(Photo by me, from Rehoboth, Del. on March 16)
“When civilization gets civilized again, I’ll rejoin.” - Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland) in “Panic in Year Zero!”
The week started with a quick trip to New York, for a 45-minute session with CUNY journalism students, and ended with a 48-hour trip to Delaware, where my friend Chris was celebrating his 42nd birthday. I used the first trip to write and the second to read. That’s how Chris and our mutual friends — all of us grew up near each other, 35 years ago — spend our downtime. The wives find a winery, the men play cards or read books, and the food and drinks laid out across the kitchen counter slowly disappear.
Not healthy, but we know that. I’d fallen off the self-tracking wagon during our trip to London, and climbed back on this week, panting and sweating and cussing. I cut out any food with added sugar at the start of the year, but on special occasions, I can work it back in. A birthday party? Plenty special, especially because one of our best friends was waylaid and couldn’t make it after his wife injured her leg chasing after their kid on a playground. Erin, Chris’s wife, spent the week baking scones and cookies, and a homemade M&M cookie, after a month of no sugar, wired me for two days.
We dialed it back the next week, and set up the seedlings that will, when the weather finally changes, get their place of honor outside. Our first set: thyme, red peppers, sage, and mustard greens with very frisky Japanese seeds. To get the seeds going, we first left them in biodegradable peat pods and watered them. This works — every seed grew — but the mustard seeds grew fast and then and quickly broke their own necks.
We’re learning. We’ll be fine. The heavy travel is over for now, and every day gives me a little time to fix up the house, pick up books, and get rid of them.
This is most of what I like writing about, obviously, and I’m trying to manufacture a fake trend. The lazy term for it, which I need to improve, is anti-nostalgia. Most of what’s getting served to you on YouTube or Facebook or the blockbuster movie schedule (Christ) is a throwback. Did you grow up on Star Wars/Back to the Future/Ghostbusters/etc etc? Do you want to relive the joy of childhood and/or pass your unfashionable tastes to your children? Here’s some slop! I combat this by skipping over recommendations I’ve heard of and listening to/watching/reading anything I haven’t. Easy! And I’ll keep recommending what’s good on here.
Catching up:
The Best Thing I Read: For two weeks, I walked around Washington with the grandaddy audiobook in my ears. Robert Evans published “The Kid Stays in the Picture” in 1994, expanded it in 1995, ad-libbed and edited parts of the audio version, then let the narration be used by Brett Morgen for an eponymous documentary in 2002. Most of the people I’ve met, people my age, learned of this when “Mr. Show” made fun of it. Bob Odenkirk played the creator as Evans, reading his life onto tape behind dark sunglasses, dedicating it to his son — “Jesus, you’re the best, and you teach me new things every day.” Patton Oswalt riffed on it in his early sets, when he’s take a stupid pop culture memory and bejewel it with color and anecdotes.
The two parodies pulled out different ingredients. Odenkirk modeled the Evans voice, swaggery and nasal, with a speech pattern that you first laugh at then copy. (“Was it a mistake? You bet. Would it I do it again? In a heartbeat.”) Oswalt imitated the surreal reach of his stories, in which any celebrity might materialize in a compromised place, and horrible things could happen to him (“I shat out my central nervous system.”).
Did the source code hold up? Yes, go listen to it. Two friends’ books, in galleys, were quick and unsettling: Phil Elwood’s “All the Worst Humans” and Elle Reeve’s “Black Pill.” I had to sit for a while with Phil’s revelation of how he used a lazy lame duck congresswoman as the catspaw for a resolution that helped Qatar win the 2022 World Cup, and I was disturbed by every nazi (she uses the term generically, which feels smart) Reeve studied closely, as she emphasized again and again how smart they were.
I have myself time to finish two books I’d moved around for years — Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Don Hertzfeldt’s “The End of the World.” King’s book was beautiful but I didn’t get much workable advice out of it, and Hertzfeldt’s was masterful. Each page told a story, with a few simple cartoon figure lines and an absurd sentence that only made sense if society was collapsing. But I kept reading, churning through some stuff I intended to give away. Howard Chaykin’s middling late-career story of intrigue in a city of mafia robots was on that list. So was Bill Willingham’s “The Pantheon,” a collection of the epic super hero story he never finished, after his great pitch for “Fables” was accepted and he moved to D.C. It had the tropes of every other start-up superhero superhero universe, with a Justice League-ish organization mobilizing against an old threat, but Willingham had already mastered his digressions, and the best one here was a two-issue arc about a psychopathic child hero, “Death Boy,” with the power to destroy any matter by looking at it.
Best discovery was Lee Murray, a Kiki horror writer I found by thumbing the annual Bram Stoker award winner list. Everything in “Grotesque” was worth reading, and my favorite was “Maui’s Hook,” a grisly kaiju story about a skeletal monster that arises in a New Zealand lagoon and starts slaughtering people.
Books bought
Roger Zelazny, “Roadmarks”
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Hammer of God”
Books read
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, “White Rural Rage”
Bill Willingham, “The Pantheon”
Andrea Long Chu, “Females”
Robert Evans, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”
Phil Elwood, “All the Worst Humans”
Roger Zelazny, “Roadmarks”
Stephen King, “On Writing”
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Hammer of God”
Elle Reeve, “Black Pill”
Lee Murray, “Grotesque”
Don Hertzfeldt, “The End of the World”
Howard Chaykin, “City of Tomorrow”
Stephen Baxter, “Raft”
Norman Finkelstein, “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!”
The Best Thing I Watched. Friends, I am back on the movie train. The month-long pause was completely necessary, building back my synapses and letting me focus on large projects again. The needle was out of my vein, and I never grasped for it.
When I plugged back in, it was to see odd shit. “The Late Great Planet Earth,” still playing on Amazon Prime, is a late 70s treasure, combining three shoddy elements and one great one. There are weak re-creations of Bible stories, funny (in retrospect) interviews with academics and cranks, and testimony from Hal Lindsey about how armageddon is getting closer.
The great element is the involvement of Orson Welles, who brings imperial gravitas to the dumbest stuff you’ve ever heard. On pollution: “Could this be the curse which Isaiah predicted for those who transgress the law and break the everlasting covenant?” On microplastics in the environment: “If the average American was submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for sale as food, he or she would not pass government standards as being fit for human consumption.”
I didn’t watch that much scripted programming, but I adored “Savage Messiah,” Ken Russell’s biopic about Henri Gaudier, a self-obsessed sculptor who formed a proto-asexual muse relationship with the Polish writer Sophie Brzeska. This was the last film Russell did before “Mahler,” which inaugurated the loud, campy, sex-drenched style that he’s now associated with; “Savage Messiah” is a much more straightforward movie, ending with Brzeska’s vision of how her life-mate’s work would be remembered after he’s killed on the western front. And I liked “Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun,” a 1989 Werner Herzog documentary about a Muslim tribe with an accidentally unsettling fertility ritual — covering up their faces with make-up and popping their eyes and teeth to make them look larger. It works!
The Best thing I Heard: My wife and I spent about an hour of our trip from Delaware listening to the music of Lamont Dozier.
Over about an hour, I compiled all of the singles written or co-written by Dozier, in chronological order. Maybe there’s a hiccup or two, because I was basing this on public Motown discographies, not FOIAs. And maybe I should add a few more of Dozier’s solo records, which aren’t all on Spotify. It’s a work in progress, which right now runs from the first Holland-Dozier-Holland attempts to find a hit (“Leaving Here”), through the Imperial Era of Motown dominance, into the late 60s tracks that broke through despite being shoved off the charts (“Band of Gold,” “Crumbs Off the Table”), to the disco rediscovery of his forgotten stuff (“Forever Came Today”), to his 80s comeback, which is the only reason I’ve found to put Simply Red on a playlist. Please enjoy.