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Army Man: America's Only Magazine.
A note from the editor:
We offer our sincere apologies for taking a brief hiatus from this newsletter while Kaleb “Spike” Horton recovered from injuries sustained during an altercation that forced him to run off the edge of a cliff. He quickly realized the regrettable impossibility of not being able to run in mid-air and darted back to solid ground, but the attempt was futile. He is recuperating at Cedars-Sinai, where he dictated the following post after scoring an unusually robust batch of painkillers.
Times have been really hard lately, for reasons too boring and legally compromising to get into here. My current plan is to just never mention my personal life again unless I’m obviously lying, which is what I should have been doing anyway. To that end, I am 57 years old and living in a shed outside of Edmonton, Alberta.
In the meantime I’m trying every possible method for relieving stress besides being healthy. The best method I’ve found is keeping my copy of Army Man on my nightstand and just opening it to a random page. It always makes me feel better, but without the horrible burden of trying to be positive about literally anything.
A surprising amount of people I know aren’t familiar with Army Man, so I’ll explain. It was a glorified zine published by George Meyer from 1988 to 1990. There’s not a whole lot of it (and all of it is here), but everybody who wrote for it got rich and famous, usually by writing for The Simpsons, most notably the legendary and reclusive John Swartzwelder. It’s basically just a joke magazine, but a joke magazine where all the writers are deliberately trying to sound like they’re in a psychiatric hospital. It’s where Jack Handey first published Deep Thoughts, but the whole thing is great.
I think I first heard of it in maybe 2007? In any case, I feel like I’ve always known it as a holy text among comedy writers, the place where all the secrets are. Mostly just to cheer myself up, I figured I’d list my favorite jokes. Here they are:
Shameless Promo: I Have an Article in a Magazine and Unfortunately You Are Legally Required to Read It
Preface: I just found out about this weird new website called 12ft.io that "bypasses paywalls," whatever that means.
Anyway, this is what I spent the last half of 2024 working on: it's a feature for a new F1 lifestyle magazine called Esses. While it's nominally about F1, it's really about George Harrison in the 1970s, and I actually did research for it, which is wild. But that's how much I care about George.
Through a string of cosmic accidents, the article wound up being syndicated and you can read it now at Rolling Stone. It's the biggest piece I've ever published there, and I'm proud of the sucker.
Also I need a job real bad and internet job applications hate my guts and I'm losing my mind so please holler if you hear of anything. I think this article is pretty good proof that I know how to work.
walking through los angeles when the crows are screaming and going through your garbage
I’m going full nomad lately; while I still have a place to sleep in Los Angeles, I should see more interesting sights than the same few chunks of Burbank I turned into a routine through complacency. I’ll just point the car somewhere, go to a new town, and walk. I walk a lot. There’s an immense therapeutic benefit to it. You’re taking in and processing new visual stimuli, you’re a stranger, and when you’re walking you’re not doing nothing. And doing nothing will kill you.
One consistent thing this time of year is that there are crows everywhere. I spend a lot of time thinking about crows. They have the most obnoxious vocalizations of maybe any animal, they’re aesthetically unpleasant and feel like a harbinger of death, and they know when they’re bothering you and they enjoy doing it. Drives me crazy how well they’ve adapted to LA. I saw one just this week going through a garbage can, methodically picking items out of it one by one and tossing them on the ground, looking for foodstuffs. It was making a horrible mess, a mess you’d normally associate with humans. They’re such a pest, and the worst part is you have to respect it. They’re fat and happy and they thrive. They’re annoying in a way that suggests profound intelligence. If they could get around to inventing money, they should get tickets for littering. Treated like equals. I have met crows that should be in jail. There’s one in my neighborhood that seems to have a problem with me personally. They’re my favorite bird.
The job search continues to be a source of constant despair, which is part of why I walk so much. There are so many dangerous lunatics in this town with full-blown jobs, and here I am walking around Whittier all damn day thinking about crows. The tough part is there’s so much more to life than this, and I used to have it, I have personal experience with it. I’ve had a taste. What an annoyance to have known.
Keeping my chin up though. Got my Associate’s from my community college in the woods, trying to get my Bachelor’s from my regular college over by Bob Dylan’s house. Apply for a million things a day. I’ve been filling out so many job applications I even get rejections sometimes. They’ve been funny lately. A tutoring service said “we are never going to need tutors in English or history.” A temp agency said I could never get a clerical job because I don’t have any clerical experience. A gin bar downtown said they thought I’d get a better opportunity too fast. Lady, listen to me closely: you are mistaken. You could not be more mistaken.
In negative moments, I think about getting an old shitbox Westfalia van and just living on the road. In positive moments I remember I wouldn’t know how to fix it if it broke and it’s way too hot in Arizona.
For some reason I keep running into dudes who want me to ghostwrite their autobiography. They always think they used to be cocaine gods, living lives of danger and intrigue. They’re always confessing to crimes that sound like episodes of half-remembered ‘80s cop shows. They’ve all had knives thrown at them, they’ve always been shot at by a captain of the Armenian mafia, they were all gun-runners in Beirut. I always listen to their stories because what else am I doing besides listening to some comedian on Maron talking about doing panel? It’s still a distraction and I still need it all the time and the internet doesn’t work for that anymore because it’s dead.
Just trying to hold out hope. Tomorrow I’m gonna get in my car again and go to I dunno Pacoima and I’ll probably see some kid in a park somewhere who has the confidence to think he’s gonna have a rap career and I’ll ask who his favorite rappers are and he’ll only be able to name like two and it’ll be fine and then I’ll see a hundred crows eating potato chips out of the gutter somehow acting like they own the place.
Going Down The Road Feeling Bad
Apologies for the sporadic posts lately. Trying to get my groove back. I’ll just tell you what’s on my mind, rip the Band-Aid off, because it’s all I know how to do and right now I don’t have any other options. Rugged, embarrassing honesty is all I have left.
The love of my life is gone. You could probably tell just from the tenor of my past writing. I’m trying to crawl my way back to happiness, back to a life in the real world, but boy is it hard. I feel like I’ve had an arm amputated. I feel like that might actually be easier.
All the things that used to be automatic are manual now; everything takes too much effort. I shake like a leaf on a willow tree. Getting out of bed in the morning is a war. Eating and sleeping are profoundly difficult and I don’t accomplish either of them very often. On those rare occasions that I sleep, I dream about her, dream that she’s with me, that we’re doing something banal and normal like planning a road trip or complaining about a bad movie we just watched together.
Every day I wake up crying. Every single day. The only way I know how to stop is by calling family members and keeping them on the line until they’re sick of me. Thank God for them. The highlight of my week is playing Mario Kart with my brothers and just talking and joking. It’s the only time I ever feel normal. Nothing else works. In those moments I know what to do with my eyes, my hands, my voice, and I feel alive for a little bit. I feel operational.
I need to work, I know that. It would be a merciful distraction from the pain. I don’t really understand why I’m not working. I wrote for Vanity Fair solely on the back of my talent, but these days I can’t even land a job at Walmart.
I’m learning how to be alone, slowly but surely. It involves listening to the radio all day, falling asleep to The Rockford Files, and smoking a lot of cigarettes. I’m trying to quit, but it’s really difficult when I feel like they’re keeping me alive, each one buying me five minutes or so.
It’s weird how everything feels therapeutic or medicinal. Nothing is enjoyable anymore, and the sensation of joy or even peace is completely gone. I’ve lost all interest in my hobbies. I don’t read very much, I don’t watch movies, I don’t get out on the open road. I don’t even listen to music, which brought me so much joy and saved my ass a thousand times.
It feels like being a newborn. There was the old me that was with her, and he was 36, and there’s the new me, who is 8 months old and lives on protein shakes and prays to God a hundred times a day to stay alive, to get me out of suffering and self-pity and masochism, to just be useful. I lack the temperament for suicide and I plan to stay alive, but it’s a constant negotiation, there’s a lot of haggling.
It’s all so desperately uncool, so boring, so average. I was a punk rock kid and now here I am praying and meditating constantly, taking baths just to kill time, which I have way too much of, unsuccessfully trying to read self-help literature. I don’t tell people I’m an anarchist, I tell them I’m a Presbyterian.
I want to get a life back so bad. I don’t want to move back in with my mom and lose my independence, lose the city that’s felt like home since the first day I set foot there 20 years ago. I want people to be proud of me and respect me. I want to write cool shit people like. I want to bring joy to others, I want to entertain, I want to be a force for good. I want to stop being so obnoxiously selfish, stop telling people I need constant help to stay alive. I don’t want to be the main character in any story, I just want to be normal. I want to be able to sit down at a table and eat real food without considering every last bite. Take out the garbage. Whistle. Sing.
Wouldn’t it be great if you weren’t reading this because I didn’t feel the need to write it? I’m 6’3 and have a full head of hair I’m not going to lose. It should all be so easy. But everything is heartbreak and sorrow and loss.
A lady at the grocery store gave me a hug last week and she said it was because I looked really sad, like I wasn’t going to make it, and I didn’t even catch her name but I think about her all the time. I thought I just missed physical touch but I think what I really missed was love. I want to have the strength and resilience to give it to others. I profoundly regret not having a child, because then I could direct my energy at someone else.
I love making people laugh and I haven’t been able to do it since last year. God I miss being funny. I miss writing good sentences. I miss working. I miss everything. I miss life.
Even though I don’t listen to music anymore, lyrics pop into my head all the time. “There’s a story in the Bible about an eagle growing old, how he grows new sets of feathers and becomes both young and strong” by Billy Joe Shaver. “I’m going down the road feeling bad, Lord, Lord, and I ain’t gonna be treated thisaway,” which I think is by Woody Guthrie but I’m not gonna check.
I want to write a novel about the dust bowl that takes place over the duration of a man’s life and begins in Oklahoma and ends in Bakersfield and opens and closes with the line “can you swing a hammer?” but I can’t sit still and write it. I cry too much. I feel too sick.
It would be nice to get a reprieve from the sensation that I’m going crazy. It would be nice to have dignity again but the only way I can stay alive is by forgetting about dignity, by admitting to anyone who will listen that I’m not making it, I’m not pulling this off, I’m confused and overwhelmed by anything beyond lying in bed listening to Art Bell reruns trying not to shake. If I were truly alone, doing this by myself, I would find a way to die. And I always feel like I’m dying. There’s nothing medically wrong with me but it just feels like I’m slipping away. Like life on earth is a waystation, like I’m a thousand miles away from home and waiting for a train.
All I know is I got rhythm and two perfectly good hands. I hope to write nice things again. I hope to work again. I hope to one day pick up an apple without thinking about it and just eat it. That day hasn’t come yet. For some reason that’s not what God wants for me right now.
Right before my grandma died, when she was wrecked with cancer, she texted me a Willie Nelson lyric, “it’s written in the good book that we’ll never be asked to take any more than we can, sounds like a good plan,” and I suppose that’s true because I’m still here. I just wish I could stop living in pain. I don’t know how. I’ll try anything if it can be done on two hours of sleep and doesn’t cost any money.
Thank you to everyone who has donated to this newsletter. It keeps me going. One of these days I want to write the best damn essay you’ve ever read. But today I have to figure out how not to die. It’s harder than you’d think.
On The Comedy Store
I’ve been away too long, and not by choice. Turning my life into something recognizable in spite of being broke and brokenhearted has been a 24 hour a day job lately, and it hasn’t even worked, which is devastating and definitely somebody else’s fault. But those are the exact times that force you to rally and do stuff you’ve been doing forever, whether you want to or not.
But I’m deeply thankful to my subscribers for giving me an excuse to even treat writing as an option right now. That’s a huge screaming deal.
Fact is, the last month in my mind has felt like being chased by wolves in a place I never wanted to be to begin with. It’s really only age and being “oh fuck it” levels of honest that’s made me appreciate that this is how every single other personfeels unless they’re that bastard over there, that guy who sucks. And I’m not that guy. You’re not that guy either.
Coping with that involves a lot of self-help type tricks and doing dreadful things like having a relationship with your parents or, oh man, calling your siblings, but for me it also involves trying really hard to laugh. Not so much actually laughing, which almost never happens for me anymore (which just means I’m 36), but the desire to laugh, and the infinite search that comes with it.
When everything has gone to hell, and it has for me because wanting to be alive is a decision I have to make repeatedly every single day, I know for a fact that laughing helps. It’s better than any drug. It’s innocent, one of those unbelievable, natural good feelings that tells you yes, you should be here, doing this, this is fine and you’ll be fine too. Laughing is a miracle, the master’s handiwork, it’s too good to exist.
So I decided to ruin everything and watch the Showtime documentary The Comedy Store.
The titular store, which they mythologize like a high school football career, is an oddities and curios shop in Baltimore, founded by Ukrainian immigrants in the 1910s, that sells joke books, your basic stage magic kits, props, sparkly stage jackets, and fake vomit for the kids. True to co-founder Vasyl’s idiosyncrasies and stubbornness, they also sell classical sheet music and violins. Above the cash register (they only accept cash) is just one picture, of Jack Benny.
I want to keep describing this thing I made up indefinitely just to see how long I can go without research because the alternative is describing the real Comedy Store, which is the mental equivalent of cleaning the men’s room at a Barstow truck stop. Or the men’s room at the Comedy Store, actually.
Basically it’s a stand-up comedy club on the Sunset Strip founded in the 1970s. It’s where they sourced acts for Johnny Carson, and Johnny Carson made your career, like a mafia kingpin (and like a mafia kingpin I think he could have had people killed). If Johnny liked your act and had you on the couch, you were now a millionaire and cocaine was free. And that’s important because if you were a first-timer comedian on Johnny Carson, you probably lived in a broom closet and woke up every morning contemplating a loaded gun or a bottle of vodka sourced from sewer water and made by a guy who escaped from an El Salvadoran military prison. It made your life. You exchanged your rags for clothes.
It’s also a place I remember from college as being disgusting and full of dreadful acts that were never going anywhere. Wish I could say I had a funny memory there but it was just a place full of people who made you feel like you should take a shower. Entourage types. People still casually using coke and generally just standing around being judgmental and Godless. I never went in. Acts you actually wanted to see were always playing various Improvs or the Ice House.
The documentary is long, which is great because I use documentaries to sleep, but it’s long because it’s all hagiography. There are interviews with some of the legends who started there, like David Letterman, but you can tell they didn’t give long interviews, so the whole thing gradually devolves, even as hagiography, into interviews with people you’ve never heard of, rambling about people you don’t care about. There’s not a ton of real history, because that would be profoundly unpleasant. Ultimately this was a business in West Hollywood, which means there are literal demons there.
It’s basically ephemera, containing nothing of even comedy junkie import, but it got me thinking about stand-up as an idea and why I care about it. If I hate 99% of the people in this documentary, and it makes me want to join the church and exile all comedians to an island somewhere to see how long it takes for them to break down in tears trying to tie a basic knot and eventually eat each other (day one: they figure out they need water, day two: they try to drink salt water, day three: they try to drink other peoples’ blood), why do I still think about stand-up so damn much?
I’m not sure. The following is definitely true: I only like about ten stand-up comedians and you can guess who they are. The rest of them, I basically want their bones to bleach on the desert. They sicken me as much as kids in Malibu trying to become DJs. For me to even go to a stand-up show (all the headliners I really like are dead) would be devastating.
And the way they all romanticize the craft of stand-up, mythologizing bombing and crowdwork while nakedly hero-worshipping, feels not like a fake energy but a misplaced energy. Energy that should be spent on school or a trade or volunteering. It’s wrong. And half of them actually are just apologizing for drug addictions or undiagnosed mental disorders. Don’t you have a DUI class to go to?
They’re generally not good at their jobs anyway, they just hope their desperation will be rewarded. Go play the lottery.
And yet and yet and yet. I still think about stand-up a lot even though it’s basically a 20th century artform. It belongs in night clubs. With a few exceptions, none of it holds up to sober morning scrutiny, which drives them nuts, but it actually can. Rodney, Pryor, Norm, whoever, the material can survive daylight examination.
I think laughing and the search for laughing is almost a holy thing. When it happens, your day just became good. You want to be with others. You want to celebrate what you’ve discovered. And when you do it, it’s a high you want to chase forever. At least if you’re of my temperament, which is a lot of depression, loneliness, and isolation. You want to get it back so bad. You will study how to do it. You’ll learn rhythm, you’ll learn pauses and the virtue of silence, you’ll learn how to use stage space, you’ll learn what word choices sound funny, you’ll learn what gold claims to keep mining. It’s a true skill that takes a life of practice and it’s really hard and heartbreaking but the result is magic. There’s not another word for it. When you succeed at being authentically funny on stage, which doesn’t require much of the audience to laugh actually, you know magic happened. You made Bigfoot exist for a second and you brought back the dead. It’s a beautiful ritual that’s probably roughly as old as language.
Stand-up actually is dead. I never watch it. But I think about how to do it a lot. Because it’s about summoning something with language and the way we use language and nothing else. At its core, stand-up is creating a reaction with speech and it’s powerful. You can feel you’ve created something new and unrepeatable, and it does help people in a fallen world. That’s a lofty characterization because it’s all true, but the reason most stand-up you actually see is antisocial garbage is because it almost never happens, almost nobody makes it happen. You just have to keep searching and it takes a lifetime.
The Only Good Shows Ever On Television
picture I took by Weaverville
I was reading a list in Variety, one of those lunch break lists where you’re chewing your sandwich and see some faces you recognize and some words underneath that make you think “huh, that’s wrong” and then you finish your sandwich and throw away the wax paper and then the list is gone, like it never existed.
It occurred to me, reading this thing, that it presupposes you enjoy television. You turn it on and watch the shows people are talking about and it’s fine. I’ve spent most of my adult life, at least once in awhile, writing about television for money, so I assumed I like television too. It’s easy and everybody else does it. But now I’ve turned states and I’m trying to just be normal and I realize I don’t like TV. It’s basically a numbing agent, and it doesn’t work on me anymore. I just dissociate or think about dying.
Doesn’t matter how much people hyped up a given show or said it was totally my thing. Take Severance. Got recommended to me a lot by friends I trust. I made it 70 minutes before my brain decided it should have been directed by Spike Jonze, it should have been a 102 minute movie, and it should have come out in 2004. After that thought existed, I was cooked. I couldn’t pay attention anymore. I mean, I could, for money, but recreationally it was impossible.
Variety’s list was fine if you like TV. Steve Carell did give one of the best TV performances of the last 25 years in the sense that he kept a big network show in business for a long time, moved you through the world of the show, explained the rules, made you relaxed, whatever. He’s great.
But I didn’t watch that show because I don’t like TV. I’ve had good times with it, but it’s not my friend. I enjoy saying “oh wow, they’re on Alameda. That psychic is still there actually,” but only around other people, and they don’t enjoy hearing it. I figure there are other people like me out there who feel the same, so to that end, I’ve created my own list: a comprehensive ranking of the only good shows ever on television, in exact order. Looney Tunes is disqualified because those were actually supposed to be played in front of movies. Twin Peaks: The Return is also disqualified because it’s a film.
The Rockford Files, which is good even if you’re by yourself and can’t annoy anyone by saying “how does he get from Malibu to North Hollywood that fast?”
Actually The Sopranos, sorry
Columbo but not the revival on ABC, where there’s too much set-up and he’s Bugs Bunny but elderly
The Twilight Zone but only the ones Rod Serling wrote.
Letterman reruns
Sanford & Son
Jeopardy when Alex Trebek was alive but only if you swear you won’t audition for it
King of the Hill, especially when your life is ruined and nothing makes sense. Skip the ones where they switch to digital animation unless it’s one with Tom Petty
Eastbound & Down
Regis Philbin
The Larry Sanders Show but not if you’ve been laid off from a media job in the recent past
Newsradio but start emotionally distancing yourself in season four and skip season five
Dick Cavett
Get Smart
Really long Johnny Carson compilations on YouTube
Saturday Night Live but only old pirated episodes where you know NBC pulled some sketches and the musical guest from circulation
The Bob Newhart Show but you have to say “I had such a crush on Suzanne Pleshette” whenever she’s on-screen
Arrested Development but start emotionally distancing yourself in season three and skip seasons four and five
Serial Experiments Lain after you show a script for Zoloft, Lexapro, or Effexor
Really old sitcoms that were canceled early in the first season just so you can feel like you were definitely the last person on earth to watch them
True Detective season one as tribute to the creator and director who both died when their small plane flown by a non-instrument-rated pilot crashed in Ventura
Battlebots episodes on an old tube TV, on a homemade VHS tape of the original broadcast with the ads intact, preferably with somebody who was on the show and has problems with the failure of imagination that leads to wedgebots. Hi Don, I hope Washington state is treating you nice. I’ll get up there one of these days. I never have seen it. How similar is it to Medford?
Win Ben Stein’s Money
The Andy Griffith Show but only if you’re sick or took time off to quit smoking
Kids in the Hall but you gotta fast forward through a lot of it
Videos of people driving around a city you’re familiar with in a time period you’re not
Really long documentaries that aren’t about true crime. Bono can’t be in them either.
Go back in time 30 years and watch one of those shopping shows where it’s just knives spinning around really slowly for hours
Good Lord, I Found an Episode of Art Bell with Merle Haggard
The last time I saw Merle Haggard. It was the only time in the show where he wasn't wearing his sunglasses and hat.
This sounds like a parody of something I would post specifically. You’re completely right. Spiritually, I made it up. But it’s real somehow: I found an episode of Coast to Coast AM where Art Bell interviews Merle Haggard. And that undersells it. Merle sits in for the entire five hour broadcast.
Story goes like this. I’d been thinking about Merle Haggard a lot. Not as an artist, but as a local mascot, a window into what it felt like to grow up in the California Central Valley. A shorthand for how the region shapes a person.
To summarize, there’s an outsize sense of individualism that borders on being a brain disease. You have to do everything yourself. Not only is nobody going to help you, but they may be trying to sabotage you, so make sure you arm your perimeter. Any version of any government is a scam and you shouldn’t vote because it leaves a paper trail. The military is doing something unspeakably evil at Edwards Air Force Base. You’re always looking over your shoulder a little bit. You cannot trust another person ever, and that lack of trust will make you and break you at the same time. You don’t care about crime per se, but you know where the famous prisoners are and where the famous crimes happened. When you drive through Corcoran you think about Charles Manson. When you’re in Vallejo you think about the Zodiac. It occurs to you, even if you never do it, to stockpile water. You know way too much about the politics of water in general. The world is going to end very soon, and not the Christian way.
In other words, you’re the ideal Art Bell guest. You are the perfect combination of cynical, conspiratorial, and apocalyptic. One night I remembered Merle calling into Art Bell when I was a teenager, something about black helicopters. I started poking around to see if anybody archived it, then I almost immediately hit the jackpot.
Hold on a second. Nobody I know who is younger than me knows who Art Bell is. Art Bell is this: a late night talk radio host who talked about conspiracy theories and the supernatural in hypnotic hushed tones. He had lots of crackpots on, lots of radio theater, let you know he didn’t believe any of this stuff per se, just asking questions. It’s a kind of show that would become explicitly political, but we weren’t there quite yet. It actually was about aliens and ghosts and remote viewing and cryptozoology and really anything that can make you hallucinate in the desert. It was a show for people who had some conversational knowledge of electrical engineering or physics and really liked the movie Contact. If this reminds you of anybody working today, they’re ripping him off. Anyway.
Merle isn’t just interviewed on this episode. It’s not particularly important that he was one of the best songwriters who ever lived. He’s not a celebrity guest, he’s a straight-up second mic. He could have co-hosted this show. He could have filled in on weekends. Merle clearly listened to the show as much as I did (nightly).
He’s just an effortless Art Bell character. He covers everything. UFOs are real and he’s seen a couple. Aliens exist and they might be interdimensional beings or they might be from Europa. A 9/11-sized domestic terror attack is probably about to happen. All drugs should be legalized. The president is a pawn for unknown dark forces. We are all going to die. He even racks up some bonus points by talking too much about weird dietary supplements. It’s one of the best episodes of Art Bell I’ve ever heard, a trip back in time to a world where late night talk radio was good as hell. There’s unfortunately not a better word for this, but it makes you remember that late night radio is a lost art.
From The Archives: Merle Haggard, Son of Bakersfield
Note: I wrote a bunch of stuff before posting the actual article. You know, like recipe sites, except I heard some of those guys make money. So just scroll down a thousand words for the actual thing you clicked on. Which reminds me, consider a paid subscription if you like what I do. Cotton is down to a quarter a pound and I’m busted.
Getting too wistful will kill you, so I want to say up front that I’m not sharing today’s archival post because I’m wistful. It’s my obituary for Merle Haggard, originally posted on MTV, and I wanted to show it to an editor. But I was disgusted to discover that not only did MTV remove it from their website, they don’t even play music videos anymore.
Anyway, here it is, pulled from my personal collection (Wayback Machine). It was almost nine years ago now but it still feels like yesterday. I found out in the car and just pulled over and sat there despondent somewhere in North Hollywood. Merle Haggard was the greatest country singer/songwriter who ever lived, an almost-academic belief that I could write a really boring thesis about. But he was also my hometown anchor, the guy I could point to and say hey, the Bakersfield I knew is still here. So when I was asked to write about him, I was pretty well destroyed. I’m thankful for it though, because it gave me a direction for my grief, let it vent.
I can’t actually read this piece ever again because it was really me working through the feeling that the Bakersfield I knew, old labor camps and canals and Dust Bowl grit, was going away, and I was doing that thing where you realize your concept of home is going away and you have to make your own now. And you won’t ever get there. You’ll never feel home in the same way ever again. All you’ve got is memory, a place where you can’t live.
My grandparents have died since then. They’re buried by Buck Owens but it’s off a really annoying freeway exit so I don’t go to the cemetery. We sold my grandpa’s house, and it was hilarious how the realtor staged the tour pictures like an Airbnb but couldn’t remotely get rid of all the rectangular lines on the wall where picture frames prevented nicotine staining. I hope the new owners never even once feel haunted by an old ghost from Arkansas who forever walks around the yard with a hose, spraying the dirt so it doesn’t blow through the windows, softly mumbling “Oh, My Darling Clementine” until the end of time and the stars crash. I’d hate that. Oh and if I die, it would be awful if they found me out in the shed holding up a bunch of different huge knives and asking “why did he have so many knives?” If they don’t cut down the lemon tree then hopefully it won’t happen.
I don’t go to Bakersfield now. I don’t know anybody there. I used to jump between Bakersfield and L.A. every couple weekends for most of my adult life. The muscle memory still kicks in on Saturdays when the weather’s nice and I’ll restlessly pace around for an hour or two before remembering “oh right, this is the part where I’m supposed to drive too fast and do some Dust Bowl cosplay and have no opinions about David Zaslav.” I miss it but it’s not there anymore.
There are still some cool landmarks though. There are legit historic buildings and businesses and surviving midcentury stuff, these little time portals that still look like Los Angeles used to look, and California used to look. Andre’s, that big shoe, the old coffee shops and roadside burger shacks, Dewar’s, Woolworth’s, Smith’s, Happy Jack’s, the 24th Street Cafe, they’re worth the detour if you made a mistake or two and wound up there. But the “this is the edge of the earth” existentialism it used to have has long been phased out and replaced with big box stores and vacuum-sealed tract houses and ominous undecorated corporate buildings called like AGGISTICS, which is a totally different breed of existentialism. I think it’s the Pynchon kind but I haven’t read him.
Anyway, the piece. It’s a snapshot of time. How I felt at the moment (bad, I felt bad). There were no edits. But it’s all true, which is nice. I’m glad I didn’t go through that phase a bunch of writers go through where you lie a lot. I’m proud of my moral compass that only let me lie by omission, so I could have plausible deniability.
If I were writing this now, I’d still tell people how I felt (bad), but I’d probably play more offense, try harder to explain why Merle’s writing was so good, why Merle and California country felt like freedom from Nashville and the church, why it was so damn western. How it did and still does feel like punk rock after you’ve had enough of the pretty formalism out in Tennessee. How tight his band was. (Austin City Limits ‘78, get after it.)
Merle Haggard was as much a big screamin’ deal as Hank Williams but he never got his due in the same way. The press is bored by the survivors. He lived long enough for local shows to be something people blew off because they didn’t want to spend $40 that weekend. There was no MTV-ready comeback. He was kind of a hardass. People say he didn’t like his fans, and they say that about Bob Dylan now, but like Bob Dylan, he played concerts everywhere all the time, which is all that really matters. I mean, he also didn’t like his fans, but he didn’t retire so my rebuttal is so? I just want people to know he was the best who ever did it.
This article was funny because MTV hired me to cover the 2016 election and go to the conventions and write real hard about it but this is the only thing I published there that anybody ever mentions anymore. Norm Macdonald said it was sad and beautiful. Judd Apatow liked it but didn’t give me a job for some reason. Somebody told me it was in the Grammy Museum for a minute, which probably isn’t true. Dave Alvin told me it was the best piece about Merle he’d ever read. I felt like I had this new, tangible moral obligation to carry the torch for Bakersfield writing and the Bakersfield sound, a tangible moral obligation I ignored as fast as I could.
My main memory of this piece though, is when an old family friend, who knew Merle in the ‘60s and ‘70s, silently read a printed-out copy for what felt like an hour but was probably 3 minutes, shed exactly one tear, wiped it off, and never talked to me again. I have no idea what he was thinking but it’s better that way.
Merle Haggard, Son of Bakersfield
(Originally published on 04/07/2016)
I’m from East Bakersfield, right at the end of Highway 58 before it takes you to the desert. My grandma cleaned houses until her body wouldn’t let her anymore. My grandpa is a retired truck driver and smokes a pack a day. It used to be Camel Straights but they got to be too expensive so now he buys Seneca, king size, unfiltered, at a reservation in Porterville. And I’ve never seen him happier than when he said he saw Merle Haggard’s steel guitarist there.
I was born into country music. I didn’t have a say in the matter. I was given my grandpa’s surplus Merle Haggard LPs as birthday presents before I even knew what rock and roll was. I knew the words to “Mama Tried” a solid decade before I heard of Elvis. When I look back on my childhood, my fondest memories are of sitting in my grandpa’s tiny yellowing living room in a cloud of smoke listening to Merle Haggard records while he drank coffee and said almost nothing. Merle Haggard wasn’t the beginning and the end of country music — he was the beginning and the end of music. Period.
I knew he’d been sick this last few months. But he had been sick before. It was expected. He treated his body like hell. But he always survived the mythological country music vices. The straight-out-of-the-bottle whiskey guzzling, the mountains of cigarettes, the shoeboxes full of cocaine. He had lung cancer and beat it. He was unkillable.
But by Easter Sunday, sitting at a family reunion with people who knew Merle Haggard personally, well enough to call him Merle without pretense, it felt different. Merle was very old now. He was about to turn 79. He had pneumonia, and he’d been in the hospital, and now he was canceling tour dates. I asked my uncle if I should be worried this time.
“Let’s put it this way: His bus driver retired.”
The air went out of the room. He’d had the same bus driver longer than I’d been alive.
“He likes being off the road,” my uncle continued. “He’s discovering Netflix now. He called me up and asked if I’d heard of House of Cards. I said ’Yep, I sure did, three years ago, pal.’ I figure he’s about twenty years behind on television. He spent way too much time in that damn bus.”
We all laughed, but we were laughing to keep from saying good-bye. If Merle Haggard was off the road, Merle Haggard was about to die.
When I finally got the inevitable news, a thousand images came into my head at once. The image of him approaching my mom at Safeway and asking her what kind of salt he should buy. The image of his tour bus pulling away from a Walmart Supercenter at midnight as the employees stood at the door dead silent. The image of him sitting at a corner booth in his go-to greasy spoon, eating chicken fried steak on a Sunday, while I sat listening to the place turn suddenly into a church. The image of two twentysomething dudes sneaking slugs of whiskey in the men’s room at one of his last hometown concerts, bragging that they shared his weed doctor.
When Johnny Cash died, it was like part of the American landscape vanished, like we lost the Grand Canyon. But when Merle Haggard died, speaking as someone born in Bakersfield and descended from Okies and Arkies who knew exactly what the Dust Bowl was, it was like losing a member of my immediate family, like there was one less place to set at my grandma’s table.
Because Merle Haggard wasn’t a singer to us. He wasn’t a songwriter. We never called him the “working man’s poet” or waxed philosophic about his role in the Bakersfield sound and how it shaped rock and roll. He was too important for that. He was the center of our culture. He was a part of every family gathering and every drive. A man who not only sang about my family, but to my family, without mythologizing or patronizing or getting any of the details wrong. To use my grandma’s phrase, “he sang my life.”
Haggard’s songs were tough, undecorated songs about the struggles of common people who were barely getting by in a country that wasn’t particularly receptive to them. They made you feel like somebody was in your corner through the struggle just to exist. He empathized with people who worked with their hands. And he never got patronizing about it, because he knew what it was like. He’d been there. You could hear in his smoke- and alcohol-ravaged voice and unaffected singing style that he had been there.
What Merle Haggard had is what separated Bakersfield country from Nashville country. He didn’t try to sing pretty, he tried to sing honest. He tried to write honest. The great Merle Haggard songs, like “Mama Tried” or “Workin’ Man Blues” or “The Bottle Let Me Down” or “Kern River,” they didn’t dress up for you at all. They sounded like they’d been kicked around by dust devils for a few months before he recorded them. They sounded beat up and hard-traveled. And that worked. He just went and told his story and played his songs. He could play any city in the country by being exactly who he said he was.
That made it all right to be from Bakersfield when a lot of people weren’t all right with that. When people might physically recoil at your destitution or wonder if you could read. Here in your corner was Merle, and he was truthful about where he came from, about being an ex-con who had lived in a boxcar in Oildale, and people were fine with him. He legitimized people like my grandparents and all of the other displaced people in the parts of California people try to get away from. He legitimized everybody who got up before sunrise to drive trucks or pick cotton in some of the most desolate towns in America. Towns where it never rained. Towns of dirt and canals and corrugated sheet metal. Every time he had a hit record, he told you it was perfectly normal to wake up with a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table instead of any food and stare out at a highway. He made you think that you, too, could do something besides stand in a field or sit in a truck, but that if you had to, well, that was all right too.
After he died, I thought about the California he knew, and how it left the world long before he did. The clubs he played are all gone. I’ve driven by many of the places where they used to be, and not a trace remains. The Lucky Spot on Edison Highway in Bakersfield is long gone. It’s a parking lot abutting two shuttered antique stores. The ruins aren’t even there anymore. And the place he was from has become almost unlivable. Oildale is so overrun with crime and drugs and destitution that it’s impossible to imagine escaping it. If you walk through it, you feel a bone-deep grinding misery that will physically cause your chest to tighten. And Bakersfield now has the deadliest police force in America. Merle Haggard’s California, the honky-tonks, the Dust Bowl survivors, the labor camps, is fading away.
The physical traces of what molded him have almost been erased, or relegated to museums, which will make him tougher and tougher to understand as he’s slotted into the history books. But I can say this. If you want to get to the soul of the man, you have to look past “Okie From Muskogee,” his sad lapse into jingoism with “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” and his accidental reputation as a conservative, which he spent much of his career undoing. You have to think about the misery he escaped, what it took to survive the Dust Bowl, to survive an oil town or an agricultural town. You have to think about people at the bottom in the towns nobody on TV talks about. You have to think about songs like “They’re Tearing the Labor Camps Down,” which I consider his masterpiece.
It describes the misery working people have to see in America, the despair they have to carry with them. It understands the deep sorrow of feeling left behind and doing everything you can just to hold on. It’s desperately hard to make it in America, and he understood that. His career was a constant reminder of that. He never, ever forgot how tough it is for common people to get by. If you asked the people in my family, most of them one emergency away from going underwater, what they think about Merle Haggard’s passing, they would be very clear with you. The best songwriter ever in country music is now gone.
2025, So Far
I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and talk to my dad in 1988, just before I was born, and tell him what it’s like to live in the future. I’d tell him all the amazing things that are happening. Francis Ford Coppola is still working but it’s weird and he can’t get financing. The Rolling Stones are still together. Ringo Starr’s new album is better than you’d think. David Letterman has this huge beard and wants to look like a cross between a billionaire and a moonshiner. There’s a western nighttime soap called Yellowstone that you and all your friends are obsessed with. We all have pocket-sized computers now. You can look up encyclopedia articles and stuff but you’ll mostly use it for checking the stock market and playing a game called Candy Crush. It’s really just something to do with your hands, like cigarettes. Life is mostly a string of subscription services you get from the computer, nobody will ever buy a house again, and the American dream is dead but not in a way you’d immediately notice. (Then I go win the lottery a few times and put in a bid on the Sheats-Goldstein Residence.)
The first month of 2025 has been one of those “oh no, we’re living in history” moments. A singularly American onslaught of death and degradation, moving at the speed of light. I won’t list any of the bullshit that’s taking place because it’s not helpful. It just sucks and everybody knows it sucks and we can’t do much about it.
The speed of all that death and degradation deadens the brain, which those responsible are well aware of: they did it that way on purpose and it basically works. When I ask friends how they’re doing, I get a lot of sighs and long pauses. A lot of those poignant silences are about football, which sucks too, but still. Nobody I know is in a good mood.
I’m almost a year into my “launch a paid newsletter while also wildly cutting back on social media because I’m a genius” experiment. No idea what I’ve learned from that, but I know being online is a drug and so is news. They are both addictions that rewire your brain to be miserable and, maybe worse, to anticipate being miserable.
I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I’ll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it’s actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called “wildly miscalculated” and you haven’t seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.
You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.
Death Is Just A Change
David Lynch has gone on to whatever the next place is. I’m very sad about it; it came at a hard time for the city of Los Angeles, a place he dearly loved, and it’s hard not to think his change of consciousness, which we kinda knew was coming (“I knew a couple of weeks ago that he was failing. That it was going to be soon.”) was hastened by the fires. Made less peaceful because it followed his evacuation, because it was in the middle of a tragedy that will make the city permanently different. That there had to be a violence to it.
I love David Lynch, he’s a hero. I’ve written about him a lot over the years and I’m going to keep doing it. I cut a three hour podcast about what would be his last project, Twin Peaks: The Return. I think it’s his masterpiece, and I think it’s a film, and the greatest one made in the 21st century. It’s so rich, it’s so dense, so full of ideas that I could talk about forever. It’s also a meditation on death and it helped me more than anything else to process my grandma’s death from cancer, which happened in the middle of the show’s run. It helped him process the deaths of, what, like 80% of the cast of that thing? Half of them died before it came out and Harry Dean died right after.
He was philosophically tuned in to death, profoundly ready for it, and he knew time was running out. The show wouldn’t exist if he wasn’t. I think it’s one of the great miracles in the history of filmmaking that he was able to get it made, and not just get it made but make it the culmination of every idea he explored in his career. To write his own conclusion. Most people don’t get to do that. And I don’t think we’ll see anything like it again. Even during production it kept seeming like negotiations would fall apart, and in the streaming era it feels like people don’t even make television anymore. It feels too challenging and perfect and huge to even be television (which is because it’s not, it’s a film). How the fuck did he get away with this, I keep saying in his voice.
Today is David Lynch’s birthday. People have been keeping vigil en masse and making a shrine to him at Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake, where he famously drank a milkshake every day at 2:30, a milkshake he would later correctly say was really bad for you. I’ve had time on my hands so I’ve just sat there for a few days thinking about him, how much he meant to me, and it’s been a powerful thing to see so many people who felt the same way and cried and hugged and smoked cigarettes, which the restaurant would never let happen if it was anybody else.
One of the beautiful things about David Lynch was that you could find your people through him, how a whole community was built up around him. I’ve had a lot of really nice conversations with people who get it and we can jump right into his whole deal, what it means, means to us. So many people going through grief, not for him per se but for their own families and the city, and getting to process it communally, in a way that feels healthy. His work changed people and it was a real blessing.
It’s because it came from the heart. He was a real empathetic, compassionate, same on both sides of the fence dude. He was one of those artists you just wanted to hug and say thank you too, because he helped you process how hard this life is.
I don’t have anything fancy to say about his work except that it helped me figure out this whole bullshit, that he taught me what it means to be an artist and make art. He made it accessible and doable, even if he was cranky and crotchety about it. Also meditation and being meditative in your own work. Meditation saves lives.
People who are a little bit older than me probably got into him through the original run of Twin Peaks. I got into him by checking out Mulholland Drive my first week of school. My roommates all accused me of just watching pornography but I got to have this whole private experience of thinking about the ideas in a movie for the first time, what movies can do, and knowing I would think about it forever. (“You will see me one more time if you do good. You’ll see me two more times if you do bad” is kinda my favorite line ever, sidebar.)
I have the rest of time to talk about things like dreams and archetypes and his perfectly unique conception of the American West. How good he was at finding faces that clearly feel things and have humanity, like Harry Dean or Laura Dern or Robert Forster. How funny but left-field powerful his little roles are in The Fabelmans or even Louie. How astonishing he was at sound design, how The Straight Story (also about death) is the greatest G-rated movie ever made, the value of stillness and repetition and having a routine you do every day, all these things, but I won’t. He’s my favorite filmmaker and I’ll get better thinking about it as I get older. I’ll just say this: at the memorial today, the sky was finally blue and it was a beautiful sunny day in Los Angeles.
The Last American Band
Honest to goodness
The bars weren’t open this morning
They must have been voting
For a new president or something
X is calling it quits. They’re my favorite band ever, so it’s hard to say that and harder still to wrap my head around it enough to know I’m telling the truth. They gave me a purpose as a teenager and made me feel like I had a home as an adult. One of the rare bands that can make you feel like there’s a point to this whole racket.
If you’re a fan, they’re one of those bands that’s more than “important,” but important to you, in that intimate coming-of-age way that means you can’t fall out of love with them. Everybody has one and it doesn’t strictly matter who it is. So objectivity is out the window here; I can’t even try to sound smart. I’ve seen them dozens of times. They’ve always been there, half the time literally, during times of confusion, heartbreak, loss, excitement. A part of growing up and finding an identity, or even learning you can have one of those.
It got to the point with me where they felt like relatives. I made friends with them. I made friends with their fans. I never felt like I could talk to anybody but at their shows I could talk to everybody. They were all family. I was usually on the guest list. Sometimes I’d stay out smoking cigarettes with Exene until 4 in the morning talking about Loretta Lynn or Richard Nixon or Harry Dean Stanton and everything else people talk about while smoking cigarettes until 4 in the morning. One time in San Diego when I was especially broke, D.J. Bonebrake gave me their catering and I ate it for a week (I bet it was from Costco). They’re the master key that unlocks my whole deal.
(Here I’ll note that I’m not gonna make any cracks about Elon Musk and his horrible website. They’ve had their name 45 years longer than he has. My only position on the subject is that he should give them a billion dollars as one of his very funny gags.)
Through them I got to meet a lot of the musicians I admire. Los Lobos, The Blasters, Alejandro Escovedo, Neko Case, Lemmy, even Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. It boggles the mind how many of my memories are tied up with them. I got to go backstage at the Greek Theatre and steal a setlist from Flaco Jimenez (he went home early). I got to meet Winona Ryder. I got VIP bullshit from places that I only knew as myths, like the Whisky, the Roxy, the Troubadour.
I’m not bragging with all that, I’m just thankful that they made me feel like I belonged somewhere. I was a homeschooled kid from the even-worse part of Bakersfield and never had friends, not ever. I learned their music on headphones in the middle of the night. When I moved to Los Angeles for school, I barely even knew how to drive, especially not over the Grapevine, that big stupid metaphor separating Bakersfield from the people who had a future, and almost right away they made me feel like the Troubadour was a place I could go and drink underage and be welcome. Are you fucking kidding me? The only place I ever went before was Target and it was because I worked there.
First time I saw them, somewhere in Hollywood, they seemed like the biggest rock stars who ever existed. There they were, John and Exene, locking in on those harmonies that felt like blood-soaked incantations and also specifically the opposite of whatever Fleetwood Mac was. D.J. murdering the drums. Billy playing his Gretsch with that silver jacket and his legs spread impossibly wide, unbreakably smiling and bugging his eyes out at random women, acting like Eddie Cochran if he was from Mars. The visceral, bone-deep reaction, whatever that thing is you feel in your gut, they created was unbelievable. The audience was moving as one life form. People were losing their minds to this band I listened to in the dark in another town. Something about this, something in here, is what I do now.
This is a piece I wanted to write for a real magazine, but nobody was interested, which I realize now is because they’re not famous, they’re just famous to me and the rest of the community who felt their magic happen. Even after I decided to just write about them for myself I thought about interviewing them. But I realized that would violate whatever the pact was I had with them.
The civil wars
And the uncivilized wars
Conflagrations leap out of every poor furnace
The food cooks poorly
And everyone goes hungry
From then on, it’s dog eat dog
Dog eat body and body eat dog
I can’t go down there
I can’t understand it
I’m a no-good coward
An American too
(A North American, that is)
And I must not think bad thoughts
In 2024, X released their final album, Smoke & Fiction. It got solid reviews but it didn’t set the world on fire. Part of me still wants to be mad about that. Imagine The Clash releasing a new album in 2024. Imagine the Ramones doing it. The Sex Pistols. Imagine them even retaining their classic lineups. It’s unthinkable. Even if it could happen it could never happen. But X did it because they’re unkillable.
And anyway 47 years is a long time and the world is different. I don’t really feel like I understand music anymore, I’m stuck back in the 20th century somewhere with dumbassed guitars going clang clang clang. Call me a music historian if it pays anything. They made an album, they’re touring it, they’re properly saying goodbye. Sonically, it's still Chuck Berry telling us we're all gonna die for half an hour. Still sounds like some kind of freedom. That’s all I’m after, I got mine.
It’s completely appropriate that they’re winding things down on this album. They’re from the class of '77. They’ve been together longer than most marriages, including John and Exene’s. 47 years is a staggering amount of time to endure as a band. It doesn’t happen. They’re objectively lucky just to be alive, because that usually doesn’t happen either.
If you don’t know X, they’re a rock and roll band from the Los Angeles punk scene. They were the center of that scene because of their Johnny and June go to hell stage presence and because they could all play their instruments. Both those things were extraordinarily uncommon. By the way, now that I think about it, the only thing I remember about the first time I heard them was that they had a girl singer. I truthfully didn’t know punks could have those. And they had serious, literary lyrics. Some proprietary recipe involving Raymond Chandler, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, John Fante, Bukowski but in a good way, people like that.
It’s probably the lyrics that did me in. They were thoughtful and timeless, never an afterthought. And the fact that there was so much classic, gutbucket country in the blood of the writing. I only ever talked about Merle Haggard with my grandparents and here was a band that could cover his songs without smirking. And the fact that there was a sense of doom and dissolution to the lyrics, an earnest desperation. But a personal one, not a grandiose political one. The kind of poetry that kicks your teeth in, leaves you bleeding on the curb.
I should try and sell the band to those who aren’t from California. X’s songs are audibly from Los Angeles mostly because they sound cool while you’re driving and smoking, but they sound good anywhere, and most of the band isn’t native anyway. These are ultimately American songs. They were Americana before that genre had a name. These songs are all stalked by the ghost of Woody Guthrie, who sang about B-E-E-T-S, not B-E-A-T-S. They’re songs about itinerance and decrepit motel rooms and freight trains and driving all night long. They also sound really really good, and huge, which is true of, all told, about seven and a half minutes of any other American punk music. And their first four albums are as consistent as punk rock ever got, more consistent than anybody really thought it could be.
Now that you pulled the school underwater
And drowned the prom
Which man will you save for this Friday
You can put him in a fish pond
And watch him swim around
Then have a catholic dinner
If it isn't men it's death
It's the same old testament
At the cross her station keeping
Stood the mournful mother weeping
Where my man extended hung
Driven with nails to wood
Smoke in one hand looking for a drink
Drink in the other hand
Pointing out midnight
It’s fitting that I write this immediately after the death of Jimmy Carter. He was the permanent president in my neck of the woods (it's a figure of speech, we didn't have woods), just his spirit of well-intentioned despair, and X started under Carter. It was a world of huge lines to get gas and the gas station didn’t even have any gas left, a world where we’re the losers now and we have to make sense of it and make peace with it. The malaise speech subconsciously runs through all this music. But so too does the Carter era belief in the unique power of historical American music. That it’s all born of jazz and hillbillies and outcasts and migrations, something you caught from a radio station in another town somewhere you haven’t seen, and it all winds up intoxicating. They’re the only American punk band that effectively tapped in to that and had a perspective on that. These songs are America. It’s an America that’s on fire and down we go, cradle and all, but that’s America too. (Here I think it’s interesting that I don’t want to compare them to any other punk band, but precisely Merle Haggard.)
X isn’t terribly well-known even though their four classic albums were all worshipped by critics. I have a theory for that, and it’s that the New York and London punk scenes were really good at self-mythologizing, and Los Angeles people never really cared. They hung out in shitty apartments in Hollywood drinking beer and doing speed. They never had anybody to do their mythologizing for them, and it’s maybe the only reason you still see Ramones on T-shirts everywhere but not X. X is not lesser, and not local by any stretch. You could seriously argue they were the best punk band period. But they didn’t have the advertising or the navel-gazing. At no point did any of them pretend they were famous or try to be famous: even in Hollywood, they were somehow as far from showbiz as a band can get. I know that because Exene told me that and maybe because it’s obvious. I firmly believe X could have been from Wichita. They couldn’t because Los Angeles is how the outcasts found each other, but they could’ve been.
I’m not the guy to review their final album or put it into perspective, but I can say it’s roughly as good as their four classic albums and their previous "final" album that they wanted a do-over on because it came out during the pandemic. It doesn’t aspire to be anything more than an album of new X songs, but it succeeds perfectly at that, which makes it my favorite album of the year, if only when I’m driving, because that’s the ritual, that’s how these albums work. It’s a minor miracle that they found a way to do this. When groups have been around this long, you generally hear that not recording new music is the only way to keep touring, or if they do record they descend into weird ego-clashing, lawsuit-heavy mediocrity. They no longer have a way to work together. But X figured it out, the engine still runs, and that blows my mind. It’s the last album by the last American band. Please bring the flag.
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Bogus Holiday Post: Good Song Titles
It’s Christmastime, which means it’s time for people who make posts on the computer to list things with a little preamble you slammed out in five minutes. It’s an actual time-honored tradition I like, because it’s so easy to list things, and even when you get it completely wrong, nobody’s keeping score.
I didn’t consume much media this year, which is great for me but bad for content. I got asked to vote in the Uproxx music poll, and I might still do that, but it would pretty much just be listing the 14 albums I listened to and then stealing Tom Erlewine’s list to fill out the rest of the thing. There were exactly two albums I loved and twelve albums I respected by people I respect.
Only saw like three movies because for some reason I still live in Los Angeles. You hit a point where you know just enough about production that watching anything remotely contemporary just reminds you of the sorry state the business is in and how they don’t make stuff here anymore.
So I’m doing this: listing song titles I like. The twist is I’m only listing song titles I liked completely divorced from context. Song titles that jumped off the tracklist so hard that it was enough incentive to listen to the album, regardless of genre or credibility. Titles that made me go “hold on what was that.”
This list is in no order and I didn’t really cheat. I tried hard to recall these from memory, because the point of the game is how sticky they are, not how objectively good they are, and I skimmed my phone for stragglers.
The list that follows is surprisingly close to complete (though I cut a few that are so filthy I don’t want them to follow my name in a google search). If I ventured much further than this, I’d be trying to make myself look good and I’d be lying. Or I'd be writing a long and proper essay. Which is not the point of bogus holiday posts.
The result was interesting: it’s still mostly stuff I like, a lot of old pop, and a lot of pretentious cred shit. But it’s not a 1:1 correlation with the artists I like. Most of my favorite acts are not on here. Bob Dylan doesn’t make it in. The Clash don’t make it in. My favorite songs don’t have my favorite titles. So it’s kind of a barometer of quality, it’s a good data point, but it obviously doesn’t matter that much.
Song titles are clearly their own art form. Dunno what these titles have in common. A lot of them suggest that I, Kaleb, was raised in the church and like Biblical language (I mostly banned gospel and jazz traditionals because they're across the board too perfect). There's a lot of apocalyptic stuff in there, which, same thing.
Not a lot of "funny" titles though. If a title is too funny, it generally creates the impression that the song will be contrived or annoying. I like complete phrases but they have to be euphonious, poetic. I don't gravitate toward stuff that's long and smart-sounding. It usually has to make a point, justify itself. One of my favorite song titles is Tom Petty's Refugee, because the first time I saw that, I said to myself: I need to hear a song called Refugee. What the hell does that sound like? Same thing with Courtyard, which sounded ghostly and confident.
Anyway here’s the list. You love those.
Kris Kristofferson - They Killed Him
Siouxsie & The Banshees - Cities In Dust
Blind Willie Johnson - Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground
The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - A Child of a Few Hours is Burning to Death
Guy Lombardo - Stars Fell On Alabama
Jandek - You Painted Your Teeth
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Refugee
The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God
Silver Jews - Like Like The The The Death
Roky Erickson - Birds’d Crash
Dirty Three - Some Summers They Drop Like Flies
Allen Toussaint - Victims of the Darkness
Merle Haggard - I’m a Lonesome Fugitive
The Shirelles - I Met Him on a Sunday
Howlin’ Wolf - Killing Floor
Sonic Youth - Anti-Orgasm
Chuck Berry - No Particular Place To Go
The Beach Boys - California Girls
John Fahey - On The Death And Disembowelment Of The New Age
Ramones - The KKK Took My Baby Away
The Beatles - And Your Bird Can Sing
Warren Zevon - Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
Spiritualized - Cop Shoot Cop…
Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper - Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child
Willie Nelson - Darkness on the Face of the Earth
The Bobby Fuller Four - Let Her Dance
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach - This House is Empty Now
X - Sex and Dying in High Society
The Birthday Party - Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)
Bob Wills - Take Me Back To Tulsa
Captain Beefheart - My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains
The Chiffons - One Fine Day
The Joy Formidable - The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie
X - I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts
The Soft Boys - I Wanna Destroy You
The Beat Farmers - God is Here Tonight
Hank Williams - Lost Highway
Cyndi Lauper - I Drove All Night
Tom T. Hall - That's How I Got To Memphis
Bobby Womack - If You Think You're Lonely Now
The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog
Mission of Burma - That’s When I Reach For My Revolver
The Beach Boys - Wouldn’t It Be Nice?
The Marvelettes - The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - More News From Nowhere
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Cortez the Killer
Bobbie Gentry - Courtyard
Tommy James & The Shondells - I Think We’re Alone Now
Red Sparowes - The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty Storm, Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses.
Love - Alone Again Or
Future of the Left - Arming Eritrea
The Pop Group - She Is Beyond Good And Evil
Joy Division - Atrocity Exhibition
Mississippi Sheiks - The World is Going Wrong
Bo Diddley - Pills
Faron Young - Unmitigated Gall
Broken Social Scene - Our Faces Split The Coast In Half
Charles Mingus - Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting
Blind Willie Johnson - Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning
Culture - I’m Alone in the Wilderness
Bill Morrissey - Barstow
Bangles - Walk Like an Egyptian
Tom T. Hall - It Sure Can Get Cold In Des Moines
A Silver Mt. Zion - Sit in the Middle of Three Galloping Dogs
Willie Nelson - Funny How Time Slips Away
Dolly Parton - The Seeker
Black Sabbath - War Pigs
Nina Simone - I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free
Writing About Writing
People have been asking me for writing advice a lot lately. All I really have to say is just start typing until you’re done, and make sure none of what you’re typing is bullshit. The first part takes until whenever your deadline is, and the second part takes your entire life.
I can’t be a hypocrite though. My relationship with writing is dysfunctional. It’s usually a fight against swearing it off forever, and half the time I lose. But it can be fun when it starts to feel like playing music. Finding a line that you know belongs to you, getting into a groove, and playing for you, not the audience (every few days I have to rediscover that the last part is the only way to ever in a million years do anything).
But I’m starting to appreciate how odd it is that I’ve had a writing career. I did not grow up thinking that was a job you could do, and I mostly read comic strips. I kind of wanted to be in the newspaper business because they got to be inside and it’s hot outside. And I sucked at math so accounting was out. My grandparents always had country music going, and my grandma taught me Roger Miller was a writer because he got to sing all this goofy shit nobody else was going to write for him. That was about it.
Then I went to college (my application essay was some give me money garbage about not wanting to be an illiterate hillbilly) and the only teacher who didn’t hate my guts taught a class on American realism. I wrote an essay about An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and he wrote “wow!” and it was the only A I got. Then I started to actually meet writers and they were all stupid assholes so I thought hey, this is a scam I might be able to do. I don’t have the stomach for regular crimes.
With that in mind, here is the writing advice I have:
Don’t die. A lot of people get tripped up here, because dying is really easy. The trick is to eat and sleep at roughly the same time everybody else does, take walks, and do laundry.
Write like people talk in real life. Do this by listening to people talk all the time. When you’ve written something, read it aloud and if you think “that sounds stupid,” that means it is.
Listen to a ton of music and read poetry. This will give you rhythm and meter. I’ve written whole articles to the tune of specific songs that were stuck in my head. It also gives you structure because you get a sense that it’s time to head for the chorus.
It doesn’t have to be short but write like it is. Lonesome Dove is the shortest 900 page book you’ll ever read.
Write the version that sucks and do it really fast. John Swartzwelder gave that advice once. In the morning you can pretend some jerk wrote it and after that you just have to clean up after him.
Be honest. Lying is fine but it takes too much concentration.
If a line just arrives in your head like it came from somewhere else, write it down immediately, meditate on it, and make it the foundation of whatever you’re building.
Watch a lot of comedy. It’s good for rhythm, editing, and surprising people. It falls apart when it’s not tight. If you make yourself laugh you’ll feel like a genius.
Read the actual Bible a lot. It’s the first real book and everybody rips it off, so you’ll secretly learn a bunch of rules.
Booze and drugs are a crutch and prove you’re too chickenshit to actually do the job. You had to invent some other guy.
If you have a favorite book that makes you want to read, steal from it as much as you want all the time. Throw a brick through the window and empty out the cash register.
Figure out what kind of writing you don’t like, anthropomorphize it, and write like you’re going to burn its house down.
Do some old-fashioned actual reporting of an event; local paper type shit. You’ll learn how to gather details and listen to people. People constantly say insane things. It’s also kind of not rewarding at all so you learn when something is just done and be glad it’s dead.
If you’re talking about writing, you’re not writing.
Get a time machine and go back to 1995 when you’re seven years old and just piss away all your time on the internet getting into arguments on message boards, then do that for ten years straight. You will develop prison muscles and you’ll be a good thief.
GIve yourself a time limit and word count for writing something and actually hit it even if you have to screw it up so bad that your own mother will lose respect for you and you’ll seriously begin to question why anyone would ever do this for a living and wouldn’t it be nicer to just go outside and look at cloud formations or maybe even nothing and just feel normal again just for a couple minutes and later you can get in a car and drive around the deserted part of town where the cops don’t go and break the speed limit or head into oncoming traffic as a goof and play obnoxious music way too loud and sing along in a cruel imitation of the voice of Johnny Cash then maybe go to the Fosters Freeze to get a cheeseburger but I’m just kidding about that part because you’re writing which means you have no money unless you have a trust fund and if you have a trust fund why don’t you just go do something normal like white collar crime and develop a horrifying but manageable drug addiction or buy a perfectly stupid car and maybe say you’re a conceptual artist while you’re at it
Really Smooth Music
I’m in the home stretch of an assignment, and I should be doing that, but last night I saw a documentary that wound up being so specifically related to my assignment that I can confidently claim this is a rehearsal.
I saw the new Yacht Rock documentary on HBO. It was wonderful, and I’m not saying that because I’m friends with like half the people involved. I was just happy to see them there. They picked the exact right talking heads. That’s no small thing; whenever I actually know about a documentary’s topic, I immediately and unconsciously start grading it according to whether they interviewed the right people, and I usually turn it off after half an hour. Didn’t happen this time. I was floored. Go see it.
No time to get in the weeds about explaining the yacht rock “deal,” which is all in the doc, but I saw the Yacht Rock sketch series when it came out. Me and my cousin watched it a thousand times. We have the dialogue memorized. It was a guaranteed pick-me-up during a time when our plan for adulthood was to become drifters and die of tuberculosis, and it’s a memory I’ll always treasure, the way you treasure anything you feel like you “discovered.” You have a sense of ownership. Whoever made this, these are my people.
Sometimes I wonder why. It was funny, yeah, but I think it was ultimately a high school rivalry thing. When yacht rock was getting popular, Merle Haggard was doing some of the best work of his career and The Clash was changing the world. There was a tougher world in the arts, of harder people, and this stuff just seemed like it was by and for rich brats who didn’t know pain. So maybe we just liked seeing them get punished by comedy.
It was also about guys we’d met and had bad interactions with, my cousin in the music business and me tirelessly at work inventing new ways to be unhappy in Malibu. These were all guys who could play anything but they only wanted to talk about jazz albums that bored me to death. And their stories were all, like, so I stole my dad’s key to the studio, drove to Sunset even though the traffic was terrible and then I accidentally walked in on a session and said “keyboards, huh?” and the song went to #1 and a couple weeks later I was buying a house. Quincy had the best coke, man. He really did.
I think the Bakersfield thing just gave us an outlook on music that prioritized “real” storytelling. You had to bleed, and it seemed like these guys didn’t bleed. Never mind what a diminished fifth is, are you bleeding?
And these guys were cynical, which is cool, but we liked guys who were prison cynical, not Encino homeowner cynical. They could turn music into a series of solvable math and engineering problems, and that destroyed some of the magic. There’s a religious, ritual side to creating music that yacht rock neglected.
And there was this underdog thing of “shouldn’t you guys just go be electrical engineers and leave music to the poor bastards who can’t do anything else?” that still creeps into my head now and then even though I have no official business caring at all.
But I have to admit there’s something to yacht rock. It has this uncanniness, this unknowability, of being slightly before my time, slightly too far away by geography. And it was quietly ominous, made you feel like it was up to no good. Like going into a yuppie’s house that’s decorated like there are no guns in there, but there are definitely some guns in there.
I have one memory of yacht rock before the webseries came around and put a name to it. When I was a kid at my grandparents’ house, I’d sit alone watching TV a lot, at antisocial hours, because I was a lazy bastard and hated secondhand smoke. There was an ad that played mercilessly for some sort of “Music You Remember From The Radio Before Your Divorce, You Love This Don’t You” compilation. It played little five second clips of soft rock staples, overlaid with images of couples on the beach and probably going to like Moonshadows. There was one clip that got stuck in my head forever. It made me want to actually bang my head against the wall, as in create noises and pain to distract from it, and I’d get a little sick every time I remembered it. Not just physically sick but morally sick, like everybody knows what I’ve done wrong and they’re onto me, there’s no way out. Like I was in the human zoo from 2001. Awful, disgusting sounds. After I watched this documentary, I looked up the lyrics to the clip I remembered, and this was like 30 years ago, and I didn’t know them but I knew them phonetically so I just started spelling out sounds on Google, and I actually found it. Finally. I can look my enemy in the eye. The song was “After All,” by Al Jarreau. Now it’s over. Thank God.
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Seasonal Content (2024 Edition)
I’m way too tired to write, which is why I’m doing it. I’m finishing a magazine gig and gathering the nerve to stick the landing. God willing you’ll see it early next year. I’m gonna use a word my mom abuses: it feels weird doing magazine assignments when you’re not actively employed doing something else. When you’re not chasing a dream or leveling up at a hobby. I’m doing it to pay bills for one month. That’s all.
It’s a powerful motivator and I appreciate the fact that it’s a rare luxury to do work like this at all, even once, as a professional. But I’ve never had that motivation manifest in a positive way. Not once in my life. The way it always works is this: I gather up a bunch of research, toss it in a pile, highlight some stuff, write on legal pads for awhile, then I spend a month inventing new ways to be neurotic. Just pacing around the block smoking cigarettes, wishing I was somebody who could string two sentences together to save his life. Wishing I could be forgiven by everyone I’ve ever known, just for being like this.
I know the hip thing to say, at least in sunny California, is that it’s imposter syndrome, but modern living has too many labels. What happens is I feel like a criminal, like I’ve sinned, that I should be ashamed and punished. Like all this could go away. But everything always could go away at any time, that’s the deal. This has an urgency to it. A heat on your neck. Like somebody has a sniper rifle trained on you. The feeling will only go away when I file the damn thing, feel like I’ve been hit by a truck, and spend the afternoon at Bob’s Big Boy, looking like I’m thinking about my life even though I’m actually just struggling to think of anything, for my brain to do anything. Sometimes it’ll take 45 minutes just to come up with an idea as challenging as “food is good, I like burger.”
I’m not doing anything for the holidays; nobody in my family is. It’s too complicated and expensive. But there’s always a temptation around this time to feel left out, like you have permission to feel sad and lonely. Get a sad Christmas tree and put two ornaments on it or some shit. Get a bunch of peppermint bark and eat it joylessly, until it tastes like chalk. Get a storebought pie and house a cowardly amount of it, like a little more than half, before realizing it isn’t particularly good. Put on The Last Waltz even though everybody familiar with that movie finally knows that they had to rotoscope the cocaine out of Neil Young’s nose. Of course they did! It was directed by Martin Scorsese and filmed in California in 1978! They didn’t even do that good of a job! You can still see some cocaine!
I don’t hate the holidays. It’s just that it usually winds up being a bunch of conspicuous consumption you can't actually afford and it feels like nothing. And that’s where the real sadness kicks in. When everything is hollow. Where you think somebody ripped you off because you don’t feel different. All this ritual and money and it doesn’t even work.
This afternoon I took some time to earnestly reflect on what I like about the holidays when I’m feeling down and out. It sounds stupid but it’s not. I like to get in the car and drive somewhere in the daylight, get out on the actual highway. Pull off to a gas station and get some Camels. Go to McDonald’s and get some fries. There are two reasons for this: it’s literally forward movement (I’m going somewhere else), and it’s boring as sin. The one thing I never feel on the holidays is normal and bored. I’m always thinking about others’ expectations and my own disappointments or anxiety, the cultural weight of all this pointless storytelling. I just want permission to feel normal, and sometimes that means driving to a random gas station, something that could happen to anyone on any day of the year, good day or bad. Something about that feels like freedom.
Mining for Gold
It’s the holidays, so I’m making subscriber posts free for the rest of the year. But please subscribe because my only other source of income is telling strangers about times I’ve met Bruce Dern, a job which currently, and I know it’s tough out there, pays zero dollars a week. And anyway all those stories take place in Los Feliz, which makes me think he just lives around there.
This observation was probably first made the weekend after humans achieved behavioral modernity, but music is like food. It’s so obviously fundamental to life that it’s usually routine. Not something you think about at all. But sometimes, at certain hours in certain weather, it’s magic. So your relationship with it is constantly evolving. And the circumstances necessary for it to become magic are highly context dependent, and they’re constantly evolving too. You can speculate about when magic is likely to happen, but you’ll never know. There are days when Albert Ayler and John Zorn are almost too normal, and there are days when Chuck Berry will kill you dead in two seconds.
I always try to jot down the moments when the magic happens, so I can be in the right place if it happens again. Try to figure out who was responsible, the ingredients they used, the way they prepared it, how they served it. The whole process matters.
This year, somebody died who was part of that process. He made magic happen and it changed me. You don’t know him unless you lived in San Diego before I was born. His name was Paul Kamanski. He wrote the song “Hollywood Hills” for the Beat Farmers.
If you asked me for my favorite songs, I have a list of well-manicured, educated answers that would make you stop reading after this sentence. But if you asked me to shut up about pre-war folk, I’d say Hollywood Hills is my favorite song ever.
Dunno why. It’s in a tradition with The Byrds, Neil Young and Tom Petty, and it’s a heartland rock anthem, whatever that means, but I just sat through most of a John Cougar Mellencamp show and nothing happened, so that’s not why.
Shit, the answer is personal. Damn it. I’ll get it over with quick. I went to school in Malibu because other people said I should. I hated it there. Never even went to the beach even though I could see it from my window. Christianity plus starfucking – what could go wrong? (Me, it turns out.)
I had a 2000 Ford Explorer that always had $2,000 worth of medical problems. When I was visiting my grandparents in Bakersfield one weekend, I was there most weekends, it broke down. Head gasket. So my uncle had to drive me back to school. I was washed up. Society was officially 86ing me for not having enough money. I hated everything and wanted to quit.
There’s this part of the Grapevine where, after an hour of driving through subtle variations of the color brown, Los Angeles County starts to announce itself. It’s bigger than you. It glitters. Flirts a little, but not too much. You still have to get past Castaic.
I don’t remember if I was in one of the cool promo cars my uncle occasionally got to drive, but he was doing like 130 when we hit the top of the hill and I was just a ball of motion sickness. Then Hollywood Hills came on and I felt alive. It’s not a party song and it’s not subversively optimistic; it’s kind of a drag. I didn’t feel happy or like I was the star of my own movie. But I suddenly felt like everything happening to me was normal. That the contract I signed when I opened my eyes for the first time said I just have to hold on whether I like it or not, it’s right there in the contract.
As we started to go downhill, breaking the freeway speed limit by at least one freeway speed limit, this song felt like what I imagined doing cocaine felt like “when cocaine was still good.” Just a full body experience. Everything heightened. Everything significant even though it wasn’t. It said life is basically about getting your ass kicked, and it helped me be alright with the ass-kickings.
The Beat Farmers never had a national footprint. They’re one of the last local bands, really. There should be a Kmart discount sticker on all their records that says you had to be there. But the LP with this song is like an archaeological discovery. Something that might be at the antique mall for a dollar, something that looks like nothing. But it’s as good as anything Tom Petty was up to at the time. You don’t need the connection I have with this song to appreciate that. It’s just one of those albums that says you can still discover things. It’s called The Pursuit of Happiness.
The Least Mysterious Song on the Internet
A few months back, I wrote about a hot new obsession among Reddit perverts: the most mysterious song on the internet. I did this because it doesn’t matter, and part of my problem, my whole bullshit, is I need to write about things that don’t matter or I’ll get sick and die.
Anyway, somebody found the damn thing. Game’s over. Time to hit the parking lot and get in your car you can’t find because it looks like all the other cars. It was made by some German kids who wanted to be Duran Duran, because of course it was, that’s exactly what it sounds like. They played some festivals and opened for Eric Burdon and eventually they got real jobs. They were called “FEX,” which is fine.
There’s a cycle to the content mill and there’s some satisfaction to be had in how predictable that cycle is. It’s pretty much natural law. More than a decade of online obsession leading nowhere? That’s a story. That’s a two-hour YouTube documentary with paid partnerships. More than a decade of online obsession getting a mercy-killing? That’s the last page of the book. Everything else is epilogue. The song could have been made by Jimmy Hoffa and the guys who escaped from Alcatraz and it would still be the epilogue.
After that it’s all boilerplate. Singer’s tech-literate daughter explains the internet to him. The band, made up entirely of regular guys, tearfully reunites at probably a train station. Some radio interviews, a couple acoustic performances, then they’ll get in the studio and re-record it for old times’ sake, then they’ll be surprised that the new recording gets about 1% of the clicks the old one did. The window for monetizing stories like this always closes as soon as you can see the window.
The search for the song didn’t strictly mean anything – it was basically a text-based ARG – but finding it does. The fact is, this is it for “lost media.” It’s done now. Everybody found everything. That’s not literally true, as MGM lost a billion zillion movies in lot fires and Mick Jones still won’t sign off on an official release of Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg, but it is spiritually true. The community, such as it was, used this story as advertising, the final boss of the game. There are no more lost media mysteries that come anywhere close to the Q score this had.
That’s because a good internet mystery has to have a good brand identity. This song had a few things going for it: tape hiss, anonymous Germans, and enough hooks to sound like a slightly uncanny version of a chart hit. That’s why so many people suggested it was from an alternate dimension. It was so close to being normal.
To be mysterious, a song can’t simply be unknown. My cousin has played plenty of sessions that will never get released. He has the only surviving copies of some of these. The bands involved might not even remember doing them. But that’s just something that happens in the music business in California. It doesn’t make you lust after piercing the veil of time. It takes that extra layer of uncanniness. It has to be an unscratchable itch. My grandpa’s brother made some 45s and I may wind up being the last person to own copies of those (if some specifically German collectors don’t outlive me) but they’re so conventionally competent that they’re “worthless.”
It’ll be a huge uphill battle to ever make somebody care about a lost media story like this again. There won’t be an origin story to make. There will still be some detritus from the early internet, some made-for-TV movies here and there, that people will keep looking for, but they’ll be sidequests to the main mission. Western society just doesn’t have a lot of real secrets and the CIA killed Kennedy.
The only thing that could even compete today would basically be an act of God: maybe London After Midnight is in the hands of a lunatic private collector in Amarillo, Texas or hiding under the floorboards of a condemned school for the deaf outside of Edmonton, Alberta. Maybe that would compete. Maybe there are still some unadulterated safe deposit boxes patiently waiting to lose their virtue. But we’re about done here.
Media preservation is still a profoundly huge problem, and now it’s down a spokesman. It’s probably not necessary to digitize VHS tapes you found at a yard sale, but it is necessary to preserve as much of the internet as we can. Doesn’t take a doctor to see that we’re rapidly losing, for example, the “good” era of the internet and it’s being replaced with an ad-sponsored AI simulacrum that doesn’t even pretend to work right. Try researching anything from the early days of the Iraq War and watch how many walls you hit with dead websites. Archives that should exist but don’t. It’ll drive you nuts, and you’ll understand that we’re in a staggeringly fragile era of preserving information. And barring the misnomer of the benevolent billionaire, there’s nothing much we can do but call attention to it.
From the Archives: My Entourage Review
Makes me sound like an elderly liar to say this now, which is my whole deal so it's fine, but Twitter occasionally felt like magic in 2015. It was possible to just write some nonsense and have it get picked up by traditional media. Walk right in and convert being unhappy at 2 in the morning to a few hours of utterly unwarranted social media influence.
This is my review of the Entourage movie. All I remember is that it was a hundred and change in Bakersfield when I wrote it, and I was in my grandma's sewing room, which had no air conditioning and questionable electricity, and I wanted to see if that could stop me from writing some nonsense. The next day, the piece was read aloud on MSNBC by Chris Hayes (famous) himself. Got a couple calls from literary agents and it was brought up specifically at two actual job interviews. I was "blowing up."
Different time. That would never happen now. Definitely feels indescribably "of the Obama era." Anyway here it is.
Say you’re in a room and see something so revolting you have to leave. Maybe it’s someone who reminds you of your failures, or the life you couldn’t have, or the anger you buried. You don’t want to leave, but your willpower is no good – this is something deeper than will. It’s something that makes your face redden and your chest tighten before reducing the whole room to an exit and the obstacles in front of it. Maybe it’s survival, maybe it’s just preservation of sanity. It doesn’t matter in the moment. You’re already gone.
I was in a movie theater with my brother. The Entourage trailer came on. I felt that something. It was anger and physical revulsion. Maybe it was dread, too. But it was foremost an awareness that my self-control was flying out a window. I started to stand up. I wanted to yell “yeehaw, the American dream is dead!” but instead I mechanically whispered “popcorn” and walked to the lobby with my eyes to the floor. Here, after all, was the enemy. Here was unchecked greed, hedonism, and decadence; West Los Angeles and all its vices attacking me remotely. Back tattoos. Yachts. Private jets. Checkered fedoras. Gary Busey. An entire cast of hollow-eyed rich guys in Polo shirts on the verge of offering you a bump at your boss’s boss’s Fourth of July party in your nightmares. And I was gone, and a coward, and I had to go back. I had to see this movie.
My reason was simple. Morality needs anchors. Sometimes you need to see what you hate to remember what you love and why you love it. Otherwise your worldview becomes a fog of conflicting value systems entertained dispassionately and you forget who you are. Maybe Entourage, the mere suggestion of which had the power to make me leave a room, could bring my fire back.
Then I was in Bakersfield. Muscle memory took me to my old neighborhood movie theater without knowing what street it was on. Such was the destroying force of Entourage that the parking lot was utterly empty, the mall abandoned, and the doors on the movie theater boarded up. At the end of the parking lot a boy of I dunno maybe 9 was riding a skateboard unattended. I turned around and went to the theater across town.
There were twelve people outside the other theater, all of them smoking. I bought a ticket and told the girl I was a journalist and seeing it in that capacity, which she rightly did not believe. Then I found my seat and settled in, trying to be grateful for air conditioning.
So what is Entourage? Aside from a physical manifestation of disgust that makes your jaw swing open like a saloon door, it is a continuation of an HBO series. I’ve never seen the show myself. It seems to be one of those meta-shows where Hollywood self-mythologizes under the guise of making fun of itself.
And what is Entourage the movie? Ostensibly it’s a comedy, and it’s directed by somebody named Doug Ellin, and here’s what it is. Write down every single famous person you find detestable and think about why you don’t like them. Well, Doug Ellin loves all those people, they’re his best friends in the world and he cuts out their pictures from the magazines and draws hearts all over them, and he loves them for the same exact reasons you shun them. I mean, look. Mark Wahlberg and Piers Morgan are in this movie. Both of them.
The film opens like the pretty edgy screenplay of your friend who always says he’s filling out job applications but you know it’s online gambling because of the rhythms of his cursing. It’s dudes on a boat. It’s babes on another boat. Some of the babes – shit, hold on just a second, I’m just waiting on the, uh, form to load, shit – some of the babes are topless. The first line is “I may have to jerk it before we even get there.”
After you hear this line, the film ceases to have words in it and becomes a collection of noises overheard in and around Los Angeles County’s finest porn mansions. It’s eleven words and then it’s all static, like an AM radio station three towns over. The static has different rhythms and volumes sometimes, and the impression of words is given, but you’ll almost never hear them. Sometimes you’ll get close, and maybe you’ll even pick up a whole line. But if you succeed it’ll be like setting the high score on a Ms. Pac Man machine in a radiator repair shop: a lonely victory that can never be shared or even explained.
But even without language, we can infer what happens. There’s this actor, see, and he’s got an entourage. The actor has decided to direct because he wants to do something meaningful. The movie he makes, which looks like a trade show video for a gaming-oriented laptop manufacturer, is somehow a brilliant Oscar contender – the Oscars are legitimate in this universe – and the studio is getting in the way. It’s going over budget and the money men are too concerned with the bottom line to see the magic, man. And Jeremy Piven has to cocaine his way out of this whole mess. There you go. That’s what happens.
It’s all a blur, devoid of content, a TV Guide channel PR feature bloated to a wheezing 104 minutes. It is an unrepentant love letter to the types of people who get pulled over on the 101 in yellow Lamborghinis and think the northern border of the known world is the In N Out on Ventura right before it turns into Highland, the one across the street from Vivid. Everybody’s always having a bunch of fake sex and drinking and drugging then having those meaningless epiphanies rich drunks are always having when they have to go outside for five minutes. Of course, naked women are ubiquitous and treated with slightly less humanity than the film’s myriad fresh-off-the-line convertibles.
It’d sure be nice to say Entourage hates women and leave it there, but above all else it just hates people. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. Hate requires passion. This movie, with all the charm of a seasoned leisure class alcoholic, coldly and mechanically celebrates the degradation of humanity. It is a movie with no moral center. A movie with no worldview. A commercial for having a million dollars to kill on the Sunset Strip. It is a monument to avarice so morally broken, so poisoned from the soul outward, that it could make Donald Trump join the church and make Benny Hinn leave it.
But let’s table moral toxicity. There are other cardinal sins to address. This is a comedy with no laughs in it. This is a movie that thinks America is made up of Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Manhattan. And this is a movie that kills everything good it touches, so its inclusion of Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and the Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up” is abhorrent. And its bit part for the wonderful Judy Greer is beyond forgiveness. The only person who gets out of this movie alive is Billy Bob Thornton, who knows how to treat the material – like 10 to 15 minutes of shooting with no script, no director, and a giant check.
I saw the whole movie. I thought about leaving constantly but didn’t. This was an exercise in will. But when I left, driving past countless old houses that looked the same once but were now crumbling into unique identities, I felt unclean. I was shell-shocked by its tone deaf narcissism and glamorization of unmerited riches. Entourage is a hideous, unwatchable moral low for mainstream filmmaking. But this does not make it fun to watch. If you’re thinking about watching it ironically, to stir up rage, please, do anything else. Go for a walk. Read that book you pretended to read in high school. Stare at a bad painting until you think it means something. Stand in front of a mirror and part your hair in a different direction. Ask your gas station attendant what items people steal most and least often. Tell some trusted family members you’re in jail and figure out if they’re good for the bail. See how far you can throw a rock and then go find the rock. If you do all these things and you still want to see Entourage, do yourself a favor and start a new life somewhere.
The D*lbert Project
(a shot I took for the piece)
It was 2013, I was starting to develop a Twitter following, and I was mad that media people seemed to be having a good time. So I thought I’d use Twitter as a way to freak them out. That was my entire MO. Just bring the doom.
I also decided to have a problem with Scott Adams, whose politics had started to profoundly bother me. This whole idea of an IQ-based meritocracy where everybody in the room besides you is an idiot. So I designed and wrote this, and it didn't make a ton of sense but that's fine because ultimately I just wanted to do an insane thing. Just to see what happened. The Dilbert Project:
From the Archives: Writing about Donald Trump.
As I said after the election, now is not the time to be miserable. It’s time to be normal as hell. One foot in front of the other. An election happened and it wasn’t good. Totally normal, happens every few years. All anybody can do is be realistic about what they can control and try to be useful.
Trump’s president again. It’s been helpful to me to reflect on the time I spent in 2015 and 2016 as a “Trump voter whisperer,” when I became confident he was gonna win. And when I was one of the earlier sicko writers to call it in public, mostly because of my experience with the Schwarzenegger campaign and being a member of that famous white working class the news loves so much.
I had some good material about Trump during my time at MTV. But a lot of it was a product of its time. I was trying to keep my job and the market was calling for pieces anticipating his eventual loss, so I wrote a bunch of stuff where I imagined a post-Trump politics. In that context, you had to say things like “he’s made too many mistakes to win but we have to take his supporters seriously while still acknowledging that we, the smart ones, will ultimately carry the solemn burden of power.” This was of course impossible, so I’m now embarrassed by a lot of what I wrote. Which is fine. That’s political writing. It’s got a shelf-life. That stuff expires.
Over the next couple months I’ll be sharing some of my writing about Trump that hasn’t expired. Go figure, it’s the goofy stuff. The first piece I’m sharing is one about Trump’s dinner with Mitt Romney. I was completely destroyed from covering the election on the road, and my brother’s near-death experience, but I had to write anything about the circulating photo from that dinner. I had a total stress meltdown, fell asleep for an hour, slammed a pot of coffee and wrote the piece in 45 minutes, then it was published with no edits. It was probably my most successful piece about Trump, because I didn’t think about it at all. It just spewed out, already finished. I like reading it because you can tell.
The other piece is something I put up in June of 2016: a selection of Donald Trump’s tweets as president. It was a joke piece, but yeah, I was definitely hoping to make people imagine his win a little harder. Total junk, and it was basically my reaction to him blocking me on Twitter for whatever reason. But I almost, almost enjoy that a couple of the tweets got close. I got the tone right (this was back when one of his gimmicks was less road-tested fringe bullshit and more "random insane observations punctuated by surprisingly lucid opinions about pop culture"). Funny to remember how burned out I was back then. I thought I could never get more burned out than I was in the summer of 2016, which was, and I just double-checked, a really long time ago.
On March 3, 2016, the 2012 Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, called Donald Trump a fraud.
On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump became president, stunning the world.
On November 29, 2016, the two men sat down to dinner. This is what happened.
“Hey, Mitt! Mitt! Yeah! I’m the president now! The bad thing happened! The bad thing is real!” exclaims Donald Trump. “The bad thing, which is good for me but bad for everyone else, it really happened!”
“Yes,” says Mitt Romney.
“This food is great,” says Donald as he surveys his meal, which consists of a pile of french fries and nothing else. “Too bad the cooks forgot to bring you anything and then went home. You can’t have any of my great food either, because I’m so hungry from being president. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” says Mitt.
“Anyway, Mitt, you’re not going to believe this, but presidents need a secretary, and I might want you to be that secretary.”
“Secretary of State? Secretary of Defense?” asks Mitt.
“Yes, a secretary. It’s a pretty big job, yeah, and there’s so much you have to do, like you have to go to businesses with a baseball bat and get the money from the businesses,” Donald says, his eyes widening with happiness as he touches some of his french fries. “Then you have to go to the old bridge outside of town and take the money to some men in the dark in exchange for briefcases only I’m allowed to unlock! Yes! I’m the president and that’s what my secretary does! Lots of people want to do it, too!”
Mitt drifts away. He’s trapped. This isn’t right. Donald Trump is still a fraud. Mitt knows that. But he can’t go anywhere. He can’t leave his chair. His eyes soften as they lose their focus, and he goes away to his special place in the past. It’s a farm where he spent his summers as a boy. There’s a farmhouse there, of course, and everything is warm in the farmhouse. There’s a pot roast in the oven, and there’s a fire in the fireplace. There’s a dog sitting on the porch, and in the yard there’s a tire swing on a grand old oak tree. He feels the crunch of autumn leaves underneath his feet, and he takes a deep breath as he approaches the nice white fence that leads to the nice warm farmhouse. He can almost smell the pot roast.
“I got you a great table picked out for when you’re my secretary,” announces Donald, his voice muffled from all the french fries in his mouth. “It’s a card table. I got it from a prison,” he says, getting a speck of french fry on Mitt’s forehead. “The card table will break if you sit on it. You will fall through the card table. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” says Mitt.
"You’ll be flat on your ass because you fell through the stupid card table!" says Donald, his voice quickening as if he can’t get the words out fast enough. “You can never replace your prison card table! You’re not allowed! It’s illegal! Do you understand?”
“Yes,” says Mitt, but Mitt doesn’t understand anymore. He’s opening the gate in the middle of the nice white fence. The air is so crisp. The sky is so blue. The light is so warm and pure and good. Maybe he’ll swing on the tire swing, for old time’s sake. Maybe he’ll pet his dog. He’ll comb his hair before he goes to the house, he remembers, in case his grandma is there. She likes all the boys to have combed hair. He rifles through his jacket pocket for his comb, but it’s nowhere to be found. He thinks nothing of it.
“Your other job, OK, it’s such a good job, I love it so much. You’re gonna dance. OK? You gotta dance so much when you’re my secretary, because I love to see people dance! You have to dance every day when I’m in the room, it’s all you can do, and you can’t stop dancing, OK, until I tell you to stop. Some days I won’t even tell you to stop at all! You’re going to be sick from dancing so much! I hope it doesn’t hurt you, but if it does hurt you, you have to do it anyway! Gotta dance for Donald every day! All this because the bad thing happened!”
Mitt walks toward the oak tree, toward the dog, toward the house. A breeze starts blowing through the air, and it becomes a bitter wind, and the sky begins to turn gray. Mitt feels cold. His hair is a mess. The house is farther away than he remembers. He walks toward the oak tree and something feels wrong. There are no leaves on the oak tree, because the oak tree is burned and black and dead. There is no tire swing there. A sadness takes him, the kind of sadness that takes a boy when he realizes he’s too old for his stuffed animals and must never play with them again, because big boys don’t play with stuffed animals.
He presses onward, toward the farmhouse, but it’s very far from him now, and the wind screams and lightning cracks in the distance and the sunlight is falling away. He’ll get to the house, because he has to get to the house, he knows that, and he’ll apologize for his uncombed hair and his soaking wet clothes and he’ll dry off by the fire. He’ll feel good in the house.
Donald is talking to him from the sky now, somewhere beyond the rain. “You’re going to eat shoes in a basement! Bad shoes! Terrible shoes! From the same prison!” roars the voice. “That’s how I’ll know you’re right for the job, because you ate the shoes. I’m going to watch you do it. And remember, it’s illegal not to eat the shoes! Because it’s disrespectful! It’s so disrespectful not to eat the prisoner shoes!”
Mitt isn’t walking anymore; he’s running to the house. The dog starts approaching him and he feels good, but then his stomach churns as he realizes this is not the dog he knows, but a wolf, a sick wolf, with its hair falling out in clumps. Mitt runs through the grass, and the grass dies behind him as he runs. He kicks the wolf away and the wolf makes no noise as it falls to the ground. He looks at the house and his face becomes twisted with horror as he sees the shingles fall from the roof and hit the dead dirt.
Faster!
Faster!
The smoke from the fire is gone. The paint is peeling. The windows shed their glass and the lights go out. The front door falls off its hinges.
Faster and faster he runs, but he’s too late.
The ground quivers as he arrives at the porch. The second his footsteps hit the floorboards, the house is ripped away, like a sand castle in a hurricane, and all the light in the sky is gone. He’s alone in a dark and empty place. The storm goes away and the land is dead quiet. From the sky, he hears Donald Trump’s voice.
“Do you want the job?”
“Yes,” says Mitt. “I want it.”
