Keele Life Top 10, March-April 2025

Another gathering of recent favourite things

(Why “Keele Life Top 10”? (a) I currently live on Keele St. in Toronto. (b) The format is borrowed in tribute and with apologies to Greil Marcus’s “Real Life Rock Top 10.”)

1. Walton Goggins and Sam Rockwell in The White Lotus S03E05, “Full Moon Party” (March 16, 2025)

(Warning: Spoilers, natch.)

This sequence a couple of weeks back was much talked about for Sam Rockwell’s extended speech about sex tourism and race/gender, um, confusion, as well as a proliferation of Walton Goggins reaction memes. (It was soon eclipsed by the next ep’s sibling-incest reveal.) But the way it immediately struck me was as a pornographic version of Louis Malle’s 1981 cult classic My Dinner with André. They’re both scenes about two old friends reuniting in a restaurant in Bangkok/New York; both feature mostly one character in an escalating whacked-out monologue, but are really about the other person’s point of view.

In My Dinner with André, Wallace Shawn sets up the film by condemning himself: Once he thought about art, but now all he thinks about is money. Then André Gregory’s recounting of his exploits since they met last shows Wally the opposite extreme, of being obsessed with aesthetic authenticity. André’s revelations involve talking with insects and having been buried alive in Grotowskian mystic rituals. How is this going to alter Wally’s feelings? The question is left open.

Likewise, Goggins’ Rick in White Lotus is on a revenge quest he realizes is a danger to his soul. His friend is there to speak, wittingly and unwittingly, to the dead ends of chasing the ego’s thirsts, mounting to peaks of delusional debauchery. The nocturnal interior setting is reminiscent of Malle’s, and so certainly is the hushed tone of confidentially absurd epiphanies shared, and received with barely restrained astonishment. I’ve heard complaints that Rockwell’s monologue is just a “special effect” because it’s not about a character we care for. But it is. Just not the one who’s talking. What Rick will do next remains unresolved, but as later events indicate, surely changed.

2. Life Under Headlines: On Lucy Dacus (2025) in Slate

This past week in Slate, I wrote about the new Lucy Dacus album. I got some flack from people who read only the headline, which calls Forever is a Feeling “one of the best of the year.”

Headlines are written by editors to maximize attention. Personally I wouldn’t make “best of the year” comparisons in March. I don’t even like making year-end lists very much. But unless a hed is genuinely misleading, I’m not going to be a jerk about it to my editor, who is doing his job. And the statement is true: Forever is a Feeling is one of many great albums so far this year. I prefer what I call it in the piece, “a minor masterpiece of modern songwriting about love.” It is “astonishingly honest,” as my editor wrote, especially in the context of the prying voyeurism of social media: Dacus recently confirmed that she’s in a relationship with her Boygenius bandmate Julien Baker, which made them the objects of many headlines. This record deals with the risks of that kind of exposure. But only as a subset of the overall scary, timeless, sorry-grateful chanciness of love. It’s mainly as an essay on that subject that I’m happy with the piece.

3. Flipside by Chris Wilcha (2023)

I recently watched this doc thanks to a tip from Nick Hornby’s Substack. Ostensibly a portrait of a New Jersey record store, it’s actually a very Gen X memoir-essay about creative paralysis, aging, and “selling out.” It’s assembled from the remains of multiple documentaries that director Chris Wilcha never finished after having a minor success in the 1990s with his first film, The Target Shoots First, and while falling into what became his real career, making TV ads. The stalled projects include one about the jazz photographer Herman Leonard, another about writer and podcaster Starlee Kine’s own case of creative block, and more, plus of course the one about the improbable survival of the cluttered, magical record shop where he had his first job.

I identified all too closely with many of Wilcha’s dilemmas, including his ongoing issue about what to hold onto and what to let go of, both materially and not: “Where did I get the idea that it’s my job to remember everything?” he asks himself. But isn’t that in fact what a cultural documentarian of any kind is supposed to do? The problem is how to discern what really matters, both to the world and to you.

The film features many more surprising cameos and tangents I won’t spoil. Watch on the Criterion Channel or another streaming platform of your choice.

4. Melomaniac, by Katlin Schneider (2022)

Both similar and the opposite of Wilcha’s film is Katlin Schenider’s Melomaniac, about someone who totally fulfilled their cultural intentions, even when those intentions seemed ridiculous and/or annoying to many around him. It’s about a longtime figure in the Chicago music scene, show taper Aadam Jacobs, who recorded indie shows, sometimes multiple gigs a night, for almost three decades.

In part it’s a portrait of a scene character, a sometimes beloved, sometimes just tolerated eccentric like St. Louis’s late Beatle Bob. But it’s also about how the significance of documentation and archiving emerges over time, especially in fields of ephemera that don’t usually get institutional recognition, like indie shows, or zines. Jacobs was acting on a personal, collector-style compulsion. But by this decade, everyone in Chicago music (many of them, like the Mekons’ Jon Langford and the members of Eleventh Dream Day, interviewed here) came to recognize that his archive was invaluable. But what the hell to do with it?

After Schneider’s film was done, a resolution was found to that question. Maybe not an ideal one, but perhaps the only one possible: Jacobs’ tape collection is gradually being digitized and uploaded to the Internet Archive, under the banner “No Tape Left Behind: The Aadam Jacobs Collection.” Only a fraction of his 10,000-plus tapes are there so far, but they certainly demonstrate proof of concept, if you browse for things you care about. On just a quick perusal, for instance, I found a Mekons-led 2005 tribute concert to the late brilliant English eccentric singer-songwriter Kevin Coyne. As well as a rare 1989 gig by another such character, Peter Blegvad, once of Slapp Happy/Henry Cow. But all the more usual indie stalwarts are in there too, including early Pavement and Nirvana gigs, etc. I only hope those working on it can keep the energy up till the whole archive is preserved. And backed up somewhere safe, if there is such a place, too.

Running just over an hour, the doc is available to view on Vimeo.

5. Requiescat in pace: The Dakota Tavern, Toronto

The basement Dakota Tavern at the corner of Dundas and Ossington, a music lover’s haven for some 20 years, has shuttered, apparently for good. I wish I’d spent more time there. I’ll look back especially fondly on the times I got to hear Joe Pernice there—he’s a reticent live performer, but couldn’t always turn down gigs such a short stroll from his house. David McPherson, who’s made a specialty of encomia to live venues (he wrote the book on the Horseshoe), does the joint justice.

6. Requiescat in pace: Jonathan Sterne, 1970-2025

I join many other writers and thinkers about sound and music, everywhere, in mourning the loss, at only 54, of the McGill-based sound-studies scholar Jonathan Sterne. We weren’t personally close, but when I was putting together the expanded edition of my book a decade ago, he generously agreed to contribute, and wrote an essay called “Giving Up on Giving Up on Good Taste” that both reinforced and gently pushed back on my conclusions:

“I worry that Wilson’s pluralist position—and my own—runs a little too close to liberal pluralism, where those of us at the centre get to enjoy the diversity around us, even as we still make judgments about the basis for reasonable inclusion and exclusion… Being omnivorous, being inclusive, can itself mark and perform various kinds of privilege and status.”

For those unfamiliar with Jonathan’s fantastic work on all kinds of audible media, his publisher Duke University Press offers a great introduction and tribute. Geeta Dayal wrote well about his most recent book, which came out of his long illness. And Damon Krukowski has a touching and meditative appreciation.

My deepest condolences to all of Jonathan’s friends, colleagues, and loved ones.

7. Tropical Fuck Storm, “Goon Show” (2025)

It’s impossible for protest songs to keep pace with the topical fuck storm coming at us in the news out of Washington and elsewhere. But one of my favourite contemporary rock bands gets the mood right in this screed from their bird’s-eye perch in Australia.

It's like being at a party where the party's always right
And I was not planning on going out tonight
But I'll grab some pepper spray from Kmart
Chuck a ski-mask in my bag
And then scream an incantation
Change the colour of the sky…

'Cause if you lose you win
And all you need's the wind
That blows where people wave their flags
at people waving flags

8. Daredevil: Born Again (2025)

I’m not much of a comic-book person nor a superhero-movie person. But I was a comic-reading kid, and one that I latched onto in an unusually intimate way was Daredevil. There was something captivating about the idea of a blind hero, whose super-ability was always in tension with his disability; that he was a brainy lawyer by day and a brawny outlaw vigilante by night underlined the play of contradictions.

Today I realize that Daredevil’s mix of characteristics probably spoke to me as a non-neurotypical kid whose strengths were also inextricable from his weaknesses—with more fantastic results, of course, than the often discouraging reality. As an adult, I still feel compelled.

The new Daredevil series is a bit of a mess compared to the 2015 Netflix series, which I thought was the best thing Marvel’s ever done in TV or film (especially the first and third seasons). But it’s still got Charlie Cox in the title role and Vincent D’Onofrio’s incredible Kingpin performance, so I’ll stick with it.

Btw, it came out after I lost interest in comics as a kid, but I recently read my friend Annie Nocenti’s late-1980s run as the Daredevil comic writer (issues #236 to #291). It’s as extraordinary as its reputation: a socially engaged, philosophically heightened sequence that takes the character to its limits.

9. Jess McKenna and Zach Reino, We Object to Fear (2018)

Twee alert: I get that musical theatre and improv comedy are offputting to a lot of people on their own, let alone together. Feel free to skip. But … I first heard the Off Book improvised-musical podcast many years ago. While the hosts were obviously highly skilled, I couldn’t quite get into it—until this winter, when I discovered this video of them doing their thing.

Starting with an audience suggestion, Jessica McKenna and Zach Reino play all the characters in a long-form improv about a high-school Mock Trial team getting together for an end-of-season party. Friendships are tested, romances are kindled, parsley is put on garlic bread. And the social hierarchies of extramural legal roleplay competition are scrutinized in extremely knowing detail.

It made it much more accessible to see the duo act out the parts, and to watch their expressions as they struggle to keep track of all the material they’ve just generated. For a spontaneous creation, it’s incredible how nearly cohesive it all is and how close to genuinely good the songs manage to be.

I went on to search out lots more Zach-and-Jess foolery.¹ Now that I have their faces and mannerisms in my head, I even enjoy the audio show. But just watch We Object to Fear. The most succinct case I can make is the part about 10 minutes in, when the Mock Trial defence attorneys (always second fiddle to the prosecution kids) sing an ode to their greatest inspiration:

Remember—you’re never in a pinch
Remember—that morality is a cinch
Remember (remember)—Atticus Finch!

At the end of which, Reino’s character turns to McKenna and says with perfect teen sincerity: “You know what? … I think, in this moment, that I’m realizing I’m gay.”

Your honour, the defence rests.

10. Recommended reading corner

• As an old family friend of Dan Bejar’s, it was always a tricky matter for me to cover Destroyer, but early on I felt compelled to spread the word. These days I recuse myself from declaring, e.g., that the new album hilariously titled Dan’s Boogie is sounding to me like one of his best. But I still can revel in a Destroyer press cycle. My favourite moment in this Stereogum interview, aside from the headline? Arielle Gordon asks Dan if he’s seen A Complete Unknown: “‘Are you trying to get me in trouble?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes. ‘By saying mean things?’ ” I know that expression well!

• This investigation of the real genesis of the definitive 1980s dancehall Sleng Teng riddim, by Wrongtom in the Quietus, would go directly into the Best Music Writing 2025 anthology if that series still existed.

• Likewise I had no idea how deep Stuart Berman could go on Black Flag’s My War, in a P4K piece that explained more than a lifetime of casual fandom and Our Band Could Be Your Life reading ever has.

• My friend and colleague Cathrin Bradbury's upcoming memoir, This Way Up, is an entertaining and often moving book about aging and self-discovery. I'm proud to have helped out with some editorial consulting. There’s an excerpt this month in The Walrus.

• In No Fences Review, David Cantwell brings his reliable incisiveness on class and region to an excellent essay on Chappell Roan’s not-just-midwestern but specifically Ozark origins, and her latest single’s apparent country turn.

• Billy Woods has put out a lot of the smartest hip-hop of the past decade-plus. Just how smart he is, as a political and humanist thinker, is evidenced in this Jacobin interview, which you needn’t know the music to appreciate.

• Delighted by these poems by Stuart Ross, which sent me right down a velvet-upholstered Peter Altenberg rabbit hole.
  

1. As in their two-season Play It By Ear series on the Dropout comedy channel/platform. As well as the live-show videos on Off Book’s Clubhouse site, often with guest improv luminaries including Paul F. Tompkins (whose Varietopia show comes to Toronto at the end of April).