Not everything works out. I had an idea for a story that took me to New York for the day, and I could tell 10 minutes into it that the material wasn’t there. Luckily — weird word to use this week — the panicked national debate about the Israel-Gaza war consumed everything, and I had material for that a few blocks away.
I believe in specialities, beats, and I know enough national security and Middle East correspondents to say that my beat is not Israel. I cover domestic political groups, some of which were making headway in the Democratic Party, but definitely aren’t doing that right now. This is not a politics newsletter. Forget about it!
D.C. felt empty this week. New York was a jolt, full of people intent walking straight ahead and making everyone else take a step aside. I took the photo above illegally, after walking blithely past a check-in desk for the Moynihan train hall’s executive lounge. Everyone in there was sitting on a cushioned seat inside, light the color of buffet lamps. No one was on the deck, with its view of a good-looking terminal built with no free seating, to keep the homeless away. But I was caught — again, ignorant, thinking one of the award buttons on my account gave me this access. It’s hard to relax fully in a room where everyone’s seen you talked to by security, so I went to another lounge and read “The Song of Kali” by Dan Simmons.
I got a little too lazy. For three weeks I’d eaten no added sugar in anything, and felt as good as the smug people who tell you not to each sugar feel. The shirtless joggers are right — uncaring agricultural conglomerates really are poisoning you! But on Thursday, my office-mates held a Halloween desert bake-off. People who were useless at this before the pandemic (me) got decent at it. People who were fairly good at this pre-pandemic, then applied themselves during, got terrific, and the winner of a competition that filled the kitchen was a red velvet cake coated with white marzipan twisted to look like brains and jelly frosting that made it look freshly scooped out of a head.
Clearly I had to eat some of that. I sampled enough small portion of desserts that I had no desire to eat for 25 hours. When you’ve cut everything sweeter than milk out of your life for a while, that is mind-altering. My justification: I’d woken up that morning and immediately pulled a muscle in my deck. I needed a win.
The neck felt better on Friday, when my wife and I went to Baltimore to see Stavros Halkias. We met her friends at JBGB’s, where everyone looked like a member of Kings of Leon except for one table of men in white Nike Air Force Ones; and, I suppose, the toddler dining with his sleeve-tattooed parents.
Great place. I went for the most gentrified food on there: Kimchi pizza. One of my wife’s friends got what he assured us, and a waiter confirmed, was the best burger in the city. We took our time, then piled into a four-door sedan and drove to a garage near the Lyric, where Halkios — fans call him “Stavvy,” and I should, too — had nearly sold out three nights.
We’d spent far too much time this year getting rid of unused T-shirts to grab more merch, but I felt a pang of regret when I saw the purple Ronny shirts the people all around us had grabbed. Ronny is Stavvy’s Baltimore dirtbag character, a TikTok ECU thing where he says psychotic things about the Ravens’ weekly games. like “this is the most fucked up thing to happen in Baltimore since my cousin got arrested for a DUI even though he was only on pills.”
Ronny had given Stavvy a bigger audience, which all of us were happy about. We loved this guy’s work, he’d taken some risks in promoting it, and he was filling opera houses with people who’d paid to see him imitate how he looks in the mirror he installed over his bed. He walked onstage in a black velvet tracksuit with purple Ravens stripes and told a loud idiot in the balcony to shut up, then wondered whether anyone who found him via TikTok would be confused because he didn’t sound like “Ronnie.” He was from Baltimore, with all the rounded vowels and dropped consonants, but he was operating at level 6 and Ronny was 10. He imagined how Ronnie would talk about the war in Gaza, then made fun of the Orioles on the grounds that Greeks shouldn’t own anything more complicated than a diner, then got fake-attacked from offstage by the Oriole Bird.
Fine way to spend an evening, and we got home on $6 Amtrak tickets. Highlight of a grim week — and it took one of our friends out of his news-induced fear spiral.
What else?
The Best Thing I Read: Definitely “The City is Up for Grabs,” Gregory Pratt’s instant history of Lori Lightfoot’s surreal political career. I can’t say more about a book that isn’t out yet, but the shrinking of the Chicago Tribune, and Lightfoot’s own obsession with undermining it, did not stop Pratt from reporting every crucial detail either firsthand or through diligent FOIAs.
The best read that you don’t have to wait until next year for: Probably Jonathan Spence’s “Emperor of China,” an experimental memoir that constructs K'ang-hsi’s thoughts, saved in various fragments and letters, into a coherent story about Manchu governance. “The Song of Kali” was, hm, less sensitive. Dan Simmons wrote one of the great sci-fi novels, “Hyperion,” with two chapters in particular that I will never scrape out of my brain. (The Priest’s Tale and the Scholar’s Tale, if you want to be convinced.) None of his other work has gripped me the same way, but “Kali” attained a kind of pulp classic status, and it uses the same gutting trick as the Scholar’s Tale.
[spoiler break]
A father watches his daughter die.
That part works, and so does the overall story, about a literary magazine editor — one of the funniest jobs to give your protagonist — going to India to find a poet’s final work and getting wrapped up with a gruesome Kali death cult. The only recent discussion I’ve seen about this work has questioned Simmons’s portray of Calcutta (Kolkata now) as a stinking, poisonous hole, a place that would be better off nuked if it would get rid of the beggers. “I've never been in a place that seemed as mean or shitty,” our hero tells us, “and I've spent time in some of the great sewer cities of the world.” Less frequently discussed: The hero’s nightmare of rough sex with Kali, and her endlessly unfolding tongue. I survived this more than I enjoyed it.
I had much more fun with “Nobody’s Fool” by Bill Griffith, one of the late career triumphs by the creator of Zippy the Pinhead — inspired, as he covers in detail, by the real-life Schlitzie the Pinhead. He tells the story of microcephaly’s first celebrity with great pathos, briefly weaving in his own story, of seeing “Freaks” (with Schlitzie’s unintelligible speaking role) and then pulling that memory from his head to create a character for his underground comic.
Most of “Dracula” is behind me, and I found a copy of Stephen King’s “Four Past Midnight” — the one with “The Langoliers,” which will always be funny to those of us who remember multi-night TV Events trying to recapture the magic of “It” — so I’m mowing through those next.
The Best Thing I Saw: Huh. Well: I finished Hal Hartley’s filmography, a project I started after getting back from my honeymoon and completed even after deciding that I enjoyed maybe half of his work. His early Long Island films clicked for me like early Godard clicked for me — the same ragged formalism, existential dialogue, and well-used dance sequences. “Henry Fool” was terrific, the best spin I’ve ever seen on the “Tartuffe” story of a charismatic drifter being invited into a home to bring excitement and ruin. “Fay Grim,” the sequel, lost me halfway through, and “Ned Rifle” made me ask why I’d spent so much time in this world.
Am I missing something? Probably. Maybe. Hartley’s decision to turn his best script and character into the basis for a Fool Cinematic Universe is understandable; watching him attack these characters in completely new angles, with updated equipment and spartan budgets, was fun enough to justify one sitting.
But what did I watch? Hartley’s work usually puts alienated people in an uncomfortable setting and changes their life with an accident or a crime. In “Henry Fool,” Henry is the accident, giving Fay Grim (Parker Posey) a baby boy and Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) the inspiration to become a great poet; in “Fay Grim,” Henry’s trail of destruction claims several human victims; in “Ned Rifle,” the antihero’s son sets out to murder him, and accidentally rides along with the woman who Henry molested when she was a teenager. (I am seeing why the first movie, which establishes that Henry went to prison for sleeping with a 13-year old, hasn’t made it into the cult canon.)
“Ned Rifle” himself is played by Liam Aiken, who originated the role, and plays it cold — emotionally dead, chaste because of the Christian faith he adopted from his foster parents. Aubrey Plaza, who plays Susan (the grown-up Henry victim/lover), is her usual deadpan self, and in the Hartleyverse that comes off manic. Most of the best scenes are hers, rattling off intense/insane thoughts about Simon Grim’s poems, squealing about the “embarrassment of riches” in a supermarket, enticing Henry with “free coffee products and semi-fresh donuts.” He’s put such rich characters together here that I got disappointed with some late-Hartley decisions, like multiple un-engaging scenes with a bank call center employee and a generic drone shot of Seattle — Hartley never did establishing shots if he could avoid them, thinking it was more important to introduce his characters and dialogue. I’m done, anyway. Probably back to horror movies until the month’s over.
The Best Thing I Heard: Tony Thaxton’s “Bizarre Albums” episode on MC Hammer’s star-crossed comeback album, “The Funky Headhunter.”