The first time I saw Beck, I bought three tickets and had to unload two of them. It was the year 2000, and I was living in London — everybody came through. Beck, then on tour behind “Midnight Vultures,” booked one night at Wembley, and this felt to my teenage brain like the best way to see a reliable artist, one that my friends could get into, in a venue I’d read about in books.
I was right, except for the part about my friends. No one wanted one of the extras, and I sold them at a discount to a scalper who upsold them to a British couple on a date. None of us complained. Beck had booked Beth Orton as an opening act, and when the crowd seemed to turn on her, he emerged from backstage and duetted on the Rolling Stones cover “No Expectations.” That calmed everybody down, and after a stage change, he returned with “Beercan,” a single I hadn’t thought about since I last played my CD of Mellow Gold. When he played “Debra,” mid-way through the set, a gigantic bed descended onto the stage, and he sang while writhing all over it. And when he wrapped up, with “Devil’s Haircut,” the ensuing and mostly-planned riot onstage went wrong, and he impaled himself on a bass. I went home, he went to the hospital.
Since then I’ve seen Beck two more times, always with friends. My wife and I headed to Philadelphia on Sunday to see a line-up that looked perfect to me, but bored the man in front of me so intensely that he spent the evening looking up college football scores: Weyes Blood, Phoenix, and the man himself, touring just one new song, “Odyssey,” a collaboration with Phoenix that, live, revealed how much DNA was borrowed from “Once in a Lifetime.”
Phoenix was the surprise; I’d liked them every time I heard them but would never have classified them as a favorite band. The slower Weyes Blood got, the better it worked, but Phoenix just whipped from groove to groove, and made use of the same backdrop as Beck, a wall of screens that usually lit up so bright — images of Greek columns, of art museums, of the world seen from 100 million light years away — that they turned into silhouettes.
Great time, one of two concerts we saw this week. The other one, at the Kennedy Center, was a performance by Jacob Collier, who I’d never heard of until my wife got tickets. I didn’t even know what he looked like, and started to applaud when a conductor walked onto the Kennedy Center stage. So did everyone else! But they applauded with more vigor when a small man in a technicolor male caftan and even brighter, rubber shoes slid onstage and started playing peppy songs that reminded me of Todd Rundgren — the composition, and the composer’s habit of running over to drums or a piano or guitars and playing his melody for the orchestra to follow.
We were lucky that this wasn’t much of a travel week, apart from one day I spent following state legislative candidates in Virginia. (Not that one.) We had one day of cleaning up and one day off, which we used to visit the Small Press Expo in north Bethesda.
Do I strike you as the sort of guy who goes to comic conventions? Probably, sure. But I mostly go to this convention, a two-day annual gathering, in a single hotel, of independent and small press comic creators. When we were headed out the door, we read the fine print again, and realized that we would have to wear masks to enter.
Do I feel like taking this precaution, ever, this far from the pandemic? No. I never do. But we were (paying) guests, and we rolled with it, and once inside our friend Mattie explained that mask mandates were sort of a norm at indie comic conventions, where many of the artists have disabilities or comorbidities, and nobody wants to exclude them.
Good policy. I spent the majority of my working life with reporters and political operatives and am perpetually the squarest guy at an indie comic convention; this was true even when I bumped into Jake Tapper here a few years ago. Starting in 2018, when “Steven Universe” creator Rebecca Sugar headlined the convention, I noticed that I had never been in a room with such a high proportion of queer-presenting people. More than once, this year, I noticed that an artist’s name on a badge was different than the name on the book they were selling; and then, when we talked, I heard a voice altered by HRT. I would flip inside their books as we made conversation — I’ve done book shows, this is tricky — and discover creation myths, Veggietales parodies (“NIV Genesis: Evangelion”), erotica drawn onto sheets of metal, coming-of-age stories, coming-of-age stories disguised as the comedic adventures of Henry Rollins and Glen Danzig. A nice heady space to spend 3 hours are.
I bought a few things on sight or after a nice conversation, but less than I used to. I now have a real sense of how much can fit on my shelves, and how much I’ve impulse-bought stuff before that looked great in the convention hall but was a drag to read. I need either great art of a stirring story — both if possible — or I skip it. The haul:
These were mostly old favorites; I’d also brought a few books from home to get signed, like Derf’s “Kent State” and every other Bill Griffith book. (Not really visible here is “The Buildings are Barking,” Griffith’s tribute to his late wife, and the one book he refuses to sign.) “Cosmoknights” I bought because the artist made a good pitch; same with “Three Fingers,” sold to me as a Dark “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Eddie Campbell’s books, I bought sight unseen, because the man himself was in front of me, and I didn’t even realize he’d gone through “From Hell” and recolored everything. (The version I’d read years ago was in a ghostly, Gorey-ish black-and-white.)
Have only read “The Buildings are Barking” so far, but let’s get to the important stuff.
The Best Thing I Read: I had to rip through a number of Biden-centric books for work, and the best, going away, was Frank Foer’s “The Last Politician.” That you’ll have to read about at the day job. The most fun I had was with Mary Fleener’s “Life of the Party,” a cartoon memoir about the artist’s life as a musician, in her “cubismo” style. Absolutely gorgeous to look at, especially in the most dissolute stories, which are matched up with her most surreal art, faces breaking apart into ungodly shapes.
I wanted to read some short novels in between all the work books; forget how I came across it, but halfway through Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion,” I’m already loving it, historical fiction with a brilliant observation about humanity on every page.
The Best Thing I Heard: My friends have been playing a short round of Music League, an app game where you create music playlists. I started this one, with a few goofy categories that compelled the players to be funny. One was songs about real people, and my friend Amanda recommended a jangly ballad about Robert Wadlow, the 8’11’’ man who died at age 22 because one of the leg braces he needed to hoist himself and walk caused an infection. Didn’t strike me as ballad material, but now I get it.
The Best Thing I Saw: Very little on that front, but my favorite was “Smoking Causes Coughing,” the moronic new anthology film from Quentin Dupiex. The trailer’s a ruse: It has you expecting a goofball parody of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers with five French actors playing Tobacco Force, a crew of avengers imbued with the power of tar and nicotine. You get some of that, but you get it as a wraparound story that introduces three unsettling short stories, one told at a campfire and one told in the last words of a fish being grilled to death. The best thing I can say about this is that I’ve been thinking about the gruesome stories for days, and about the scene when a rubber monster explodes and expels at least three times as much blood and gore as could possibly fit inside it.