You can’t outrun the wind
My entire world has the AI piss filter on it. It looks like a damn Coldplay song out there. No not Clocks.
For today's feature Rax King joins us again to write about the band Crass and the long simmering tensions in punk music between the art-educated left wing and the working class. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it in full either down below or here:
Luke O’Neil
The problem with clinging to a neat, undeveloped story like “art kids vs. the working class” is the void of ideology yawning open under its surface. If you’re an art student without trade unionist bona fides, you risk seeming out of touch when you sing about the poor and downtrodden. But if your shtick is that you make real working class punk music, free of university pretensions, you open yourself up to Nazis. At the above-mentioned Sham 69’s farewell show in 1979, a gaggle of National Front supporters marched up to the stage, throwing bottles and Sieg Heiling, while frontman Jimmy Pursey tried in vain to calm things down. Similar nuisances plagued the live shows of other oi! and skinhead bands, to the point that most people’s first association with the word “skinhead” is no longer “working class” it’s “Nazi.”
She most recently wrote for Hell World about reading Milton Mayer’s 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 in the age of ICE.
Luke O’Neil
Early in the book, Mayer outlines some of the reasons his little men still cherish their time in the Nazi Party, and not one of them cites the carte blanche he had in those years to torment the Jews. Indeed, his friends sheepishly attest that, prior to the official expulsion of the Jews from their town, they’d all had relations with their Jewish neighbors ranging from the cordial to the intimate. The unpleasant task of mistreating them was just the cost of, to name a few perks, stable government jobs where before there had been only the university; free summer camps and activities for the kids; and deeply discounted trips abroad for provincial people who had never been outside Hesse, much less Germany. In Marburg, the ten little men all vigorously attested, “nobody” went hungry or cold or uncared for the whole time the Nazis were in power. (“Nobody they knew,” Mayer is quick to point out.) In their telling, even in the repentant schoolteacher’s telling, the Party was more civil-social organization than genocidal force — the Lions Club for antisemites.
I had four new short pieces go up at Flaming Hydra yesterday. Here's one of them.
The Editors
You’ll never work a day in your life again
Me and the boys were digging a big old hole at the beach. Just to do it. To have it done. At first we were hooting and hollering but about an hour into the job we all got real quiet. A job is what it in fact had become. Our job was hole and we worked at hole. I thought briefly about updating my LinkedIn but then forgot about it just like that. What the internet even was. The sky was so red. I saw it reflected in our newly excavated pool. The kids all dropped out one by one over time crying that it wasn’t fun anymore. You’re scaring me dad one of them said. I don’t know which kid or which dad. Something in me wanted to give a speech about responsibility. The type of thing a father would say. But this hole wanted digging. None of that sand or water belonged down there it was meant to be delivered unto the sun. And we would replace what we had removed in kind.
Elsewhere I popped by Jeb and Roth's Christmastown podcast to bullshit for a while recently. Check it out here.
Here's a cool looking photo my buddy Ken took up the street from where I live.
There is never any shortage of cool photos when we go through this routine every year or so now apparently. Here's one from We Had It Coming that feels appropriate to share.
The birds and critters in my yard are acting strange too. Maybe they don’t know how to run away from the smell of fire when it’s everywhere? I guess this one from A Creature Wanting Form is related as well.
Something else I wrote about the smoke last time it was this bad in Massachusetts:
The thing is though there was nothing to be done about this smoke the other day. Nowhere to hide. I looked believe me. Like an idiot cartographer mapping a course to breathability. I checked to see what the air quality was in Maine and New Hampshire and other neighboring states etcetera but it was all fucked. A big blob like spilled orange gatorade covering the entire known proximate world on the wind map forecast. And even still I worried what if the air looked better somewhere and by the time we drove there the wind had shifted? I’m not Marky Mark I can’t outrun the wind.
Remember that movie lol.
So all there was left to do was to sit there and feel helpless and breathe in the smoke. The bad kind. Trapped. I thought this is probably how it’s going to feel to die from a climate change some day. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I guess if we’re being honest though we’re bringing it on ourselves.
I also just went back and read this one by John M. Ganiard about watching the television series Girls for the first time in 2025 and the oppressive wildfire smoke and homelessness and our addiction to our phones and the inability of art to capture anything resembling the realism of the present anymore.
Luke O’Neil
On days when the smoke is thick, I’ll watch strollers blithely pass by on the sidewalk outside, joggers struggling and rubbing their eyes. Two summers ago, I might have worn a mask on an errand into town during an orange alert. Now I’ll only do so for a red. I work from home near my apartment’s mechanical room. I think about the benzene seeping out from the water heater pilot all day, under the door, floating toward my desk invisibly, compounding the exposure from all the benzene I voluntarily drew into my lungs for years, compulsively, so that I might neutralize a few stray intrusive thoughts. I think about my dentist hearing out an unrelated question I had about my bite guard, reflexively and defensively interrupting me to ask, “Is this about microplastics?” I tell myself I am learning that part of living is accepting all the various ways we are and will be poisoned.
The other day in this one I wrote about touching grass out in Western Mass last weekend. A nice reader wrote in with a recommendation for where to go hiking that just so happened to be exactly where I went. I really liked what they wrote and the turn the message took. It struck me as particularly Hell World-y and like something I would write so I wanted to share it.
Luke O’Neil
Luke I'm glad you touched grass in western Mass, I hate it out here in the boonies but we have a lot of grass. I would just reply to you on Bluesky like a normal person but I am not on social media anymore. Nothing. Anyway next time you're here there's a place you should go but only if you like dogs. It's my favorite place to walk, hmu if you're in the area and I'll take you. There's a bunch of farm fields owned by the ag-voc high school that used to be part of the state mental hospital, and the entire property is this beautiful free place where walkers, joggers, and off-leash dogs wander around in the sun and the shade under the old abandoned apple orchards. There's a little beach the dogs have made for themselves on the shallow river. A disc golf course is in there too but I think it might be for rich losers?? Sometimes people come to do that but they bring wine and boomboxes and it's obnoxious.
At the center is probably my favorite mass grave, a big hill where the bodies of folks who died at the asylum were buried. The hill isn't accessible, it's bordered with thorny bushes and planted with stiff, spiky grass. The horrors those souls witnessed are over. We make plenty of new ones, don't get me wrong, but those particular ones are gone, and those particular corpses rest among happy dogs, laughing children, lovers holding hands in the sun, blooming flowers—beneath only sky. Nobody can ever step on them again.
I think walking in this place saved my life.
It's on Burts Pit Road in Florence. It's called that because a Mr Burt had a gravel pit on that road.
Take it easy and thank you for writing things, they mean a lot to me!
A conflict as old as punk itself
by Rax King
When British anarcho-punks Crass first tried to release their 1978 debut LP, The Feeding of the 5,000, they met some trouble that I’ll let them describe in their own words. From the lyrics booklet of that record:
“Once again the violent majority assert their bigoted reality through the silencing of others. [Opening track] ‘ASYLUM,' an antichrist/feminist statement has been erased because no company would press the record if the track was left intact.”
To phrase it somewhat less stridently, the workers at the Irish pressing plant charged with filling the order didn’t take kindly to such lyrics as “shit, fuck, I vomit for you, Jesu…down now from your papal heights!” They refused to press the record with such a blasphemous track on it, and so The Feeding of the 5,000 would begin not with “Asylum” but with one minute of silence titled “The Sound Of Free Speech.” The band also included a note in the liner notes offering to sell cassette tapes featuring the prodigal track to anyone who wanted one; a few hundred punks apparently took them up on it. In the band members’ recollection of the incident as it appears in the book The Story of Crass, one can make out the two fighters, locked in a conflict as old as punk music itself: in this corner, the art-educated left wing; in that corner, the working class.
(This feels like the right moment to launch my disclaimer that this essay is going to be unsatisfying to somebody. Punk fans tend to be obsessive autodidacts, and I don’t doubt that many of them can upend this same cup and read a completely different story in the tea leaves with just as much evidence to support it. My advice to anyone who wants to loudly disagree with me, which I hope you’ll receive in the intended spirit, is: write your own essay, or shut the fuck up.)