Nothing’s hard if I know what I’m writing about, and this week I did; primaries in the first half, Tennessee in the second. The picture above was taken a few minutes after Republicans in Nashville, where they have a legislative supermajority, failed by one vote to remove state Rep. Gloria Johnson from her seat. She hugged Justin Jones, who had just been removed from his seat, and told media gathered there that the fact of who stayed and who got pushed was determined by their skin color.
It was a little more complicated than that, and Republicans had poorly drafted their resolution to remove Johnson, who many of them liked. But it made the story even more compelling to progressive Democrats outside Tennessee, who cheered the legislators powerlessly on.
That was work, and I try not to obsess over work in this journal. It did take me to a familiar city, and I got a drink both nights with old friends — two reporters I knew, two county legislators. Radley, one of the reporters, had just published an expose of how Nashville strivers snitch each other out to the city for code violations; exciting story, fully recommended. The legislators were grappling with how the GOP legislature voted to fire half of them, shrinking the council from 40 to 20 seats, which was on its way to court. It was hard not to run up into government this week.
When we had time off, we decorated. We plunked two cardboard boxes of books on the sidewalk outside our place, refilling them as people grabbed the good stuff. (Among books that have survived all the refills: “Bloomberg on Bloomberg,” Allen Ginsberg’s “Deliberate Prose,” the fifth collection of “The Wicked and the Divine.”) We moved a bookshelf out of the living room, replacing it with a drink cabinet. The goal was opening the room up and prompting ourselves to have people over.
This gave me a change to re-order the books we were keeping, and decide which were so fun to pick up that we’d want guests to see them as soon as they walked in. Everything by the Hernandez brothers, the old hardcover version of the complete “Eightball,” Jim Woodring’s weird shit, and all of Peter Bagge. You can get properly lost in these. I got around 75% of the way through assembling a shelf of the most interesting-looking books I owned, when my fiancé finally got tired of my puttering around and shoved whatever books were piled on the table into the spare shelves because “you’re not going to do it.” The impetus to throw out and give more away increases — less fighting, that way, over that extra pile of books I didn’t get rid of.
Yes, sorry, mostly a book post, again.
The Best Thing I Read: No contest, it was Gordon K. Mantler’s “The Multiracial Promise,” a well-reported history of Harold Washington’s short mayoralty and the long movement that made it happen. On that other social network, and in my stories, I whined about the short shrift Chicago kept getting from the east coast media. This week’s election restored a left-wing faction of the Democratic Party that only got a few months to exercise power, giving it up to a neoliberal faction that wanted to make the city attractive to yuppies and international corporations. Was another kind of growth possible? Too late to find out.
This was the only true book I read; mostly, I wanted to get through pulp stuff so I could give it away. That meant “Dark Blue,” a dirty cyber-cop story by Warren Ellis; two volumes of Mark Waid’s “Archie” reboot, now the most sincere Archie product; the first volume of Eric Powell’s horror-action throwback “The Goon”; a compendium of Gary Reed’s “Dead World”; David Lapham’s “Young Liars,” which takes his usual crime story in a harebrained “Fast X” direction; Liz Baillie’s “Freewheel,” a hobo adventure story; and the second volume of “The Best of Dark Horse Presents.”
How did I amass this stuff? For years, if I had some downtime in an unfamiliar town, I’d head to a used book store or comic shop. If I was on the fence about getting something, I’d lower my standards and get something odd from the cut-out bin. That was the origin story of all this stuff, and it went down smooth, 20-minute stretches of good story and erratic art. “Dead World,” an eldritch 90s zombie story which diluted survivalism that got popular 15 years later, suffered especially hard from that problem. It only looks gruesome when Sami Makkonen shows up.
I put it down to write this, but I’ll finish “Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy!” tonight, a compilation of rock-era music writing edited by Dylan Jones. Name taken from The Who album, so unpleasant you never forget it. Anthologies are some of the easiest stuff for me to give away, especially on this topic, because I’ve subscribed to the essential Rock’s Back Pages for about a decade. Can I ever find Joan Didion’s profile of The Doors again? Yes. Albert Goldman’s bitter, confident reconstruction of Elvis’s last days and the mythology that obscured them? Sure, if I really want to.
The Best Thing I Watched: “Animal Factory,” a 23-year old prison drama directed by Steve Buscemi, starring his friends and a bunch of white ethnic character actors who’d populate season two of “The Wire.” The dialogue gets more hard-boiled as it goes on, until you’ve go people worrying that they’ll get “crushed like bugs on a windshield” if their plan fails. Mickey Rourke shows up as a cross-dressing prisoner with wise advice for Eddie Furlong, and lots of things to say about his ass.
Nothing else mind-blowing. Fiancé wanted to see the Mario movie, I obliged. My guess on why the plot was so lazy was a confidence that this material deserves it, that the mythological power of this little Italian man and his quest does not need ironic punch-up because it’s so elemental. Saw “Monsieur Hulot's Holiday” to test out a sound system, and had a lot more organic fun laughing at Tati’s tennis racket power stance than CGI Mario jumping on a bullet. Tied it off with the Joe Bob Briggs presentation of “Uncle Sam,” which was the only way I’d recommend seeing it.
I like your comics picks, but no Chris Ware? He's my favorite of that generation of writers.
The Radley piece sounds interesting, definitely going to check it out. Wicked and divine by gillen I haven't read yet, but I did read his more recent once and future by him and Dan mora which has a messing with mythology comic vibe to it.
I think if anyone has traveled to the level that you do, if they didn't amass stuff like that they're probably missing out. Comic shops are the best places to check out wherever you are whether your a hobbyist or not. There's something about the comic medium that elevates it over a book store or Cafe or any other space you can occupy as an out of towner. I visited a shop on a college town recently and walked out with a cap comic for a buck that now has me wanting to get the rest of that run just due to a couple of scenes with taskmaster.
The ellis book sounds interesting as always, curious about waid's earnest Archie as you put it since I always saw Archie as unapologetically earnest in its pg rated high schoolery.
The last things I saw Buscemi, furlong and Rourke in were 30 rock, American history x and double team, so a bit if an interesting contrast came across my mind as you described that film. The sound system sounds dope.
I like how the book battle has turned into its own recurring bit. I've been trying to shed some stuff myself and the progress is hard to track. I think I now get why that folding clothes lady was such a big thing.