YOU GAZE OUT your bedroom window in the doldrums of suburbia. Rain slashes at the glass, pummels on the rooftops. Each house looks like the one you’re standing in, hidden lives unspooling behind red-bricked walls—hundreds of lives, banal yet distinct, not one likes yours.

The real world is out there, you think, somewhere beyond those rooftops, waiting for me to find it, far from these faceless shadows and all their secret pain.

Sometimes you feel so alive you could cry.

Often you feel so anxious you could die.

This is the sound of the world’s greatest disappeared band, Title Fight.

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THE BEST ARTISTS are like sharks: if they stop swimming they will die.1 To the deepest waters the fearless artist swims, each project another opportunity to be found and lost and found again.

The safe choice means stasis, sinking to the black depths. But if you’re always swimming, you’re always far away. Always alone.

In music, there is perhaps no act which more purely exemplifies this restless artistic spirit than Title Fight. Across four albums,2 its music evolved from melodic-hardcore-tinged pop-punk to a kind of emotive post-hardcore shoegaze.

Fuck genre labels, though. Who needs them? I reject them in my fiction and I reject them here. What matters is how art feels, and no labels can encapsulate that.

TITLE FIGHT FANS don’t just love Title Fight—we cherish the band like it’s the last known copy of some beautiful, priceless book filled with secrets and magic.

Maybe this is because Title Fight vanished from the world at the band’s creative zenith, the moment it finally flowered into full bloom, without an announcement or explanation or even a goodbye, coinciding with, for many of us, a period of similar transition in our own lives. To shed one’s skin leaves a scar.

IN EXPLORING THE music of Title Fight, I will show you my two favorite songs. Listen to them. Soak them up. Forget genre labels, forget which scene you think they fit into.

How do these songs make you feel?

First, “Your Pain Is Mine Now” from the band’s final, and greatest, record, Hyperview.

Dreamy, right? Did you notice how, halfway through, the guitars sounded like one of those groan tubes? You know, those weird toys when you were a kid that, in the words of this redditor, “when you turn the stick upside down, the cylinder goes down the stick and it goes ‘AAAAAAEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUU,’ and when you turn it upside down again it goes, ‘UUUUUEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAA.’”

How producer Will Yip, who recently won a Grammy for Turnstile’s Never Enough, made guitars sound like that, I do not know, but I love him for it.

The production on Hyperview is enchanting. There is a distinctly more “grownup” texture to this record, which is more complex musically than the band’s remaining body of work, but that adolescent ache pangs here still.

Next is “Dreamcatchers,” which, bizarrely, is, I think, a B-side that failed to make it onto debut LP Shed. This particular version of “Dreamcatchers” was released as a limited-edition seven-inch for Alternative Press.

What a fucking song. I could play it ten times in a row—in fact, I have.

You are struck by the contrast from “Your Pain Is Mine Now,” I’m sure. Listen again. Hear that lonely yearning in Jamie Rhoden’s voice. The way the melodies shift rhythm and energy, transforming from fast punk into “something else”:

I’d nail a dreamcatcher above my bed
If I thought it would keep you
Out of my head

But that wouldn’t help
I’m reaching out for
Something else

Together these two songs encapsulate everything I love about Title Fight, illustrating both the band’s evolution and the seed of brilliance in it from the start.

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TITLE FIGHT FORMED in 2003, in a small borough of Pennsylvania called Kingston, as twelve-year-old (yes, fucking twelve) twin brothers Ned and Ben Russin, on bass/vocals and drums respectively, and Jamie Rhoden on guitar/vocals. Guitarist Shane Moran joined soon after. The Russins’ older brother Alex was a guitarist in Cold World, a hardcore band with hip hop vibes.

Title Fight first released a series of EPs, collected in 2009 under the compilation The Last Thing You Forget. The underlying texture of this collection is notably pop-punk (or rather punk-pop), but its abundant rhythm-changing, intros/outros, and groovy, rather ingenious riffs are distinctively Title Fight.

Consider “Loud and Clear,” a shockingly confident song for a band so young. It makes me think of Alexisonfire. That riff. The way that outro surprises you every time, shifting gears then building energy. How the strangled vocals ride the wave.

Title Fight’s debut LP, Shed, released in 2011, and like the other two LPs, it is perfect. More of a post-hardcore/emo sound, Shed reveals the band’s growth and plants the seeds of the softer, more “grownup” textures that Rhoden, Moran, and the Russin bros would explore with increasing confidence on Floral Green, and perfect on Hyperview.

This aching, searching side of Title Fight is revealed on Shed through the back-to-back tracks “Safe in Your Skin” and “Where Am I?,” which I consider one song. The transition is wonderful; you need to hear it with the tracks joined together.3

This strange routine
Sometimes weighs down on me
But I wouldn’t trade it
Not for anything
Maybe there’s nothing
Only this moment

Floral Green saw Will Yip begin his collaboration with the band. This is many fans’ favorite Title Fight album, such as Turnstile’s drummer, Daniel Fang, who told Pitchfork it’s his all-time favorite record. Fang’s top track is “Lefty.” It’s mine too, haunting and quietly desperate. Rhoden’s pained cries sound more restrained and vulnerable on this song than any other pre-Hyperview.

Despite this softness, and a foreshadowing foray into shoegaze with fan-favorite “Head in the Ceiling Fan,” Floral Green also contains some of Title Fight’s heaviest songs, and Yip’s production makes them all sound stadium sized.

Which brings us to my personal favorite record, the majestic, one-of-a-kind Hyperview. The evolution to this album feels like the jump from cannabis to LSD: strange and shocking at first; then infinitely rich, complex, profound. (It also happens to be arguably the ideal album to listen to on acid.)

I showed you my favorite track on Hyperview. Here’s another equally radical song, “Hypernight.” You’ll notice that insane bassline right away, but consider the lyrics and the friction in Ned Russin’s voice as he sings and shouts and sings again.

Vague, I’m so misleading, forgotten feelings
Try to read my mind
Hiding secrets in front of open eyes

See a question in its reflection
Never knowing more than
If you’re the flower or if you’re the soil

I’ve always been most affected by Rhoden’s voice and songwriting, but Russin sounds incredible on Hyperview. He further explores this shoegaze-leaning sound in his current band, Glitterer, which is really good but is not Title Fight.

Ben Russin drums now in Citizen, and Shane Moran has reportedly worked or toured with such artists as Kenny Mason, Beabadoobee, and Turnover.

In 2018, at the Revolution Bar & Music Hall in Amityville, New York, Turnstile opened what turned out to be Title Fight’s final ever show. Two years later, the Revolution Bar & Music Hall shut its doors forever.

Tragically, Jamie Rhoden is nowhere to be found. Like Title Fight, he seems to have vanished without explanation, as if, by the time the closing track on Hyperview was recorded, he was already haunting his own dreamy, lonely songs.

WILL TITLE FIGHT reunite one day? I hope so. For fans new and old, seeing them live would be a spiritual event in a way that is not true for most bands. It would be like seeing the dead rise again. In times like these it might inspire hope, as if maybe not everything we loved about the world we once knew has been lost.

Because the thing is, Title Fight means a whole lot to a whole lot of people.

What happened to Title Fight? you ask. Truthfully, I don’t much care.4 All I know is that I never got to see my favorite band play, and I lament the day it all fell apart.

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At fifteen, I was reborn.

That was eighteen years ago, and once again I am celebrating a fifteenth anniversary of sorts. Because it could be said that, fifteen years ago, at eighteen, I took the first tentative step on the path to becoming a professional novelist.

Of course, I had written before then, having first attempted a novel at ten years old (which, appropriately and hilariously, was a crime thriller), but, after a mid-teen transition into music as my raison d’être (including a diploma and BA in Music Production, all eight grades of Drum Performance, and joining three bands), it turned out that music—which, crucially, involves other people—was not, in fact, my calling.

To this antisocial weirdo the written word called once again. And while five more years would pass before I got serious about the craft and the prospect of a career, in the interim came another novel attempt, this one disastrous and insane—but intoxicating. I was a writer.

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IN NOVEMBER 2025, at thirty-two years old, still antisocial, still a loner, if a married one, I sold my third novel, epic thriller American Fury, to legendary UK crime publisher No Exit Press, now under Bedford Square.

The hardback publishes in spring 2027. It’s around 148,000 words, 650 pages, and burns with rage and rebellion. I put everything I had into it, and I’m excited for people to read it.

While this is my third novel, it feels in many respects like a new beginning, the close of one era and dawn of another. Just like how I felt at fifteen.

I wrote a bit about American Fury last year, after I finished the first draft, and I will wait for the official promo to begin before I elaborate.

Central to the story, though, is a tragic coming-of-age tale which follows the main character at the ripe age of—you guessed it. Although my youth did not involve neo-Nazis and white rage in a small city in Northern California, this section of the novel is nonetheless the most personal my fiction has come, and my favorite.

As I await the promo, I’m working on my next project. In the meantime, here is a mix1 I made that encapsulates, to me, how it felt to be fifteen.

1. Hotline TNT - Protocol

2. Beach Slang - Kids

3. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Young Adult Friction

4. Mannequin Pussy - Emotional High

5. Japandroids - Younger Us

6. Title Fight - Safe in Your Skin

7. Title Fight - Where Am I?

8. Germs - Manimal

9. Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized

10. OFF! - Panic Attack

11. Joyce Manor - Violent Inside

12. Title Fight - Dreamcatchers

13. Angel Du$t - Take My Love

14. Nightmare Boyzzz - Problem Child

15. Cerebral Ballzy - Drug Myself Dumb

16. Mom Jeans - Shred Cruz

17. Joyce Manor - Heart Tattoo

18. Remember Sports - Saturday

19. Momma - Callin Me

20. Mannequin Pussy - Romantic

21. Basement - Covet

22. Turnstile - Underwater Boi

23. Nourished by Time - Idiot in the Park

24. Hotline TNT - Spot Me 100

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BILL HICKS SAVED my life, probably. In my darkest moments I have found salvation in his words. He was a funny motherfucker, but he was also punk rock to the core and spiritually enlightened. He was an artist in the truest sense, and he lived his art every day. Hicks is the kind of artist I hope to be, and though he died when I was ten months old, I miss him dearly.

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I WAS SIXTEEN years old, high on European cannabis and the rush of staying up into the night before school, the hot white glow of the computer screen my portal out of that black room and the duties waiting beyond. There is nothing so free as a teenage loner in the dead of night with a laptop and an Internet connection. I have been chasing that feeling ever since.

So much I discovered on the Web then, when it truly was free, from underground music and ideas to philosophy and film noir. I found horrors too, dark sights and sinister ideas that frightened me. Among it all I discovered Bill Hicks, whose precious few video specials I watched clips of on YouTube with near religious fervor.

Sixteen years later I’m realizing how profoundly those nights spent giggling on my bed in the dark shaped how I see the world today. And I can say it now: All that sacrificed sleep and all those schooldays spent too exhausted to learn were absolutely, unequivocally worth it.

I DISCOVERED PUNK and Bill Hicks around the same time. Looking back on it now, the connection is undeniable. One of my favorite Hicks routines features his evisceration of the hollow popular entertainment that reared its head in the Reagan era and set about eradicating culture ever since. That’s no accident of course. Art challenges power structures and unites us around our shared humanity. This threatens the psychopaths and spawn of Satan determined to spread as much misery on this planet as possible.

And so art had to be replaced by entertainment—or “content,” as they freely admit now. Hicks was having none of it.

Fuck that! When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children to listen to people who fucking rocked! I don’t care if they died in puddles of their own vomit. I want someone who plays from his fucking heart!

In Hicks’ material this topic often intersected with his disgust of

the war against drugs, which actually is a war against civil rights—don’t ever be fooled again. If they cared about us they’d get rid of the number one drug, which is cigarettes. Kills more people than crack, coke, and heroin combined times one hundred—legal.

…[But] marijuana, a drug that kills no one—and let’s put it in a time frame: ever—illegal.

Hicks expressed often how the “drugs” our society deems dangerous have the curious effect of making us choose love over fear—or unity over the profits of the military-industrial complex.

I’m glad mushrooms are against the law because I took them one time and you know what happened to me? I lay in a field of green grass for four hours, going, “My God! I love everything.” Yeah, now if that isn’t a hazard to our country. How are we gonna justify arms dealing when we realize that we’re all one?

When I first tried mushrooms, it opened a window to the universe that has never closed. The delusion we call “reality” faded away along with the delusion we call “me.” I saw the fabric of the world, and my spirit was free.

I use psychedelics and cannabis at times to help keep that window into the cosmos open, but since that first experience with mushrooms all my destructive habits have faded away. I have barely touched alcohol ever since, which, for me, was a fairly gigantic transformation. Whatever pain the alcohol was numbing, whatever deluded bullshit it was feeding were wiped away by the near wordless truths I learned that day, truths whose exposure was facilitated but not caused by psilocybin. (Alcohol, I have discovered, takes us further away from enlightenment by blocking our ability to see. Because of this, though certainly helpful to the introverted among us in social situations—gasp—ultimately, alcohol is poison to an artist.) I haven’t done any hard drugs since that day either, and I haven’t been a force of chaos in my life or anyone else’s. And my creativity has been turbocharged. Finally, I had figured out what I want to do and how and why.

In other words, in psychedelics I found healing and enlightenment (like , who writes about it beautifully), and it’s wonderful for this version of me now to see that, in this, I have followed in Hicks’ steps. (My other favorite comic, the iconic George Carlin, said the same things about psychedelics too.)

The connection Bill draws between the war on drugs and vapid entertainment is perhaps best exemplified in his ’92 special Relentless. You really have to watch Hicks perform this one to get the true effect. The clip is below. It’ll be the least-wasted twelve minutes of your life.

Drugs have done good things for us. That’s my belief: drugs have done good things for us. Hard to believe I’m saying this: drugs have done good things for us. “What do you mean, Bill?” Well, if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor then: go home tonight, take all your albums, your tapes and your CDs, and burn them. ’Cause you know what? The musicians who made that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years… real fucking high on drugs, okay?

…Okay, uh, look, just look at it in another way then: these musicians today who don’t do drugs and in fact speak out against them—“We rock against drugs!”—boy, they suck. Ball-less soulless spiritless little corporate fucking puppets, suckers of Satan’s cock each and every one of them. “We rock against drugs, ’cause that’s what George Bush would want!” “We’re rock stars who sell Pepsi-Cola products!” “We’re rock stars who sell Taco Bell products!”

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I BROUGHT MY brother to a Bill Hicks tribute night in Dublin, Ireland, a long time ago. February 2017 to be exact, a few months before I moved to Canada. There were musical acts and standup comics, and Bill’s brother Steve did a virtual Q&A with the audience. I think I recall a documentary about Bill was screened. The atmosphere was exuberant, Hicks fans celebrating his life’s work with love and appreciation. All the proceeds went to the Bill Hicks Wildlife Foundation.

Do you ever wonder where the world went? It wasn’t that long ago, yet it’s gone. I’m not even sure what it is that I miss. Whatever it is, it’s about as real as Bill Hicks ever was to me. The man looms so large, yet I’ve never seen him outside the confines of a screen. Hicks was long dead by the time he entered my life. Cancer killed him in ’94. Thirty-two years old. He was a ghost of the past to me even then, but now that world is dead with him. Trying to remember it feels like chasing a dream.

Then I return to one of Bill’s specials (many of which are on Tubi), or the clips still floating on YouTube, and in flashes, I remember. And I wonder. So often these days I wonder what Bill would have made of this new world. He must be screaming in his grave.

What would he say about the “greatest crime of this century,” for example? My heart is broken over Palestine. The grief it brings is relentless; I hear screams on the wind. I wonder what Hicks might have said.

Perhaps something similar to this re the Gulf War.

This needs to be said: There never was a war. “How can you say that, Bill?” Well, a war is when two armies are fighting. So you can see right there, there never was a war.

And probably this too about the same conflict.

I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops.

And he would for sure unleash his fury on the monsters responsible, such as he did back then with Bush Sr.

People ask me where I stood politically, you know. It’s not that I disagree with Bush’s economic policy or his foreign policy, but that I believe he was a child of Satan here to destroy the planet Earth. Yeah, I’m a little to the left there.

See, Bill Hicks was angry—no—he was fucking furious. So am I. Constantly. At my worst I feel it corroding my insides like battery acid. At my best, or most enlightened, it’s a dull background throb.

Hicks dealt with his rage by traveling the US and elsewhere (particularly the UK, where he achieved the kind of star status he would not live to see in America) to make people laugh while giving them something to chew on—not just for that night but the rest of their lives. Hicks challenged power structures and punched up, and he spent damn near every day of his later life on the road preaching truth to the people while showing them a good time. That’s a fucking beautiful thing.

Hicks refused to let the horrors of this world beat him down. He refused to succumb to nihilism and depression. He knew that to fight the power structures that dominate us, even when the odds are insurmountable—especially then—is to free one’s soul from them. He knew that while our bodies may be trapped in the physical world and the conditions herein, the human spirit is cosmic and forever, and cannot be contained nor killed. Of all the lessons Hicks taught me, it’s this I cherish most.

This message is best showcased perhaps in the closing monologue of Bill’s final video special, Revelations, recorded in London in November 1992 at the height of Bill’s powers, and fifteen months before his death.

The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real, ’cause that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round; it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun… for a while.

Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question. “Is this real or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say, “Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid—ever— because this is just a ride.”

And we... kill those people. “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real!”

It’s just a ride, and we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that—you ever notice that?—and let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because… it’s just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the world right now to a better ride: take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

SIXTEEN YEARS AFTER stumbling onto Bill Hicks clips on YouTube in the dead of night, I have realized that I carry a little piece of Bill’s spirit. This brings me some peace.

In his final weeks, Bill wrote a letter to the world and said goodbye.

February 7, 1994 –

I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961, in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always “awake,” I guess you’d say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place.

All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who’ve helped me. I’d read these words and off I went—dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.

On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having “liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas.” One of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. “Why me!?” I would cry out, and “Why now!?”

Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness.

Amen

I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.

It’s a just a ride, Reader, and we can change it any time. Don’t ever forget it.

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. As I celebrate another year of life, of living in relative comfort and safety, I’m thinking of Gaza.

I don’t want to. Who does? We glimpse a headline which mentions that place and we avert our gaze. It’s only human to be repulsed by genocide.

And yet it’s happening. Right now.

As I type this children scream in the ruin of a shattered world, fleeing missiles that rain from sky black with smoke onto the corpses of hundreds of thousands of children and as many adults.1

The end of the world is here. Palestine is where it starts.

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IF YOU EVER wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, you’re doing it now. That’s not an indictment. I’m not doing much either. I’m writing about it now. I wear a Free Palestine pin everywhere I go. I pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions as an author. But I don’t have one fiber of the fortitude of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old United States Air Force serviceman who self-immolated outside the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC, in protest.

I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

Bushnell’s act was heroic. His sacrifice is Christ’s. Typing these words and flinging them into the gaping void of the Internet is, at best, self-indulgent.

But it’s something.

Lyle Jeremy Rubin writes about Bushnell in The Nation,

As an active-duty member of the United States Air Force… he was someone who had signed up to sacrifice himself for the greater good, only to discover… that he had signed up for the opposite: to become a willing accomplice to evil.

But you don’t have to wear the boots of imperialism to be an accomplice to evil. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

THERE’S LITTLE I can write about the genocide of Palestinians which has not been said more eloquently by others, many of whom witnessed it firsthand. Such as Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric ICU doctor who battled to save the lives of children in Gaza and delivered an eyewitness statement to the United Nations.

Palestinians are being intentionally massacred, starved, and stripped of everything needed to sustain human life. There are no words that can adequately convey the pain and depravity of this aggression. Those who cannot be moved by the pictures of dismembered and charred corpses will not be moved by some words. What sort of world have we descended into?

Or , one of the great journalists of our time, who also has spent time in Gaza.

This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

Or this guy.

Or even this Israeli newspaper.

This genocide is Israel’s but it was funded, enabled, encouraged, and sustained by the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and other nations that comprise the West, a collective power structure built on the brutality of capitalism, a system so exploitative and abusive it requires war, colonization, and genocide to sustain itself, as well as regular recessions/depressions and the abysmal conditions it creates in society as waste products of its self-propagation: poverty and homelessness and addiction and mental illness and forever chemicals and microplastics, oh, and the potential end of civilization as soon as 2050.

The least we can do for the Palestinians—the literal least—is bear witness to what has been done to them by Israel and the West. Because, despite cases in the International Criminal Court, despite the endless photographic evidence of the most-documented genocide in history, the truth is being suppressed.

It doesn’t help that Israel has murdered approaching 250 journalists since October 2023, making this the deadliest period for journalists on record, and arrested many others.

And it doesn’t help that Western nations are busy prosecuting journalists for telling the truth. But it’s worse than that. Google, Meta, X, and mainstream media and the major newspapers and the gatekeepers of culture and virtually every powerful institution in Western society have aligned with the Zionist regime. It is no coincidence that these same institutions appear ready, if not eager, to sell out the last vestige of our pale imitations of democracy.

The ruling class has rigged society against us. They control the levers of power and the means of production and the weapons and the bombs and the wealth. And yet every day in Palestine courageous souls stand up to the might of Israel and the American Empire with little more than their words and their indestructible, compassionate hearts.

At minimum, then, our duty is to honor them by learning about this genocide, talking about this genocide, and passing the truth on for the pages of history.

IN PROPAGANDHI’S FIRST new song in eight years, Chris Hannah cries,

Prostrate yourself to the killing machine
To spare yourself from its wheels
“Better them than me”
Rolls so seductively off your tongue
Your reckoning has begun

How I wish I could believe him.

If there is a reckoning I fear it’s not for monsters who know only hate and rage and lust but for those with tender hearts who heard the screams and turned away.

Never again, humanity swore after the Second World War. And we, those who think of ourselves as good, as righteous, we failed to prevent a genocide.

We failed the children of Palestine.

Quite probably, we failed to save our souls.

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A SCREENPLAY I wrote is out to some production companies and agents as I type this, among them my dream studio and the rep for a fairly legendary actor. I’ve been down this road before. Close but no cigar. It’s exhilarating, hard work finally paying off, a light at the end of the long black tunnel. Intoxicating even. But what goes up must come down.

The screenplay is an adaptation of my second novel, Porno Valley, a darkly comic neo-noir about a vanished porn star, the old PI hired to find him, and two junkie lovers in search of the perfect score in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. Like its protagonists it’s hard-edged and grimy with real heart. It’s the book that truly taught me how to write.

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This isn’t a sales pitch. Porno Valley is flawed. It’s a little too long and a little too complex, the pacing drags, and, frankly, I was too enamored with the characters and the world they inhabited to properly attack it. I hadn’t yet learned how to edit ruthlessly and relentlessly, which is what makes writing great. That and patience.

And yet there’s something about this tragic mystery I can’t shake. There’s a lonely, haunting quality to it. I love the characters. They felt real to me when I wrote it and they feel real to me now. Set in 1999/2000, they live in a world where the decline in living standards driven by neoliberalism is becoming hard to ignore, a society that two decades later will teeter on the edge of an abyss. Young junkie lovers Richie and Alabama especially, I think, can sense the abyss coming for them. Their desperation is palpable.

Porno Valley published in 2021. I have learned a lot about the craft of fiction in that time, and since then I have been endlessly writing and rewriting and editing and polishing the screenplay adaptation. We have traveled the Boulevard of Broken Dreams before, this script and me, and when we spun out in a cloud of dust a little part of me knew that another chance would come, that these characters and their tragic little lives would call out to be seen.

And so I dusted myself off and I hunched over the keyboard and I downed coffee and I blasted music and I made the script better. The result of that and the many, many other rewrites over the past five years is a 90-page screenplay that sheds the novel’s flaws and never stops moving, with dialogue worked on so extensively the characters’ voices shine through most every line.

Perhaps the latter is inevitable when characters whisper in your ear for so long. It took this time for the script to find its true form. This is partly because it was only my third screenplay, and certainly the first good one, but it is also because writing fiction, and screenplays especially, is brutally difficult. As I wrote re fiction as a career,

If you pursue it seriously, it will eventually cost you everything.

This is true. I could not quantify how many hours I have spent alone at a desk, facing a screen and a wall, headphones over my ears, isolated from the world. I have been writing fiction for close to ten years now and for the last few years especially I have been writing or doing something adjacent to the process not far off every available moment not wasted by soul-sucking full-time work.

Then you get the message: Script’s gone out to X and X and X! Will let you know when I hear back! and the old longing resurfaces, that glimmer of hope returning. Maybe the struggle will end, you think. Maybe I won’t have to labor until I’m gray, desperately trying to make as much art as I can in the hours that remain. Maybe I can dedicate my life to art, not just mornings before work and evenings after and long sessions on the weekends never quite long enough, but more, if not all, of my life and still have time left over to get enough sleep, enough exercise, to be less self-involved. Space to breathe.

But that’s not why we make art, is it? “Success” would be nice. It sure would make the days pass easier. My mental health would improve tremendously, along with my relationships. But it’s not the why. We make art because it nourishes the soul. We make art because it’s only when we’re making art that we truly feel alive.

Making art connects you to all of humanity while separating you from everyone around you. It may be both the loneliest and most spiritually fulfilling act there is. Writers in particular, we make art to connect with strangers across space and time. The interaction is abstract but the isolation is concrete.

And yet if you make art long enough, if you lose yourself inside the art of others enough times, you start to see the fabric of the world. You shed your ego. You realize that we are all each other and we are the universe, one cosmic organism experiencing itself forever. Or, as said by my favorite comedian, Bill Hicks:

How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn’t that be newsworthy? Just once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstitions and lies? Just once? I think it would be newsworthy. “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

In the scope of that, hope, longing, disappointment all become somewhat trivial. They feed the ego but not the soul. In fact, they tear our minds from our spirit by making the world appear so very real. We become convinced of our existence, chasing after “success” like it matters, like it’s real.

PERHAPS, AND INDEED most probably, this latest ride down the Boulevard will end the same way: spinning out in a cloud of dust. But I’ve been writing long enough to know that anything can happen at any time to anyone, and the wildest shit happens when nobody expects it.

What goes up must come down, and so these days I don’t pay my hopes too much attention. They only get in the way. All that matters is to make something beautiful while we’re here. We’re all just dreaming, anyway.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Nourished by Time came as a B-side on the Swampy EP by Dry Cleaning, a London post-punk band with spoken word vocals laced in acerbic British wit. That song was “Gary Ashby” as remixed by Nourished by Time AKA Berklee alumnus Marcus Brown, who grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and lives in London.

Art speaks to art. It crosses mediums and communicates across space and time. Remixes make this interaction explicit, and Nourished by Time’s rendition of “Gary Ashby” is an exceptional remix. I love it even more than the original.

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With “Gary Ashby” Brown taps in to the nostalgic melancholy at the heart of Florence Shaw’s lyrics, which concern a pet tortoise lost in the big world. A song that evokes distant grief as softened by Shaw’s wry vocal delivery becomes a heartbroken lament to loss with Brown’s soulful baritone, the magic touch of his creativity.

Emotion is the essence of Nourished by Time. This is music you hear with your spirit and your bones and then your brain. Brown colors his R&B canvas with a multitude of palettes, from ’80s pop to psychedelic, electrofunk to blues.

His music feels like gazing at Jackson Pollock’s Convergence. It evokes the creative mania of Prince. It’s impassioned and virtuoso with the right amount of raw. And it’s got groove. His music compels you to move, even when it’s squeezing your heart.

And this music is political, explicitly anti-capitalist and worker-conscious. “This is now an extension of my labor,” Brown told Flaunt, “another version of working at Whole Foods.” This class awareness reveals itself throughout his discography.

On “Had Ya Called,” over a funk groove beneath huge, euphoric synths, Brown grieves a lover lost within the jaws of the economy.

It breaks my heart
The system got you, baby
But don’t rub off on me
I ain’t ya friend, money’s ya friend
I ain’t the one, money’s the one and only

Memories of factory lines evoke the most brutal form of capitalist exploitation on “Worker’s Interlude” from debut album Erotic Probiotic 2.

I still can feel the cotton
And the heat from the fields
Made the country so damn rich
Ain’t no way to heal

To be trapped in the trauma of the past while dreading the future is a special kind of anguish, one Brown expresses again in “Poison-Soaked.”

I don’t know how to heal
….How does one stop the suffering?

Layers of rippling vocals reverberate into the ether.

Poison-soaked are the memories

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Poison-soaked too is the future, and nowhere does Brown express this more explicitly than Catching Chickens EP opener “Hell of a Ride.” It’s the sound of the end of America. At least, that’s what it concerns. Over glorious deep house and angelic backing vocals, Brown cries for a generation born into ruin.

Children stuck in the matrix
They know when it’s fiction
Young, breathing in them toxins
Used to have a third place
Now they got no options

Goodbye, baby, goodbye, he sings during the jubilant chorus that evokes a church choir exalting the Christian god,

To the red, the blue, and even the white
I don’t know why, I guess it never felt like mine

Apocalypse has come to America before—first for the Natives and then for the slaves—but this time, Brown prophesies, not even the white will evade devastation.

Brown is reaching for the stars and he knows it. His passion is contagious. There is something epic about it all, not just the scope of his lyrics but the ambition of the composition. It’s the highlight of Catching Chickens, and the evolution of Brown’s songwriting here has the feeling of an artist having found his voice and expanding his vision—all the way to the end of the world.

But every ending is a beginning, and every great work of art transforms as you engage with it. I hear the terrible beauty of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” differently every time I listen to it, the song Holiday arguably gave her life for (one Kanye West sampled ingeniously and performed brilliantly on Jools Holland).

The agony/ecstasy of Holiday’s voice mirrors the rapture of raw expression that shines in Brown’s baritone. Like Holiday, Brown has a remarkable ability to transform a simple phrase into a haunting croon that scratches at your soul.

NOURISHED BY TIME exemplifies that, in the end times, celebrating our existence becomes an act of defiance—and all the more euphoric because of it. Four Horsemen might be hurtling out of the cosmos and yet the power of Marcus Brown’s music is that it makes this knowledge bearable. I don’t know how to heal, he tells us, but we can hear him healing as he sings because we’re healing too.

EVERYTHING HAS ALREADY happened and time is an illusion. Mickey 17 releases in theaters. The President of the United States threatens Canada with annexation. Screams of Palestinians fall like tears onto soil soaked in children’s blood. Our time is a grim one. We stumble in the dark, yearning for a world we barely remember, recognizing only the corruption that slowly, then quickly, corrodes everything around us. We deny the beauty we cannot see.

The opening sentence of this piece is a lyric from “100% Endurance” by British post-punk band Yard Act1. There are two versions of “100% Endurance.” The first features on 2022 debut LP The Overload. The second, recorded for Record Store Day 2023, features Elton John. And one of them will, if you let it, carry your soul to Heaven.

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I FIRST HEARD “100% Endurance” while blazed on my exceptionally uncomfortable couch. I was woken by a bang, announces lyricist James Smith. Enveloped within the purple haze of Pink Island Kush, I too would be woken by a bang in the form of this brilliant fucking song.

I heard the original version first, served to me on YouTube between videos I no longer remember. What I remember is seeing actor David Thewlis (who once played in a punk band called Door 66) awaking on a public bench as if from a three-day bender as Smith narrates the scene. Quickly he recalls a pivotal moment of the night before played on a loop by the news as a reverb-soaked keyboard shimmers above chewy, grooving bass.

Basically, thеy’d discovered that therе were others just like us
Other beings, other creatures, other planets and other species
Who had other gods that they believed in
And they interviewed all of them and every one of them
Not one could give any hint of a clue what they were doing here either

Reader, I was hooked. My brain swam with visions of bewildered aliens trapped in the United Kingdom. I haven’t a fucking clue what I’m doing here either, I agreed, as the chorus swept in, evoking an entire lineage of British guitar music.

It’s all so pointless, it is,
And that’s beautiful, I find it humbling, sincerely,
And when you’re gone, it brings me peace of mind to know that
This will all just carry on with someone else (someone else)
With something new (something new), no need to be blue

By this point our protagonist has gathered a following while striding majestically around the council estate he awoke in, voicing proclamations. He vibrates with life. His enthusiasm is infectious. I am aware of myself, moments before engulfed by this couch mourning a lightless world, now chuckling as David Thewlis, in a council estate in an England drained of color, dances unfazed.

I have been a fool, I realize. Yes, our planet will soon be uninhabitable, yes, we have surrendered the water and the air and our liberty and our lives and those of the unborn to faceless corporations, but what the fuck is moping going to do about it? You could be dancing on the street to a song only you hear. You could be savoring what time you have left with the people you love. In essence, Reader, I realized, if we’re all going to hell, what if we refuse to suffer one more minute we don’t have to until we get there?

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IN 2015, FOLLOWING a romance the death of which smothered something inside me forever, I fled my pain along the east coast of Australia until, penniless, I returned to Ireland a year later older and skinnier and browner and no less sliced up than before I left. It was, of all places, in Zen Buddhism where I learned to cultivate a sense of peace.

Radical acceptance saved my life, or at least it saved my spirit. Because it was only when I understood, not just intellectually but spiritually—cosmically—the truth—that there is no self and therefore no death, that all moments occur simultaneously forever, that our resistance to reality paralyzes us inside of it—that I became able to see my suffering as an attachment to my ego, a figment of a construct. Made up. It’s all so pointless, I had been despairing, when all along the path to peace lay inside that very same revelation.

DEATH IS COMING for us all but not today, Smith declares in the interlude with only that warm, dreamy keyboard,

Today you’re living it, hey, you’re really feeling it
Give it everything you’ve got knowing that you can’t take it with you
And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you

The return of the full band is preceded by the arpeggio pluck of what sounds like a harp. Its placement in this song can only be called divine. An electric guitar washed in reverb leads to the final, most spiritual rendition of the chorus. The song is at its busiest now, its most ecstatic. I sit perched on the edge of the couch. It is more than a song. It is a calling. It is a prayer. I will be kinder to myself. I will be less antisocial. I will wake with gratitude. I will never again forget to remember how good this feels.

NINE HUNDRED WORDS ago, I told you there are two versions of “100% Endurance” and one eclipses the other. If you figured it’s the Elton John version, well done. Of course it is. The Elton rendition is structurally similar, but if you listen deeply you’ll notice a few ingenious tweaks that lift the song to the level of brilliance.

The most obvious change is that Elton John contributes the backing vocals, which are, of course, glorious, as well as the keys, switching out the synthesizer for a grand piano beamed in from some eon past. Elton’s style matched to Smith’s earnest idiosyncratic lyrics creates an effect of timelessness. The shattering of the illusion.

The most ingenious change arrives near the end. Like the original, the song fades out… until cellos and violins swell like a wave, Elton’s fingers dancing on the keys as the piano-and-strings outro soars the song to its most blissful peak before beginning a gradual descent. We were flying so high it takes a full minute to carry us back down to the earth.

I don’t know who’s responsible for these changes, Yard Act or Elton John or producer Ali Chant. It doesn’t matter. The universe speaks and we listen.

I LISTEN TO “100% Endurance,” the Elton John version, on seven-inch vinyl. My dog shuffles out of the bedroom and lies his warm body next to mine. Children scream in Gaza. The rich have stolen the world. And when you’re gone, cries Smith, it makes me stronger knowing that all of this will carry on with someone else, someone new. It’s not like there’s gonna be nothing, is it?

MAGNIFICENT, ISN’T IT? You could gaze at it in wonder for a long time. Maybe, if you stare long enough, you’ll start to see yourself. Your potential. What you can Become. Powerful. Awe-inspiring. Divine. The true you. And when, His great wings outstretched, the Dragon finally speaks, noticing at last the cosmic speck of your wretched existence, you will heed the Red Dragon’s words—you will do anything He commands you.

So it goes in the novel that catapulted Thomas Harris’ career, the one that precedes Silence of the Lambs. Reading it, you feel you’re at the rim of a great void, peering in. Ever crept too close to the cliff edge? Your footing slips, your heart lurches in your chest, and with a flash of prescience you see, you accept, your imminent death. At its best, Red Dragon feels a little like that.

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“SEE THE CHILD,” opens McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian. It would make an effective opening for this book too: to see and be seen lies at the black heart of it. Will Graham, FBI psycho specialist and hunter of serial murderers, can “see” into the minds of the sickos he pursues—call it radical empathy—which makes him the opposite of a psychopath. Whereas the emotionally crippled killer, who works in a photo lab, sees his victims in swiped home video footage of middle-class all-American families, his gaze lingering obsessively on Mommy.

Disfigured facially since birth, Francis Dolarhyde does not like when people look at him—that is, until Will Graham and, through him, the great psychiatrist/insane cannibal Hannibal Lecter see Francis for what he really is: a man convinced he’s transforming into the Great Red Dragon trapped on the page by William Blake circa 1805, the beast which bellows to Francis from the top of the stairs just like his grandmother used to—his grandma who once clamped his little cock between the jaws of a scissors after he wet the bed. Yes, Francis is one fucked-up little boy.

Harris revels in it. That’s the key to this book’s brilliance, I think: the author is not afraid to let his characters take him to messed-up places. And there are some beautifully twisted moments indeed, all glazed in sweaty, urgent paranoia: face biting, skin gluing, jerking off to snuff. Someone’s burned alive. It’s wild stuff, told with gleeful madness. The pages turn themselves.

What makes a novel distinct, what makes it yours, lies in the little details. The way a character speaks, like Dolarhyde doing his utmost to avoid sibilant sounds, which expose his deformity. Or the fact he places shards of glass over his slaughtered victims’ eyes in order to see in their gaze the majesty of his Becoming. Maybe the texture of the dialogue or the crisp, surgical prose. The idiosyncrasies.

And it’s also about being weird. Being fearlessly yourself. Red Dragon was a fucking sensation when it came out and has sold millions of copies, and, like, the killer in this book literally films himself slaughtering whole families while naked and wearing his dead grandma’s false teeth, which he bites them with, and then he jerks off to the footage later! Be fearless in your writing. There are a whole lot of readers out there eager to be surprised—to feel something.

Ultimately, the kind of art that lives on is deeply authentic, unapologetically itself. To write fiction is a spiritual thing. We tune our brain waves to a higher frequency and we vibrate with the stars, man. Writing fiction, if you’re doing it right, is brutally difficult. If you pursue it seriously, it will eventually cost you everything. Never half-ass it. Give it everything you have or do something less punishing—the people in your life will love you for it. Trust me.

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TO KEEP THOSE pages turning, that is the goal. Everything else—your feelings and your ideas and your ego—falls second.1 That’s not to say simple entertainment. Entertainment is easy and hollow in the middle. We’re talking about magic: to take a piece of the human experience and plant it in the heart of a stranger.

Harris writes like this could be a mantra. Notice here, on page one, how he leaps off the blocks from the novel’s opening sentence and keeps it moving, injecting exposition without slowing down.

Will Graham sat Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea.

Jack Crawford looked at the pleasant old house, salt-silvered wood in the clear light. “I should have caught you in Marathon when you got off work,” he said. “You don’t want to talk about it here.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anywhere, Jack. You’ve got to talk about it, so let’s have at it. Just don’t get out any pictures. If you brought pictures, leave them in the briefcase—Molly and Willy will be back soon.”

“How much do you know?”

“What was in the Miami Herald and the Times,” Graham said. “Two families killed in their houses a month apart. Birmingham and Atlanta. The circumstances were similar.”

“Not similar. The same.”

[skipping some lines]

“He’s not too comfortable with locks,” Crawford said. “Used a glass cutter and a suction cup to get in the house last time. Oh, and his blood’s AB positive.”

“Somebody hurt him?”

“Not that we know of. We typed him from semen and saliva. He’s a secretor.” Crawford looked out at the flat sea. “Will, I want to ask you something. You saw this in the papers. The second one was all over the TV. Did you ever think about giving me a call?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There weren’t many details at first on the one in Birmingham. It could have been anything—revenge, a relative.”

“But after the second one, you knew what it was.”

“Yeah. A psychopath. I didn’t call you because I didn’t want to. I know who you have already to work on this. You’ve got the best lab. You’d have Heimlich at Harvard, Bloom at the University of Chicago—”

“And I’ve got you down here fixing fucking boat motors.”

“I don’t think I’d be all that useful to you, Jack. I never think about it anymore.”

“Really? You caught two. The last two we had, you caught.”

“How? By doing the same things you and the rest of them are doing.”

“That’s not entirely true, Will. It’s the way you think.”

And just like that we are introduced to a core concept: Graham’s ability to “see” what others can’t. That is how you start a story and especially a thrilling one: charge at the reader; toss them into a scene and make them curious. Then keep things moving. If you have a niggling feeling part of your story is dragging, it probably is. You need less on the page than you think you do. Trust your readers. They’re pretty sharp.

“If you brought pictures, leave them in the briefcase—Molly and Willy will be back soon.”

This is the first real indication that something particularly awful has happened. Something gruesome, we fear. A single well-placed line of dialogue. Harris doesn’t linger on it, moving immediately to key details of the case. Half a page in and we’re more than curious, information coming at us swiftly. It feels like we’re watching a documentary, or the home video footage Dolarhyde trawls through for victims. Like him, we can’t look away.

“…Oh, and his blood’s AB positive.”

“Somebody hurt him?”

I love Graham’s response here. Like good movie dialogue, it moves quick enough we must think fast to keep up. Graham’s leap to this conclusion characterizes him efficiently: this is a man who has faced darkness. And yet his immediate concern is that someone might be hurt. To me, having read the book, that line evokes Graham’s extreme sensitivity, his almost painful revulsion toward brutality. It also shows that he’s intelligent. This rapid-fire, characterized dialogue forces us to pay close attention. That means we’re not bored.

Notice also how few words there are, how sparsely Harris sprinkles brief lines of action between the well-developed dialogue. It’s a cliché but true: in writing, less is more. When language is stripped back, the words grow powerful, their placement deliberate. In tattooing, traditional Japanese pieces demand a master artist at the height of her powers despite the style’s relative simplicity. “It could be said that all tattoo roads lead back to the Japanese tattoo,” writes master tattooist Carl Hallowell, “the zenith of the art form worldwide.”

Writers are obsessed with exposition, afraid of it, but I’m here to tell you the good news: it’s not a real thing, not really, so don’t worry about it. Every scene, if it’s good, communicates information. Style and execution decide if it feels like exposition. In the above extract, did you feel like you were being told information?

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE IS tortured by what it means to be a man, or what he thinks it means anyway, his certainty he cannot measure up. In an increasingly hopeless society, this describes many males whose self-loathing leads them to far-right echo chambers and accelerationist ideology, boys and men so certain of the ugliness of their souls they would destroy everything beautiful until the world reflects, like glass placed over a slaughtered family’s eyes, the ugliness they see inside themselves. It is Graham’s empathy, a trait which psychopaths by definition do not have, that gives him the upper hand. And isn’t that exactly what fiction does too? Expand our empathy. Gift us the ability to see.

In one thrilling sequence, Dolarhyde, overcome with a need to break free of the Dragon’s hold, devours the original Blake painting at Brooklyn Museum, his hate literally eradicating art. It might sound exciting, and a little silly, happening as it does inside a book, yet the very real monsters ruling over us are busy eradicating our humanity too. Artificial intelligence (aka theft). Streaming (aka theft). Book bans. Defunding art to push hollowed-out entertainment which neglects to challenge the systems that crush us. Their insanity infects everything. Indeed, reading Red Dragon in 2025, I see its madness reflected everywhere I look.

Extracts are taken with appreciation from Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (Putnam, 1981)

At Christmas I finally finished the first draft. It feels crazy to me to have reached the “end,” especially because this story has existed in concept for much longer. And get this: that first draft was 1,100 pages. I shit you not.

Okay, to be more accurate, this book is written in a fast-paced, minimal style with lots of paragraphs, more than a few of them one sentence long, so it’s not quite as long as 1,100 pages implies. The word count of this first draft did climb to 290,000 by the end, though. Clearly, I lost my mind.

In recent weeks I ripped out a few hundred pages, stitched in a couple new scenes, and will soon, finally, begin language editing. The task then will be to hack at it ruthlessly until every letter and punctuation mark earns its place. I hope to cut the word count in half. Write demented; edit ruthlessly.

All this to say: American Fury is coming your way soon, and, friends, I’ve got something on my hands with this one. Stay tuned.

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