Joe Keery Has Shooters

My Back Pages: 8/15/26

Welcome back to My Back Pages, a weekly digest recapping everything of note from the last seven days—pods, bylines, appearances, plus a few odds and ends.

Let’s get to it.

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Piece of the Week

Last weekend, I went to Outside Lands for the first time, courtesy of friend of the pod (and now that we’ve met just plain ol’ friend) Dave Depper. I had a wonderful time, and I got to catch sets from favorites new and old: Geese, Death Cab, and my forever favorite band, the mighty Strokes.

There was also plenty of bullshit, as you would expect from a music festival in the year 2026, and I included a few tossed off thoughts along those lines in my write up. Unfortunately, the Instagram post I made to promote the piece seemed to break containment, particularly amongst fans of the insipid “Djo,” aka former Stranger Things star Joe Keery, and I was inundated with bilious comments from any number of equally insipid individuals.

Which is perfectly fine. I was raised in the fires of pre-social media message boards, so I can take just about anything that comes my way online—plus, engagement is engagement, baby. But the irony of dozens of strangers berating me for not being more obsequious toward brutally untalented millionaire pop stars was obvious (to me, at least).

Anyways, you can decide for yourself how mean I am:

Pods of the Week

Not much in the way of pods this week, as we’re on a brief hiatus gearing up for Jokermen 4: Leonard Cohen. Here’s a little bit from the announcement post I wrote on Patreon:

Since his passing a decade ago, Cohen’s legacy has only grown. Today, he’s acknowledged as one of the greatest writers and performers in the history of popular music. “Hallelujah” is known the world over (even if isn’t always his version), and records like Songs of Leonard Cohen and I’m Your Man are hailed as landmarks in the history of rock songs. Most significantly for us, Leonard is a man who continued making vital, extraordinary art right up until the very end, releasing one of his best-ever collections of songs just two weeks before he passed. Nothing could be a greater testament to the ethos of Jokermen.

Read the whole thing here.

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On Never Ending Stories, we hit a few listener questions, including a delightful one asking our opinions on “Steel Bars,” a Bob Dylan/Michael Bolton collab from 1990. This little ditty had somehow escaped all of our notices, so it was a treat to stumble upon it at this late date, when, as Evan put it, it seems like we’ve already turned over every single rock in the Bob Dylan garden.

Chune of the Week

Cameron Winter: “$0”

Man, what a knockout.

It took me a while to get around to Heavy Metal. I don’t think I started seriously listening until nearly a year later, after Getting Killed dropped. Since then, I’ve returned to the record every couple months, drawn unconsciously to the cockeyed little snowglobe in which it seems to exist, and I’ve fallen madly in love.

Let me state for the record: I understand I’m not saying anything novel or interesting. Heavy Metal has been universally lauded since its release, and opinions on Cameron Winter and Geese are pretty firmly fixed—you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. Still, I can’t go anywhere else this week. I knew when I woke up this morning that I needed to listen to this record. Now that I am, I’m thrilled all over again.

It’s probably best for the culture at large if Winter devotes himself to his role as frontman of Geese—a great rock band is a much rarer thing these days than a great solo artists. But damn if I’m not absolutely titillated by the concept of a Heavy Metal follow up. And what ever happened to those Carnegie Hall performances that PTA and Benny Safdie were filming…?

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Wednesday, August 12th to meet my friend Ori for dinner in Oakland. We went to Popoca, a California conceptual take on Salvadoran cuisine that has received rave reviews all across food media. It was good—I recommend the lengua pupusa.

As for the look, it was easy-peasy: chinos, long sleeve polo, Wallabees, and a nice little jacket to top it all off. I kept colors tonal throughout the base layers—dark brown shoes, light brown socks, dark brown belt, mid brown trousers, dark brown shirt—then used the black jacket to set everything in place, as if drawing an underline beneath the phrase, “Yes, I am wearing all brown.”

If you look closely you’ll see my left pocket is bulging out, indicating that my pants are a little tight. This isn’t a surprise: I’m about seven weeks into a “bulk” phase at the moment, so I’m packing on the pounds. After dropping from ~194 lbs to ~173 lbs during a “cut” at the beginning of the year, I’ve now gained nearly all that weight back. Most of it is muscle (hopefully), but some fat inevitably comes along, too.

I’ll continue to bulk for another 4-6 weeks, then enter a maintenance phase where I neither gain nor lose weight. Come January, I’ll start another cut to eliminate some of the excess weight I’ve added this summer.

Because I’ve learned how to control my diet and exercise regimes, I’m sanguine about my changing body. Though it impacts the way my clothes fit, I’m choosing to view it as an opportunity, as opposed to an obstacle. My new and different shape forces me to make new and different decisions about how to dress. How exciting.