The nightmares haven't stopped
Today's main thing is a lovely remembrance of the life and music of Garth Hudson of The Band and in particular The Last Waltz by Rax King. Paid subscribers can read it down below or go directly to it here.
Luke O’Neil
Rax previously wrote for Hell World about the film Anora.
Luke O’Neil
For another piece on the passing of a great artist read Corey Atad on David Lynch from the other day if you missed it.
Luke O’Neil
And for more writing about another classic concert film read Donald Borenstein on Stop Making Sense.
Luke O’Neil
It is such a disorienting feeling when someone you care about but hadn't talked to much in a couple of years dies suddenly because there is now a freshly dug hole inside of you and yet the day to day routine of your life has not been altered one bit. A new kind of absence has taken over for an older different shaped absence and now the two are overlapping and perhaps at odds with one another. Trying to fit a triangle shaped sadness into a rectangle shaped sadness.
And it's 1° right now in Massachusetts in the coldest week of the coldest month I can remember. I didn't think we were supposed to have cold winters anymore. Maybe thought we didn't deserve them.
I don't know if you good people expected me in this moment to write about how evil Trump is and all the damage to innocent people and to our guilty country he intends to do or not. I feel like you can get that everywhere at the moment. Not that journalism itself as an institution is up to the task. It's pretty obvious already that we're not going to be seeing any kind of so-called resistance from the major media this time around. Every day in the newspaper and on cable news thus far it's mostly been a parade of reporters and politicians and corporations alike rolling over and showing their bellies.
An expanse of exposed shiny white bellies as far as the eye can see like rolling hills covering in snow.
Unfortunately journalism – the profession that has at its core the mission to explain to us the world as it is – has one little loophole which is "knowing what is in the heart of a man" regarding racism or Naziism. It's metaphysics for that one specific thing.
Barry Petchesky
And by the way you do not have to be a Nazi to be evil there are so many different kinds of evil you can be. Every type of evil guy who comes along doesn't have to meet the exact contours of the most famous evil we have all heard of. If that was not a Nazi salute (it was) it doesn't change who he is (a Nazi) or who any of them are.
I certainly will do a lot of writing and reporting on this administration going forward. But while this newsletter has always been about the systems that put suffering into motion more than that it is about the other end of it. The byproduct. The runoff the churning factories dump into the rivers we all drink from.
Metaphorically I mean but I suppose also literally.
Here's some Trump related shit you might read if you're in want of it.
Spencer Ackerman
Hamilton Nolan
Rafi Schwartz
I will say it is some comfort knowing that the Parliamentarian is gonna pop up out of nowhere any minute now and declare that all this shit Trump is doing isn't allowed. As far as I understand that's how it all works when the president wants to do anything.
My friend is nevertheless still dead. I wrote about it in here in the last newsletter if you don't know what I'm talking about.
A friend texted me today about his own recent experience with a friend who had died by suicide and I am not going to share what they said but what I said was one thing I can't figure out is whether or not I have cried sufficiently. I have wept multiple times but I stopped after three or four days. What is that? Is that enough?
The nightmares about it haven't stopped though. I am watching it all in mind like a shitty true crime reenactment.
Another old friend called and I said the first day or two I just wanted to know what happened and how it happened and then we found out and I wished I hadn't ever heard that shit.
I can't help but relate it to when my father died but I suppose that's not surprising from me the little bitch with an eternally dead and dying dad.
Luke O’Neil
Even after all of these interviews and the hours I’ve spent thinking about my father’s texts it’s not entirely clear what they mean to me or if they even mean anything at all. Contending with the digital endpoint of a relationship with a person who was a constant and loving part of your life for a long time is a lot different from when it is a reminder of someone who was absent. I can no longer call my father on the phone but that was true for most of my life anyway. Perhaps I should have done so more often. Perhaps he should have. Every text I have now is a glaring reminder that neither of us bothered to. I feel guilty about that. In part that’s because he had the foresight to die before my loving stepfather thereby hogging all of my weepy “my dad died” writing before the man who actually raised me could get the chance. I wonder if he was capable of thinking about any of this stuff in the last week or two he spent in a medically induced coma at the hospital as his children and exes reemerged to say goodbye one final time. It was like a dress rehearsal. We were talking to him but he couldn’t talk back. I guess I’m doing the same thing now.
I'm doing that once again now too. Hey buddy I cried for three days after you did it. Not bad right? Pretty respectable. Was that more or less than you would have expected?
I just remembered my dead friend made a cameo in this story from ACWF which is very unfortunately about the feeling that you get when you look out over the ledge. I reposted it the other day because it was Edgar Allan Poe's birthday but I'll reprint it here too because who cares.
Luke O’Neil
You can’t take it with you
I awoke early enough for the first time in recent memory to see the last of the sunrise spilling out over the roof of the house next door in its twee little pink mist and I thought to myself sure enough there is the sunrise. I don’t know if I was expecting a more profound thought than that but that was the size of it and before long it was gray and overcast again anyway and the old man next door was scurrying around fiddling with his truck getting it started and scraping the ice off of the windows.
Good morning he said.
Good morning I said.
He’s got a really thick French-Canadian accent but I don’t think that matters here. He’s also got an old man’s crush on my wife but he told us a couple times that his own personal wife had died many years ago and here he was still living despite that fact and so I thought it was basically acceptable. Let him have at least that.
I went to set my iced coffee down on the little table next to my chair on the porch and I chunked the entire thing over and I watched it happen from a remove in slow motion and I said fuck and then I had to deal with that. Everywhere else around the porch was covered in wet ice but you can’t have wet ice in this particular spot that is just how it works. Things belong in their place.
Earlier maybe an hour or so before that I remember being in bed and reaching over to make sure she was still there in the way I do and she was and then I remember reaching over again and she wasn’t there this time she was clattering around in the bathroom getting ready for work and I thought about how much effort it would take to go back to sleep again with my little videos of the ocean and the rain playing on the computer so I said fuck it and I figured I’d get up and have a nice coffee without expecting anything bad to happen to it.
A friend called that I haven’t spoken to since the early days of the pandemic back when you would call your friends or Facetime them and such and they’d go like what the fuck is going on ha ha ha and you’d go I don’t know ha ha ha back before millions of people died.
He’s sober and I told him that I had been trying not to drink lately with only a little bit of success.
I told him my problem is that when I do not drink I am constantly aware of the fact that I am going to die every second of the day and that someday best case scenario like thirty years from now although probably twenty at best at this rate for me I am going to get sick in a way that there’s no coming back from and she will be there when I get the phone call from some doctor I just met and I’ll cry and cry with self-pity over all the bad decisions I made that brought me to this point and she’ll try to console me but it won’t work because hugging doesn’t curtail oblivion.
I think the idea of all of this living is to accumulate enough loving and having been loved experience points that you can cash them in in one fell swoop at the end for an ameliorating effect on the descent but the prospect of that never brings me any comfort because it’s all erased on the other side of it anyway. A new ledger in which your balance isn’t zero it’s nothing. I guess there isn’t even a ledger anymore actually.
People say you can’t take your money with you when you die but you can’t take your love with you either.
They could wheel your deathbed out to the middle of a football stadium with the tubes and machines and nurses and everything on the 50-yard line and the stands could be full with everyone cheering and crying and you would still be down there thinking well I suppose it could be worse but what good is all this going to do me a couple hours from now?
If all this death of late has made nothing else clear to me it is the reality that you can get sick in such and such a way that there is nothing to be done about it even if you are under the care of a doctor that really or more likely mostly doesn’t want you to die. They are very busy these doctors.
I know that seems like an obvious thing to realize and I am sure I always already knew it but it’s not the type of thing you want to walk around being aware of all the time so when you do think of it again it hits afresh like a tossed punch.
If you want an idea of the future and also the past and the present picture a fist punching in a face but drain any sort of larger meaning from it. A fist without metaphor. Every day it’s just guys getting punched in the face. Queuing up like in a depression-era breadline at the face-punching factory.
You think most days that when something bad happens they’re going to marshal the heavens and earth for your benefit like you’re the governor or something but that’s awfully naive. It seems more likely at most they’ll give it a pretty good go. Like when your car won’t start you still try to turn it over a few times to be sure then maybe you check the oil and one other thing you know how to do and then are like well fuck I’m out of ideas here.
When I do drink I told my friend on the phone there if you remember him from before I said I still know that I’m going to die and that we’re all going to die but it just doesn’t seem like my problem for a little while and what comfort there is in that.
It’s probably somewhat better to be in a plane crash whacked out on sleeping pills than wide awake for it is what I mean. Despite the fact that the destination is ultimately the same. Everyone heading into the ground I said.
He laughed in a knowing way with that superpower of self-knowledge that people in recovery sometimes have and he probably said something wise or helpful but I forget what it was because I was too busy thinking about myself.
He said he had a new job and it was going pretty well and I said that’s good.
I may be repeating myself here with this I’m scared to die shit but what other story is there? Not just now at this point in time for me and you during the pandemic but for anyone at any time ever I mean.
“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.”
There are supposed to be anywhere between three and seven types of basic conflicts in literature. The most common are man versus man and man versus nature and man versus self. Then you might throw in man versus society or man versus the supernatural and a few other variations if you want to be fancy about it.
The third one there is the thing.
Maybe I’m just thinking about it through that lens because I just watched an episode of Station Eleven last night that made it obvious that that fictional post-pandemic story has been an obvious allusion to Hamlet the whole time. I mostly came to understand that by all the explicit references in the show to the text of the famous play Hamlet.
Before that I read an essay about getting sober during the pandemic and one thing the woman wrote was this: “The truth is that most of my drinking and using had one primary purpose: to allow me to feel less. To be less aware.”
I thought ah come on that’s my bit but I suppose there aren’t too many variations on the theme when it comes to this shit.
Sometimes I’ll talk to other friends in recovery and I’ll be preemptively embarrassed by how cliché my whole thing probably sounds as if I’m describing the plot to a movie everyone in the world is already aware of. Like trying to surprise someone by telling them Darth Vader turns out to be Luke’s father and then they have to act gracious about receiving that information from you. Oh wow. And he jumped into what now? With his hand cut off? That’s fucked up!
Almost immediately after I spilled the coffee it had turned to near frozen slush in the cold air and I wondered again why we torture ourselves living through this four or five months a year. I keep having this daydream about moving to Florida our worst and most American state and while I am not under the illusion that everything that is bad still wouldn’t be bad and in many ways worse there at least my hands and feet would be filled with hot circulating blood all of the time.
The last time we went to Florida we drove up the Keys to Miami in a stupid rented convertible and I gawked at the ocean for hours like who could ever get enough of this but that’s stupid to think. I realize that after a while even the ocean disappears into the background when you live next to it for long enough.
I remember climbing up a narrow winding staircase inside of some lighthouse and becoming struck with a fear of the height to the point of paralysis. Not that the structure itself was going to collapse but that in order to stop the pressure compounding in my brain I would jump. If only to get the entire thing over with.
Do you ever lay there thinking about things you don’t want to think about and the harder you try not to the more inevitable it becomes?
“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute,” Dostoevsky wrote.
That observation was extrapolated on by a psychologist in the 1980s in a famous experiment you’ve likely heard of where he asked subjects to not think of a white bear and to ring a bell every time that they did. You can probably guess what happened next.
The concept came to be known as ironic process theory as he explained it. I always thought when I said my brain was irony poisoned it meant something else.
In short the ironic tension here is the harder our brain tries not to think of something the more often it checks in to make sure we aren’t thinking of it thereby making us think of it.
Sometimes I’ll think to myself hoo boy doing a great job not drinking tonight and then a second later it’s like ahh fuck I shouldn’t have been aware of what was transpiring here.
No such problem when you’re drinking.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston and then he died forty years later in Baltimore drunk in the gutter as the story goes. Before that his father abandoned him and his mother died young from tuberculosis and so he was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Virginia the latter of whom died and then he married his uhh thirteen-year-old cousin who also died of tuberculosis.
Newspapers attributed Poe’s death to “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation” which I gather are euphemisms for alcoholism but also kind of funny sounding combinations of words you have to admit.
Congestion of the brain.
The point is this morning I came across a story of his called “The Imp of the Perverse” that I had forgotten about.
It starts out with this sort of rambling nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific jargon section about phrenology and God and what have you but then transitions into the confession of a murderer.
The thing is there was never any need for him to confess. He clearly could have gotten away with the murder in question but he was compelled against his own self-interest to do so.
The cause of the narrator’s undoing Poe writes is that he is among the many “uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.”
The themes of confession to a crime and motiveless crime itself would carry on throughout Poe’s work as well as Dostoevsky’s rather famously. The general idea of this piece also comes into play in Freud’s concept of the death drive.
It’s weird by the way that you could just be some guy writing a story about some other guy you made up back then and accidentally invent a field of psychological study.
Poe’s character explains more. He says it’s like the compulsion you feel standing overlooking a great drop.
“And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it.”
There’s an important distinction in here. It’s not the Imp that inspires Poe’s narrator to commit the murder in the first place. That impulse is driven by his own normal human greed and cruelty. It’s the Imp rather that convinces him to destroy himself afterwards because he knows that he rightfully has it coming sooner or later.
We do these actions, he writes, “because we feel that we should not.”
Alright's let stop in real quick to Luke's Movie Corner.
There's a lot to like about this one. Kieran Culkin especially. A sharp little short story about what if your cousin was weird.
And here's the song of the day.
If you want to follow along with my playlist of the best new songs of the year as I discover them you can do so here.
Everything they gave us before they left
by Rax King
And now Garth Hudson has passed away at 87 in a nursing home and The Band has finally, officially, left the building. I’m more heartsick than I thought I could be at the death of an 87-year-old man. Hopefully that doesn’t sound callous—what I mean is that Hudson had, by any reasonable metric, an exceptionally bounteous life, and it’s possible to find a somber beauty in this final closing of the circle, to say yes, these men are all gone, but look at everything they gave us before they left! But I just feel sad, because my boys are dead.
I’ve been a fan of The Band all my life thanks to my father, who had himself been a fan of The Band all his life—well, since they released Music from Big Pink in 1968, anyway. Every Thanksgiving, we would celebrate the holiday with my mother’s family in Richmond, VA, and then my father and I would excuse ourselves after the big meal to partake of our private tradition: watching Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz together, eating two pilfered slices of my grandmother’s chocolate chess pie, no matter how logy we were from the gravy and the sleepy heat of too much family time.
The Band’s final concert, played on Thanksgiving Day at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1976, was infamously plagued with tension. According to Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and singer and only American, none of the boys even wanted to stop touring together except for lead guitarist Robbie Robertson, who was so hellbent on getting off the road that the others had no choice but to give in. But all we saw watching the film was a group of five men (and nearly two dozen of their most famous friends) who know each other cold. They’ve been playing some of these songs for sixteen years, but, despite being so obviously lived-in, their performances never feel rote. Instead, my father and I nestled with pleasure into the coziness of the tunes we knew so well. These were our friends—the men or the songs, we couldn’t have said which—and we only got to see them once a year. The Band may have been pretty sick of each other by 1976, but we never got sick of them.
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