Picked a good week to be in New Hampshire. My sense was that Nikki Haley had real momentum here, helped by the collapse of support for Ron DeSantis, who positioned himself early as the trad values candidate. That never goes well in New Hampshire. Every room was crowded, and the questions were delightfully un-screened. A packed VFW shuddered when a large man wearing only shorts and a grey gym tank-top rambled to Christie about a few hospital attendants they’d both known in New Jersey.
The fraternity of reporters covering this has expanded. Haley was swarmed at her endorsement rally with Gov. Chris Sununu, taking questions from every local New England outlet then any magazine reporter with a curveball. I undid some holiday damage by eating strategically. There is world-class Nepalese food in Manchester, and I’d sweated out my central nervous system on Momo there, but I skipped fast food in favof of protein bars and had just one decadent local meal. Pastry-baked chicken, new to me, is a layer of pressed bird surrounding a ball of stuffing and encased in a crisp batter. I ran through that at an interview and was full all day.
We headed to one Christmas party and one celebrating the end of Hannukah; one in a small balcony apartment and one in a mansion with a covered-up pool that nearly claimed the people walking over it. On Sunday, we treated ourselves to “Godzilla Minus One,” the fantastic 70th anniversary take on the story, which follows a yellow-bellied kamizake pilot from his first encounter with the monster to an all-out battle to destroy him. The movie was legitimately good, but we left still thinking about “The Beekeeper,” the Jason Statham revenge picture which — if we can believe this trailer — kicks off when an international phishing operation wipes out the life savings of his kindly old lady employer. She kills herself, he kills them with a disturbingly Timothy McVeigh-ish plot, and we learn that “beekeeper” has two meanings. It is the literal day job of Statham’s character, and a role in the secret spy organization he belongs to. We were captivated by the stupidity; I checked immediately, and it’s the big idea of the writer of “Equilibrium,” a movie about a future where all citizens take drugs to suppress emotions and Christian Bale perforates bad guys with his “gunkata” technique. This is Dumb Guy movie gold.
I'm picking up the end-of-year rundown again. Music this time, books and movies in the next two editions.
Best music (new): I tapped out of fan culture a few years ago, and embraced the fact that pop music was for teens and twentysomethings. Quite a while later, I read Nik Cohn’s obituary for rock music (in 1969!) and “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll” and aligned myself with their grim, cynical, most-intense-guy-at-the-party takes. Writing about music and interviewing the people who made it made me more embarrassed by list-making and more appreciative of the well-crafted hit. What I liked:
Old Gods of Asgard, “Herald of Darkness.” Haven’t played “Alan Wake II,” but could not avoid this song, played by the in-game band of Remedy studios, previously responsible for one of the best game sequences I’ve ever played — a moving maze in “Control” that you can only access by finding a walkman that lets you blast the Old Gods of Asgard. This song’s even better, taking up space in your head even if none of it has any context for you.
Nourished by Time, “Erotic Probiotic 2.” Marcus Brown’s music reminds me of Arthur Russell’s, melodic and machine-made but purposefully underproduced. I loved the whole record, but this was the song that carried me in.
Otherwise, I mostly listened to new recommendations from The Quietus, and a little from Pitchfork. Appreciate your semi-pro curators, because we don’t have many left.
Favorite albums (new to me): First, three records I only found by checking what had gotten the 33 1/3 book treatment.
Machito, “Kenya.”
Café Tacvba, “Re”
Bobby Womack, “The Poet”
Chet Baker, “Live in Tokyo.” Available on Spotify for most of 2023, then taken down. Too bad, because it became my favorite live jazz album, remarkable for how the artist pulled himself together.
Glenn Gould, “Bach: Preludes, Fughettas and Fugues.” Cycled in whenever I needed to cheer myself up.
Best concert: Peter Gabriel’s i/O show, at Capital One. We were on the younger side of the crowd, sitting between people who’d put “In Your Eyes” on cassette mixtapes in high school. They stood and shimmied for the hit songs, but stayed seated for the rest — and there was lots of that. Gabriel played every released song from the “i/O” record (he’d been putting out one song on each full moon)
Runner-up: Herbie Hancock, playing “Chameleon” and then improvising for a crowd that was completely up for it. Kennedy Center. Good year for the geezers.
The Best Thing I Read: Richard Norton Smith’s new biography of Gerald Ford, finally finished, and totally worth it — Smith decided years ago to focus on "the modern Republican,” the figure that accepted the New Deal and was swept away by Reaganism, and this is the pinnacle of a trilogy that started with Tom Dewey and continued with Nelson Rockefeller. Half of it deftly covers the Congress that Ford grew up in, never to be repeated. Finished Ballard’s “The Drowned World,” and would recommend that too; the image of water being sucked out of the London lagoon, revealing a lost civilization that disgusts the survivors, was a keeper.
Books read
P. Craig Russell, “What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen?”
Richard Norton Smith, “An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford”
J.G. Ballard, “The Drowned World”
William F. Nolan, “Logan’s Run”
Terry Teachout, “Duke.”
Books bought
Walter Tevis, “The Man Who Fell to Earth”
The Best Thing I Watched. “Save the Tiger,” a Jack Lemmon piece of Oscar bait that worked — he won it for a movie I stumbled across on my Ovitz list. (When he started CAA, Ovitz challenged himself to watch every movie that won a “big five” Oscar. The five are: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.) The worst of these movies is no worse than the median film of their year, like “Coda,” and a mediocre movie can capture the vibe of that year, likely one you didn’t live through.
“Save the Tiger” was better than mediocre. Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, the dirtbag owner of a streetwear company which is keeping afloat by some kind of fraud. He moved through Los Angeles with a Ballardian anomie, acting amorally, surviving by luck, ruminating painfully over what he saw in Korea. There are very many movies and novels about this archetype, which was reinvigorated by Matthew Weiner, but is a little rare now. It looks great, too, smoggy and dipped in grease.
I saw “Leave the World Behind” in the usual Netflix way, occasionally with deep focus and mostly as a compelling background display. It’s one of the genre stories that media research has found a reliable audience for — the world is ending and a family is going to muddle through it. The streamers’ data-driven search for eyeballs has told us a lot about popular angst, and we’re in a heavy part of the cycle where yuppies imagine how they’d survive an apocalypse. The 80s nuclear panic produced “Homecoming,” “The Day After,” and “Threads,” and novels like “Warday,” but we have far more apocalypse fiction now. Liberals and conservatives, in their separate cultural universes, have competing (versions of this, and a lot of work — “The Road,” “Children of Men” — pleases them both.
This one should, too. It opens with a yuppie family of four (mother, father, boy, girl, the classic formulation that gives everyone a journey) heading from Brooklyn to a spacious new modern Air B&B on Long Island. Like “This is the End,” which plunked Seth Rogen and his friends into the middle of a Biblical apocalypse, this puts a likeable cast together and outmatches it. “I’m a useless man,” whines Ethan Hawke, carting his son to a survivalist’s house, knowing that someone who spent years prepping for a cataclysm is going to have a better sense of what to do than a yuppie who can’t live without his phone.
More next week. The year is slowing down and I’m more confident picking through the movies and books I consumed than the music.