1.

There can be no revelations here. I am not going to break the news. The broad strokes have already been drawn. After the Pitchfork review of More Than Any Other Day on April 29, things came in quickly. Ought Montreal Band began trending. Things were retweeted and retumbled. The band locked down a string of US dates in addition to a slated European tour. Everyone who read about Ought learned that they were from but not entirely of Montreal—students of McGill, like Wolf Parade, like the Arcade Fire; that they were a young, politically active, DIY-minded band, forged in the crucible of the 2012 Quebec student strikes; that they had signed to Constellation, the label that brought us God Speed You! Black Emperor; and that they would play their first New York show on Saturday, May 3.

That is nothing. The Ought that can be spoken is not the true Ought. Still, I went with them in their rented Nissan Quest to Brooklyn, and to lunch and brunch to meet booking agents and journalists; and I took notes, in the vain pursuit of the expression of the inexpressible.

Plus, I had a second tree to fell: a Kentucky Derby party in Greenpoint hosted and attended by the most influential artists and thinkers of my life: my college friends, all of us in our thirties, none of us laureled with any comparable critical acclaim. Two planets coming into conjunction at the center of the vortex of Brooklyn. And me without a phone or metro card or even an assignment from a web magazine to explain my project. Sans everything.

This is Ought’s third release. Sort of. It’s difficult to quantify art output, especially in a scene like the one from which Ought emerged, where musicians live together and create things and sounds in flux. More Than Any Other Day is a second draft, having supplanted last year’s self-released EP of the same name. Commercially speaking, it’s their independent label debut. However identified, it’s the one that will make the biggest ripples. The effect that this project will have on the material world will be more easily measured by contemporary market standards.

What we might not see is the quieter magick that Ought was performing before Constellation released More Than Any Other Day in April. But if we pay attention to the band now (and not just to what is said about them), we might learn the nature of the magick, and revel in its continued expression as the band’s trajectory begins to resolve, and maybe (if we are patient and listen) obtain some of the magick for ourselves, for use in our daily lives.

That’s what I thought Ought meant, as a name: a word (“modal verb,” Ben reminds us) that expresses a potential, conditional state, a possible world, manifested through your own actions and rendered as you like it. Of course I was only partly correct.

2.

Saturday, May 3. Ought is to meet booking agent no. 2 at Roberta’s in Bushwick. On the phone they’d said, “Four?” and he’d said, “I’ll be there at three-thirty,” but they get there first. It’s a pizza place; the hostess can’t seat incomplete parties, so we are told we may wait in the beer garden out back.

Sunlight, graffiti, picnic tables, all surrounded by low Brooklyn skyline. There’s a chain-link gate with a sign that says dude keep this door closed dude, and through it you can see the wood-fired pizza oven and some wooden steps that go up to a plastic-lined greenhouse where they grow herbs and maybe spinach for their pizza, and a big square of raised lawn is being sprinklered to an acute greenness; it looks as though it’s being cultivated for croquet.

Booking agent no. 2 arrives with glitter on his face; he says he was out way too late at The Knife’s after-party. He sits with the band at one of the picnic tables under the tent and speaks quietly enough for me not to be able to hear him, and it’s not clear if this is a function of his being put off by my presence or his being hung over.

These dudes—the booking agents—can talk. Observing a phone conversation with a booking agent (Ought will have several of these) is like watching someone listen to a Moviefone listing. It is maybe a form of magick—at least a rhetorical device the agents have honed, consciously or not: the more they talk, the more authoritative they sound. The more ground they cover, the more likely they’ll say something the band likes. Ought has been advised by Don of Constellation Records that the best of booking agents won’t share their politics but will respect them. Ought vets them with a catechism to which they respond exactly as you’d expect: What do you think about the record? Positive but vague feedback. What have you been listening to lately? Either the names you’d expect or the honest admission that they don’t listen to much of what they book. If you were a Shakespeare play, which play would you be? Each one says he is “not a Shakespeare guy.” One begrudges (inauspiciously), “I don’t know, Julius Caesar?” during a subsequent phone call, he says he has been counseled by his wife to say “Puck”—not strictly an answer to the question as posed, but at least you know someone’s got her head in the game.

… Okay, that last question was my own admittedly obnoxious English teacher question. Ought humored me by leveling it at the booking agents. I initially posed it to the band: If Ought were a Shakespeare play, what play would they be? This was on I-91 South, not long after they picked me up. Ben Stidworthy, bassist, thought for maybe three seconds, then he turned and said, “As You Like It.”

This band has a higher-than-average IQ, a higher ratio of lefties and blue eyes. All are intelligent well-educated men. And they are decent. A discussion of “the worst thing” each member did during high school—a topic opened by Ben—reveals little beyond the typical wrist slap-worthy transgressions associated with teenage dishonesty regarding curfews and parties. Ben being maybe the exception: his confession includes various suspensions, once when a scan of his confiscated cellphone turned up drug-related texts, and once for heating up a metal object on a science lab burner and “in a very non-violent way” holding it to a classmate’s skin. Various other minor infractions. He passed notes. When I ask him if he folded them into triangles, he says, “I usually tried to do something a bit more creative … maybe an origami samurai hat,” which he then demonstrates with newspaper.

Tim Keen, drummer, calls Ben “the kind of kid I would have hated in high school” to his face. He says Ben would have beaten him up (as though there is a direct correlation between note-passing and bullying). Ben is the last smoker in Ought; Tim Keen has a runner’s build and a musical theorist’s head. At McGill he studied neuroscience; Ben studied Eastern religion. Ben is from Portland; Tim Keen is from Australia. He drives on his Australian license; Ben still needs to get his license back. The joke is that when Tim Keen walked into practice one day, Ben was just there, like: meet your new bassist.

They are a rhythm section that cannot be fucked with: calibrated, but galvanized by an obvious tension, like two positively charged magnets held against each another. Comparisons to Fugazi and Gang of Four are apt. On Saturday, before the interview in Bushwick, the two of them go to a Greenpoint music store and buy thousands of dollars of new touring gear with money Tim procured through an Australian government grant for touring bands. Ben said his new bass, a 74 Fender Precision, felt lighter and more functional on stage—imbued, he said, with thirty years of good karma.

3.

Five PM. Ought pull the Nissan Quest up to the corner of Bogart and Rock, where Adam Finchler, their host, waits on the curb in a C. Casola Farms Haunted Hayride of Terror T-shirt, grinning. Adam has been described (by Adam) as “The Pete Best of Caffeine Patch” and (by Ought’s keyboardist, Matt May) as “the man who taught me about the importance of hair to the self.” He is a Jersey boy, fellow graduate of McGill University, and resident of a probably illegal loft space in Bushwick.

Adam’s place is a classic Brooklyn subdivision: someone built, in the last ten years, the scaffolding that turned one huge factory room into five bedrooms and a kitchen/living space, then passed the lease off to someone else who passed it off, down through the cycle of gentrification, until eventually there are two shelves of film theory books that no one owns and a mix of five post-secondary graduate residents, maybe one of whom knows whom the checks actually go to.

The books, at least, are fortuitous for Adam. He’s working on a documentary on Interspecies Wrestling—an action/art spectacle reminiscent of Kaiju Big Battel—to be titled Hilaria, so named after the pagan Roman holiday roughly corresponding to our own April Fool’s. He records under Adam Finchler but plays in several bands. He has an impressive knowledge of grunge music. Throughout our extended dialogue on the relevance of the Sub Pop 200 to our early musical tastes (while Tim Beeler, Ought’s front man, talks to booking agent no. 3 on the phone), I begin to think of us as two roadies—or perhaps rock-and-roll manager/lawyer/drug-dealer types: non-Ought members who will travel in the band’s gravitational field this weekend.

There is some casual settling-in and email checking and phone call fielding, and then Ought take what Adam calls the Bushwick gentrification tour.^[1] After Ethiopian food and a buzz through The Loom (essentially a hip urban mall), we enter Cat Town, a store that sells texts and objects related to witchcraft and general magick. They have a wide assortment of tarot decks and some good books, especially Hine’s Condensed Chaos, whose “linear diary” method I am employing during this trip.

Hine’s book is where I picked up my de facto definition of magick: the alteration of the physical world through will—which is as good a definition for magick as for political action or karma or art or conscious living of any kind.

It’s ten-fifteen PM. Ought is setting up in a practice space at The Sweat Shop. Adam booked it with his own money out of sheer enthusiasm. At dinner he couldn’t say enough how great it would be to jam with them (in fact, Adam played with three-fourths of the current Ought lineup in a previous incarnation, Crabbb, [sic]). They rotate instruments. Tim Beeler wears no shoes. Adam sings ad lib, his lyrics a pastiche of quirk and catharsis. He is somewhere between shaman and comedian. He closes his eyes and jumps up and down and shouts: Be on my team. I’m a loser, baby. Do you remember? That was the nineties. Things were so different. Pizza was for stoners. Things were so different. When we were kids.

Later, outside and cold with sweat, Matt will say, “How many bands do you think there are in Brooklyn?” Then they will all get pizza on a corner where three police cars and what looks to be a private ambulance service are parked for more than ten minutes, blue lights whirling in the night and flashing on the faces of pedestrians who pass the site of some germane tragedy with fleeting concern.

New York is the center of the world—to New Yorkers, or at least anyone who desperately wants to be understood as a New Yorker. People say things like “the city is a tough place to live.” Siberia is a tough place to live. New York—at least for the sort of people who say things like “the city is a tough place to live”—is a place to go and live when you have finished college. Gooey in its romanticism, Brooklyn is the nexus of an entrodus: an entire demographic determined to make it, in every sense of the phrase, down to the transparent hoke of it all.

My own college peers are at the aged cusp of the most recent wave in a series of tides that is probably endless. On the ride down with Ought, when Ben—who has never seen New York in real life—allowed his eyes to glaze as we crossed the Tri-Borough bridge, I could hear DJ telling me over the phone, ten years ago, how he got a nice room in the waterfront district that looks north across the East River, and every morning he wakes to see Manhattan illuminated by the rising sun, beckoning him to conquer her like some Abyssinian maid. And later, at Saturday night’s Derby party in Greenpoint, when I tell Colby I stayed with the band in a converted factory space in Bushwick, he says, “You should’ve seen it ten years ago,” like it’s the goddam Wild West.

But despite that New Yorker self-involvement that needles my patience, I am grateful: not only for New York, but for my friends who moved here like emissaries of the generation. Late that night, on the roof of Adam’s building, I hear the voice of God telling me to chill. God says: Every time you come to Brooklyn, you shall be at the residence of someone who has access to a rooftop, and so I am thankful for my charmed life and my friends in Brooklyn and Brooklyn in general.

I lie down on the floor beside the foldout bed where Ben and Matt are sleeping. I only brought a backpack, so I keep my shoes on and put my head on my backpack and close my eyes; but I keep getting up to take notes as the day’s events congeal on the liminal borderlands of sleep. I’m thinking about how when a band gains critical mass, the scene stretches and curves in proximity. I begin a somnambulant sketch of the classic physics textbook illustration: a massive object that impresses the field of time-space around it, bending the contour lines and warping the fabric like a bowling ball resting on a bed sheet. It’s a hard sketch, but I keep going, maybe just out of nervous energy. It’s impossible to sleep. The last thing I sit up to write on my hand is steering the theme, which is something Tim Beeler accused me of—probably true, definitely worth quoting, at least to my beery half-asleep brain—and then I’m asleep on the floor with just a sweatshirt as a blanket.

4.

People talk pop music like they talk wines. Contemporary music crit is turgid and purple, often gorgeously so. Simile and metonymy is (by necessity) employed to express the inexpressible. Comparisons abound—apt, sure, but how many times will Ought be compared to the Talking Heads? It grounds us in the olfactory familiar, which we need, but it also muddies the palate.

My own college peers are thirty-something now, Brooklyn decaders, musicians from a time before irony was a crime against humanity. A Pitchfork rating of 8.4 is almost enough to poison them against a band. Still, they can swish and spit with the best of them. You won’t find an educated amateur rock critic who isn’t a secret logophile, and despite the anxieties that Pitchfork’s sinister hegemony provokes in most of us (a condition that is maybe just an intellectualized form of literary jealousy), we all long to pin down the numinous god of rock with the precise logos—rune magick, if you will—that will make everyone slap their forehead and say, “That’s it!” That’s the essence of poetry.

Plus, it’s just plain fun. The allure of this impossible synesthesia is inescapable, so without any apologies, here’s my nose on Ought^[2]: This is a crisp band, more sweet than dry, well in the cut of a punk aesthetic of dissonance. Ought’s bouquet is Modest Mouse and Lou Reed up front, but the body is layered with a smooth balance—you find Sonic Youth in there (as you inevitably will in any good rock band), and diverse notes of Television, Fugazi, Titus Andronicus; some discreet elements surface also—Q and Not U, Sleater Kinney, a tannic hint of Clinic on the attack, a bold sustained expression of At the Drive-In’s Acrobatic Tenement-era sound. And in the finish I find some surprises: more ancient resonances of Babes in Toyland and Green River, the ghost of Jack Endino and the late eighties. Crisp and elegant and noisy and alive.

More Than Any Other Day is an album full of great sounds: the whisk of a scraped E-string at the front of “Gemini,” the full-room snort of the Telecaster in “Pleasant Heart,” the pinging upper level strings and keys at the end of “Around Again.” The violin like a mist amid the trees, the bass peering out from behind the trunks. And it’s made in relatively short footspace. We’re talking seven pedals total. They know what they’re after. Their magick works true.

Ought is a self-produced entity—all vets, ex-members of various bands, DIY engineers of a thousand tracks and tapes. Drummer Tim Keen is “a nut for mixing.” The new record got the professional independent label treatment. It was recorded just under Constellation Records’ headquarters in Montreal at Hotel2Tango, a studio papered with Russian scam letters explaining that the orphans all had such a great time at their hotel last year, could they please send any souvenir paraphernalia (towels, mugs, travel-size shampoo bottles, etc.) that the orphans might cherish as mementos.

Ought speak of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, who recorded More Than Any Other Day, as the perfect engineer. He was transparent and dexterous, and he did unexpected things to their sound—made lightning intuition moves that they just hadn’t thought of, like bringing the violins way up on “Pleasant Heart.” When I ask them who their ideal producer for the next album is, they say “Radwan Ghazi Moumneh” in unison.

They laid down the tracks in three days of live takes. Tim Beeler lost his voice, recovered, and did the vocal work a month later, over the course of a week. Like the great latter-day hip hop freemen, Ought own their masters. They used the cover art from the eponymous EP (a found photo of a cluster of hands merged in solidarity), and Constellation packaged it in heavy matte stock with square liner-note sheets, an understated single-fold poster, and their signature adhesive plastic sleeve. 180 grams. A serious project that got appropriate artistic attention.

It is easy to hate Pitchfork for acting as gatekeepers, but we have allowed them to porter the gate. The 8.4 came in like a charge of dynamite, now here comes everybody. To their credit several smaller sites, especially in Montreal, broke the album and threw up a review prior to its official release, but most held off—presumably to see what Pitchfork would do with it—and then fell in line over the course of the next few days.

Ought now has what most bands want and do not have: the promotional capital of social media (with all its commercial ramifications). This weekend, they will be approached by PR men and upstart managers, field emails by booking agents and promoters and rival label headhunters, answer interview questions. They will be offered drugs, invited to secret after-after-parties. Tim Keen will be introduced to a woman who “must be a model or something” and asked to give her a noogie.

But Ought is a band that has already made a space for itself in the Forest of Arden, where our deepest desires are written on the trees. Theirs is the self-made world of underground labels and noise albums, home recordings and group catharsis. When I first went to Montreal to see Ought in 2013, Tim Beeler told me I’d know the house by its red square; and the politics of anarchy and direct action underlie not only their ethos, but their praxis. Their roles are self-assigned, and they can live in them quite comfortably for some time (though they have been assured that they can count on at least one solid year of media attention, sufficient at least to fill their shows and move their records).

Trajectory is important. They are familiar with the miserable pattern of so many millennial indie rock outfits: huge hype on the first album, rush to put out a second stale installment, then definitive decline, the oubliette of rock history, nothing but wastable time before them. The booking agents all nod and assure them that they’ve got it, that they’re perceptive and clever and that they totally agree with them—but Ought are looking inward, at each other, for confirmation.

5.

It’s noon on Saturday. Matt and I are standing outside Ange Noir Café, talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of the opening credits sequence of season 3, there’s a shot of Buffy holding a weapon aloft after a battle with demons in hell. It’s a quick shot. The weapon Buffy is lifting up is very obviously redolent of the Communist hammer and sickle, and when Matt first noticed this it provoked a fan-site research mission and meditation on Joss Whedon’s artistic intention. What did that shot mean? Was he suggesting a subtle political context behind Buffy? Or was he just tapping a recognizable cultural symbol, cynically integrating it the way one might throw Mao or Che onto a T-shirt?

Of course it doesn’t always (or ever?) matter why an artist picks an image. It comes out of the sub-conscious, personal and collective, and its effects are not always correlative to the sign’s original meaning. Nor should they be. That’s the etymological fallacy. Dreams and the tarot and David Lynch movies all work the same way: the viewer is presented with an image, and it’s the job of the creative mind to unpack it, imbue it with meaning.

Just as we’re talking Lynch, Tim and Adam exit the café and step up to an adjacent door. It’s corrugated iron, painted black, with [ND] stenciled on it in white. There’s a note taped to it that says Perfect Blonde Auditions In Here. Knock. They knock, and are admitted to a narrow alleyway by an unseen porter. This all happens in a few seconds with no commentary.

Matt grins and nods at the door. He’s the pleasant heart of the band: the darkest, fuzziest, shortest, warmest. Of all of Ought, Matt is the only one to definitively say “yes” when I ask them if they see children in their future. Matt loves kids. If he becomes a history teacher, it will be to the whole world’s benefit. He is the arch-cooperator, and beyond Ought he is the co-founder of Misery Loves Company, a cassette distribution outfit in Montreal co-run by Tim Keen and a dozen others, several of whom are women, several of whom played in The Femmaggots.

The Femmaggots—who have since supernovaed into at least eight separate entities—were one of the formative bands of the Montreal scene that birthed Ought. Four of the band’s eight members lived with Beeler, Keen, and May on Avenue Christophe-Colomb. They are sisters-in-arms, thanked in the sparse liner notes of More Than Any Other Day. When I stayed up there last February, Anniessa let me stay in her room while she was away.

The fundamental context of compassionate anarchy is equality, and between Ought and the Femmaggots there has been substantial cross-over; almost all of them have played together in some manner of side-project. Portia Larlee, former roommate and Femmaggot, says the house on Christophe-Colomb was “a safe haven from the constraints of gender felt in most places.” The fact that Ought and the Femmaggots have cooperated to such prolificacy is as vivifying a sign as their apparent segregation (at least on stage) into gender-specific bands is conspicuous. Ought is, by coincidence, all-male; the Femmaggots were an all-woman band by choice. The lessons of feminism are not simple ones, and no one is going to pretend the rock world isn’t a boys club, often revolting in its pretension and assumption of hetero-specificity. Non white-male bands want room as much as they want inclusion. Check Bikini Kill’s girls-in-front policy. Ought are willing to stand in the back, I’m sure; but they have nonetheless been pushed to the front by a familiar dominant culture. What will they say now that they have the microphone? And who will want to share it with them?

Matt quotes Kurt Vonnegut (I don’t remember in relation to what): “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” It doesn’t have to be understood as an annoying teacherly admonishment, either. Everyone has to start by pretending. You can’t speak fluently until you go through the canon of babble. Tim Beeler, on a related solo project, has a clip of himself at five-years-old, finishing a short song and announcing, “That was a song about my life.” They all made the decision to be Ought, even if it was pantomime. They chose to act. And thus.

This is another reason Ought is As You Like It. In Shakespeare’s comedy, Rosalind loves Orlando; but she’s disguised as the boy Ganymede, so she’s got to convince Orlando to pretend s/he’s Rosalind so he can pretend to woo her.^[3] Spoiler alert: it’s going to work. They’re going to throw off all the disguises and be revealed to be exactly who they were pretending to be, and they’re going to get married, and the forest will echo with laughter. Hilaria.

6.

It’s a bit after noon on Saturday. Ought is in Bushwick, at the Rookery, talking to the journalist. She’s asking them if their music reflects any (she hates to use the term but does anyway) millennial-generation attitudes. Like: What’s the point here? Why is my adult future not manifesting as readily as my college career did? How can I seriously compare my privileged ennui about laundry to the struggles of the socio-economically disadvantaged and literally oppressed who deal, every day, with real problems? In the background, just beyond her shoulder, a man is building a brick chimney on the roof of a two-level commercial space.

She says Ought make her realize the small everyday beauties in spite of these self-absorbed non-issues. She cites the lyric “today I am excited to go grocery shopping” as a line that literally opened her eyes one morning. She searches the table for a respondent, then turning to Tim Beeler, she asks, “I mean … do you write the lyrics?” And he nods.

Tim Beeler sits still and straight, a being of violet fire. He’s the front man. People rightly or wrongly expect him to have the answers. But Beeler’s intelligence—his awareness of both the complexity of all issues and the tendency/necessity of all writers toward contextual reduction—double-binds him: first, to an almost aloof-seeming reticence; second, to a responsibility to concise and refined expression that is difficult to harness. Especially when everyone is looking at you.

More than ever, everyone is looking at Tim Beeler. They will see an uncommonly tall and thin man, still boyish in his length, with a disarming half-smile and patient eyes (if they see his eyes—he’s taken to wearing sunglasses when he “need[s] to hide”). He wears an ash-gray T-shirt with red lettering: WESTMORELAND, his hometown in New Hampshire. Everyone who knows him loves him the way you love a smart sensitive boy hero, Harry Potter or Huey Freeman. On his forearm is a pen-ink tattoo that says, approximately: i → iii. I ask him what it means. He says it means a lot of things, and though I am privy to a few nutshell explications, to unpack it here would rob it of its runic power.

Ought are unified in their disdain for the verb “unpack” when used to describe acts of verbal analysis and exegesis. They agree it is a verb that belongs to high school English teachers, a bit of jargony newspeak. Nonetheless, they are asked on numerous occasions (at least ten times by me, and at brunch with the journalist) to unpack the political underpinnings of their music.

The importance of the 2012 Quebec student strike to Ought is beyond question: the political milieu of protest and police reaction—the clash of idealism with regimental pragmatism—galvanized their attitudes toward action and expression in a permanent way. Tim Beeler mentioned that “Pleasant Heart” is (at least on a subconscious symbolic level) a response to this dynamic. He was active in the Alternative University Project, an initiative to provide university-quality lectures and workshops to students on strike. Ben’s involvement was of a different timbre. “I was,” he says, “more on the throw-rocks-at-cops side of things.” The house on Christophe-Colomb that both the Tims and Matt shared with the Femmaggots was a forum for political discourse and anarcho-cooperativism. Portia Larlee calls her former roommates “radical people … good at checking their privilege.”

Still, Beeler is wary of calling Ought—or any rock group—a political band. Music is no more inherently political than any other creative endeavor, and every aspect of personal choice is charged with political karma anyway, so what’s the worth of a modifier like political? To Tim Keen, drummer, the essential take-away of 2012 is that regular people, during the strikes, were willing to disrupt their daily routines for the purpose of cooperation, collective action, and social transformation—concepts too often relegated to abstraction amid daily life.

Ought—and Montreal, and good anarchist academics on the whole—owe a lot to the Dadas, Lettrists, and Situationists. What Tim Keen is describing is, in essence, the Lettrist concept of dérive: the deliberate derailing of customary pathways by the active metropolitan pedestrian: choosing to walk off one’s normal route. The city becomes your mind, and you live in that space; if you don’t shake off the pattern sometimes and try strange and dangerous things, you’ll wake dead and walk unaware. You’ll be living in the shell.

Which is why, around four PM, I must leave Ought in Bushwick and walk north to Greenpoint without a phone or metro card. Not a particularly heterodox route, but I’m not a resident. Every perambulation here is a new one—at least until I arrive at my collegiate peer’s apartment, where the faces are as familiar as the beer and snacks, and where I can process the weekend, at least for a few hours, before tonight’s show at the Brooklyn Night Bazaar.

7.

The one-and-a-half-mile walk up Bogart and then Morgan is an extended exposure to the lower forms of graffiti the city has to offer: Hug Life. Fake Bacon, Real Tears. Ughs Not Drugs. The tags along this pathway are typified by piggybacking, one-upmanship: someone has converted no way out to KnoW way out, another has drawn a goofy face onto a silhouette intended to be faceless. Swervewolf is everywhere.

Graffiti, however derivative or ironic, are hieroglyphic; from them, one gleans the migratory patterns of the urban writer just as a dog might sniff out the scent of all who came this way before him. Expression in general is sacred, even the vulgar, especially the vulgar. At a show in Montreal in 2012, Tim Beeler offered his microphone to the audience, urging them to mount the stage and express whatever they felt they needed to say but could only say with a band behind them. Dozens took the mic, as if in rapturous receipt of the Eucharist, while Ought extended the coda of “New Calm 2” forever. No one recorded it, and no one got famous from it. It was the mundane and ephemeral expression of the human organism, always a miracle, like the first word ever spoken.

Orlando, ecstatic with love, can’t help but “carve on every tree” the inexpressible. All the characters have a go at his amateur verse: the clown, the melancholic, even the woman he loves. But it will serve.

When I get to the Derby party on Nassau, it’s all jokes: “Here comes Kersey Foster Wallace,” Colby says because I’m wearing a bandana, and DJ says, “Slept on the floor last night, huh? Make you wish you were twenty-two again?” I’m not sure if he’s asking me whether I wish I could live like that again, or whether I wish I still had the body of a twenty-two-year-old. Whatever the case, I smile and embrace them and accept mint juleps. I am all love now, among the familiar, at the party I know.

Assembled here are men I went to college with, and their wives and girlfriends. (Some—fewer of them—are women I went to college with, and their husbands and boyfriends.) My freshman dorm-mate is here; two men I lived with in Jamaica Plain outside Boston, and two I lived with in North Carolina; three of these men I traveled across the country with, along with four others, several of whom are here in New York (though not here at this party). This is my touring band, even if we weren’t really a band, even if we haven’t toured for twelve years.

Like Ought, and the innumerable Outremerican crusaders before them, we traveled by van. Our performance poetry troupe had a name. Even the van had a name. Like Ought—at least before this week—we booked our own shows (that is, Scott booked our shows) using Book Your Own Fucking Life and the internet’s rapidly metastasizing social media circuitry: the nascent Craigslist and something called the Poetry Underground Railroad and good old-fashioned email. And like Ought, we were craftsmen; we knew ourselves in our self-made roles and had visions of our artistic trajectories, both personal and collective.

But we were careless. Our sense of legitimacy was tied to the reward cycle, and we had at least an ironic sense of ourselves as incipient icons, quoting the new surrealists and listening to Anticon and reading from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. We never made the sort of quantum leap that Ought has made—partly because there will never be a broad market for performance poetry, and partly because we couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

All that is behind us. Our ambitious twenties, like a love that hurt when it burned true, is now remembered fondly, anesthetized by nostalgia. This Derby party is a love-fest. I hear about their jobs and the novels they’re writing and the sounds they’re hearing and making in this city, and I show them a picture of my daughter and we all eat burgers and veggie burgers on the roof until the rain comes down hard before switching to a whisper, then nothing. The horses run, and in the final stretch California Chrome pulls way ahead and wins by several lengths. Hands and confetti go into the air. I give DJ a copy of the Ought record and he promises me De La Soul, Shabazz Palaces, new and exciting work from old crews with new names.

By the door, the starry host James pulls my face close to his and tells me to kiss my wife for him like so, and he kisses me tenderly on the upper lip, his currybrush moustache in my nose.

It’s nine at night. Then it’s nine-thirty. I’m going to be late to the show, but I don’t know it yet. Alison is talking about the Jackson Heights Orchestra. In the background, just behind her shoulder, Anne is shaking loose and then binding up her hair in the bathroom mirror, a hairband between her lips. Kern holds Sara close and kisses her head, right at the part in her black hair. It’s so beautiful that for a second I don’t think I can actually leave.

Colby slaps my back and says, “I mean this must be a big moment for you. You’ve got something invested in this kid. There’s a bit of you up on stage with him, right? I mean, you taught him. You’re like an integral part of his being or—”

—At this point in the essay, I get to congratulate myself for having suppressed this long the fact that Ought’s front man Tim Beeler and I have known each other for eight years; that he was my student in three separate high school English classes; that once upon a time he introduced himself and asked me to sign on as supervisor for the music review and criticism club, Off The Record, that he was starting up with three other sophomores. This was back in the mid-aughts; Tim was sixteen and I was twenty-six. I have watched his progression with an avuncular fondness that is inexpressible without sounding totally corny.

And when Colby says I’m an integral part of Tim’s being, he’s got it understandably twisted. But Colby and I have lived in different cities for more than ten years, and Colby is a reporter and I am a high school English teacher, so I can’t explain (not right here, right now, in a Greenpoint apartment with a mint julep in one hand and the strap of my backpack in the other, waiting for the right opportunity to slip out to the show) how Tim is a part of me—perhaps the purest and least judgmental part: how he kept me writing about music through my twenties, even in the dearth of acknowledgment, among a readership and peer group of teenagers; how he solved the riddle of Kelly Link’s “The Hortlak” and changed my understanding of a short story forever; how when I offered to play and sing a song for our advanced creative writing class on the condition that at least one student bring in a guitar and match me song-for-song, Tim matched me, and I played “Holland 1945” and he played an original composition with lyrics from a sonnet he’d written for his portfolio; how he and Victoria and Cooper and Alex and Giles all pitched in to buy me the Instrument soundtrack on vinyl, a gift more thoughtful than any I’ve received; how Tim is the only person to have read my gracelessly over-long novel; how he’s the only former student I’ve ever traveled to Canada to stay with, or whose band I’ve seen live, or followed to Brooklyn in a Nissan Quest. These are the secret signifiers, runes shot out of my or Tim’s forehead into the sky, changing the material world through love and action. How can I not steal away?

Though the temptation is great to stay here, among the familiar, among the faces and laughs I’ve loved since I was a teenager, and to drink and reminisce about shows and tours and songs and poems for many more hours before eventually falling asleep on a real bed and waking up to a clean rent-stabilized apartment with an aching guilt that I missed something extremely important—though this is a very real compulsion, I do leave. I warn DJ and Kern and Colby that this is it, I’m leaving in five minutes with or without them, and then I do leave. With them. Down the four flights of stairs and onto the street and into the spitting mist of nighttime Brooklyn, reeling with alcohol, headed for the Night Bazaar.

8.

Despite these maudlin ruminations, I’m still late to the show. We come through the curtains while Ought is finishing their third song, “Gemini,” and I can hear Tim shouting, “You’re wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted wanted …”

The Brooklyn Night Bazaar is a giant warehouse lit with blue lights and lined with kiosks and vendor stalls. At the far end, beyond the bar booth and a glen of picnic tables, is the stage. Ought’s casual rule not to play rockstar-style shows with flashing lights and high stages has been crept upon. Behind them is a triptych of bright blue screens with nothing running on them. Before the show they were met by the bearded promoter, one John Rambo, who assured them their every need would be met while sympathizing with their unease at the venue.

It’s always shocking to see Tim up there, no matter how many times I see it. I make no pretense to objectivity, so I scan the crowd. There’s an old guy, probably fifty-something, who stands a head taller than everyone else. Some kids up front are singing along. They know the lyrics already. Someone yells, “You guys are really good!” which is all you can really ask for as far as endorsements. Tim breaks a string during “Habit,” and it takes more than a minute to get a new guitar (a Gibson Custom with a crunchier sound than his Telecaster) up to the stage and strapped on effectively, an experience he will liken to tying your shoes in front of everyone you’ve ever met. He tells the band to just go into “Beautiful Blue Sky,” then he merges flawlessly into the new song before the first verse blooms.

Tim Keen says that when he hears Beeler play with a strange guitar, it’s like seeing him in disguise; but he’s got an uncanny ability to mold the sound to his will and reclaim his sonic persona with astonishing brevity. “Beautiful Blue Sky” is a juggernaut, one of those Fugazian songs where the lyrics pose no breathable gaps—you think the singing is going to have to stop between the verse and the chorus for at least a second to accommodate the shift in tone, but instead it charges forward, like a tantric mantra, maintaining an impassioned momentum: war planes war planes mass initiative mass initiative I feel alright I feel alright I feel alright how’s your family how’s your family how’s your family how’s your family beautiful weather today beautiful weather today how’s your family how’s your family— The song pants. It is a tongue of violet flame. All the artifice in the world cannot defeat Ought: neither city nor internet nor industry nor irony.

After the show Ought—Tim Beeler, mainly—is besieged by people purporting to be PR agents and managers and other gatekeepers. He is polite to them. Brooklyn scenesters say hello. They sell twelve records and two CDs and watch the last band take the stage, but in general the blue lights and mercantile atmosphere of the bazaar drive them onto the sidewalk and into the night air.

The after-party is back in Bushwick at Alaska, a bar that John Rambo “sort of own[s]”. The word is that it’s being DJed by Pitchfork writers, but I’m not sure what that means—the glow of a smartphone by the bar, the blown-out speakers, the dramatic tempo-shift in the transition between songs that suggests an app has deposed the old rap god of analog beat-matching. My men are there, too—DJ and Colby and Kern—and I perform the magick of bringing two spheres into conjunction by introducing them to the band. I’m still wearing my backpack, carrying literally all I have, and I swerve in the current of bodies, pulled by the humanity.

At some point I’m yelling to Beeler through the din, trying to talk about his tattoo, shouting: “That guy Hine … he wrote the chaos magick book … talks about runes, rune magick …” Beeler nods and waits for me. It’s hard to tell what a former student thinks of what you’re saying because your relationship has been forged in the context of an insuperable dynamic. “It’s like your tattoo … you get this whole big mess of ideas and feelings boiled down to a manageable symbol … and then … and then you …”

I’m no better at expressing complex ideas than anyone else. I can pull it off in front of a classroom because the milieu is moderated by the traditions of authority, and because I’ve said the same things about The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby a thousand times. What I want to say to Tim is something like this: you have projected a conception of reality, through art, into the world. You have brought all the complexities of the political and aesthetic milieu into conjunction here in this moment. You saw a community where there had been a scene, a whole where there was fragmentation, and made a gathering of the show. You have seen the forest for the trees, and you have written your love on the trees of this Forest of Arden.

That’s what everyone is responding to, what all the hype about Ought is. The sense that we’re all in this together: the straights and the stoners; those who went to New York and those who stayed in the forest; the millennials and the Gen-Xers and whatever my middling generational slice is called—even our parents, especially our parents. Behind your riot mask, you are one of us. We welcome you.

Then it’s three-thirty-three AM. We’re at Tina’s place (Proudly Serving Bushwick for 80 Years): Matt and Tim Keen and Adam and me. Omelets and egg-sandwiches and my head is throbbing. Never have I desired to sleep on a floor so desperately. All my friends have gone home to their apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. On the sidewalk outside Alaska about an hour ago, a young woman with green hair whose voice was loud and quick had materialized out of the concrete with a joint that sent Ben back to Adam’s couch, Beeler in tow. She was a dryad, a spirit of the city, bearing herbs. Brooklyn has accepted Ought. Tomorrow they will go back to Montreal. Adam will stay and do the Brooklyn thing, then he’ll go on a short solo tour with Charlotte Cornfield. I’ll instruct English. We’ll grow old, affect our world, raise families, die. Be reborn. The future stretches out before us, punctuated and distended by the now, a super-massive object that lies heavy in the middle, distorting everything around it. It pulses in my head. The shuffle back to the loft is forgotten.

9.

Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love
As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 1

10.

It’s nine AM, Sunday morning. We’re in the Nissan Quest headed north on I-95. Ben is talking about Buddhist self-immolation in the context of 20th century China. He says it’s not exclusively political—some monks are demonstrating a “radical detachment from the body.” He says that when a monk immolates himself, the two questions are usually: 1) did he die sitting up? and 2) were there relics? Sometimes, when a lama is cremated, perfect spheres of solid glass are found among the ashes.

Tim Beeler is driving. He says the van smells like everyone had sex and ate pizza. He rolls down the window. Matt and Tim Keen are sleeping in the back. I’m in the middle, just behind Tim’s shoulder, leaning forward with my chin on the fabric of the driver’s seat, working out the details of what I missed from the beginning of last night’s set.

They opened with an old song—one that’s not on the new album—called “New Calm 2.” They brought Adam Finchler up from the merch table to play guitar on it. It’s a weird one, with deadpan spoken verse lyrics and a “bum-bum-ba-dum-bum” chorus. Ben says he was nervous when they opened with it, but he doesn’t say why. But he’s glad they did, and so is Tim. It really brought the energy in right away. Tim says, “I’m sad you missed it,” and I am too.

My house is fifteen minutes from the interstate. Ought has another show tonight in Montreal. Sound check is at six, so I suggest they just drop me off at the bottom of my driveway and turn around to minimize the lost time of stopping and getting out to shake hands or embrace or use the toilet or see my family or my garden.

So Tim turns the car around, and I wave over my shoulder and climb the gravel drive through the spring trees and into my working week. Me, I’m The Tempest: buried staff and drowned book, an old wizard learning to forgive old grudges. When I step inside, my daughter is asleep on my wife’s chest on the couch, so I close the door quietly and take off my shoes and begin to unpack.

Spring, 2014

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Notes:

1^ Language is so loaded in New York, in 2014, in an essay about music. Matt mentions an article he just read about the term gentrification: whether it should be used pejoratively, as it is essentially a socio-economic compliment to a neighborhood’s new white middle-class residents (i.e. that they are gentry and not colonialists or immigrants); and hipster is a hot potato like no other—despite some unique turns of phrase from this weekend (e.g. “institutionalized hipsterism”), I can’t truck with that kind of verbiage here.

2^ Though we do well to mind Richard Beck’s observation in “5.4” (n+1, 2011) that “when a pop critic talks about influences, he’s almost never talking about the historical development of musical forms. Instead, he’s talking about his record collection, his CD-filled binders, his external hard drive—he is congratulating himself … on being a good fan.”

3^ Plus there’s the added irony that in Shakespeare’s time Rosalind would be played by a boy, an irony that in no way devalues the comedy or undermines the beauty, which is real.
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