“We should be going to Aruba,” said our flight attendant, “but we’re going to Washington D.C.”
That was Saturday night, but it felt like the end of my week, mostly spent in the city I now understand to be the opposite of Aruba. I left for a short but productive trip to South Carolina, covering the Palmetto Family Council’s Vision ‘24 National Conservative Forum. Actual journalism on this will be published tomorrow and Tuesday — and who knows, maybe in the book about this campaign, if Vivek Ramaswamy calling for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis to join him and demand that Alvin Bragg stop prosecuting Trump becomes a pivotal moment.
I’m not being sarcastic! You can’t be too cynical about this stuff. Remember when Tulsi Gabbard unloaded the clip on Kamala Harris, and a candidate the legacy media wasn’t taking too seriously changed the course of the race? (Gabbard, by the way, was the most interesting speaker in North Charleston, condemning the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s war effort and the mainstreaming of “gender ideology” more vehemently, and compellingly, than anyone there who’d been a lifelong Republican.)
Nothing particularly bad happened to me in winter’s last week, apart from a bungled invitation to meet a visiting foreign politician (a mix-up about the venue) and a brief, unpleasant Metro interaction with a woman who asked, with unexpected menace, if I had a “fuckin’ problem” with her. I’d glanced at her when walking down the platform, and every so often, you lock eyes with someone whose reaction is not “tee hee, let’s both turn away,” but “I AM THE DEVIL.” But she didn’t follow me onto the train, and really, the only embarrassing part of this was that I was wearing my sunglasses underground. Didn’t mean to. Just forgot to take them off. We’ve talked about my ability to zone out on public transit.
I went on Wednesday to the first real D.C. book party I’d been to since 2019, a celebration of Liz Hoffman’s “Crash Landing,” which I haven’t read yet. (See below.) It was held on the street Barack Obama moved to after he left the White House; the first familiar people I talked to were the president of the Association of Flight Attendants and the former CEO of American Airlines, reminiscing together between a plate of muffalettas and a neat pile of books. That kind of party. Nobody asked me what I did for a living, that much-loathed D.C. icebreaker; this was because they knew too much about me.
At night, we unpacked, and I think we’ve established that there’s no way to make that interesting. We disassembled a guest bed that my friend Jeb and I’d had a hell of a time putting together. Our hard, bumbling work seven years ago paid off: It broke apart like a Kit-Kat. We gave away more books, plus an ancient Yamaha keyboard that was on the curb for 10 minutes before a pleasant man in a yellow cardigan took it away. I read more to give away, instead of books I planned to keep — see, I explained the “Crash Landing” thing — and we ordered new, hardy bookshelves for a new, adults-live-here vision of the room.
The Best Thing I Heard. Nothing musical. One of those low-effort weeks when I’d usually hit “play” and “random” on a Spotify list, usually starting with HAIM’s “Now I’m In It.” This is deeply basic music, licensed last year for a montage of on the Marvel Cinematic Universe debacle “She-Hulk,” in which Jennifer Walters dates a man who seems like he’s going to double-cross her then does. But I like this band best when it sounds like Wilson Phillips, making lightweight pop, and it ends with an echoey drum beat that I love. Played live, the Haims walk to individual three-drum sets; instead of a beat, they play rhythmic solos. So you only get that little piece of music on the record.
Well — it’s fine, but not new to me. Best thing I listened to was a 2014 interview with Mike Myers on Marc Maron’s podcast. I’m too old to apologize for having mainstream tastes, or for the fact that I’ve been scrolling back to the Obama administration because I like Maron’s interviews and missed a few hundred of them. Myers’s celebrity had been waning for a decade, partly because “The Love Guru” (undiscussed here) flopped, partly because he’d already attained the freedom that comes with success. At one point Myers calls fame a “byproduct” of doing good work, to separate it from the pleasant part — satisfaction with the product, a good reaction from the audience, financial success. Being famous, by itself, was a drag. This is just obviously true but I don’t think I’d heard it put so well.
The Best Thing I Saw: Just one movie: Walter Hill’s “Southern Comfort,” streaming on Kanopy, the service you get for free with a library card. I’m always surprised by how many public library shelves are taken up by movies, but it’s a nice little social service, and I remember renting “I, Claudius” from the Lewes, Del. library tape-by-tape in the late 1990s, so to me it feels like tradition.
Hill’s movies got interesting to me again while reading Walter Chaw’s “A Walter Hill Film,” which filled the hole I felt after I finished “Cinema Speculation.” This is the sort of film-writing I like these days, getting into the guts of the productions, and it definitely enriched a Dudes Rock survival adventure in which nine Louisiana National Guard members re-enact the Vietnam War, bayou people substituting for Viet Cong.
The Best Thing I Read: Nearly everything was for work or giveaway, but I’d toted “The King’s English” by Kingsley Amis around for at least a decade without finishing it. It was collected a few years after Amis died, which made me nervous going in; if you read “Hitch-22” or “Experience” you know that Amis’s focus was going at the end. But I couldn’t tell that from the text, which is 25 years old and records a few word battles that the good guys won. (Nobody says “adaption” anymore, but Amis worried that it could take over.) On the plane home I alternated between this and the Old Testament, a complementary vibe.
By the way, I finished this edition early on Sunday, and hit send, but tripped over some final substack post-confirming button. In my mind I have yet to miss my self-imposed Sunday deadline - my promise to you!
Listen to Marc Marron's interview with Julia Louis Dreyfus.