CINCINNATI — The story of the week was Donald Trump’s arraignment, which took place about a dozen blocks from my office. I had a colleague there, and a plane ticket to get out of there, to Ohio, where I spent a couple of days reporting on a constitutional amendment.
Ohio was the first place I traveled to after the start of the pandemic. It’s memorable mostly because I only realized much later, after a friend wrote about this for The Atlantic, that “I was on a plane” was a fun story to pitch in April 2020. You wore a mask. You were one of four passengers on the way to a major American city. You paid $59 for a ticket, as the price of gas collapsed. You get to your hotel and sign in across a table that has been repurposed from its usual role holding up a coffee station to give the clerk six feet of separation to throw her pan and receipt across. You eat two meals at Dunkin Donuts — the savory stuff, which is still too sugary — because nothing else is open.
Things are better now. I was given a Tesla to drive around the state, the second time recently that I clicked “cheap manager’s special” on the application and an electric car was the cheapest. The third place I had to drive it to was a union hall, where I figured an extremely non-union car would stick it. But it was one of two, the only one without a sticker that read “I BOUGHT THIS BEFORE ELON WENT CRAZY.” Does that explain why I keep getting this car, the shame factor? Are that many people turning down the Tesla when they land? Can’t be. Do they hate sitting around for 30 minutes while a car charges? Possibly; some people don’t know the joy of completing tasks while in the driver’s seat, sitting still. Completely forgotten to-do items reoccur to you. Do they hate how hot it gets if you have to drive for hours in the sun? Maybe that’s it — every time I’ve gotten this car I’ve started boiling 30 minutes into the long drive.
Didn’t matter, got the stories I wanted. Got a weekend at home after that, a priority because we had to buy four new pieces of furniture. What I learned is that if you trust your partner’s taste, and you shop during a 20% small business sales weekend, and you spend impulsively, you can get this task done in an hour then enjoy your walk until you need to flee inside to avoid the sun. We had time to ourselves, and used it.
The Best Thing I Watched: “Beau Travail,” the 1999 Claire Denis film that kept creeping up the Sight + Sound list. If I know something’s likely to be great, I try to head in cold; I knew so little going in that the appearance of Denis Lavant, the character actor who looks like a handsome man who’s slammed into a window, surprised me. By the end Lavant and I had achieved emotional catharsis, escaping jealousy and vindictiveness in the desert for a loud, lonely joy. Terrific movie
But it had competition this week, as we worked around the house and I finished up movies I’d abandoned a while ago. We saw “A Night at the Opera” because she was in the “mood for a comedy” and I knew a little dopamine was waiting for me if I saw my last missing movie on the AFI’s 100 list. Started off great, lost steam whenever the actual opera stuff commandeered the plot, and I’ll never appreciate the early talkie habit of throwing extra songs into a movie. But the great task was accomplished. More fun was “Interstella 5555,” the anime created for Daft Punk’s “Discovery” album, which translates the mostly instrumental album into a story about an alien rock band making it big on earth, then returning triumphantly. Watched “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” during a two-hour flight delay, soaking up the amazing Spanish colors and James Mason/Ava Gardner romance, enjoying nearly every turn of the convoluted plot. Finished “The Mission,” which I’d put down a year ago, halfway, because it felt like a gorgeous soundtrack in search of a movie. That’s still my assessment of the whole thing; is there such a thing as a Roland Joffe stan? A Joffe completist?
The Best Thing I Read: I got an interview out of “Easy Money,” so let’s divide this into fiction and non-fiction. That wins the latter category; the first category went to “Orlando,” the Virginia Woolf novel that I finished a decade after Alan Moore made Orlando a character in his “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” series. The jokey version of the character in that — an immortal who changes genders every century — was a take-off on both Woolf’s character and the superhero trope. That was the gag in every issue, Moore vacuuming up the entire western canon, and all of golden age and modern science fiction, and turning it into a comic book adventure. The Woolf novel is much funnier, with a hero/heroine who takes centuries to finish an epic poem and struggled to explain anything concisely. I don’t need to identity with what I’m reading but it’s appreciated.
The rest of my reading was perfunctory stuff — you’ve heard about me speed-reading the graphic novels and middling sci-fi that I want to give away. I had the most fun with “Follies of Richard Wadsworth,” the title story and about one-half the length of a collection by Nick Maandag. Nice spin on what turns out to be a reliable pathetic trope, from “Stoner” to “Asterios Polylp” — the mediocre academic. Maandag’s flat art helps deliver some strong sight gags, but the biggest jokes (in this and the other stories in the collection) all rely on a man humiliating himself in the pursuit of a woman he shouldn’t be with. Perfect for a single read then a give-away.
The Best Thing I Heard: Still on my Hal Hartley kick, though I haven’t had time to watch more of the films. When debating whether to watch “Trust,” I played the trailer again, and discovered a boppy little 90s rock song, the kind I kept searching for during my jangle-pop phase — the year when I’d say “ooh, nice” if I found a Connells album in the used bin. The song was “Walk Away,” and the original recording of it isn’t available anymore. Hartley got Hub Moore, the songwriter, to re-record it for the compilation of his film music that I got into last week. Enjoy it.
I have not seen Trust since it came out but I sure do remember loving it. Maybe I need to revisit soon...then again, maybe it's best left as a strong positive memory instead.