Quasi is a Portland-based rock duo with Sam Coomes and former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss. I first came across their music in 2019, deep into my Elliott Smith emo phase in high school. In interviews, Elliott would often say Quasi was his favorite band. He would cover their 1997 song “Clouds” at some shows and Janet and Sam served as his backing band during the Figure 8 tour around 2000. 

Quasi has 9 albums and one compilation of early recordings. Their most recent album from 2023, released a decade after their prior album, Mole City, and is titled Breaking the Balls of History. The album is an ironic, raw, and blunt reflection on modern life, politics, and middle-aged angst. Boasting self-reflexive lyrics to catchy guitar riffs and bouncy drums, the album is easily one of my favorites from last year.

Sam, the primary lyricist, sings with a tinges of both honesty and humor. Janet keeps the songs energetic and grounded with her masterful drum lines. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Quasi twice in the last few years, once at the Rickshaw Stop in SF and once at Third Man Records Cass Corridor in Detroit. Both intimate venues, it’s a joy to watch these two play together. They sit slightly facing each other, Janet on the kit and Sam on the Rocksichord. They play off each other’s energy and Sam often makes witty quips in between songs to give the shows a welcome air of comfort, feeling like you’re watching the band at a house party or garage show. 

Their sound is hard to describe. Some of their albums sound like Modest Mouse, Pavement, or Built to Spill, but not quite. Their newest album is fun and youthful, but some of their older works speak to a more serious and self-deprecating tone. Such is the indie rock scene of Portland in the 90s. “Gravity”, from their new album, is a ballad-like song communicating feelings of being lost or insignificant in the larger scheme of things: “You can walk on water if you so choose / And you’re made in USA, concrete shoes / Gravity don’t care at all.” Other songs like “Doomscrollers” have a more critical, Covid-situated stir-crazy energy that speaks to how we were all feeling in the uncertain and bleak times of 2020-2021 when the album was written: “All the kids in their virtual classes / Stuck at home sitting on their asses / And all the houses lost to fires / The anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers.” One of my favorite songs from the album, “Rotten Wrock” is jumpy, anxious, and full of brilliant metaphors: “So what exactly is a human being? / A little button on a touch screen?” 

It’s a wonderful album, and Quasi is going on tour this year to commemorate and play their 1998 album Featuring Birds. I highly recommend checking out their show across the Bay in SF at The Chapel on July 27. I had the pleasure of interviewing Janet and Sam last year about Breaking the Balls of History, their onstage dynamic, Portland, and their thoughts on vinyl. Enjoy!

First off, congratulations on Breaking the Balls of History! It’s an amazing collection of music and is as cool sounding and fresh to me as your other albums.

(Janet) Thank you!

This is your 10th Quasi album, first on Sub Pop, and comes after a lot of major events for you and the world beyond: the Portland BLM movement, the Trump and post-Trump political climate, Covid, and Janet’s accident. My question comes in three parts. What felt different about making this record (if anything)?

(Janet) For me, this record follows a period of great personal upheaval. The accident was a real shock and it put my ability to drum in serious jeopardy - I wasn't sure I would be physically able to play in the manner to which I am accustomed. And although the ordeal was really scary, the love and support that came pouring in was so profound. Really for me, everything felt different this time around. I felt a new, immense sense of gratitude as well as a desire to play and sing at my highest level.

Did you feel there was something beyond just music at stake?

(Janet) A lot of people helped me get through a pretty long recovery. I wanted them to know I took their aid seriously, I felt that debt that could be repaid by making a really great album.

In your lyrics you tend to blend political commentary with comedy. Is this something you consciously think about as you’re writing a new song or is it just your nature as a person+songwriter? In a broader sense, Do you think comedy is an effective tool to work through the unsavory parts of life or to deal with volatile political climates? (I’m thinking about “Shitty is Pretty” / “Doomscrollers” / “Breaking the Balls of History” with this question). 

(Sam) Really I just write how I feel, try to make it rhyme, & it winds up being humorous to the listener.  I do like to play with absurdity sometimes, & that can also seem humorous.  So, I guess you’re right about it simply being my nature, rather than a conscious thing.  I do think that juxtaposing opposing elements in music & in creativity in general is a central idea in what we do, so  uniting seriousness & humor, or other dichotomies like light/dark, hard/soft, etc is certainly part of our process.

The lyrics on this album are overtly political in a lot of songs. Do you think these events changed what the instrumentation sounded like?

(Janet) We were going for a live, raw, stripped down and punchy sound from the get go. Sam usually has the lyrics pretty much completed when we start working on the songs, so yes they definitely affect the sound. This record is rebellious and fiery in both lyrical and musical content.

In your live shows, because it is just a two person set-up, you both appear to be super locked into each other and to be playing off of each other’s tempo/improvisation. How do you two feed off of each other during live shows?

(Janet) The live show is where we really excel. Sam and I have an unspoken musical language that has been developing for 30 years. The way we set up on stage, almost facing each other, allows us to incorporate lots of visual cues. We watch each other, especially during improvisations, so that we can make something unique in the moment. The moments when we lose the script are the most exciting.

Both of you have had various projects and bands within the Portland and Pacific Northwest. How do you think Portland has changed since you’ve lived there? How do you think the Portland music scene has changed? How do you think this may have affected your musical projects?

(Sam) I’ve lived in Portland forever, & I’ve actually lived in the same neighborhood for over 25 years - so of course it’s changed a lot.  When I leave my house & walk around it feels to me like I’ve somehow moved to a totally different city, without even leaving home.  But now there’s a new level of change- first gentrification, but now there’s the widespread homelessness & bad street drugs…of course they’re related, as gentrification pushed housing costs beyond the means of so many people.  The music scene…I have to admit losing touch with it over the years, but recently, as I started going to shows again after Covid I’m seeing a bunch of great, young bands e.g. Yuvees who we’re on tour with at the moment, Sea Moss, Spoonbenders, Shaylee….  But at this point I don’t think any of this affects our work at all.  We’re pretty much on our own path.  I’m glad to have live local music that I can get into just as a fan, though.

What do you think has changed (if anything) from how you played together live in the 90s to now?  

(Janet) We are better communicators than we were back then. And I think we both appreciate Quasi and each other more as we get older, knowing that we are lucky to still have the band, and to be still creating music together that feels vital. 

Domino reissued three of your 90s albums last year and this year for Breaking the Balls of History Sub Pop had a pink vinyl for pre-order and to buy now. Do you prefer vinyl to other mediums of listening to music? If so, why? Do you think fans should invest in listening to Quasi albums on vinyl instead of solely streaming? 

(Sam) Vinyl is what I grew  up with, & so for me the album experience isn’t just the music- it’s the artwork, the liner notes, all the info…it’s a musical experience & also you get cultural history & technical knowledge, etc.  Streaming is just one dimensional.  Also, streaming as an economic model completely shafts the artist financially.  Strictly speaking economics, the CD format was most favorable to artists…but aesthetically it’s a step down from The LP.  So yeah I would absolutely encourage fans to listen to vinyl rather than stream…everyone gets more out of it.​

Sources:

                           “Anne Carson is a Gemini. Because, of f****** course she’s a Gemini.”

The above text is one of many I sent to my Gemini coworker over the course of the summer of 2022; it also encapsulates the two major occurrences of that summer, which were that:

1. I had a massive crush on my Gemini coworker who was a cool five years older than me and about two thousand times more mysterious and aloof than I think I will ever be.
2. I bought a book of poems and essays called Glass, Irony, and God from the book store by my apartment on a whim one day. 

I will give you a hint now to tide you over as you brave this convoluted blog post: one of these is still important a year and a half later, the other is a silly vignette I tell to house guests and high school friends sometimes. Here’s a second hint because I’m feeling oh-so-benevolent: Anne Carson is the author of Glass, Irony and God. It’s simply one of the greatest books of all time, which makes me feel supremely lucky because I bought it without any knowledge of the work or the author at all. The title spoke to me, and I mean that in the least obnoxious-art-kid way possible I promise. I’m about to walk that promise back immediately by talking about art theory, though, so brace yourself now. In art we talk about proximity as a tool to communicate the relationships between subjects. Those relationships, in turn, create meaning.

Example 1: The book title. What do glass, irony, and God have in common? Why has Anne strung them together with flimsy commas and a brazen “and,” and slapped them on the front cover as if those subjects relate to each other at all? It’s not entirely about the contents of the book, either. It’s true that there’s a section called “The Glass Essay” and another called “The Truth About God,” but none of the section titles breathe a word about irony. And, to that end, there are a bunch of sections that are not referenced in the title. Why isn’t the book called “Glass, TV Men, and God” or “Isiah, Glass, and Sound?” Not that those titles make any more sense to the blind viewer who is too afraid to crack the book open in the middle of the store to skim the section titles than Glass, Irony, and God does, but you get my point. Why does it feel like Anne is teasing us before we’ve even committed to buying the damn book. What do glass, irony, and God have to do with each other? Why has Anne forced them into close proximity, and why is she daring us to join them? What the fuck has Anne’s confusing title got to do with me? Why am I handing the cashier $17 and walking out of the bookstore with a lightness behind my eyes? 

Here’s a fun fact for you: Anne Carson is a classicist. She studies ancient Greek and Latin, and it is damn near impossible to forget that when you’re reading her books. Alternative fact: I was deeply and stupidly in love with a 20 year old philosopher who taught me how to play clawhammer banjo when I was 18. She would not let me forget she was a philosopher when we were together. Mostly it was in her eyes. That and she was always talking about Descartes’ epistemology. It probably would have been more productive to hang a “do not disturb” sign up in those eyes than to even attempt to decipher what she was thinking about at any given moment. 

She also absolutely detested poetry. She said that she hated things that she didn’t understand. I found that especially rich coming from someone who studied philosophy and played clawhammer banjo, but, you know. We kissed once and then never again. I didn't quite understand that. She told me I kissed very fast. Frantically, like I was waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under me. Obviously she didn’t actually say that last part, she hated similes. I stopped writing poems for a while after we stopped being in each other’s lives; I didn’t have anyone to try and prove wrong anymore. 

Example 2: Anne is talking to you and you should probably listen. Reading an Anne Carson book is like holding something up to the light and trying to figure out what’s shining through the other side. She as the author makes you as the reader do half of the work at any given moment, she’s clever like that. Anne writes in an inherently confusing manner. It is easy enough to follow when the poem’s subject is alone, but the whole thing gets tangled up when other characters are introduced. Her dialogue generally abandons quotation marks or any other reliable notation of separation between subjects. The proximity goes all out of whack. It seems a little itchy and unpleasant at first; we don’t like the things we don’t understand. 

Personally, though, I adore it. I feel that reading Anne isn’t about comprehension, the work she asks of you is almost entirely emotional. She throws you directly into the weeds in her depiction of relationships, forcing you to start untangling fast or admit you don’t like poetry and put the book down. She’s teasing you again. You really thought you could make it through the book passively? Not a chance, Anne won’t stop talking to you in the second person. Right when you start to feel like you’ve got her, right when you’ve become the bouncer outside the club who just held up your friend’s very fake Connecticut driver’s license to reveal that it has no microperforation on the back, you realize that Anne got your ass. She was the one holding you up to the light the entire time and you didn’t even notice. Anne Carson writes narratively, not autobiographical. It was around the third readthrough of Glass, Irony, and God that I realized I was just as much a narrative device as the TV men were. When I annotate her books, I write to her in the second person. She’s talking to me, it only seems fair that I talk back.

I told the Gemini coworker about Glass, Irony, and God sometime before we kissed for the first time on a night before I was scheduled for a 5am shift at the coffee place we both worked at. I made sure I kissed slowly this time. I don’t think I ever saw her show up to another shift on time after that night. I don’t quite get that part, either. I helped her move into a room of an ancient house near a loud intersection and a bar that definitely wouldn’t clock a fake Connecticut driver’s license if it slapped them in the face, microperforation be damned.

 She gave me a bookshelf that she didn’t have the space for anymore. I keep my Anne Carson books in there now when I’m not loaning them out to my friends. I never knew who to be when the two of us hung out. I felt like the wrong answer, not that she ever gave any indication that she comprehended either one of us as conscious and tangible human beings, but I thought maybe that’s just what it was like to be 24 so I tried to be 24. She bought me vegan thai food the day she gave me the bookshelf, I would say that was the most romantic thing that ever went down between us. I presume that was probably by design. I spent a few months in the summer listening to obscure indie music she sent me and reading Anne Carson’s poems and trying not to look at my phone and then it just stopped one day and we never spoke about it again. I was better at making coffee when I wasn’t trying to be 24, I think. 

Example 3: Why do you keep putting yourself in the path of things you know are going to absolutely body you? This is the thought that runs through my head every time I’m buying a new Anne Carson book. I want to say that I own seven of them these days, although two are currently lost to the ether of friends’ apartments. The biggest danger of Anne’s books is that you will probably finish them in one sitting when you really shouldn’t. You also probably shouldn’t go over to a philosopher’s house for a clawhammer banjo lesson two days after she said you kiss too fast and one day after she said she would really rather not kiss you ever again, actually. You also shouldn’t go to a brewery in Alameda when you’re underage without a fake Connecticut driver’s license that says otherwise just to try and impress your Gemini coworker who kisses you when she’s bored, mostly. 

I like to think that I don’t jump the gun quite as severely as I used to. Getting older is such a funny thing, I fear. I don’t get paid to make coffee anymore, I play Scruggs style banjo instead of clawhammer now, and I tattooed a star on my ankle like I said I would forever ago. There’s a beautiful satisfaction that comes with keeping a promise to yourself. You have to go slow with Anne, but I swear that it’s worth it. She's taking a lot of time out of her busy schedule of being my favorite contemporary poet to sit and talk with you between the pages of “The Glass Essay,” after all. We owe her the respect of a few pencil annotations in the margins to let her know that we hear her and we can feel her holding us up to the light. 

Quasi is a Portland-based rock duo with Sam Coomes and former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss. I first came across their music in 2019, deep into my Elliott Smith emo phase in high school. In interviews, Elliott would often say Quasi was his favorite band. He would cover their 1997 song “Clouds” at some shows and Janet and Sam served as his backing band during the Figure 8 tour around 2000. 

Quasi has 9 albums and one compilation of early recordings. Their most recent album from 2023, released a decade after their prior album, Mole City, and is titled Breaking the Balls of History. The album is an ironic, raw, and blunt reflection on modern life, politics, and middle-aged angst. Boasting self-reflexive lyrics to catchy guitar riffs and bouncy drums, the album is easily one of my favorites from last year.

Sam, the primary lyricist, sings with a tinges of both honesty and humor. Janet keeps the songs energetic and grounded with her masterful drum lines. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Quasi twice in the last few years, once at the Rickshaw Stop in SF and once at Third Man Records Cass Corridor in Detroit. Both intimate venues, it’s a joy to watch these two play together. They sit slightly facing each other, Janet on the kit and Sam on the Rocksichord. They play off each other’s energy and Sam often makes witty quips in between songs to give the shows a welcome air of comfort, feeling like you’re watching the band at a house party or garage show. 

Their sound is hard to describe. Some of their albums sound like Modest Mouse, Pavement, or Built to Spill, but not quite. Their newest album is fun and youthful, but some of their older works speak to a more serious and self-deprecating tone. Such is the indie rock scene of Portland in the 90s. “Gravity”, from their new album, is a ballad-like song communicating feelings of being lost or insignificant in the larger scheme of things: “You can walk on water if you so choose / And you’re made in USA, concrete shoes / Gravity don’t care at all.” Other songs like “Doomscrollers” have a more critical, Covid-situated stir-crazy energy that speaks to how we were all feeling in the uncertain and bleak times of 2020-2021 when the album was written: “All the kids in their virtual classes / Stuck at home sitting on their asses / And all the houses lost to fires / The anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers.” One of my favorite songs from the album, “Rotten Wrock” is jumpy, anxious, and full of brilliant metaphors: “So what exactly is a human being? / A little button on a touch screen?” 

It’s a wonderful album, and Quasi is going on tour this year to commemorate and play their 1998 album Featuring Birds. I highly recommend checking out their show across the Bay in SF at The Chapel on July 27. I had the pleasure of interviewing Janet and Sam last year about Breaking the Balls of History, their onstage dynamic, Portland, and their thoughts on vinyl. Enjoy!

First off, congratulations on Breaking the Balls of History! It’s an amazing collection of music and is as cool sounding and fresh to me as your other albums.

(Janet) Thank you!

This is your 10th Quasi album, first on Sub Pop, and comes after a lot of major events for you and the world beyond: the Portland BLM movement, the Trump and post-Trump political climate, Covid, and Janet’s accident. My question comes in three parts. What felt different about making this record (if anything)?
(Janet) For me, this record follows a period of great personal upheaval. The accident was a real shock and it put my ability to drum in serious jeopardy - I wasn't sure I would be physically able to play in the manner to which I am accustomed. And although the ordeal was really scary, the love and support that came pouring in was so profound. Really for me, everything felt different this time around. I felt a new, immense sense of gratitude as well as a desire to play and sing at my highest level.


Did you feel there was something beyond just music at stake?

(Janet) A lot of people helped me get through a pretty long recovery. I wanted them to know I took their aid seriously, I felt that debt that could be repaid by making a really great album.

In your lyrics you tend to blend political commentary with comedy. Is this something you consciously think about as you’re writing a new song or is it just your nature as a person+songwriter? In a broader sense, Do you think comedy is an effective tool to work through the unsavory parts of life or to deal with volatile political climates? (I’m thinking about “Shitty is Pretty” / “Doomscrollers” / “Breaking the Balls of History” with this question). 

(Sam) Really I just write how I feel, try to make it rhyme, & it winds up being humorous to the listener.  I do like to play with absurdity sometimes, & that can also seem humorous.  So, I guess you’re right about it simply being my nature, rather than a conscious thing.  I do think that juxtaposing opposing elements in music & in creativity in general is a central idea in what we do, so  uniting seriousness & humor, or other dichotomies like light/dark, hard/soft, etc is certainly part of our process.

The lyrics on this album are overtly political in a lot of songs. Do you think these events changed what the instrumentation sounded like?

(Janet) We were going for a live, raw, stripped down and punchy sound from the get go. Sam usually has the lyrics pretty much completed when we start working on the songs, so yes they definitely affect the sound. This record is rebellious and fiery in both lyrical and musical content.


In your live shows, because it is just a two person set-up, you both appear to be super locked into each other and to be playing off of each other’s tempo/improvisation. How do you two feed off of each other during live shows?

(Janet) The live show is where we really excel. Sam and I have an unspoken musical language that has been developing for 30 years. The way we set up on stage, almost facing each other, allows us to incorporate lots of visual cues. We watch each other, especially during improvisations, so that we can make something unique in the moment. The moments when we lose the script are the most exciting.


Both of you have had various projects and bands within the Portland and Pacific Northwest. How do you think Portland has changed since you’ve lived there? How do you think the Portland music scene has changed? How do you think this may have affected your musical projects?

(Sam) I’ve lived in Portland forever, & I’ve actually lived in the same neighborhood for over 25 years - so of course it’s changed a lot.  When I leave my house & walk around it feels to me like I’ve somehow moved to a totally different city, without even leaving home.  But now there’s a new level of change- first gentrification, but now there’s the widespread homelessness & bad street drugs…of course they’re related, as gentrification pushed housing costs beyond the means of so many people.  The music scene…I have to admit losing touch with it over the years, but recently, as I started going to shows again after Covid I’m seeing a bunch of great, young bands e.g. Yuvees who we’re on tour with at the moment, Sea Moss, Spoonbenders, Shaylee….  But at this point I don’t think any of this affects our work at all.  We’re pretty much on our own path.  I’m glad to have live local music that I can get into just as a fan, though.


What do you think has changed (if anything) from how you played together live in the 90s to now?  

(Janet) We are better communicators than we were back then. And I think we both appreciate Quasi and each other more as we get older, knowing that we are lucky to still have the band, and to be still creating music together that feels vital. 


Domino reissued three of your 90s albums last year and this year for Breaking the Balls of History Sub Pop had a pink vinyl for pre-order and to buy now. Do you prefer vinyl to other mediums of listening to music? If so, why? Do you think fans should invest in listening to Quasi albums on vinyl instead of solely streaming? 

(Sam) Vinyl is what I grew  up with, & so for me the album experience isn’t just the music- it’s the artwork, the liner notes, all the info…it’s a musical experience & also you get cultural history & technical knowledge, etc.  Streaming is just one dimensional.  Also, streaming as an economic model completely shafts the artist financially.  Strictly speaking economics, the CD format was most favorable to artists…but aesthetically it’s a step down from The LP.  So yeah I would absolutely encourage fans to listen to vinyl rather than stream…everyone gets more out of it.


​








































​
​Quasi at Third Man Records Detroit. Photo taken by author.

I'm talking about that one building on campus that constantly spews out opaque white gas. Old, dilapidated, missing windows, strangely art deco-y with pilasters at the corners. Looks like a child or two may have died in it when labor regulations weren't as strict. You know the one.​

Due to a lack of a better term, my friend Elisa calls this structure the "Toxicology Building." I too will refer to it as such.

I cannot remember my first encounter with the Toxicology Building. But, I can say that every time I see it, I have the same distant yet completely apparent thought that something seems very off and potentially dangerous. There was once an entire week in which I passed by the Toxicology Building and smelled the stench of gas, persistently. And while this did concern me, I didn't do anything about it. I'm not a chemtrail conspiracist, but I feel like I should care more about mysterious gasses. Maybe I, like many other college students, secretly hope for a disaster so I can sue the school and get free tuition. But I already get free tuition because my dad busted his knee while playing soccer for the U.S. Navy. So I really don't know why I think this.

Maybe it would be kind of cool to be part of a generation of slightly genetically-damaged UCB students. Like an X-Men situation, but instead of doing cool things I just hope that somebody gives me a job for my art history degree.

Anyways, it actually wasn't very hard to discover the true purpose of the Toxicology Building at all. While there was a part of me that expected a long, sordid past of dark deals and chemical warfare stuff, maybe some MK-Ultra shadiness, it turned out all I needed to do to find out more was go on Google Maps, identify the name of the building, and then look it up.

So, the Toxicology Building isn't the Toxicology Building it all. It's known as both the "Central Heating Plant" and the "Cogeneration Plant." Right beside it is the "Hazardous Materials Facility," but ironically I have no interest in investigating this adjacent building further, so I simply will not.

The Central Heating Plant/Cogeneration Plant, or "Toxentral CoHeauilding Blant" as I would now like to christen it (there's no official pronunciation; choose one) has been spoken of a few times by various sources.

Berkeley Facilities Services claims that the Toxentral CoHeauilding Blant provides 100% of UC Berkeley's steam needs and 90% of the campus's electricity needs. Where it loses me is that it doesn't state where the other 10% is from. Very suspicious. I assume there are goblins in a basement somewhere on stationary bikes coughing up the rest of the energy. Also, a website straight from the institution would never tell us if a child died in the building, so I don't really trust it as a source. BFS also claims the Blant operates 24/7/365, which makes me curious as to what would happen if it stopped. The obvious answer is Lucas would die, but what one may not realize is the campus very well might lose power!

Tobin Fricke provides the earliest account of the Toxentral CoHeauilding Blant that I could find. Published in 2001, his blog post offers detailed insight into the workings of the Blant, including several images of '90s computers. While Tobin claims "any of the information here could very well be wrong" because he had "written it all from my memory," I'd like to counter this by saying a man so honest could never be incorrect. Tobin says the interior of the building is hard to take pictures of because it is tightly packed with ducts, pipes, and equipment. He also did not have access to an overall plan of the Blant. So it seems like you could maybe hide a small body in there somewhere.

Jeana Lee of the Daily Californian immediately loses me because she claims the building goes unnoticed and unquestioned by most students. However, I begrudgingly reference her because she does seem to know what she's talking about. She says the Toxentral CoHeauilding Blant was built in the '30s (child labor?), but did not become a cogeneration plant until 1987. The Blant burns 150 pounds of coal a minute and is responsible for 71% of Cal's CO2 emissions, so it will have to be replaced or shut down in order to reach UC Berkeley's carbon neutral goal by 2025.

Despite all the information I uncovered about the Blant, I am more concerned with what I could not find: an explicit statement that no child has died in the building.

Anybody else with the misfortune of being from San Diego is likely familiar with the Nuclear Boobs, (officially the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant) a power plant between San Diego and L.A. that looks like, you guessed it, some boobs. And I still remember the deep, shared sorrow I and my brave contemporaries (the other people at my high school) felt when we found out that the Nuclear Boobs were being shut down permanently. This sorrow is similar to what I feel for the Toxentral CoHeauilding Blant–uncertainty, nostalgia, and the sentiment that I am face-to-face with a relic of the past that can no longer do what needs to be done for the people.

Fly high, Toxentral CoHeauilding Blant. Although I'm not really sure if it's actually going to stop spitting out gas all the time, or if they’re ever going to admit that a child died in the building, this surely is the end of an era.

Just remember, if that beloved dame of a building decides to go Chernobyl on us, you know where to find me: at Strawberry Creek. Drinking the water.

shades of melancholia

i let my clock fall three minutes behind
then four and with the changing of the season
it becomes 56 minutes ahead
i let it because it doesn’t mean much to me
my body never really observed it’s rigid lines
likes more of the mental gymnastics it takes for me
to calculate the difference
between the bedside clock and the number on my phone,
the one in my mom’s car and the one above the stove,
…
i calculate my age for the day
even by the hour it changes
traveling from 17 to 21 to 54
my body would expand to create years
in the span of a couple of hours

when i close my eyes
time looks like my stretch marks
expands, retracts
breathes in and out
since the last time i’ve seen it
my body says see how i’ve grown
look at the new space i’ve created

our connection to time isn’t new love but ancient recognition
it isn’t shivers and goosebumps,
it’s reverence and sustained power just below the surface of your skin
sometimes i feel like a stone in a zen garden
the sand moves like water around me
making serene landscapes
…
i calculate the amount of grief i’ll carry with me today
i often underestimate, but it’s okay
the weight of the many versions of myself that i’ve lost
tug at the hem of my jeans
who i could’ve been, the lives i promised myself

forced to slow down
i realize i live in shades of melancholia
and not wanting it any other way
i do wish i could separate the two realities
jump from one to the next
all at my convenience

but for now i live in them both simultaneously
mourning quietly
and with any empathy i can spare
feeding a new found fascination with dichotomies
and the painfully bright way they merge
…
my body often forgets it’s own language
the different regions have new slang
and their accents make it hard to understand
and when my body forgets it’s own language
it only knows how to scream

my body has made the space in between my home
standing on the cusp of overwhelming sound and complete silence
familiarizing myself with uncertainty
and many people only pass through
but i’ve been trying to make it my home
building upon shifting land

i wonder what my body would say
if you asked it what it feels like
to live in the space in between

n.m.

~ a reflection on crip time by ellen samuels

by Lucas Fink

What is it to be gentle? What makes someone, something, or some act gentle? I think gentleness could be said to entail an exploratory hesitance, a tentative curiosity, a desire to know the object tempered by a hyperawareness of the object’s rich affective life-world. A desire to approach and wrap around and feel without disturbing. I might have been wrong to say “know the object”, at least insofar as knowing/looking are extractive operations and are therefore operations that always disturb, that always condemn the object to legibility. Moten and Harney on hapticality might be helpful here. For them, hapticality is not merely a more capacious account of common feeling, and is therefore not a brutal liberal appeal to the universality of human affects and experiences. Hapticality does not designate any one emotion or collective emotional circumstance; rather, hapticality is the act of feeling someone else feel you (Moten & Harney 98), a feeling through the other. Hapticality is love, then. Gentleness is a mechanism of love, for the hyperawareness of the object’s rich affective life-world prompted in and by the caring apprehension of gentleness is the condition of possibility for hapticality/love in the first place. The awareness that the object has/is a life-world, that I also have/am a life-world, that I am also an object (for you), and that finally the boundary between our two life-worlds is porous at best and phantasmatic more likely. Gentleness, finally, is this slow, sensitive movement through the world of things, a movement motivated by the desire to caress and to be-with always already contextualized by an awareness of the multiplicity of desires out there in the world of things blossoming beyond you. A sub-genre of empathy, a desire to experience alterity without rocking the boat, without violently imposing the Self over and above it.

The vine next to my bed has been growing steadily for the past 3-ish years. At some point in those last three years, I tucked the vine under a wooden plank in my bed frame and let it continue growing over and on top of the frame. It has now arrived at the other end. The plant’s other vine drapes lazily down over my reading light and tissue box. What interests me most about the modality of movement these vines instantiate is the interplay (I’m sorry but I like that buzzword better than dichotomy) between their exploratory eagerness and receptivity to my guiding their exploration. Wherever I let them hang, whatever I wrap them around, the vines will – with a Mediterranean lethargy – happily come to know the room’s spatial specificities (as long as they get light). Am I circumscribing their exploration more than merely guiding it? Maybe. Am I harvesting from this plant the earthen eco vitalist aesthetic its appearance lends? Or is it enlivening my apartment bedroom pro bono, imposing on me a debt I can never hope to repay? Anyway, unanswerable questions. What is in fact certain at this point is that the vines are gentle. Does a thing have to be alive to be gentle? Does it have to move (so it can move slowly)? More unanswerables. Obviously this picture fails to capture the vines’ gentleness because pictures cannot capture movement (absenting maybe time-lapse photography and such). You can see the history of its movement, though, the trail it took to get where it is now, the little gap between boards where I notched it, the suggestion of an infinite vine produced by the visual omission of the vine’s terminus at the other edge of my bed. I guess its movement is there, then, as a trace. Again, though, does gentleness necessarily imply (slow) movement? If a thing moves, does it need to move slowly for it to be called gentle? Life-saving CPR isn't very slow, nor would most of us call it gentle. It's life-saving, though. Odd. Lots of things move, though. Architecture moves: a pillar moves into a cornice moves into a cupola moves into a weather vein. Movement need not bear any easily legible, linear temporal orientation. This is why I love this plant: it goes, just not forward. It goes around and loops and dives and extends, but never goes forward, nor backwards. A movement without a telos. It just wants to feel. I love the way the sunlight plays with the leaves and their shadows. Were the shadows already there, hiding under the leaves, waiting for the sunlight to arrive?

It's fine. If you came to House of the Dragon hoping to be delivered to the heights of Game of Thrones season 4, you will be sorely disappointed. Or for that matter seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. There are plenty of visually stunning battles, Lannisters, Targaryans, and Dragons, but the show lacks what made its predecessor and sequel so enthralling, the dialogue and structure that endeared (or detested) us from its characters and their fates. Hampered by an extravagant budget, House of the Dragon is too quick to depict incredible battles and majestic dragons, missing what made them so enjoyable. Additionally, a focus on female empowerment and its ostensibly more progressive outlook than Game of Thrones is undercut by the obviously self-aggrandizing tone and propensity to depict violence for shock value.

One of the most striking differences between the opening episodes of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon is the dialogue. Characters in Game of Thrones speak cleverly and often with distinction, but their lexicon is not unfamiliar to the viewer. Undoubtedly aided by the superior acting of Game of Thrones, communication has subtext upon subtext: Tyrion and Cersei and even Ned weaving witty remarks, parental advice and threats together seamlessly, often in the same words. Monologues, when they do occur, feel truly menacing or inspiring: Tyrion’s pleas at his trial and Baelish’s pronouncement that chaos is a ladder still ring in my ears. Conversations feel natural and dramatic, each line further characterizing the characters as containing complex and contradictory motives to country or house or family. In House of the Dragon, conversation feels coerced in search of drama, concocted by writers who preferred consulting a thesaurus of old English to literature. Written in a terrible replication of Shakespearian language with none of the complexity or heart that made Shakespeare Shakespeare, you can practically hear the writers’ room when any character speaks, awkwardly mixing antiquated sentence structure with more modern speak. Aesthetically this pulls the viewer from their engagement, but hurts the characterization of the show on a deeper level. When writers resort to platitudes rather than wits, preferring to proffer contrived dramatization to genuine moments of connection found all throughout Game of Thrones, they deprived the viewer of an opportunity to learn more about the characters, what motivates them, who they love, why they are fighting. Relationships aren’t given a chance to evolve, and viewers aren’t enabled to connect with the characters but instead marvel at them.

The structure of the beginning of Game of Thrones is brilliantly paced. Battles come rarely, and when they do are epic and memorable, dragons take seasons between their introduction and destruction. Blackwater and The Battle of the Bastards remain as memorable as the day I viewed them. The time skipping of house of the Dragon absolutely demolishes its own structure. To engage with a climax, there must be a rising action. When you jump right into fire and pageantry you offer nowhere for the viewers’ expectations to go but down. Without a proper build up, the writers of the House of the Dragon have cornered themselves into delivering on impossible promises, to one up themselves eternally when their budget will only stretch so far. Additionally, the time jumps break the continuity of the show. We don’t care about the triarchy or the Crabfeeder, as he is only a villain for three episodes. Even if he is not a main antagonist, the failure to even attempt to portray him and his motivations fails the wider purposes of the characterization of Daemon and Rhaenyra. We are told the war has lasted three years and caused great harm to the seven kingdoms, but how are we supposed to emotionally connect with exposition? House of the Dragon attempts to claim the exalted status of prestige drama entirely offscreen, fast forwarding through the character growth, and aftermath of conflict, and catastrophe that would make the audience care about the show. The pacing of Game of Thrones built up to the epic heights of Hardhome and the Red Wedding like a methodical chess game, each player playing the long game, trying to outsmart their opponent, moves taking seasons to pay off, building suspension for that eventuality. House of the Dragon simply has Paddty Considine exclaim it’s been however many years at the beginning of each episode. You can’t have the payoff of epic battles without the care put into constructing the participants so that you care about the outcome.

Finally, and potentially most egregiously, House of the Dragon attempts to claim its spot amongst the best of HBO by blatantly appealing to the current political climate rather than the more essential and timeless humanistic themes of literature. While certainly not perfect, mainly in terms of later character arcs and depictions of sexual violence, Game of Thrones portrayed powerful female characters. Dany, Arya, Cersei, and Sansa amongst others had competing loyalties to friends, lovers, children, power, bannermen, common people, religions, and trades. They had rich histories and growth marked by self-empowerment. By appealing to the classical themes of literature, love, obligation, duty, honor, greed, but recontextualizing them in the hands of women protagonists, too often ignored in high fantasy, Game of Thrones successfully incorporated feminist ideals. By granting female characters autonomy and depth because they were characters equally as worthy of attention as male characters, they were able to help bridge the gender gap in prestige television and media as a whole. House of the Dragon is proud of its female protagonists. It puts them front and center in the marketing, producers talk openly about how childbirth is the real battlefield and every other character in the show reminds the audience that a woman should never ascend to the Iron Throne. While women in Game of Thrones were constrained by the patriarchy, their struggle was encapsulated in implicit systems of control, dehumanizing acts of obedience, and derogatory dialogue. While Game of Thrones could have reined in the obscenity, this more subtle approach to depicting the patriarchy proved to be more effective at demonstrating its ubiquity and strength. When characters in the House of the Dragon make reference to it, there is not nearly as widespread a depiction of the struggles women in Westeros face, the show preferring to skip over the more mundane but potentially overbearing and brutal methods of control to the girlboss moment of defiance. Sansa’s ascent to power was impactful because the viewer understood the forces she was up against, personally and politically. When House of the Dragon shows the victory without the struggle, it cheapens the fight, breaks the immersion of the show, and undermines its messaging. The showrunners also show their priorities clearly even in the first episode with over the top violence not even seen in Game of Thrones, most noticeably in an excruciatingly prolonged childbirth scene. Watching the scene felt like gore, festishing the struggle for the sake of purely shocking the viewer. Instead of spending her short lived screen time fleshing out her character, we watch her suffer and bleed out on her childbearing bed. The showrunners preference for shock over nuance is just as apparent in their continual use of child marriages. Suggesting marriages between adults and infants, a king decades older than a prepubescent child is a pastime of the small council. They are introduced with such fervor you are made to consider not the destructive nature of child marriage but rather question how far the writers will go. This scenes are handled without delicacy, and while central characters act disgusted at the prospect, there is no wider examination of the culture that encourages it. Showrunners can’t claim to aspire to feminist messaging when they would so easily undercut those messages to shock the viewer in a misguided belief that simply showing the brutal effects of oppression is acceptable instead of depicting how those oppressive systems function and can be demolished.

House of the Dragon’s main draw is the emotional attachment viewers have to the original show. I watch it because even if it isn’t as good as its predecessor, I get lost in intricately crafted fantasies, and House of the Dragon provides more depth to the works of George RR Martin. I admit I am entranced by dragons, battles, and admittedly simplistic and obviously set up drama. Even every once in a while I’ll appreciate a snappy back and forth. I worry that by continuing to engage with House of the Dragon, I am supporting a model increasingly dependent on intellectual property and drawing in viewers by spinning off ridiculous numbers of projects from an initially enjoyable franchise. I critique it because I want it to be better, to not only exist in the same world as Game of Thrones but to live up to it.

2.5/5