Sketch of New Jersey, February 2021 or A Winter Day's Odyssey for the Man from the West Coast

      A gray patch of playground slush in kindergarten. That's the closest I ever came to snow before settling here. As I got older, the East Bay grew dryer. There were times I stopped and counted on one or two hands how many days it'd rained in a year. Near the end of my California period there was a scramble to buy masks too, as the state government issued air quality warnings due to record-breaking wildfires. With one advancing toward us, trees in Castro Valley were cut down. Every season a fire season. From "climate change" to "climate collapse." So it's with the shock and pleasure of a former resident of a parched and burning state that I think of snow, of the earth being well fed, of powdered branches against a mauve sky. But it's not all cheerful visions of fertility and hitting my nephew with a snowball or two. I've gone from knowing nothing of snow to battling snow. And I've learned firsthand that there's no winning, only enduring. If one can.

A respite: snow piled everywhere but the sun out. With snow coming down, blanketing everything, and keeping customers away, I have a reason to stay home from the snakepit I call work. With the sun out and the roads clear, however, I figure I should obey my oath to the store and try to make it, despite the obstacles. Bloomingdale is not very friendly to the pedestrian on the most tranquil of spring days. When snowplows clear the roads, the snow is pushed onto what few walking paths and sidewalks there are, creating frangible walls to scale. The alternative is to walk or jog carefully in a two-lane road, trying to avoid ice, cars on your back that can't be counted on for patience.

Rounding a corner, a woman snug in her SUV seemed to be enjoying my situation. But I made it onto the less busy road uphill that I walk most of the way without a scratch. Traffic tends to come downhill. I walk on the other side of the road and switch as necessary. Once, I stepped onto a driveway to let a car pass and nearly slipped on ice, then nearly slipped stepping off. Further on, two cars came each way at the same time. I stepped onto a sturdier snow wall and waited. This leg of my trip was about typical. The trickiest came after, upon reaching the freeway in Riverdale. More lanes means more snow pushed onto the path, the wall looming over the waist-high steel barrier fixed along half of it. And it is a very sooty wall. The only choice I had other than spending ten minutes plowing neckdeep through bonechilling filth before work was to

And I got to work right on time, with no serious injuries. I stepped into an empty part of the parking lot to put on two masks and started for the entrance, tensing up.

Since I last mentioned the coronavirus, signs have appeared throughout the store informing everyone of how to properly wear a mask. It is a clear, if cartoonish and undemanding, visual, a gentle, infantilizing message to adults to please do the bare minimum to protect themselves and others from the contagious and potentially fatal illness that has killed scores of people, wrecked the economy, and upended life in our country and beyond for about a year. My day begins with an inessential coworker lumbering directly toward me wearing his mask incorrectly, as usual, in a narrow space. I turned around and waited in a safe corner for him to pass. 

Anything you have to say about taking it easy with this whole coronavirus thing is going to be idiotic. Not so long ago, I stood away from another coworker who can't be bothered to wear a mask properly or keep apart from others. Irritated, he asked me how long I was going to distance myself. I recited the latest numbers within the US alone: the millions infected, the hundreds of thousands dead. I added that it seemed like a problem worth taking seriously to me. He went on to air his view, with absolutely no encouragement from me, that what we ought to be doing is taking off our masks and infecting ourselves to build our immunity.

The vaccine has arrived long before the most optimistic predictions but the US has bungled the rollout too. What's more, it appears people who work at grocery stores, for instance, among the most exposed and underpaid for their trouble, are at the back of the line to receive it. Another reason to remain vigilant, the sensible person would conclude. What one gets instead are coworkers who share breakroom tables without wearing masks. Customers, meanwhile, are as much of a problem as ever. I may very well be the only person in the store at any given time that makes an effort to keep a distance, as frequently instructed.

Convincing explanations have been provided for such behavior but it's not likely to change any time soon. The point is that I never considered staying indoors for winter at work if I could help it, the most dangerous season for the spread of the virus. But my oasis is covered in snow. I tried to run up the steep hill on the edge of the parking lot to get there, promptly slipped, landed on all fours, and slid right back to where I started. A car honked. Every potential outdoor place to sit alone, in safety, is covered in snow. My solution: Guide a grocery cart to the side of the store, where there's a lone salted road used mainly for deliveries, overturn the cart and sit on it. I missed the quiet and solitude of the forest and kicked around the idea of bringing a shovel to work. Somehow in my relatively obscure winter spot, in a fifteen- to thirty-minute window, a few maskless strangers, customers apparently just wandering around the perimeter of the store, have appeared and come too close. And a truck passing through to spray salt sprayed me too. The driver looked to be on his cell phone.

After my shift, worn down from another day spent parrying as much as working, I escaped into the night. In hand was a box for laundry detergent in which I carried a box of disposable masks, a box of reuseable masks, and a box of mini Drum Sticks. My ride didn't arrive. "Cool," I said. The temperature would at least preserve my Drum Sticks on the long walk back home. Starting down the road, a car honked. It was not my brother.

I scaled the filthsnow wall. Not so bad at first. It'd melted and frozen and it maintained structural integrity initially. And it was too dark to be grossed out. Then, halfway across, as I came under a street lamp, illuminated and highly visible from the parking lot, a leg sank fully into the snow, followed by the other. I tried to stand and my arm sank. My box toppled and my glasses came off. I reached out and got poked grasping a prickly branch. Eventually I fought my way to a stable portion of the wall. I snatched off my masks, wiped down my glasses, and made sure my products were safe in my box. I thought of a good snowstorm scene in an Icelandic novel I otherwise didn't care for. Stranded, on an icy rock soon to come apart beneath my feet. If I ever wanted to get home, my only other choice was to 

And somehow I made it. That's what's important. Near the start of my downhill trek, in the dark, I had a runny nose. I didn't have a tissue so I blew my nose into the palm of my glove and wiped my face on the knuckles as best as I could. No one saw and yet I had another reason to get home: to feel less feral.

Back near the busy two-lane road, I scaled the wall, stepping where others had. All went okay until, under maximum illumination beneath the street lamp, as cars sped by, I slipped into the snow pathetically, with no resistance, just an ugh. Getting to my feet, slowly, I thought: Tired. Hungry. Sick? Home.

I balled up my gloves, hid them in my pocket, put on a mask, and walked in with my usual: "Yo." Civilized human once more. And alive.

The Soul of A Confederacy of Dunces

     I'm always eager to hear someone's take on a book that belongs to my personal canon, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, whether the writer enjoyed it or not. A recent piece in the New Yorker by Tom Bissell is the latest I've come across. On second reading, he still doesn't much like it. I write now because he's yet another reader of the novel who, in rendering his final verdict, disappoints me by missing what happens, mischaracterizing it as a mere barrage of gags leading nowhere. I'm looking for a discussion of the book's meaning, not another declaration that it has none. I intend to prove that it does in hopes that the next writer will start from there already.

Ignatius J. Reilly is a manchild content to live off his mother, a fact that, on its own, makes him nothing if not pathetic. That should be a universal rule. The horrendous injustice inflicted upon him is when he's forced by circumstances to get a job. Except he can't bring himself to work or tolerate others and thus can't hold down a job. His real work, he believes, consists of scattered notes in yellow legal pads, scribbled between masturbation sessions. But the novel's main source of comedy is his calamitous interactions with other people, the dunces. Ignatius can't get through a taxi cab ride without irritating the driver, deems his first boss, upon seeing him, a "blight." In return, everyone, almost without exception, scorns him. Having read all this, and having noted that the character had its origin in a person Toole knew and made fun of, Bissell refers unironically to Ignatius as Toole's "hero." Toole's hero is aggressively ridiculed from every single angle, down to his mammoth yellowed drawers, throughout the entire book. It is a satire and Ignatius is its prime target.

I've had to adjust to the pitch of a writer. For years I could only read about 300 pages of a Dickens novel before setting it aside. Harold Bloom describes his work as an endless festival - tantalizing promotion, fatiguing experience, for obvious reasons. As would be the case with any festival, no matter how deliriously fun, I had to leave. (I finally started small with Hard Times and worked my way up to Bleak House.) Though I allow that Toole's pitch might seem antic, I've never felt the same need to adjust with his novel, as the entertainment provides balance for what would otherwise be a grisly tale of a man on the verge of getting himself thrown into a mental asylum. If the jokes come rapidly, it's a measure of how dire the situation is, how necessary laughter is just to present it. Every joke on Ignatius is a cut.

George Orwell, in his analysis of Dickens, says that there's always an idea behind a joke. It took my own second reading for me to notice the few lines and passages in the book that explicitly reveal Toole's meaning. When I noticed, I thought I glimpsed the mark of a young writer or maybe the imperfection bound to be uncovered in any novel. To contradict Bissell once more, the idea behind Toole's jokes risks seeming too transparent. (But then I observe how often readers seem to miss it and wonder whether it was a deliberate imperfection, highlighting and underlining and circling that still isn't enough. The old story of the clown whose humor is assumed to be empty and lowbrow. And the book opens with a line from Swift, from which the title derives.) A Confederacy of Dunces can be likened to an addiction narrative: a succession of disasters that lead to "rock bottom," to the moment where a choice must be made either to climb out or be destroyed. One or the other. The jokes, the thousand cuts, approximate the granularity of the ordinary life of a noxious person who experiences and - Toole suggests - requires that much punishment to break through a barrier and reach a moment of clarity.

Ignatius gorges on cheap screen entertainments he claims to be appalled by in the manner I suspect many others do, as a distraction from his miserable life and his role in creating it. During a scene at the movie theater, the narrator mentions, in arguably clunky fashion, that he has no interest in watching a foreign film about a man who's lost his soul. There must have been many films Ignatius chose not to watch on one of his many trips to the theater. Why isolate this one? Then, nearing the end of the book, Ignatius and his mother have a dramatic, not comic, shouting match that spills out into the street. Again, that word: his mother accuses him of having no soul.

The book prompts me to ask a couple of questions that are always worth asking: What is a soul? And how is it lost?

If you sit there and consider your greatest fault, it is no abstraction. Adhering to it, if you dare to peer deeply enough, past your defenses, carefully constructed or not, would be the evidence against you, your least heroic moments. There may even be one rending moment in particular in which you couldn't escape the truth of who you are and what you've become. Ignatius has that moment. He's at a party, dressed as a pirate. As usual, he has turned everyone against him and is ostracized. Alone, he remembers a traumatic incident from back in high school, suppressed perhaps until then, when he pissed his pants. There are few more effective means in life at that age to be instantly shunned, to be treated with disgust and be forever branded as preposterous, than pissing your pants in front of your schoolmates, especially if it can't be blamed on alcohol. And Ignatius, recalling it as the crowd edges away from him once more, can't hide behind his defenses, rage and delusions of superiority, as he so often does, any more than if he tried to do so with piss-soaked pants. All he can do is stand there, unsure of what to do with himself, sadly swinging his plastic sword.

No, Ignatius isn't a hero - which makes Toole's last-minute display of compassion after the fusillade of ridicule and pain so remarkable, changing its nature. It's not limited to the act of Myrna Minkoff arriving to save him. It's that Ignatius recognizes that he's been saved. The book closes with him aware of his incredible fortune, grasping irony, expressing actual appreciation for someone, and prepared to venture into the world and its possibilities, thereby recovering his soul. Cormac McCarthy: "If it's not about life and death, it doesn't matter." Ignatius manages to stave off death and cling to life. Toole isn't, as Bissell concludes, simply portending the incel or rightwing troll. He certainly isn't valorizing him. He's not even just demolishing him, though there is that. The wag is a wise man with a message that can broadly apply to anyone who's become unmoored, loathed, and seemingly hopeless but particularly to the guy who today rots in front of a screen, overwhelmed by rage, the victim of a conspiracy, unable to fathom why women aren't intrigued and why the system doesn't conform to his angriest fantasies. Toole's great feat is to issue a comic warning that unites mordancy with humanity. Highly instructive.

Working Women of Today's South Korea

     If I Had Your Face (2020), Frances Cha's debut novel, is about modern South Korea as seen through the eyes of five women, four of them narrators. I can't remember the last time I walked around with a book this pink in my hands. And I'm not sure why I was expecting there to be a plot, there isn't one, yet my interest never waned. 200 pages in or so it struck me as odd. The reader enters the story at what begins to seem like an arbitrary point in their lives and sees how they unfold over a period of months. She could have added another month, another 100 pages, and it wouldn't have changed the book's architecture. Physical beauty and surgery play a significant part in their lives - as work, as a measure of a person's worth, as the promise of a better life - but not a central part of the book, as the title would suggest. Perhaps the lone dependent clause, for me, suggested mystery and desperation, and desperation a desperate act, a crime, and crime - a plot. Cha almost teases it with a sudden burst of violence or a scream. But the violence remains only a burst and the screamer turns out to be fine. On to the next day.

Borges, in a polemical introduction to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares's debut novel The Invention of Morel, memorably defends the plot and imaginative invention and writes of how we unwittingly resign ourselves to Proust's realism, as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of the day. I've encountered books that forced me to repeat his observation, with a wounded moan. But Cha gets me caught up in her realism, which eschews the dulling method of meticulously recording objects and sensations, appearances and psychology. Five intersecting lives: though her voices aren't distinct, between work, relationships, personal history, and society, she covers much ground, tossing off frightening details, angering details, bitterly amusing details. Cha says in a recent interview that she didn't intend to write a condemnation but a character states clearly what's inescapable throughout the novel: someone is always looking down on someone else. Aside from physical appearance, a person's value is determined, upon being introduced, by school, job, family, connections, money. Provide unsatisfactory answers and find yourself treated coldly and barred. The protagonists are on the lower end of the hierarchy, living precariously. One woman works in a high-end room salon, a sort of club catering to rich men that's not strictly legal. She says, while under threat from a vengeful client, that if the police raid the establishment, it's not the managers and certainly not the owner, some "shadowy fuck," who face the consequences but the women. Otherwise they work to pay off debts to their employers, spend their days getting ogled and felt up and plied with alcohol, get used and thrown away by clients, can be assaulted to appease them if they're unhappy with the service. Her story is probably the most intense but all of them, a hairstylist, an artist, an office worker, get knocked around day after day and expect no less. Their world is an antagonist.

However, If I Had Your Face never steeps fully into the murk and its close isn't arbitrary. Another vein of detail: One woman is there to hold her friend's hand after a painful operation. Another woman prepares hangover food and washes her friend's soiled sheets. Two women, arm in arm, walk through the hallway laughing enticingly. A woman takes a chance and surprises her friend by scheduling her an interview for a better job.

The drawback of the novel is that its appeal is mostly journalistic. Cha doesn't exhaust her material and can handle scale, go on the attack (if not consciously then by faithfully rendering her status-obsessed, spirit-crushing world), and inhabit lives, plural. I wouldn't reread it but I'd be interested to see how she builds on what she's got.

The Literary Life

"Then there are books that are not bad, but also not good enough" - Paul Collins

Careful with the word "clever": there's funny-clever and then there's unfunny-clever. In Sixpence House (2003), a memoir about books, about moving from San Francisco to England, to Hay-on-Wye, a village of books, Paul Collins can loosely be described as clever. That's the kind of voice he primarily establishes, anyway. But I hurry to add, as others perhaps fail to in similar instances, so there's no confusion: he is largely arch or unfunny-clever. In one scene, the writer sees an old saw for sale. He studies the sign, the price crossed out and lowered and crossed out again until on the bottom it finally reads FREE. The seller approaches him and asks if he's interested. Collins replies: "I'm waiting for the price to go down." The acme of unfunny-clever that is followed by, in the curious way the book has of commenting on itself, directly and indirectly, the appropriate response: the seller smokes his pipe.

"Hedley Lodge, it turns out, is run by Benedictine monks of the Belmont Abbey. So if you steal the towels, you're going to hell." It appears that in the margin next to these lines I drew a stoneface smoking a pipe. 

"Jennifer was reading a book that bore a blurb from the Times describing it as 'luminous' - and indeed it would be, if you soaked it in kerosene and burned it." No drawing but there might as well be.

It's the kind of humor, encountered page after page, that can be accompanied by a laugh track on a justly forgotten sitcom. You may know a friend, a family member, a neighbor, a coworker who's nice, who makes these sorts of jokes, though probably not with the same frequency. To spare his or her feelings and avoid awkwardness, you smile politely, laugh a little, and move on, together. Someone may do the same for your weaker jokes. A near-invisible kind gesture that helps keep society from crumbling. Sometimes, however, people take the act too far, throw back their heads, ho ho ho, bellypat, wipe away a non-existent tear, creating a starker contrast a moment later when, free to react as they wish, something more than a stoneface, a stinkface, emerges. Pure misery! (Which makes me laugh.)

Back to the book. Collins is better when drawing from his knowledge of obscure, forgotten reading material, which is summarized or quoted throughout. He informs us that a 19th-century travelogue he's a fan of ends with the writer transcribing the sound of himself vomiting. (Whoop, whoop, oh dear, whoop, etc. - for a whole paragraph.) He transcribes sounds throughout too, mostly to amusing effect, though other fillips fare less well from overuse, soon curdling into distracting tics. Also, he finds some genuine mirth by simply observing his daily life as he adjusts to his new home, such as when he runs to answer the phone and his young son anchors himself to his leg for the last ten yards.

Here's Collins on a work that serves as a model for his own: "His book consists of what amount to pleasant musings upon the home, upon books, upon city and country life." He goes on to praise it for putting him to sleep. Sixpence is thoroughly low stakes. It's not revealing, no one is vividly drawn. Nothing pulse-quickening happens as it meanders from one chapter to the next. His insights aren't piercing. Yet for all his attempts at levity, and his obvious passion for reading, his thoughts on the subject lean more toward sadness. He sees countless books no one will ever touch. Books with something but not enough to them to be rediscovered. Burdensome books. The familiar sight of books in boxes abandoned in the street. Books no one wants unloaded on unsuspecting aspiring booksellers. Books that aren't burned in one colossal pyre solely because the flaming pages would blow away. He tries to search the internet for a once acclaimed novelist, queries his old publisher, sends emails to possible relatives, and finds absolutely nothing, not a shred of information about him. 

A reader like Collins looks back, goes where many others wouldn't think to, with a spirit of adventure, trying to make sure such a writer isn't completely neglected. In part it's because he counts himself among them: "Someday this book will join you on those dusty shelves, its binding shaken and a little soiled like yours, and we'll all gaze out upon the passing years." I salvage what shouldn't be lost to them: his good readerly conduct. It's a commendable quality one hopes never vanishes.

The Strokes in San Francisco

     This past Halloween marked eighteen years since I attended my first concert, the best concert I've ever attended, as it happens: The Strokes in San Francisco. I was fourteen at the time. 

Miguel, my older brother by six years, had his music collection, mostly essential rock albums everyone knows, and, without asking, I'd spent a couple of years getting acquainted with it. And him through it. Radio stations covered some of the holes: pre-Beatles pop, Motown, 70s soul, R & B of the 80s and 90s. (Shoutout to the program "Between the Sheets," a nightly ritual for years, the sexy sounds of which kept them ghosts away long enough to let me sleep in peace in the dark, after an hour or two of quaking between my sheets.) But as I got a little older, I came to realize that there was no modern guitar rock worth listening to in the usual places I went to let music find me, the deeply uninspiring nu metal and rap metal and pop punk and arena rock hits of the day having turned my soul inside out. Worse, it didn't end there. For musical domination brings with it a domination of style and mood that makes being on the outside all the more torturous. A defining image: a person at an outdoor music festival in dark glasses, scowling, wearing a T-shirt that grimly reads "LOSER." Caught between sonic and sartorial lugubriousness on one side, skateboards, chain wallets, and sophomoric chortles on the other, all of it drab, pummeling, heavy on the hair gel, and ignorant of flavor. Juvenile mockery eased my pain, sort of. Though I could have used a great band in my life as an amulet, I suffered without giving much thought to an alternative. The revelatory moment is when what one is dimly looking for suddenly appears, as one bites into a sandwich. The Strokes were revelatory.

Is This It?, the best post-Nirvana rock album, was one of the first I bought (along with White Blood Cells, Veni Vidi Vicious, and The Ramones). Perfectly sequenced, every song a potential single. "Last Nite" was the first. I caught the music video at daytime, sitting on the carpet in the living room of our place in Union City, CA. One of the most striking observations I've come across about The Strokes is that, for all the early use of and associations with the term "cool," they are an exceptionally self-conscious band. Proof can be found from the first self-consciously introductory moments, the song kicking off with the group appearing in shadow before the vocals come in and all the lights turn on. The song's structure, beginning with a lone guitar chord, gradually building, shapes the visual structure. They make the novel decision to perform live. Weird and refreshing that they feel no need to rely on what had become the standard wash of overblown instrumentation. Drums bounce at a hangout pace, artfully unclean guitars lightly strummed and stabbed. Verse is as catchy as hook. The visual aesthetic is warm, classic but I couldn't quite place the era they were drawing from. The band is composed of individuals that share a loose, tossed off, worn-all-day-and-all-night style. Denim, color, funky t-shirts, bought cheap from a thriftstore or discovered by chance buried in a closet. A quick 12-bar guitar solo that's all fun, no flash. Not a single choreographed jump. The singer sips from a bottle, walks into a guitarist, a mike stand falls over - another element of rock n roll theater. It's not music aimed at an adolescent audience, creating a world that seems bound by adolescence, a world I was chafing within. It's boozy, amiable, the sound of a more mature brand of trouble. The singer tosses his mike. The great song starts much as it ends, a lone guitar chord, accompanied by the drums, that together come to a blunt stop. Lights out.

When we return! Nickelback? Sum 41? Who knows? 

A neighbor who happened to be in the room with me said it was the group all her lady friends were talking about. 

The Strokes are now firmly part of the legendary NYC music canon and in my innocence I was ready to place them there from the outset. But as I began doing research, expecting to hear only universal praise from the further reaches of the music press I began exploring because of the group, I found that the image was one among a few things held against them. Pretty boys with more style than substance, their reputation inflated by the surface appeal. Another: Children of privilege slumming it who somehow bought the attention they received. These criticisms lost their bite, if they ever had any, upon returning to the music. Despite the complaints, I've yet to find the group whose rightful position The Strokes cruelly usurped. The final notable criticism, the accusation of plagiarism, was more absurd but less easily shrugged off, at least by me, the novice music listener, because it required one to compare the group to the luminaries their music brought to mind. The "saviors" are just - The Stooges, Television, The Velvet Underground. Except in no way is the band a carbon copy, one does not go to them when "Gimme Danger" or "Marquee Moon" or even "Sweet Jane" have been played one too many times. Before I formed an idea of what a bad reader is, I began forming an idea of what a bad listener is. Annoyed then, I laugh now. Bad readers, bad listeners: they'll turn up, sooner or later, to deal what they think of as massive blows. The best survive them, silence them, and often secretly convert them. The album is a classic, as much a beginning-to-end pleasure to put on today as it was then.

A year after it arrived, I was there, kids, in the audience for the show.

The first thing I noticed about that glorious night was that I'd never before (and haven't since) seen so many gorgeous women gathered in one place. Not simply physically attractive but dressed to impress, tugging at skirts nervously, peering into pocket mirrors, touching up makeup. My head was spinning before I'd made it through the lobby. In hindsight, it shouldn't have come as a surprise. If part of a group's image is formed by self-presentation, it naturally spreads a sort of self-consciousness to the audience. I could also say I hadn't before or since seen people at a show care so much to be seen. The group's sense of style even merges with the music in an anecdote from Lizzie Goodman's oral history of the period, Meet Me in the Bathroom, Julian Casablancas once describing the sound he was looking for to the producer of Is This It?, Gordon Raphael, as a well-worn pair of jeans. And I became conscious of a personal style myself. I grew my hair out. I balanced my taste for black - black Dickies pants, black New York Dolls t-shirt - with a thick wool longsleeve olive green army shirt, worn as a jacket. I kept my black-and-white high-top Chuck Taylors long enough to let them fade and get a hole or two. There were missteps in high school that swiftly earned me verbal abuse, I confess - loud movie theater vest, rusty nails in my Members Only jacket - but I was in classic teenage DA form that night. Anyway, that's the form memory places there and it's probably true.

This was before I'd had a growth spurt and I felt my size keenly during the long transition between the Mooney Suzuki and the main event. The floor was packed, weed smoke filled the air, and I wasn't tall enough to breathe somewhere above it. Not that I complained. Didn't occur to me. First of all: In what would be a recurring pattern, Miguel and I had become separated so there was no one to complain to. Second: though I began thinking I could pass out, I was too thrilled to care. Maybe the danger was part of the fun. Rock n roll? Jostled and pallid as the crowd swayed one way and another, I thought: Here! I! Am! People noticed how I looked and asked if I was okay, telling me to let them know if I needed to be lifted so I could get fresh air. 

Lights out. Screams.

It's mostly an intoxicating blur from then on. They sounded perfect. No, my judgment hasn't been warped by nostalgia. I don't look back on the passing years with any particular fondness or wish to turn back time and relive them. Nor do I find myself refusing to look back, for fear of what I'd find. Too much going on now to lose myself in the past for long. They sounded perfect during a period in which any song they would have chosen to play from their modest catalogue could have been a favorite. Ample evidence from shows of the period can be readily found online. They performed a couple of songs I'd never heard before, songs that would appear on album two, Room on Fire. This was before most people owned a cell phone and raised them to document every moment. If I'm not mistaken, I didn't even detect what would later make me think twice about going to shows, the sense of being surrounded by stiffs brought there by the hype alone. It was electric.

At one point, someone asked if I wanted to crowd surf. Before I could answer, I was crowd surfing. (One way or another, someone was determined to see me launched.) Riding the crowd like a baby struggling to stand up, I realized that I didn't understand crowd surfing, didn't like it. I have never done so again and would like to think that I'm too much of a big man now to launch so easily. Soon I'd made it to the front, where a burly security woman plucked me from the crowd and cradled me, like a baby, to lift me over the barrier and dump me somewhere in the back. That's where I was, feeling a momentary mix of disappointment and relief, until the lights came up.

These days there doesn't seem to be a center anymore. I'm not oppressed by sounds, bypassing what I don't like almost completely. Having lately discovered the beauty of ad blocker, I'm not even briefly interrupted on my daily YouTube musical flights. When I step outside, it's usually for work, and so my style has mostly become utilitarian. With age, The Strokes seem less concerned too. Julian will sport a ridiculous suit while performing at a Bernie Sanders rally.

The Strokes haven't released an album on par with the first. Someone asks in Goodman's book, as the band is ascendant: "Are they going to be The Clash?" Album one from The Clash featured "Remote Control" and "Career Opportunities" and "48 Hours" but also pushed into the future, in length, genre, and songcraft, with "Police and Thieves" (which I prefer to the original). By the end of the decade they would outdo themselves in every way with London Calling. The list of groups that can come up with a classic sound across an entire album is short. Shorter is the list of those that achieve the same feat with another classic sound. To emphasize the exclusivity: The Beatles, The Stones, Hendrix, The Ramones, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, The Pixies are not on that list! And neither is The Strokes. The group struggled to expand on the classic sound and haven't attempted a total or near-total break from the past. (And covers don't seem to be for them and perhaps provide a clue to their hindered progress.) They've done variations on it that occasionally rival their early songs but a sustained, surehanded vision of the future has thus far eluded them. Although "The Adults Are Talking," a song released this year, will surely find a place on a greatest hits collection and is the closest they've come. It's recognizably them and yet in tone, structure, length, individual elements they're a different group - frayed, melancholy, aged, somewhat metallic but bracing all the same. Albert Hammond Jr. says he's excited about what comes next and I think he has reason to be.

Limp Bizkit fails to make a comeback in the US. Retreating to Europe, Fred Durst says: We ain't going out like that! I say: Sure you are. Meanwhile, The Strokes never left.