Dave's journal, year two, weeks eighteen, nineteen, and twenty

The prodigal blogger.

(Photo by me, in Nashville.)

Been a while since I wrapped at you. One solid reason why: A new writing project that I have to be cool and mysterious about for a while. (Nothing major, if a media reporter reads this newsletter. Keep reading me at Semafor, I’m not going anywhere.) Some flimsier reasons: Travel, work, numbing my brain by playing “Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth,” which drills so hard into my nostalgia center that I can let two hours disappear collecting upgrade materials.

Travel was more fun than that. We spent a weekend in Nashville, where my wife was attending a conference and I wasn’t — a twist! The highlight, which I planned late but perfectly, was a concert at Chief’s, a towering new place on south Broadway with a fourth-floor venue built to look like a miniature Ryman. We walked past a dozen bars with country-fried cover songs wafting out of the open windows and took our pew-like seats for Suzy Bogguss, whose clear, rich voice and well-chosen covers got her a small 90s fanbase; my wife and eye were, eyeballing it, 20 years younger than the other people in the room. None of us particularly wanted to mingle with the bachelorettes outside, and Bogguss could tell: “I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad THEY’RE out THERE.”

I’d been coming to Nashville for some kind of work since 2018, and didn’t begrudge the people having the best weekend of their lives. I left that to other people. Our airport driver seethed with contempt for the people he drove around who didn’t even know what the Ryman was; he was tender from three days of moving people around the instant city of Morgan Wallen fans who’d come to town for his stadium residency. We saw the Ryman, and we stopped at the Johnny Cash museum, which has no right to be as good as it is, situated across from the official Goo Goo Cluster store and the Kid Rock bar that sets up a wall of window-facing seats like the drinkers are competing on “Hollywood Squares.” Johnny Cash’s personal Bible! The suit he wore at the Bicentennial Parade! The “liar’s chair” from the “Hurt” video, which plays on a loop all day!

There was a little less to see in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs, where I spent half the following week; the sightseeing was limited in east Texas, because I arrived after a shock storm that shut down most of Houston. When I’m traveling and unaware of a weather disaster bearing down, I’m usually alone — everyone with the sense to watch local news has put up the storm doors already.

Not this time. Everyone agreed that the Derecho came out of nowhere. On Thursday, I was finalizing details for an interview in the city; the next morning, the candidate I was going to meet apologized and did it remotely, from her phone, as neighbors huddled in her home because the rest of the block lost power. I drove through part of the city to get to one un-canceled meeting, and twice, linemen arrived in my path and cut it off so they could start re-connecting the city. Most of the intersections I drove through had busted traffic lights. A cafe that seemed to be open shooed me away; the door had flung wide accidentally as employees were clearing out a freezer. One of the few businesses that kept power was Kaboom Books, where I stopped for two new hardcovers and talked with the owner.

The store, he said, was proudly non-eponymous; only then did I realize just how many bookstores include paper or book puns in the name. An earlier store design, he said, had covered a wall with old bookstore bookmarks, which both revealed just how punny they were, and how often they used the same quote: “A book is man’s best friend outside of a dog, and inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” That was always attributed, he remembered, to Groucho Marx or Mark Twain. It didn’t sound like either of them, because the quote actually came from Boys’ Life.

All this, and a small, stupid injury, made me pause the training I’d down at the gym near our house. My goal with that — none of this to be diaried unless it pays off and becomes interesting — is to learn exactly how to work out and replicate it. And I have, learning that like everything else, effective weight-lifting involves obsessive self-tracking and repetition. You cannot hack your way out of that. You have to be told, again and again, what to do about your scapula.

The Best Thing I Read. For the first time in a bit, it was nonfiction: “Fascinating Rhythm,” a biography of George and Ira Gershwin, focused almost entirely on their collaborations. One chapter handles their youth, one covers Ira’s work in the decades after George died, but the bulk of it covers the years when they wrote the American songbook. I don’t read for favorites anymore — I read to find new music, new lines, old insights that are new to me. And the line “He’s the man the people choose/loves the Irish and the Jews” was new to me. Half a life lived before learning of this musical!

“The City & The City” gave me the most fun of any novel I read, all the feelings I wanted but rarely got when I picked up Kafka.

Books bought
Shawn Levy, “Ready, Steady, Go!”
Deena Ruth Rosenberg, “Fascinating Rhythm”

Books read
Tulsi Gabbard, “For Love of Country”
Naomi Klein, “Doppelganger”
China Mievelle, “The City & The City”
John Wyndham, “The Chrysalids”
Neil Gaiman, “Miracleman: The Golden Age”
Richard Matheson, “The Best of Richard Matheson”
Michelle Dean, “Sharp”
Aaron Copland, “What to Listen for In Music”
Hieronymus Bosch, “Complete Paintings and Drawings”
M. Dean, “I Am Young”
Mike Hixenbaugh, “They Came for the Schools”
Deena Ruth Rosenberg, “Fascinating Rhythm”
Carrie Brownstein, “Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl”
Shawn Levy, “Ready, Steady, Go!”

The Best Thing I Heard. The true answer is “Bookish,” a TrueAnon episode interviewing Dan Sinykin, author of the best-covered book I’ve seen this year.

Another answer, still true but more shameful, is a suite of songs I’ve called “The Ballad of Bobo Bojangles.” One of the boring hobbies I haven’t written about here is my pruning of YouTube. Every big tech social network is degrading, every one feeds you sludge. If you have a few hours over a few days, you can knock the worst stuff out of your recommendations, and get NEW bad stuff.

This was how I started getting music from Forgotten Vinyl, one of a few accounts that uses AI tools to make stupid, putrid song-poems. It is one of two to play with the character Bobo Bojangles, created (I think) by prompting a machine to come up with Motown-style songs about bodily functions. Every time, Bobo goes to “the bingo club.” Every time, he’s accompanied by a “lovely lady.” Every time, the transition to the gross-out is announced, like: “But in a strange turn of events,” or “but in a freaky turn of events".”

After two Bojangles songs set the tone, conveying the guilt the singer felt after vomiting in his date’s car (“sorry, that’s gonna leave a stain”) and defecating in her pants (“they were kind of tight; they squeezed my guts all night”), Forgotten Vinyl provided an “outtake” of the singer in the studio, battling with the engineer, begging for different material.

“Are we really going to do this shit again?” he asked. “Where I sing about being at a bingo club, and some ridiculous shit happens?”

He would. Like the head of Mimir, embalmed and preserved to keep dispensing wisdom to the Aesir, Bojangles was given no choice. Man created him, and man wanted him to keep entertaining. This was the set-up for, I think, the best of these idiotic songs, “Can’t Believe I Pissed My Pants.” And all of the gags were there: “Saturday, at the bingo club; I been drinkin’ 16 hours straight.” It was the first time I’d ever enjoyed AI, and it was terrible.

I got over this by making another run at a Jimmy Webb songbook.

The Best Thing I Watched: No contest, it was the latest Jenny Nicholson video, assembling her early visit to Disney’s Star Wars theme hotel together with bad promotional material for the hotel, unused sketches of what “Galaxy’s Edge” was supposed to include, and a summary of how the entertainment giant slaughtered its sci-fi goose. It is four hours long, and a tough editor would junk half of it, but Nicholson is the Bela Tarr of YouTube; with her, every shot matters, every aside and every number of the numbered list.