Mostly Iowa and New York this week, a lot of travel, giving me a cold that made my head too small for my sinuses. I’d wake up at 6:30 feeling awful, power through it and feel merely bad by mid-day, then go to bed feeling healed. Then I’d wake up again – “I Got You Babe” on the clock radio, cycle repeats.
I kept going for the stories, which turned out great, as the 2024 primary starts to take a recognizable shape. On Saturday, I wound up a few feet from Mike Pence, as he pulled on a leather vest with a POW patch on the back and was baited into talking by a TV reporter’s unapologetically strange question: “Gonna rev up some votes today?” Sometimes you need to get a candidate saying “what?” and the ice melts.
I tweeted a photo of Pence’s eyebrows lifting as he processed this bonkers question, and the replies filled up with people yelling, incorrectly, that this was all a phony stunt. A stunt, sure, but not phony: Pence was the only Republican presidential candidate who actually rode a motorcycle from the start of the annual “Roast and Ride” to the air-conditioned county fair building, a Wal-Mart-sized barn where he and seven more candidates would give speeches.
Ron DeSantis was one of those candidates. I remembered why I write this weekly diary because until I did, I hadn’t appreciated that I spent the front half of the week in other parts of Iowa, following him around. (Obviously I didn’t forget doing that, I just didn’t process how much happened in a week.) Smack in the middle of this, I went to New York and back for the final must-do meetings before our wedding, unbreakable commitments I couldn’t just Zoom into from Sioux City. Cakes secured, officiant secured, interviewed Keith Ellison, went back to Iowa, dropping off the large portion of test cakes we didn’t eat with the first friend I offered it to.
A lot of time was spent this week on whether Ron DeSantis, who doesn’t enjoy the grip-and-grab part of politics, would look strange and aloof on the trail. People who wanted to write that got enough material. When I was close to him, DeSantis was doing fine — nothing as flat and awkward as the “okay” he returned to a man in New Hampshire who’d just introduced himself. Most of the talk between candidates and voters is, no offense, boring. You would be amazed at how many times I’ve seen people buttonhole a senator or governor and spend a full minute asking if they know some friends of theirs from high school. I’m not trying to judge here, just saying that most of us would sound kind of glib and awkward at times if a camera was always next to us. (Dylan Wells has been very good about getting a camera with solid audio pick-up next to DeSantis.) Are most politicians unusually charismatic at all times? Yes. DeSantis is different. He will not win a warmth contest with Trump; he can be the nominee if that’s not really top of mind for Republicans. I doubt it will be.
The Best Thing I Read: Back to my rock geek roots this week, picking up books I could enjoy even while my head pounded. Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?” builds on an idea the author first encountered in a book of predictions – one of those open-any-page time-wasters that people leave in a beach house bathroom.
He does an awful lot with the idea, imagining what people not now living will remember about our pop culture. My favorite example: If rock music, clearly spent, is remembered through one icon, it would matter plenty whether that icon was Elvis (an entertainer who sang other peoples’ songs) or Dylan (a songwriter who made music you can’t dance to). As in “The Nineties,” last year’s Klosterbook, he’s least convincing when he discusses politics.
The usual reaction here might be: Hey, if he’s wobbly on the subject I know best, what is he right about? I didn’t have that reaction, because Klosterman clearly knows more about his other topics; his recollection of the 2000 election starts with remembering the video for “Guerilla Radio,” the Rage Against the Machine song that assured Gen Xers that the right choice was “none of the above, fuck it, cut the court.”
But that wasn’t my favorite read. I ripped right through “The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise” by Brix Smith Start, the upper-middle class Angeleno who fell in love with Mark E. Smith and joined the great working class rock group The Fall.
I discovered The Fall, like a lot of other music, on Mark Prindle’s website. Before my own tastes hardened, I often defaulted to Prindle’s, and that included loving The Fall, really loving the period when Brix was in the group, and failing to convince my friends that it was good.
The impediment to that, for most people, is Mark E. Smith sang for the Fall, and it can be hard for any fellow English-speaker to understand him. Smith’s lyrics were brilliant post-beat poems, sung in a wobbly voice, every line ended with an extraneous “-ah!” Brix was an impressive pop songwriter whose light tone filled out the band’s sound. Most of the best Fall records were made when Brix was in the band, married to Smith for about half that time. And I didn’t know much about her.
Fixed that. Brix is a sharp memoirist, who tells interviewers that she prefers not to think about negative experiences from her past; it reads like she was as raw and specific as she could be about her tragedies, to get them on paper once and forget about them. Mark would channel his anger into songs: “Everyone was paranoid about having songs written about them. It was part of his vengeance.”
Smith died five years ago, but Brix has found real joy in a few post-Fall careers — a boutique, Brit TV talking head gigs, and new music. This isn’t a tragic memoir. It’s packed, and I read it in one go.
The Best Thing I Saw: Look, more nostalgia. My college friend Mark got me into “Clone High” shortly after it was canceled, back when a major perk of campus housing was laser-quick 10 gbps ethernet. If you heard about something fun, you could download it, and he’d downloaded this light, goofy comedy about the clones of historic titans (Lincoln, Gandhi, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc) forced to attend high school and endure Degrassi-like problems.
Scarcity made a good show feel like a classic. You couldn’t own the series unless you bought a DVD copy sold only in Canada. (Really not hard in the Midwest.) The in-jokes, like every episode being introduced as “very special,” were recognizable whenever someone ripped them off. The creators (Lord/Miller) went on to phenomenal success in animation, getting an Oscar nomination for “The LEGO Movie” and winning the lil’ guy for “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.” (Too busy this weekend to see the sequel, but I’ll get to it.)
Those movies are as loved. The IP reboot spree – MAX doing it here, as it drops some of the failed reboots from its server – has not produced much TV worth watching. If I could take a pill to forget that “Futurama” is returning for the fourth time, I would.
But the nostalgia got me here, and the new show, light as ever, is smart about pop culture’s new rules. “Clone High” season one ended at prom, when the characters were put into cryogenic freeze, moments before Abe (Will Forte) could say whether he was in love with Joan (Nicole Sullivan) or Cleo (Christa Miller). Season two picks up right now, 20 years later, and we immediately learn that the gawky, sensitive Abe confessed his love for smart girl Joan, not vain girl Cleo. In 2023, he’s with neither of them: Joan is dating the entendre-obsessed clone of JFK and Cleo is distraught by her lost status in a world that celebrates unsexy outsiders. Frida Kahlo and Harriet Tubman, cloned after the first batch was frozen, run the school; Topher, a clone of Christopher Columbus, has crippling social anxiety because in his lifetime his DNA donor got “canceled.”
The new show abides by all the new rules that conservatives hate. Cleo’s voice actor is now Mitra Jouhari, one-third of “Three Busy Debras,” an Iranian-American, not the WASPy Miller. (She voices a new “secret government employee,” as the Abandoned Pools theme song describes the clone-makers.) Gandhi is left frozen, because Indian MTV watchers complained about the character (a horndog Abe sidekick with ADHD) twenty years ago. Taking his place: Confucius, because the billion people that offends buy fewer streaming subscriptions than the billion people cartoon Gandhi offended.
Again: I never go in for these nostalgia projects. I bailed on the “Arrested Development” continuation, essentially the same idea as this, 10 minutes into the first episode. Getting seriously into this at my age, and realizing my tastes hadn’t evolved since I was a college student reading Joss Whedon fan blogs, would have scared me. No need: The first episodes shake the nostalgia stick, but aren’t hitting like the Quicktime files I watched with Mark. Surprisingly for a Lord/Miller project, there are fewer jokes taking advantage of the “historical figures in high school” gag; the focus stays with the main cast.
The single best joke I saw was in “The Other Two,” in a new episode that takes place mostly at an “AIDS Play” that threatens to never end, and keeps flashing back to foreshadowing scenes that get further and further from the discovery of the virus. The funniest deadpan reaction, from a character who knows he’ll be photographed and shamed on social media if he leaves early. “I’m glad we’re in 1776, and I’m excited to see how it connects back to AIDS.”
The Best Thing I Heard. “Valley of the Dolls,” Brix’s new solo record. It dropped in March, but I might never have heard of it had I not read the book. Every new rock record sounds like it could be the last one, before the poptimists inherit the world. It sounds like Hole, and got me looking at her old stuff, which is what I’ll sign out with.
Good stuff here, not living in a state where the primary matters it's something to know that Iowa canvassing is just talking with a dude if he went to high school with another dude. I liked the mention of the pow patch, felt like there was some irony there and yet there wasn't.
The breakdown on clone high was informative and the aids line landed well. I too had a nostalgia trip that was not as high minded unless tv's cheaters with Joey greco is just a reenactment of proust. You're spot on about campus housing internet, back in the day that thing could download whole TV shows off limewire like nobody's business.
I loved the term "poptemists", never heard of the fall but might look into them. My own tastes have hardened quite a bit, so I dunno if it'll stick.