Arizona’s Biltmore opened eight months before the Great Crash, and enjoyed spurts of fame for very different things. Its own apocrypha claims that Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” there, which is believable; the La Quinta in Los Angeles takes credit, too. Nobody disputes that John McCain conceded the presidency there, framed by Camelback Mountain. Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary about conservatives and the election starts with that, cutting from news footage of McCain’s speech to a crowd view of furious, ungracious people, already planning their resistance. (I’ve always hated this movie’s title, and don’t remember liking most of it, but that footage was worth it.)
I spent two days there, driving from a cheaper hotel and parking in the only part of campus that doesn’t look like the Ennis House, covering a conference of Democratic governors. Most of them made it, but Gavin Newsom was the only one I saw gawked at; most of them don’t go on Fox News like he does. (Most aren’t 6’3’’ either.) On the way out of town, I stood in line ahead of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who eventually was whisked to the front with his entourage (one staffer, one security guard) and said “sorry” to the briefly inconvenienced people who weren’t running for president.
The more industrious reporters there joined a 10k on Sunday morning; I hiked but had to keep it brief. There just wasn’t much downtime this week, for me or anyone generally on my beat. Not a complaint here, just fact. Two days passed before I reached into a Walgreen’s fridge for a Kim Kardashian-branded seltzer water (marked down 75%) and realized that I hadn’t read the books I’d been carrying to work. Start into a sentence, get interrupted by a text about some campaign disaster, pivot, forget to pivot back.
The downtime only came today, with a long pair of flights and an equipment delay in the middle. Who wants to go to the northeast, from Arizona, in December? I didn’t, but I went anyway.
The Best Thing I Watched: By a mile: “Plagiarism and You(Tube)” by HBomberguy. My sense, from talking to IRL friends who read this journal, overlap with me least on YouTube tastes. In 2013, when fog delays stranded me in a Dallas airport, I struggled to fall asleep and remembered to check out “The Angry Nintendo Nerd.” Ten minutes later I was stretched across two hard chairs, watching James Rolfe — like me, a possessor of the Philly region accent — curse his way through “Ghosts and Goblins.” One man, with good editing skills, sincere opinions, and decent jokes. This was what I wanted to watch on YouTube, and nothing else.
I didn’t know who Harry Brewis was until much later, when his “measured response” to the online climate change debate blew up. One clip was everywhere: First Ben Shapiro talking about how people could sell sea-level homes if they were threatened by climate change, then Brewis Jack Torrance-ing his way through a wall to shout: “Sell them to who? Fucking Aquaman?”
Brewis’s output slowed down considerably after 2019. When he uploads something now, it is so long that the clock on the bottom right is startling; three and a half hours about a “Deus Ex” sequel, premised on how mediocre it was. He’s meticulous, citing the videos and texts that he depends on to understand the game or pop-sci or ideology he’s talking about. And that led him to this controlled demolition of James Somerton, a pop culture YouTuber with a focus on queer topics who had, for years, ripped off essays word-for-word in his scripts.
Somerton only appears half-way through that four-hour runtime, as a twist. But the first half isn’t a waste. It’s the best study I’ve ever seen of the pollution and entropy of information quality online, and how lazy and dishonest people rip off work or comment on it while original products and sources get lost. “Maybe it’s good to have some standards for not stealing,” he says, after a tour of increasingly sad and vampiric plagiarists.
Again: I really don’t spend that much time on YouTube. Bad content makes me gag and click away, and the most exploitative accounts, which game search terms to pump up their copycat videos, show up high on my feed. I hate them for what they are, and hate them more because they’re wasting the lives of people who click through and burying any original ideas. My searches for primary source videos of stories I cover (like candidate town halls I missed) are larded up with zero-add reaction videos. How much time have I spent sifting through that crap? More than it takes to watch this video. So nobody complain about the length.
Not much else onscreen this week. On a flight, I saw “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One,” probably the funniest sequel title since “Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days.” The built-in cliffhanger does one good thing, dramaturgically — it makes one character’s death more surprising. But it’s not really necessary, and I was really only there to watch the real-life sets and uninsurable stunts. The simplest, best idea is a ruse that takes Tom Cruise down a narrow hallway, where he’s stick if he stood naturally, and has him fight talented henchmen. One on each side. Great variation on an idea that I’d thought was washed.
The Best Thing I Read: “The Squad” by Ryan Grim, his second installment of his history of the electoral left. Grim has nurtured a beat that other people spend a few years on and quit; the most immediate stuff in here consists of texts from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who texts him to vent from weak moments and committee rooms. It’s not gossipy, except maybe for a story about Rep. Josh Gottheimer that appeared first in The Intercept. (“Gottheimer spotted the car of the staffer who had driven him to the event and channeled all of his rage on it, raining blow after blow down upon its roof.”)
When I’ve wanted a quick read lately, I’ve gone for one of the stories in the SF Masterworks series, a collection by a British publisher that includes everything from foundational works (“The Forever War”) to stories on the edge of the canon (“Greybeard”) to stories that would probably get forgotten if an anthologist wasn’t on the ball (“Life During Wartime”).
This week’s diversion was “This Is the Way the World Ends,” the strangest apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read. It opens with a hero, a professional gravestone carver, buying a rad suit that will help him survive a nuclear attack. The catch: Buying it admits his complicity in the end of the world, because he’s admitting that he expects it and will do nothing to stop it. The end comes, and he is transported to Antarctica, where surviving humans are put on trial by the living representations of humans who will never be born.
It gets weird, basically. The first half has the sort of vivid, ghastly portrayals of a dead world that the genre allows; a man attacking a frozen field with “bloody fingers” for the potato he knows is buried there, a Cambodian couple weeping when they realize that radiation has snuffed out human fertility, a survivalist stacking bodies as his lymph nodes are attacked by plague. Then there’s the second half, which reimagines the sort of heavenly trial you saw in “A Matter of Life and Death” — and I guess, before that, in the afterlife of Anubis. It’s ambitious, maybe too much.
The Best Thing I Heard: Lloyd Cole’s back! The mopey dreamboat of 80s singer-songwriter pop has been churning out good music ever since he could put it online; Cole uploads his demos to Patreon and publishes melodic electronic music before he can add lyrics.
This is his second album in a rich, melodic style that blends synthesizers and guitars with his usual vocals and poetry (“We got shopping carts filled/ With Chanel and Dior/ In keeping with the new order.”) It’s great. “On Pain” is the title, and you can start anywhere.
Another debate this week, but less airport time. See you later.