It’s what makes us human

Last week David Roth texted from a weekend getaway in Connecticut that he had just walked by what looked like a Rob Zombie painting exhibit. Please go in and write about it I said instantly. That to me is what it's all about. Being able to publish writers you admire greatly writing about whatever happens to catch their attention even if – or especially if – it's not about all of this. Unsurprisingly he nailed it. I'm very excited for you to read it.

You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it in full however. (This will go out in the next Hell World newsletter in a day or two.)

I felt similarly about this piece by Parker Molloy from the other day. It's a must read I would say.

Roth as you know is one of the people behind Defector – the last good website. The last time he turned up in Hell World was right after he and the gang had up and quit Deadspin. We talked about it here. It's interesting to go back and look at how different things are now. And of course how they are nevertheless the same.

We chose not to continue to eat shit

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

So too with this interview I did with a bunch of the other Defector folks right before they were about to launch the site in July of 2020. July 2020 man. What a concept.

Speaking of R0b Zombie he also has a cameo in a short story from my new book We Had It Coming. It's the one about Pete Buttigieg eating a shredded up Cinnabon like a buffalo wing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to help

This story appears in my new book We Had It Coming available now. I was looking at my phone on the couch when D___ looked up from her phone on the couch and she goes please don’t ever open the door for a strange woman if she arrives asking

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

It goes in part like so:

Our niece had slept over a few nights before and she’s at that age where she’s starting to watch horror movies and loves to talk about them almost to scare herself on purpose in the daylight when it's safer. To poke her feelers out into what the frightening world can sometimes be in the way that kids do. She asked me what my favorite horror movie ever was and I thought about it for a minute or two and couldn’t decide on just one like I was worried about insufficiently impressing this child with my refined taste and I said well I will tell you one horror movie that has stuck with me because of how abject and mean it was and that is House of 1000 Corpses. It was made by Haverhill Massachusetts’ own Robert Bartleh Cummings I said and she said she hadn’t heard of it. I thought about pulling up More Human Than Human for her on YouTube to illustrate what the nineties were like for me and her parents more than anything but instead I said have you ever heard of the band Wet Leg and she said what and I said have you ever heard of the band Wet Leg and she said yeah. She said that she had heard of them. D___ said what band are you talking about and I sang a little of Chaise Longue with the cute accent and everything and she said oh right. 

I don’t think I’ve ever spent any real time in Haverhill despite having a degree in Massachusetts Studies (unaccredited) although I know it’s a decently large river milltown that has probably seen better days even though it was founded something like four hundred years ago. To be frank I imagine the days were worse then no matter what it’s like there now. No one ever says a town has seen worse days it’s always the other way around.

It’s what makes us human

by David Roth

It’s one of the little games a person plays while going through the Becoming Washed years—is it upsetting that this person, who mattered to you in your youth or was just ambiently present for it, is now old? For instance: Kenyon Martin, who I pretended to be while dunking on a subway station beam while waiting for the train on the way to my first adult job, has a son who is also a professional basketball player. That’s fine, I guess; people start families, and it has been a long time since I did a chin-up in a subway station. Now consider that the kid is currently playing in China, and quite possibly done as a NBA player after several years spent bouncing around various benches. Well that I don’t care for. I actually think that’s rude. It’s a delicate balance, and an entirely arbitrary one. 

It was initially surprising to me that I found it fairly easy to process the fact that Rob Zombie is 60 years old, and painting. There was never a public version of Rob Zombie that seemed young, exactly; the look he cultivated was closer to “previously dead” than anything traditionally youthful. There was too much stagecraft and artifice and makeup and hair involved in the version of Robert Cummings (that’s his name) that became famous to get an accurate reading re: when the very gnarly man howling at the center of all that strobing light and noise—a man who had very consciously styled himself like one of the feral desert weirdos from the 1977 version of The Hills Have Eyes—might have graduated from high school. You wouldn’t think to worry about how old that dreadlocked dead guy in a big weird hat is. You would be more concerned with how recklessly he is driving his overstated steampunk car. 

Zombie became extremely famous and successful making arch, theatrical, glossy heavy music during what now looks like the last period in which anyone could do that. In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I never really vibed with the music Zombie made in his platinum-plus era, first with the mid-’90s iteration of White Zombie and then as a solo artist; the hits, which were all I really heard, all sounded too shiny for my taste, and while I appreciated that there was an elaborate joke embedded in all of it, I never quite felt like I was in on that joke. (I was happy to discover, while preparing to write this, that White Zombie’s significantly skankier late-’80s stuff, which the Numero Group remastered and released as a deluxe box set in 2016, is excellent; when I was in middle school and Zombie really was young, the band sounded kind of like The Stooges.) (I am also old.)