Longfellow or watched the Colorado Rapids knows this shit can be boring. But if you’re into it, you keep waiting in the hope of some moment of grace—the perfectly-weighted pass, the unexpected turn of phrase—that will make time jump and stand still all at once. The page and the pitch are blank, brutal spaces, but every once in a while someone transforms that nothingness into beauty.

Over the past few weeks, as the Premier League has started up again in empty stadiums in England, one of the best players in the world has been an American: Chelsea winger Christian Pulisic. Just watch what he does here against a Manchester City team that gets paid roughly $200 million in total salary:[1]

On the occasions when American players have done big things in big games—both men’s and women’s—they have tended to rely on sheer physicality and effort: the speed of Landon Donovan, the strength of Abby Wambach, the tenacity of Clint Dempsey. And while Pulisic is a remarkable athlete, possessed of excellent speed and agility, what jumps out in this clip is his tactical foresight, his well-timed risk-taking, and how calm he is finishing a high-pressure shot. And yet, somehow he’s from Hershey, Pennsylvania rather than Argentina or Italy.

2020 has been a sad, tragic, and embarrassing year in America. I can’t imagine you need me to list the reasons why. And of course the fact that a kid from Pennsylvania is good at soccer changes absolutely none of that. But still, it’s been nice that for a few hours each week, at least one American is excelling on a global stage.

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[1] Just so we’re clear, Chelsea pays its players around $165 million. No one in that clip is poor.

Carl Phillips' "Archery": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 3

A few days ago, my friend and colleague Jenny Molberg pointed out that the July/August issue of Poetry magazine has quite a few excellent poems (also excellent, btw, is Molberg’s new poetry collection Refusal, which is one of the best things I’ve read in 2020—in fact, go read this poem now). Jenny specifically praised Rosebud Ben-Oni’s excellent “Poet Wrestling with Blood Falling Silent,” which is one of the first published poems I’ve read that deals with the Covid epidemic. There’s plenty of other good stuff in the issue as well, including a poem I particularly liked by Erika Meitner that uses the image of a gilded mammoth skeleton near the receding coastline of Miami as the centerpiece of a reflection on climate change and geological time.

The piece I keep coming back to, however, is a poem by Carl Phillips called “Archery”.[1] It is at least in part a love poem, and like so many love poems it is also (and perhaps “really”) about time. Like so many poems about time it is pulled gravitationally toward thinking about death, and like so many poems about death it considers one of the oldest impulses of lyric poetry, which is to imagine aesthetic perfection or permanence as an alternative to or end-run around mortality. That description, though, makes “Archery” sound like a rehash of a Renaissance sensibility, which it definitely is not—the speaker is too skeptical for that, too aware that a poem can’t be at the center of the universe any more than we can, even if a poem can be at the center of one or a few of our own little moments.  

The first stanza (of six) is the only one that actually talks about archery, most notably in this sentence: “To have timed your arrow/ perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a kind of/ timelessness.” This jumps out for a few reasons, not the least being that it is surrounded by sentences that are filled with commas and parentheses. The sentence with the arrow, though, flies directly to its conclusion as it describes a breathtaking moment when some well-calculated action is performed “perfectly,” and thus seems to freeze time.[2] Then the next line mentions a lover, which implicitly brings into the poem the idea of cupid’s arrow (another version of breath taken, time frozen). And so the idea of momentary perfection is introduced, and will eventually be echoed near the end of the poem.

But the center of the poem is far more vexed. In the second stanza time becomes murky, as a new lover mumbles in half-sleep things you would expect to hear from an old lover. Phillips echoes this murkiness in a shift from past tense (“meant”) to present continuous (“he’s mumbling”) even though we are (I think) in the same scene with the same two people in those sentences. Then, the third and fourth stanzas widen to a more panoramic scope:

     All those hours spent trying to outstare the distance

of what the days must come to,

and pretending a choice to it: now the shadow-script

that willows and hazel trees mark the barn’s western

face with; now the wind-rippled field, like a lesser version—tamer,

tameable—of the sea, for movement (same infinite

pattern, and variation; randomness and intention; release;

restraint—that kind of movement) ...

If Phillips stopped at the colon (after “choice to it”), this would still be incredible stuff. Those three lines powerfully evoke the effort it takes to ignore how little control we have over the end-points of our lives’ trajectories. But the next five lines are the heart of the poem. They give concrete imagery to Phillips’ decidedly metaphysical concerns, yet they resist becoming some symbol that lets us pin down the poem. One way to read everything after the colon is that the two clauses beginning with “now” are the options in the choice we pretend to have—specifically, a choice between shadows on a barn or ripples in a field, which is arguably no choice at all. But perhaps there is some solace that the choice we pretend is between two beautiful things, and arguably even two meaningful things (one is “shadow-script,” the other might have “intention”), though again, that meaning might be something we project. Does nature signify, or do we see what we want? Phillips doesn’t posit an answer so much as he makes us experience the question, in lines that catch and sway like the oceanic field he describes.

There is, though, another way to read those two “now” clauses—not  that they are options (“on the one hand this, on the other that”), but that they are two points in a temporal sequence (“now it is this, and now it is that”). In this reading, the speaker is elaborating not the choice we pretend, but the “distance” we try to “outstare.” And if these lines are about trajectory across a distance (as so much of the poem has been), the trajectory leads from something relatively human-scaled—the barn and the trees—and out into the field that moves in “infinite/ pattern, and variation.”[3] The field is more “tameable” than the sea, but at the extreme edges of our vision, it becomes pure motion, an abstract suggestion of nature’s grandeur, or even just the grandeur of physics.

In any event, the poem pulls back to shorter, tighter phrasing after this. Phillips is loose with grammar throughout the poem—there are more fragments in it than complete sentences—but that is especially true in the last two stanzas, where the clipped statements read as the speaker trying to get things under control after the sweep of the fourth stanza. This is apparent in the statement “To sing a song/ of water, and not drown in it,” which perhaps nods to the way that the poem itself sunk into abstraction right after it mentioned the sea.

But if you can sing of the sea and not drown, you’re onto something: “Some calling that/ a good trick. And some calling it// mastery.” Phillips undermines the authority of the word “mastery” a bit by putting it right after a rather abrupt stanza break—certainly he’s setting the word apart to make us think about it. But these lines are also reminiscent of the lines about archery from the start of the poem. One “good trick” is a perfectly aimed arrow, and another is the trick of the artist able to dabble in danger, to think hard about darkness, but then execute an escape and not dwell there permanently.

The last three lines of the poem execute their own elegant escape, and they’re beautiful in a way that I’m reluctant to tread upon with some reading of what they’re “about,” though surely they’re about love, death, and a dream of renewal. I’m struck by the degree to which archery and the image of an arrow color my thinking all the way through the poem, even though Phillips only actually uses the word “arrow” once, in the very first line. Yet it is a powerfully resonant image across the text, able to call to mind love’s arrow, but also time’s arrow, and perhaps even the arrows of Artemis, goddess of the moon, “mute arbitress of tides.” Which is to say you can make archery represent time moving forward, or time cycling, as you see fit. But ultimately, Phillips uses the image of the archer to reflect upon the probably naive, possibly pyrrhic effort a poet makes to create a focused, time-pausing moment amidst the sway and muddle of life: the trick of propelling some piercing phrase along a perfect line.  

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[1] I suppose I should note, in the interest of full disclosure and humblebragging, that Phillips was one of my professors at Wash U twenty-plus years ago when I was a floppy-haired English major. He was an excellent teacher, but completely apart from that, his poems always floored me. Judging by his wikipedia page full of awards, I’m hardly alone in that judgment.

[2] The line breaks here are impressive, and impressively varied: ending on “arrow” propels; ending on “for a moment” urges a pause in tension with the enjambment; ending on “kind of” builds tension via interruption.

[3] There’s a comparison to be made here to Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” which also moves in a trajectory from the human-scale to something much larger. Indeed, one hesitation I have about my reading of these lines in “Archery” is that I worry I’m just superimposing Dickinson over Phillips.

Drinking in the Yard at Night: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 2

I haven’t done much in the way of going to bars this year. I’m relatively certain that my last bar visit was when I was in Louisville for a conference, and I can at least take solace in the fact that Louisville has several bars worthy of distinctions like “the last bar I went to” and “the last bar I remember going to.” But since March, I’ve done none of that, which is too bad, since I like a good bar. As the esteemed John Greiner said the other day, “I miss drinking with people I only kind of know.”

John uttered that particular bit of wisdom while sitting fifteen or so feet away from me in my backyard one evening a few weeks ago. This summer, if you’re being at all responsible, that’s the socializing you can do—sitting outdoors, reasonably distanced from the people in your life that you’re relatively certain have not been making out with strangers at Buzzard Beach.

If there’s any solace in this, it’s that once the evening rolls in and you’ve got a bit of shade, drinking in the yard with a couple of friends is not half bad. And once the stars come out, it’s downright lovely. I’ve even learned a bit of astronomy. You want to know where Arcturus is? Get a couple cocktails in me, and I’ll be happy to point it out. When it gets to the wee hours, you can see Saturn chase Jupiter across the southern sky. I’m told there’s a comet knocking about, but there are trees to the northwest of my yard, so I wouldn’t know.

To be certain, I enjoyed a good drink in the yard at night long before 2020 rolled around, but only in 2020 has drinking in the yard at night become a health-conscious expression of one’s commitment to civic duty. And you know how I am about health.

So I recommend you get out there. The wi-fi signal is terrible, and when the wind blows in the trees, it sounds like any other year.

The Mountain Goats' "Exegetic Chains": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 1

This is the first of a series of essays discussing things I have actually liked about the year 2020. 

Back on April 8, I took a walk on an eerily quiet night, and then I wrote the following:

In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.

It’s tempting in reading that to wish that I’d cut everything after “moment,” since violence and anger became the news of the day just a few weeks later. But I think I was right that the heavy silence of early April is as much a part of the truth of this year as the incendiary summer and ominous autumn that will probably dominate historical memory.

Surprisingly, though, it took only eight days for me to hear a new song that answered my hope for something that would “evoke that silence.”

The Mountain Goats’ album Songs for Pierre Chuvin, which came out in mid-April, is a big deal if you happen to be a fan of John Darnielle, who effectively is the band. For the first several years of the Mountain Goats’ existence, Darnielle recorded all of his material solo on a Panasonic boombox, culminating in the 2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West Texas. After that album, though, the boombox got put away and Darnielle began recording with a full band. Plenty of the full-band material is good, and a little of it is great, but if you got into Darnielle’s songwriting through the scratchy, warts-and-all sound of those early albums, the Mountain Goats with a rhythm section and studio engineers wasn’t quite the same, even if Darnielle’s major themes remained constant: hope despite sadness; troubled grubby teenagers; spectacularly failed marriages; everyday beauty.

Like the rest of us, Darnielle had to stay home beginning in mid-March, and he used this as an opportunity to get out the old boombox. He wrote and recorded a song a day based on a book by the French historian Pierre Chuvin called A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which according to its blurb at Harvard University Press is “a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco-Roman culture.” Honestly, that’s about all you need to know to get the gist of the album. I’m sure there are nuances you could pick up by reading the book, but a couplet like “Me and my pagan crew/ We will deal with you,” or, in a very different register, “Return the peace you took from me/ Give me back my community” pretty well speaks for itself.

So, yeah, it’s a concept album. Moreover it’s a concept album about the last of the ancient Roman pagans. If this sounds Rush-level dorky it probably is, but Darnielle is able to use this concept to create something remarkably moving. These are small songs about enormous loss. They are quiet, meditative, and almost reticent in their accounts of state-sponsored violence being used to stifle a culture of inestimable richness. They are songs about powerful Christians ruining everything. They make a lot of sense in 2020.

My favorite song on the album, which is also my favorite song I’ve heard anywhere this year, is the closer “Exegetic Chains.”[1] “Favorite” isn’t exactly the right word—it’s more that I haven’t heard another song that does a better job of sounding the way that 2020 feels. It is muffled and repetitive, centered on a few spare chords. There’s a lot of “space” in the recording, as they say. Darnielle singing is restrained, almost sotto voce, like he wants to make sure he’s heard but not overheard.

The singing style fits the theme of hidden messages that fills the verses. Darnielle sings about echoes of old myths you can find “in the shadows on the ground beneath the trees”; secrets whispered in city squares; or the warmth inside the “panasonic hum” of the song itself. The title “Exegetic Chains” gives us some clue as to what he’s up to with all this cryptic evocation of things cryptic, since exegesis is the act of critical interpretation or explication—we’re being asked, in a sense, to parse mysteries.

But then there’s the second word in the title: what’s going on with these “chains”? One the one hand, a chain can be a series of connected links, even connected historical links, as in the European transition from paganism to Christianity. But chains are also restraints. Indeed, in rock music, chains are almost never good things, whether it be a “Chain Gang” or a “Chain of Fools” or “Battleship Chains” or the chain that keeps Fleetwood Mac together.

Here’s what Darnielle does with the chain image in his chorus:

Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night.
Keep the chains tight.
Make it through this year
If it kills us outright.

The line “keep the chains tight” comes right after a line about saying your prayers in the night, in a spot where you would expect the thing you hold tight to be a blanket or a loved one. One way to read this is as violence or threat—presumably you would keep the chains tight to control a prisoner, which is jarring in a song that otherwise feels a bit ethereal. It could also be read as a directive to “keep it together,” whether metaphorically as in keeping a family or community linked together or literally as in keeping a mechanism or tool functioning.

Then the last two lines of the chorus are a tip of the cap to Mountain Goats fans. Darnielle alludes to one of the band’s most popular songs, the rousing sing-along “This Year,” which is basically “I Won’t Back Down” for white Gen Xers with literature degrees. In that song, written fifteen years ago, the chorus is joyously defiant: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” Last summer, when I was in a good deal of pain and taking more vicodin than would be ideal, I listened to “This Year” a lot. But fast-forward to 2020, and in “Exegetic Chains” the same words slightly rearranged read more as stoic than joyous, and more cognizant of the possibility of absolute defeat.

“Exegetic Chains” is a song about fear, loneliness, and watching an era end in calamity, which is as relevant to the 21st century as it was to the 5th. But in the last line of the last verse, the speaker says that he is “headed somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours.” Here’s hoping.

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[1] That title, to be sure, transcends Rush-level dorkiness to achieve Yes-level dorkiness. Nevertheless, the song works.

A City of Fountains

A little over a year ago I had major foot surgery, and as a result, I spent most of last summer migrating back and forth between our guest room and the couch. Thank the Lord and his prophetess Megan Rapinoe that the Women’s World Cup was entertaining, because outside of that, my June ’19 was quite a bummer. As I named constellations in the ceiling tile and counted the hours to my next vicodin, I got through it all in part by imagining all the fun stuff I was going to do when Summer 2020 rolled around.

Sigh.

To be clear, I’m not complaining or woe-is-me-ing to any great degree. Given the state I was in a year ago, I’m one of the few people on earth for whom May 2020 was less challenging than May 2019, even if my dreams of busting out of the house for concert-going and sports-shouting haven’t panned out. There’s nowhere to go, but at least I can walk there.

One thing I have done to pass the time this summer is sit next to fountains. Oft can I be found next to fountains old and new, functional and not, public and private, urban and Kansan, cloistered and vista’d. Perhaps I do some reading; perhaps I plan a class; perhaps I just watch the water circulate. It’s a nice enough diversion, and I live in the right place for it, because Kansas City is bananas for fountains.

Plenty of articles recirculate the claim that the KC area has “more than 200 fountains,” though the original source of this statistic is not clear. Still, the number passes the sniff test, and if anyone did a census that included things like fountains in people’s yards or the little waterfalls framing the signage of office parks, the number would undoubtedly be far higher. A visitor to KC who did only the most basic tourist stuff—shop the Plaza, stroll the galleries at the Nelson, take in a Royals game—might notice that they’ve rarely been more than a couple blocks from a fountain during their trip. And the thing is, while the Plaza is almost comically dense with fountains, the rest of the metro area, even down to residential neighborhoods, has an uncommonly high number as well.

The map of KC fountains maintained by the City of Fountains Foundation is impressive. It chronicles fountains as far-flung as the “Kids at Heart” Fountain in Lee’s Summit and, 43 miles north, the abstract unfinished-billboard-esque monstrosity that welcomes travelers to KCI. But if you know KC in any detail, you realize pretty quickly that when you look at the map of fountains, what you are really looking at is a map of money. There are more fountains west of Troost than east; more in Johnson County than Wyandotte; more in northeast Johnson County than Olathe. Even where fountains exist on the East side of KCMO, many of them (especially along the Paseo) were built roughly a century ago when the neighborhoods that hold them were wealthy and white. So the map of KC fountains is not only a map of money, but also a map of the history of money.

The architect of KC’s fountain disparities—as he was of so many of KC’s disparities—was the early-twentieth-century real estate developer JC Nichols. Residential neighborhoods throughout the KC metro have fountains, but the neighborhoods that Nichols developed in the 1910’s and 1920’s are absolutely teeming with them.[1] For instance, a walk down a one-mile entirely-residential stretch of 69th Street from Ward Parkway to Rockhill takes one past four fountains. And that’s just on the Missouri side—Mission Hills is even more saturated with fountains.[2] As the architectural historian Sara Stevens writes, fountains were an essential part of Nichols’ development strategy:

Nichols’s landscape architects also used another kind of design—statuary fountains—to sell buyers a vision of high-end suburban living. The neighborhood’s traffic-directing street layouts created small, postage-stamp sized parks, islands surrounded by roads. These Nichols turned into selling points by filling them with fountains and sculptures. He collected the art on trips to Europe, adding to the general cachet of the endeavor, and held receptions to unveil new acquisitions. More than mere ornaments in the landscape, Nichols believed these objets d’art established an aesthetic tone that reflected the street design, and helped build a long-term vision for the quality and financial stability of the area.

Fountains were not, however, the most important driver of Nichols’ economic success. That, without question, was the use of racially restrictive deeds to create exclusively white neighborhoods. Advertising signs for Nichols’ neighborhoods referred to them as “Protected Residence Property.” It doesn’t take much intuition to guess from whom the developer promised to protect the buyer. That coded language, which was printed on billboards in a larger typeface even than the phrase “Attractive Prices,” makes clear that the exclusion of African-Americans was a core selling point—perhaps the core selling point—of southwestern Kansas City during the city’s interwar boom. Nichols laid out the racial and economic divides that still shape Kansas City a century later, and tragically, his influence extended far wider. As Stevens points out, he was the founding president of the National Association of Home Builders, and his restrictive deeds the model that the Federal Housing Administration recommended to developers in the 1940’s.

Photo credit: State Historical Society of Missouri

I live in one of the neighborhoods that Nichols developed, and in spite of the fact that the restrictive deeds he used were finally made fully illegal 52 years ago, it is uncommon for me to see any African-Americans when I walk around my neighborhood. My neighborhood has a variety of public spaces scattered among its private residences, and more than anywhere else I have ever lived, people actually use those public spaces. But when Nichols designed those public spaces, he did so in a way that aggressively policed who gets to count as part of “the public,” and that legacy is still visible today. And yes, one could state truthfully that anyone is allowed to walk down the street and sit on a bench in my neighborhood. But the blunt fact is that only someone who looks more or less like me is likely to feel fully comfortable doing so. The restrictions Nichols designed, and which generations of white Kansas Citians bought up with enthusiasm, still define the daily lived experience of this city.

The most famous and photographed fountain in Kansas City was named to honor JC Nichols. It sits off of Main Street at the entry to the Plaza, and features statues of four horses which are meant to symbolize “the four mighty rivers of the world,” all of which are located in Europe or North America. The Nichols Memorial Fountain is featured in countless Kansas City postcards, it is virtually guaranteed to make an appearance when any Chiefs game comes back from commercial, and I suspect that most Kansas Citians have a picture of themselves standing near or in front of it. I didn’t even realize that I had one until I went scrolling through my facebook photos, but there I am, eleven years ago. 

Photo Credit: Anne Twitty

Unlike the smaller fountains in residential neighborhoods, the Nichols Fountain is a public space used by all sorts of people, and it has long been a key location for political protests, including the recent Black Lives Matter protests. More than anyplace else in the city, the Nichols Fountain is Kansas City’s town square.

The news came out today that the Parks Board is going to remove Nichols’ name from the fountain. Good. And I’m sure that someone will argue that this constitutes “erasing history,” but that’s ridiculous. Nichols’ influence is so wide-ranging and profound that to erase his history, you would have to erase Kansas City itself. We live our lives along geographical lines he quite literally drew, and it will take a lot more than altering the name of an equine fountain to erase that. But Kansas City cannot continue to honor him. Taking his name off a fountain is of course entirely symbolic, but it is a symbolic action this city has to take if we want our next 100 years to be defined by something other than the sins of the past 100 years.   

Further reading: If you're interested in knowing more about the history of Nichols' role in Kansas City, the article I cite by Sara Stevens is well worth your time. Whitney Terrell's novel The King of King's County deals with a fictionalized version of the Nichols family, and Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, probably the most important novel ever written about Kansas City, depicts life in Nichols' Country Club District in the 1930's.

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[1] I was going to say “overflowing,” but I have too much respect for you, dear reader.

[2] Sorry—couldn’t help that one.