Did anyone like the entry about the dreams I’d been having? Well, too bad. Over the past couple of weeks, the dreams that lingered when I woke up were white-knuckled stress dreams — the really dull kind, the bourgeois kind. They took advantage of the zero-time-off schedule I’d given myself, and lord, they were boring.
The run-up to Super Tuesday is always like that. No complaints. We sign up for that, and we spend a year preparing for it. We don’t always pack in a trip to London and environs, but my wife’s birthday came right before the vote, and I didn’t like the precedent it was set if I skipped that. “Sorry, babe — need to see if Nikki Haley can pull it off in Vermont.” Funny, but no, I wasn’t going to do that.
Nothing suffered except for my self-tracking, which includes this journal. Instead of back-dating two missed editions, I’m going to catch up in one big omnibus edition. Imagine that I’m a comic being illustrated by Frank Quitely. You can live your life and find other distractions before the new edition comes out. Who cares if it’s late? Maybe the guy (Quitely and me) will get back on the horse one the delayed issue arrives.
Well, maybe I will, because all the self-tracking really is good for you. Thinking through it now, before I adjust the only clocks in the house that don’t auto-update for DSL,* I can remember events but know some details got blurred.
The highlights? Went to southern California to cover the state Libertarian convention, which included my first (11-minute) sitdown with RFK, Jr. The great Meryl Kornfield and I watched Kennedy speak behind expensive private security about his conception of freedom.
“We all remember, today, the poems of Aeschylus, the plays of Sophocles, the wisdom and the philosophy of Aristotle,” Kennedy said as a few dozen Libertarians devoured a buffet lunch. “That only happens in systems that maximize human freedom, and maximize the capacity for the elevation and inspiration of the human spirit.”
Who could disagree with that? Most California Libertarians could, because they didn’t trust this life-long environmental attorney showing up and self-baptizing in the Church of Rothbard. He got a single vote in the straw poll.
From California, I went to London for my wife’s birthday, showing her around a city I’d lived near for three years. We stayed in the St. Pancras hotel, built into a train station, next to the British Library. That gave us our final-day assignment — walking a block over to the place where I researched about half of my book 10 years ago to see the Magna Carta and the First Folio. Before that, we zipped around the big tourist sites, most of which I’d seen before, but not since various jubilee-related improvements (2002, 2012, 2022) that made them even kinder to confused tourists.
This included Bath, where the catacombs of the Roman baths now include projections of loin-clothed people tossing medicine balls and lifting weights; Windsor Castle, with a gift shop tastefully dropped in the middle of the unused residences for guests to buy coronation gear; the crown jewels, so recently in King Charles’s puffy hands, displayed between small treadmills, so visitors can say “oooh” and “look at that” without crowding each other.
We had one loud catch-up dinner with friends at Dishoom, a restaurant that I keep expecting to emoty out and become uncool; this never happens, it’s always full. But we mostly kept to ourselves, with me typing up Super Tuesday news and taking phone calls from people who felt awful about interrupting me.
Good times, and I’m back on course now. Sorry for disappearing on you.
The Best Thing I Read: A very close race between two short fantasies that I knew I could finish quickly, during my London commutes. Neil Gaiman’s “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” is the deathless children’s story that Gaiman mastered early on; a sort of Willy Wonka product that can turn the adult reading it into a nervous kid. Wherever you’re actually reading it, you’re under a tented blanket with a flashlight, finishing it as fast as possible before mom and dad tell you to knock it off.
But honestly: I had more fun with John Varley’s “Millennium,” a time travel novel in which the sick and dying remnant of humanity kidnaps people who are about to disappear from history so they can repopulate the universe. If this is remembered at all, it’s for the lousy 1989 film adaptation that turned into a decent Kids in the Hall joke. “I want to make a terrible movie in Canada. After all, everybody else has!”
Who can blame anyone for trying to make it? Varley builds a gruesome world — a distant future in an earth so poisoned that humans develop fun diseases like “polyleprosy” and wrap themselves in “skinsuits” to look presentable before they die around age 32.
“Suicide was popular,” says Louise Baltimore, our unreliable narrator for about half the story. “In the springtime you didn’t dare walk the streets for fear of being squashed by a falling body.”
These sickly, near-sterile humans must pull off heists to bring healthy humans into the Last Age, where they can be sent to a new planet and restart humanity. (Future DNA is too gunked up to be worth it.) They are rich in detail, like Louise, whose heists involve dressing as a flight attendant and stealing healthy people from planes that are about to crash. (“Taking a mother and her crying infant is perfect,” because when the other passengers notice that the crying has stopped, nobody wants to find out why.)
Yeah, that’s the movie. Don’t watch it! Read the novel.
Books read
Carlos Lozada, “The Washington Book”
Liz Cheney, “Oath and Honor”
Greg Grandin, “The End of the Myth”
Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane:
René Grousset, “The Empire of the Steppes”
Winston Churchill, “A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume I: The Birth of Britain”
Ian Naird, “Naird’s London”
Ken Plume, Jackson Publick, and Doc Hammer, “Go Team Venture!”
Books bought
R.A. Lafferty, “The Best of R.A. Lafferty”
Greg Egan, “The Best of Greg Egan”
Matthew Holness, “Garth Marenghi's Incarcerat”
The Best Thing I Watched: “Anatomy of a Fall,” seen on the flight to London through the headphones provided to Virgin’s Economy Delight customers. Objectively good, but not the great theater experience of my last three weeks. That was “Madame Web,” which my wife convinced me to see over “The Zone of Interest,” on the theory that a live audience would really open up the movie and release the tannins.
And it did. I don’t seek out “so bad they’re good” movies anymore. It’s a fun activity when you don’t fear death or wonder how many movie-going years you have left. When those worries creep in, you don’t want to waste time anymore. The days when I’d relax by throwing on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” are over, until we have kids, and those kids are unhealthily interested in TV over outdoor activities.
But I saw “Madame Web,” and the experience was worth the Tuesday night discount we paid for. Our audience, filling about half the room, was giggling after the first line of dialogue, overdubbed nonsense fitted on an innocent Tahar Rahim. (The fall from Judas Iscariot to Ezekiel in “Madame Web,” good god.) Two hours later, as Dakota Johnson rolled into frame to deliver her closing monologue (“I see you… fighting for what you believe in”) we were shaking like a Jamaican church.
Reviews for this thing sometimes called it a throwback, evoking the pre-MCU era when superhero concepts were IP for schlocky action movies. This was, arguably, healthier for all of us. When superhero films got reliably good, pulp characters became mainstream, replacing other pop culture. Crown men would show up to construction sites in Deadpool T-shirts; kids who might have dressed as little Frankensteins or Mummies bought off-the-rack Spider-Man costumers. I liked this stuff into my twenties, as a hobby, and felt some guilt about its kudzu spread over all of movies.
But Marvel’s stumbles didn’t make “Madame Web” awful. The properties that Marvel spun off when it was hurting, like “Fantastic Four” and “Daredevil,” have been handled terribly for years! The level of idiot plot and amateurishness on display here goes far beyond those movies. Nothing makes sense, from Ezekiel’s supercomputer that can de-age his mental images to the decisions Cassie Web makes to repeatedly abandon her wards so she can do field work. The bad guy is smashed into by a car twice and defeated by the falling “P” of a Pepsi sign. It’s terrible, but Canada is blameless.
The Best Thing I Heard: The sequence of events was: 1) I remembered the film “All That Jazz,” 2) I remembered liking George Benson’s cover of “On Broadway,” which accompanies the audition scene at the start of the movie, 3) I realized that Benson’s catalogue was a mystery to me apart from that song and “The Other Side of Abbey Road,” his jazz guitar cover collection, and 4) I wondered what his soundtrack to the Muhammad Ali biopic was like.
Falling backwards, this was how I learned that Benson wrote “The Greatest Love of All,” the hymn to self-confidence turned into an 80s megahit by Whitney Houston. That song has always stepped on my nerves. As a young Christian kid, “loving yourself is the greatest love of all” isn’t what we’re taught to think; as a hater of 80s R&B production, the song sounded as hollow as an empty cistern.
The original version, though? It’s great, take a listen, just the right amount of schmaltz.
Back to normal this week, with a quick New York trip and a lot of primary reporting. BBL.
*microwave and oven, same as you
Great find with the Ali soundtrack - reminds me a little of "Stay Gold" from The Outsiders.