NOTES FROM AN EMPTY TABLE
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ESSAYS, POEMS, AND STORIES (BUT MOSTLY ESSAYS)
ON CULTURE, CALAMITY, AND CREATING BY TOM GUZZIO |
 Moisturizer by Wet Leg. Photo via Domino Records This essay has taken a while to write. The previous entry of my “Songs that Meet the Moment” series was posted on July 26th. Since then I’ve been struggling to catch another moment and find a song to meet it. How can you soundtrack a roller coaster ride when roller coasters make you motion sick? A few days before my last entry, Trump banned trans women in college sports (all 10 of them). Remember that? Trans men can still compete, though. I guess if a guy loses to a so-called “biological female” he deserves 5th place. Since posting “It Will Get Worse” fentanyl has been designated a “weapon of mass destruction,” giving cover to our military’s extrajudicial killings of 117 suspected drug traffickers in international waters. The administration offered no proof of their crimes, though. There were no pictures documenting any seizures, no surreptitiously recorded videos of $50,000 exchanging hands. It’s not even clear that the boats or the cargo they carried were heading to the U.S. If only we went to such great lengths to tackle the number one killer of American children. I guess it’s worth the “...cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights.” Rights that we aren’t willing to extend to Caribbean fishermen, like, say, due process. That wouldn’t be prudent. We raided Venezuela and arrested its corrupt president Nicolás Maduro because he was a drug trafficker (we really hate drugs in America. That’s probably why even the legal ones are so outrageously expensive). But kidnapping Maduro wasn’t about drugs, or democracy, or any other word beginning with “d” – unless there’s some d-fronted synonym for “oil” I’m not aware of. Otherwise Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado would be president right now. Instead the U.S. has left Maduro’s hand-picked successor in charge, and her “colectivos,” the United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s so-called “defenders of the Bolivarian Revolution,” still roam the streets with machine guns stamping out any signs of dissent. This even after Machado gifted Trump the Nobel Peace Prize she won that he so desperately wanted. Health care costs are ballooning. Despite being more of a band-aid to the hemorrhagic price of living and dying in America, the subsidies provided by The Affordable Care Act were clearly good at making care accessible and affordable to previously uninsured Americans, while allowing providers and insurers to continue to reap record profits. Trump’s first term promise to repeal and replace Obamacare with something better never came to be, and after his party let those subsidies lapse, some people are finding their insurance premiums cost more than their mortgage. The administration has countered with TrumpRx, a prescription drug website that claims to lower prices by allowing Americans to buy directly from greedy drug companies, and The Great Healthcare Plan. Only TrumpRx excludes less expensive generic drugs from its marketplace, and tells customers who may still be able to afford insurance to “check your co-pay first,” because, “it may be even cheaper.” In other words, TrumpRx does fuck all to lower prescription prices in any meaningful way. Meanwhile Trump’s healthcare plan is so comprehensive it can fit on one page. It includes such groundbreaking reforms like requiring hospitals to “publicly and prominently post their pricing and fees to avoid surprise medical bills.” Who doesn’t like shopping around for the best place to have a heart attack or stroke? “No. Nope. This place is too expensive. Put me back in the ambulance.”  From the official White House X account on Jan. 23. Only there are no penguins in the arctic. Then there’s Trump’s bizarre obsession with “acquiring” Greenland (and abolishing windmills). If it weren’t for the United States, he told the World Economic Forum on January 21st, those ungrateful Icelanders – I mean Danes – would be “speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps.” Nevermind that without French ships and Dutch guns 250 years ago, the counterfeit bill George Floyd got murdered for in 2020 would’ve had Queen Elizabeth’s picture on it instead of Andrew Jackson’s. Finally (for now, at least), 15 American cities have been invaded by Federalized National Guard troops or DHS and ICE agents, resulting in at least 36 deaths, including that of Renee Good, who was killed in Minneapolis by a man she was attempting to drive around and who should never have been standing in front of her vehicle in the first place. Her son’s an orphan now. Alex Pretti was literally dragged into a situation by ICE agents as he was documenting events. He was murdered after the handgun he was legally carrying was taken from his person. A helpless helper, murdered before our very eyes, despite our government’s attempts to convince us otherwise. He was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. I’m tired of feeling sick; of spinning. So I’m picking a spot on the horizon that I know will straighten the ever-blurring distance between my eyes and brain as I try to ride out these dizzying times, and “u and me at home” by Wet Leg is playing in the background. You and me at home again, you and me at home In the fall of 2007 I wrote about love with a desperate clarity I’ve rarely felt about anything else. That essay was an exploration of the chemical mystery that makes male mantises prey to their mates. I wrote “That Suicidal Yes” in an dumpy, basement apartment after a divorce left me stumbling and headless. It was a manifesto sent to the world via Match.com, posted to a profile propped up against a 30-day trial because free was all I could afford. “We are currently caught in a cyclone with the answers to ageless questions swirling around us,” I wrote, “waiting to be plucked from the air.” At the time, the science of love and loneliness was rapidly growing, and while I didn’t particularly feel loved just then, I knew it when I saw it. And I could see it everywhere – in the people I worked with at a school for troubled kids, in Annie Dillard’s words, my daughter’s eyes. So I wrote from the seat of my ratty, red Target futon to spite an aching loneliness that quantifying did little to lighten. My words boomeranged back to me and brought someone else along, too. Nineteen years later, I’m writing about love again, only the couch is yellow leather, much more comfortable, and I share it with the woman who clicked my Match profile all those years ago (and a half-blind Cocker Spaniel who takes up way more room than her size suggests is physically possible).  Lexie. At home. My small world is filled with love, and so is my heart. I see it and feel it now. That science could define something most often understood figuratively still captivates and confuses me, especially when I look at what people do for “love” today. As citizens living in lower tax brackets begin feeling the consequences of Trump’s transactional facism, they’re squaring up to fight for and against his policies. If asked, I imagine each one of them would claim to do so out of love – of country, family, God, immigrants, civil rights, law and order, thy neighbor. Only, “There is no fear in love.” Baby, we're just stoned again, funny how that goes “u and me at home” is a love song. It comes from Wet Leg’s highly-anticipated and deservedly acclaimed second effort, Moisturizer, an album that finds the band building off of their earlier success by simultaneously embracing and moving away from what made their self-titled debut such a colossal hit. Moisturizer’s hooky, melodic indie rock easily picks up where Wet Leg left off, but the packaging and lyrical content have shifted. The delicate cottage-core personas that collided with the cool lyrical aloofness of songs like “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream” on their debut have given way to an album “full of stupid-happy love songs” sung by a bolder Rhian Teasdale, who struts and flexes through live sets as if she’s been triple-dog dared to.  Wet Leg: Tiny Desk Concert. Photo via NPR This shift towards softer subjects and away from a softer look is calculated and truthful. Instead of folding under the weight of their rapid fame like so many other next big things, Wet Leg sought to manage and grow into it on their own terms. The band officially expanded to a five-piece with Teasdale and co-founder Hester Chambers graduating Joshua Omead Mobaraki, Henry Holmes, and Ellis Durand from touring to full members. All of them share the weight of the band’s success along with songwriting credits on Moisturizer, a move that made sense as it built on bonds formed during the constant touring for their debut. There were other choices, too. As Teasdale crafted a bolder persona and moved front and center Chambers embraced her social anxiety and took a position upstage, often performing with her back to the crowd. Maybe we could start a band as some kinda joke Teasdale’s posturing and Chambers’ retreating are born of the same impulse: to maintain and control – to the extent possible for a band that rocketed to sudden success – some sense of self amidst chaos they neither expected nor were prepared for. The two met at music school as teens and stayed close as each tried to carve out careers as solo artists. When jobs more conducive to eating and paying rent started taking more and more of their time, they formed Wet Leg hoping to “‘play some cute festivals’ and enjoy gigging together.” Speaking to Ilana Kaplan of Flood Magazine in 2022, Chambers explained how, “We were like, ‘Let’s do a band and it will just be our hobby, and because it’s our hobby, we’ll make sure it’s the most fun thing that we can be doing with our spare time.’” But “Chaise Longue,” a song Teasdale said “was supposed to be just for us” went viral. A few months later Wet Leg were selling out shows and earning praise from critics and fans alike. Dave Grohl told The Independent how the band would take over America, while Rolling Stone labeled them “the buzziest new band.” Harry Styles, who Wet Leg would open for in 2023, covered their song “Wet Dream” for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. In the space of a few years, Wet Leg went from writing songs with an eye towards playing a few shows – maybe even a small festival or two – to winning Grammys and filling stadiums. “Now, we've been stretched across the world, over land and sea If they wanted to stay sane, the band had to find and to respect their limits. “Oh God, it was just a lot,” Teasdale said of the band's early fame, “We were totally not prepared. Your booking agent or management will say that it is physically possible for the band to get from here to there, with no buffer to combat sleep deprivation or anxiety, illness or mental health… but nobody knows their own capacity.” They made the bold choice to cancel a few U.S. shows in late 2022 so they could regroup and recharge before another year of touring. Best to be wide-eyed and level-headed because not every band gets to make a second album, or a third, and so on. “This crazy roller coaster dreamland thing we’ve been on – this weird trip,” Teasdale told Crack’s Shannon Mahanty, “that is definitely gonna run out.” If I should get sad along the way I used to wonder if there was a point where both ends of the political spectrum could reach so far from the fulcrum they’d start to blur and blend into one another at the extremes. Despite the open-carry crowd lining up against this administration’s assertion that people shouldn’t bring their legally registered firearms to demonstrations, I don’t think that’s the case. There have always been extremists on both sides; but today, when one side fights with words, whistles, and phone cameras while the other battles with bullets and bear spray from behind masks, it’s clear which side has made extremism the norm. The proof is in the pictures: Can a perpetually divided nation rebound from the way Trump has used fear to divide and exploit, or is “this crazy roller coaster dreamland thing – this weird trip” called the American Experiment about to end? If you go to Rome, you can see the ruins of formidable empires layered like a lasagna. Trump can slap his name on as many landmarks as he wants, but no amount of gold gilding can hide how his very being has tarnished our global reputation or affronted the ideals that follow “We the people…”  "Unpresidented" by Sue Coe. Linocut in black ink with stamp in red ink. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Sometimes, I get so sad The love songs on Moisturizer are reflective of the band’s experience living through the whirlwind together without letting it carry them permanently to Wonderland. They wrote and recorded Moisturizer on a farm, splicing sessions in between shared meals and movie nights. Chambers and Omead Mobaraki are a couple, and in addition to becoming a global star, Teasdale managed to find time to fall in love. None of this is any of our business, and while all three are coy about their relationships, Teasdale is quick to credit falling in love for her lyrical shift. Anyone who’s been to a Wet Leg show sees how playful, supportive, and authentic they are with one another. Teasdale steps forward so Chambers can have space in the music they create with Holmes, Omead Mobaraki, and Durand. To someone watching from the crowd, the stage seems like a safe space in a business that naturally tilts towards turmoil. It’s like they made a home away from home, and invited us all in for tea through the looking-glass. You and me at home again Even though “catch these fists” might fit the divide we straddle a bit better, “u and me at home” works best for me right now. If this is indeed the end, I want to approach it wide-eyed and level-headed, knowing that the love I’m fighting for isn’t insular, even as I lean into those who love me in order to keep fighting. I hold on to love songs because they keep the fear at bay. They remind me that for pop stars and school teachers, a kind of love worth fighting for can mean two people, sitting on a yellow leather couch, together, at home, looking for ways to make the love they feel possible for everyone. Not just people who believe and look like them. You and me at home again
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