Dave's Journal

Let's see how this works.

I spent most of the week where you probably wish you weren’t: The bowels of the Capitol building, asking members of Congress about the race for House Speaker. If there was doubt that Twitter would survive, despite the fury some of its power users feel toward Elon Musk, the four-day Speaker race burnt them away. Nobody was following this beat-by-beat on Mastodon. The funny, frivolous moments that didn’t fit into stories were shared on Twitter, by reporters waiting nervously and emailing sources nervously and talking with members who were mostly not nervous about the stakes of their problem.

The funniest thing I heard, I heard while sitting in the speaker’s lobby next to Jim Newell. He heard it clearer, positioned perhaps a foot closer to George Santos than me. “You can’t make this crap up,” said the freshman Republican from New York who had made up nothing but crap to get here.

On Friday, when the Republicans resisting Kevin McCarthy were convinced that they’d squeezed enough out of him to drop their weapons, I drove to Virginia Beach to cover a race for state Senate. The first stop was a soul food restaurant where ex-Rep. Elaine Luria, whose term and service on the Jan. 6 committee, was the special guest at the Black Democratic club’s happy hour; the last was a rally where every living Republican governor of Virginia except poor Jim Gilmore marched to a polling place with the Republican candidate.

It was a long drive there and back. When I can’t write anything, if my head’s clear, I start thinking of what I should be writing, Would it be a fun exercise, sending a rundown of what I did this week to subscribers? Why not try?

Best thing I read: “Revelations,” the 2021 biography of Francis Bacon from Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. Most of what I’ve read recently has come from the books I need to give away, as the fiancé and I combine houses. This one I’d planned to keep if I loved it, and just my luck, I loved it. Gloriously detailed, filling in nearly every moment of Bacon’s life, and brilliant when it slows down to analyze the art. I’ve been looking back at the “Three Studies” every day since I read it, which should be healthy.

Best thing I heard: Music-wise it was Glenn Gould’s collection of Bach’s “Preludes, Fughettas, and Fugues.” Entering month three of my Gould habit, confirming my preference for the solo piano records over the piano concertos. But I’ve been juggling a few audiobooks, in just two genres: memoirs by British comedians who read the text themselves, and classic works that were originally shared by rhapsodes. I finished one of the former, the in-character Alan Partridge memoir “I, Partridge,” which didn’t always work but did reveal new canon, very important for those of use who end up watching everything Steve Coogan does with the character.

Best thing I watched: The classy answer would be David Lean’s “Summertime,” which had been taunting me from my HBO Max recommendations for a while, and had an attackable length (100 minutes) in a week with no time to breathe. And it was fine, a sweet romance with a powerful theme but not much momentum.

The truer answer is “We Finally Watched Nukie,”a short documentary from RedLetterMedia, about the nascent collectors’ market for sealed VHS tapes. I hit “play” on it when I got into my Virginia hotel room, mentally checked out for the day, and woke right back up as the boys talked about collector culture, their own video junkie museum, and the fate of a terrific long-running gag of fans sending them copies of a piss-poor “E.T.” ripoff. One thread here, a thread in a lot of what I’ve watched lately, is just how gullible traditional media can be about pseudo-trends.

Best thing I ate: The salmon with the bourbon glaze at the Happy Cafe in Virginia Beach. The fad recently’s been to dribble lemon on top of the salmon and wake up the flavor with the acid. This recipe went for sweetness, and rescued a memory I had of a sweet salmon jerky I bought in Seattle and then forgot to bring to a party. When I mentioned this, I was assured of what I should have thought in the first place, that nobody shows up to a party wanting to smell dried fish. The thing was that I bought the jerky after tasting it, and it tasted like this, like a candy made out of something that’s 90 percent good for you and 10 percent mercury.

Fun exercise. I’ll try it again next week. There are times when I’ll travel and have anecdotes worth telling, and times when I’ll be good and settled with the most interesting diversions all coming from books. If you want to judge what I read, terrific, I’ve given my data to a website that makes that easy for you.