We are standing hip-deep on the shallow side of a pier on the bay. It is a warm-morninged day. We cast a net for glass minnows, for bait, he says, and while we wait my uncle names the fish we could catch. There are the shad, the mullets, the needle-nose gar, the flounder, the sea trout, the stinky old ladyfish, and the Jack Crevalle.

He says we won’t catch any of these. But since there was a rain we could catch a catfish in the brackish water.

We walk through the water, the short way, he says, to where the river meets the bay. I am dragging the now full bait-net. [...]

One of my favorite Twitter personalities these days is, actually, an economist—Umair Haque, who I found because he was being all doom-and-gloom about the culture industry a few weeks ago. (“We should be VERY worried that what tech did to news and books and music it will do to fashion, style, and art,” he said on Friday.) He writes for the Harvard Business Review, but unlike so much of the business literature that made my eyes glaze over when I was reviewing management tomes at a long-ago job, his work is clear-eyed and thoughtful, with a particular emphasis on how the current economy is broken in such a way that it’s causing people to sacrifice their happiness in too many ways.

Lately he has been waxing particularly poetic on the subject of love, making brash declarations that stick out from the rest of my Twitter timeline like giant iron spikes. “Your job is to live an extraordinary life. That has little to do with money, sex, stuff. It has everything to do with Big Love.” “Love isn’t happy puppies. Nor is it just good sex. It’s transformation. And so it takes suffering. [...]

I’ve maybe heard “thinking outside the box” used without irony twice or three times in my life—I’ve not seen it in the wild for a decade. More often, I’ve heard it used as stand-in for a whole horde of metaphors, euphemisms, twists of jargon and pinches of wishful thinking that you might collectively describe as “business speak.” It’s a world of helicopter views over blue skies, drill downs and bleeding edges, a world where we touch base on issues before the close of play but are always, always taking things forward.

For as long as this world has existed it’s been ridiculed, the softest of targets—a low-hanging fruit, you might almost say. Ask a newspaper comment box to name the worst excesses of management speak and you’ll unlock a flood of cathartic mockery, contempt and sheer spleen—not to mention a fair haul of eyeballs, which makes the fearless assault on biz-speak one of those pieces that keeps on being written.

Meanwhile the language itself continues, with brass-necked imperviousness to ridicule. After reading a half-dozen or so pieces from the last decade mocking it, I started to feel that perhaps business speak was being hard done by. Some of it is leaden—”key” as an adjective, the ubiquitous “learnings”—and some is fussy, but there’s a compact, vigorous metaphoric sense to much business language that deserves better than contempt.

Think for a second about the much-derided “blue-sky thinking”—a variant on “outside the box” that encourages knowledge workers to think laterally or creatively. Strip it of context and overuse and it’s a lovely phrase, conjuring lying on one’s back on a summer’s day, or the freewheeling motion of birds in flight. You could substitute “imaginative” for “blue sky,” or “get to the bottom of” for the aggressive “drill down,” but you’d be missing the point. Most of this language originates with trying to spark people into seeing an everyday task—problem-solving or researching—with fresh eyes. On Twitter I saw one marketing academic rail against a press release for not using “everyday words” to describe a particular technique. “Evolved” was one of them. [...]

I had to listen again.

And again.

After 10 or 15 plays, I wondered what it would be like to live in the song a while. After 30 plays I decided I had to take drastic action to get it out of my system.

I have 99.5 days of music in my iTunes library. I am a paying Spotify subscriber and can hear pretty much anything I want within seconds.

I decided to listen only to “#Beautiful” for a week.

To restrict my choice to one song felt perversely old-fashioned—infantilizing, even, as if I had just come back from a birthday party or bar mitzvah with a 45 as a party favor and wouldn’t get my allowance for a week. [...]

Money, of course, is the flamboyant, profane, despicable and grotesque alter ego of Floyd N.M.I. Mayweather Jr., the world’s finest boxer for the entirety of the past decade and the most lucratively wrought villain in the history of sport: an insufferable trash talker who incinerates hundred-dollar bills in nightclubs, tweets photos of his six-figure betting slips and collects Maybachs like they were Silly Bandz. No one in the hurt business can incite more crowd reaction and real-life animosity than Mayweather, who has never been in serious trouble in his professional career. The term in the wrestling industry is “heat”—cheers for the good guy, boos for a villain—a sort of absolute value of passion. Or “relevance,” as Floyd has grown fond of calling it.

The character of Money Mayweather is just that: a character. Or a caricature. Doesn’t matter. What fans think they hate about Floyd the fighter is a calculated business decision, no different than a shrewd viral marketing campaign or the price point of your Extra Value Meal. And it’s worked. Mayweather’s net worth only ballooned after he decided to be the cowboy in the black hat: Since 2006, he’s generated more than $600 million in revenue—mainly because people fork over the pay-per-view price of $59.95 in hopes of watching him lose. For several years he’s been at the top of Forbes’ highest-paid athletes list despite virtually no income from endorsements, which may strike some financial minds as wasted earning potential but which in reality makes him beholden to nobody but himself.

His hard work and dedication to his craft—old-school values too often obscured by the new-school excess and endless posturing his contemptible stage persona typifies—are genuine; there’s no substitute for the commitment, self-sacrifice and mind-turning consistency that have kept him at the summit of the most unforgiving sport for more than a decade. Strip away all the hype, the pomp, the bluster, the racks on racks on racks, and you’re left only with Floyd Mayweather Jr., at once enigmatic and overexposed, insecure and cocky, one hundred and forty-six pounds of fast-twitch muscles and warring contradictions.

• • •

It’s a sunny Tuesday in Las Vegas, five days ahead of Mayweather’s 44th paying fight. When he climbs through the ropes on Saturday night, it will have been 364 days since he outpointed Miguel Cotto in his sternest examination in years—which means he actually lost a few rounds before winning a comfortable decision. [...]

Most were New Brunswick locals, although Brandon Hayes, a spacey but enthusiastic 19-year-old, had made a five-hour bus trip from Boston. He didn’t have a place to sleep that night and planned to wander the streets until morning, he told me as he pulled from a brown-bagged bottle of Jim Beam. But his lack of a plan didn’t matter; he had to see this.

The mural behind Marissa Paternoster depicted the late actor John Candy either urinating or ejaculating neon-green Mountain Dew while surrounded by angelic kittens eating Doritos. Donning a black dress that matched her hair, she was ready to play as her solo project, Noun, with her friend Miranda from Black Wine accompanying on the drums. Brandon bounced on his toes, shook his dreadlocks, and pushed his way to the front of the semi-circle of space that constituted a stage. Opening bands had mumbled into their microphones, their vocals swallowed by the damp, cramped space. Paternoster was the sole exception. At around 9:30 p.m., in the bowels of the venue (dubbed Cooler Ranch), both the singer and her wood-finished Stratocaster started howling loud enough to wake the dead.

Paternoster, who is 26, collects tacky artwork from thrift stores and is obsessed with nuns. (The book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence is a particular favorite.) Her fingernails are so short they will make you wince, and the bangs of her bushy bob rest just above her eyebrows. She carries a red backpack with a patch that reads “Pro-Choice, Anti-Christ.” A self-described introvert, she prefers staying home with her tuxedo cat Earl, who is on an all-raw-meat diet. She goes to bed early and wakes up late because she’s depressed.

Apart from a friend’s birthday party played with her band Screaming Females a month ago, this was her first hometown show in a stretch. Police interference has crippled New Brunswick’s basement scene, and illness has crippled Paternoster. After canceling a slew of tour dates due to an unknown but chronic musculoskeletal condition, she was ready to push back against her body. In a sense, she’s always resisted some unseen force, garnering notoriety for her raucous guitar solos in an era populated by performers that specialize in tastefulness. She’s defied the limitations of her physical frame, too, even before her arms felt like they were being stretched on a rack and her legs perpetually felt like they had just run 25 miles. She’s 5’2″, according to her driver’s license, but the formidable bellows she conjures make her seem larger than life.

• • •

About a month before the Cooler Ranch show, I was a pilgrim like Brandon. During my college years in Gainesville, Fla., house shows were de rigueur, and punk stalwarts like Against Me! and Hot Water Music were hometown heroes. I’d spent the entirety of high school listening to music from New Brunswick and its surrounding areas; one mediocre show would amount to an adolescence wasted romanticizing triviality, as startling as finding out Santa Claus wasn’t real, or that one’s parents weren’t a source of infinite wisdom on purposeful living.

I was also afraid of missing my stop. It was my first foray into Jersey. “You know what’s in New Brunswick?” a bespectacled veteran train traveler asked me. “Nothing. It’s a college town, and you’ll know it when you see it.”

He was right; it was hard to miss the transition. [...]

Stories We Tell is so immersive and so fluent in the universal grammar of families that—regardless of how much your mom looks like Diane Polley—you will probably start mixing up the Polley family’s memories with your own. There is, for example, some crackling Super 8 footage of Diane gabbing away on the phone, holding one finger up to the nagging cameraperson (much of the film’s b-roll comes from the fact that Diane’s husband, the British actor Michael Polley, was a prolific home movie-maker), and mouthing something along the lines of “I’ll be off in one more minute!” (Sarah then cuts to one of Diane’s own sons, now grown, doing his take on this move, clearly one of Diane’s signatures.) It brought me back, vividly, to a recurring scene so inconsequential I hadn’t thought of it in years: My own (usually hyper-attentive) mom on the kitchen phone, chatting with a friend or family member and holding up that same finger, giving my little sister and I that same loving but visibly imploring One more minute? look. But we won’t give her even that. We are stomping on the linoleum, tugging on her pant legs, and I am putting my newly acquired command of the alphabet to good use by scribbling on a memo pad: “MOM GET OFF THE FONE.” My memory then zipped to a scene that took place about 16 years later in that same kitchen, which—like my mother’s hair—had gone through a few full cycles of remodeling. I had just graduated from college and moved home for a couple of months of flailing and thinking too much. One afternoon, as soon as I heard my mom turn on the shower upstairs, I crept into the kitchen to swipe out of the cupboard one of the Joni Mitchell CDs that I had spent my entire adolescence pretending to hate because of her love for it. [...]

We don’t hang out at the mall like the other kids. We hang out in Kenny’s room with the black lights and Emerson, Lake & Palmer posters, or in Paul’s garage, with the drum set and the Ramones’ Road to Ruin playing over and over. But sometimes, we go to the mall to go to Record World—usually, the only reason to get on public transportation or beg someone’s older brother for a ride. We’d pore over their offerings, praying that we’d find 99-cent treasures in the cutout bin. But only Heart and Blue Öyster Cult would be there. (And the 45 of Nazareth’s “Love Hurts,” which got something like 50 spins over the three days after we unearthed it.)

It’s late in the summer, and Kenny’s mom won’t let us hang out in the house and Paul’s mother is having a garage sale. [...]

What pinball’s good for is mindlessness in the most noble sense of the word, the state of absolute ego-demolishment that seems like a psychic necessity to some people, particularly those who have a tendency towards overthinking. During a game, conscious thought is most often a liability, an impediment between your eyes and your fingertips that’s likely to screw up your shot if you let it take up too much of your attention. Watch a skilled player in action: They grow blank-faced and slack-jawed, their world reducing to the table in front of them while the primitive, reaction-based parts of their brains take the load off their frontal lobes. They only show emotion (frustration or triumph) when their ball finally rolls down the drain, stopping play.

The game’s capacity to cause mindlessness probably has a lot to do with the bad rep pinball’s carried around for nearly the entirety of its existence, at least as much as the fact that it was a pachinko-like game of chance before flippers became standard features around the middle of the last century. To American eyes, there’s something suspicious and unwholesome about spending time on something that doesn’t serve any tangible purpose. Two other classic American activities that are closely associated with drinking establishments—billiards and poker—have earned a surprising amount of respectability over the years, but that’s because of their compatibility with this country’s inherent capitalist ambition. Who bets on pinball? I’ve played countless games in every kind of establishment you can find a pinball machine in, in every part of the country, against every type of person you can imagine, and I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve seen someone wager so much as the next round of drinks on a game. For some reason, doing so just doesn’t make sense. [...]

After a five-year break between albums, Mudhoney—needing time to vent from its banal existence of day jobs, wives and kids—are back with the raging garage-punk hard-on Vanishing Point. The fiftysomething Arm is as pissed off as ever, hurling cuss-filled spit bombs at douchebags, critical darlings, and pieces of shit who want to cozy up to him. As he raves, Turner inflicts six-string damage.

Maura spoke to Arm about Mudhoney’s long arc over the phone; he was at Sub Pop’s Seattle HQ, where he works.

The last time we spoke, you were giving me juicy quotes for a piece I did on feedtime.

That was a band I never thought I would see… another band I never thought I would see, much less play with [laughs].

What other bands are you talking about?

The Scientists and the Stooges and The Flesheaters.

You sang on a Scientists tune with the Melvins on their new covers record, Everybody Loves Sausages. Did King Buzzo give you a choice of what covers you wanted to do?

They recorded two songs and they were like, “Sing on both of ‘em.” And I did.

What’s the other one you did?

Which one is on the record?

I’m blanking out.

[laughter]

It was “Swampland” and “Set It On Fire.”

Oh, right. “Set It On Fire” is on Everybody Loves Sausages. Are you working today?

Yeah.

You’re going on tour soon. Do you think things will get fucked up in the Sub Pop warehouse while you’re gone?

No, no. I’m pretty confident that the people who will be working when I’m out know what they are doing.

Why do you think people—rock writers in particular—are so fascinated by your day job?

[laughs] I have no idea. I don’t know if some people have the idea that just because you can put out a record and have a certain amount of name recognition it’s like you’re just living in luxury. I think people in Europe are really surprised.

Do you get psyched when a lot of Mudhoney records are being shipped out?

It’s good to see. I try not to get too psyched because of those times when there aren’t a lot going out. Then it’s like, “Well… ” You gotta keep that kind of balance. [laughs]

What don’t you like about your job?

The thing you don’t like about any job is that you just have to be there at certain hours every day. That’s why it’s work, and that’s why you’re paid to be there. If it was something you just really, really loved to do no matter what, then they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it. [laughs]

I just saw that funny trailer you did with Tad Doyle, Jack Endino, and Kim Thayil from Soundgarden for Sub Pop’s Silver Jubilee, happening this summer. Do you see those guys regularly?

I probably see Kim the most but I see Tad and Jack on occasion, a couple times a year.

Since it’s both Sub Pop and Mudhoney’s 25th anniversaries this year, do you have something super-special planned for the Silver Jubilee?

Um, nothing that I’m aware of. [laughs]

You’re not going to bring back [former member] Matt Lukin to play bass on some songs or something like that?

[laughs] We did a record release show the weekend before last and he got out [laughs] and walked across the stage before we played and then… flipped the crowd off. Good work, Matt.

Lukin used to be on Facebook and posted the sickest shit. What happened to him? Did he take himself off?

No, he got kicked off. I think he did something where he posted his asshole and he sent that to all these girls that were his friends. And that got him kicked off. He’s on there under a pseudonym now.

What’s one of the best Matt Lukin stories you have?

The best Lukin story? [laughs] My kinda weirdest favorite Matt story is watching him become the character that he became.

Is that good or bad?

Well, no, it was weird, like something in his brain broke or something, and I don’t know what happened. It was pretty early on, probably like ’89 or something like that and we were on tour on the West coast. We played the night before in Davis, California, with Cat Butt. We all crashed on somebody’s floor in some condo apartment complex and there was a swimming pool there. The night before was just insane. [...]

For those of you who haven’t subscribed, too, there’s a new default issue for you to download: Best Of Maura, which collects some of the outstanding writing that’s run in the magazine’s first 17 (!) issues. Maura Magazine wouldn’t be where it is without the stellar work of our immensely talented contributors—not to mention our fiction editor Jami Attenberg and our copyeditor Brad Nelson—and I am so grateful for their thoughtful, wonderful writing.

Thanks to the team at 29th Street for their hard work, and thank you for downloading the app, subscribing, and offering your feedback. It’s been a wonderful ride so far and I’m excited for the many things coming up. Drop me a line and let me know what you think, or just to say hi.

Download the new Maura Magazine at the iTunes Store.

For me, this album, its hashtag title fitting for a man whose stage name web browsers and Twitter clients automatically render as a URL, will forever be associated with an eight-months-ago livestream premiere of “Reach For The Stars.” The song was horrible, its dense strings and kid’s choir rising and falling only out of habit, as if they couldn’t come up with anything else worth doing. [...]

Those other campers—five of them, two men, three women—brought Jules into their self-selected clique, which they referred to as “The Interestings.” They are all city dwellers; Jules is the outsider, a scholarship kid from the suburbs who was sent to the camp, ensconced in the Massachussetts woods, after her father passed away and her mother sank into depression. For Jules, the experience is so transformative that it even changed her name; when she left Underhill, the mid-island suburb, she was known as Julie. Rechristening herself—or, rather, being rechristened by Ash Wolf, the gorgeous alpha female of the bunch—was a way out of her previously mundane existence, fate plucking her out of becoming her mother and putting her on the path toward a different type of success.

But what is “success,” anyway? A Dewey Decimal point’s worth of material has been written lately about the concept of Having It All, and The Interestings provides an effective riposte to each one of them with its six focal characters, each of whom enjoys some sort of envious position as their lives unfold. [...]

When I was a kid, I loved watching words on screens float by: The Weather Channel’s just-the-forecast-ma’am incarnation, the Newsday-sponsored channel that would flash stories from the paper across the screen in a way that would make them look as if they were being typed in real time. (Sometimes I would try to type along on the TI994A attached to the TV, but my predictive text abilities weren’t so hot.) I also reveled in watching Swap N’ Shop, Cablevision’s in-house classified ads that would run on channels after they’d gone off the air. [...]

The story of Eric Robert Myers, my dad, begins in Liverpool in 1922. Dad grew up in a proud working-class household and bravely answered the call to fight Hitler in World War II before coming back to The Pool, ready to take whatever life would hand him. As it turned out, this wasn’t much. In 1956, after attending night school, he packed in his dead-end job at the Dunlop Tyre factory and ran away with his wife Bunny to America—which, if you were English in the late 1950s, meant Canada.

Post-war Toronto wasn’t exactly a city of gold in those days, and Dad often remarked that parts of Yonge Street weren’t even paved when they stepped off the train in 1956. Still, the relative prosperity of a town that had never been ravaged by Hitler’s rockets, as Liverpool had, and the abundance of like-minded British expats made it feel a little less alien. At least you could get a decent cuppa tea.

In Toronto, Dad was a salesman; at various times, he peddled insurance, encyclopedias, and Better Business Bureau subscriptions. He was a man of few comforts. One, maybe two, warm beers on a hot day, televised sports, and The Goon Show or Bob And Ray on the radio. [...]