(Photo by me)
Nobody was surprised. There was a flutter of anxiety in the last hour before the polls closed in New Hampshire, for the same reason as always, a partial release of unfinished exit poll data. This is a great way to hook viewers, because the numbers already add up to something — people will get sick of “1% of precincts reporting” around 7:30 — and because they require basic math to be clever about. What does it mean that a minority of voters identify with the “MAGA movement?” Is it the end of Trump?
No, it wasn’t. I spent the rest of the week burning off stories, and ended it with a haircut and nutritionist visit. “I did some damage on the road and have already been cutting back” — that’s a good first thing for a nutritionist to hear. The two-week road period always undoes me, but I craved less junk last time, remembering Penn Jillette’s advice. Did something taste great? Do you remember how it tasted? Great, don’t need to have it again. I craved no fried foods and ate a pound of jerky. I had my first donut in six months, my last for the year, at the Wicked Good in Salem. Had never been there before, would not order the marbled coffee stick again. Consume sugar the right way and when you taste it, you don’t want it for months. It’s as remote from your diet as caviar. And as my GMC Acadia zipped away from the last voter interviews I’d do for the New Hampshire primary, I felt that I’d earned caviar.
We decompressed, hard, when I got home. My schedule allotted two days back before heading back out, to Las Vegas, where socializing is much easier and more expensive. (A joke name that reporters and some locals give to Manchester: Manch-Vegas. It’s said warmly!) On the way out, over two delayed flights, I had time to read books that I’d dug two-thirds of the way into but never had the concentration to finish. Still uninterested in screens and movies, I finished them.
The Best Thing I Read: Hard to pick. Two classics this week, and a third that didn’t quite work for me: “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” and “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.” I’m still not tired of reading pop culture’s early code, and there was a lot of here. But when I find it, the second-stage literature, which borrowed a couple ideas and drove the material elsewhere, doesn’t interest me as much. Vonnegut’s book is the best kindly tycoon story, a genre that was over-served when I grew up (“There's only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you've got to be kind.’”) Brodie is almost a cult story, and the jokes about fascism get more mileage now than they must have in 50 years. (“In Italy, the unemployment problem has been solved.”) “Flow My Tears” lost me with the twist, and didn’t enrapture me like Dick’s other police states.
“Three Fingers” I’d picked up from SPX, because the artist was standing next to Derf, we all got into a brief but amiable conversation, and it seemed rude not to pay for his work. Elevator pitcher: “Kid Stays in the Picture” meets “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Cynical documentary-style strip about a Kenneth Anger nightmare Hollywood where cartoons walk among the living. Didn’t love it, sorry. Every splash page in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s “Roaming” was gorgeous, but I wasn’t hooked by the story, of three friends growing closer on a New York weekend. It’s signed, and if we start raising a kid, and emulate the old Onion story about parents alienating their children from playmates with their hip, outdated taste — well, I think the kid would like this.
(Photo from Amazon)
Books read
Kurt Vonnegut, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”
Muriel Spark, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”
Philip K. Dick, “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”
Drew Magary, “Men With Balls”
David Lynch, “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity”
Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, “Roaming”
Rich Koslowski, “Three Fingers”
Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic”
Sasha Issenberg, “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age”
Books purchased
John Wyndham, “The Day of the Triffids”
The Best Thing I Watched: “House of Games,” Dave Mamet’s carousel of double-crosses. I’d started it before giving up on movies and decided to watch it on the flight from Washington to Minneapolis. Previous Dave had paused the movie in the middle of the first con, when Lindsay Crouse (wooden, but married to Mamet, so here she is) nearly gets fooled into cutting a check to Joe Mantegna. Ricky Jay wins on an impossible hand, puts a gun on the table, and Crouse identifies it as a fake because it’s leaking water. I don’t think I’m off movies per se, but I’ve lost my taste for new movies. I can’t keep writhing in my chair, hand over my eyes, when the screen is irradiating me with pain “from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn.” No: I want to watch Mike Nussbaum spit insults at Lindsay Crouse and watch Joe Mantegna embark on a scam inside a scam inside a scam.
The Best Thing I Heard: Greg Foat and Art Theman’s “Fresh Snow,” recommended by Pitchfork to guys like me who’ve lost the rock bug and want only to hear extremely smooth or extremely complicated instrumental music.
I’m going through a rut that’s very specific to this journal. All’s well, but this hasn’t a been a priority, so I’ll get through Sunday and shake out of my torpor.