Fall on me / the world resists / the only thing worse than the devil
On R.E.M., Carrie and East of Eden, and The Terror
Welcome to Hell World the internet's premiere television criticism blog.
I hope you like reading because it's a long and packed one today. It would be pretty weird if you were here and did not like reading you have to admit.
Today we have for you nice people two great pieces by two of our best critics. First is Zack Budryk on the new adaptations of East of Eden and Carrie and the recent series Furious.
Luke O'Neil
It is perhaps not incidental that both these characters are women and, even if they don’t originate in texts with a feminist bent (both King and Steinbeck have complicated histories on that front), are both trying to survive in a world hostile to them even if by immoral means. Flanagan and Kazan could not know when the series were in production that they would hit at another high point for women’s frustrations with the abuse they are expected to accept as a fact of nature.
By happenstance or fate, though, both shows overlapped with public fury over yet another appalling crime against a woman and the institutional apathy around it, up to and including the president lamenting that he “felt badly” for the alleged perpetrators because his enemy is investigating them.
Next is Sean T. Collins on the latest installment of the anthology series The Terror: Devil in Silver and the nightmare of U.S. healthcare both literal and metaphorical.
Luke O'Neil
This, he learns from his fellow patients, is because New Hyde Hospital does not want him to leave. No one ever does. They are trapped there, and nobody — not the staff, desperate to keep their jobs; not their families, who might visit but don’t want them back home; certainly not their government, which put them there — is going to rescue them from the demonic entity that lurks behind the ward’s locked silver door. They aren’t patients. They barely qualify as prisoners. They are food being poured into a ravenous maw.
Plus read Collins in conversation with showrunner Chris Cantwell – also co-creator of the amazing Halt and Catch Fire. "Our joke was that the only thing worse than the devil would be the American healthcare system," Cantwell said.
Both are for paid subscribers at the links or down below.
Here's some other free stuff from me to read first.
I had a few pieces published at Flaming Hydra this week.
Luke O’Neil
Here's one I've been thinking about a lot lately since the attempted assassination by ICE of New York man Oscar Belgal and his five year old son.
She wrote poems too
Every single day is like the parable of the man on the deserted island refusing to be saved by boat or by helicopter because he's waiting for God's help to arrive but instead it's about any Democrat with a backbone and an iota of charisma refusing to take the opportunity to become the next president by simply describing reality as it is.
What a small ask that is right?
I'm not even talking about The Truth – although that would be nice – but merely the truth. And how grateful we would be for the pittance. To have someone in a position of power accurately observe and then accurately explain what has happened and why it is wrong. What has long been wrong.
Hell I'd settle for a news outlet capable of and willing to do that.
One of those corrupted things is the longstanding double standard applied to cops of any kind in this country. How fucking convenient it is that they get to fear for their lives anytime they want to absolve themselves of anything they might do and yet when we actually fear for our own lives specifically because of them and do anything a scared person would reasonably do it's used as a justification for our killing.
And now schools are closed throughout Minneapolis for the rest of the week. To protect the children from the government.
There is a category of people in this country that are supposed to be composed in high stress situations. They train for them in fact and get paid well and are given very broad leeway on how they react. Still they shit their pants constantly and cry about how scared they are all the time. And we're supposed to venerate them as our sainted warrior class.
Don't you drive a little tightly and perhaps poorly when there's just a normal cop standing there as you go by?
Tense up.
Imagine a bunch of them with guns pointed at you. You would of course not be calm and collected.
Or maybe you would. Perhaps you would smile and tell them you are not even mad at what they’ve done. What they’re about to do.
My word what a lovely night of friends new and old, irl and from the computer alike, onstage and in the crowd the other night in Brooklyn. Thank you to everyone who came it was very nice meeting a few Hell World readers. It was all enough to make a grumpy old Boston salt like me smile once or twice.
Rax and Niko did a great job organizing it and you should read all their stuff. I knew most everyone's work but one highlight for me was being introduced to the music of the talented and lovely Wendy Eisenberg which you should check out here.
aigroegs
I'd say the only drawback was Josh Gondelman throwing his weight around all night and demanding his own private area in the green room. "I'm on NPR" he shouted a few times.
The other thing I want to point out is that I most definitely did not mix up the order of my pages while I was reading and throw my an entire essay out of wack. Someone would have noticed if I had done that.
All the readers last night have contributed to Hell World before a few times but since we're talking about music why not read Rax and Josh on their favorite Weezer songs; Grace on her favorite Lana Del Rey songs; and Niko on her favorite R.E.M. songs and why not, while we're here, read me on my favorite David Berman songs.
The idea was the writers would write about their favorite song then the musicians would cover it.
Check out a couple videos of Ted playing Fall On Me and Ted and Augusta playing Can't Hardly Wait.
Anyway follow everyone's work.
Josh Gondelman - @joshgondelman
Rax King - @raxkingisdead
Luke O’Neil - @lukeoneil47
Grace Robins-Somerville - @grace_roso
Niko Stratis - @nikostratis
Wendy Eisenberg - @wendyeyes
Augusta Koch - @guffy212
Ted Leo - @realtedleo
Here's my thing I read about Fall On Me which I expanded from something I wrote a while back.
Fall On Me
Everyone used to say that they had no idea what Michael Stipe was singing about and especially so on the early records. And so it was kind of a big deal when Stipe came out last year and clarified the actual lyrics to It’s the End of the Word as We Know It. He did it on Bluesky of all places. To the delight of everyone there because anyone on Bluesky is old enough to be an R.E.M. fan.
One of the lines, he wrote, was in fact:
“Team by team reporters, baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped. Look at that low playing, fine, then.”
After that, and wiih an assist to really bolster my thesis, such as it is, here, he followed up by saying Mike Mills had to correct him on that one.
“Mike Mills says ‘Love your posts on BlueSky, but wasn’t it ‘that low plane, fine, then’ not ‘flying’ then?”
“I remember you said it was from a roadside sign about watch out for low planes flying. But that was a long time ago,” Mills told him.
“So I’m doing my best” Stipe said.
What the fuck were you doing on stage all those years then man? Just making sounds.
Well yes. Kind of.
I don’t think it was until Green – about eight or nine years into their career – that they ever printed any lyrics in a record sleeve. In this case for the song World Leader Pretend.
“I sit at my table and wage war on myself. It seems like it's all, it's all for nothing. I know the barricades. And I know the mortar in the wall breaks. I recognize the weapons. I used them well.”
Man what a song.
The song I’m here to talk about today though, Fall On Me, had a video with the lyrics on the screen a couple of years earlier apparently, but I was too young to know about it at the time. Being too young for the early R.E.M. days is one of the few things I am still considered young for.
If I were elected senator or president tomorrow they would say "Behold! There goes the youngest man alive!"
If I died right up here on stage they would also say I was too young to die. Some of you in here would post that. Will post that.
The point is it was hard to understand what this motherfucker was talking about for so long. But that collaborative tension is and always has been part of the process of becoming an R.E.M. fan I believe.
I Believe! Now there’s another good song.
It was a symbiosis kind of deal. Participatory art if you will. In the way that the film monster that is withheld – Monster! What a record! Everyone sold that CD back and they were wrong to do so.
In the way that the film monster that is withheld is always scarier than the one you see right upfront, the lyrics you can’t immediately parse are always more fraught with meaning because now you are writing them on your own. You’ve been thrust on stage.
Stipe did become a big time New York Art guy eventually inevitably but I don’t know if this kind of thing was always his intention. I know they were trying to be mysterious early on but maybe he was just shy. Or lazy. Too pretty to be smart yet.
God he was so pretty back then. Have you looked at pictures of young Michael Stipe lately?
As someone who did my share of it in my day, let me tell you that having to write lyrics sucks so fucking bad. Writing essays or journalism or poems or short stories was always easy for me but lyrics are a different thing. Maybe because it’s not solo like a traditional writer. As a singer your lyrics have to be as good as the music your friends have written alongside you.
This is a sidebar but I just had a vision of an alternate universe where Stipe never went bald.
Billy Corgan too.
Also me.
Both me and Stipe became less evil after losing our hair I think. Billy became more so. It can embitter a man or free him of pretense.
I do write my poems like that too though. What I was just saying a few minutes ago about Stipe’s writing. The percussive phonetics being more important than the information that the words are meant to convey. Sound over meaning.
“Any other lyrics” besides End of the World, Stipe posted, and again, this was happening on Bluesky, "just form vowels and syllables. And mean it.”
“And don’t even try chronic town murmur or reckoning by the way," he wrote.
Becoming. Being an R.E.M. fan has always been a state of becoming. This band can be your favorite band for your entire life even if you never listened to any of the first or second or third decade of their output (alright maybe not the third) and no one is mad about that. Should be mad about that actually. I do have some friends five or ten years older than me who love Chronic Town and Murmur and Reckoning more than anything and are still mad about Green if you can believe that.
Another sidebar here. I saw an old list of Kurt Cobain’s favorite 50 records going around online recently and Green was on there strangely.
Orange Crush and You Are the Everything are obviously the ones for me off that record but I will defend Stand and Pop Song 89. I don’t care. Whatever baggage people have about that shit is ancient history. I'm not trying to impress hipsters from the past. I'm not even trying to impress you hipsters from the present.
So.
Becoming is the thing.
You always had to renew your allegiance to R.E.M. like a driver’s license with every successive record.
I don’t know what that means but it sounds like something which is basically my point about lyrics.
I just looked up the words to Losing My Religion. I thought this whole time he was singing:
"Like a hurt, lost and blinded foal, foal…"
I didn’t even know what a foal was when I first heard the song but it made me feel like I should know what things are and therefore I tried to.
Who gives a shit what a foal is. That’s what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t matter what he's saying. I consumed and digested and processed the general intent of that song instantly upon my first listen. No thinking just song. No words just song. Mandolin and sadness. And it nourished me and grew inside of me. Like an animal emotionally manipulating you with its eyes even though it cannot speak. A foal perhaps? Like a person coming on to you in a foreign language you do not understand.
Maybe like going to the opera in Italian. I don’t know I never did that.
Fall On Me is without a doubt my favorite song of theirs and always has been. Life’s Rich Pageant is my favorite record of theirs by which I mean the most personal to me even though Automatic is clearly the closest to divine. Is divine. Forget the hits. What about Find the River and Try Not to Breathe?
I looked up the lyrics to Fall On Me earlier and didn’t recognize a lot of these words as being what I remember them being besides the fourth line which is the actual hook.
What is going on here? I’ve listened to this song at least one thousand times – 25 this very week – and had no idea the words feather or iron or pulleys were involved.
"There's a problem, feathers, iron. Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys. Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air. Buy the sky and sell the sky and tell the sky and tell the sky..."
I would’ve guessed it was something like:
"There’s a problem they’re designing. Blabla building. Wait some bullies. Better sit the ground before to wait beneath the end..."
Not exactly that but something like that.
My version sucks but it doesn’t make a difference is what I mean. Everyone knows what he’s singing in Everybody Hurts and maybe that’s why it’s the song that everybody who has ever heard of R.E.M. thinks of when they think of R.E.M. but maybe it’s ok to tuck away a little project you and the boys worked on together and keep it for yourself.
I do a lot of posting about R.E.M. online and one time I said Fall On Me was my favorite song and someone said:
“People can argue whatever they want about R.E.M. but the one indisputable truth is that Fall On Me is their best song. It’s not just perfect but perfect in the most R.E.M. way possible.”
What they were actually saying there I think is that this is a Mike Mills song. Many of them are Mike Mills songs but this is the type of Mike Mills song that even a casual fan can recognize as being a Mike Mills song. Everyone in the band is so good don’t get me wrong but R.E.M. is just a very good wiry southern post punk band without Mike Mills.
Texarkana is another favorite. The platonic ideal of someone else sings lead and the frontman sings background to me along with I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dream by Weezer.
I should say I did always pay attention to what Stipe was saying outside of the lyrics though. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I wouldn’t have become the person I became if not for him and Kurt and Morrissey (sorry) and then Rage Against the Machine modeling a different kind of behavior and world of politics for boys and young men in the 90s. I was a jock from the suburbs of Boston. It could have ended up so much worse.
It bums me out sometimes that I do not think they mean anything to many young people in the way that I think Nirvana perhaps still does for certain kinds of kids. The Smiths and The Cure seem to constantly be in a state of perpetual rediscovery as well. R.E.M. outsold all of those bands did you know that? Even Nirvana. Maybe that seems obvious but I didn’t think it was that lopsided.
I was hoping a couple of years ago after The Bear needle drop of Strange Currencies that we might start hearing their music popping up more but I guess not. It’s rare that you want to tell a band you love to license more of their material to movies and shitty TV shows like the famous FX comedy series The Bear.
They don’t seem worried about that kind of thing though. They made a lot of money. They are one of the only bands who counted their money and said ok that’s enough. That is almost unheard of. Especially now but also fifteen years ago. I am not mad they became insanely popular to be clear. I think that is marvelous. What a thing to have happened. One of the coolest underground bands coming out of nowhere in the south in the early 1980s as a cult hit then on the cover of Rolling Stone in a few years then on MTV everywhere then the biggest rock band in the world then just putting out very good to pretty good records every other year until they said enough.
And they never came back.
That is important. They withheld that from us. Obscured it is another way you could put it. I wonder what it is supposed to mean.
In other friend news check out this package I just got from Dan Ozzi.
Get your own copy and a bunch of other cool shit by Dan here.
While I was searching for that I just came across this interview Dan did with Augusta earlier this year.
Dan Ozzi
All her new music is great too but this one from her old band Cayetana is still very special to me.
And to me you are a laundromat.
Oh, I picture you like that.
Trying to get clean again.
Well, just keep spinning,
Spinning, my friend.
Good taste-haver of the week!
Let's move on to this week's features shall we?
The world resists me and I resist the world
by Zack Budryk
We’ve been trying to understand evil from evil’s perspective almost since we acknowledged the concept. To simply leave it unexamined, to declare that evil is wholly a choice, can be comforting to those who want to draw a clear distinction between it and themselves as the Good Guys, but to only react to evil, to simply penalize it rather than seek a deeper understanding of whence it comes and how to prevent it, is to constantly play catch up.
In the 1970s, FBI agent John Douglas sought to understand what motivates some of the most aberrant behavior seen in our species. Douglas’s brainchild, the bureau’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, pioneered criminal profiling based in part on interviews with some of the nation’s most notorious incarcerated murderers, from serial- and spree-killers like David Berkowitz and Richard Speck to Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. The scientific validity of much of the profiling field has come under scrutiny, but it still represents a concession by even federal law enforcement that certain behavior can’t simply be incarcerated into submission.
In fiction, putting ourselves in the shoes of monsters has sometimes seemed like a challenge to see how much complexity a good writer can draw out of the most seemingly one-dimensional examples. A cackling witch whose most iconic line threatens a little dog led to Gregory Maguire’s bestselling book Wicked, adapted as a Broadway musical and movie that both became cultural phenomena. In his 1971 novel Grendel, John Gardner examined the nature of the cannibalistic monster of the ancient heroic poem Beowulf and how being cursed as a monster is a self-fulfilling prophecy. “The world resists me and I resist the world,” Gardner’s Grendel summarizes. And of course one of the most celebrated poems in the English language, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, asks us to consider things through the eyes of the devil himself.