So after a lot of pre-release buzz the Jennifer Lawrence film Die My Love fizzled at the box office and did not get much attention. (Note: Minor spoilers ahead.) That’s a bit unfortunate, as it has the terrific performance of Sissy Spacek as crazy J-Law’s mother-in-law, who is trying to help her overcome postpartum depression.
Sissy’s and Jennifer’s scenes are the glue that holds the fractured storyline (and structure) together. Sissy plays Pam, Jennifer Lawrence’s (as Grace) husband’s mother, with husband played by the feckless Robert Pattinson (as Jackson). I felt sorry for Jackson throughout, who seems harmless enough, except for bringing home a puppy to the much-addled and psychologically desperate Grace, not the right move. Grace descends into madness as the new dog barks and barks.
After a while you see this is not going to end pleasantly. Ultimately she channels her inner Kristi Noem, famous for bragging about how tough she was to shoot a dog that bothered her. (It’s a short step from shooting a troublesome dog to shooting troublesome people, as Kristi’s ICE goons are doing now in Minnesota. No. Correction: It’s not a short step. It’s no step. It just shooting living things you don’t like.)
Looming in the background of Die My Love is the topic of postpartum depression. I hesitate to say that’s what it’s “about,” which would be reductive and dismissive. It’s not a Lifetime Channel movie or an ABC After School Special. It has a great cast (including Nick Nolte as Harry, Jackson’s dementia-cursed father), an artsy sensitivity, and a fragmented structure—much is elliptical and unstated. Jackson works but it never really shows what he does. We never know much about him. He’s the Boyfriend, the Young Father, then after their (ill-advised) marriage he’s the Husband. The guy we can feel sorry for.
Then there’s Grace, the Mother, who starts out like a firecracker—in vintage, sassy Jennifer Lawrence mode—and fizzles into a basket case. She creates a tragic, believable character, although at times it seems the director told her, “Just act crazy.” She crawls around on the ground a lot. She barks a lot. She pleasures herself . . . a lot. She takes care of her baby a lot—until the madness sets in, and then it’s like “Baby? What baby?” Ostensibly she’s a “writer,” although they never really mention anything she’s written. At one point Jackson asks her how she’s doing on writing The Great American Novel. He’s lucky he doesn’t get stabbed in the forehead with a fork.
One of the saddest scenes occurs late, when Jackson is driving Grace home after she’s had a hospital stay. They sing along with the great John Prine/Iris DeMent song “In Spite of Ourselves” as it plays on the radio. Poignant moment. When she finally confesses, “I can’t go back” it’s heartbreaking. We the audience don’t know exactly why she feels cornered and trapped, but we can guess. Good soundtrack. They also play the great Johnny Cash song “The Beast in Me.”
So my wife and I are inveterate backpackers—the seasoned, often bedraggled kind. We’ve backpacked in many locations from Denali National Park in Alaska (perhaps the “wildest” backcountry) to Yellowstone and the Wind Rivers in Wyoming and many others. But truth is we don’t enjoy carrying heavy packs on our back. That’s the hard part. Sometimes the miserable part. (Depends on how far you have to go.) The reward, however, is always worth it: We backpack to reach beautiful, untrammeled and uncrowded locales. (Yellowstone is our favorite, have done about a dozen pack trips there.)
En route to Alaska, the Saskatchewan River near Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.
Shouldering the packs is always a chore. Sure, we try to pack lightweight and carry ultra-lightweight tent etc, but usually for a weeklong adventure my pack would be around fifty pounds. That’s a third of my weight and about as much as I want to lug. Most movies that depict backpacking are silly, fake, or foolish. You can always tell the actors don’t have much weight in their packs. They stand so straight! And when they stop they don’t drop their backpacks asap. I always suspect the packs are filled with Styrofoam peanuts. They often seem as if filmed by people who have never or very seldom carried a pack for miles. Which is where last year’s excellent film The Salt Path deserves a mention.
While I usually try to avoid spoilers, I should note this is most definitely not a thriller, murder-mystery, horror, scifi, or action-adventure flick. No demon strippers or flying monkeys either. It’s quiet, thoughtful, compassionate, and touching. There are some surprises I won’t reveal. But the core of the film, and the engine of its charm and emotional appeal, is an aging, late-Middle-Age couple (they have grown children) who embark on the “Salt Path”—a backpacking trail that follows the coast of England for several hundred miles.
Opposed to the fake backpacking films I rant about, the packing depicted in the film seems surprisingly realistic. For one thing, it looks hard. The husband is played by Jason Isaacs, of recent White Lotus fame, season three in Thailand. (He played the father who decides to kill his family due to financial collapse.) He struggles at backpacking more than I ever have, and he has to go miles and miles. I felt sorry for him from his first limping steps. The wife is played by Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame, although that seems dismissive: She’s been in many films and television since that Nineties show, including Sex Education and The Crown—in which she played Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher. She is remarkably stoic in their physical travels and travails. Anderson does a good job of not milking the difficulty, but not sugar-coating it either.
Yet the film is not only or even primarily about “backpacking.” As I’ve noted in my intro, I think of carrying heavy packs as just a means to an end. The film touches on our modern economic perils, on companionship, on honor and dignity, and on how to survive and even prevail when the going gets tough. It’s touching and heartfelt. A rare commodity these days. We watched this movie out of sheer chance, and I’ve remembered it more fondly than most films I saw last year. Here’s a comparison: One Battle After Another is being touted as this year’s Best Picture; The Salt Path is better.
Note this is a true story. That adds some zing to the suffering and the struggle of the couple. Based on the eponymous book by Raynor Winn, which is touted as an International Best Seller and the Best Book of 2019 by NPR’s Book Concierge.
So last year my family got the itch to take an unplanned springtime beach vacation. Long story short: We had nothing booked, and only a vague notion of where we might want to go. Florida is nice enough, sure, but it’s . . . Florida. And in March/April, busy with Spring-breakers. We love Hawaii and have been several times, but our usual resort venues were all booked up.
Meanwhile we were watching the third season of White Lotus, set in Thailand. At one point a character said, “No wonder no one comes here.” Huh? (Which is definitely not true, but from my anecdotal experience could be amended to No wonder not many Americans come here.) That piqued my curiosity. I got to checking and found a resort and flights for reasonable cost, and in the blink of an eye, suddenly we (wife, myself, and eighteen-year-old daughter) were going to Thailand.
Mind you I pretty much knew nothing about Thailand. A good friend of mine years ago did psilocybin mushrooms on a Thai beach and said that I had to go there—which was alluring, but a distant memory. Most of what I knew at booking came from White Lotus. So I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand. Although we stay at nice hotels/resorts, we wouldn’t be doing the Four Seasons—whose villas can run over four thousand dollars/night. Two weeks on the island of Phuket in mid-April here we go.
Beach sunset on first day
After the trip I discovered the term “Set-Jetters”—people who travel to places they have seen in movies/TV. We joined the club, so to speak. First surprise: our resort was adjacent to the Anantara resort at Mai Khao beach on Phuket Island. Like, right there. (White Lotus was shot in a variety of resort locations in Thailand. Anantara at Mai Khao was just the opening and closing scenes.) It immediately seemed like we were stepping into the HBO series. We stayed at the Mai Khao Marriott resort. From what I’d read about it, I guessed it would be somewhat loud, boisterous, and teeming with kids. (It was described as the “family” resort in the trio of Marriott resorts at that location.)
Resort view from terrace
Instead it was quiet and peaceful—serene, even. A twenty-foot-tall metal sculpture/contraption with a large brightly painted bucket filled with water constantly then tipped it over to dump it into a kiddy pool complex, filling the pool area with the pleasant sound of splashing water, even when no one was swimming. It seemed like stepping into the storyline of White Lotus—only without the incest and murderous, rich-bastard plotlines. Good restaurants were nearby, and we also ate at the famous open air markets in Phuket City. I liked the beach-side restaurants the most.
Elephant on beach in front of restaurant
Second surprise: at our local Turtle Mart (a kind of artistic mini-mall) there were high-end clothing boutiques, a small grocery mart, a Starbucks, and a cannabis dispensary. It’s legal in Thailand. Although the hotel complex is no-smoking, they allow smoking on the terraces (every room has one, as far as I could tell), so it was the first hotel I’ve ever visited where you could smoke cannabis legally, without having to stuff a towel beneath the bathroom door.
Third surprise: The snorkeling and sea-kayaking were great. We took tour boats to various locations, both east and west of Phuket island, cheaper than Hawaiian excursions.
Tour boat in Andaman Sea
Usually the tour boat maneuvered close to smaller islands and launched the sea kayaks for us to paddle through lagoons.
In some places we paddled through sea caves, way cool.
Sea cave from kayak
The snorkeling was fantastic. Better than Hawaii. Why: At least in March (when I’ve been to Hawaii) the Pacific is still pretty chilly when you go snorkeling. I’ve been shivering while snorkeling in Hawaii more than once. Thai ocean water is warm but not hot. Just right.
Lovely exotic fish near snorkeling reef
That’s perhaps our biggest difference between the mythical White Lotus family and our real-life vacay: We were active, went out and did things. We snorkeled at the Phi Phi Islands and the Similan Islands (at which many movies have been filmed, as our guide hilariously informed us, including by having us pose with fake guns at James Bond Island). My daughter tried jet-skiing and scuba-diving.
Andaman Sea snorkeling
There was more wildlife than I expected: monkeys, monitor lizards, elephants, exotic birdlife.
Monitor lizard in kayaking cove
The monkeys were a bit unsettling. On one “Monkey Island” (I had the sense that wasn’t its real name but what it was called by the tour-boat guides) they were scattered across the beach, and curious about our kayaks. A guide warned me to be careful: They like to steal tourists’ cameras and rush into the jungle and hide them.
Monkey coming for my camera on kayak
We arrived in late April, the start of monsoon season. After a 30+ hour flight from Colorado via Hong Kong we were a bit frazzled and discombobulated when we picked up the rental car. (Note: Skip it. You don’t need one.) When we walked outside to pick it up rain was pouring down in gray torrents. My glasses fogged. It was maybe 98 degrees with 100% humidity. It felt like a scene from Swimming to Cambodia.
Monsoons from our terrace
Our greatest drama? (Well, mine.) Driving on the left side of the road and trying to avoid running over the many mopeds. On the way to the resort, first day, my daughter was in front seat, saying, “Dad? Dad? You’re on the wrong side of the road again.” And I’m like, “Yeah . . . I know that,” while trying to suavely steer back in the correct lane without mangling any Thai people. Other drama: When daughter lost her passport, right before leaving for the airport to Bangkok. This instigated frantic searching, bickering (“I gave it to you!” “No, you didn’t!”) and general mayhem. Told she couldn’t fly without a passport, she moped back to the car in disgrace and disappointment . . . only to listen to her mother and (finally) check one more place, and there it was. She flew to Bangkok on another adventure while my wife and I had one final night at the resort, with final sunset splendor.
Andaman Sea sunset
Do I recommend “set-jetting”? Absolutely. Especially to Thailand. Food was great, people were friendly. I realize we have also done it twice: After the first White Lotus, set on Maui, Hawaii, we went to Maui. Apparently the next season takes place somewhere on the French Riviera: Ooh la la.
So I sleep with dogs. (You got a problem with that?) Actually that should be “dog,” singular, a particularly cantankerous Beagle-Terrier mutt named Swishy. Although in my head I think “dogs,” plural, because Swish is not the first dog I’ve ever slept with, and probably not the last. (Note I am not being “metaphorical.”) One mutt I slept with back in the Seventies was named Mozart. (I still miss him.) But why? It’s therapy. Who wouldn’t like a furry, warm, supremely loyal beast sleeping beside them in the night? One who would bark at and frighten any intruders? (Even though I can’t say I’m worried about intruders interrupting my sleep, but still.) There’s a kind of Zen calm you experience when waking in the middle of the night (like last night, when our house was shaken by tremendous mountain winds) and reaching over to pat your snoozing mutt. I pat her back, feel her furry ribcage, scratch her belly. Now Swish is an easy fit in bed: She weighs a little over twenty pounds and is on the Small side of a Medium. It is true, however, that if I nudge her accidentally with my foot at any time in the night she will growl or yelp out of all proportion with my gentle nudge. But . . . what can you do? A true dog lover doesn’t flinch at an occasional growl. Or quibble about size and poundage. I visited a friend in Austin, Texas a few years back and his guest room was his dogs’ room. So I had two oversized furry mutts, Luke & Tazz, as my bed companions. They were both long-haired beasts and it was shedding season. I was covered in so much fur in the morning I was an Honorary Dog. Here’s a photo of the Most Loyal Dog in the World (which is, like, every dog owner’s dog):
So here’s a story that hasn’t been featured much in the news media: The Southwest has had a pitiful winter so far—parched and warm. It’s drier than a tumbleweed here in south-central Colorado. And it’s worse elsewhere south and west of here. It’s like the flip side of the famous “Year Without a Summer” (1816) that is cited as an impetus for the creation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and is widely believed to have been caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, circa 1815. What’s our warm winter cause? Most likely La Niña, which tends to cause the jet stream to veer farther north, making winters warmer and dryer in the Southwest. Whatever the cause, the result is very little snow and brown grasses in fields and hillsides usually white. Ski resorts in Colorado are panicking. I’ve owned a home in the Sangre de Cristo mountains since 2003. This is the worst snow drought I can remember.
Although there is some snow—as the photo above illustrates, showing the Wet Mountain Valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains west of Pueblo, Colorado—it’s a pittance of what we usually have. Climate change likely has a role in this moisture decrease as well. At one point in climatologist Michael Mann’s excellent book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012) he warns that La Niña winters could become common in the West, and exacerbate a mega-drought. It seems to be happening.
So I have to begin with a confession: I’m most definitely a fan of the much-acclaimed nonfiction writer Simon Winchester. One of my first Winchester reads and still one of his finest (and my favorite) was Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003), his epic description of the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, the final explosions of which are still recognized as the loudest sounds ever heard by humans, back in 1883. (The noise was heard over a thousand miles away.) It does a great job of bringing that (literally) earth-shaking event to life, and setting it in the context of the history of Indonesia, as well as the geography and vulcanology of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. One image he describes has stayed with me: In the months before the final eruption the beaches of Krakatoa actually split apart and spewed lava into the ocean. It’s an amazing book of an amazing event.
Since then Winchester has given his readers a number of excellent works, including A Crack at the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (2005), Atlantic (2010), and many others. He’s perhaps the King of Fun Facts, but that seems a slight of sorts: Not only does he have a knack for the scintillating detail that makes a story come to life, but he also writes in a literary, approachable style. With books on such expansive topics such as Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World (2021), the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, he tends to grapple with Big Topics, usually with a geographical angle. His latest book is a daring addition to that tendency, about no less than the atmospheric phenomenon we all know as Wind—titled The Breath of the Gods: The History and the Future of the Wind (2025).
It’s one of my favorites of his recent books—not as exhaustive and exhausting as Land or Atlantic. As usual it’s full of Fun Facts, including terrific descriptions of why hurricanes rotate counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern. From the “singing” sound of wind on sand dunes (which happens at The Great Sand Dunes National Park near Alamosa, Colorado) to the derided racial theories of climate, Winchester examines the minutiae of wind from both a physical and a cultural viewpoint. He notes in the beginning the curious phenomenon called The Great Stilling, the diminishment of wind speeds over land in the decades between 1980-2010 (which has abated in some areas). Readers of a scientific bent will love it.
So I recently read the somewhat-infamous bestseller by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (2025). It’s a white-knuckled warning about the imminent peril of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). Note that they emphasize the distinction between run-of-the-mill A.I.—the kind that will write your term paper on The Great Gatsby or create a video of a cat playing a banjo—and the humanity-shattering A.S.I. that will bioengineer a super-virus to infect us all.
Did I enjoy the read? Hmmm. Technically I’d say it’s not really “good” and has many flaws, but is fascinating nonetheless. Basically it argues we could never control ASI so we shouldn’t build it: ASI will find humans dispensable and get rid of them. They (two authors) may very well be right but their writing style/organization is rather slipshod. They don’t have much evidence for the argument so you basically just have to believe them (that we’re all doomed). Worst thing about the book: Each chapter begins with a parable that it seems they (wait: two authors? how does that work, anyway?) made up. And the parables aren’t very good. After the parable comes a lot of ranting. The rants certainly include scary info nuggets: Some A.I. experts say the chance of ASI apocalypse is anywhere from 10-50%! (They quote various experts.) And they’re talking about the very foreseeable future. At some point they posit we maybe have 10 years left. They make a good argument that ASI research needs to slow down, that we’re rushing to create a super machine intelligence that we won’t understand or be able to control. One implication/subtext suggests ASI would be sneaky and untrustworthy. That it could pretend to be “aligned” with our goals—say, searching for cure for cancer—but meanwhile it would be developing some way to get rid of the pesky humans who want to find the cure for cancer. And we would have no idea what it was up to.
In the wider context of the A.I. and A.S.I. benefits/drawbacks debate—on the one hand we can giggle at the banjo-playing cat, before wailing in anguish as we face a horde of killer A.I. drones—certainly Yudkowsky and Soares argue an extreme viewpoint, but one that (according to them) is shared by many A.I. experts, including Nobel-prize winners. Others are equally cautious, and suggest an even earlier expiration date for humanity, such as the scenarios suggested in AI 2027, a polemic published last year by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean.
A more moderate, cautious approach to the peril is suggested by Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
As the credits note, Suleyman is the co-founder of Deepmind and Inflection AI, so it’s an insider’s perspective. The Coming Wave has a user-friendly structure and more “evidence” to support its grandiose proclamations that A.I. will be the greatest invention since fire, but its Pollyanna view of the future at times seems decidedly foolish. One example: He asserts that A.I. will be such an economic benefit that humans won’t have to work much anymore, and gives a casual nod to the idea of a “universal income”—that seems rather unlikely, considering human nature. Okay we’ve taken driving away from humans, and factory work, and medicine, and retail work . . . . So someone (who? the government? Google?) is going to give us all the money to buy all the products that A.I. will make so incredibly efficient to market? Good luck with that. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, sugar-coated. But I imagine many readers will read TheComingWave out of the same impulse as I: Curiosity. For that reason, it’s a good book. Actually, after reading both books (plus A.I. 2027), I think I understand the nature and dangers of A.I. more than ever, and that at least my worries are informed. But how to reconcile the urgent warnings in If Anyone Builds It and A.I. 2027 with the well-documented and much-discussed frantic research into achieving A.S.I.? Greed, basically. Could the combination of greed and entertaining fake videos of banjo-playing cats do in humanity? Maybe.
So one of the downsides of our irritating Consumer Culture is that we’re programmed to be always looking for the next New Thing—be it car, refrigerator, book, movie, or significant other. It can lead to a niggling feeling that our lives are disposable, cheap, and tawdry. And while I read “voraciously” (though I don’t eat the pages) I’m often less-than-impressed with the results: I read 24 books in the last year and would count maybe 4-5 as “good” or “excellent,” with the other 20 being so-so or disappointing. (Case in point: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 (2025). It’s okay and interesting, but that’s about it.) After finishing a recent read—Simon Winchester’s The Breath of the Gods—I cast about for a new read. Nothing new grabbed me. So I poked around my library and found a First Edition (American) of Yasunari Kawabata’s novel The Lake, originally published 1954. (American first edition published 1974, 52 years ago!)
It’s nothing less than an eerie, exquisite masterpiece. First novel I’d read in several months. There’s a timeless weirdness to it. And a bit of synchronicity: At times it feels like a reimagined Lolita (1954), with less sex and more pathology. Both novels have a lyrical quality that elevates them over the ordinary best-seller with which we often clog our brains. (I’m looking at you, Dan Brown.) The final scene unfolds at a Firefly Festival in Japan, where they release captured fireflies from a tower in park, with a lake below. The festival-goers paddle rowboats onto the lake to catch the fireflies as they float from the sky. I want to live in that festival. That’s what the best books do.
So my title today is a nod to my writer-friend’s excellent book of stories, George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (of which I have a rare first edition). With all the ICE chaos and MAGA mayhem it’s a relief to see the natural world surviving and thriving in the face of such stupidity. Yesterday during a snowstorm we had a bobcat hunting squirrels in our back yard. Our dog and cat harass the squirrels but never come close to actually catching one. Here’s the predator in its glory:
This one is something of a “gray morph”: We’ve had bobcats in the yard before that were much redder. It almost looks like a lynx. The hunt was fascinating to watch: Bobcat treed the squirrel up our large locust tree and kept getting closer. It sat patiently for a while, at base of tree.
Finally the squirrel ran up high and bobcat shot up after it and knocked it out, then scampered down and nabbed it when it was still stunned. Like the snail said after the wreck with a tortoise, “It all happened so fast.”
So I’m still a skeptic as far as alien visitors are concerned but it seems I’m bumping into extraterrestrial stories whenever I turn on the TV. Following the epic success of Better Call Saul (one of my favorite series of all time) the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan (great name), has returned to the New Mexican landscape with a mind-bending show titled Pluribus.
Without giving too much away I can say that it’s a clever send-up of the often-asked question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Well, in Pluribus, we do all get along, or at least most of us—all but 12 survivors of a global cataclysm. Rhea Seehorn (who played Kim on Better Call Saul) is the flinty star of the show. She’s good in the role but awfully ornery. At least she is until toward the end of Season One, when she does loosen up a bit. My take: The shadow of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) lurks in the background. The cataclysm that occurs seems a metaphor for an ASI apocalypse of sorts. Good news: It’s not all bad! Everyone gets along! (Of course there’s a catch that I won’t give away: Watch the show and find out.) That brings us to Bugonia, which will no doubt be somebody’s darling in the awards shows.
Alien life forms and civilizations hover around the edges of this story, and not wanting to give too much away, I’ll leave it at that. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are both terrific in it, and mange to pull off the kookiness with aplomb. But in both Pluribus and Bugonia there’s a hint (or more) of humankind having an expiration date. It’s our zeitgeist. Will the 21st century be our last? I doubt it. But every century has its apocalyptic moments, and we seem to be fodder for the End Times.
