This is the last face you see at Peter Gabriel’s shows. Not his: He’s walked offstage, fist raised, leaving his band behind. Each member leaves the stage, one by one — bass, guitar, strings, keyboards. Only drummer Manu Katché is left, pounding the beat of “Biko,” helping the mostly-white, middle-aged crowd pay tribute to the Black Consciousness Movement.
To be clear, I loved this. It’s easy to be aloof and cynical, and Gabriel, who I’d never seen play live before, is unapologetically sincere. He opened with a joke about ABBA’s recent hologram tour, and how the Swedish pop gods had appeared twenty years younger: He would be doing the opposite, “twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier,” while the “real Peter Gabriel” tanned himself on a beach, “looking like a Greek God.” He wore the billowy monk costume that he adopted after the “Us” tour, bald on top, white beard, though without the mephistophelian curl he teased out for the “Barry Williams Show” single.
He played new music, mostly, which isn’t usual for a touring artist in his 70s. “Solsbury Hill” was the only song on the setlist released before he turned 40; my wife was one of those people who had to have a man (me) tell her that the guy used to be in Genesis. We got a great deal of “I/O,” the record Gabriel has been releasing one song at a time, and not monthly. Too easy! He’s released one song for every full moon, with old collaborators, natural progressions from “Up,” the only previous record of new music he’d put out since I’d started listening to him.
We enjoyed the hell out of this, and the crowd went along with it, jumping up to dance for the songs we knew and sitting down respectfully when PG had another new piece. We were just as respectful when the guy who soundtracked countless prom dances paused to tell us his worries about AI and climate change. A great show, and Ayanna Witter-Johnson nailed the impossible task of replacing Kate Bush’s vocal parts. Gabriel’s phrasing, at this age, reminds me less of any other progressive rock singer than of Willie Nelson, melting and bending around the familiar songs, landing not where we expect it to, making it — here is that word again — feel sincere. (He has been doing a lot of AI art bullshit in his video promos but that depresses me and I’m going to move on.)
Easy early highlight of the week. I turned my Iowa reporting into an assessment of why Nikki Haley’s campaign is doing well, and ended the week in Texas, interviewing Asa Hutchinson, who knows that he isn’t doing that well and isn’t stopping. (My last, obvious question to him was whether he’d quit if he missed the debate cutoff tomorrow, and he said no, the race was too important.) I learned that a friend was in serious trouble; we went to a wedding in Philadelphia where the bride and groom danced to Ed Sheeran and handed out soft pretzels when the venue closed. And I caught up with another friend, who after his father died unexpectedly used the insurance money to travel across six continents and write a book about it — seemingly all of it, from slapping Messi on the back and being checked by his security guard, to cheating on his girlfriend with a fling on Easter Island. I am not that honest on this weekly update, but I don’t have any island affairs to disclose.
That’s actually a segue way to my next topic. If you pretend that this newsletter always comes on Sunday — and if you do, thanks — last week little too early to record any takes on Kristen Welker’s debut as “Meet the Press” moderator. When Chuck Todd took the show over, he got an opening-day interview with Barack Obama. Welker got Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, which put her in the ever-gleaming crosshairs of the critics who think Trump will go away if people like Welker stop talking to him.
Here is my take on Sunday shows: With no malice, nothing bad to say about any of the current hosts, I don’t like how the shows are build around stars. The model for the Sunday show, abandoned many years ago, was one moderator anchoring a panel that would interview one guest for around 30 minutes. This is how it should be, not just as an appeal to tradition, but because brief one-on-one have changed the dynamic, flattening what used to be unique hot seat interviews into slightly more prestigious upgrades on cable news segments.
I don’t want to sound pompous about this, or like I’m urging a network to put me in the big chair so I can ask my rambling questions and impersonate Albert Brooks. No: What was great about this old format was the regular, friendly competition between a few reporters and the guest, an approximation of a press conference where everyone knows the subject and isn’t going for something cheap. I barely remember this format, and I miss it, but what really mattered was the time with guests. We’ve split the good format — long interviews that can touch on anything and drill into subjects — from the good medium. If you want a lengthy conversation with a candidate or relevant politician you have to find him on a podcast where people rarely know how to push a conversation somewhere interesting. Welker’s Trump interview was unusually good, making unusual amounts of news, because it was long, and my dream Sunday show (I’m in the last generation that dreams like this) would dump the panels and reach for one focused interview.
On to the culture rundown.
The Best Thing I Read: Surprisingly, Karel Capek’s “R.U.R.,” which you hear about frequently as a foundational sci-fi text — "robots,” as we understand them today, came out of this play — but never hear about as a story. The story is simple: Three scenes, three snapshots in the history of humanity’s big promethean swing. Robots are created to take care of menial tasks; mankind loses meaning and the drive to procreate with robots doing all the work; robots supplant humanity but have no idea how to propagate their species. These themes have been worked over by generations of writers, but Capek got to all the big themes first.
I liked this a bit more than “The Fifth Head of Cerebus,” which any other week would have won out, a post-colonial story set on a recently colonized star system. “The Psychopath Test,” which I’d had on the Kindle for years, was my least favorite Jon Ronson book — still a breeze, still informative, but with more bumping around dead ends than in his early work. Still figuring out what I thought of “Speed” by William S. Burroughs, Jr., because it’s hard for me to separate the work from the rotten life his father gave him. Burroughs, Sr. was the only Beat writer I could get into, having never really been moved by “On the Road.” Yet I liked reading an updated version of the Beat adventure story, set after the drugs got harder and the country got grimier.
The Best Thing I Saw: Enough, for now, about Hal Hartley. I like to save “desserts” for last, and resolved only to watch his Henry Fool trilogy when I was done with every other Hartley on the Criterion Channel. Was this a mistake? Can’t be sure, yet. But the movies that pushed Hartley off the map, over to an academic fellowship and a few years in theater, didn’t work at all for me. Both of them are easy to describe in an appetizing, back-of-the-VHS way; “No Such Thing” follows a meek journalist who discovers a sorrowful, eloquent beast living on a remote Icelandic island, and “The Girl From Monday” is Hartley’s “Alphaville,” a completely unadorned sci-fi movie about a future where Triple M, a corporate conglomerate, has taken over America and replaced the old economy with one where everyone commodifies himself/herself.
Boy, it sucks. Hartley’s brief embrace of blurry digital video produced some of the worst-looking pictures I’ve ever sat and paid for, and he piles detail after goofball detail into a completely inert story. “No Such Thing” looks better but has worse writing and pace — God, the writing, the clunky dialogue he gives Helen Mirren to make her sound like a bloodthirsty, ratings-crazed TV editor. I liked “Meanwhile,” his last movie with all-original characters a bit more, mostly because he dropped the gimmicks and found a great lead (D.J. Mendel) who has more energy than any other Hartleyverse actor. Hours of handsome men and beautiful women talking emotionlessly in his Godard-soundalike dialogue, and here comes a bald, desperate, likeable guy who feels human.
Just not a great week for movies; saw Paul Schrader’s “A Master Gardener” on a plane and have to pin the ribbon on that one.
The Best Thing I Heard: Here you go.