Dead soldiers lined up on the table

Ratboys, The Testament of Ann Lee, smoking, The Small Bow and more

Luke O'Neil

31 Jan 2026 • 24 min read

Anyone read through an onslaught of stomach-turning typo-strewn emails between a cabal of rich perverts that run the world lately? Today's newsletter is already kind of loaded so I don't have much time to get into it but I do love how every statement Elon Musk makes about Epstein has Ron Howard narrating.

We've got Christopher Harris back today writing about the new Ratboys album. We all love Ratboys baby. All my friends love The Nice Ratboys. Their gorgeous and heartbreaking song The Window was number two on my favorites songs of 2023 in fact.

And also Zack Budryk on the acclaimed new film The Testament of Ann Lee.

The French New Wave icon Francois Truffaut opined in 1973 that the nature of the medium means that “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Perhaps a similar dynamic is at work with depicting faith on film: to depict the spirit that moves someone like Ann Lee, you must use the filmic language of delusion, of hallucination, of a break with reality. That’s what a religious experience is, after all, even for a believer: a piercing of human reality into something else entirely. The nature of faith means it’s something you have to see for yourself rather than second hand, but maybe the hallucinatory beauty of art is the next best thing.

Both of those are for paid-only subscribers for now. Please consider a subscription. I know, I know, I know. I don't like it any better than you do.

Paying for writing is good for the soul

I'm happy to have a new poem or essay or whatever it is I do up at The Small Bow today. The Small Bow is one of the best newsletters we have going (as I once told New York Magazine) and has been for many years. It goes in part like so...

Comes a time when the ashtray wants emptying. No one has as of yet codified what number of cigarettes constitutes a full ashtray mind you. It is a matter of art not science. Of individual taste. But after a certain point it is undeniable by any reasonable standard. It’s no coincidence an overflowing ashtray on a coffee table in a film is shorthand for a person who has given up.

So too the countertop filthy with empties. Dead soldiers lined up on the table as the song goes.

I maintain a modicum of order. The bottles are placed in the bin and the bin is taken outside to the larger bin and the larger bin is wheeled out to the curb to await its deliverance. One of another series of lies we tell ourselves.

One of the best Hell Worlds ever – the one about drinking and "going to Japan" etc – originally appeared at TSB. Read it if you never did. It's also kind of a prequel of sorts to my piece Round Pond, Maine.

Sometimes I talk to my friends who are sober the same way you would when someone has just gotten back from a vacation to somewhere cool you’ve always wanted to go. Oh wow what was Japan like? And they tell you how great it is and you say you definitely are going to go someday but you know you probably won’t but you say it anyway.

Sorry to AJ and to his readers and to everyone and mostly to myself that I haven't gone to Japan yet. One of these days!

I also really liked this one by Ben Gaffaney about the last day he drank. Which happened to be the day David Berman killed himself.

On my last drinking day, I wrecked a 6,000-pound truck in a heavily populated area, and somehow I didn’t injure anyone. I went to jail, but not prison. A few days later, just before I went to rehab, I found written in my pocket notebook, “Why doesn’t anyone know how sick I am? Why doesn’t anyone care?” in giant letters across two pages, hand-shredded them and buried them under the wet food trash. If I’d died the same day as David, it would have been my suicide note.

Over nearly five years of sobriety, I’ve found so much strength in listening. At AA, I make a point to turn and watch the person sharing unless it appears to bother them, because I want to do my part as part of a collective, which isn’t easy for a loner like me. I feel a lot of relief when I share, but I gain strength from others, hearing every share as a tiny segment of a longer story to come.

But when someone dies, particularly an artist, they become a complete story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I normally can’t help but put the artist’s work into context after the fact, knowing the work is done.

And this one by John Saward about mourning your only-sort-of-friends that are nevertheless a big part of your life as a drinker.

There were months when I saw Jim and the guys in that bar more than I saw girls I was living with, more than I saw my parents when I was a child. We’d close up at 2 in the morning and they would be there again at 1 in the afternoon the next day, asking if I’d turned the fryer on yet. Sometimes they brought their half-eaten takeout with them from home, container still cold from the fridge.

The bar was a real shit hole, but in a way like it hadn’t accepted it yet; it wasn’t a place where the squalor is one of its charms, with the curated jukebox and the affected 28-year-olds and the irony. It was once a proud and crowded sports bar, but neglect had brought it here, broke it down and stranded it somewhere in 2005, and there was an owner who was once a rowdy drunk before sobriety had turned him cold and quiet, and who seemed to wish he was still living back before he had to make some hard decisions. There was a Bernie Williams jersey hanging behind the bar next to an autographed picture of Trish Stratus. There were mice that got trapped in the walls and died and stunk so bad it would seep out of the plug-holes in the electrical outlets. A satellite dish that would freeze in these pixelated 8-bit scenes every time it drizzled. A retired-model central air unit that chugged so hard to keep up with the thermostat it would freeze itself to a kind of death and you’d have to chip the ice off it to bring it back to life.

I recently contributed to TSB's Men Who Are Afraid series and said this:

We never had children. That's largely due to me not caring one way or the other for many years until eventually saying fuck it why not? Then finding out it was a bit too late for non-rich people like us. Slow motion video of the championship losing shot. I'm scared I squandered an important part of existence for her is the point.

Then again I just watched “Adolescence” and I would be scared I would raise a son like that had I had a son so those two things even each other out. I'm back to square one baby!

I was sincerely always scared of bringing some fucking asshole into the world though. Some random pud. A guy. Which is part of why I never pushed for having a kid. I worried that I would be my exact father to my hypothetical son and I sort of am but the kid we both raised is me. Father and son at once. Now I just gotta figure out what the Holy Ghost in the metaphor is.

Anyway the point is I'm scared I'll regret this forever! Mostly for her but also a little for me.

AJ Daulerio who runs TSB wrote about his favorite Chris Cornell songs for Hell World here.

I also really loved this piece of his for Flaming Hydra about a pet crayfish situation gone wrong.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, I heard my 5-year-old daughter calling out my name, a faint sound of terror in her voice. I was groggy and disoriented, but then I heard my older boy explaining what had happened. “Dad, Chompy escaped.”

I assumed they must have seen the empty tank and were upset. I got up, scratched my head, and prepared to tell them the sad news. Even though they didn’t like Chompy, they still considered him a pet. Death is never easy to explain to a child, but I was prepared to be a kind and compassionate parent just in case.

But when I walked toward her bedroom, I saw what she was so upset about—it was Chompy, briskly marching out of her bedroom. His antennae were waving wildly and his big claws were open. Chompy looked ready to fight.

He had a great talk with Trey Anastasio on the podcast recently.

Speaking of Flaming Hydra we turned two years old this week! Here's a bunch of free ones from the last year you can read.

This was a lovely and very funny piece by my old pal David Thorpe about his longstanding bit with the recently passed Dan McQuade who you can read more about in Hell World here.

It’s hazy, but I think I first came to know Dan because he’d send me funny story tips when I was a writer at the Boston Phoenix in the early 2010s, doing a music column called the Big Hurt. One of my recurring bits was posting a roundup of music-related press releases: artists partnering with brands and generating very stilted, very fake PR quotes. (My favorite example: Pete Wentz purportedly uttering the words “I am stoked to collaborate with Nordstrom.”)

For some reason, Dan was maybe the only person on earth who found these stupid quotes as funny as I did, and he would often send me press release quotes he found in the course of his own work as a writer. He gifted me with gems like “Making content sharing easy is what Kodak is all about, so this integration was a natural fit between Kodak and Kings of Leon,” which made it into the column all the way back in February of 2011.

I saw that Toad the Wet Sprocket was playing sometime soon and it made me think back to this bit me and Thorpe did for the Village Voice ten years ago Two Jerks Revisit Alt Rock’s Nicest Band Toad the Wet Sprocket. I was pleasantly surprised to see it still exists online. Mostly for this last line here:

DT: I’m sure if Toad the Wet Sprocket had just been advertising a show by Todd Wetsprocket (of Toad the Wet Sprocket) (Featuring the songs of Toad the Wet Sprocket), we wouldn’t be talking about a 360%-funded Kickstarter, we’d be talking a slightly underfunded county fair. The big difference here is that this is the Toad boys are back in full force. We’re talking original lineup, man. Actually, I have no idea whether this is the original lineup, but they could tell me it was and I’d believe them, because who gives a shit?

But yes, my cockles are a little warmed by the big crowdfunding success of this Toad record, probably because I only remember them for their vaguely pleasant music and their ridiculous name. (Trivia: most people think Toad the Wet Sprocket is a terrible name, but it’s actually a Monty Python reference, making it a nerdy and terrible name.) Maybe I’m just pleasantly shocked to see their name pop up again, since I figured they died along with all the other ’90s AOR power-pop bands in the Dishwallocaust.

Wow. Look at all that reading! So much to read. And mostly for free.

Ok here comes Zack Budryk on The Testament of Ann Lee and Christopher Harris on Ratboys. Plus Luke's Movie Corner and The Song of the Week.

You'll have to be a paid member to read on. Thanks for being here either way.

And remember: There are more of us than there are of them.