THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 15
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TOURDEPT.
FA DKIDS
S
poon, shooting pool. Or really just
two members of Spoon, the rock
band from Texas: Britt Daniel, the singer
and songwriter, and Jim Eno, the drum-
mer. They were in a West Village pool
hall called the Cellar Dog, formerly the
Fat Cat, which Daniel had discovered
one night some years ago when the wait
to get into a few other jazz clubs nearby
was too long. Spoon had a scheduled
appearance the next day on “The Late
Show with Stephen Colbert,” and an-
other after that at the Hammerstein
Ballroom. But now they had time to
kill—an idle afternoon on tour.
Daniel and Eno ordered pints and
got a table. Eno took a few cues off a
rack and rolled them on the felt. In one
corner, a pair of let’s-say-Bulgarian dudes
in tight pants played a fierce game of
Ping-Pong. The speakers were blasting
DJ Drama: “Stop bein’ friendly to the
fuckboys, stop bein’ friendly to the fuck-
boys.” Daniel racked, Eno broke.
Daniel, blond, lean, and a little scruffy,
had on gray jeans, a Joe Strummer T-shirt,
and a green denim jacket. Eno, dark-haired,
stockier, with a hard-to-place George
Clooney vibe around the eyes, had on
black jeans, a black shirt, and a black denim
jacket. They’d been in bands together for
thirty years, all but two in Spoon.
Had they ever had a falling out?
“Hmm, constant fallings out, right?”
Daniel said. Eno laughed. “Never a big
one,” Daniel went on. “But I definitely
have pissed Jim off.”
“I’ve pissed you off, too.”
“Probably. When we met, we were
young, and I definitely—I’m still a
dick sometimes, but less often than I
used to be.”
“I don’t think you’re really a dick.”
“I was a dick the other day, and I
apologized to you.”
“I didn’t even think twice about it.”
“That wouldn’t have happened when
we first met.”
“I probably would have dwelled on
it a lot more. And you probably wouldn’t
have apologized.”As for the offense, Daniel said, “It
was him asking if we—I don’t know if
I can explain it.”
“I can,” Eno said, smiling. “Do you
want me to?”
No need.
Eno was better at pool than Daniel.
He more or less ran the table, in a self-
effacing kind of way. He is five years
older than Daniel, who was turning fifty-
one the following day. Daniel, from Tem-
ple, Texas, grew up in a household reli-
gious enough that the name of Spoon’s
latest album, “Lucifer on the Sofa,” has
been problematic at home. “I planned
for weeks about how to tell my mother
about the title,” he said.
Originally from Rhode Island, Eno
moved to Houston after college to workas a computer engineer at Compaq. A
job at Motorola designing microproces-
sors, and an itch to make music, took
him to Austin, in 1992, where he and
Daniel, a student at the University of
Texas, played in a rockabilly band called
the Alien Beats.
“I only started playing drums when
I was twenty-one or so,” Eno said.
“I was always asking for a drum set
growing up.”
“Really?” Daniel said.
“My parents, they’d say, ‘It’s too noisy.’
My mom still feels bad.”
“Interesting. I didn’t know that. You
couldn’t play in the garage?”
“They just—didn’t want it.” Instead,
he bought drumsticks and wore out
the upholstery on the couch. “TheyRuth Estévez, Amant’s chief curator,
walked in. In addition to dozens of
busted-currency boats, called “Fleeting
Fleet,” the exhibition was to include a
six-foot-long mobile that, owing to an
airport-worker strike in France, was
stranded in Paris. Estévez had been call-
ing FedEx for days, begging the com-
pany to turn the mobile over to a friend,
who would bring it to New York. “But
it’s in the warehouse there, and there is
no way to take it out,” she said. “It’s like
it’s kidnapped.”
Zaccagnini lives in Sweden, a coun-
try known for generous family-leave
policies and a notable lack of financial
upheavals. She was born in Argentina,
which has been studied extensively for
the number of times the government
has defaulted on its debt (nine). Her
mother was a Lacanian psychoanalyst,
and her father was a car salesman and
a part-time inventor; he created a ma-
chine that could test the ink on Amer-
ican dollar bills to determine whether
they were authentic. It became highly
useful as the trading of dollars blew up
on the illegal market.
In 1981, when the exchange rate was
particularly favorable, Zaccagnini’s par-
ents decided to move the family to Bra-
zil, where their money would go further
and allow them to buy a house with a
pool. Zaccagnini’s grandmother set up
a sewing machine in her kitchen and
made Zaccagnini’s mother a vest with
special hidden compartments, in which
about thirty thousand U.S. dollars could
be concealed and secreted across the
border. “She got really warm,” Zaccag-
nini said, remembering the flight. “But
she couldn’t take it off.”
The family settled in São Paulo, and
Zaccagnini’s father came up with a
scheme to hide their savings and thwart
potential robbers, putting some dollars
in a safe that he built behind an electri-
cal outlet, and thousands more dollars
and German marks in a plastic jar that
he buried under tiles behind a bidet.
One night, Zaccagnini said, she came
home late and found her father on his
hands and knees, piecing together mu-
tilated hundred-dollar bills. Water had
got into the jar, and the money had con-
gealed into a wet ball. Not all of the
notes could be saved. Zaccagnini said,
“My mother was super mad.”
—Sheelah Kolhatkar
Britt Daniel and Jim Eno