Wake up, babe, Oz is going down

Plus, an interview with punk photographer Linda Aronow

Today I have a very special interview with Linda Aronow, whose new book of photos Punk and Other Four Letter Words was published by Cabin 1 Books.

But first Luigi.

The moment I read the headline about the CEO of UnitedHealthcare getting shot in the street outside his hotel in Manhattan I said to my wife, “The revolution has begun.”

To be clear, I am not a revolutionary. I am not part of an underground resistance movement. I have never orchestrated a vigilante attack against the corporations that make American healthcare an absolute shitshow.

But I wrote a book about all of these things.

Granted, my premise is a bit more dystopian than assassins gunning down CEOs in broad daylight, but it was shocking to see a story in the national news that married healthcare with violence in such an explicit way. I thought that was my turf.

Naturally, I’ve been fascinated by the way so many people have cheered on the actions of the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, and I think I know why.

When you or someone you love gets sick or injured, it is an intensely private thing. One day your doctor calls you with the results for your biopsy. Or your spouse gets sideswiped by a drunk driver. Or your dad has a stroke in the shower. While the rest of the world goes on, you and your family enter the house of pain, the house of sadness, the house of shame.

Let’s say for simplicity’s sake this terrible thing has happened to you. Your body becomes not your own but a battlefield, a laboratory, a source of debate, a topic of conversation with people you don’t even know. It betrays you. Your autonomy gets taken away. Maybe you can’t drive anymore or use a toilet or eat the foods you have spent your whole life eating. You don’t feel great about any of these things. You don’t feel good period. As far as you’re concerned, you and only you are in pain.

You feel angry about this. Very, very angry.

The rest of the world goes on living like they’re in a truck commercial, a Nike ad, a TV spot for Carnival Cruises. Choose your own capitalist fantasy. At least that’s how it feels in your house of sorrow. You’d give anything to be so carefree for the five or fifteen or thirty seconds those people are on your screens. There’s a part of you that knows there are plenty of people out there who are in pain, but it is not your pain they are feeling. That belongs to you and you alone. The rest of the world doesn’t give a fuck about your pain.

Then Luigi entered the chat.

All of a sudden, this private pain you’ve been carrying has a face and a name that is knowable because someone has shot that motherfucker down, has in fact murdered your pain.

Hell yeah you’re excited.

That’s the revolution talking.

We are all so scared of being failures, of being bad at capitalism, that when its horsemen roll up and start lopping off heads we act like it’s our fault. Sorry, didn’t mean to get addicted to opioids. My bad. I had no business being in that crosswalk. Whoops, if only I’d exercised more and ate a little better and cut down on the salt/butter/caffeine, I wouldn’t need this tumor removed, aorta repaired, brain hollowed out, etc.

We are sick of our shame. Watching someone shoot a CEO in the street and seemingly got away with it was revelatory, like watching the climax of The Wizard of Oz for the first time.

“Pay no attention to that man behind curtain!”

The fuck you say.

Oz is rigged. There is no wizard. There is only compliance. These are things Dorothy can’t unknow and her response is 100% legit: “You are a very bad man.”

The system only works if enough people believe it will work for them when they need it—even though it has failed so many others.

That belief is crumpling before our eyes.

When the American people woke up to the cheers of the assassination of a CEO, that was the moment the big lie gave way to the truth.

We’ve had enough.

Luigi isn’t some anti-fascist street fighter or rightwing lunatic or, heaven help us, a podcaster. He’s not a demagogue. He didn’t have a record before his arrest. There’s nothing the media can latch on to and say “He’s no angel” the way they always do every time the cops murder someone.

Luigi is inconveniently good looking. He’s telegenic. He’s already launched a million memes. He was also in a lot of pain.

The CEO was many things: a father, a husband, a son, etc. but one thing he was not was innocent. Let’s get that straight.

To ask if he deserved to die in the street is to also ask:

Did my mother deserve to die when she was denied coverage?

Did my partner deserve to die when the request for the test that would have saved their life was denied?

Did my aunt deserve to die when she could no longer afford the cost of her skyrocketing meds?

Did my father-in-law deserve to die for avoiding the hospital altogether because he knew the cure would bankrupt his family?

We all know the answer to these questions. We don’t even have to think about it.

That’s revolutionary, too, isn’t it?

We have to think about so many things, make so many decisions every day, we are overwhelmed with choices. But we know exactly how we feel about the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, don’t we, Dorothy?

And the hypocrites telling us it’s wrong to feel this way are scared shitless.

You can buy my vigilante healthcare manifesto novel here.

Interview with punk photographer Linda Aronow

I got to know Linda Aronow while I was writing Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records and looking for images for the book. I’d been captivated by the photos Linda regularly posted on her Instagram account and reached out to her about licensing some images. That was years ago and I didn’t meet Linda in person until fairly recently when I went up to LA for a screening of Scott Crawford’s Salad Days.

That was also around the time when Linda published her first book of photographs Punk and Other Four Letter Words, a large collection of photos you probably haven’t seen before and has instantly become essential reading for fans of LA punk, goth, and rock from the early ’80s.

Check out what she has to say about taking these photos and rediscovering them all these years later.

Alice Bag, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye

Jim Ruland: How did you get into photography? You mentioned that you used your dad’s camera to take these photos. Was he a pro? Did he teach you?

Linda Aranow: I got into photography before I discovered punk rock. I think I really fell in love with it around junior high when I took a summer school class at the local park near my house. I had a great teacher, but the equipment sucked, and we'd time the developer by listening to pop songs on the radio, which were about three minutes long at the time.

My dad loved photography as well and he did some photography in the Air Force in WWII. He wasn't a professional, but he always had cameras and drove everyone crazy taking photos—although looking back I'm very grateful that he did. The Canon AE1 he bought was new at the time and he let me "borrow it" until he finally gave up and let me have it. I used it so much more than he did that it was a losing battle. I still have the same camera and just had the light seals replaced a few years ago. It's built like a tank, and I still use it whenever I shoot film.

What are some of your earliest punk rock memories in LA?

I can't remember the first time I heard the Clash but the Clash and 999 were the first imported 45's I bought at the tiny record store in my neighborhood. Hear and Now Records in Culver City was the size of a matchbox, but had an amazing selection of imported singles and punk records. I think the Clash was the gateway drug before I started listening to local bands and before I made it out to my first show. I remember discovering bands listening to Rodney on the Roq on KROQ and being exposed to a lot of music I'd never heard.

About this time, I was introduced to Sharon and Suzi, two sisters who lived on the next block and were far ahead of me in the scene. They had already been going to punk shows, and they took me to my first big punk rock show. It was at the Santa Monica Civic: Black Flag, the Adolescents, D.O.A., and the Minutemen. Amazing lineup and life-changing experience, I had never felt anything like the energy and intensity in that building. I think I was also probably a little scared but completely exhilarated and it was just the beginning of many shows and punk rock road trips we'd end up taking together.

When I licensed photos from you for Corporate Rock Sucks, you didn’t know when and where the Meat Puppets photo had been taken, but you’ve since discovered that it was taken at Fiesta House. Where the hell was that?

Trying to figure out where a lot of the photos I shot were taken has been an ongoing puzzle. I didn't shoot for a fanzine or anything specific and I didn't keep any real records. I did write down some of the info on some of my proof sheets and on others I have zero information. I finally discovered that photo was taken at the Fiesta House which was on Olympic Blvd in downtown Los Angeles because of another band I had shot on the same roll of film.

Mikey Bean who put out an amazing book on the deathrock scene in Los Angeles called Phantoms had sent me some photos of Die Schlaflosen flyers and helped me piece that together along with a lot of my Christian Death photos. I've also been able to place some of the venues by seeing other photographer's photos of the same night. I had no idea where some of my TSOL photos had been shot until I saw Alison Braun had shot the same night and that's how I discovered it was the Ukranian Cultural Center. She has amazing records on all of her photos and that was super helpful.

Mike Ness, Twisted Roots, GBH

What was your favorite band to shoot?

It would be hard to pick a favorite band to shoot, although GBH has definitely been one of my favorites. I have enough photos of them throughout the years that I could do an entire book just on GBH. The same friends who took me to my first show met GBH on their first tour out here and we became friends, especially with Ross. I love their music, and they are such great people it's always fun to have an opportunity to shoot them. I've been seeing them for decades now!

I loved shooting TSOL. Jack has always been so theatrical, and I love their music. Haunted Garage was always so much fun to shoot because everybody was such a character, and they put on such a great stage show. Those are just a few that come to mind, but I enjoy everyone for different reasons.

I love how you give space for the subjects of your photos to talk about their bands. Some are like hidden chapters of punk rock history and some are eloquent statements on what punk means to them. Did you give any guidelines or just tell them to go for it?

The only guidelines I gave to the musicians I reached out to was to ask if they would be willing to write a paragraph, share a story, or recall a favorite memory about their band or even about the time period. I left it very open to whatever they wanted to contribute. I just asked them to keep it to 500 words or less because of space constraints. There were a few people that didn't feel comfortable writing anything but were happy to answer some questions and have me put it together or edit it down. I really enjoyed all the different responses I got so I'm really happy that you liked that part.

I started this well before I had a publisher, but I knew I wanted to put out a book of my photography one way or another. I started reaching out to people during the pandemic so it was actually a good time to connect with people who had more time at home than they might have had otherwise. I was also fortunate enough to connect with Tony Morrison over Facebook who was in the Angelic Upstarts and Long Tall Shorty. He really liked my photos and seemed to have a great sense of humor and was very kind and responded right away. Sadly, he passed away from Covid before I was able to get my book published and ironically Mensi passed away from Covid as well within a year of each other. I was able to reach out and track down Tony's widow and son to get their blessing to publish what he had written. It was really important to me to get their permission before I included his story, and I was really grateful that they gave me the go ahead.

So much creativity came out of the pandemic, but we lost so many incredible artists. After taking time away from punk rock, what brought you back?

I was away from punk rock for a long time and my photos and negatives had been stored away. I had been through at least a decade of dealing with a lot of loss and family illness and was doing a lot of caregiving.

This might sound strange, but I had just come back from taking a bucket list trip with my sister to Italy and it had really inspired me in a way that I hadn't felt inspired in years. Ironically when I got back from this trip, I had a voicemail from an old punk rock friend that I had lost touch with at least 30 years prior. He had tried looking me up before, but he couldn't remember my last name and one of his friends had a print I had done of Mensi from the Angelic Upstarts with my first and last name on the back. He was able to track me down and we had a great conversation and because of that I started to pull out my photos and started texting some to him. He really encouraged me to share them and said that they would mean a lot to some people. (Thanks Dean!) I was very naive; I wasn't on social media at all and had no idea how many people still loved and cared about punk rock. I didn't think anyone would really be interested in my photos, but I kept digging and realized that I had a much bigger archive than I originally thought.

After a lot of encouragement from a few close friends, I decided to contact an old friend/coworker Matt Kennedy that had his own space—Gallery 30 South—just to ask for some advice because I wanted to see if I might be able to do a show one day. I think timing is everything and not only did he love my photos, the artist he was supposed to show the following month needed more time to finish his pieces. I grabbed the spot and put together a show in about a month. I wasn't sure if I would ever have another opportunity, so I jumped on it. To give you the most long-winded answer ever, this led me back to punk rock!

Pulling out those photos and then putting together a show and a playlist helped me rediscover how much I loved the music. This was right before the pandemic, so I wasn't actually able to go to a show for a while. I had tickets for TSOL and Channel 3 right before everything shut down and I got sick and couldn't go. I still wasn't on social media when I had my first show but when I started posting on Instagram a whole new world opened up to me and I connected with this huge community of people and bands. It was the first time some of the bands ever had a chance to see some of my photos and that was especially gratifying.

What’s been the most surprising thing to you about getting back into punk all these years?

I think what surprised me the most about getting back into punk is how huge it's become. I went to Punk Rock Bowling for the first time in 2023 and I was blown away by the whole experience and being in the pit with all those other photographers. It's been really cool to see families and whole generations of punks. It's great to see so many young bands as well as bands that are still touring like GBH.

Do you have more photos in your archive? What are you working on now?

Yes I have a ton of photos in my archive, this book is a small sample of what I shot, and I hope that people enjoy it. It was hard narrowing down which photos to include but I think we ended up with a good cross section.

I'm going to take part in a group show that the city of Fullerton is doing next spring and I'm hoping to do something next year with the Punk Rock Museum. In the meantime, I'm going to be promoting my book and I'm trying to be open to whatever presents itself next.

Linda Aronow & Mike Magrann in Long Beach

If you’d like to pick up a signed copy of Punk and Other Four Letter Words, you’re in luck! This Sunday Linda will be at Alex’s Bar in Long Beach where she’ll be joining Channel 3’s Mike Magrann, who will be signing copies of his novel Miles Per Gallon.

Did you enjoy this interview? If so, check out some of the other interviews I did in 2024 with horror novelist Keith Rosson, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Punk noir author Joshua Mohr, Bad Religion’s Pete Finestone on the sweet science, and editor Sarah Coolidge on Latin American Horror.

Thanks for reading. You don’t want to know what I’m doing tomorrow but light a scented candle for me.

(Yes, another Home Front video but this one is loaded with Repo Man references.)

If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. I hope you’ll consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Doorand the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.