A popular bumper sticker circulating when George W. Bush was president read “Bush is a Punk-Ass Chump” — a masterpiece of anti-dipshit propaganda that I proudly displayed.
(I was in Texas Bush-country at the time, so I didn’t dare slap it on my car, lest an overzealous cop pulled me over for some imaginary misdeed. The sticker found pride of place on my fridge.)
I’m reminded of the rascally decal by a new bottle of booze that just hit online shelves and is already sold out, dammit. It’s made by Empirical Spirits and it is called — squeamish eyes avert now — Fuck Trump and His Stupid Fucking Wall. This surely zesty libation is a “habanero spirit based on barley koji, pilsner malt and Belgian saison yeast.” I don’t know what in the hell that is, but I want it.
But, like I said, the 50cl bottles, at $68.51, are plumb sold out. You can sign up for email alerts when it’s back in stock here.
As I haven’t tried the drink, here’s more about it from Uncrate, an elegant site for the highly selective male shopper (gander at its galaxy of dizzyingly unaffordable goods here):
“It could end tomorrow, or we could be in for six more years. Either way, spirits like this bluntly-named one from Empirical might help make it all slightly more tolerable. Distilled in Copenhagen, this clear spirit is based on barley koji, pilsner malt, and Belgian saison yeast. A habanero vinegar is used to rectify the spirit, but the final product is free of a spicy kick in the face — unlike the current political reality we face each and every day.”
Cheers to that. Gulp your beverage of choice accordingly. Drink responsibly. Or in this case, go nuts. We are rather thirsty for change.
Though the FTHSFW spirit is gone for now, you still can get a T-shirt embossed with the bottle’s clinically-plain label here. You owe it to your country. Clink.
Though I’ve only made a wee dent in the book I got today — “Seven Types of Atheism” by philosopher John Gray — I am already bitten and beguiled. On page 33 of the 170-page manifesto, I find myself putting it down often to copy a tart line or provocative passage.
Gray, without airs but with erudition, places in his crosshairs the arm wrestle between religion and atheism, that eternal, irreconcilable chasm of belief, God and godlessness. He is acridly and relentlessly critical of both.
Dense but light on its feet, slim but chubby with fact, philosophy and opinion, the book reveals a bracing entertainer who hardly balks at taking intellectual swipes at celebrity atheists slash rational humanists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and other crusaders.
Gray, says The Guardian, “is a card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance, and for whom history has been little more than the sound of hacking and gouging.”
That’s my kind of guy, though Gray takes things a little further than I do when it comes to faith, history and humanism. Still, his book, from 2018, is studded with eyebrow-cocking history lessons, slashing judgments and pleasing iconoclasm. A few nuggets from my early reading:
“There is no such thing as ‘the atheist worldview.’ Atheism simply excludes the idea that the world is the work of a creator-god, which is not found in most religions. … Nowhere does Buddhism speak of a Supreme Being, and it is in fact an atheist religion.”
“Many versions of Jesus and his life can be supported on the basis of existing evidence. Among the least plausible are those that have been presented as fact by Christian churches.”
“Christian thinkers have interpreted the rise of their religion as a sign of Jesus’ divine nature. Among the many prophets teaching at the time, why should he alone have inspired a religion that spread to the last corner of the earth? Unless you think that human events unfold under some sort of divine guidance, the metamorphosis of Jesus’ teaching into a universal faith can only have been the result of a succession of accidents. … The Christian religion is a creation of chance.”
“A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning its prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species, they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair.”
Meeting celebrities is easy. Interviewing them is a breeze. They are generally polished to a professional sheen. They know how to play the game, which is patently transactional. Some are harder than others (I’m squinting at you, Paul Thomas Anderson). Matthew McConaughey? He’s a cinch.
A good ol’ boy from East Texas, with a boingy twang, squinchy blue eyes, and bounding with bonhomie, McConaughey is much like what he seems: a smart, friendly dude you might want to shoot a shot with. He’s a charismatic lava lamp, alive and aglow.
To a journalist like me in 1998 — young, a smidge green — he was the most caring, amicable guy around. I was having a face-to-face interview with the actor in a Beverly Hills hotel room during a junket for “The Newton Boys,” Richard Linkater’s ill-fated western-comedy. A Texas guy, McConaughey was fascinated that I’d recently relocated from California to Austin for a newspaper job as a film critic.
He seemed genuinely interested, and we talked all things Austin and Texas, acting and movies. And from the room balcony he pointed out the groovy ‘70s-style van in the parking lot that he was driving cross-country for the hell of it. He was 27. We bonded enough that he’d remember me for years afterward.
Like when he was walking the red carpet at the premiere of his 1999 comedy “Edtv” and he spotted me, grabbed my hand, pulled me aside and asked me how I was enjoying my new Texas hometown. He was sincere and serious, with laser eye-contact, shutting out the bustle around him. Then he smiled wide, cheeks caving into dimples, before moving on down the line.
He didn’t have to do that. He could have said hi, answered my softball questions and walked on. But he was cool, concerned, a gentleman. He had class.
Months later, when I ran into him at a Wendy’s on the University of Texas campus before a rare screening of Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 “Some Came Running,” McConaughey seemed a little out of his element, a tad awkward, though he still made a point of making me feel welcome and an equal. He spoke in a hushed drawl. He barely smiled. He kept things low-key. I introduced him to my girlfriend. He bought a large Coke. He sat in the middle row, we sat in the back.
The relationship between journalist and subject/source is a dicey one. They are rarely seamless. There’s a give and take, a perilous reciprocity that often leaves one party feeling burned. And so there’s this:
McConaughey was working the red carpet for the local premiere of Kevin Costner’s 1999 baseball melodrama “For the Love of the Game” at UT. He was beaming, strutting out of a black limo, in all white and all alone.
He isn’t in the movie, he was just a celeb guest at the gala. And he was chomping a hunk of gum like cud. He approached me affably, answered two questions, then sauntered into the auditorium, chased by hearty cheers.
I report details. I like what’s called “color” in my stories. So in my piece about the screening I prefaced McConaughey’s quotes with: “He was conspicuously chewing a huge wad of gum.” Readers want to know each iota of their beloved celebrities’ behavior. This, I thought, was a telling detail — innocuous but revealing. Or so I thought.
Matthew, gum, chew.
In 2003, four years after this gum-chewing reportage, the Austin Film Society threw a 10-year anniversary bash for the release of Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age masterwork “Dazed and Confused,” which was made in Austin and co-starred a cocky, hilarious young newcomer named Matthew McConaughey.
A red carpet press-line was formed. Here comes McConaughey, who I haven’t seen in four years. He is arm-in-arm with two young women, and chewing gum. I hurl him a question. He stops on a dime before me, and says, pointing to his mouth, “Tell them that I was ‘conspicuously chewing a huge wad of gum,’ you got that?” Dimples flashed, this time with a shit-eating grin, and he brusquely walked away with an up-yours swagger.
Perhaps, just maybe, I had pissed him off.
Forward five years, to 2008. I hadn’t seen People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (2005) since the “Dazed and Confused” screening and I was a little nervous as Iwas scheduled to interview him for the micro-indie comedy “Surfer, Dude” in Austin.
He was there, in shorts and sandals, hair mussed and shaggy, mood ebullient. He greeted me with glowing teeth and cavernous dimples. He was almost ecstatic. He loved this movie. He was back.
McConaughey during our “Surfer, Dude” interview
At the end of a very friendly chat, I screwed up the nerve to ask him about that day when he repeated back to me, “Tell them that I was ‘conspicuously chewing a huge wad of gum,’ you got that?”
He laughed heartily. “I didn’t like the use of the adverb ‘conspicuously,’” he told me, practically slapping my knee. “If you hadn’t used that word I wouldn’t have cared!” He was over it. We cracked up.
The intricate dance of writer and subject is a fragile one. Like that, it can topple in misunderstanding. It can snap on the perceived power of one simple word. But people, even movie stars with eggshell egos, are resilient, forgiving and, sometimes, like McConaughey, true mensches.
I am sipping wine as I write this, a chilled glass of Portuguese rosé that is an ideal swirl of sweet and dry, fruity and floral. It is 42 degrees outside. The fusty stereotype says that rosé is expressly a summer drink, just as some insist soup is only a winter meal. I say balderdash to both feeble-minded myths, which suffer a fatal lack of imagination.
So, indeed, I am sipping wine (rosé!). And I am thinking of an article a friend sent me about the intricate neurological processes involved in the simple joy of tasting wine. It says: “According to neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd, the flavor of wine ‘engages more of our brain than any other human behavior’” — be it pitching a baseball, basking in Bach, playing Fortnite or, I imagine, having tangly Tantric sex.
I’ll drink to that (and I did). More, and listen closely as the ideas get knotty:
“The apparently simple act of sipping Merlot involves a complex interplay of air and liquid controlled by coordinated movements of the tongue, jaw, diaphragm and throat. Inside the mouth, molecules in wine stimulate thousands of taste and odor receptors, sending a flavor signal to the brain that triggers massive cognitive computation involving pattern recognition, memory, value judgment, emotion and of course, pleasure.”
I’ll drink to that, too, mostly because that passage was as complex as some of the most sophisticated wine varietals, and it kind of gave me an instant hangover. (Shepherd’s book, by the way, is “Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine.”)
Yet so much jibber-jabber is a buzzkill. So let’s for a moment detour to Turkey, the last place I really indulged in wine. Namely to Göreme, in Cappadocia, where I enjoyed a marvelous wine tasting. Just me, the sommelier and lots of wine.
After almost crashing a rented motor scooter about four times in the craggy hills of Göreme, returning the vehicle well before it was due, I was rattled. Walking to the town center, defeated and with a comical helmet head, I caught a sign outside a handsome restaurant that said simply “Wine Tasting.” It was time for a drink, a celebration that I didn’t smash open my head toppling off the scooter into rocks and shrubs.
Apparently I stumbled upon a hotspot, the newish Mozaik Restaurant, which is rated the #1 restaurant in Göreme on TripAdvisor. (OK, it’s TripAdvisor — take it with a grain of salt.) For about $18.50 you get four tastings of the varietals of your choice. The wines come from the rugged Cappadocia region, a local tasting.
A rose from Cappadocia, served by my sunny sommelier.
Thing is, and I’m hardly complaining, my friendly host did not pour tasting measures — a few hearty sips — but pretty much full pours. I sat there for a good 90 minutes, sipping four glasses of wine — a Chardonnay, Merlot and, of course, two rosés. They were excellent, dimpled with notes and accents and bouquets and finishes and all that jazz.
I all but forgot about the scooter drama, because, little did I know, this was happening inside my head: The wine, recall from above, “stimulated thousands of taste and odor receptors, sending a flavor signal to the brain that triggered massive cognitive computation … emotion and, of course, pleasure.” (Italics mine.)
That’s a lot of action from a sip of fermented fruit. I know shamefully little about wine — I’m no vino snob; the rosé I’m sipping came out of a box — but I can tell good grape from rotgut pretty well. All that “cognitive computation” triggered by a “flavor signal” is nifty enough. But I think many of us agree it’s the “pleasure” that’s triggered that we are after. I’d drink to that, but, alas, my glass is empty.
Critics and crowds made big stinks over these movies this year. I didn’t.
1. “Roma” — Topping many “bests of” lists, Alfonso Cuarón’s meandering memory drama, based on his early-‘70s childhood in Mexico City, was the biggest disappointment of the year. Flaccid and unfocused, this pretty black and white picture is about Cuarón’s middle-class family just as their father leaves it. Fatally, the film’s nominal main character is the live-in housekeeper, who, perplexingly, is a narcotized, non-verbal cipher. Her reaction when she discovers she is pregnant rivals Buster Keaton’s stone face matched with Harpo Marx. Some critics have tried to pass off “Roma’s” absence of structure as a “meditation.” It is not. Rather it’s a story-free stream-of-consciousness that leaves little to grab onto and be affected by. Dog poop, believe it or not, plays one of the liveliest roles. For all of Cuarón’s lush, gliding camerawork, swooshing this way and that, capturing rambling life as it happens, the affair is implacably inert.
2.“Leave No Trace” — A film that leaves no trace, emotionally or otherwise, this achingly static homeless drama about a father (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter (Thomasin McKenzie — both shine) living off the grid in an Oregon forest suffocates on its own aridity. Scant happens when they’re hauled into social services, or when they attempt a run for the wild. For so much heart, little resonates.
3. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” — In this six-chapter Western anthology, the Coen brothers hew tightly to time-honored oater conventions while spinning them on their dusty Stetsons for typical tonal whiplash. Zigging from bloody to farcical at the speed of a bullet, with a game all-star cast, it’s handsome, violent, intriguing, and tediously quirky. (Earmark the episode with Zoe Kazan. She’s fantastic, and she’ll shatter your heart.)
4. “Shoplifters” — This sometimes playful Japanese social drama by the accomplished Hirokazu Kore-eda sporadically springs to life with small jolts that only make you hunger for more. The award-sprinkled film is about a family that relies on shoplifting to ease its poverty. Naturalistic and deeply humanistic, it suffers from a lack of movement, and the modest emotional punch comes too late.
5.“Private Life” — A hackneyed bourgeois dramedy about, sigh, a middle-aged couple that can’t have children in the traditional fashion, so try all manner of misadventure to conceive. The couple, played by Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn, great comic actors brought down by middling material, are New York writers (really?) surrounded by brainy friends (really?) who try and help. Marital friction erupts (really?) until a secret weapon appears. Hope abounds. This is slushy, sitcomy stuff that writer-director Tamara Jenkins (“The Savages”) is above.
6 more: an honor-roll of the overpraised, in no order:
“Isle of Dogs” — Wes Anderson, that leaping leprechaun of willed whimsy, presents a fun, funny premise about stray animated dogs sloughed off to a trash-heap island in Japan, until he, reliably, clutters things up with over-plotting and mirthless mayhem.
“You Were Never Really Here”— I wish someone could’ve said that to me after watching this turgid hitman character study, starring a grody Joaquin Phoenix and directed by the grit-addicted Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar”).
“Hereditary” — Toni Collette’s lashing performance as a beleaguered mother can’t salvage this confused supernatural horror tale that careers from realistic, upsetting family drama to near-laughable nonsense replete with séances, demons and covens.
“Mandy” — A full-on bonkers genre goulash of volcanic incoherence that, despite the presence of a teeth-gritting, eye-popping Nic Cage caked in baddies’ blood — just the way we like him — isn’t half as fun as it thinks it is.
“Black Panther” — As I wrote in June, I found this mega-hit a “slick, savvy vehicle that gets predictably bogged down in mythical mumbo-jumbo, comic-book convolutions and contrivances that I haven’t the energy to follow or care about.”
“Happy as Lazzaro” — Watching this coy Italian flirtation with magical-realism, I felt I was dying a slow, awkward death.
I am one of them. I am scum. A scoundrel. Rude, obnoxious, miserly, cheap.
I confess: I have gone into an independent bookstore with my phone or laptop, browsed, then purchased the books I wanted on my Apple device — inside the bookstore.
I did not carry the books to the cashier and buy them. No. With withering impudence, I hit the Amazon app, clicked twice and bought the books online, saving on average $8 per title. It was disgusting. It was exhilarating.
And it was wrong. No matter it was a decade ago, that cute little caper still reeks to high heaven. What I hate is that it’s probably worse than, if not equal to, what small bookshops are now dealing with: the tacky phenomenon of “showrooming,” explained here by The Guardian:
“Of all the insults that booksellers stomach, the most awful is the newest. Gone are the days when it was someone shoving a book down their pants … Now it is ‘showrooming’: when customers go to physical shops only to research purchases they will make online. This is a bugbear of the booksellers who have been engaged in a David and Goliath battle with online retailers for the past decade.”
Adds Keith Edmunds, a former bookstore owner, at Mental Floss: “They’ll come in and use their phone to take a picture of the cover and barcode and just use the bookstore as the Amazon showroom. It’s awful.”
It is awful. It’s gauche and sneaky. It gives one’s moral relativism a mighty workout.
As mentioned, I showroomed. Some 10 years ago at my local indie bookshop, I scanned the shelves for Vietnam travel guides, plucked three or four volumes, went to the bookshop cafe, cracked my laptop and bought the best titles — online, at huge discounts.
Back then, I thought this was hand-rubbingly clever, cutthroat capitalism in action: Screw you, full-priced bookstore. I found a real deal!
Even now I don’t like paying $18 for a new paperback that I’m not sure I’ll like and that I can usually get in used condition for $4 at Amazon (one penny, plus $3.99 shipping). And I admit, guiltlessly, that I shop Amazon a lot, though I’m more inclined to use the library these days, saving cash and trees.
On occasion I will haunt our local indie bookstores, used and new, but my fealty to them isn’t ironclad. I feel more spiritually crushed paying $27 for a book at the store than paying $16 for the same product online. It’s a virtue vs. Visa smackdown.
I want to support the local shops, yes, but it comes at a literal high price. I have philosophical quibbles with Amazon, even if many authors do not (word is they profit more from high-volume discount sites than full-price brick-and-mortar outfits).
What’s not cool is showrooming. If you’re going to drop cash at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, do it at home. Looking at books in a store helps you shop with accuracy, and asking staff questions about titles is invaluable. And why you’re there, you might actually buy a book from the indie shop, a move that could abet its fragile longevity.
A great tweet from the owner of Fountain Books in Richmond, VA, recently went viral:
“We had a lot of ‘showrooming’ today: people taking pictures of books and buying them from #Amazon in the store and even bragging about it. This is not ok, people.
Find it here.
Buy it here.
Keep us here.”
Your neighborhood bookshop. A showrooming-free zone.
In Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway production of “Network,” frantic stagecraft whirls with clamoring bodies in a dance of hectoring topicality.
Multiple technicians wield video cameras, roving the stage, filling television screens small and large around the theater. Actors coax “live-studio-audience” applause from the crowd and demand that we bellow, not once but several times, that brimstone incantation: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Led by Bryan Cranston’s bristling performance, there’s a lot to take in visually, if not intellectually. It’s all very slick, stylish and duly explosive. It’s a bombastic mediocrity.
Unlike Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film, written with literary panache by Paddy Chayefsky, this “Network” — adapted both too faithfully and too diffusely by Lee Hall — lacks the prescience about corporate greed and TV’s noxious influence. We know all that now. We’re living it. It makes this adamant version too on the nose. It brays to the choir.
But there is Cranston. As Howard Beale — crusty anchorman-turned frothing oracular madman-turned vitriolic TV commentator — the actor is a one-man brush fire. His fed-up Beale, who declares he’s going to kill himself on air, becomes, in the words of one of his venal bosses, “a latter-day prophet, a magnificent messianic figure, inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times.”
In one blazing scene, Cranston cracks. Sara Holdren at vulture.com describes it with zest:
“Cranston’s disintegration is a hell of a thing to watch, especially in the excruciating moments of silence before Beale launches into his first famous tirade. With a camera up in his face and that face looming, distorted with pain, up on the set’s back wall, Cranston stumbles and sways, squinting through tears and groping to pull the scattering fragments of his brain back together.”
All well and good, and Cranston veers to greatness. The rest of the cast — chiefly Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”) and Tony Goldwyn (“Scandal”) — is serviceable. No one stands out, meaning Cranston carries the lurching show, which never stops groping for to-the-minute provocation.
What really hobbles things, though, is a story diluted with redundancies and non-essential scenes. Goldwyn’s moments of midlife melodrama await merciful amputations.
Yet it might be argued that this “Network” is a raucous, rousing, gimmicky divertissement by master showman van Hove (2016’s knockout “A View from the Bridge”). He pulls many effective flourishes from his bag of tricks.
But van Hove underscores the text’s topicality with a crowd-pleasing urgency. The show is timely, perhaps too timely. By the end, this Beale reaches a point of clanging didacticism and facile relevance that’s tiresome for all its exertion.You yawn instead of wince.
“Rather than make one’s argument come alive, clichés do the reverse. They capture a morsel of thought, cover it in batter, and fry it into mush.” — Mark Abley in The Walrus
For good measure, here’s a rogue’s gallery of flagrant clichés. As language guru William Safire put it (with a sardonic wink): “Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.”
Don’t cry over spilt milk; Selling like hotcakes; The rest is history; Every cloud has a silver lining; When it rains it pours; Don’t judge a book by its cover; Don’t beat around the bush; Don’t count your chickens before they hatch; It’s a dog eat dog world; To be honest; Basically; With all due respect; Giving it 110%. It is what it is; Paradigm shift; Walk the walk; Pushing the envelope; Thinking outside the box; The elephant in the room.
The goose is loose, the geese unleashed. They waddle from the nearby park into the residential hinterland of manicured landscapes, Christmas lawn ornaments and porches peppered with boxes from Amazon and UPS. A suburban snow globe.
Remarkably noisy, honking their own holiday songs (worlds out of tune), the geese are like plumed seasonal interlopers that just want to say hi to their human neighbors. And poop all over. And occasionally whip up a nest and lay eggs in your front yard (that happened, true). And spread disease. And … we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
You know they’re coming from their squawky honks (squawnks?). Those bestial blasts are something else — the primitive, tortured horns on a 1912 Ford Model T. Nasally and blustery and violent. Atonal, discordant, foul (fowl?).
The geese are here — it’s winter. The plump poultry galumph, don’t fly, south for the winter, a whopping three blocks south, the lazy bums. The park creek is frozen and perhaps food is scarce. They move in small gaggles of two to four, really just giggles.
And for the number of dogs in the neighborhood, they are a bold lot. Strut they do, chests thrust, hooting and blaring. They are so cocky that they can be mean, and they’re known to attack humans if “provoked.”
Exhibit A:
Experts at Rutgers University call this “Nuisance Behavior.” I’d say. “When protecting nests and goslings, geese can become aggressive. Attacks are rare, but they can cause injury to small children and pets.” That looks like a full-fledged adult to me, in full-blown duck and cover. Take note.
The Rutgerians explain that Canada goose flocks, which are what these are, head for places of “recreational purposes, such as parks, athletic fields, and shorelines.” (“Recreational purposes” — love that. Maybe geese enjoy hoops and the monkey bars.)
Next to knocking you to the ground, the geese bring all sorts of wonderful. “Accumulation of feces potentially creates a foul odor and slippery conditions, and these areas quickly become unattractive to people,” notes the panel with exceptional acuity.
We like, if do not love, the geese. Animals will be animals. Dookie is what they doo-doo. Yet the academics present a bona fide dark side: “Canada geese are carriers of bacteria and parasites that may be pathogenic to humans,” the most common being E. coli.
Rule No. 1: Do not pet the geese. Play it safe and don’t even look at them. They’ll probably give you the stink-eye anyway. No. 2: Wipe your shoes with a kind of horror-movie panic.
Jesus.
The more I learn about these geese the more they unnerve me. The more I want to purchase a crossbow. They are ornery, incontinent, complaining, belligerent and noxious. Plus, they’re homely devils.
Not long ago a story ran at thedodo.com with the headline “Why Are Geese Such Assholes?” The piece describes geese attacking humans, but implicates ducks, chickens and turkeys, too, as being “over the top,” says a woman.
“But as it turns out,” writes the author, “it’s actually for a very sweet reason. ‘The moms protect their eggs and young. The dads protect their families — their flock,’ ” says the same woman.
Best lines in the story: “A wildlife officer agrees that geese are just really scary into their kids. Like soccer mom scary.”
While I’m sort of reveling in reviling the creatures, there’s this factoid that should unsettle all air travelers, those with and without feathers: “Canada geese can be a significant threat to aircrafts … Of the approximately 95,000 bird-aircraft strikes that occurred in the U.S. since 1990, about 5,300 involved Canada geese.”
That seals it. I haven’t been assailed, squawnked at or otherwise molested by the local geese, those downy demons that make the occasional sojourn from the park to car-strewn streets, plop caca and hypothetically ravage a berserkly horrified human. But I’m taking no chances. Those beaks look ferocious, the flapping wingspans formidable. About now I’m thinking I need a fresh set of down pillows. Perhaps a comforter, too.
People, places and culture — little consolations — that are turning me on (saving me?) in the waning days of a sometimes unbearably tumultuous year …
Courtney Barnett — Guitar rock lives. Or so we can dream, a reverie persuasively advanced by grungy guitar-slinger Barnett, a pop-punk pixie who’s making some of the crunchiest, catchiest, folky-fuzzy rock around, music that sounds improbably lasting. A devout DIYer with a Grammy nod and fervent following, Barnett traces the raw, minimalist contours of Nirvana and the Pixies, with squalling distortion and a voice so uninflected that her Australian accent claws right through. That voice echoes the talk-singing and slightly nasal tones of Liz Phair, Patti Smith and The Hold Steady. Wincingly intimate, her jagged, jangly songs are shot through with personal drama and cutting irony. Often they’re downright hilarious. Choice cuts: “Pedestrian at Best,” “Debbie Downer,” “Avant Gardener,” “City Looks Pretty.” Watch her in concert HERE. And visit her squiggly world HERE.
“Night Train”: New and SelectedStories by Thom Jones —I didn’t even know Jones died two years ago. He’s one of my favorite short fiction writers and I kept wondering where in the hell he went, when he would publish again. I was alerted to his fate by this posthumous assemblage, plucked from Jones’ classic ’90s collections “The Pugilist at Rest,” “Cold Snap” and “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” each worth owning, and cherishing. But with this chubby tome, featuring seven new stories, including the typically mordant title tale and spanning the biting, semi-autobiographical Vietnam War epic “The Pugilist at Rest” to the absurdist vermin mayhem of “Mouses,” Jones’ spare, sinewy, mean and bust-up funny realism comes into exhilarating focus. Fueled by grit, violence and the tough tenets of his hero Arthur Schopenhauer, this is essential contemporary fiction.
Gin and tonic at Angel’s Share—Last month I drank a gin and tonic with a Japanese gin I criminally did not get the name of at Angel’s Share, the dark, elbow-jabbing speakeasy in New York’s East Village. It was the smoothest, lightest, tastiest G&T I’ve ever sipped, spritzed with a gorgeously un-cloying tonic that was gently fizzy, not nose-tickingly fizzy. The drink was a perfect alchemical mingling of alcohol and mixer, a frosty masterpiece. (If only I could afford the $17 elixir more than once a year.)
“I Am Dynamite!”by Sue Prideaux — Penetrating and punchy, with an attractively light touch for the weighty subject, Prideaux’s new biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of my dearest great dead thinkers — atheism! nihilism! iconoclasm! self-invention! and more furrowed-brow brilliance — is like literary windshield wipers, a slashing text of clarification and demystification. Despite the luxuriously daunting walrus mustache and monumental scowl worthy of a grumpus Mount Rushmore, the German polymath — yes: a prickly, willful malcontent — wasn’t the poisonous philosophical force we’ve been warned of. (For one, he abhorred antisemitism.) Reason reigned, until it crumbled amidst the famous crack-up that would kill him at age 56. Dead: first God, then him.
Istanbul — First come the post-vacation blues: the immediate despondency felt when you return home from a great trip. Crap, it’s over. And then there’s the afterglow: the crazy satisfaction and rapture you feel when the depression burns off. Damn, that was the best trip ever! I got back from Turkey last month and I’m basking in the afterglow. I was mostly in Istanbul, one of few cities that can hurl me into a dream state that’s as wondrous as it is ineffable, an otherworldly stupor of sights, sounds and flavors, pocked by the lovable multitude of stray dogs and cats and the unfailingly caring and splendid people. I still savor my Istanbul lodgings, the über-charming boutique Hotel Ibrahim Pasha and, in Cappadocia in Central Turkey, the Pumpkin Göreme Restaurant and Art Gallery, where the cheap and divine fixed menu delivers the allure of Turkey on many plates. If I sound a little intoxicated by it all, I am.
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
“Skate Kitchen” — The young women of this scruffy 2018 skateboard drama are hell on wheels — or is that Chanel on wheels? No way. The tribe of shredding female street teens are all about the clacking and scraping of boards on New York concrete, smoking spliffs and coupling with the opposite (or same) sex. The star here is bespectacled Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), a taciturn 18-year-old from Long Island who defies her mother for the skate parks and subways of Manhattan, where she’s promptly absorbed into a rowdy posse of all-girl skaters. The film is predictably sincere about teen rebellion equating to freedom and addressing, softly, teen politics and gender politics. Yet it works; it has kick. Crystal Moselle (2015’s hit documentary “The Wolfpack”) shoots with a meandering vérité camera, the city captured with gritty love and bloodied-knee realism, and music to match. The movie is on DVD and streaming. The trailer’s HERE.
Cubby the Wonder Dog— The perennially pampered pup, huge heart, small bladder, gives as good as he gets — hugs and snuggles, mutual adoration, tricks and treats, ribald chit-chat over Scotch and cigars. We love the mutt with our lives, no matter if he begs, bedevils the cats or poops and pees on occasion and off the Wee-Wee Pad. Spiritual creatures, dogs are fuzzy founts of friendship, besting humans, I’m afraid. I’m rotten when I wake up, until I see that damn dog wagging his curled tail and things fall into place. Mused author Thom Jones (see above): “Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them, filling an emptiness we don’t even know we have.”
GNASHING. 