GREENVILLE, Miss. — In my early, isolated years of music fandom, I’d flip through “best record” books and experiment with the classic stuff — historically important, never played by young people at parties. What business did a teenager in 1997 have listening to Buddy Holly’s “20 Golden Greats” or Chuck Berry’s “The Great Twenty-Eight”? Memory: My friend Dave, who was significantly larger than me and wittily called “Big Dave” by our friend group, scowling when I mentioned listening to Bobby Darlin. The musical equivalent of carrying a briefcase to home room,
I only listened to old blues record in this period, and never really got them, may not have even finished “The Complete Recordings” of Robert Johnson by putting on the second CD. This stuff helped to translate some rock star interviews and lyrics, but I gravitated toward more complicated music. The Delta gives me a little guilt about this. You are hard-sold on blues appreciation; you turn on the road that’ll take you to the assignment and realize it’s the B.B. King Memorial Highway. Wary of local stereotypes, I waded through them. Dinner at a place that sells steak with hot tomales*, right before the Hot Tamale Festival nearby. (This was a good move, because the tamale stands closed before anything else, and were mostly packed up by the time I was done with the candidate.) I turned off his highway and saw the grave of B.B. King. A film at his museum leans heavily on testimony from fans on a tour of Europe, which didn’t feel very archival, but featured tight-laced people from Luxembourg waxing about King’s music moved them.
It helped that the work part of this trip was exhausting, and took me to towns that were disappearing — blocks of closed stores, condemned homes, a family eating miserably in the yard of a house with a collapsed roof. Yes, the state needed to do some charming, pride for the locals and a distraction for the road-trippers. Plus, I’d done “Lovett or Leave It” in D.C.
Mississippi felt very distant from the news consuming D.C.; not even the Sunday sermon, at the church where I traveled with the candidate, mentioned Jerusalem, and if you’ve read the Bible you know that’s a feat. The people I talked to, about the upcoming election for governor, were entirely interested in food prices, rent prices, and whether the candidate could bring back money and jobs. The second time I’d come here for work, it was to cover a Republican primary for U.S. Senate where the Tea Party conservative forced a runoff and the incumbent Republican won by sending mail to black voters in the Delta, highlighting all the federal tax money he’d brought home, the money his usual voters hated. (The first time I’d come here was for the 2012 presidential primary, when I tried to drive through a rainy night to cover Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum competing ahead of the primary, and drove my car into a ditch.)
“Lovett or Leave It” went well, too. When you guest on that show, you have to think up a “rant,” like the close of Bill Maher’s show but more ad-libbed and, usually, less anti-woke. I ranted about the small number of conservative donors who keep fueling “Glenn Youngkin ‘24” stories, not from any animus toward him — who knows, lots of people could be president — but from amusement at the wealthy people who know less about Republican primary voters than your average Young Turks listener. It was off the dome, but I remember challenging the donors who were ready to move on from their last anti-Trump knight to “look Tim Scott in the eyes and say it to him.”
What else? Semafor turned one year old, and we celebrated at a party that had, while not too many cancellations, fewer from congressmen than from the people assigned to cover them. The former could do whatever, with no plan, and the latter needed to pull stories out of this jiggling void.
And I enjoyed a couple of things.
The Best Thing I Read. Nothing that I finished; when you pick up a 630-page short story anthology, and work every hour of a manic news cycle, the weekly rip-and-read section of the diary suffers. Two-thirds of the way through “Skeleton Crew,” which I’m enjoying; somehow I’d lived this long without having the ending of “The Jaunt” ruined for me. The man knows how to exploit your feelings about horrible things happening to children. I killed “News from Nowhere,” one of the first novels about a techno-future socialist utopia, and dull in the ways that all that H.G. Wells-adjacent stuff is dull.
I did finish a lousy book, three years after it was already pickleballed around the substacks. Vicky Osterweil’s “In Defense of Looting” had a moment in the summer of 2020 — kismet that publishers stay awake fantasizing about. It hit shelves in August, right as the George Floyd uprising (the preferred term of Osterweil and social justice groups) kicked off. The author did a round of interviews which were, inevitably, more widely-read and debated than her fairly short book. The people who argued that Joe Biden should issue a Sister Souljah condemnation of a Verso book were, probably, more familiar with its title, and Osterweil’s glib answers to Isaac Chotiner, than the book itself.
Forgiveable. Most of the book builds tediously on Osterweil’s original essay with a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and labor struggles. What does a slave rebellion, which even the most tote-bagged liberal can defend, have to do with looting a CVS? Her argument is the one I first heard from KRS-One, then (going backwards) from Angela Davis, that police are the “reformed” successors of plantation overseers.
“There is quite simply no freedom without an end to white supremacy and settler colonialism, without the victory of Black and Indigenous liberation,” Osterweil explains. “We need to argue for and defend every tactic that might help us to overturn this miserable world of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, empire, and property.”
If you’ve cracked the spine of any Howard Zinn book, little of the history will surprise you; Osterweil stops the narrative and marvels when she finds a riot that other historians ignored, which isn’t very many. Osterweil grouses that “liberals and well-meaning activists accuse anyone who escalates conflict of being a government agent attempting to discredit the movement.” But sometimes — frequently, in 2020 — they were. There’s a reference to non-violence running its course as a tactic in 1963, then, a few pages later, a reference to Selma, maybe the most effective non-violent protest of that decade. Do you think the New Deal worked, it that it “staved off the formation of a real revolutionary rupture and set the terms of liberal domination of the poor for the next fifty years?” If you picked option B, then steal this book.
We are living well into the backlash to the 2020 protests; two years ago, I was in Minneapolis, watching a coalition of white and black liberals reject the ballot measure that would have replaced the city’s police department, and re-elect the mayor who’d always opposed that. Sure, I’m not the audience for this book, but I can be convinced by something not written for me. The dream of overthrowing capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy with mass looting is over; the backlash, seen now in liberal cities panicking over retail theft, is more than Osterweil let herself imagine.
Sorry, that was unusually serious for this little diary. This week I’ll finish “Blood Meridian” — we should all have fun with that.
The Best Thing I Saw. Finally watched Spielberg’s first movie “Duel,” which was sitting around on the Criterion Channel’s horror month shelf, and it holds up. (“Spielberg good,” what a bold and controversial take I’m giving you.) Very hard not to watch, post-”Jaws,” as anything but a dry-run for that movie; the long pauses between action, the decision not to go breakneck until the final act. The voiceover doesn’t work at all, but no other complaints here.
The Best Thing I Played. “Lies of P,” which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and which keeps surprising people, because an action RPG that follows Pinocchio’s violent journey through the puppet apocalypse shouldn’t be good at all. My high gaming days were during the pandemic, when there was no real competition to the TV screen, and I have since learned that when I hit a wall, I react like I do when anything is to challenging — walk away for a bit, go to bed, let the synapses adjust. Getting stumped by a particularly dense page of Deleuze isn’t that much different, mentally, than getting pancaked by a boss with a massive hammer.
The Best Thing I Heard. This whole album, but this song especially:
*the first time I tried these, in 2014, were the first time I understand the many rock references to them. Still didn’t like the songs!