By no means did I think my week would be spent on the DNC protest. Direct actions unfold in D.C. constantly. Small, hardy left-wing groups headquarter here and train people in how to disrupt Senate committee hearings. Walk down the most gentrified blocks and you’ll see posters for emergency rallies (“climate disaster,” “black political liberation”) on the lampposts. On Wednesday night, I figured I’d be one of a few dozen reporters covering this march to the DNC, because dozens of us were told it’d be happening.
Quite a few cameras were there, but by 10 p.m. or so, after the protesters had been pulled away from the doors they were blocking, it was clear that I’d be one of a handful of people with direct knowledge and a megaphone that could compete with people making up stories. Surreal experience. On Twitter, I posted dry, but sometimes exasperated, recollections of what I saw, usually with video. My gist: Protesters ran past police, blocked off entrances so members of Congress who were inside couldn’t leave, were removed by force. People who hadn’t been close to the scene were confidently talking about protesters “storming” the building, which they didn’t; the passive phrase “turned violent,” a shrug at the effort of trying to figure out who hit first, was everywhere.
So, I talked a lot about something I spent two hours documenting. The rest of the week was easier to get through; the highlight was a stand-up set by Sabrina Wu, which my wife had bought tickets for, and I joined sight unseen.
It turned out that I had seen Wu, who plays “Deadeye” in the all-Asian sex comedy four-hander “Joy Ride.” Raunchy comedies, which could duke it out with mid-level action blockbusters before COVID, haven’t really come back since. “No Hard Feelings,” a summer sex comedy in which yuppies pay Jennifer Lawrence to be a cool girlfriend for their pathetically awkward son, got good reviews that came with outright pleas to see this in theaters. Just as music’s relationship to the listener changes when it’s taken offstage, compressed into a file you can listen to alone, comedy loses a dimension when you see it alone. I have a humiliatingly vivid memory of watching “American Pie” in a Rehoboth movie theater with a sell-out crowd of teenagers who thought that we were getting away with something by being there, screaming at punched-up jokes about drinking and sex and a goofy use of Etta James’s “At Last” before that become hackneyed. That movie is never making it into my pantheon, but that was the way to see it.
Anyway, I saw “Joy Ride” on a plane. Wu was the breakout, playing the austistic goofball roll you need in a modern four-hander; think Zack Galifianakis in the “Hangover” movies. But can you pretend that a movie that made less than $16 million worldwide was a hit? Wu didn’t bother, and remorselessly mined the embarrassment for material, describing junkets where the cast had to crank up the raunch in one breath and talk about how “representation is so important” in the next. The best riff was a story about losing a college contest to an arch-rival who she could only defeat if she became infinitely more famous: Amanda Gorman. “Michelle Obama said that her poem changed her life! I’m a sex clown and she’s our Joan of Arc!”
Good times. Did one last round of cleaning in our guest room, throwing out two more bags of things that made it through the last, manic phase of the last clean, crammed into a Hefty garbage bag. Once you’ve envisioned something as garbage, it’s difficult to go back, and I did one search for truly rare stuff — we’re talking brochures that may one day be sought after by the 2012 Presidential Primary Museum — before I junked it. The rest:
The Best Thing I Read: Two books stood out. “Random Acts of Senseless Violence” is a novel about the collapse of America, told by a 13-year old girl to her diary. (The diary is called “Anne.” Yeah, I know.) She starts the last year in a private school that her parents are straining to pay for — mom’s a laid-off English teacher, dad’s a struggling screenwriter. They leave the house for a shabby apartment and put her in a new school where she’s not getting bored by “Silas Marner” anymore. Society crumbles, presidents are assassinated on live TV: “On the news tonight the new President said there's no reason for anyone to worry about the situation. He didn't say which situation.” Jack Womack writes in the “Flowers for Algernon” style, our hero changing her prose once she falls in with the gang-bangers at her new school; the happy ending is that she’s found a new, low lifestyle that’s better for surviving what comes.
Great book, and for different reasons than “Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll,” the Nick Tosches compendium of short profiles that humanizes the pre-Elvis, “race music” rock origins. He put this out right after “Hellfire,” the Jerry Lee Lewis biography, veering from the big character who didn’t innovate much to the forgotten songwriters and singers who developed the genre.
Bought
“The Gate to Women's Country” by Sherri Tepper
”This is the Way the World Ends” by James Morrow
”In Praise of Folly” by Erasmus
“Random Acts of Senseless Violence” by Jack Womack
Read
“Random Acts of Senseless Violence” by Jack Womack
”Resist Phony Encores!” by Gruff Rhys
”Unsung Heroes of Rock" and Roll” by Nick Tosches
The Best Thing I Watched: Believe it or don’t, Loki. I have completely healthy opinions about the Marvel Cinematic Universe: There are going to be expensive blockbusters anyway, and I enjoy formulaic hero stories better than formulaic spy stories. (Those aren’t the only two kinds of movies, but they’re the ones always trying to become franchise-extending blockbusters.)
So: In “Avengers: Endgame,” set in 2019, our heroes must go back in time to grab the Infinity Stones, assemble them, and defeat Thanos. In the chaos of one time adventure, Loki — apprehended by the 2012 version of the Avengers — steals the Space Stone and disappears. What hijinks will this god get up to, now that he has the power to manipulate space? None, because he’s immediately apprehended by the Time Variance Authority, a heretofore unknown organization that protects “the sacred timeline” by destroying anyone who acts in a way that violates it. No time-traveler, no alternative timeline/universe. In season one of his own show, Loki meets himself from a timeline where he was born female, falls in love with himself, and watches as his female doppelganger kills the villian who keeps the timeline in place. In season two, everything comes apart, and I was unengaged with the first four episodes.
I got invested with the fifth and sixth (final) episodes. In episode four, a complicated Loki plan to prevent disaster fails. In episode five, he obtains the ability to slip through time. In the finale, he does this for centuries, going further and further back to adjust the plan that didn’t save the universe, until finding one that does. He sacrifices himself, pulling the timelines — it sounds less silly if you remember the Norns, who spun peoples’ lives on their needles — into a space where he can hold on to them and keep the universe from ending. This is what the increasingly un-loved genre is for: Cosmic fiction, which sincerely tries to recreate the majesty of religion with a silly sci-fi story.
Expected nothing from the series, walked away happy.
The Best Thing I Heard: Halfway in, I’m getting a lot from “The Grip of Film,” the third of Richard Ayoade’s books for Letterboxd patrons. He came out of the gate with a parody of the Faber and Faber “director on director” interview books — he was the director! Then came “Ayoade on Top,” ostensibly a critical essay on the airplane rom-com “Room at the Top,” digressing for mundane stories about Ayoade.
“The Grip of Film” really is about movies, and it’s funnier, packaged as an A-Z guide to movie-making compiled from the uninformed theories of Gordy LaSure. On the audio version, voiced by character actor Jon Korkes, LaSure is captivating; think of Al Goldstein’s old TV segments if they focused on harmless material, with observations like “if there’s not a part for Stephen Seagal in your movie, maybe you’re not done writing it” Ayoade’s persona has been set for 15 years, introverted but always ready with a high-IQ comeback. He is channeling something else with the LaSure character, a Dumb Guy who the serious film geek never wants to become but likes having around. Without him, all those blu-ray box sets would go unsold.