Outside, gusty winds render trees, shrubs and bushes lashing percussion fit for a Nine Inch Nails concert. If Trent Reznor showed up, we’d be golden. Instead, I’m gazing into the helpless eyes of a small Schnauzer-terrier that’s terrified of the thrashing flora this warm spring day has unleashed.
Cubby the Super Hound — he should have a cape and rubber suit with nipples on it — has his kryptonites, and one of them is blustery winds that rattle objects into outdoor cacophonies. There goes a recycling bin and all its clattering innards. Whoosh-bang, a gate door swings open and shut, on repeat. And those whipping, whistling trees are declamations of the devil. For him, it must be like dwelling in a haunted house, terrorized by loud, chilling sounds of unseen provenance.
As long as the wind blows, he follows closely wherever I go, as if my pockets are stuffed with treats (they are not). At rest, he cautiously climbs on my lap and quakes like a 25-cent motel bed.
He looks up at me, pleadingly. I look back at him, pitifully. It’s a staring contest between man and beast. Alas, the poor pup wins every time.
I’m re-reading a deep, delightful little novel titled “The Friend,” which is about writers and writing, friendship, dogs and suicide — a perfect brew of the contemplative, canine and emotionally punchy. It stars a nameless narrator, a middle-aged writer, who’s in a ghostly, one-sided conversation with her close friend, also a writer, who killed himself. It also stars a depressed Great Dane the size of a zebra. The 2018 book won the National Book Award and the author, Sigrid Nunez, has a wry, gently profound way with words and ideas. She has a lot to say about creativity, loss and bonding and does so with chiseled economy washed in a beauty that’s unshowy but electric. “The Friend” runs a mere 212 pages — a wisp, a wonder — but contains worlds of hilarious, heartbreaking humanity. It was made into a movie starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, but I won’t watch it. I don’t want to upset the novel’s unruffled perfection.
The South Korea trip — that again — is creeping closer and the old pre-trip jitters are manifesting. Things like: Will I get through customs with Xanax in my luggage? The anti-anxiety meds are a controlled substance and bringing them into Korea requires reams of draconian paperwork, including an absurd handwritten note from your doctor. I’m going to chance it; they don’t always ask. If they do stop me and confiscate it, well, I hope they enjoy. It’s a blast!
I’m also getting flustered, a churning storm in my gut, about possible TSA lines that run longer than a Frederick Wiseman documentary. I can’t stand long lines, and for some reason airport security lines make me irrationally nervous. I find them stressful, mania-inducing, like I did something wrong and I’m about to get busted by some granite-faced goon. I’ve purchased TSA PreCheck, which allows small security short cuts (e.g., you don’t have to take off your Nikes) and theoretically provides shorter waits. We’ll see about that during this latest Congressional crisis. Where’s the Xanax?
How I spent last Saturday, all cheers, jeers and blaring car horns. The signage — priceless:
Before I visit a country for the first time, I like to bathe in the local culture, mainly through books and movies. (I save the food part until I get there and do it right, with bite.) As mentioned in my last post, I head to Seoul, South Korea, in a few weeks, so I’ve been hungrily reading novels and watching films by Korean artists. Christ, they’re grim. How I love it.
Take “Memories of Murder,” by Bong Joon-ho, who made the stinging class-warfare satire and Oscar-winner “Parasite,” itself fairly bleak. This excellent serial-killer detective saga throbs with death and dark humor, winding down to a gut-punch ending that will leave your jaw somewhere around your big toes. Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” is another serial-killer drama, a fiendishly clever spin on the revenge thriller splattered with brutally sadistic punishments that I cannot speak of here, lest the authorities bust in.
Something lighter? Try the smash Netflix series “Squid Game,” in which financially strapped citizens try to win millions playing grueling games with the simple rule: you lose, you die. I haven’t seen so many blood geysers since “The Wild Bunch.”
Twisted, yes. But then you don’t know Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece “Oldboy.” Yet another revenge rampage, Park peppers his gorgeously gory film with creative curlicues not easily forgotten — like the antihero devouring a whole, live, squirming octopus in one take and, later, fending off dozens of assassins armed with only a hammer, a tour de force of cinematic choreography.
It’s not much sunnier on the book side. I just finished the slim novel about suicide “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” by Young-Ha Kim. It’s gloomy, but also not great. It’s infatuated with its own misery.
More famous is “The Vegetarian” by Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang. The heroine of this celebrated novel renounces meat, triggering a plague of psychological and bodily repercussions. (Put. Down. The. Cheeseburger.) And I’ve just started “Lemon” by Kwon Yeo-sun, about the unsolved murder of a high school student. More death — party time!
Is Korea so cracked? Apparently I’ve tapped into a thick cultural vein of crime, vengeance, class disparity, the sordid and surreal, the darkly existential and the exceptionally, even giddily, violent. That vein is a bloody gusher.
Speaking of unchecked violence, the other day I bayonetted my cheek with a thumbtack. I was lancing a pimple, not too giant, but big enough to evoke the Elephant Man. A hard, stubborn whitehead that was impervious to onslaughts by furious fingernails. So I said F-it, I’m getting a tack and uprooting this beast. First, I sterilized the tack’s point in the dancing blaze of a Bic lighter. Then I rinsed it in hot water. Then I took the business end of said tack and dug out the pimple’s white core from my cheek. Blood happened, but I extracted the thing in 30 seconds flat. My threshold for pain and gore is impressively high. The tattered flesh around the deceased pimple healed in a few days. I am an absolute master. Dermatologists, take note. And fellow zitheads: Shelve the Stridex. You might find more relief at Staples than CVS.
Like its kaleidoscopic neighbor Japan, South Korea is a Day-Glo bouncy house of the whack, weird and wonderful. While there, I will have ample offbeat options: Should I visit the Toilet Park and Museum, aka Mr. Toilet House, a festival of fecality? Or the Penis Park and Museum, studded with upright totems of erotic arousal (stop it!)? Or the Meerkat Friends Cafe, where twelve meerkats — so smooshily cute, like living anime creatures — a random raccoon and a floofy white Arctic fox scamper and play with you as you sip, and conceivably spill, coffee? I’ll be at all of them, of course. Oh, I almost forgot the popular Poop Cafe, whose theme is all things playfully bowel-adjacent (think chocolate soft serve, etc.). Consider it checked.
The email contained bad news. My guide, whose ratings are off the charts, was bailing on our tour of Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. Cold comfort: He was enlisting a substitute guide in his place, someone named Ivanna, about whom I knew nothing. I pictured a comely Ukrainian woman, perhaps bespectacled, tall, sweet and ironic.
A few days later Ivanna introduced herself via text: “I’ll be the little Asian lady with bluish hair, so I’ll be hard to miss!”
Oh. Grand.
Trips are rife with hiccups, snags. This wasn’t one of them. Ivanna turned out to be a joy, a brainy fount of local knowledge, witty, thoughtful, considerate, with hair tinted a winning shade of cobalt. She’s young, Malaysian, went to Loyola University in Maryland and speaks three languages. She lives in Aix with her husband and children. In two brisk, stuffed hours, she led me down skinny cobblestone lanes and yawning boulevards, telling me scads about the city’s history, from kings to cathedrals, and where to get the best ice cream and ogle good art.
This is the best of travel — the brain- and eye-popping excursions that crack open new vistas you could only wonder about. Topped with two scoops of lip-smacking ice cream.
I was staying in Marseille for six days last week and Aix was an obvious day trip, as was Arles (Roman ruins! Van Gogh!), but more on that lovely town another time. Marseille and Aix are 39 minutes apart by train, yet worlds apart in complexion.
Marseille: gritty and huge (France’s second largest city); slathered in graffiti and street art; assertively multicultural; set on a picturesque port; growling with speeding scooters and motorbikes; part Paris, part chaos.
Aix: exuberant, medieval charm constructed of yellow and ocher stone; clock towers, boulevards and basilicas; fountains juiced by thermal springs; home of Cézanne (though, tragically, the city owns none of his paintings); boutiques and tranquil beauty.
The dichotomy is dizzying. One thumps with rap and rock, while the other strolls, hands in pockets, whistling. Both are ancient — at 2,600 years old, Marseille is the oldest city in France — and exude that quaint, sometimes ghastly, always intoxicating historical spirit that Europe seems to have a monopoly on.
One of many famed fountains in Aix-en-Provence
Why Marseille, you say? Partly because it’s enjoying a moment right now, with hosannas in The New York Times to Condé Nast Traveler and beyond. A trend follower I am not. I did a day trip to Marseille in 2007 that spurred my urge to return to this bustling, bracingly diverse city. And so I did. And I’m glad. There you have it.
Marseille’s reputation for crime and grime is passé at best, slanderous at worst. Locals laughed with me when this was brought up, like, What are they talking about? Think New York, Chicago, San Francisco — they have their blights and trouble spots, but there are simple ways around that. And what’s a big city without some dirt under its nails? (My Fodor’s travel guide said my hotel was in an “iffy” neighborhood. I call bullshit. The crib and the hood are très cool.)
Marseille’s fabled Cours Julien district. It’s never met a can of spray paint it didn’t love.
Vaunted as a foodie’s paradise, Marseille let me down many times gastronomically. I tucked into good but never great dishes originating from France, Italy, Argentina, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast. Alas, with heaving disappointment, my maiden acquaintance with Marseille’s world-famous fish stew, bouillabaisse, was a bust. The fish was dry and flavorless, the broth bland and tepid, and this was at legendary bouillabaisse megastar Chez Fonfon. The soup and one glass of wine took me for a hundred US dollars. The web review I wrote back at the hotel is a seething tirade about getting rooked.
Where the food flopped, the people shined. My minor allergy to others is cured when I travel. Connections with locals are almost always tonic and nourishing, pulling me out of my fortress of solitude to swap world views and pleasantries. We laugh as we wrestle with our linguistic limitations — my French is pretty much non-existent, basically sign language — and commiserate when politics are broached, which gladly is not often.
Marseille from the hilltop Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica
My past as a film critic is my social super power. It uncorks an uncanny passion in people that’s rooted in the universal language of cinema. I had a half dozen lively conversations with local Marseillaise about their favorite films and filmmakers, from Tarantino to Tarkovsky and every indie and classic in between. France’s renowned love affair with the movies burns bright. (I stumped them all when I mentioned “Annie Hall,” however.)
Meanwhile, over at my hotel, the hipster joint with the hipster name, Mama Shelter Marseille, the music played loud on weekends, pure DJ slop stuck on the same crowbar-to-the-cranium beat. The throb carried straight to my fourth-floor room well past 1 a.m. and I found myself in grandpa grumpus mode, calling reception to complain. To my surprise, the next day they upgraded my room to a larger one away from the bar, and even gifted me two fat gourmet cookies and a bottle of apricot juice. I felt like a little boy. I thought it was the nicest thing in the world. I’ve never said mercibeaucoup so many times.
A small Marseille port, lined with restaurants, including the notorious Chez Fonfon. A soup with a view.
About fifteen feet from the hotel is a tiny pizzeria, really rather a dump that’s mostly for take-out, where I got my final meal in Marseille. No more overpriced, underwhelming haute cuisine on this trip, I sniffed.
Again, the people. The pizzeria is run by a stout, olive-skinned woman in perhaps her mid-forties with a handkerchief on her head and flour on her hands. I bought three plain slices and while they heated up we chatted in stilted English (she apologized for hers) about where I was from and she seemed happy for this foreigner’s patronage.
She told me her son had just visited Miami and loved it. She asked if I had been and I had to say I wasn’t a big fan of South Beach — the place reeks of douchebaggery, though I left that out — but that young men adore it and, for that, America is doomed. I left that out, too. She chuckled. I took my slices back to the hotel and bellowed a hearty Merci! Au revoir!
Later, after watching “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” in French with no subtitles, I went to bed. I heard nothing but the occasional motorbike screaming down the narrow streets.
The city in its graffitied glory. Me, I love the street art. It has character, panache.
Been enthralled rewatching the eight-part docuseries “Simon Schama’s Power of Art,” keeping winter’s brrr at bay with deep insights and gobsmacking grandeur. The 2006 BBC show, now streaming, profiles an octet of artistic titans hosted by the smartest guy in the room, scholar and scamp Simon Schama, known for a heap of cultured feats, including “Citizens,” the landmark history of the French Revolution.
With theatrical kick and piercing opinions, Schama surveys these pigment-stained characters in one-hour slices: Caravaggio (blood, beauty and butchery); Bernini (boggling, blissed-out sculpture); Rembrandt (peerless Dutch portraits — “Mr. Clever Clogs,” Schama cracks); David (the divisive “Death of Marat”); Turner (violent squalls of blinding light); Van Gogh (dazzling swirl-scapes, with an ear to the ground); Picasso (Cubism: Braque ’n’ roll); and Rothko (pulsing rectangles of preternatural color).
Tweedy but cool, shirt buttoned low, Schama is a delight. He deploys effortless erudition with an impish glint in his eye, a calibrated smirk and a gift for eloquent, giggle-making irony — he’s brainy and funny. But he’s also dead serious, reverent, about his heroes and their eternal masterworks. Art, he seems to say, is no joke. Except when it is.
As one observer says, “Schama is not neutral; he argues, provokes, and interprets boldly,” adding that the series “helped shift popular art docs away from polite scholarship toward emotion, conflict, and stakes.”
It’s how he peels back the works’ essence and the artists’ humanism that stands out. For example, he not only declares but demonstrates how Van Gogh “created modern art” amid a maelstrom of mortal mental distress. (That chapter is understandably the most heartbreaking.)
If you like transcendent art — “Slave Ship”! “Starry Night”! “Guernica”! — cinematic reenactments with fine actors in real locations, and the sly, conspiratorial air of a charismatic host, the series is a feast. More than edifying, it’s electrifying.
Just listen to this guy: “Great art has dreadful manners,” says Schama, who writes every episode. “The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to rearrange your reality.”
Right about there, my knees buckle.
Schama presenting Caravaggio’s gleefully grisly “David with the Head of Goliath”
I’ve been blabbing here about going to Marseille in early February. A picturesque coastal city, the second largest in France, it’s famed for a gritty, hip, multicultural vibe, a fabulous port and craggy shorelines kissed by Listerine-blue Mediterranean waters.
Marseille is also famous for its motley cuisine, from French and Moroccan to pizza and West African. But above all it’s known for the iconic, somewhat extravagant seafood stew, bouillabaisse — rich, aromatic and typically made with various Mediterranean fish.
The recipe generally goes like this, and here I’m cribbing:
A traditional bouillabaisse has two parts:
The broth – saffron-gold, flavored with fennel, garlic, tomato, orange zest, olive oil, and Provençal herbs.
The fish – several firm, rock-dwelling fish from the Mediterranean, added in stages so each cooks properly.
Now, many hot-shot chefs mess with the recipe, adding shrimp, lobster, mussels and other mollusks, god forbid. This bouillabaisse virgin — never had it! — is allergic to shrimp and lobster (an adult-onset allergy; I love shrimp), so I fretted about where I would get a purely traditional fish stew in Marseille.
All the guidebooks and websites point to one restaurant, Chez Fonfon, which has been serving bouillabaisse for 74 years using scorpion fish, red mullet, eel and other fishies in its recipe. “We offer to prepare the fish in front of you or already prepared for immediate enjoyment,” says the Fonfon site. I’ll take the show, please.
Then, as is my wont, I over-thunk the meal. What if they also add shrimp or lobster? I’d just have to see. Or not. Yesterday I emailed Chez Fonfon and asked the question. A few hours later they responded.
“Our bouillabaisse is prepared in the traditional way, using only rock fish and vegetables. It does not contain any crustaceans such as shrimp or lobster.”
Jackpot. Now I can sleep at night and dream of rock fish swimming in my bowl, sans crustaceans stinking up the joint, toxic creatures that would make my throat swell, my breathing sputter, likely ending in my death, face-down in my very first, and last, bouillabaisse. Merde!
During the post-holiday malaise, things poke and peck at my addled brain, fretting about the good, the bad, the grotesque …
Starting with the latter — the elaborate idiocy, the vomit-inducing venality of the so-called Donroe Doctrine, whose cutesy moniker makes me wonder: Who is he kidding with this crap? The perverted man-child is not kidding with, in his words, “my own morality,” which includes everything from ICE to Iran, a rogue’s gallery of revulsion. I pray that crippling tragedy looms in his wretched future. His crew of groveling lapdogs? Same.
On the good side, I’ve cracked a newish book that’s been called by critics “a magnificent vision,” “transcendent,” “spectacular” and “not so much a novel as a marvel.” That would be Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” which is relatively slim for its daunting 700 pages. Yet what it lacks in girth it makes up in thudding weight. I could curl it and achieve Himalayan biceps.
I’m only on page 50 in this (let the publisher describe it) “story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity,” and I’m hooked.
It’s one of those chunky novels with character/family trees for a prologue, like “War and Peace” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which can trigger the scram instinct in me. I don’t relish flipping back every twenty pages to recount who’s who.
But so far, very good. Desai conjures scenes and characters with creamy eloquence and imagery as supple as a Degas. The prose is wise and true, and funny, too. I only have 650 pages to go (sound of me lifting a cinder block).
Planning for two imminent journeys — Southern France in February and, implausibly, Nashville in March — continues unabated. It’s kind of a chore, but, like cooking or Lego building, it becomes a stimulating hobby, a minor challenge with low stakes.
I’m doing well so far in this First World folly, but the fine tuning feels endless. A Nashville restaurant I booked just emailed to say, sorry, your reservation is canceled because we are now “permanently closed.” The same happened with the Patsy Cline Museum (maybe these closings qualify for the “bad” in my opening paragraph), which a dear friend hinted is better than the popular Johnny Cash Museum. Call me “Crazy,” but I’m more interested in Cline than Cash. Bummer.
I voluntarily bailed on a street-art tour in Marseille, France, as I came to my senses that $194 is obscenely too much for a two and half-hour stroll amidst what’s essentially glorified graffiti. I don’t even know how I got myself tangled in that scam.
But I do that a lot. I plan trips with wide eyes and a growling stomach at first, and then, as the dates approach, I reel myself in and get sensible. Like, do I really want to do that whiskey distillery tour and tasting in Nashville? Well, yes. Yes, I do.
Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” an exquisite novella I’ve read twice, once some years ago, once this winter, has been adapted for the small screen (Netflix) with mostly luminous results. Directed and co-scripted by Clint Bentley, the movie tells the story of a lumberjack razing towering forests in the Pacific Northwest to make way for the nation’s railroads. He marries. He has a child. Life intrudes.
Honoring the book’s ethereal touch, the movie aches to be a Terrence Malick epic: languid voice-overs, long traveling shots, fetishized natural beauty, breezes blowing through rustling trees, time-jumping episodes in place of linear plot.
It’s commanded by sylvan abundance and the honed, minimalistic performance by Joel Edgerton, whose eerie quietude is near-tragic if well-earned. Though cast in shadow, there is joy here — family, friends, sharp epiphanies. I was moved by the story’s rich poignancy and tender humanity. It’s as delicate as a dandelion.
The dog smells like a bowl of stale Doritos. The nor’easter is splatting rain and blowing tree-tossing gusts. Our sociopathic “president” continues to appall on a daily basis (no, you’re not getting the Nobel, so shut up). And I have a zit on my forehead that’s festering like Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Otherwise things are just super, grand and dandy, unless you consider that Diane Keaton, one of the most charming and beautiful creatures ever to grace the big screen, has died. Crushing. Long live Annie Hall.
I go to Mexico City in precisely one month, though just days before that I have a dental appointment I’d rather not keep but will, because two of my teeth appear to be turning gray (this mad world!). I’m afraid I am becoming wizened.
If you squint really hard you can squeeze out some of the bad news and unfettered horrors — Gaza, Ukraine, the new Spike Lee movie — unfurling across the world. But it’s not easy, and almost certainly not possible.
But back to the one kernel of okay news, my vacation in Mexico City, a full week in November. I’ve been booking tours and making reservations with tentacular zeal. And I’ve also been uprooting prior plans. In an earlier post I mentioned that I registered for a tacos al pastor cooking class, a splurge and a mash note to my favorite taco.
Well, I nixed the class (sorry, Anne R.!) for two expeditions: one a three-hour guided tour of the National Museum of Anthropology (sounds deadly, but I’m assured it’s essential) and the other a festive, three and a half-hour Tacos and Mezcal Tour, whose price tag I blush to share with you. Guess which tour I’m looking more forward to.
Other good news lurks. Fall has fallen, and despite the nor’easter, which is really quite mild in these parts, the weather is totally dreamy. Usually I’m abroad for Halloween — Europeans try very hard to get it down, though it’s still strictly amateur hour there — but I’ll be around this time and that’s a plus.
I dig a good monster mash. I also like all the costumes that I can’t tell what the hell they’re supposed to be. Is that a ballerina werewolf? I hope some savvy kids deck out as Annie Hall: men’s tie, vest and khakis, and that wide-brimmed hat. Sartorial genius. They can flummox all their friends who still dress in Pokémon.
On a side note, what ever happened to the smashed pumpkins in the street? In my day, that was as mandatory as begging for goodies. Kids today. So thoughtful. Or clueless.
I guess in the end that’s also good news. Smashing Pumpkins is a great band — pay special attention to the superhuman drummer — but smashing pumpkins is just boneheaded vandalism. Thus I hesitantly cheer its extinction.
Good news and bad news will always share a table, so we’re kind of stuck. Israeli hostages are freed (yay). Diane Keaton dies (boo). Leaves are falling with the temperature (yay). Jeff Tweedy releases a solo triple album (boo). Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, “One Battle After Another,” is an apparent masterpiece (yay). Oh, and the dog. Yes, the dog. He really needs a bath (self-explanatory).
About that Mexico City trip I’m taking in November, I think I’m getting carried away. I’m there for a week and already I’ve booked four dinners and six tours, and I’m scanning more adventures in the heaving megalopolis, which goes by the sporty acronym CDMX.
The gargantuan city is so overwhelming, with so much to see and eat, I feel I require more guidance and guardrails than on previous trips. I’m so fretful that I woke at 2 a.m. to make a pair of rarefied restaurant reservations just to make sure I secured them at the exact right time. (Scored!)
But I’m also a loner, so, when it comes to tours, I really don’t want to get stuck with too many chatty chuckleheads from, say, Melbourne and Milwaukee. I can roll my eyes only so much. Still, I have six tours on my slate, a personal record, which could be a canny or foolhardy proposition.
That said, I’m probably going to spend the rest of my time strolling the many neighborhoods solo and uncover my own delights. The place is frightfully big, so this expedition will either be sweetly exhilarating or operatically tragic.
One of the tours I’ve booked is of the vibrant Roma area, billed as a paradise of local markets, parks, trendy restaurants, bars and hipster cafes. If that’s my sort of thing — and it is, though I do love my grunge — it also evokes writer-director Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 memory film “Roma,” set in the neighborhood during the much different 1970s, when the socio-political scene was uniquely combustible. (The area, incidentally, is named after Rome, Italy, as a tribute to its wealth and culture.)
The award-dappled movie is a languid stunner, an autobiographical portrait of growing up in Cuarón’s tight upper-middle class family, with special focus on the domestic help, namely Cleo, who, beyond sweeping up dog poop and making beds, takes care of Cuarón and his three gangly siblings.
Deceptively simple, “Roma” — shot in shimmery, Oscar-winning black and white that looks like quicksilver — is family drama at its most heightened and honest. Its verité verve is pure documentary immersion.
From the director of masterworks “Y tu mamá también,” “Gravity” and “Children of Men,” the movie examines with a flea comb the daily dynamics of living and loving together, and all the pain and joy that involves, including fatal frictions between husband and wife.
And then there’s quiet, big-hearted Cleo, cooking and cleaning and embracing her role as part of the family — and in the process, becoming a sort of angelic savior keeping the clan together. The movie ranks #46 on the New York Times list of best films of the last 25 years.
As a childhood KISS fan, this makes my stomach twist. Trump has tapped the grizzled glam rockers as inductees to the Kennedy Center Honors this year, a tribute so perfectly tawdry, I don’t think many get the irony, the hilarity.
KISS, whose integrity has always been dubious, is reportedly not a fan of our portly prez, calling Trump a “true danger to democracy,” but now of course say they’re “honored.” Trump says he picked the bawdy band because they’ve “made a fortune,” which is true, but a repugnant reason to exalt them. He’s also trying to irk the libs, of course. Funniest snub: Tom Cruise dissed Trump’s induction. That’s why he’s a big-screen action hero who can practically fly, without a cape. (Seen the Photoshop illustration of Trump as Superman, cape and all? You’ll vomit.)
Trump’s so stupid he doesn’t even know what culture is. He also elected disco queen Gloria Gaynor for the honors, evidently unaware that her biggest hit “I Will Survive” is a celebrated gay anthem — a song he loves with ignorant gusto. It’s much like the Village People’s comically transparent “YMCA,” a Trump theme during his campaigns that he would clap to like a bloated orange oaf.
The bigot is blind. And deaf. Our tinpot despot has a tin ear.
Keeping it light, some recent news plucked from the headlines …
RIP Ozzy Osbourne, madman and mensch, who amazingly didn’t die of rabies. He was the gentle, doddering Prince of Darkness, whose live shows brought out the crowd-pleasing celebrant, all cackles and hand claps. He would hop like a pogo stick. I saw him in concert when I was 13, my first metal show. I can’t shake it decades later. Satan is smiling.
Trump can’t elude the loaded Epstein case, and he’s shaking in his loafers and pissing his pants as he tries to deflect the pressure. Wipe your brow, sir; the flop sweat is showing. And on a scathing “South Park,” so is your talking micro-penis.
The New York Times posted its 100 best films of the past 25 years just to tick me off. While I agree with the bulk of the choices, if in different order, some make me want to throttle the voters. For starters, “Parasite” (#1 ?!), “Mulholland Drive” (#2 ?!), “Inglourious Basterds,” “Hereditary,” “The Master,” “Amélie,” and I’m just getting going. But bless them for including “Melancholia,” “The New World,” “Grizzly Man,” “School of Rock,” and so many other gems. Still, I don’t know why I read such lists. I don’t need the aggravation.
She perched gracefully atop sign posts, fences, rocks and cars, like a canine ballerina, poised and pliant. Maddie the spotted coonhound was the subject of her owner’s lustrous photography, clearly in the spirit of William Wegman’s whimsical photos of his preternaturally patient Weimaraners. Maddie’s charming pictures boast 1.2 million Instagram followers and comprise two books. But there will be no new pup pics, as Maddie died this week at age 14. I just got acquainted with her visual poetry, and still I’m crestfallen. Her loving obit.
Chuck E. Cheese got mouse-trapped. “Come with me, Chuck E.,” said the policeman who arrested the human-sized mouse — er, a human in a mouse costume — at the children’s pizza chain in Tallahassee, Fla., this week. The un-mousey behavior? Credit card fraud. Somewhere Mickey Mouse is blushing. “Astonished children wondered why the restaurant’s mascot was seemingly done for the day even as they continued to eat pizza and play arcade games,” said one report. “How do you explain this to a 4 and a 6 year old?” asked a witness. A youngster wanted a photo with the mighty mouse, but “a cop out of nowhere grabs his arm and says: ‘Chuck E.’s busy right now.’” Dying to know how his fellow inmates take to his gaudy outfit, big plastic head and all.
Hulk Hogan, a hideous human being, did the world a favor — he died.
Next to the excellent bookabout the Beatles I just finished, I’ve been staying intellectually nourished this summer with a spate of lush art, from musical earworm discoveries to great movies revisited. These are some highlights so far:
My brother turned me on to the rambunctious novel “The Death of Bunny Munro,” and I don’t know if I should thank him or break his thumbs. Outrageous and splendidly salacious, the book, a dark comic romp, is by Nick Cave, the singer, performer, screenwriter and all-around Renaissance man, who looks like a dapper, raven-haired cadaver with a ghoulish gothic cast. Bunny, the protagonist, has just lost his wife to suicide. He decides to take his 9-year-old son, Bunny Jr., on a rambling, sex-fueled road trip that becomes a pervert’s picaresque filled with carnal catharsis and lessons learned for innocent but brilliant Junior, who appears to be on the spectrum. The novel pops with blazing prose, twisted laughs and, as one critic put it, “grotesque beauty.” This Bunny goes down the rabbit hole and never comes up for air.
Released in 2007, “There Will Be Blood” retains its status as a cinematic landmark and holds up awesomely years later, getting better on each viewing. The New York Times recently named it the third best movie of the 21st century so far, behind the number two slot, the flatly unworthy “Mulholland Drive.” Paul Thomas Anderson’s strange, majestic saga of greed, faith, misanthropy, violence and of course crude oil is anchored terrifyingly by Daniel-Day Lewis working his acting sorcery for one of the great performances of male tyranny. He’s a monster, and he’s mesmerizing. Johnny Greenwood’s eerie, atonal score is as epic as the gorgeous visuals, and lends the film much of its woozy, unsettling power. There’s so much grandeur going on, you have to ask: How did they do it?
I tend to be way behind on new popular music. (Olivia Rodrigo who?) Mostly I just ignore it, and then it takes years for an ancient song to wind its way to my virgin ears, and then it’s a revelation (and a slight embarrassment). Like, I just discovered the 2018 album by the inimitable Mitski, “Be the Cowboy,” which was slavered over by every critic and named the best record of that year many times over. I’m especially infatuated with two songs, “A Pearl” and “Me and My Husband,” neither of which were the album’s hits or standouts. But they’re little jewels to me, each just over two minutes long. Mitski, a Japanese American with a made-up stage name, plays with piano, synthesizers, horns and her trademark guitar on the album, which has been frequently called genre-defying, but is firmly modern pop, with an outré twist. I won’t get all music critic-y and deconstruct my two favorite songs, saying only that “A Pearl” is dreamlike and yearning and rather heart-tugging, while “Me and My Husband” is funky with perhaps terribly ironic lyrics about a marriage. Or not.
They are practically begging to die. So it seems amid a coterie of big wave surfers whose only aim in life is to locate the wickedest, most ferocious waves possible, get on their surfboards and hit the water and ride roaring barrels. That’s what ace documentarian Chris Smith captures in his transfixing HBO series “100 Foot Wave,” an unlikely plunge into foam and fury and a beautiful human portrait of a tribe of surfers who salivate at the sight of an unforgiving ocean that dares them to take it on. The nominal star is middle-aged master Garrett McNamara, who leads the surfers from massive swells in Portugal — you cannot believe how enormous the waves are — to the far reaches of the Pacific. It’s season three in the series, but start anywhere, because the drama — from gnarly surfing to nasty wipeouts — is everywhere. Watch with a glass of wine. Your adrenaline is going to skyrocket, in the best way.
GNASHING. 