(Wonderbook in Frederick, Md. Photo by me.)
It had been a little while since reporting took me out of town. Last Friday, I decided that a story about Israel and Democratic primaries would be enriched if I spent time in Rep. Summer Lee’s district — Pittsburgh, some of its suburbs, and a slice of Westmoreland County, which used to vote for conservative Democrats and now votes for even more conservative Republicans. Flying there is easy, if you’re short on time, but I had plenty of time. So I drove, and when I needed gas on the way, realized I was close to “Wonderbook,” a store I discovered 12 years earlier.
In my memory, this was one of the great used bookstores, a type of place I seek out whenever I travel. I would do a little research first. How old was the place? The older the better — just as you and I forget what’s in the bottom of that box at the back of the coat closet, owners of old stores have stock they never look at, unless the landlord screws them over or a natural disaster attacks their stock. For a very long time, it was hard for me to take a trip without finding a place like this, and hard for me to enter it without buying something. The way my memory works, if I see an object in my house, I know exactly when and why I bought it. Everything in a used bookstore was a memento from a place I may never visit again, and a voucher for the time to read it.
Everyone who had a good story this week went to see the eclipse in full totality. I did this in 2017, and we didn’t make special plans this year, which I regretted immediately; my habit is to skip amazing things if I’ve already done them, and thought I’d “hog” a space if I went west again to watch this, and that was stupid, because we were not going to run out of totality if I was there. Instead, I saw what D.C. functions like when only half the city is working. And, thanks to a colleague’s eclipse glasses, I saw the sun obscured by the moon, looking like a face tattoo a kid gets at a block party.
A few nights, I did typical D.C. things — less typical for me until recently. A colleague gathered reporters and academics for a dinner at Cafe Milano, where the wine was free and I had to keep gesturing “no” for the refill after I took a glance. The subject was whether America could be saved by “top five” voting, which would replace all primaries with open elections where people get five points to assign to five candidates. Katherine Gehl, who came up with the idea, was outnumbered; I had covered its use in Alaska, and the effort (ongoing) to get rid of it in Alaska, and was apologetic when the meal was over about not jumping in more obnoxiously to endorse it. One of the skeptical questions boiled down to, “isn’t this a little complicated for low-information voters, who already hate the system?” I disagreed with that. Lots of low-information voters have chosen to learn little about politics. They don’t trust the system; don’t trust people who get emotionally invested in it; want to be left alone. They’re proud that they don’t care about a choice that, in much of the country, is between a party that usually wins and one that usually loses. It’s compartmentalization, not stupidity.
The following weekend, I badly injured my left big toe, and still don’t know how. I downed aspirin and went to two friends’ get-togethers anyway, one for a Palestinian friend who’d come to town and would be staying for a while, and one for a friend who’d quit his job to report full time in Ukraine. At both houses, copies of Anthony Shadid’s “Night Draws Near” looked out at me from the corners of bookshelves.
The Best Thing I Read: This was another churning week, giving one more try to books that had been in my house unread for years. I read one new book relevant to my job — “The Boniface Option,” a pamphlet about the need for Christians to build families, build bodies, and make war on the “fake and gay” reality that atheists had turned into “trashworld.” Not sure what to write about that yet. In Pittsburgh, I picked up the last book published during Ed Piskor’s lifetime, before killing himself and ending the most promising career in comics. I didn’t even like “Red Room,” his final series, a meticulously illustrated splatter-comic about an underworld of masochists who do harm for digital currency. Piskor’s work was so good that I could get through it, but most comics leave me cold now; I hit a point where I just don’t enjoy the medium like I do text.
So the most fun I had was with Gene Wilder’s memoir, another read-by-the-author comfort blanket, which I listened to on the drive to and from Pittsburgh. Every actor’s career, over time, is remembered for a few big roles or completely forgotten. Wilder is remembered for “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” which was a dud at the time and gained immortality by being played on cable and in classrooms where teachers needed a two-hour break. (This was how I saw it.) The cane gag in Wonka came from Wilder; the title of his memoir came from Gilda Radner, who told him to use that phrase for a title if he ever needed it. This was how his sad, sensitive, mournful book about art and show business was spared the title “I Lean Toward Women.”
Most of what I read, I got rid of, and I am trying to finish Hugh Thomas’s massive “Cuba” to add to the giveaway stack. A beautiful, nearly square paperback, which won me over on the 14th time I saw it at Secondstory Books, before realizing: I do not need to know 1500 pages worth of history about Cuba. Let’s see how that goes.
Books read
Gene Wilder, “Kiss Me Like a Stranger” (audio)
Ed Piskor, “Red Room: Trigger Warnings”
Ed Piskor, “Red Room: Crypto Killaz!”
Various, “Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle and Sebastian Anthology”
Andi Watson: “Skeleton Key: Beyond the Threshold”
Andi Watson: “Skeleton Key: The Celestial Calendar”
Andrew Isker, “The Boniface Option” (digital)
Garth Ennis, “Dicks”
Jessica Abel, “Soundtrack”
John Smith, “The Complete New Statesmen”
Tadao Tsuge, “Slum Wolf”
Michael Turner, “Fathom: Blue Sun”
Matt Kindt, “Dept. H: Omnibus Vol. 1”
Michael Moorcock, “Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse”
Books bought
Ed Piskor, “Red Room: Crypto Killaz!”
Clive Barker, “Weaveworld” (digital)
Tim Weiner, “Legacy of Ashes (digital)
Ann Leckie, “Ancillary Justice” (digital)
The Best Thing I Watched: The most relevant recommendation I could put here is “Civil War,” which came out 72 hours ago, preceded by one of the dumbest social media movie discourses I’ve ever seen. A24 did its job: Everybody had an opinion about this thing, everybody had scrutinized its map (The “Florida Alliance?” The “Western Alliance” of Texas and California?), everybody packed it into the dough of an oven-ready take. One sub-discourse even questioned what sort of character Jesse Plemons would be playing, speculating that the lollipop-red glasses he wore in the trailer signaled that his soldier was fighting for Communists. Trust your gut: Plemons was paid to play a racist, and his scene unlocks the movie, which trusts the viewer a lot for a movie where a MANPAD blows off part of the Lincoln Memorial. (An especially nice tough, as the Parthenon that inspired the memorial’s design was ruined by explosions in a war. We’ve learned our lesson from the Greeks and haven’t packed any ordnance under Lincoln’s seat.) I liked it.
At home, I’d been prioritizing older movies — Lindy stuff, movies that few people saw for fun or knew about, but critics and distributors held onto. This meant watching two Jerry Lewis movies. No jokes. After reading Shawn Levy’s unsentimental Lewis biography a few summers ago, and after realizing that what exists of “The Day the Clown Cried” would be viewable this year, I felt like watching one of the Peak Lewis comedies.
That meant “The Patsy,” a movie Lewis made at age 38, still young enough to be a bellboy, which is what he’s playing when a group of Hollywood producers panic about a star who’s just burned alive in a plane crash. It was the final film role of Peter Lorre, who died after making it; he was alive for the “Muscle Beach Party” premiere, but did not get to sit with an audience as it watched him radiate contempt for Lewis’s Stanley Belt. Stanley has no talent, and looks every year of Lewis’s 38, but he rescues a lip-sync of “I Lost My Heart at the Drive-In” movie. (Within a year, Lewis’s son Gary would have a #1 pop chart hit, which Jerry never got, and the old man is very good at parodying a dreck teen pop song.) This is bitter without getting over-indulgent, and Lewis makes a lot of stupid faces. Less of that in “Arizona Dream, Emir Kusturica’s only American film, cut to pieces after Warner Brothers thought that a two-hour surreal comedy about the search for meaning would sell better than a 140-minute surreal comedy about the search for meaning that ends with Lewis and Johnny Depp at an ice-fishing hole, watching the walleye they just caught float into the sky.
A quirkier person than me, or someone who can better tolerate quirkiness, should really go back and watch that. Rediscover it as a vibe movie, leave it on in the background when you have friends over, watch the conversations pause when Faye Dunaway used a prop plane to re-enact “North by Northwest” with Vincent Gallo, who we previously see “imitating” Cary Grant’s role for a stand-up act.
Weird. Sorry, the best movie I saw was “Benediction,” the too-perfectly named Terence Davis study of Siegfried Sassoon. Davies died late last year after a career of perfect movies that few Americans see, and this wasn’t supposed to be his final movie. But it’s immaculate. Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi split the Sassoon role, Lowden as the young man simmering and romancing the Bright Young Things, Capaldi as the old man who never got the recognition he wanted.
The Best Thing I Heard: Still on my “songbook” kick, taking 30-45 minutes to assemble a guide to individual songwriters’ work. On Tuesday, I decided to try it with Isaac Hayes, who like most middle class white guys born in the 1980s entered my world from two portals — the “Theme from ‘Shaft’” and his acting role on “South Park.” I’m going to keep making these, and plan to spend Thursday through Sunday writing and cleaning while I listen. You can listen, too.