The sun is setting on the city. During the day, whole countries of clouds passed beneath the blue sky. At this moment, the window to the universe is opening and the stars are coming out. The bar I'm about to walk into, Boxcar Ale House, is on the border between the Ballard/Interbay industrial district and the quiet neighborhood of Magnolia. Across the street from the bar, train tracks, train cars, manufacturing complexes, warehouses; behind the bar, roads lined by homes and apartment buildings. On one side, the world of work and exhaustion; on the other, rest and recuperation. The Ale House—which has a slim two-story facade but a long and bulky back—is something like a gateway from one zone (social reproduction) to the other (domestika).

My reason for visiting this bar is the jukebox that's right next to the entrance, just below a window that looks out onto the outdoor seating area. This machine is stuffed with pages and pages of music. Not one of them has an image of a musician or an album cover; each only contains dense lists and sections of tiny writing. Indeed, to look for a band in the jukebox (turn after turn) almost feels like academic work—you scrutinize the pages like a scholar looking for some important but very small detail in a tome. It took about five minutes to find something I wanted to play: Portishead's "Wandering Star."

I've always imagined this classic triphop tune to be inspired by this passage in the dazzling science chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses: "Of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures." I also suspect that it might be inspired by the last lines of William Butler Yeats's "Who Goes with Fergus?": "For Fergus rules the brazen cars,/And rules the shadows of the wood,/And the white breast of the dim sea/And all dishevelled wandering stars." Beth Gibbons of Portishead sings: "The blackness, the darkness, forever." Later, I would sing, during the excellent karaoke session at the back of the bar, the Church's "Under the Milky Way": "And it's something quite peculiar/Something shimmering and white/It leads you here, despite your destination/Under the Milky Way tonight." For whom it may concern, during my visit, I ordered a plate of french fries, a plate of chicken wings, a shot of house tequila, and three glasses of house red wine.