D-Day minus 13. I’d say that wedding planning has been less stressful than people let on; that’d be unfair to the fiancé who made all the crucial bookings when her partner was in a steel tube over Iowa. Traveling less this month has kept me in the room for the niggling stuff, including a questionnaire about how we met other. That required some reporting. The cloud had kept our first message to each other — her to me — and we realized it was sent not just the same day of the month but the same minute we’d be walking down the aisle.
Really nice. Happy surprises make up for the negative externalities of being around more, like leaving on John Carpenter’s final film “The Ward” too loud and waking the house up with Amber Heard yelling “witch!” and bodying a fellow mental patient (in the movie) off a gothic sanitarium’s roof.
No embarrassing audio explosions at the day job — good week for that. It closed out with the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference, which brought every Republican president candidate except Doug Burgum. Go ahead, tell your joke. Burgum wasn’t in any worse shape than the rest of the non-Trump candidates. Simplifying things a bit, there’s a race between Trump and his super PAC and Ron DeSantis and his super, and there is a race by strivers who think DeSantis has no swag. They condemn every legal problem Trump ambles into, but they hope, in a secret place, that one of them knocks him sideways and he must stop running.
Seem likely to you? Not to me, but I like these kinds of conferences; good chance to listen to catch up on what true believers are worried about. It took 10 minutes, from National Anthem and prayer that kicked us off, for an inspirational speaker to inform us that we were living in the last days. In a breakout session, I heard a passionate woman speculate that God had wound back the doomsday clock (for America, anyway) when Roe v. Wade went down. (It’s always on the “ash heap of history,” never the “dustbin of history,” which I know realize sounds too British to take off here.) One highlight: A woman with a long-winded set of remarks, having heard the plea for questions to actually end in question marks, just saying “question mark” when she had finished talked.
Otherwise: We worked, we made dinner for each other, we fretted over the wedding, we read. Hadn’t been out for a while, so we saw the new Wes Anderson movie and bought tickets for a concert next week. This’ll be a short entry, with actual life experiences to come later.
The Best Thing I Read: Another turn-and-burn week for the books we’re getting rid of, trying to escape my fate as one of Baudrillard’s “impoverished and inhuman” collectors. That meant a lot of mediocre graphic novels, which went directly to giveaway — and, on a break, two books I wanted to keep. One was Hanif Abdurraqib’s “Go Ahead in the Rain,” a series of essays covering the whole career of A Tribe Called Quest, up to the final post-Pfife comeback gig at The Grammys, when Busta Rhymes called Trump (ugh) “President Agent Orange.” Abdurraqib, obviously, can write, and the digressions into his own experience with the music, as a poor kid growing up in a fun-sucking Midwest city, were just as involving as the band history.
Great book, but the winner’s “The He-Man Effect,” Box Brown’s new graphic novel history of the modern children’s entertainment industry, and its colonization of what had been — pre-Reagan, pre-laissez faire FCC takeover — TV with strict censorship driven by concern about kids’ developing brains.
Brown’s gone down a docu-comic path recently, figuring out a new storytelling style between the first-person indie comic and the old Larry Gonick “cartoon histories” of everything. He is just as opinionated as Gonick, but doesn’t draw himself in as a wry commentator. The narrative and argument are straightforward, familiar if you’re seen Adam Curtis’s documentary about Edward Bernays. Brown tells the story of propaganda, then TV advertising, then how what had been boisterous, creative childrens’ playtime became a for-profit nostalgia factory.
There’s a b-story in Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman,” in which a rogue nightmare, wanting to imitate a dream — both are obviously anthropomorphic in this series — takes over an abused boy’s subconscious. Instead of the randomness of dreams, he is trapped in a kind of comic strip, a “Little Nemo” story with cliched plots and characters and callbacks. Been thinking about that story recently (it was adopted in the Netflix series) as I look at the decaying IP flyweel Disney built for adult fans; fans who started buying “Star Wars” toys 40 years ago. People have chosen to spend so much of their dreamtime on a couple of janky fantasy worlds.
The Best Thing I Saw: “Asteroid City,” which I’m still sorting out my thoughts about. The Anderson aesthetic that’s been pumped into Midjourney and other AI sludge factories is still there. What I’d forgotten, while getting annoyed at how many “Care Bears as a Wes Anderson movie” reels were being passed around, was the appeal of his matryoshka story structures. The last movie he made without having at least one extra layer of narration was “Rushmore.” Here he’s got an actress played by Scarlett Johansen running lines from a play, while she’s a character in a play called “Asteroid City,” while she’s an actress playing that character in a wraparound Golden Age of TV special about the making of that play. That special takes place in the Tarkington Theater, a nice touch, because Anderson’s writing in the long-winded, list-making style that Great Novelists used to use.
I also saw Max Landis’s pitch for a Justice League movie in his “Kryptonian Epic” fan-fiction universe, because Nathan Rabin wrote about it. Landis, at one point, describes a fight that would be “filmed like Succession” with higher body counts than John Wick. Wish I hadn’t seen that, but Landis has countless hours of this stuff, just fascinating to watch now as the studios are watching more superhero movies flop.
The Best Thing I Played: “Bioshock,” probably the reason I didn’t have better anecdotes. I’d picked it up and put it down years ago, but it was free to download and I have two nights off when it was far too humid outside to do anything but fight mosquitos. Addictive even when the ancient AI would glitch out or the damage registration in fights stopped making sense — a genuinely good story and two twists I’d avoided by not knowing where to find game writing.
I’ll miss those unsettling cut-scenes of saving enslaved undersea city children from addiction to human-enhancing plasmids. Back next week.