*Quarantined*

Brian Kelly Costello : Author, Professor, Leftover Debris from the 90s : Orlando, FL

April 4, 2020

“8:45am - Check the grim stats, a daily ritual. Florida has passed 10,000, U.S. has passed 275k, world 1.1 million. It’s hard to watch sometimes, but, much like the last 3 years, there’s a feeling that one must check what’s going on just to make sure it hasn’t completely fallen apart.  How bad will it get in Florida? Evangelicals still congregate. Old people generally don’t give a a fuck. Bad. The un-reality is heightened by the vacation vibe of 70 degrees and sunny, ocean surf, cornflower blue sky. “

Brian Kelly Costello has made his way around various parts of Florida, Illinois and even a stint in LA to find himself back in the Sunshine State. I met him when he was the door guy at my favorite venue in Chicago - The Hideout (shout-out, they’re still hosting live shows online, check it out). Since then we’d run into each other occasionally and connect briefly virtually.

He’s one of those folks where you just want to know what the f*&! is going on in their brain. A couple years ago, he wrote a novel called Losing in Gainesville about Gainseville Florida in the 90s and the punk scene there. You can check it out here.

PRAISE FOR LOSING IN GAINESVILLE:
"If Joyce was right that you could rebuild Dublin by reading Ulysses, you could definitely reconstruct a very specific American village of dive bars, record shops and drugstore cowboys from this slab of post-punk tragicomedy[...] [Losing in Gainesville] traces the emotional arc (or lack thereof) of superslacker Ronnie Altamont, the lead singer and guitarist in his low-rent Florida rock band, The Laraflynnboyles. Set in the mid-1990s, the story captures in intimate detail the wilderness years experienced by many American males of a certain class, age and background. The desolate outlooks of Ronnie and his buddies are weighed down by crap jobs (asbestos removal, pizza delivery, etc.), fueled by the massive and constant intake of drugs and alcohol, and soothed only by the likes of Charles Bukowski, Lou Reed, The Kinks and The Replacements[...] It's a big, messy, uncomfortable story but one that captures its milieu[...] [I]n the end, the book's real question is whether this beautiful loser is capable of being saved from himself. A rock-and-roll fable about the secret lives of the unsatisfied."
—Kirkus Reviews

He also has a one-man band musical project called Future Bartenderz which can be accessed on Spotify. Brian is also an English Composition professor and for the last 2 1/2 years, he’s been going through the Lou Reed discography and writing about each album. He’s made it through the first 21 albums, currently spending time with the 1996 album "Set the Twilight Reeling." This can be found here.

So read along to see where we may find our subject and their opinions on Publix, punk music and Florida’s probability of falling into the ocean: