Shooby de doo wop wop say what yeah

A book, a movie, and a record--plus some thoughts about the Internet

It’s the end of the year, everyone’s busy, and it’s the ten-year anniversary of a very fucked up day, so I’m going to try and keep this brief.

This weekend I logged out from Twitter and Instagram and deleted the Instagram app off my phone. (I took Twitter off my phone a long time ago.) It’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. The quality of the experience has been declining steadily (Instagram) and rapidly (Twitter) and I’m dissatisfied with the time I’m spending on these websites. So I’m pulling the plug for a while.

I’m not deleting my accounts. I’ll be back to check messages and make the occasional post, especially when I have something important to share, but I sincerely hope my days of looking at websites for infotainment are over.

I’ve been reflecting on my reading and writing, which is normal for this time of year. (Next week I’m going to share my annual Ten Raddest Records list for 2022 and the week after that I’ll share my Year in Books.) Every year I’m low-key disappointed that I didn’t read more, seek out more music, get farther along on various writing projects. That’s normal, but I want to see what I can accomplish without the distractions.

I want to go deeper into the things I care about the most and the content I’m scrolling through on a daily basis is all surface, a magician’s trick, a hall of mirrors, and it’s devouring large chunks of my time. I didn’t sign up for Instagram to watch bar fights. I didn’t sign up for Twitter to read right wing political screeds. But guess what pops up on my feed again and again and again?

The most relatable scene in all of Repo Man is when Otto is sitting in the bar watching the lounge version of the Circle Jerks perform “When the Shit Hits the Fan” and says, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.”

That’s what logging on to Twitter and Instagram is like these days. The shit is hitting the fan, my friends, and it sucks. Incidentally, how on point are these lyrics at the twilight of 2022?

In a sluggish economy
Inflation, recession its the land of the free
Wait in unemployment lines
Blame the government for hard times

(By the way, I’m going to see OFF! later this week and I’ll report on that next week as well.)

But what about Substack?

Being able to share these thoughts with you in Message from the Underworld is an enormous privilege and I’m grateful to every one of you for spending time with me here.

I’ve noticed that a lot of newsletters follow The Discourse. They write on the topic that everyone else is writing about through their own particular lens into the world and when that exhausts itself they jump on to the next topic that everyone else is talking about. I suppose that’s one way to generate subscribers otherwise why would people do it?

I don’t do that and I generally don’t like newsletters that do. I don’t need to know what The Discourse is on any given day and I sure as hell don’t want to chase after likes. The aging Gen Xer in me finds that shit embarrassing.

Because of the nature of my writing, I don’t think of myself as a freelance writer or even a newsletter writer, and after three years of doing this I don’t see any reason to start. I love writing Message from the Underworld but maybe I should be putting more thought into making it more of what I’m passionate about: books, music, and books about music. Maybe I should be looking for more ways to bring people into the conversation. Maybe I should make it more like a zine.

On that note here are some quick thoughts about a book, a movie, and a record…

Andrea Barrett’s Natural History

Andrea Barrett is one of my favorite living writers. I’ve been captivated by her stories since Ship Fever, which won the National Book Award. Her stories are often linked and not just within the scope of a collection but across all of her work. She’s got her own Barrett Fictive Universe going, which is remarkable because she doesn’t write plot-driven potboilers but quiet historical fiction, often about scientists, that sneak up on you and quietly devastate you.

In the final story in her new collection, Natural History, there’s a paragraph that jumped out at me. It’s from a woman reflecting on why she walked away from a promising career in science:

“I had loved my work for a while, loved sharing it with Deirdre and others—and then I didn’t. My father died, my sister disappeared, some other things happened and all I could see was what a business science had become. Money (there was never enough, not even in the biggest labs), politics, grant-writing, speech-making; all of us struggling for recognition, envying and competing with each other while the actual work we’d trained to do contracted to a slim bright thread. The wonder, gone. The looking and thinking and experimenting, the quest to make sense of the world as we found it: all that, gone.”

See what I mean? Replace “science” with the ruling passion in your life. Is it still the thing you obsess over when you get out of bed in the morning or is it a “slim bright thread”?

Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night

Violent Night is an odd entry to the Christmas movie canon. It’s basically Die Hard: The Christmas Movie but instead of the wildcard being a cop it’s Santa Claus. Not a fake Santa Claus (sorry kids) but the actual sled-flying, chimney-shooting gift giver from the North Pole. It’s also Home Alone only much grislier. Oh, and it’s also Elf in that it goes for laughs and is absolutely 100% sincere about Christmas magic.

It’s not a great movie. It probably isn’t a good movie, but what if I told you that this Santa Claus started life as a 12th century Viking raider who wielded a hammer called Skullcrusher?

Mrs. Claus said, “Knock you out…”

Soulside’s A Brief Moment in the Sun

After hyping the new album in my tribute to Soulside, I thought about writing a review of the new record--the DC rockers’ first since 1989--but Tony Rettman at

No Idols

beat me to the punch. Here's the final paragraph but you really should read the whole thing:

Much like Trigger and Hot Bodi Gram, A Brief Moment In The Sun is crammed with a lot to consider. Every bit of it from Bobby’s heady brew of lyrics to the saucy static kicked up by the band is something to take back to the lab and stew on — especially when you consider it is a ‘concept’ record about racial oppression in the U.S. Scott McCloud’s foggy, rockist guitar sound synonymous with Girls Against Boys slinking around with Bobby’s words on Assata Shakur and other revolutionaries is surreal and challenging — another couple of qualities that run throughout the bands’ discography. It’s refreshing to know Soulside can still provide that giddy rush of discovery sans the moshing to the oldies vibe. I guess I should end this review with something profound like THIS RECORD ISN’T THE PAST. IT’S NOW! I prefer just to say THIS RECORD “IS”. If you catch the drift of that statement, purchase A Brief History In The Sun from Dischord.

You heard the man, go get it. I’d like to add that A Brief Moment in the Sun is a creeper. I thought Side One was a little on the mellow side but Side Two floored me with that old Soulside feeling. This made me listen to Side One more closely and it more than holds up to the scrutiny. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite records of 2022. Will it make my Top Ten? I guess you’ll have to tune in to see.

That’s it for today. Be kind to each other and if you can’t be kind don’t be a dick.