The concept of the “birthday week” — or even worse, the “birthday month” — sits uneasily with me. If you hit a milestone, sure, have a couple of banquets, invite Anna Wintour. If you’re given some grim prognosis and you beat it, absolutely, have cake for a week. But unless you’re a Satanist, a random birthday ending with a number other than zero isn’t very interesting.
I abandoned this belief on Saturday and had a few friends over to celebrate my birthday, 10 days after it happened. No cake, just dim sum and a stash of drinks that was 1) far smaller than anything I’d have put together for friends in my 30s and 2) far too much for a crowd whose average age cracked 40. You hit a certain age, and even a little liquor is like a spraygun aimed at your colon. Instead of fiddling endlessly with a playlist, I trusted my wife to play a series of videos in which DJs played more fashionable music than we’d listen to, for more fashionable people than us, some of them looking incredibly bored and therefore incredibly cool.
It was a nice night off. We got a few of those this week. We saw “Stop Making Sense” on its new theatrical run, in a theater that was maybe one-third full. But we lucked out, and sat in front of earnest people who wanted to behave like they were at the Pantages Theatre, going “YES” when Chris Frantz walked onstage with his polo shirt and “TINA” when Tina Weymouth arrived to play “Heaven.” On Sunday, we walked to the American Art Museum to catch the Alma Thomas exhibition, then to an Italian restaurant (fewer of these in D.C. than museums) for comically large portions of zucchini and meatballs. There were people with brutal reporting jobs this weekend, life-changing jobs, and I wasn’t one of them.
What else? I talked with Larry Wilmore about the campaign, and worried the whole time that I was talking too much, but nobody else seemed to think so. I moderated one friend’s book event and lurked in the aisles of Politics and Prose for another. No venue brings out the more-of-a-comment-then-a-question brigade like P&P, a book store punishingly far from the Capitol, but close to people who consider themselves to be the unacknowledged experts on whatever topic’s being talked through. On Sunday, that manifested as a federal employee informing Kashmir Hill that there was a regulatory fix for facial recognition abuse — an FTC complaint — that, one, was so complicated that it needed four minutes of background on how nobody had taken his advice on this, and two, that was so easy that it could be done right away.
This is already a late edition, and it’ll be a little short, because I don’t feel like getting too frivolous right now.
The Best Thing I Saw: It’s very easy to recommend Owen Jones at the Tory conference, which got more than his usual amount of flack. We don’t really have anyone in American media like Jones, a big-hearted and earnest thinker who can write convincingly about anything and do compelling interviews where the subjects get a fair shake.
The best movie I saw, though, was “Henry Fool,” instantly the best thing I’ve seen from Hal Hartley, after going methodically through his catalogue and saving his career-capping trilogy for last. I’ve donated to Hartley’s “Where to Land” kickstarter, and he’ll probably make it, but if he doesn’t, his film career ended with a 17-year epic about a family whose lives are bent, transformed, and ruined by a pretentious, sex-crazed, and criminal drifter. This might not sound funny, but it is: Hartley writes Henry as a charismatic phony whose stories don’t stay consistent, and Thomas Jay Ryan plays him credibly, as someone you’d kill to get out of a conversation with, who confesses to his landlord Simon Grim that he may have erred in having sex with his mother because it’ll blow his shot at screwing his sister, Fay, played by Parker Posey. (It doesn’t.)
I didn’t fall in love with “Fay Grim,” the second part of the trilogy, which jumps genres and follows Posey’s character — the mother of Fool’s child — on an intentionally confounding international spy mission. She thinks Fool’s dead, after he bailed on a short stint as a loving father. (When she caught their kid drinking, Fool explained that “his throat hurt from smoking.”) He isn’t, and he’s as pompous as ever: “They have to bludgeon a man into obscurity before they'll acknowledge his genius.” I’m saving the conclusion, “Ned Rifle,” for any free 90 minutes I get this week. The non-Hartley highlight was “The Devil’s Rain,” famous for two brilliant things: William Shatner in a dramatic and mostly-shirtless hero role, and a painfully extended scene of Satan-worshippers being melted by — well, you guessed it. It should be famous for the brio Ernest Borgnine brings to the lead Satanist role. You’ve never seen Marty like this!
The Best Thing I Read: This is complicated. The whole world has turned on Michael Lewis over “Going Infinite,” his close study of Sam Bankman-Fried, who gave Lewis unparalleled access to his life; the author built on that with deep reporting about Bankman-Fried’s first job, at Jane Street, and how he determined that a little graft could create more wealth than his law-abiding employers ever could.
I largely loved the book, with some bias, because it cites the reporting I did on Carrick Flynn’s race for Congress, when FTX’s largesse funded a super PAC that tried to turn an introverted effective altruist into a politician. (It didn’t work, but he came in second.) But it takes a swerve in the final chapter, when Lewis explains that FTX was a viable company that could have survived if its founder’s emotional deadness and suicidal risks didn’t collide with an enemy. The critics, largely too harsh on the book, are right: This isn’t very convincing. But I ripped through it in a day, and not because it was lacking.
On my commutes, I listened to Jennette McCurdy’s “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” read by the author, my preferred way of absorbing a celebrity memoir. From time to time I want to read a book that the larger world is obsessed with, even if I don’t get it, and I don’t get the “iCarly” thing — the only Nickelodeon show I cared about was “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.” But I get why this was a hit. McCurdy, done with acting now, realized in his twenties that her mother had abused and starved her to give her the stardom that she herself had wanted. Not the first time I’ve read that sort of story, but there is seemingly nothing McCurdy couldn’t endure and can’t confess — a family of hoarders who made the kids sleep on cots because the bedrooms were full of junk, a boyfriend who became convinced that he was the reincarnated Jesus Christ, the late-life revelation that she was not raised by her biological father. Now I get it. The only Halloween-flavored book I read was Philip Nutman’s “Wet Work,” a disgusting-on-purpose story about a comet bringing about a triple apocalypse — disease, zombiefication, and finally a nuclear holocaust brought about by a zombiefied and decaying President George H.W. Bush. Incredibly silly, with lurid descriptions of gore on every page, but there are some brilliant moments when the narrative is taken over by people becoming flesh-starved ghouls — Flowers for Algernon of the Living Dead.
The Best Thing I Played: “Lies of P”
“Grim and gritty Pinocchio” — that’s the game of the season, a Korean rip-off of the phenomenal Dark Souls style of game where you bash your way through a series of complicated settings and get murdered repeatedly by too-hard bosses. I got this after the “Souls-like” fandom, of which I am an incompetent part, raved over it. It’s beautiful, and a pain in the ass, faithful to the original games even when it’s painful; I am thinking right now of how there is no jump button, and to get over one tricky water-wheel trap you must sprint and then hit “up” at the exact right moment. Things of that nature — annoying, but if you have the right mindset, nice inducements to shut the damn thing off and read instead.
That’s all for this week. Be safe out there.
Happy birthday, Dave!!