2025, weeks three and four

Stop saying "ancien regime," you don't know what it means.

(Photo from the D.C. Zoo, 1/26/25)

How was it for you? I’ve been in D.C. for five inaugurations now, always resenting — patriotically, if you ask me — how the city is transformed into a Yevgeny Zamyatin police state. In 2005, I drove on I-395 out to North Carolina for a long weekend, and was stopped just outside the city by one of the traffic cops who’d been forced into service for the week, exhausted and trying to make some quota. In 2009, the whole city was celebrating the coming of Barack Obama; I had to write a ton on the clock, and off the clock, I crammed into the back of a Pete Seeger concert and went to a friend’s party where the “Monday Night Football” theme was slipped into a playlist of patriotic music. I suppose the city was happy in 2013, too; I covered that inauguration from inside the press zone and remember very little of it.

Four years later, I filed copy on the Trump “American Carnage” address and the protests, then walked to my office, where the protests were getting real. A small group of anarchists had set a limo on fire, right at the base of our building. Those who needed to edit stories stayed inside and looked down nervously, and those who needed stories went down to see dozens of reporters already on it. Our new alert system for First Amendment Problems was in effect, and when night fell, I got text messages warning me not to go where I went. In 2021? The real action was on Jan. 6, and the city and the security state overcompensated for the Biden inauguration. Our current system of massive perimeters around the Capitol, starting blocks before the office buildings that, typically, anybody could walk to — that started in 2021, though I remember some conspiracy talk about how the feds were shutting down democracy to install Biden. Don’t need to worry about him anymore, but they invested in those tall fences, and they will use them.

I partied, responsibly. Because the Spectator “spotted” me there, I can confirm attendance at a Spotify brunch that came with multiple warnings not to put anything on the record. Why? My guess was that the company was inviting its biggest podcast hosts, and all of those guys were conservative in a way that companies used to apologize for. But we’re over that, right? Didn’t Neil Young even come back on the artist-robbing, life-changing streaming service? Later that night I went to Turning Point’s celebration, which had the same guests plus Conor McGregor, and closed out with JD Vance dancing “YMCA,” played live (mimed live?) by the surviving Village People.

As usual, my work is all here. On to the lists.

The Best Thing I Read: Chris Hayes’s new book about the war for our attention is legitimately great, a guttural (but thoughtful!) scream by a fellow old millennial who has watched the media we grew up with and went to work in great replaced by guys screenshotting articles on X. Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” is spellbinding, enriching everything she and Mapplethorpe ever did; we need to forgive Matt Smith for doing a biopic largely based on this memoir, because you want to live inside it while you’re reading it, and you understand why so many ugly ducklings still move to Manhattan thinking their greatness will be appreciated there. If they actually contain greatness — good bet!

Books read
Eddie Campbell, “The Death of the Artist”
Eddie Campbell, “The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell”
Patti Smith, “Just Kids”
Ed Brubaker: “Incognito: Bad Influences”
Rick Spears: “Black Metal Omnibus”
Maggie Nelson, “The Argonauts”
Yōko Ogawa, “The Diving Pool”
Chris Hayes, “The Sirens’ Call”
Richard Hanania, “The Origins of Woke”
Jeremy Carl, “The Unprotected Class”
Claudia Lonkin, “Neue Deutsche Welle”
Hannah Barnes, “Time to Think”
Warren Ellis, “Tokyo Storm Warning”
Denis Mack Smith, “Modern Italy”

Books purchased
Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”

Books given away
23 of them, including a duplicative copy of “The Invisible Bridge” I’d owned for ages.

The Best Thing I Saw: Took me until last weekend to see “Run Lola Run,” which was a new hot DVD when I got to college, and watched/worshipped by my dorm friends. Young adult Dave never took the chance to watch it, which was ridiculous, and adult Dave spent 27 years assuming the film was a real-time document of Franka Potente running across Berlin to do/prevent something.

You’ve probably either seen it or read the Wiki summary of the movie, so you know that the film actually uses video game logic, letting Lola restart her story again and again to prevent disaster, affecting some of the lives she runs past. (Even the character introductions look like PC game selection screens.) In one of her unhappy versions, Lola causes a bike accident that introduces the rider to his wife. In the next, a slightly different accident turns him into a dissolute hobo. In another, she doesn’t get into the accident, helps advance the plot, and we are denied a glimpse of his future.

This was a masterpiece, and nothing was going to top it, but I was glad I watched “Lynch/Oz,” Alexander Philippe’s anthology documentary that assigns different filmmakers and critics some overlapping narration about David Lynch’s debt to Americana. Some of the contributors (Amy Nicholson) read insights I never came across in 30 years watching Lynch’s films. Some are more banal; I didn’t need a cheat code to realize that the opening of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” apes the opening of “The Wizard of Oz.” Philippe’s been working longer than Rodney Ascher, but Ascher gets one of the segments, and the whole film feels like one of his projects; this runs a lot like “Room 237,” with fewer oddball theories from cranks.

I didn’t watch a thing during the inauguration work week, but I tried to watch some masterpieces at the weekend. Had owned, but never seen, “La Dolce Vita.” Now I own it and have seen it, three hang-out hours spent watching Marcello Mastroianni and his women’s sunglasses smirk on the edge of clubs, parties, and pseudo-intellectual salons. My wife and I have a March trip to Italy planned, before we complicate our lives a bit; I am beaming in every image of old Rome into my eyeballs before I make all the bookings. Before we went to bed on Sunday, we watched “A Real Pain,” a fine contribution to the genre of a gallant and goofus on tour together, worth seeing for Kieran Culkin’s incredible delivery and clowning. (There’s a bit where he gets depressed by a story at a restaurant dinner table, chugs a beer, belches, slams his hand on the table, watches a fork fly to the ground, and promises to pick it up as he belches again.)

The Best Thing I Heard: My old (c. 2022) hobby of making playlists based on every year of recorded or transcribed music is back, and it’s still a great way of stumbling across pieces I would never hear organically. Did you know that the inventor of the Kodály method wrote orchestral pieces, too? You probably did, but I didn’t, and here’s one he finished in 1933.