by Ash Margolis “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:
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.
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by Ian Kammerer  Quasi at Third Man Records Detroit. Photo taken by author. 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. |