No lessons learned
Come see me at The Sinclair in Cambridge on Saturday November 8 with Dave Wedge, Bill Shaner, Eoin Higgins, and Evan Greer; Wednesday November 12 at the Francis Kite Club in New York City with Spencer Ackerman, Kylie Cheung, Edward Ongweso, and Grace Robins-Somerville; and Thursday November 6 at the Pen & Pencil in Philadelphia with Emilie Friedlander of the Culture Journalist podcast (+ more to come).
I was pretty sure I had interviewed Marc Maron at some point. I could not have told you when it was or even what publication it was for never mind what we talked about. But sure enough after some searching I found evidence of it in my email this morning.
(Apparently the useless fucking Gmail search does a thing now where it shows you synonyms for words you put in i.e. results for "career" instead of "occupation." Has to be some cool new "A.I." innovation. Piece of shit.)
I also learned I had interviewed George R. R. Martin at some point too in my dinking around which is weird. I guess that's another thing Maron and I have in common. Little to no memory of all the thousands of people we've talked to over the years.
But the actual interview itself with Maron is nowhere to be found. It was for the Boston Metro in 2015. So much of my past work is gone. So much of everything is gone. What could I have possibly asked him then? Was I nervous? I know it could not have been worse than the Tracy Morgan interview from around that time because that was one of the worst ones I've ever done. I'll never forget that one. Mostly because I use 30 Rock before bed every night of my life like xanax.
On the topic of old Boston publications that no longer exist I just saw that we put out this iconic cover at the Dig 20 years ago this month.
Although come to think of it I may have already gotten fired by then. Like I said I don't remember so many things.
I was thinking about all that Maron business because it's the final episode of the WTF podcast today. As many predicted it's a talk with Obama. I was prepared to get choked up about the end of an era but I guess not. You won't be surprised to hear it's an hour of his usual "come together despite our differences" shit and Maron saying "right, right."
It's always two center left libs telling each other exactlyyyy.
I'm not sure how he hasn't yet learned the lesson that that does not work by now but never learning a single lesson is one of the pillars of the Democratic Mind.
Here's the guy that the 77 year old Mills has been enlisted to stop by the way.
Platner may or may not be the real deal but he at least understands the vast appetite from the left and from normies alike for holding these monsters responsible for the atrocities they are committing.
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I will miss hearing from Maron though. A constant presence in my life for over a decade now. He even influenced this newsletter in a big way when I realized you can just ramble about whatever at the start of things before getting to the main event.
For today's feature Sean T. Collins returns to write about Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, the new Kneecap film, and troubles, and Troubles, both old and new. He wrote about The Hunting Wives earlier this month.
Luke O’Neil
You'll have to be a paid subscriber to read the piece in full. Here's a nice discount.
I never did come up with a catchphrase like Maron's Lock the gates! or Boomer lives! though. Maybe this one will stick:
We had it coming.
Now obviously I am no fan of the Senate and have little to zero respect for any governing body in this country but I suppose it was – if not cool – then at least somewhat notable to see a Hell World article being read on the Senate floor last week. Unfortunately it was by Rand Paul lol.
The piece in question was this one by Jake Romm. I've shared it a number of times already but it really is one of the best we've ever published.
Luke O’Neil
I'm not going to hand it to Rand Paul in anything but the narrowest of terms on the rare occasion he is right but he is right in this case. The president has no right to summarily execute people suspected of being "terrorists" or "drug smugglers" simply because he wants to. That's true of Trump now and it was true of Obama then.
Here's the video if you'd like to watch it.
And here's the part he quoted from. He elided over the bold part of course.
"The hollowness and malleability of the term [terrorist] means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition (not too dissimilar from the definition advanced by the Israeli Counter Terrorism Law) that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable."
Since we're re-sharing pieces I've shared too many times might as well throw this one in once more too. It's from two years ago today.
It went in part like this:
I'm not sure what else I was expecting to see after turning on cable news for the first time in a while this morning. Of course it was a parade of warmongers espousing genocidal and eliminationist rhetoric. I certainly imagined the drum was beating while I couldn't hear it but now there it was thundering so loudly.
As unsurprising as it should be are you also not at least a little shocked about how quickly almost every single one of our leaders and most in the media from conservatives to liberals not to mention many of the rest of us have reverted to 2001 mode? Like restoring our American factory settings.
Like we'd all just stepped outside a theater for intermission and were filing back in to our assigned seats to resume the proceedings.
...
Like many of you I've been trying to calibrate my moral compass as it pertains to war and violence this past week and as best I can tell from what I've been reading and hearing is that the formula by which we determine whether or not a killing is either justifiable or "terrorism" is the physical distance between the aggressor and the victim. Up close is barbaric but launched from far away is reasonable.
The civilian deaths in the latter scenario accidental or a regrettable but necessary condition of "self defense."
Maybe it's because we think it would be so much harder to kill someone while looking them in the eye?
Is that why the powerful countries are so prolific at it then? We don't even make our combatants do that anymore.
I don't think it really matters for the victim one way or the other but the killers get to convince themselves there is a moral distinction.
I understand why there are supposed to be “rules of war” of course and certain things are “prohibited” – like the use of white phosphorus for example – and maybe I am being naive here but I never really got why exploding a building on top of human bodies is one of the acts of war where it’s just how it goes. It's considered basically fine.
Are the victims not being tortured in there while they die?
For Americans who sanitize the bombing violence we and our allies have routinely done and pretend it's not really murder and terror maybe it has to do with the fact that we cannot imagine ourselves being bombarded?
Shot with a gun sure. Of course we don't need to imagine that here in America.
But bombed? Over and over again? For years. That doesn't even seem real. That doesn't happen to people.
I am telling you we are going to regret this. Our support for this. We the very lucky to still be alive will regret it whether that is sooner or later. We might even tell ourselves somewhere down the line that we never did in the first place. That we in fact opposed it. That we knew right from wrong when it was happening.
We went to Providence on Saturday for a friend's birthday and it was a lovely time. Such a fun and pretty little city.
Here's a billboard that I saw that – while a nice gesture I'm sure – struck me as some real Hell World business.
Alright here's the main thing.
For more real Irish shit you may also appreciate this piece on the series Say Nothing and the history of hunger strikes.
Luke O’Neil
Our Day Will Come
by Sean T. Collins
Collins previously wrote for Hell World on The Hunting Wives, Sinners, Fargo, The Curse and the 2024 election; Sexy Beast, vampires and class warfare; Godzilla Minus One and the trauma of war; and the surveillance cinema of The Curse, The Zone of Interest and Skinamarink.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not just the title of a movie — it’s a promise, a warning, a threat, and an advertisement. It leaves little doubt about what you are going to see when the lights go dim; people who watch this movie want, or at least think they want, to watch someone with a chain saw massacre people in Texas, and will spend the entire time until that first revving sound anticipating and dreading it. It’s like naming your band Alien Sex Fiend: You’ve ensured that your people, and perhaps only your people, will find you.
One Battle After Another takes a similar approach. Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s somewhat less adventurously titled novel Vineland by Paul Thomas Anderson, the rechristened story does what it says on the tin, as the fella says. You go into the theater expecting an action film from one of America’s finest directors in which some guy is forced to spend the whole time fighting, and that’s what you get.
OBAA stars Leonardo DiCaprio as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, aka “Rocketman,” an explosives expert with a militant group that works to set immigrants free from federal concentration camps. When his long-time love interest Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) gets caught and rats everyone out to save her own ass, Pat goes into forced retirement. He adopts the name Bob Ferguson, raises his and Perfidia’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, who has the most Pynchonesque name in the cast), and smokes a ton of weed. He becomes the Dude, is what happens.
Then he gets drawn back into the country’s years-long battle against its own rabidly racist and anti-immigrant authorities thanks to their living embodiment, Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. (I tend to hold up three things as the pinnacle of funny names — the work of Tim & Eric, the East/West Bowl sketches from Key & Peele, and the Space Mutiny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but Pynchon’s work is way up there.)