The archive in the mouth and the archive is on fire
That’s the story

—Peter Gizzi





Monday, June 17, 2024


The fire truck appeared behind us, taking the turn off Symphony Circle onto Wadsworth, moving insistently, lights on, but sirenless. I could hear the wail that wasn’t, a kind of conditioned synesthesia at the sight of the flashing red and blue. It was 5:45 a.m., a Monday, three days to the summer solstice, and Allentown, Buffalo’s last-call district, had just turned in for some hard-earned shut-eye. We saw the smoke as soon as we took Wadsworth’s turn east into Allen. It plumed to the north side of the street, rising above Mulligan’s Brick Bar and blocking the sunrise. Another fire truck was already parked about twenty yards ahead of us, two ladders extended into the thickening billow and directing jets of water into the broken Mansard windows of the most recognizable building on the street: The Old Pink.

I pulled into a parking lot next to Nietzsche’s to get out of the way of the second truck coming up Allen. Rachelle and I were on our way to the gym, our Monday routine. We didn’t need to ask each other what to do. We left the car and walked east as the quiet buildings around us formed a sluice for smoke, chipped shingle, and thousands of gallons of water, all churning and running down the sleeping, tree-lined side streets of College and Mariner, the unsuspecting avenues of Porter, Pennsylvania, and Richmond. We stopped behind perhaps a dozen firefighters and two news photographers—even most of the neighbors were still asleep—and my first thought was of what might be saved: the framed velvet Elvis that had hung behind the bar for as long as anyone could remember, the dizzying checkerboard floor, or, most precious of all, the collection of CDs in The Pink’s narrow DJ booth, a library that had introduced me to Television, Happy End, Question Mark and the Mysterians.

Because The Pink was an uncommonly precious place. The shabby, late-nineteenth century building had held several watering holes before The Pink: Jimmy Oates’ Pub in the 40s, Birdie’s 19th Hole in the 60s, then the Allentown Café and the Buffalo Bar and Grill before twenty-three-year-old Mark Supples and twenty-two-year old Amy Taylor borrowed $12,000 from relatives to rent the building from the Brinkworth family and open The Pink Flamingo. [1], [2] They painted it a haunted gray-white and hired the Parsons-trained artist Scott Liffschutz to emblazon an enormous pink flamingo on the façade, the whole thing a double-homage to the John Waters film and to Supples’ native Cheektowaga, the inner-ring, working-class suburb known for the plastic pink flamingoes that dotted its modest lawns. This was the iteration that would achieve Buffalo immortality, outlasting even the sale of the business and a brief interlude under a different name, “The Blackstone,” which operated there for a few years in the aughts, while regulars refused to adopt the new name. From 1983 onward, The Pink would always be The Pink. It served Rare Breed bikers and off-duty cops, rosy-cheeked freshmen and grad students on a budget, local celebrities ranging from Rick James and FM DJs to Buffalo Bills and Sabres, and always drag artists, pool sharks, and addicts of every stripe—but especially coke users, from the weekend key bumpers to the serious skiers. Despite its overmastering squalor, the grill reliably turned out one of the world’s best steak sandwiches: an exceptional cut of meat cooked rare, a toasted roll, provolone cheese, peppers and onions braised in Guinness. And this milieu came to represent Buffalo: it was one of the ways we saw ourselves, if not exactly in a mirror, then at least reflected in the reactions of initiated visitors.

“Any time anyone was in from out of town there were three places I took them,” said Mike Shatzel, owner of other iconic Buffalo bars and restaurants: Cole’s (his own establishment), Niagara Falls, and The Old Pink. “They typically liked the Old Pink the best.” [3]

Around 6 a.m., I saw the first flames shooting out of the round aluminum kitchen vent on the west side of the building. Until then, there had only been smoke visible from the street. I pictured velvet Elvis’s lip curling into a pout, the slow melting of a thousand polycarbonate CDs.

The roofline went next, an orange underscore, then a huge, purling plume of flame—striking a miserable contrast with the cheeky green tongues of fire that for years had been painted on the building’s dark purple exterior. “On my god,” Rachelle said, filming from the sidewalk next to me. We both realized then that nothing would survive. A wall of smoke passed through us and a cop moved in to clear the sidewalk.






Friday, June 14, 2024



“After the War of 1812 Buffalo burned itself down every year, each year building a brand new Buffalo atop the still-smoking ashes.”

The poet and dreamer Mathias Svalina stands beneath an old, spreading cottonwood, his back to a blue sky that frames three concrete monoliths, each one an angled cluster of industrial silos that once held wheat, barley, and linseed. Silo City is a holy ruin south of downtown Buffalo, once a hub of our vanished shipping industry, now a vast laboratory for experiments in ecology and the arts—jazz and bluegrass music, sculpture and light projections, site-specific theater, dance, and poetry. This evening, Mathias is leading a small group on a walking tour he calls a “Dream History” of Silo City: we perambulate the ruins, the wilds, the banks of the Buffalo River, and periodically Mathias stops to recite “things that definitely didn’t happen” on that spot. Silo City is so obviously a palimpsest of seemingly unconnected circumstance and significance—like this cottonwood tree, once part of an agricultural meadow tended by the Wenro and later Seneca people, then a place where the dock and railyard scoopers might have escaped the summer heat, and just last summer the place where Rachelle and I were married—that it’s refreshing to consider Mathias’s dream histories, the vastness of what didn’t occur.

“Part-ritual and part-convenience,” Mathias continues, “this destruction was celebrated annually for some period of time, but no one can tell how long, or when the series of destructions began or ended, or even if it has ended, as all the records burn with the city each year, so each year the city must build a brand new history.” Across the small crowd I lock eyes with Rachelle and then with the poet Noah Falck, an adopted Buffalonian originally from Dayton, Ohio, who helped to usher in Silo City’s most recent, and ongoing, history—and who officiated our marriage under this very tree just nine months ago. We recognize our city and ourselves in Mathias’s dream.

Then a wryness creeps into his voice. “So one year you might have something wonderful, like a hostel downtown, and then the next year the city officials are saying What hostel? What downtown? What Buffalo?”

We all wince-laugh. He’s referring to real history now: a city agency recently evicted Buffalo’s only hostel, which for decades has served visitors and hosted arts events from a beautiful, E.B. Green-designed building in the theater district. The city’s reason for the eviction was its own deferred maintenance on an adjacent building: fixing that property, it said, would put the hostel in danger. An all-too-familiar sequence of canceled meetings, missed deadlines, and dodged FOIA requests followed.

Mathias’s dream history of this site dramatizes a contradictory duality of our Buffalonian nature. We do burn and we dorebuild, both remembering and forgetting this ritual as it happens. On one hand, we practice a complex mythology of loss, remembering and reverencing tragedies that range from actual attacks, like the racist massacre at a Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022, to symbolic losses, like wide right, skate in the crease, or fourteen seconds. [4] On the other hand, we cultivate a selective amnesia, quickly forgetting the people and places that fall out of sight for even a moment, while heralding anything “new,” from authors to ice cream shops, like surprise messiahs—each once a second coming absent prophesy or precedent. And we are all complicit in these simultaneous cycles. Yes, Buffalo is like this, we nod at each other across the meadow—mindlessly patting the matches in our pockets.






Monday, June 17, 2024



We recorded it, of course. In Rachelle’s videos, smoke pours upward from the roofline and jets of water plash backward onto Allen. In my video, flame reaches like a claw from the northwest corner of the building, as if to pull The Pink’s roof down into the basement. We posted them to X and Instagram and put our phones away when the cops moved to widen the perimeter. We didn’t realize then that we had captured the earliest videos of the blaze, posted them before even the professionals had sent their shots back to newsrooms around the city. Within seconds our phones were buzzing with retweets and comments and within minutes Channel 4 and Channel 7 had reached out for permission to use the clips in their morning broadcasts.

A visceral sense of loss gripped the city and didn’t let go for the rest of the day. Many of the immediate expressions of shock and loss came in the form of reposts of what Rachelle and I had uploaded at 6 that morning, giving us with an unexpected instrument for sensing and recording the unfolding of the city’s grief. Comments ranged from the vulnerably earnest to the unrepeatably crass. There were comparisons to Notre Dame in 2019, which at first gave hope that, like the great cathedral, The Pink might survive. Once a fire department spokesperson declared the building a “total loss,” the expressions of grief, encomia, and gallows humor accelerated. Interestingly, one of the most common sentiments was a lack of any specific memories of The Pink. Recollections that populated X and Reddit were often absurd, fragmentary things, non sequiturs, impressions, not even vignettes. I don’t remember most nights at The Pink, many posts began, but goddamn, I loved the place.

A piece of me just died, someone said above my video. And this seemed to sum up how everyone was feeling. We were losing a specific place to which we wouldn’t be able to return; we were losing a specific steak sandwich; we were losing the site of specific (albeit fragmentary) memories, and therefore we would begin to lose our ability to recall those memories. But even more than this, we were losing a cultural touchpoint that connected us all, that allowed us to recognize each other, to recognize ourselves. Just as we were losing this connection, a new one was forming, painfully—a psychic scar, stretching from each one of us to the next, from Allentowners to distant expats. As the shock subsided, a dull, perhaps even pleasurable ache set in. Here we are familiar with such stitching.






Friday, June 14, 2024



I follow Mathias from the Silos to Hallwalls, a gallery and performance venue in the back of a converted church, where we listen to Brandon Lopez on contrabass and Steve Baczkowski on several saxophones. They improvise ferociously—Steve dropped to his knees and Brandon fixing us with what the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ana Vafai, also in attendance, calls a “death glare.” The music, like the dream tour of the Silos a few hours before, fills me with something I can only call bigness: life is more than it was when I walked through the doors. Afterward, standing in the not-quite-dark of the near-solstice night, we agree we’re game for another beer. I ask Mathias, in town only a few more days, what’s on his Buffalo wishlist. Without hesitation he says “The Pink.”

It’s quiet for 10:30 on a Friday night, but The Pink’s peak hours have always been between midnight and four: it is a stop best reached when the fainthearted turned in two bars ago. Despite the light crowd, its familiarity embraces us both: the piss-smell, the Bush- and Clinton-era stickers on the coolers, the reddish-purple gloom that seems to pull you back, back, toward the dartboard. I sense postnasal coke drip like a phantom limb. I order Hayburners, a favorite local knockout IPA, and toast to Mathias’s latest book of poems, Thank You Terror. I ask if he’ll read from it, and he shrugs. He started to let go of the work of self-promotion several books ago.

“My first book came out literally on the day my father died,” he tells me.

Before I can respond a woman a little younger than me appears between us with a tray of shots, some kind of whiskey. She says it’s Maker’s Mark and Maker’s Mark 46.

“What’s Maker’s Mark 46?” I ask.

“It’s like Maker’s Mark,” she answers, “but elevated.”

We elevate two shots of 46 and order another round of Hayburners.

We keep talking—about our writing, about the soccer we watched together when we both lived in Northampton, about Mathias’s new spot in Richmond, and the unequal ways Buffalo treats its cultural heroes, from Robert Creeley to Lucille Clifton to Myung Mi Kim. But I’m still thinking about Mathias’s first book, Destruction Myth. My father is still alive; I’ve never published a book, let alone lost someone I loved on the day of its arrival; but something about Mathias’s experience seems immediately familiar. I think it’s that loss is inherent in the experience of publishing, or making any art. To make a poem or a painting or a symphony is to give yourself over to something that eventually will decide that it’s finished with you. You can continue to love it, to promote it, to perform it, but the part that was alive—the process of making it—is over.

Lately I’ve been listening to the podcast Deep Night with Dale from the comedian James Bewley. [5] The host Dale Seever, Bewley’s character, wears a black turtleneck, sepia-tinted glasses, and an owl pendant and speaks in a voice that floats above any specific time or place, like an apprentice hypnotist with a traveling carnival some time between the Civil War and the birth of the internet. It sounds like something that might be recorded here at The Pink, in the phonebooth-sized DJ’s room, or perhaps in the way-back by the dartboard in the blissfully deep-fried hour between last call and last last call.

Just this morning, I listened to an episode in which Dale, cleaning out his late father’s house, discovers a VHS with a recording of his mother, who had passed several years before, appearing on a local television program. The clip is short and poor quality. The voice, Dale notes, is strangeto him, somehow an ill fit with the mother that, in the years since her passing, his memory has invented. This leads Dale to meditate on the format of the transmission, the VHS cassette, one among countless methods and technologies our species has invented in its unending war against mortality.

“The first real recording to magnetic tape had issues,” Dale explains, referencing the London Philharmonic’s recording of Mozart’s 39th Symphony to an AEG K2 Magnetophon November 19, 1936. “Loss, always loss. Weird stretches where the audio wobbled and ducked, bending under the weight of so much information.” Famously, conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and the members of the orchestra were disappointed with the recording. “They were unhappy with their own voices,” Dale says, “their own musical expression, their own life-patterns reflected back to them but altered—less than the lived experience.” This was Dale’s experience, too, when he heard the brief recording of his mother.

“It turns out that the format of capturing audio and video has loss built into it,” he says. But this is as true of Mozart’s own handwritten notation in 1788 as it was of the LPO’s experimental recording in 1936. “Not all knowledge gets handed down. Not all history is complete. Our human stories, rituals, methods of beating back the darkness, is not ‘lossless technology.’” Loss is built into the format—every format, whether a vinyl record or a poem. It was built into the format of Mathias’s first book, Destruction Myths, and it is built into his latest, Thank You Terror.

Each poem in Thank You Terror is titled “Thank You Terror,” as if each is a copy of some original idea, question, or impulse. The fact that each poem is different reflects art’s inability to copy exactly or completely: the best we can hope to do is capture a fraction of the infinite variability nested within any one experience. In one such copy, Mathias catalogs the suddenness of endings:

we were friends

& then we weren’t

we were in love

& then we weren’t

we were activists

& then we weren’t (60)

It is at once a litany of loss and of survival, a testament to that which is ongoing and that which is irretrievable.

we were in love with the world

& then we weren’t

we were going to die of our love for the world

& then we weren’t

we were going to burn the world down

& then we weren’t (61)

I think of Peter Gizzi’s archeophonics, a useful word he invented [6] to suggest “the recovery of lost or buried sound. ... It is a metaphor for what we do as poets,” he told Jennifer Chang, “we bring the poets back that have given us wings, as it were, we bring their gestures, voices, energy field, back into the world of light and speech.” [7] Thank You Terror, like Archeophonics, is a perfect example of the dual, opposed forces in poetry: recovery and decay, the scratch and the hiss in the visited voice.

The Maker’s Mark promoter returns with another round of shots. The crowd is so sparse tonight that she’s already made a full circuit. We like the taste of free. In exchange, she asks to take a picture of us—not for the internet, she promises, but to send to her boss to authenticate her efforts here tonight.

Mathias’s poem ends with a slant rhyme that escapes from his refrain:

something hurt

something hurt

with such pain

& such reliability

it felt like a part of my body

it felt like a word I signed

when I had to sign

my name

to a blank line

it hurt

& it hurt

& it hurt

& then it didn’t hurt (63)

We ham it up for the camera and order a final round.






Saturday–Sunday, June 15–16, 2024



Sunday morning—bright—sore—a little sunburned—and thinking about poetry.

Last night Rachelle, Mathias, Noah, and so many friends met at The Silos again for one of the readings Noah has been hosting here for the last eleven years—poetry, art, and music in the resonant cylinders. The poet Fred Moten read with Brandon Lopez on bass. Completely different from the Hallwalls show on Friday, this time Brandon was a gentler partner, backstopping Moten, who threw his voice a hundred and thirty feet up the silo from his seat at a plain wooden table, which he occasionally beat to emphasize or complicate his meter.  

My Sunday mornings are for a different kind of percussion: rubber ball on a concrete wall, pop-ing, thwack-ing, and crack-ing with that rare, perfect rollout. About a dozen of us play on one of the last two remaining outdoor handball walls in the city of Buffalo, off Lawrence Place, in the middle of the west side.

“my surfaces / are the extent / of my reach,” Fred Moten intoned to the silo. [8] That night, his surfaces reached into the heavens and deep into the region’s past.

Sunday morning, a different group gathers at a surface that brought us together, one place where each of our reaches connect.

“My parents came from New York when I was twelve,” Angel tells me, sitting out a game on the sideline—“but I didn’t. They packed up the van and I ran away.” He describes living in New York for three years, alone except for a dog, sleeping in dark corners, ripping open trash bags for food, before he followed his family to Buffalo.

Two parts of New York he kept with him: raising dogs and handball.

A different story brought each of us here. Kuti and Gilbert met on 10th Street in the 90s—courts that are long gone, now. Jose, originally from Staten Island, found the courts because he coached baseball across the street. Pot grew up next to the wall but didn’t know what it was for until prison; inside, handball was his favorite rec, and when he came home, he found us.

“This right here was my house. I helped plan this whole thing,” Angel says, extending his arms to encompass the park—from a pavilion and playground off Massachusetts to the basketball court and walking trail in the heart. When his home on Lawrence burned down, he added the land to the park, donating it to a nonprofit that had been caring for the common space and other vacant buildings in the area—provided they build a handball court to his specifications to replace an earlier wall that the city had torn down.

“And that over there’s a pool,” he says, pointing to a fenced-in section of head-high weeds. “They just filled it with dirt.”

“We found too many bodies in it,” Kuti chimes in.

This was news to me. I pictured the concrete bowl under the thriving riot. A softness unsafe for building or for playing, apparently. To the kids on the basketball court, or the twentysomethings buying trendy flips around the corner, just a patch of weeds behind a fence. But to Angel, to the lifers on Lawrence or Hampshire, a memory, a present absence.

“I’m beginning to understand that absence itself could be a landmark,” the poet, essayist, and translator Laura Marris writes. “That sometimes, to know where you are, you have to navigate by what’s not there.”[9]

Angel, I realize, lives with a mental map of absence superimposed upon the changing west side of Buffalo. Maybe, if we live long enough in one place, we all begin to practice this kind of cartography, a record of destruction and defacement that we know better than the real world around us. If loss is built into the format of our remembering, then absence is built into the map: the steadily decaying apartment building where you lived with you first love, your grandparents’ house re-sided, the bait-and-tackle shack torn down for a high-rise of market-rate, river-front lofts. Certainly this is true in Buffalo. At least since December 30, 1813, when the British actually burned down the fledgling village, the map of our city has been primarily a map of loss: lost parkways, lost libraries, lost Frank Lloyd Wrights and the lost plaster palaces of the Pan-American Exposition. [10] These actual losses of towers and tree-lined boulevards point to more abstract losses, too: we once were the best-planned city in America, the city of psychics, artists, and millionaires, the nexus of the heartland and the Atlantic.

Those who gathered at The Silos last night, we moved across a map of industry that unwittingly shaped a space for poems. And Angel’s map marks the ghosts of a burned-down home, the outline of a long-gone handball court, the ruin of a pool waiting to be rediscovered. All these absences more real to us than whatever filled them up.






Monday, June 17, 2024


A spontaneous vigil began on Allen Street and grew throughout the day. Only fourteen hours after the first firetrucks appeared on the scene, excavators caved in the last of the Pink’s brick frame. Strangely, the crowd erupted in a cheer. It wasn’t a joyous noise, and not quite a wail of grief, either—more like a salute. There were tears, but also laughter, stories exchanged. Thirty-racks of PBR surfed across the top of the crowd, shared freely. The cops looked the other way as individuals and then small groups surged past the caution tape to grab bricks and other pungent mementos. A man pulled a handle of Evan Williams from the rubble, caked in ash. He raised it above his head, turned to the crowd on Allen, and in a choked voice announced, LAST CALL! He took the first, strong pull and passed the bottle down the mound. It was empty in minutes.

I wasn’t there to witness any of this. I heard of it in real-time through various groupchats of neighbors and Buffalo expats, and I saw it in the chiaroscuro portraits and stark street scenes that the photographer Pat Cray took and uploaded the next day. I wasn’t there because as I preparing to leave the house, I got a text from an old friend, Adam. We had met when we were teachers together in the same middle school nearly a decade ago. Two summers ago, at a beer-league volleyball match, he fell to the sand with a seizure. Doctors discovered a tumor on his brain. With this knowledge, everything in his life was changed: his body, his mind, his job, his art, the ways he was able to care for his wife and his children, the ways they suddenly had to care for him. I visited Adam in the hospital during his setbacks, I followed his tribulations on Instagram; we texted, sent each other videos, and got together for coffees when circumstances allowed it. Last I’d seen him, a advanced clinical trial was showing signs of early success. But we hadn’t been in touch in a few weeks when, on the evening of The Old Pink fire, he messaged me.

Looks official now, I read. They just gave me six months or less.

The fire I’d watched that morning, the loss of the building and the network of memories it sustained, felt trivial. The vigil for a dive bar while Adam was dying was suddenly grotesque. As I thought of how to respond, my phone kept surfacing new notifications—reposts of what I’d shared that morning, still pouring in. Many still were the simplest expressions of shock and grief, but others were contrarian, sharing something of what I, then, was beginning to feel.

smh. all of Buffalo would shut down to hold a funeral for a shitty bar.

good riddence

Many of these posts adopted the whataboutist formula that makes up such an outsized percentage of online communication. We mourn this but not that. We remember this but not that. Look over here, over here, over here.

What do you want to do right now? I asked Adam, pulling myself away from the endless scroll. How do you want to spend those six months?

He texted back: Let’s get absolutely blasted.

There is a Buffalo kind of irony in this. If Adam and I were to have planned one last epic night out, it would have ended at The Pink. Now what?

I watched videos of the crowd at the ruin of The Pink taking the building home with them, brick by brick, and I remembered another poem from Mathias’s book. [11]

THANK YOU TERROR

This fucking world, how we

collect the broken

pieces & stack them into

ruins, awkward but

comforting, which collapse, & then,

because one must,

we stack the toppled ruins

again, never quite

as beautiful, but never quite

as understandable as

the commercials that profit from

your misery proclaim

a life to be. (64)

I began to run through every memory I had with Adam, every adventure, every circuitous conversation—and again and again my mind skated around the absences, the gaps in the record.

I realized something then. The outpouring of grief at the sudden loss of The Pink wasn’t, of course, a choice to mourn The Pink over anything else. It is a fallacy to feel that an expression of one grief exclude all others. But more than that, what was happening in Buffalo that night wasn’t even just about The Pink. It was about all loss. All ruins. All funerals. The maps beneath the maps of our changing world. And only The Pink—or the loss of The Pink—could have evoked this shared experience so viscerally for the people who filled the street that night.

The Pink had always been a place to come in contact with loss: yes, lost phones and credit cards, but also unexpected reunions with forgotten friends, songs from the DJ booth that brought back whole eras of a life, suddenly remembered stories of othernights at The Pink, the kinds of stories that sustain relationships over decades and distances, that orient us through the grim and relentless change of our lives. And then, at the end of any night at The Old Pink, inevitably we forget much of this remembering. Loss is built into the format.

The last photo of me in The Pink, if it exists at all, lives in the storage of a work phone belonging to a regional sales manager for a distributor of Makers Mark and likely other liquors. In it, Mathias rests a hand above my knee while we elevate plastic cups of bourbon, grinning glassily. I like to imagine that behind us, the griddle sizzles with a prime cut of steak and Guinness-braised peppers and onions. Each of us knows that someday we will lose one another. But in this moment, the world is changeless, the map is teeming, and nothing is lost.






Notes

---

[1] A Redditor helpfully collected images of each of The Pink’s iterations: “Timeline of 223 Allen St: currently The Pink.” https://www.reddit.com/r/Buffalo/comments/177yea7/timeline_of_223_allen_st_currently_the_p

[2] See local food reporter Andrew Galarneau’s detailed history, “The birth of the Pink Flamingo was anything but immaculate” at his Substack newsletter, Four Bites, published June 22, 2024. https://fourbites.substack.com/p/the-birth-of-the-pink-flamingo-was

[3] Quoted in “‘There’s a hole’: Regulars grieve after beloved dive bar Old Pink burns,” by Ben Tsujimoto and Debadrita Sur, The Buffalo News, June 17, 2024. https://buffalonews.com/news/local/old-pink-allen-street-allentown-buffalo-fire/article_912d61d6-2c96-11ef-a99e-4b328308bdd9.html

[4] There is no equivalence among these events, but there is a reason that Buffalo’s first poet laureate Jillian Hanesworth reached for sports metaphors at a vigil only three days after the shooting: this is how we relate to ourselves, how we recognize each other and remember who we are. Later in 2022 the Buffalo Bills commissioned Hanesworth to write and perform a poem she called “Choose Love” to honor the victims of the Tops massacre, though she has since taken to X to argue against the conflation of real tragedies with events in the world of professional sports: https://x.com/SocJustice_poet/status/1829527033300594763

[5] I’ve never met James Bewley, but we share an uncle who recently pointed us out to each other. The character Dale Seever first appeared in a live lounge act that James Bewley and Erin Bradley introduced in San Francisco; he reemerged as a late-night radio host upon Bewley’s move to New York. Since 2009, the show became know for Seever’s penetrating interviews with up-and-coming comics and actors. In the midst of the 2022 season the real James Bewley lost his father, and his alter ego Dale grappled with this grief in real-time. Deep Night went dark for a year and reemerged in summer 2023—changed. Abandoning interviews, Dale adopted the mode of the personal essay, bringing into sharper relief some of the themes that had been present from the first season: loss, grief, signals from beyond the grave, communicability, charged artifacts, technology—and often all these themes at once, as when Dale begins to believe that his dead father is communicating with him through eBay. You can listen to all 15 seasons at https://www.daleradio.com/

[6] David Grundy argues the word “refers to a very early form of recording technology (the “phonautograph”) in which sounds were captured on smoke.” ”Peter Gizzi,” Chicago Review, January 14, 2020. https://www.chicagoreview.org/peter-gizzi-archeophonics/

[7] ”Behind the Byline: Peter Gizzi,” New England Review, September 6, 2023. https://www.nereview.com/2023/09/06/peter-gizzi/

[8] This is a quote from the visual artist Jennie C. Jones in relation to her installation “Constant Structure,” which references a method of jazz composition that, freed from the diatonic progression, allows the tonal structure to shift freely among chords with the same quality but different roots (for example, a B Major 7th, an F Major 7th, an A Major 7th, and so on). Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock are the best-known composers in this tradition. This appears in Moten’s poem “The Red Sheaves” in Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023).

[9] ”Lost Lake,” The Age of Loneliness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2024.

[10] See this excellent thread of Buffalo’s demolished architectural treasures: https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/buffalo-ny-demolished-buildings-and-history.1406368/

[11] Mathias Svalina. Thank You Terror. Washington, DC: Big Lucks Press, 2024.