Miami! No, you’re thinking of Miami Beach. Cubans! That’s Hialeah, where Donald Trump had a rally this week, surrounded by people wearing his mugshot on their T-shirts (appreciatively).
I was in the city proper, Miami, looking down from the 16th floor of a Hilton at the arts complex where several Republicans, but not Donald Trump, were debating. The last debate here was a trip, held at the height of the Democrats’ “not in our name” rebellion to Donald Trump’s border, detention, and deportation policies. Before it started, most of the candidates visited the outskirts of a detention center in a tiny-seeming city called Homestead that’s larger than the city I grew up in. Have you seen the meme of Kamala Harris waving. Right, that’s Homestead. Democrats returned to the Adrienne Arsht Center and almost all agreed that non-citizens should have access to Medicaid, while a few, going further, suggested that crossing the border should no longer be a crime.
Anyway, this was a different kind of debate, and immigration didn’t really come up at all, local Republicans proving that you can endorse everything Trump did and run a lawnmower over the Democrats. You can read what I wrote from there; the most perceptive thing I said, on the way from the press room in a hotel ballroom to the spin room two blocks away, was “that’s probably it for Tim Scott.” It was, and my sincere plan to pick up the original Sunday schedule for this diary was ruined. (Would have been worse, but I had a Scott campaign obit file going and updated it as soon as he walked offstage in Miami. Nothing person, you could just see the towel being waved.
Ate too well in Miami. Been eating too well generally. Weighing yourself is a good safety valve for this problem; I have weighed myself and will not be having another Jibarito until 2026. Democrats, who have been throwing airballs for years down here, insist that inflation under Gov. DeSantis is going to bring some of their voters back. If everything was priced like downtown Miami, I can see that, and paid more for a bad iced coffee than I’ve paid for bad coffee anywhere else. I barely ever strayed from Biscayne Boulevard, walking a mile down to talk on a radio show that was located through a set of metal doors inside a hotel garage. Other than this, just meetings, with and without food, and a debate whose press attendance had likely been cut in half when Trump announced the Hialeah event.
Weird campaign. You knew that. We had downtime when I got back from Miami, which I used to 1) sleep off whatever bug I was picking up, 2) worry about what to do with our spare queen mattress, and 3) get brunch with one group of friends and attend a dog’s birthday party (with cake) with another.
On to the real time-wasters.
The Best Thing I Read. Nearly a year into this, I’ve decided to ape the format Nick Hornby used in his Believer column: Recap on what I read, accounting of what I bought.
Bought
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards
Sonic Life by Thurston Moore
Read
From the Ashes by Bob Fingerman
MCU
Zodiac Starforce by Kevin Panetta and Paulina Ganucheau
They Made America by Harold Evans
Sid Meier's Memoir! by Sid Meier
Just ridiculous. I have too many starts in too many books, and I don’t like to quit on them. One week, I’m going to finish the Big Novels I opened, but they can throw me off. A hundred pages into Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I noticed Neil Gaiman’s name in the blurbs and remembered that I’d never read American Gods. Was that good? It had built enough of a cult to get a middling show produced, and it the e-book was on sale, so I grabbed it. Hundreds more pages for the before-death pile. I am now halfway through both; Gaiman walks you so smoothly into his stories that you get lulled and forget the way out.
I grabbed MCU anyway because the copy I found on Saturday was signed by the authors, and this would be an easy gift for a friend tbd. My two close circles of friends — people I met growing up in Delaware, people I met during my working life in D.C. — happened to like sci-fi and superheroes, before and after they ate the monoculture. Unbuilding my collection has made me regret how time spent reading this stuff. The best, something like Watchmen, is about as good as an prestige TV episode. The worst is moronic, zero-stakes fight scenes and derivative stories. You get a rush from reading something truly great, like Miracleman or Invincible, and try out a lot of other comics, hoping to repeat that rush.
My interest in all this has waned, but I remember being a pretty credulous fan, going with big groups of friends to the most impressive screen we could get tickets for, and leaving at least an hour to discuss what we’d seen at the closest bar. The idea of a multi-character cinematic universe, when it first came up, was exciting to us. We were in our 20s, we’d read each others’ stacks of comics, and it felt like a faceless studio was serving us.
MCU is a great read for right now, when the Marvel magic has started to flicker out — when people like me aren’t even thinking about their new movies. The corporate story, of Marvel saving itself with an IP yard sale and getting lucky with “Iron Man,” is familiar but told briskly here. Ego clashes always end with a victory for the studio; the authors speculate that Edgar Wright could have been a hub in the MCU had he not let “Ant-Man” slip away. There is a meeting in 2008 about what to do with the obviously doomed DVD market; the several households I’ve visited where entire Marvel movie collections are contained in their Mjolnir-shaped gift sets explain how powerful this brand got.
One book that stuck with me, from earlier in the year, was Box Brown’s He-Man, which looks like a history of one toy but develops into a story of corporations stealing childhood imagination. There were, in the early years of TV, rules preventing commercial TV selling toys to kids. Brown, like a lot of convincing Gen X leftists, points to a Reaganite decision — free the networks! — as the spark for American decline. I was in that first generation that got hard-sold toys, and lucky for me, I didn’t care about most of them. But my mind was colonized by middle-aged toy sellers as much as any other millennials. Avi Arad, a key character in MCU, did more than lead paint to shrink our minds.
Zodiac Starforce, which I’d gotten for free at SPX, came from this same programmed light-ent world, and didn’t interest me much. I’d owned They Made America for at least 20 years, picking it up for $5 because I’d like Harold Evans’s other coffee table books, and I liked this one — a collection of short inventor profiles, longer than an encyclopedia entry, written like newsmagazine articles. From the Ashes, in which Fingerman imagines himself and his wife navigating nuclear winter in New York, had his usual wit, but got silly fast, and dated; there is a large stretch focused on a tyranny in the New York ruins, with cyborg Bill O’Reilly as its despot. Meier’s book was dry but enlightening, and reminded me of the college friend who nearly flunked out from film school because he could not stop playing Civ III.
The Best Thing I Watched. Internet Historian, an Australian (I assume) YouTuber, won me over in 2020 with his immaculately edited studies of stupid online moments. (For a while I’d tell people that his video about the 4Chan/Tumblr wars previewed all post-2014 politics, and I think I still believe that.) He’s started a new series of “fancy” videos about high culture, with all the same tricks and tropes — he appears as an, avuncular, animated version of Hide the Pain Harold — applied to western art.
Better than the movies I saw, which were mostly cross-offs of stuff on my list. How popular was Nicolas Cage in 2005? He could make it so “The Weather Man,” a dark James Thurber-ish story about a Chicago meteorologist enduring a mid-life crisis, barely lost money. The wife and I finished half of “I’m a Virgo,” Boots Riley’s tremendous mini-series about a 13-foot tall black teenager, which feels like the last interesting thing to escape the streaming channels before the money dried up. Opinion to follow when we’ve seen more.
The Best Thing I Heard: Musically it was the DJ Shadow album, on my listen-to-list forever, moved up because he just put out a new record and I’d never heard his masterpiece.
Most of the music I heard, though, I got from Jake Fogelnest, who I support on Pateron and spend a few hours listening to every month, usually in a burst of three episodes. Fogelnest is two years older than me, but hosted an MTV show, “Squirt TV,” when he was 14; I’m 42 and still haven’t hosted an MTV show, and have started to feel like my time might never come.
The Best Thing I Played: Still “Spider-Man 2,” which I’ve tried to play when my wife is around to watch the plot advance. This isn’t something I’m subjecting her too; after she took a night off to read, and I informed her of the three plot twists she’d missed, I detected genuine regret. It is so addictive that I can’t recommend to someone with ambition. The gameplay borrows a lot from the “Devil May Cry” school, with lots of combos and air battle that you don’t have to be a whiz to pull off. My Marvel pleasure center is burned out, but something flickers when — wearing the “bodega cat” costume that puts an orange cat in my backpack and incorporates it into every heroic animation — I fight 20 thugs at once and disable them with webs.
I am off to do something else, but by the next time this diary comes out, I will know how victory feels for a Spider-Man.