DES MOINES — On Friday, after helping some fellow reporters close down Buzzard Billy’s, I followed them into a spacious rental van and headed to the Beachwood. Why that bar? Why hang out when, since the honeymoon, I’ve either been ordering seltzer on its own or with a dash of bitters? Well: I wanted to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in person since 2020, and I remembered the Beachwood as the preferred dive of the underdog Democratic campaigns that cycle. Need to run into a Buttigieg strategist? Or someone trying to make Gillibrand happen? Swing by the bar with a basement full of archival Budweiser neon, and far too few bathrooms considering how many people fit on the patio.
There were no Democratic staffers there this time, because there’s not really a Democratic campaign in Iowa. (The national party has pushed it down the calendar and Joe Biden’s challengers are mostly campaigning on podcasts.) We arrived and formed a cell of forty-somethings, alternately ignored and bumped into by people born no earlier than the year 1995.
This primary is happening for different people — middle-aged Republicans, mostly. And they had a great week, the first one with a campaign fully chugging around the state. Ron DeSantis, on a bus paid for by his super PAC, kicking off a 99-county tour! Will Hurd, showing up at the party dinner to get booed offstage for saying Donald Trump was running “to stay out of jail!” Candidates renting hospitality suites where potential caucus-goers could take selfies and play mini-golf! Chris Sununu, not running for anything anymore, just hanging out!
We got some good stories out of it, and I left with a better understanding of what caucus-goers feel. They feel terrific. The only people who want Iowans to make up their minds quickly are the candidates; voters themselves, in my conversations, appreciated almost everyone running, and felt flattered that so many people wanted to introduce themselves as alternatives to Donald Trump, who most of them expected to vote for when this was over.
The story changed from day to day, as it should. My honest take on Friday was that DeSantis had the best 10-minute spot at the party dinner, benefitting from a format that allowed no digression or riffing. The online conversation about DeSantis, this week, mostly swirled around videos of him struggling to make small talk with Iowans — “that’s a lot of sugar,” he told a child drinking a slushie. Now, one thing DeSantis’s ardent defenders will say, especially the ones who’ve met him, is that he’s always bored by small talk because he wants to get immediately into the hard details of policy. The deal, with a DeSantis presidency, would be less warmth and have-a-beer-with-ism than we’re used to from a president, coupled with Prussian ruthlessness about enacting his agenda. Left Twitter gets to laugh at videos of DeSantis looking uncomfortable; right Twitter scoffs and says yeah, that’s the point, just wait until he’s signing executive orders.
But DeSantis can run long when he’s got a microphone, and has a habit of talking over any break for applause when he gets excited about re-capping a fight he won or a bill he passed. Onstage, forced to compress his remarks, he stuck to simple promises and uncomplicated sentences, and described the most conservative governing record in America. Went great for him, rescued the week, but I headed home not knowing how much it would benefit him.
Didn’t have much downtime, except for a few breaks on the flights and a Wednesday evening we’d reserved to see “Oppenheimer.” That’s a good place to start the superlatives.
The Best Thing I Saw: “Oppenheimer,” definitely. My biopic tolerance is high already, and I only winced at the end, when a key character asks who the junior senator from Massachusetts is, in 1959. No one seriously navigating D.C. politics in 1959 was unaware of John F. Kennedy. And no, this is not a major point in the movie, most of which is a study of a brilliant, arrogant, hubristic man giving himself enough “wiggle room” to become the most important scientist of his age while self-sabotaging his career. There’s a sequence at the top of the third act, when Cillian Murphy’s “Oppie” delivers a rah-rah speech to the heroes of Los Alamos, that does things with sound effect and lighting that I’d only ever seen before in a haunted house. Just terrific - bring your dad if you see it.
I liked the “Loch Henry” episode of “Black Mirror” more than the critical consensus. Is Charlie Brooker done with the “wot if social media was a bleedin’ menace” plot now? Is he just making mini-horror movies? If so, he’s pretty good at that, taking fairly predictable horror plots and making them interesting by mixing up the media he uses to tell them. There’s a found footage movie in here, a fake trailer, a “Ghosthunters” sequence, and a well-lit “Local Hero” story about a kid trying to rescue his town.
The best TV we saw was “The Righteous Gemstones,” the apogee of the Danny McBride comedy project so far. But we barely watched anything else.
The Best Thing I Read: Devoured “Easy Money,” the Ben McKenzie/Jacob Silverman study of the crypto scheme that in practice is the story of McKenzie parlaying his “mid-level” fame and interest in finance into a few acts of terrific investigative journalism. Didn’t finish much else, but am on the verge with “Greybeard,” the Brian Aldiss novel about a fifty-something man navigating a future where most mammals, made sterile by chemicals, are dying off. The grey-bearded hero, still vital enough to fight intruders and go on quests, is one of the youngest people on earth. “Children of Men” borrowed a bit of this, not just the sterility plot but the desolate horror of describing the last generation of humanity. The most haunting part of “Children of Men” (the novel), for me, was always the church service interrupted by a deer, a symbol of nature already re-occupying the emptying human spaces; the images I have been remembering when I click off my “Greybeard” kindle copy are the dilapidated homes that the last men squat in, unkempt because there’s no one to leave them to.
Article-wise, I had the most fun with Tim Lee’s explanatory piece about large language models.
The Best Thing I Heard: Still getting into Hal Hartley, and really enjoying his homebrewed soundtracks, simple and heart-tugging melodies for keyboard and guitar. I’ve only seen “Amateur” and “The Unbelievable Truth,” but have been playing through all the themes Hartley collected on “Possible Musics,” and enjoying how he does it. His choice of 90s rock for Godard-inspired dance scenes is even better, though — I leave you with this, which neither you or I need to see the movie to appreciate.