A good rule, in Iowa, is to avoid cliche. The local doesn’t appreciate a hackneyed references to “rolling through iconic cornfields” or devouring pork tenderloin, and the discerning reader doesn’t like it, either.
But campaigns love cliches, and I spent a good chunk of my Friday watching Nikki Haley (above) drive an $800,000 John Deere combine. She referred to it with a child’s wonder at every stop after; “I’d driven a combine simulator before, but not the real thing.” (A simulator? I banished my snobby reaction right away, but have preserved it here for you.)
That story is in progress; the trail story you can read right now is this one from northern Virginia, reported from Loudoun County, which for Republicans has become a metonym for progressive overreach on gender identity. On short notice, I headed to northern Virginia to cover a Glenn Youngkin “parents matter” rally, discovering that the built-out Silver Line travels 36 miles from D.C., which may bore you but thrilled the hell out of me. And I mowed down every book about Joe Biden in the White House (there aren’t that many) for another story, hooked to the release of “The Last Politician,” which manages to make the 2021-2022 battle over Build Back Better readable — simply incredible.
Mostly, I traveled, spending Friday night with old friends in the Des Moines suburbs and Saturday night closing down a restaurant not far from the marathon GOP candidate forum we’d just covered. I kept up with my obsessive self-tracking, which is tested more in Iowa than almost anywhere else — restaurants close early and gas stations overflow with cheese-stuffed foods that look delectable when you’ve been driving for two hours.
Have I said much about the self-tracking business on here, recently? At the start of the year I remarked that I was trying to write down everything I ate and reverse a lifetime of damage. I mentioned the little notebook I was using? Great. Well, I dropped that, and realized how I’d track everything without disrupting my usual, laptop-intensive work day.
Ready? I realized that the MyFitnessPal app had a web browser version, and I bookmarked it. That was it. When I’d get distracted now, in addition to the uncountable number of silly websites that could waste my time, I had a useful, gamified little website where I could peck and hunt for the right brand of sunflower seeds. I’ve kept this up for 40 days; in Iowa I upped my game and bought a little measuring cup, with marks for imperial and metric quantities, and snacked only by filling it with one ounce of pistachios or cashews.
This isn’t very exciting, and I’m only going to write about it at length if I have some heroic fitness story to tell in six months or so. All of it comes down to self-affirmation — and while I find that boring to think about, every self-improvement book and about a third of literature is about it. “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
The Best Thing I Read: It took me an embarrassingly long time to pick up “Meet Me in the Bathroom.” Lizzy Goodman’s masterpiece shared a publication day with my book, and I was busy that week; it covered the “rebirth” of rock in New York after 2001, which I was late to appreciate. (Obviously I came to progressive rock “late,” too, and typing these reasons down doesn’t mean they’re valid.) In the early aughts, powered by the ethernet in Northwestern’s Communications Residential College, I took my cues from Pitchfork and a dorm-mate who, a few years later, would end up working for Pitchfork. My “Losing My Edge” brag was seeing Wilco play “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” back before a label wanted it; a more forward-thinking Dave would have bought the T-shirt they sold at that show, with a design (a lunar module, IIRC) that they abandoned for the iconic Marina City towers. Okay, another brag: Will Butler of the Arcade Fire was a class behind me, we became friendly, and I saw his stunt band Sandpiper Air play at a dance marathon. They were named for the airline in “Wings,” dressed like flight attendants, and threw single-serving peanut bags at the audience during a cover of the theme from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Anyway, no, I got into this music after college, via LCD Soundsystem, the obvious entry point for someone who’d confuse people by blasting Can from his plug-in HP laptop speakers. I appreciate it more now. Goodman’s research was relentless, following the Legs McNeil “Please Kill Me” playbook with a tighter focus. No pre-history about the Velvet Underground, but you get a play-by-play of David Cross partying with the Strokes. (Discovering that they quoted “Mr. Show” bits to each other and named a tour after Wicked Scepter made me wonder what took me so long to like them.) One thing I loved in particular: Goodman finding the moments when rock writers, brains numbed by the shit music they were covering, discovered a perfect line and realized what they were listening too. “Words are poison darts of please” – that was the moment when they realized Franz Ferdinand was for real.
Competitive week, too. I ripped through Christopher Buckley’s “Little Green Men” because it was a paperback and I wanted to give it away; the story of a replacement-level right-wing TV host remaking himself around an alien abduction, more relevant than ever.
The Best Thing I Heard: Re-heard, technically: Turns out I still like “House of Jealous Lovers.” It was fun, being around for the end of rock! Runner-up: Marc Maron’s interview with Parker Posey, two middle-aged people spilling their guts as they contemplate their low periods.
The Best Thing I Saw: “Once Upon a Time in the West,” Sergio Leone’s other bladder-beating cowboy epic – the one that has Charles Bronson in the Clint Eastwood role, and Henry Fonda playing a villain for the first and only time. (If you’re a southern revanchist, I guess he played one in “Young Mr. Lincoln.”)
I can spoil a 55-year old movie, right? Fonda’s “Frank” appears at the end of a nearly-wordless opening sequence, where a gang meets up and murders the family whose land it’s stealing for an ailing, rapacious tycoon. A child survives the onslaught, and comes face to face with the gang. We see Fonda’s bright blue eyes and trustworthy chin, dappled with sweat and stubble. He smiles, until another thug asks “Frank” what to do. He grimaces. “Now that you’ve used my name,” he says, and America’s Dad murders the wet-eyed, red-headed child.
The movie’s as good as everyone says, and it made a nice respite from the Hal Hartley marathon I’ve been on since the Criterion Channel started it. Back to that. See you next week.
That Henry Fonda performance is soooo good.
Fonda's definitely the bad guy in Fort Apache!
It's of the all time best disastrous-martinet-commander roles, and he gets a better, bleaker version of the Liberty Valance ending.