Dave's journal, year two, summer omnibus edition

Been a while since I rapped at ya

(Photo by me, from the Libertarian National Convention)

It wasn't a planned hiatus. Writing in this little online journal had been fun, and when it wasn’t fun, it was good discipline. The photo above is from the Libertarian National Convention, from Memorial Day weekend, and when I re-loaded the substack dashboard today I realized that I’d accidentally bookended my summer.

What was the delay? I just deleted a few hundred words of throat-clearing from June, and there were three answers. One: Laziness. Two: The unprecedented Democratic experiment of dumping Joe Biden and replacing him on the ticket with Kamala Harris, which devoured all my time. Three: “Elden Ring,” same as the first answer but with lore developed by George R.R. Martin.

At key moments, usually around 10 p.m. on Sundays, I also got stopped up by the feeling that I wasn’t adding much value with my posts. I forgot the original idea for this thing; write clearly and quickly about what I did, staying out of the political discourse and focusing on the trivia. Instead of lying to myself about my ability to recall events, I would write down the details. I missed a few things by flaking. Some highlights":

A busy run of Republican events at the height of their optimism, from the Last Biden Debate through the RNC. The last person I talked to at the debate site, before it started, was Gavin Newsom. I asked him, as someone often mentioned as a potential Biden replacement by Republicans, if he thought the debate would end all their chatter about the need for one. “One hundred percent,” said Newsom: Biden was going to win and the doubters would realize how ridiculous it had been to question this for a year.

Ah, well, nevertheless. After the debate, the first question I asked every Republican nominee was “who’ll be the Democratic nominee?” Most of them laughed, and if they answered, they said either Biden (“they’re stuck with him”) or an unelectable Harris. A fun thing to live through.

Between the conventions, my wife and I traveled to Paris, for the Olympics. Her idea; I’d always nebbishly feared the hassle. She intuited that there might be terrorism or disruptions on the opening day, and their was. We watched the opening ceremony from a rugby bar in Amsterdam — we’d always planned to, and would recommend it — and time zones saved me from the entire domestic American scream-fight about it. Our event, the equestrian eventing, was a dream, staged on the grounds of Versailles, the palace visible from every angle of the bleachers. We had dinner at L’Arpège, developing theories about the loud American couple next to us who had “an apartment in Paris, but don’t usually use it in the summer” and purchased $1200 of ceramic dinner plates on their way out. We drove from Paris to Geneva, after a fire shorted out more trains, and drove from there to Gruyeres, where we reached one of my pilgrimage sites: The H.R. Giger Museum.

Many years ago, I saw a print of “Work 219: Landscape XX” at a relative’s house, and my mother recoiled and ushered me away. A few years after that I learned about how the release of “Frankenchrist” by Dead Kennedys was halted over the intent to include that painting of detached male sex organs. This year I saw innocent-looking teenagers walk right into it, standing on floors covered by vinyl Giger art, next to a boneyard bar he’d designed next door. It was a conclave of the desensitized, absolutely worth parking on dirt and walking up a small mountain for.

I covered the Democrats in Chicago, and their enemies on the left; this was from Cornel West’s brief visit to the March on the DNC, where he gave the day’s best speech then walked into a blob of cameras and cameraphones. Some questions were from reporters, some from people who wanted his guidance.

“Dr. West, what does it mean to love your brother as yourself?” asked an athletic young man in a tank-top, pointing his iPhone13 at West.

“Oh, my dear brother — the same as it ever has, from the beginning!” said West, cradling a copy of “The Case for Palestine.” The blob moved away from me before I heard the answer.

That’s from this weekend’s Moms for Liberty convention, and the title is: “We Did It Joe.” More to come with the day job. I wrote plenty over this period, all of it archived at Semafor. I went on podcasts.

There was also some time to read.

The Best Thing I Read: “The Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker. A man leaves his office for a lunch break. He eats, he goes to CVS, he returns to work. Howie’s tangential mind is transcribed in real time, every thought of dread or joy or the origins of Q-tips. Made for me. It had real competition, given the length of the period I’m now recapping. I’ll break this down a bit as I go.

Books read

to give away:
Ivan Brunetti, “Misery Loves Comedy”
David Thomson, “The Alien Quartet”
Seth Rogen, “Year Book”
Bruce Campbell, “Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way”
Lewis Trondheim, “Little Nothings” vol. 1-3
Gabrielle Bell, “Truth is Fragmentary”
Matthew White, “Atrocities”
Paul Fussell, “Wartime”
John Boland, “White August”
Robert Kirkman, “Destroyer”
Chuck Klosterman, “Downtown Owl”
Gore Vidal, “Myra Breckinridge”
Walter Scheidel, “Escape from Rome”

These I’d had around the house for ages and wanted to give a chance before I walked them to the giveaway box. The Boland novel was trash, a sci-fi impulse buy about radioactive snow, inelegant in the way most email is inelegant. The Brunetti, Trondheim, and Bell books were pick-ups from annual SPX conventions. Brunetti was revolting, a higher-effort take on Johnny Ryan gross-out humor, which leaves me cold; Trondheim and Bell are cute illustrated on-the-road memoirs by realist European cartoonists. Thomson’s book was part of a Bloomsbury academic series, and I’d probably toted it around for 20 years. Recommended, if you want a talented critic to explain why the movies work, but I think I’m full. Kirkman’s book was forgettable, one of the movie-ready stories he and Mark Millar like to write, this time about an elderly superhero dying of cancer and willing to find Valhalla on his last mission. Fun art, with a hero who looks like Archie Bunker on TRT.

books for Europe:
J.G. Ballard, “Concrete Island”
Justin Torres, “We the Animals”
Junji Ito, “Alley”
Vladimir Nabokov, “Pnin”
Nicholson Baker, “The Mezzanine”
David I. Masson, “The Caltraps of Time”
Phil Roth, “The Human Stain”
Vern, “Yippee-Kay-Ay, Moviegoer”

Apart from the Roth, these were quick reads for train rides and poolside; the Vern book is a compilation of Ain’t It Cool News reviews and features, in the tone and with the serious-amateur integrity of RedLetterMedia. That and the new Ito compilation were the breaks between the novels; “Pnin” and “Concrete Island” were the other keepers, an elevated fish-out-of-water comedy and a nightmare about being stuck in an intersection.

keepers:
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, “Fallen Words”
Garth Marenghi, “Terrortome”
Joseph Campbell, “Creative Mythology”
Kenneth Harris, “Attlee”
Jan Swafford, “The Vintage Book of Classical Music”
Paul Pope, “The One-Trick Rip-Off”
Paul Schrader, “Schrader on Schrader”
Robert Heinlein, “Farnham’s Freehold”
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, “This is How You Lose the Time War”
John Ganz, “When the Clock Broke”
Larry Gonick and Christine DeVault, “The Cartoon Guide to Sex”
Ethan Hawke, “Rules for a Knight”
Keith Roberts, “Grainne”
Brian Aldiss, “Billion Year Spree”
Anna Haifisch, “The Artist”
Meridith McGraw, “Trump in Exile”
J.G. Ballard, “The Drought”
John Wyndham, “The Kraken Wakes”
David B., “Incidents in the Night”
Margo Jefferson, “Negroland”
Rachel Cusk, “Outline”
Paul Christman, “Midwest Futures”
Pauline Oliveros, “Deep Listening”

Half of these were discount kindle copies, taking up no space IRL, a few read quickly for interviews — McGraw’s and the extraordinary Ganz book. I did “The Drought” and “The Kraken Wakes” back to back, the correct choice, two sci-fi apocalypses from the start of the nuclear age, when authors were sublimating the everyday dread of mass death. In the Ballard book, pollution has coated all water with a film that keeps it from evaporating, and a family navigates a dried-out America for the remaining brackish pools. In the Wyndham, some evil beneath the ocean begins getting revenge by lobbing explosive balls to the surface; humans nuke it, and it melts the ice caps. Ballard’s characters just suffer and adjust, while Wyndham’s puzzle through every bit of the science, in pleasantly British ways. “That’ll put the grub in his raspberry” — a way to say you’re breaking bad news, go and use it.

A good summer for reading, and thank you agains to the content industry for making so few interesting movies.

The Best Thing I Saw: God help me, I enjoyed “Deadpool and Wolverine,” which convinced me that Ryan Reynolds’s dedication to his cash cow is real. He created an in-world MAD magazine for the dominant blockbusters of his lifetime, and cares about it. Sony replaced part of my generation’s teenage animation with wise-cracking actors and wuxia sword fights. I felt finished after two hours of watching heads explode and blades tear through groins. Thank you, Ryan. Equally goofy, more interesting to look at, was Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” which follows an aging assassin on a mission, through thermal imaging cameras. Bland Florida sets become vibrant and hypnotizing; demonic tattoos are applied and unapplied by AI; a man raises his arms and a god comes out of the red pixelated sky. Paid full price and would again.

(from edglrd.com)

But new releases haven’t impressed me this summer, and the best stuff I saw came off my long-term to-watch list. “Times Square” follows two runaways and their star dreams in pre-gentrification Manhattan, where there are entire warehouses to squat in and crowds gather outside grindhouses to see singers wearing trash bags. Tim Curry plays “Johnny LaGuardia,” a DJ with not even a whiff of a Queens accent. A great soundtrack and one great original song, “Damn Dog.” I’d been aware of the 1982 Costa-Gravas film “Missing” for decades, basically aware of the plot — dad searches for son disappeared in post-coup Chile — but got wrapped up in the execution. A perfect Jack Lemmon role, polite and intelligent and navigating a fake justice system in good faith until a remarkable meltdown after curfew. “The Player” was the best Robert Altman classic I saw; “Vincent and Theo” was the best forgotten Altman, a great myth-busting biopic about Van Gogh. Another one of his revisionist histories of something sacred, his best genre.

The best thing I heard: I’m not a latecomer to Charli XCX. In 2014, my friend Marc and I — he’s relevant here because he’s a real music critic — agreed that “Sucker” was a miraculous album. Charli hadn’t produced a boring song yet, but she had a pop classic there (“Boom Clap”) and an Eric Wareheim-directed video about vanity and brainrot. Why had she put her song in a short movie that ends with smiley emojs flying out of a dead girl’s head? I respected her. And now everyone loves “Brat.” So do I! Best song and video, in my view:

Best older piece of music, introduced by an old friend in a hallway during a conference at the Capital Hilton, was Keith Jarrett’s Paris concert. I’ll end this there, and try to pick the weekly schedule back up.