We stayed around the area this week, taking a day trip to Delaware but otherwise sticking around the house. I focused on stories that made the most sense to report here, heading back to the Senate, spending more time there than I had in years. Traveling didn’t make much sense, either for stories or for the time we had before the wedding; we blocked off nights in the calendar, as if they were meetings, to push through the final few decisions. Honeymoon hotels (writing “honeymoon” in the little form to see what happens), DIY wedding decor (flowers, but not the 10x-markup kind), the final deposits (I still have a checkbook, who knew?).
When at home, we organized, moving without thinking between the piles of books and the shelves that could make them a library. Early on Sunday, I got the idea to make the one cheap shelf we’d never moved from the living room into the host for all of my hardcover novels. Why? Let me explain the logic. A feature of the usual D.C. media house, which is how someone could smirkingly classify our house, is the “ego wall” of famous people interacting with the homeowners. A feature of the D.C. media “zoom room” is the conspicuous shelf full of serious books, dominated by the physics-defying paperback spine of “The Power Broker.”
Now, I own “The Power Broker.” Two copies — the weathered paperback that a college professor once walked over and slammed shut because I was reading it during his lecture, and a hardcover copy I’d bought because of my false memory of giving away the paperback. But they are in the library, the room of shelves that we work in. The visitors to our living room now walk in and see three shelves:
A cheap, tall, six-shelf one containing all the hardcover novels I own, from “Advise and Consent” to “The City & The City.”
A more expensive, four-shelf one containing the most interesting-looking graphic novels; the Hernandez brothers, the complete “Berlin,” the complete “Eightball,” things of that nature.
The cheap, eight-shelf media unit that contains the only blu-rays I’ve kept around (mostly Criterion stuff, the introvert millennial starter pack) and all of my media-related books. I’m talking “The Glenn Gould Reader,” I’m talking “Whitney Ballett’s Journal of Jazz,” I’m talking two Trouser Press record guides — final “classic” edition and the “guide to 90s rock,” whose cover emulates a bad SPIN cover. Did I say SPIN? There’s the “SPIN Alternative Record Guide,” which includes the artist's’ own top-10 album lists, which is how we collectively learned that Joey Ramone considers “It’s Alive!” one of the greatest LPs in rock history. I’m talking “Howard Stern Comes Again” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation.”
The goal of that last shelf is to surprise anyone who looks at is and is asked: “Is the man who lives here about to get married, or is he on Reddit all day?” The larger organizing goal to reduce clutter — to eliminate any pile of books that wasn’t being worked through at that moment.
I got fresh inspiration for the project on Friday, when we headed up to Delaware to visit with a friend who, with his wife and five sons, was on leave from the Army to settle some family business. We brought drinks; everyone else brought food. There’d been incorrect reporting that all five boys were coming — they didn’t, they were with grandparents — but the house was full of kids yesterday, mostly boys, as their parents discussed our 1990s dumbassery in front of the one woman who’d never heard about it. She was planning to marry me beforehand, and stuck to the plan when it was over.
My “Delaware friends,” as I call them, come from two connection: My Army friend, and the host, Chris. Both collaborated with my friend CJ on a trilogy of action films that we filmed after college, but prepped for with years of in-joking and fighting. The church most of us belonged to had a very smart strategy for keeping us around, letting us use its gym for what we called “rumble.” The stories that stuck with us were either about fighting — the good, normal kind that friends do — or about the noises people made while fighting, like the gasp one of us let out after he was surprised by an elbow-drop and had to yelp without air.
In the basement, Chris kept his video game collection, which suggested how we’d spent the rest of our downtime. We had the same hobbies as all the post-2000 kids who grew up with easy internet access, but we were lucky: The only record of us acting stupidly was sealed on tapes. No chance of one of their kids stumbling across a video on his phone and finding out about the stupid characters I’d played in “Boys of Summer II,” the one where I mostly had cameos because I wasn’t living nearby anymore. No chance of them finding a video of us rage-quitting “Jaws” or “Ghosts and Goblins.” Chris, who’d worked for years at a game shop and saved a basement full of merchandise, had organized it so that his own sons could play, and so that the stuff had a kind of dignity on the shelf.
There’s no point in building a huge collection unless you’ve got a big suburban basement to put it in. Chris had one. The scale of the thing, and the care he’d put into it, became clear when he held up a copy of “It’s Hard” by The Who and pointed to what was facing it across the room: A working Atari Space Duel machine, the same one the anonymous kid is playing on the album cover. This was nth-level collecting. I’m out of that game. When we got home and had downtime, we were either outside enjoying the stuff we didn’t own, or inside getting rid of the stuff we did.
The Best Thing I Read: Easily “Louder Than Hell,” an oral history of heavy metal that I’d been carting around for a decade. The success of “Please Kill Me” — which, remember, was put together by journalists who’d covered punk in real time — inspired a lot of decent books like this, oral histories with a little editorial shaping and notation, attempting to tell a single definitive history of something the reader might have only experienced by buying a couple of CDs. I’d started and stopped “Louder From Hell” a few times, because I’d grown up loving the Mt. Rushmore of metal (Metallica, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath) and grown out of it before I could get deeper in.
The opening chapters of “Louder From Hell” felt too familiar, for that reason: “The Dirt,” the dorm room classic about the career of Motley Crue, covered some of the most ribald and exciting periods here. And the rest — did I really need to know more about the death of Randy Rhoads? The first hundred or so pages felt like the “previously on” for a show I’d memorized already.
It kicked up for me right after that, once Pantera showed up. In middle school and junior high — between the Delaware party and this book, I spent a lot of time reminiscing about that period — hip-hop was ascendent and metal fandom was mostly reserved for the weird kids. The bookish weird kids thought Metallica was great and the sprachensang on Megadeth’s “Speeding Bullets” was funny. The really dangerous weird kids got much deeper, showing up with Pantera and Sepultura stickers on their notebooks, and carving off the vinyl until only the band logos were left. I’d hear this music on Beavis and Butthead but not think much about it. Tool was the only weird kid band I got into, once I realized that I was in love with progressive rock, and so were those guys.
So: The best parts of “Louder From Hell” covered bands I had seen on tattoos and T-shirts but never really heard. Not a note of Avenged Sevenfold or Static-X. Nu-metal? I read enough rock criticism to know that it was worthless. Only later did I realize that there was rock for people who went to college and rock for people who didn’t — rock for front row kids and rock for the kids who beat them up. And only this weekend did I realize that Avenged Sevenfold, to borrow a nonsense expression I used in high school, kicks nine kinds of ass.*
In D.C., Juneteenth made this a three-day weekend, so I kept reading books to give away, pausing for de-cluttering or wedding calls. Burned through a couple of sci-fi graphic novel short stories: “Strange Adventures,” a prestige project from D.C., and “The Best of Negative Burn,” early raw stuff by 90s indie comics writers. Only one story stuck with me, a “Strange Adventures” morality tale about a woman whose hoarding has compelled the state to give her children away. Dave Hickey’s “Pirates and Farmers” averaged one good idea for every three essays. Steven Weissman’s “Butter and Blood” was exactly the kind of book I struggle to get rid of — a beautiful compilation of an artist’s magazine work that I don’t need to read again but probably couldn’t replace.
Slow on the novels, recently. That stuff is better enjoyed on plane rides when I don’t have, or create, online distractions, like the “millennial metal” Spotify list I started building when I finished “Louder Than Hell.” (The idea there is to build out from every Ozzfest line-up into a compilation of metal during the last time it was relevant. What’s a good time to end it? I think 2017, and the breakup of Black Sabbath. The goal is finding some songs I’d have never realized I liked if I hadn’t read the book.) Inspired, probably, by all this metal-reading, I got halfway through the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day. Other music took me away from metal, but the way these guys mined old texts and horror novels for inspiration, and not normal lives, always appealed to me. Saul Bellow: “The advantage of lesser gods is that you can take their names any way you like.”
The Best Thing I Watched: Alan Parker’s “Birdy,” which I’d only known previously from its Peter Gabriel soundtrack and the important role it played for Nicolas Cage as described in Keith Phipps’s book. One more feature that saves it from being forgotten: it introduced the skycam, an ancestor to the drone footage that now introduced every city in a spy movie — a sweeping shot of the Eiffel Tower with PARIS being typed out onscreen, as if you don’t know.
Those features — Gabriel’s nearly-ambient music, the trick shots, youthful Cage and Matthew Modine throwing everything into the roles of a tough Philly kid and his mentally ill pigeon-loving friend — elevated it over the crowded and increasingly unloved genre of “boy, Vietnam was bad” movies. The fiancé put up with “Coming Home,” the Hal Ashby study of an affair between a military wife (Jane Fonda) and a disabled veteran (Jon Voight) on Sunday, and I liked that less. Talk about soundtracks: Ashby doesn’t mess around with sonic textures. He buys the rights to popular songs and gives them to fucked-up characters, as if they’re walking around to theme music. For Bud Cort’s Harold, it was “Don’t Be Shy,” the original Cat Stevens song that plays during his first joke-suicide, and “If You Want to Sing Out,” another original Cat song that more or less describes what we’re seeing. Bruce Dern’s Captain Bob Hyde runs onscreen to “Out of Time” (Rolling Stones) and leaves it to “Once I Was” (Tim Buckley), more literal choices. But he’s not the first actor we see onscreen — that’s Voight, and his other military buddies in the hospital. It’s not his movie.
The Best Thing I Heard: Nothing to do with any of this! Kill phony nostalgia! My other tiny project this week was a year-by-year playlist of songs produced by Mitch Easter, the jangle god who produced the first R.E.M. records and spent a lifetime recording albums that sounded a bit like them. Easter’s band, Let’s Active, wasn’t new to me. I’d had my Game Theory phase right after college. I’d seen The Connells, with no warning, as the hired band at a friend of a friend’s 50th birthday party in St. Petersburg, Fla. But I’d never heard Love Tractor before, an incredible thing to say about a band that recorded a song called “Nova Express.”
See you next week. Just a couple more of these before I’m married; got to pound out the shut-in music content before I can’t.
*Do not ask me what this means. People laughed when I said it, so I kept using it, then learned not to, then remembered it for this post.