The Enthusiasm Index: May 30

Hi. I’m Ryan. I’ve written books about Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett. I was a sportswriter for a long time. Now I’m writing this. It’s a newsletter about sports, music, travel and other things we enjoy. It’s called Portfolio of Enthusiasms. It’s free, but we’d love it if you subscribed and/or shared this with your friends. Welcome to Issue No. 4, a return to The Enthusiasm Index. It’s a quick run through cool stuff from today, tomorrow or whenever. Got something you dig, you’re thinking about and/or looking forward to? Hit the comments or send an email.

Multitudes: Did you know the author of Bambi, Felix Salten, is also most likely the anonymous author of the 1906 novel Josephine Mutzenbacher: The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself? Wikipedia says it’s “filled with social criticism.” Also sex.

I did not know that, but I do know because that fact and many other fictional absurdities can be found in the new Christopher Moore novel, Anima Rising. It is, as the fancy lit critics like to say, funny as hell.¹

Rogues: There was this guy named Akasha. He sold DMT on the dark web under the name Shimshai, which it turns out isn’t a kind of sushi. It’s a name he borrowed from a guy he met in Costa Rica, and it’s shared by a folk singer. Shimshai, the DMT guy, employed a meditating Rafiki as his dark web avatar and was good at making and selling drugs. So good that back in the real world, Akasha had among his drug dealer accouterments a pet lemur named Oliver and a sidekick named Coinflip.

Wired has the whole fantastic story — “The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelic Kingpin” — as part of its Rogues Issue. Introducing the issue, Wired global editorial director Katie Drummond notes that rogues have always held a special place in the magazine’s imagination, “... the hackers, hustlers, and blue-sky lunatics consumed by the possibilities of a digitized and interconnected planet.

“Of course, Wired had no idea, then, just what those rogues would ultimately unleash: a proliferation of bad actors wreaking havoc across the web; a booming industry of online conspiracy theorists whose dangerous convictions threaten everything from the health of our children to the strength of our democracies; and a coterie of tech billionaires with checkbooks and megaphones that reach from Silicon Valley all the way to the White House.”

The longview on these dopes and their world is a lot of the reason why publications like Wired and 404 Media have been so much better in this moment than the better-funded and better-staffed legacy media. The tech press already knew Elon and his friends sucked.

Speaking of people who suck, meet Mike Smith, also profiled in Wired. Mike’s the guy who was indicted last year for using AI to create a bunch of music and then streaming it with bots to the tune of $10 million in revenue. From the minute I read the indictment I was hoping someone would write this profile. Kate Knibbs came through. Read: “‘A Billion Streams and No Fans’: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case.”

BTW: A Wired subscription is a good deal. 

McJesus: The Stanley Cup Finals begin Wednesday. It’s Edmonton and Florida in a rematch. Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice seems like a good guy. His insistence that coaches shouldn’t be in the post-series handshake line, leaving it instead to the guys who blocked the shots and took the hits and sacrificed all season, that’s good leadership. But he coaches a Tkachuk. Can’t root for any of them.

On the other side, Connor McDavid. McJesus, if you’re nasty. McDavid’s overtime goal pushed Canada a win over the U.S. in the 4 Nations Tournament last winter. He’s the best player in the game and the most watchable. This morning, as ESPN replayed last night’s series-clinching game against Dallas, I got the elliptical moving just in time to look up and see McDavid do this:

In front of him is an opportunity bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada for the first time since Montreal won it in 1993. Canada deserves that, and it would make Corb Lund so happy. In McDavid’s way? A freakin’ Tkachuk. (They’re good. I just don’t like them.)

The pre-Dude Dude: In the spring of 1974, part of the Key West crew was hanging out near Livingston, Montana. Tom McGuane turned some of the money he’d made from his debut novel, The Sporting Club, into 14 acres in the Paradise Valley. Now, a screwball western comedy he’d written, Rancho Deluxe, was being made. Jimmy Buffett was doing the music. Jeff Bridges, fresh off doing Thunderbolt and Lightfoot with Clint Eastwood, was starring alongside Sam Waterston and Elizabeth Ashley. 

Tom Corcoran, who’d given Buffett his first beer in Key West, co-written songs with him and would go on to sail the Caribbean in the coming years, remembered sitting in McGuane’s living room listening to Bridges strum a guitar and sing songs. “I thought, That’s cute,” Corcoran told me, “maybe singing isn’t in your future.”

A sense of what that scene might have been like is available on Slow Magic, 1977-78, a collection of songs Bridges pulled from a cassette tape labeled “July 1978.” So it’s the Dude’s Nebraska — except not at all. It’s a loose batch of rambles and jams Bridges recorded with his friends. Though “recorded” might suggest a more deliberate process than what happened. They fucked around and had some fun. It’s experimental, tuneful in some places and odd in others. There’s dialogue from Burgess Meredith and members of Oingo Boingo are in there somewhere.

“You take an an, and you look at an ant, it’ll tell you nothing about an anthill or what that superorganism is,” Bridges says in a promo video. “And that’s so heartening and soothing to think that it’s not about us.”

Couldn’t agree more, man.

Research: After launching the newsletter, I got a nice note from an old Portland pal, Joel Dippold. He’d done some digging on the provenance of Jim Harrison’s “portfolio of enthusiasms” quote — beyond the film Tarpon.  Joel found two items of interest.

1. This 1984 interview McGuane did with Liz Lear for the Key West Literary Seminar. She asked about someone once saying, “We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.” McGuane said, “F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m not sure, but I think it’s either from that nauseating thing he wrote called The Crack-Up or his letters. Scott Fitzgerald went through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.” It’s possible Harrison got it from McGuane who remembered it from Fitzgerald.

2. If that’s true, however, it probably came from Gatsby: “Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

Thank you, Joel.

Polish Surf Guitar: This is I. Jeziak and The Surfers. They’re from Poland. There is surfing in Poland. Now you know.

1  Moore is the author of probably my favorite novel, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, and, in his novel Noir, wrote maybe my favorite opening to a book: “She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes…”