(Photo by me at the 9:30 Club)
My library, which consists of thousands of books I have undertaken to read, is growing ten times faster than I can read. I have tried to expand it into a kind of universe where I can find everything. But this universe is growing at a dizzying pace. This pace will never slacken; I feel its growth physically within me. Every new book I add sets off a mini-catastrophe that only subsides when the book is seemingly brought into line on the shelf and temporarily disappears.
— Elias Canetti, “Notes from Hampstead”
This has become a quasi-quarterly update, which means I should start holding earnings calls and update all of the valuable Dave’s Journal investors on our latest products. Not yet, though. Every Sunday leading up to the election was busy. Every Sunday after was — look, I’ll be honest with you, I played a lot of “Resident Evil” games.
Right after the last edition, I went to North Carolina to write about the race for governor. Had a real Labor Day first, exploring downtown Raleigh and stopping into half the stuff that was open. We took coffees to a park, past a mossy dinosaur statue which, according to the sign in front of it, had “they/them” pronouns. When we lost cloud cover, we walked to an arts shop, then a food hall with breweries on either side. Earlier this year I read “The Boniface Option,” which starts with the author growing disgusted with a yuppie microbrewery, identifying the gratification-packed suburban lifestyle as a threat to ambition and fertility. Good news: Not here! Lots of families, pretty idyllic.
I caught up with an old colleague who now lives in Winston-Salem. My day finished with Liz Cheney’s speech at Duke; I drove west to the bar she wanted us to meet at, then one that was open. I ran into my friend Zoe, who was recording one piece of a massively larger radio story, at a Democratic press conference. Once I found a quiet enough hotel room, I talked about “Reagan” with my friend Jesse Hawken on his “Junk Filter” podcast.
The only real bummer of this period was the Saga of the Washing Machine, a complete parody of the all-thumbs homeowner crisis.
How to make this interesting? Right before we left for Europe, at the end of July, I packed one last load of wet clothes into the washer/dryer combo that came with my home when I moved in nine years ago. It never made good noises, but it made reliable noises. Push one button and, after a click, your stuff would bang around and get dry. It never failed until the night before this trip, when the dryer (atop the washer) stopped cold.
The next steps:
Amateur diagnosis
Electrician, who determined that the dryer’s motherboard had fried
Order of replacement motherboard
Return visit by electrician, who discovered that we’d ordered the wrong item
Order of second replacement motherboard
Successful electrician visit
Machine breaks upon first post-fix use of dryer
Trip to test our replacement
Purchase of replacement
First failed delivery of replacement — missing the kit that stacks one appliance on the other
Second delivery of replacement, discovery that the old machine used one plug and this uses two
Trip to hardware store for extension cord, discovery that it is far better to keep the machine grounded than use one of those cords
Return of electrician to install wall socket
Working machine installed
You have no idea how desirable a washing machine can be, after being denied it for months by your own incompetence. I now know an awful lot about how front-loaded dryers work, knowledge I don’t want a reason to use for another decade.
We treated ourselves what that was all over. My wife got us seats for Kishi Bashi — that’s him in the first photo — who I knew nothing about and enjoyed tremendously, reminding me how good baroque pop can be. I’d wanted to see Charli XCX for years, and we stayed a night in Baltimore to see her “Sweat” tour with Troye Sivan, the first real arena show I’d been to in years.
What do I mean, “real?” I’d seen a few catch-em-before-they’re-dead shows in arenas over the last year, but not a new act, one with a young and/or gay fanbase that dances, since I saw Drake on whim six years ago. It may never again be cool to admit liking Drake, and I barely did. But I retain a few nice memories of the rapper walking over a floor made out of responsive LED screens, fish or lava or stars moving when he walked on them, a two-hour live version of the “Billy Jean” steps. This show was better. Sivan opened up with a crew of fit male dancers, playing three of his his. Suddenly a “Brat” curtain descended on the stage, hiding Charli’s arrival from below, then dropping to reveal a singer who had none of Sivan’s interest in building a dance routine around her songs.
I didn’t care. Had a soft spot for her music since I first heard “Nuclear Seasons” ten years ago. Thought “Boom Clap” was a first ballot hall of fame pop song. Respected her for making a promo video for “Famous” with Eric Wareheim, letting him tell a story about wasting your life on celebrity worship. (The video has been taken offline.)
She played none of those songs on this tour. The curtain fell and she started singing “Brat’s” first singles — “365” then “360” then “Von Dutch,” still my favorite song on the record. She used backing tracks, sometimes holding her head away from the mic; nobody minded that she was not doing all of this life. When those songs ended, Sivan came back, taking over the more ornate part of the stage, a lattice that dancers could climb all over. Before the show ended, the two of them duetted on top of a stage that rose slowly toward the CFG arena ceiling.
(Photo by me in Baltimore)
After that, I traveled every week, prioritizing places where I might write more than one story. I kept working over my birthday weekend, but we squeezed in the first of three concerts, one chosen by me and two by my wife. Only one other road night was easy. I was in Dallas, to write about the Senate race there, first filing a story about the big position Ted Cruz’s campaign had taken in anti-gender ideology ads. My friend Cheves checked in and brought me to dinner, just like the last time I’d come to Dallas. He showed me the remnants of the burn on his arm (accident making Sunday gravy) and finished with ice cream, the first I’d had in a couple months. Phoenix after that, then Wisconsin, a few days after the funeral of a college friend who’d died unexpectedly. He’d spoken at it; I was one of a couple people who learned too late to come. We talked about this nightmare for a while, then we talked about movies, the reason we
Superhero comics felt irredeemably silly to me this year. They didn’t in 2010, when new apps made it easy to read the source code of DC and Marvel characters, and when I liked being part of the subculture. I’ll still enjoy something commended to me by a friend. I got lunch with an old political reporter friend in 2022, he recommended the “X of Swords” arc, and I sought it right out; this was a mentor, older and with a bigger house than me, and had to know something. When good science fiction writer play around with these characters, we still get great stories and sticky concepts, enriched by lore that pre-dates the Kennedy assassination.
The twist is that the lore often isn’t very good. I finally read “The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told,” one of the beginners-or-collectors paperbacks D.C. put out in the late 1980s when their “Crisis on Infinite Earths” reboot and the old issues were getting serious resale value. D.C. had hired the strongest second-generation comics guys to start fresh with their characters: John Byrne on Superman, George Perez on Wonder Woman, Keith Giffen on Green Lantern. The Flash was the most interesting of the re-drawn characters, because “Crisis” had killed Barry Allen, The Silver Age Flash, and Gen X was going to get a new one.
So, for an hour one Saturday, I read the old three-part Barry Allen by John Broome stories that birthed or adapted his rogues gallery: immortal caveman Vandal Savage, unpleasant Australian man Captain Boomerang, etc. Good stuff for kids, tight plots with strange monsters and a “cosmic treadmill” that enables time travel.
Soon, I remembered how I got interested in comics in the first place. There were three causes. One: My brother was born several months premature, when I was six years old, and a relative who wanted to cheer me up in the hospital gave me a copy of “Superman #18,” when John Byrne was still writing and drawing it. Two: My family went to a flea market in Lancaster County, and I saw the colorful cover of “Bring on the Bad Guys,” a compilation of Marvel villain origin stories. Three: I happened to see the documentary “Comic Book Confidential” staying up one night, sneaking in some basic cable TV.
Part of me regrets getting so interested in this stuff later in life, when I met friends who’d read the same things as a kid; we got to better friends, talking about our fandom. I struggled to ever take Doctor Doom seriously, or as seriously as you should take someone called “Doctor Doom,” because his first appearance was a goofball time travel caper about the hunt for pirate gold.
When I had time, I started giving more of it away.
I’ve already started to think about my year-end list, and it feels important to put out some update before that. This isn’t perfect. What did I learn, by delaying it again and again? Nothing’s wrong with the format, but I fiddle with it too much; it would be better for everybody if a regular stuff-that-happened journal went live, regularly, sometimes when it didn’t have a blazing insight in paragraph three.
The Best Thing I Read: Years ago I figured that the best kind of biopic is the deep study of one moment in the hero’s life. I’ve never enjoyed a cradle-to-grave movie, or a “Behind the Music” movie (one that ends with the hero out of rehab and better than ever), as much as I enjoyed “Lincoln.” What do you need to know about the guy? It’s all there in the fight over the 13th Amendment.
My favorite kind of written biography is the behind-his-desk book, the one that has very little to say about the wider world and focuses only on events witnessed by the subject. Ian Kershaw’s “Hitler” and David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln” both did this; both are worth the money if you have a dad, or middle-aged male friend who might become a dad.
Books read
Pauline Oliveros, “Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice”
Elena Ferrante, “The Days of Abandonment”
Noah Van Sciver, “Saint Cole”
Unknown, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
Various, “The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told”
Eric Frank Russell, “Wasp”
Walter R. Borneman, “Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America”
Richard Pipes, “Russia Under the Old Regime”
Jules Gill-Peterson, “A Short History of Trans Misogyny”
Philip K. Dick, “A Maze of Death”
Prince Harry, “Spare”
Judd Apatow, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Book”
Norm MacDonald, “Based on a True Story”
Jordan Peterson, “12 Rules for Life”
Larissa Wodtke, “Dance-Punk”
Jonah Goldberg, “The Tyranny of Cliches”
Ted Cruz, “Unwoke”
Joss Whedon, “Fray”
Ryan Pinkard, “Shoegaze”
John Byrne/Mike Mignolia, “Superman: World of Krypton”
Stanley Wiater, “Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror”
Ian Kershaw, “Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris”
Thomas Love Peacock, “Nightmare Abbey”
David Herbert Donald, “Lincoln”
Thomas de Quincey, “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”
Bob Woodward, “War”
David Foster Wallace, “The Broom of the System”
Paul Beatty, “The Sellout”
The Best Thing I Saw. Not a very good movie year, is it? The hardest choice I made this year wasn’t to watch fewer films and read more books. That was easy. It was much harder not to brag about it, or to start annoying people with self-help language about the Lindy benefits of reading text and processing the facts and events in your head. Books; they’re good, why do you need me to tell you this?
I’ve watched 22 new, scripted features released this year, 23 if you count the camp-stuffed Jennifer Lopez vanity project “This is Me… Now.” A remarkable little movie, boring for long stretches (several therapy sequences, Fat Joe as the psychiatrist), with the most arrogant cameo flex I’ve ever seen. Here are the actors who play the signs of the Zodiac: Jay Shetty (Aries), Neil deGrasse Tyson (Taurus), Jenifer Lewis (Gemini), Sofía Vergara (Cancer), Post Malone (Leo), Kim Petras (Virgo), Trevor Noah (Libra), Keke Palmer (Scorpio), Jane Fonda (Sagittarius), Sadhguru (Pisces). They live in a cosmic spaceship and comment on Lopez’s inability to find lasting love. Ben Affleck plays himself on a motorcycle, then shows up in disguise as a strangely wise news anchor.
Awful. I am not finding much that critics haven’t picked over: “Anora” stuck with me for weeks, and nothing was as cathartic in mid-October as watching the last 15 minutes of “The Substance” in a Flix Brewhouse that only me and my buddy Tim had paid to be in.
The Best Thing I Heard. Henri Dutilleux’s “Tout le Monde Lointain.”
Back to a normal schedule this Sunday. I’ve had my downtime, and traded away many journal-writing hours for hours of navigating 3-D mazes. Plenty to write about next time.