You can watch me disappear
On American Football's LP4
When someone I admire wins a Pulitzer: Ah journalism's highest honor! And well earned indeed.
When someone who sucks wins a Pulitzer: Clown show award for phonies. Total cash grab.
This easily transposes onto every single other honor in any medium.
Hello. It is my birthday. I want the same thing we all want.
I am somehow almost but not quite yet fifty. Two data points that are in conflict and also simultaneously absurd. Please join me in celebrating by subscribing to Hell World – the first and only newsletter – by using this nice 33% off discount. A present for you all if you think about it. And remember this is who you are literally stealing bread from when you don't subscribe.
Then again this is the guy that will be on the receiving end of your collective magnanimity.
Time man. That is how they get you.
I am one of those people who tends to become melancholy and turn inward on my birthday. Yes yes how would anyone be able to tell the difference from how I normally am haha.
On the topic of memories of the past and carrying on wearily but resolutely into an uncertain future today's feature is about the career of and the new album by everyone's favorite emo legends American Football.
"The eventual return didn’t feel anything like those other bands or artists running through the greatest hits of teenage millennial music past because the American Football of the past was a band that barely existed in the first place," Kevin Koczwara writes. "The most beloved act that no one ever saw. Instead, this was the mysterious lore of a lost band, a perfect record, and a warm glowing light from a window in a nondescript home in Illinois."
Koczwara wrote about the fears of being a parent raising children in the age of school shootings a while back.
Luke O’Neil
"Who can go to a mall or a concert or any place really without second guessing the decision? Who would bring a child into this world? Who would bring something so precious as a child into a place filled with hate and violence? My wife and I have. Two little kids — seven and four years old now — who weren’t alive for Sandy Hook or Columbine or Texas Tech or any of the hundreds of other mass shootings before they were born. But they’ve been around for enough mass murders that it feels like they’re possibly numb to it already."
He also wrote about his favorite Jason Molina songs.
Luke O’Neil
Here's a poem I think about on my birthday.
Nostos
by Louise Glück
There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
Here's a new one by me.
Novelty
They transferred some of us to a new wing of the place. For good behavior. A kind of boutique experience they said. One where we could design our own tormentor. Think of a gourmet omelet bar they said. I hadn’t even given it a second of thought before you appeared. Jesus (sorry) it was so thrilling to see you.
Of course you took to the task immediately with hunger which in fairness was how you always were and after all what was being asked. You knew everything I always knew about you which was convenient for verisimilitude but also now knew everything that I knew about me. Even things that you had never previously known. That wasn’t ideal. For me I mean. It was great for the guards and this version of you. You all had a big laugh together about that part. Rifling through my rolodex of eternal insecurities. Alright take it easy I thought. It’s not that funny.
I swear your smell was palpable. Arresting. The good ones and the bad. A creative engineering device. I thought of how an animal remembers to avoid certain dangerous places.
All in all the experience was a mixed bag beyond the initial excitement I have to confess. After a period of extended torture it occurred to me how inefficient this new deal was. In terms of labor cost at the very least. Isn’t this basically the same thing it always was? No one can torture me better than me.
You can’t say that kind of thing out loud though. Or even think about it for very long lest they catch wind. They love a new challenge. Novelty is the only real currency here.
Jesus (sorry again) it was still so thrilling to see you.
Excerpted from I Am Never Going to Die by Luke O'Neil, ?Books, 202?
Hm remind me not to put my poems right next to Louise Glück's in the future.
Here's another poem I just read this week and quite liked.
My Son the Man
by Sharon Olds
Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
And one more from WHIC that seems appropriate for today's theme.
Alright here's the thing. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it but remember I am a little birthday boy :). Stick around for a bonus picture of me and the American Football lads and the movie of the week and some other shit.
All my teenage feelings
and the meanings
by Kevin Koczwara
When we’re young time moves at a glacial pace. Every moment seems like it matters. Waiting to get your license or your first kiss takes forever. As we age the space between moments blurs and all of that accumulated life appears as if it happened yesterday. A song from twenty years ago still feels fresh, as if it’s playing in your friend’s car, that one blown-out speaker rattling a little with each bass thump. And why not? It only just happened.
What we constitute as new or old shifts too. How do we measure the years between a proposal, marriage and children? It no longer makes any sense. Each passing year feels like a minute. A month is a snap of your fingers and a day is the blink of an eye. Our lives stretch out, counting down toward the inevitable. The journey lengthens and contracts with no escape.
For American Football time created the perfect circumstances for a band that never intended to do much of anything to become itself. Three young friends wrote nine songs. Recorded them in a garage. Their other friends decided to release them on a record before they graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. No one would hear from them again they thought. The band had played a few shows before and no one showed up. At first there weren’t even lyrics to go with the noodling guitars and oddly-timed drums.
When Polyvinyl Records, still in its infancy, released the self-titled album in September of 1999, the same month Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival, there was no tour. No album roll out. Copies went out to college radio stations and it found a bit of airplay, but by and large no one yet knew the importance of what they were hearing. Pitchfork was still in its infancy and blog band culture didn’t exist. There were zines and scenes, but a band that broke every rule and bucked against the scene they grew up in themselves — the midwest emo world that singer and guitarist Mike Kinsella helped forge with his brother Tim as teenagers playing in Cap’n Jazz —was supposed to disappear.
“We thought we were doing the opposite [of making an emo record],” guitarist Steve Holmes told GQ earlier this year. What Holmes, Kinsella and drummer Steve Lamos could not have predicted — no one could have seen — was how an extremely, perhaps overly, earnest record made for a few thousand dollars by a few college friends would become a cultural touchstone for an entire generation. How this anti-emo record would become the benchmark by which so many others would be measured. How songs like “Never Meant” or “Honestly” would transcend and then define the genre.
“You've re-written history,” Kinsella sang on the latter. “These things change. Despite the complicated beginning to all of this.”