The week started with a work-blur; I picked up my first frivolous memory on Tuesday night, in Milwaukee. My plane had landed, delayed, around 9 p.m., and by the time I checked into my budget chain hotel and walked to the party Democrats were hosting – in town to make fun of the Republicans, not always effectively – only Republicans were left. A man in khaki shorts and a polo shirt, holding a martini chest-high as he roamed the hotel bar, stopped by the chair where I’d plopped down to text a couple of friends.
“I’m scopin’ Republican hotties, man,” he told me. Why me? I don’t keep that conversation going, so we’ll never know. A crucial text got through, and I walked over to meet my friend Vic at Turner Hall, where he’d just wrapped up playing keyboards for his band and had an hour to kill before getting back on the tour bus.
I can make a pitch for the quality of most mid-sized American cities, but Milwaukee doesn’t need my help. Downtown, it’s a collection of gorgeous buildings that give way to a boring (but convenient) arena district; drive far enough away and there’s a green, walkable stretch of Lake Michigan that hasn’t been over-built like Chicago’s. Turner Hall was right across from the FiServ arena where Republicans were about to debate, which meant that every time Vic went outside he met a Trump surrogate, which seemed to mean fun for everyone.
You know how the debate went. I headed home on a route that should not have worked — a train from Milwaukee to Glenview, Ill., then a cab from there to O’Hare, then a flight, with absolutely no time left to spare. This got me home before a storm pattern that grounded every other journalist I knew. How did I use the extra time? Throwing more stuff out, then planning a trip to Providence, where I spent 48 hours getting the material for a story about the Sep. 5 special Democratic primary election there. Mid-sized cities that recovered from their 70s doldrums? We can’t get enough.
Do you remember the entry I wrote a few months ago, about self-tracking? Well, I lost that habit for a while, justifying it (when I thought about it) by pointing and waving at the stress and duties around my wedding. That’s over now, and I’m back on the wagon, methodically entering everything I eat or drink into MyFitnessPal. There will be no updates about this until it’s working well enough to brag about, and my experience is that it takes a couple of months to get a habit locked in. But it was locked in this week, and I felt one benefit. I ordered coffee milk from a worker-owned co-op near the Bernie Sanders rally on Sunday (the relevance only occurs to me right now), took a swig, and nine days of avoiding added sugar made this sweet drink almost intolerable, like iced coffee shot through with maple syrup. The system works!
The Best Thing I Read. Just one real book finished, Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha.” If you are reading one work by every winner of the Nobel Prize – this is maybe the fourth most urgent Content Challenge I’ve got going – it’s a cheat code.
I started a few other books, and should finish Richard Norton Smith’s terrific-so-far biography of Gerald Ford next week, but most of what I read through were giveaway books. The best of them I couldn’t give away.
Volume 14 of “Crossed: Badlands” really shouldn’t be any good. This series started as a project for Garth Ennis, the Scottish comics bad boy who broke big with “Hellblazer,” developed his own story in “Preacher,” and is probably best known now for “The Boys.” His specialty is pulp violence that could not be translated to another medium. (One example, which doesn’t make it into “The Boys” TV show, is a flashback scene in which the anti-heroes neutralize a stand-in for Shazam, the kid who becomes a superhero by saying his magic word, by… no, I don’t want to put the image in your head. Move)
“Crossed” is the sickest thing Ennis ever did, a spin on the zombie genre – not stale yet when he started, in 2008 – in which a virus decimates civilization by turning the infected into murderous perverted monsters. I’d always loved James Tiptree’s story “The Screwfly Solution,” which follows how alien invaders wipe out humanity by turning the male drive to procreate into a drive for violence – just a little turn on the dial. That’s where Ennis starts, and he passed the concept off to a bunch of other writers, who either out-do each other with gross-outs (“Psychopath” is one of those stories I wish I’d never read) or high concepts (“Shrink” follows a psychiatrist studying his brother after he turns).
It’s is a gripping dual narrative by Keiron Gillen. A former college student survives the outbreak with a crew of survivalists and hunts for the work of an old professor, who seemed crazy at the time, with his theory of why humankind nearly died out 75,000 years ago. The professor’s story, recovered in pieces by the student, is told as he learns it – the story of a tribe discovering “the blood men” who
The Best Thing I Saw. “The Pawnbroker,” Sidney Lumet’s 1966 melodrama about anti-Semitism and Holocaust survivor’s guilt, starring Rod Steiger. Do you want to see Steiger quiver with anger as he recounts all the insults flung at him? As he slowly lowers his hand on a receipt spike to process his guilt? I bet you do. My wife, who hasn’t wasted as much as her life on movies as I have, discovered Steiger only recently and discusses him as if every other actor wilts in his shadow.
The strangest thing I saw was “The Jet Benny Show,” a super 8 amateur film that got featured on an episode of the Tarantino/Avary “Video Archives” podcast. I’ve been marathoning these episodes before Stitcher goes bust at the end of the month, and when the boys talk about something strange enough, something I can find, I’ll watch it. Whatever you think of these guys, they have made movies, they know what goes into them, and there were phenomenally impressed by this sci-fi convention bait, which is less fun to watch than it is to describe.
Okay, I’ll describe it. We open on a loving parody of a Jack Benny show, starring TK – who would never act again – as Benny DNA-fused with Paul Lynde. There’s a hard cut to a spaceship, the TK, where Benny is playing his violin (commitment to the bit!) until an accident knocks him off course. This is Jet Benny, a “famous lost space pilot” who gets stranded on a barely-inhabited planet with his robot sidekick Rochester. (More impressive commitment to the bit, turning Benny’s black valet into a subservient, bumbling machine with a blaccent.) All I can recommend is this short compilation of goofy nonsense, it’ll save you time.
The Best Thing I Heard. Song Exploder’s episode about Khraungbin’s “So We Won’t Forget,” the song we played at our wedding when my wife and I re-entered after the photo shoot. This band, and song, was her discovery, and I only realized how popular it was until she bought tickets for the third of five nights they played at The Greek. This show doesn’t always hit for me, but when a band can articulately talk through everything that went into the composition, I can put up with the closing ad copy about veggie burgers.
Sorry for the delay — less zipping around this week, so I’ll try to get back to the Sunday schedule.