Over the weekend, a first - someone thanking me for something from this newsletter. I’d raved about “Random Acts of Senseless Violence,” and my friend Ross told me he’d loved it. “To me it's not sci-fi at all, almost Last Exit to Brooklyn,” he texted. This was after John Womack, the novel’s author, saw me post on Bluesky about how much I got out of his book, thanked me, and sold more copies.
Isn’t that nice? This week I didn’t finish anything. There was work, as usual, but the Christmas season in Washington is good and busy, and I was lucky enough to be invited to galas — all with “Christmas” in the invitation, stop believing that liberals replaced all those references with “holiday.” My wife and I saw the White House’s decorations in rooms framed by open bars and buffet tables, as Andrew Jackson would have wanted. Solo, I went to a conservative group’s annual dinner celebration where Tucker Carlson described childlessness as a kind of suicide, but lightened the mood after that. (He did a convincing riff on fake cheerfulness, and how important it was to maintain — eventually you “hear yourself” and become cheerful for real.) I drank very little and ate enough to undo most of the good work I did during October.
But I’m not bitter. We missed these sorts of parties last year, and we threw our own. My wife launched a series of “hot luck” dinners before we got together, and this was my first as her sous chef. You can guess what kind of party it is: Everyone brings a dish, and everyone’s required to make it at least a little hot. My contribution was steak and pork chops that I’d pummeled with a spiced Memphis BBQ rub; hers was a tortilla soup with a delayed kick.
Would you like to rip off this party? I invite you to. But I doubt you can match the activity I came up with halfway through — testing my old wine bottles to see if they were drinkable.
Some context. There are things I learned how to do as I reached adulthood, and things I faked. Wine, I faked. I knew it was good to keep a variety of reds and whites, that the whites should only be served chilled, and that rosé should only be served ironically. What I didn’t know is that wine is aged properly before you buy it, and a corked bottle can lose its flavor after a couple of years. The last time we had people over, one of my best friends opened a 2009 vintage rioja and spat out the vinegary liquid inside. This time, I tried to salvage a 2010 chardonnay and the top of the bottle crushed under the opener, putting a few nicks in my finger.
What I learned was that wine should be researched before I buy and serve it, and everything that made it to the table this time was potable. Better to admit what I’m bad at than fake it.
Too much living this week, not enough reading and watching. I’m in New Hampshire now and endeavoring to make more interesting memories, but this’ll be a short one.
The Best Thing I Read: You did read the intro? I got most of the way through Richard Norton Smith’s biography of Gerald Ford, “An Ordinary Man,” which is terrific so far. I grew up in a household where Ford’s pardon of Nixon was infamous, described to me before any of the details or characters made sense, and I’ve not yet made it to that part of the book, but RNS makes a good case for his subject. The opening chapter is marvelous, recounting every minute he could of Ford’s days during the Watergate break-in and the first reporting on what happened. This is the first book RNS has written about a president, after two definitive biographies about losers — Tom Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller. (Quaint now that both Ford and Rockefeller had to navigate around the shame of marrying divorcees, and ironic that they served together.)
But I’m not done yet. Check back in after I’m not filing from New Hampshire.
The Best Thing I Watched: “The Boy and the Heron” felt almost perfect to me, a Miyazaki fantasy with the same basic kid-in-wonderland plot he’d built worlds in before, but with a scrappy little hero who never gets scared and a powerful over-arching theme. There is so much pathetic fantasy these days — adults who get married as Pokemon, adults who build their sexual identities around “fursonas” — that I appreciated a return to the old fantasy trope. A child goes on an adventure; he must return to the real world, after seeing how the pursuit of dream and fantasy can’t replace real life.
I didn’t play, but I enjoyed, “The Day Before.” My first exposure to this was coverage of is delicious controversy. 1) A middling game studio released a trailer for what it claimed would be an immersive survival horror, set in the played-out landscape of a city after a zombie (sorry, “infected”) apocalypse. 2) The game was put out with no trial period, and failed at every level. Bullets didn’t stop enemies. Enemies took three seconds to react when shot. Enemies barely appeared in the game at all; players, before logging out for good, released video clips that showed them meandering a boring landscape for hours. 3) The failure was so quick and complete that the developer apologized and shut down.
Watched Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah,” too, which made Hedy Lamarr’s reputation and ends with the beautiful destruction of a real set, the body of a Dagon statue crumbling as Samson destroys the Philistines’ temple.
Long, draining, happy week without too many diversions. See you on Sunday, after I finish driving around New Hampshire, covering four presidential campaigns, and breaking off enough time to finish something.