One Film, One Book, One Album

But first a true tale of the seventh fleet

One Film: The Banshees of Inisherin by Martin McDonagh

When I was in the Navy, I served as a deck seaman. In port, the name of the game was paint and preservation. I’d spend hours, sometimes days, scraping the rust off the deck, bulkhead, or watertight door. Then I’d slap some primer and paint on it and go find another spot that was rusting away and do it all over again. When we weren’t painting we were sweeping and when we weren’t sweeping we were swabbing. It was unskilled labor. Anyone could do it. They called us deck apes.

At sea, it was a different story. At sea we were sailors. We raised and lowered the anchor. We did all the line handling. We took care of small boat operations. We steered the ship. Other people took care of the radar and the weapons and the engineering. We did the nautical stuff, the salty shit, and we did it in every kind of weather.  

The story I want to tell you takes place in the middle of a six-month cruise of the Western Pacific. We were in a port and starboard watch rotation: five hours on, five hours off… five hours on, five hours off… ad infinitum. If our time off came during working hours, we worked. Otherwise, we slept, but we also had to find time to eat, shower, and change clothes. We were lucky if we could piece together four or five hours of sleep a night but it was often much less.

This wasn’t a one- or two-day deal. This went on for weeks. There’s something about being jarred awake at 2:45 in the morning, knowing that I’d have to stand watch for five hours, work until noon, and then stand watch for another five hours that was utterly demoralizing. And if for some reason I didn’t—or couldn’t—sleep during the allotted time, it made the rest of the night that much worse.  

I’ve been in many bad situations in my life. I’ve been in drunk tanks, I’ve lost fist fights, I was hazed throughout boot camp. But this stretch of sleep deprivation, this seemingly never-ending struggle to stay awake, was like a kind of torture. There was just no end to it.

And then JJ stopped talking to us. Personal relationships on a ship can be dicey. When your friends are also your coworkers and also your roommates and you literally can’t get away from each other because you’re stuck on a tin can together things can go sidewise in a hurry.

JJ was the most affable sailor on the ship. He was liked by all the deck apes and had friends from other divisions as well. He was from Owensboro, Kentucky, deep in tobacco country, and he was funny, charming, and gregarious. He was always telling people he liked them and why. He had charisma. So when he stopped talking to us, it sent shockwaves throughout deck division.

It started on lookout. The watch went up to relieve him from the signal bridge and he took off his headset, shoved it into the relief’s hand, and went below decks without saying a word. The next morning, his mood hadn’t improved. Word spread that JJ was pissed and he wasn’t saying why. He wasn’t saying anything.

We wondered what was wrong with JJ. Why was he upset? We were in the middle of the ocean, completely cut off from the rest of the world. No phone calls, no TV news, no communication whatsoever. It had to be someone on the ship that upset him, but why was he taking it out on us?  

Because we were so deranged from lack of sleep, we didn’t do the obvious thing, which was confront JJ about it, force him to tell us. Instead we speculated, shared theories, accosted potential culprits. We all harbored suspicions about who or what was to blame.

One night a few of us cornered JJ on the signal bridge during watch, but muttered “white devils” under his breath and turned away.

This escalated the madness by several degrees. Did one of us something racist to JJ? Did someone cross the line from friendly ribbing to saying something deeply hurtful. It was the eighties. We were teenagers. We talked an enormous amount of shit. Someone must have said something. Even more horrifying was the        questions. What if that person was me?

The prospect of losing a friend, upsetting a colleague, and harming a shipmate all at once nearly drove me mad, which also made me the perfect audience for Martin McDonagh’s latest film The Banshees of Inisherin.

The film reunites Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell from In Bruges. In that film they played a pair of hitman cooling off in Belgium after a job goes sideways. In The Banshees of Inisherin, Pádraic (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) are mates whose friendship is shattered when Colm, a fiddler, informs Pádraic, a dairy farmer, he doesn’t want to speak to him ever again. This devastates Pádraic and his befuddlement mirrors the stages of grief with catastrophic consequence for everyone in the tiny island community.  

Like In Bruges, McDonagh’s latest is dark, violent, and exceptionally morbid. The Banshees of Inisherin is also terrifyingly beautiful. It’s got excellent acting, a sensuous score, and gorgeous cinematography that will sweep you up in its seascapes. I longed to live inside those old stone cottages battered by the sea, even though I know better.

It’s a story of art, madness, and loneliness that’s as black as naval tar and sweet as a pint of Guinness, meaning not very sweet at all.

As for my old shipmate JJ, after a few days of silence he admitted he went quiet as a kind of experiment, to see how we would react. How we’d react? We nearly lost our minds and told him not to do that shit again. But for Pádraic and Colm the outcome is more drastic, much more dire.

One Book: The Employees by Olga Ravn and translated by Martin Aitken

There’s nothing like being in a bookstore and stumbling upon a book that calls out to you. Holy shit. This book is for me. I need this. It’s validating. It’s inspiring. It’s expensive but that’s neither here nor there because when the book delivers? That’s the chef’s kiss of reading experiences.

The only thing that tops this, in my opinion, is when you’re in a foreign country and books in your native tongue are harder to find. That’s what happened to me in Barcelona when I spied a copy of The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish into English by Martin Aitken, and published by Lolli Editions.

The Employees is a very strange novel. It’s a polyphonic work where each chapter is narrated by a different crew member of the Six-Thousand Ship, a large vessel orbiting the planet New Discovery, which is a terrible name for a planet, a name only a colonizer could love. These narratives take the shape of monologues offered during an interview with a representative of the entity that owns the ship. Thus, the subtitle, “A workplace novel of the 22nd century.”

The powers that be brought several stone-like objects from the planet onto the ship and it’s clear from the start that these objects are not only alive but are having an impact on the crew, some of which are human, some of which are robots. Many of the humans have technological “add-ons,” and have probing questions about their capabilities in much the same way that the robots are concerned with their limitations and the “realness” of their memories.

This is not new territory. Writers and filmmakers and video game developers have been exploring this landscape for decades. But The Employees is different. There are no heroes. No detectives. No space warriors. Just workers who aren’t really sure what they’re doing. This is the kind of future Brian Evenson plays with in his weird stories set in the future.  

Ravn is exploring a framework where the companies we work for don’t just dictate the terms of employment, they control the entire ecosystem. It’s been like this in company towns since the Industrial Revolution. Before that it was ships. Today, we see this in Amazon warehouses.

On the Six-Thousand Ship, it comes down to the objects from New Discovery. What are they? There’s no question these stone-shaped structures are alive, but how? The presence of these entities and the strong feelings they produce among the employees renders the question “What makes us human?” mute. What makes us sentient is the real question here and Ravn has an absolute blast leading her characters to it.

“I’m happy with my add-on. I think you should let more of us have one. It’s me and it’s not me at the same time. I’ve had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part that you say is also me. Which is flesh but not flesh. When I woke up after the operation I felt scared, but that soon wore off. Now I’m performing better than anyone. I’m a very useful tool to the crew. It gives me a certain position. The only thing I haven’t been able to get used to yet are the dreams.”

Is the dream a natural result of being suddenly more? Is the dream caused by the add-on itself? Or do the dreams have something to do with the objects from New Discovery? Can a dream disrupt the framework of one’s existence? Or is this the path to madness?

The quote from above comes from Statement 015. The statement aren’t presented in order. Nor is there evidence to suggest that any of the employees provide more than one statement. One entity, one clue toward understanding this mystery that leads to the big questions of sentient existence: What are we for? What is to become of us? Why are we even here?

In this interview with Ravn and her translator, here’s what Ravn had to say:

“I wrote the novel in one month in November 2017, at a time where the climate crisis filled me with urgency perhaps more than it usually does. I had also recently become a mother. I was in the state of infant care where there is no day or night, no set schedule and everything is a sort of intuitive listening combined with an overwhelming sense of responsibility for human life. Then I had to go back to work at my office job and I just found it completely absurd. It was grotesque to sit and write at a keyboard all day, when those fingers had recently touched skin that was so new to the atmosphere.

Our entire life is structured around work. Sleeping for eight hours, for example, is a relative new invention in human history, formed around our work life. Our total division of public and private life is part of the work-life structure. Giving birth was like having a veil ripped violently from my eyes. This was one of the things I wanted to examine in The Employees, the workplace derived of softness, with no flexibility. And how the ideology, if you can call it that, of the workplace forms our minds, dreams, feelings.”

And here’s what Aitken had to say about translating the book into English:

“The Employees is the work of an extraordinary imagination, at once dreamlike and unsettlingly recognizable. Olga’s short, perfectly formed sentences are filled with poetic suggestion, yet couched in everyday language, deceptively simple-looking. More fundamentally, I think my task was less linguistic than it was a matter of representing the environment in my mind and sensing its moods emotionally, entering that strange atmosphere so it could seep through into the translation.”

Employees, was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and is on the National Book Awards Translated Literature Longlist for 2022. Earlier this year, The Paris Review published “A Memorial for Those Accused of Witchcraft,” which was translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg. If you’re frustrated with your job, Ravn’s The Employees may have you calling in sick—permanently.

One Album: OFF! Free LSD Fat Possum.

I love Keith Morris. I love his ambition. His might-as-well-keep-going-because-what-else-am-I-going-to-do mentality. He is the epitome of American hardcore. A living legend.

But underneath all that Keith is very much a product of the late sixties and early seventies. A time when there was smoke on the water and fire in the sky because the punchbowl was spiked with LSD. (Something that actually happened at a Morris family barbecue and little Keith was tripling balls while Smokestack Lightning played.)  

Keith grew up loving the heaviness of Black Sabbath, the psychedelia of Procul Harem, and the glam theatricality of Black Oak Arkansas. When David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and AC/DC came to town, Keith was in the front row and if he couldn’t get tix he found a way to sneak in backstage.

I hesitated to plug Free LSD, the new record from OFF!, here in Message from the Underworld because it’s hard for me to be objective when it comes to Keith, but this record rips. It’s the soundtrack to an unfinished film. It’s a sci-fi concept album. It’s a fever dream of conspiracy theories set to shrieking feedback and pummeling distortion, clanging guitars and electronic interference. It’s a heavy rock freakout that’s like nothing else you’ve ever heard from Keith or his contemporaries in SoCal punk.

The album has some beautiful design elements. I got the translucent blue vinyl version with the Pettibon print signed by the members of the band. It’s got a gatefold cover with a trippy all-seeing eye peering back at you and scratch and sniff components to complete the experience. The lyric sheet is printed on blotter paper and I’m tempted to put one on my tongue, you know, for research.

I used to think there were more good OFF! songs than Circle Jerks songs. I started to doubt that assertion after seeing a couple of the Circle Jerks reunion shows, but now that I’ve listened to Free LSD a few dozen times, I’m sure of it. Free LSD has become a part of my airplane listening, which unfolds the exact same way each time: Bobby Beausoleil’s Lucifer Rising on takeoff, Saint Vitus’ self-titled debut at cruising speed, followed by Free LSD for the long haul. From there, my mind can go anywhere. Even outer space.

I think Free LSD might be one of the best rock records of the year in a year that’s loaded with heavy rippers like Cave In’s New Reality and Dead Cross II. I think if the Circle Jerks reunion tour didn’t suck up the spotlight, Free LSD would be getting a lot more attention.