Tag: America

Roy Cohn: The devil at the heart of the American dream

If he’d lived, Roy Cohn would’ve been 100 years old next year, but he’s still very much alive in the American psyche.

Cohn is the thin red line that winds through America for much of the last century – from the execution of convicted spies the Rosenbergs to the dramas of McCarthyism, from the hedonism of the ‘70s, Studio 54 and Reaganism to the rise of one of his most eager students, Donald Trump.

Kai Bird, co-author of the superb Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” turns his gaze on Oppenheimer’s polar opposite with his fascinating new book, cowritten with Susan Goldmark, “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy To Donald Trump.”

Cohn’s spectre has made a bit of a posthumous comeback in recent years, as his clear influence on Trump’s “never give in” style has become apparent, and their relationship was even given the big-budget Hollywood biopic treatment in the Oscar-nominated The Apprentice.

Roy Cohn was an awkward Jewish kid with an overbearing mother who worked his way into the top corridors of power with his sheer unrelenting drive to win at any cost. As a young attorney, he was just 23 years old when he played a pivotal role in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in the electric chair in 1953 for passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Cohn pushed hard for the still-shocking execution of the couple – the guilt of Ethel, a 37-year-old mother of two, remains particularly disputed decades later.

“I would have fucking pulled the switch if they’d have let me,” Cohn said years later.

The Rosenberg trial set the pace for Cohn’s career, as he moved from more liberal leanings to a conservative, pugnacious worldview, teaming up with Senator Joseph McCarthy as his chief counsel and horse whisperer during anti-communist witchhunts in the ‘50s, still just in his 20s as he launched a vendetta against anyone who was suspected of being communist, subversive, or gay.

The capping irony is that Cohn himself was gay, but deeply denied it despite his increasingly wild sex life into the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his subsequent death from AIDS at just 59 in 1986.

“American Scoundrel” shows us the making of an American monster, all swagger and bravado and zero morality. Through the darkest days of the 20th century, Cohn is there, hustling in the ears of politicians and crooks, refusing to give an inch or show compassion to anything or anyone. After McCarthyism, which stained him for the rest of his life, Cohn turned into a powerful lawyer for the mob and a variety of dubious characters, raking in the bucks and basking in his reputation as a man not to be crossed.

Bird and Goldmark show us how Cohn evolved, raised by a smothering mother whose own cousin called her “the nastiest person she ever met,” wheeling and dealing in business deals while still a teenager. Cohn was an ugly man made uglier by a botched surgery as a child to remove a small bump on his nose – his mother insisted he should be perfect – that left a grotesque red scar running down it for the rest of his life.

As he aged, Cohn took on a reptilian sheen, scorching himself with constant suntanning, his eyes becoming more hooded and piercing, the scars on his nose and from clumsy facelifts turning his visage into something Mephistophelean. His soul seemed to be coming out of his pores.

When he met a young Trump in the 1980s, who was seeking advice over a lawsuit accusing his housing properties of discriminating against Black renters, Cohn told him, “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court.” And that advice has echoed through America ever since.

One passage from “American Scoundrel” feels like it sums up the Cohn worldview – and the style of so many of his acolytes:

Roy looked out the window and angrily asked, “What time is it?”

Bob was frightened by Roy’s demeanor, but he replied, “Well, it’s nighttime, it’s dark.”

“No,” Roy said.

“I tell you it’s daytime, and I’ll prove to you it’s daytime. Now, go out and figure out how I did it.”

Roy Cohn has been dead for 40 years, but he’s still with us. As Bird and Goldmark point out in a new essay for The New York Times just this week, the sneering figure of Stephen Miller, Trump’s new chief of staff, bears a strong resemblance to Cohn in nearly every way.

“More closely than anyone else in Mr. Trump’s administration, he follows Mr. Cohn’s playbook of aggressive, unapologetic defiance,” they wrote.

Reading a biography about a damnable villain is always a strange experience. Bird does attempt to humanise Cohn a little bit – he was apparently very loyal to his friends, including a peculiar “beard” relationship with TV’s Barbara Walters – but ultimately, he was a man who fought the world day after day. I can’t say it’s a “fun” book, but it’s key to understanding the way America has evolved in the past 80 years, briskly told and much of it in Cohn’s own words – he was never shy of seeking publicity in interviews.

In the end, Cohn was disbarred for misconduct and only weeks later died a lonesome, painful death from AIDS, denying to the public he was gay or that he even had AIDS (he claimed it was liver cancer) until the end. Never apologise.

In Bird’s book, it’s reported that a journalist saw Trump at Cohn’s funeral, weeping.

I have some mild hope that last week’s midterms show a convulsive rejection in America of the Roy Cohns of the world, of the aversions to any kind of inner reflection, regret or apology.

But I’m also keenly aware that “American Scoundrel” shows us such tendencies have been part of the country for a very long time – long before Cohn’s rise and fall, of course. He simply magnified them for a new mass-media world.

Roy Cohn’s dark legacy haunts America to this day. And ghosts can be very, very hard to get rid of.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous portrait of Roy Cohn, 1981.

The night that changed American politics

A friend in Texas messaged me last night, quoting a John Lennon lyric – “I may be a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

Texas, a deeply Republican state for decades which just elected Democrats as governor and US senator, is leading the wave of Democrat victories today.

The Democrats have taken control of Congress in the midterm elections, which is going to make Donald Trump’s life very interesting for the next two years.

The Democrats won control of the House of the Representatives, the lower house, lining up Hakeem Jeffries to be the first Black Speaker of the House and second in line for the presidency.

The powerful upper house, the Senate, has also flipped to Democrats, who have picked up wins in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North and South Carolina, Michigan, Maine and Minnesota.

It will take a few days for the dust to settle, but something big has happened in America.

This isn’t just a “blue wave” for the Democrats, but as many are calling it, it’s a blue tsunami, a seismic convulsion among the American electorate that is a huge rejection of the way the country is being run.

James Talarico, a 37-year-old who’s come out of nowhere to be the first Democrat elected to Senate in Texas since the 1980s, struck the tone that many winning Democrats have taken today – optimism.

Blame whatever you like for Republican losses – the Iran war, the high cost of living, petrol prices, the rise of AI data centres or, perhaps, it’s also a rejection of the overall dark and nasty tone that’s pervaded politics for some time in America.

Take someone like Ohio Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who published a shocking ad which featured Democrat Amy Acton’s long-estranged elderly mother calling her a liar. Acton was the victim of childhood sexual abuse by her late stepfather, and had not spoken to her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.

Ramaswamy’s controversial ad drew condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats, and he lost. It felt like a low bar was reached for decency in politics.

Kansas is a very Republican kind of place, but Democrat Adam Hamilton pulled off a victory there in his Senate race. A fifth-generation Kansan and pastor of the nation’s largest Methodist church, he called for an end to the bitter divide in Washington: “This is not a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s a human decency thing.”

Maybe a little less grifting, insults and cruelty is what Americans were seeking. Time will tell.

A series of firsts have been seen – the first Black woman governor in American history was elected in Georgia, California and Texas have new Hispanic governors, and the first out gay man was elected US senator in New Hampshire. We also saw Abdul El-Sayed elected as the first Muslim Senator. There are now four Black American state governors in Georgia, Wisconsin, Maryland and Florida.

Donald Trump immediately posted on TruthSocial that he would’ve won if he was on the ballot, but it’s very hard not to read it all as a major repudiation of the way his second term in office has unfolded. But, he also told The New York Times he would accept the results, which is reassuring for those fearing more apocalyptic outcomes from the midterms.

The 2028 presidential election race is now beginning, basically, and like it or not, Trump’s time in power is going to eventually end.

The particulars of how big the new majority is and how presumptive Speaker of the House Jeffries will work with the White House remained to be seen, but it’s going to be a big shift after two years of a president who has been given very little pushback.

Donald Trump will still be president , of course, but it’s going to be a quite different political environment for him to navigate for the rest of his term in office.

It’s likely to be a wild ride.

I still believe in the jackalope

You can take your Bigfoot and your wendigo and your Jersey Devil, I’ll stick with my jackalope. 

A jackalope, for those not in the know, is a tall, sleek jackrabbit, but one with a perkily impressive set of antlers, an all-American critter that leaps and bounds across the wide open plains of Wyoming and Nevada and elsewhere. 

They are rare, it’s true, but their unique evolutionary niche is a special one to many folks in America’s western states. 

Jackalope-ology is also a bit of a throwback to the days when conspiracy theories were, well, kind of fun, as opposed to a sleazy collective of nihilistic grifting and all mankind’s nastiest impulses. I miss silly conspiracies about aliens and sasquatches and Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of. The internet’s kind of ruined that world for us. 

On my last visit to the US, I stumbled across a paperback of Michael P. Branch’s exceptionally deep dive into the long-eared weirdness of it all, On the Trail Of The Jackalope. I had no idea this book existed and it fills a hole in my soul I didn’t know was there.

Branch, a jackalope obsessive, heads out on a road trip across the western USA to interview jackalope makers, worshippers, myth spreaders and more, and in the process drafts a nifty little alternate history of the Wild West. 

America’s long-standing love for the cryptid – enjoyably explored in thorough detail in another groovy book, J.W. Ocker’s The United States of Cryptids, feels less toxic than many other obsessions are in these twisted times.

A jackalope won’t give you cancer, steal your retirement money or be co-opted for racist and sexist lies – it’s just a darned funny bunny with a big set o’ antlers. 

You will find jackalope heads mounted on walls throughout the American west, testament to a dying breed of beast, perhaps, or possibly just a really wacky souvenir.

Way out in South Dakota at the famous Wall Drugstore, an entire wall of faux jackalopes are mounted and available for purchase, as well as all kinds of kitschy jackalopiana – t-shirts, snow globes, shot glasses, posters, keychains, beer, you name it. (I wish now I still had my bumper sticker I bought there back in ’06.) 

Are they real? That depends on your point of view. 

It’s all exploded from a quirky obscurity to a bona-fide subculture, which Branch’s book very entertainingly dissects. Jackalopes became hipster fodder somewhere along the way, and Branch even takes part in a sold-out class of taxidermists in San Francisco all learning to make their very own jackalope. 

I think I first encountered the jackalope in cartoon form – a local cartoonist in the Northern California town where I grew up, the great RL Crabb, frequently drew a gangly anthropomorphic jackalope named Junior, who starred in his own seven-issue comic book series back in the 1980s. Somehow I stumbled across a copy of Tales of the Jackalope and its witty Americana satire (you’d better believe Bigfoot makes an appearance), and the jackalope always stuck in my head.  For a little while, I wasn’t sure if it was all a joke or not.

Then I realised that doesn’t matter. Branch’s hugely fun book takes a wild whopper of a folk tale and gives it another round of life. He even looks at the real-life inspiration for jackalope sightings – rabbits who were infected with a kind of papillomavirus that causes horny deformities growing out of their skulls. Those jackalopes aren’t so cute, to be honest, but a really interesting nugget of information in Branch’s book is about how the study of that virus has helped develop vital anti-cancer treatments for humans. 

The jackalope is my kind of great American myth – not one about swaggering superiority or harsh domination, but one about a spunky little battler who keeps carrying on despite the odds against them. They’re silly, but they also offer us a slight promise of mystery that might still be out there hopping across the western plains. 

The jackalope is a “trickster god,” Branch writes, bounding back and forth between real and imagined worlds. Throughout his travels, he keeps asking people why they love jackalopes.

“I’m always hoping they are real – that there’s something magical hidden around the corner,” Sarah of South Dakota tells Branch. “A unicorn or a centaur, probably not. But a jackalope? That’s something that could be real.” 

Jackalopes might not technically exist, I guess, but I still believe in them all the same. 

In defense of Mississippi, the place where I became a writer

When talking to people, it doesn’t take long before I get asked where I’m from. My thudding American accent, still firmly attached after nearly 20 years in New Zealand, gives it away.

“California,” I’ll usually say, which will typically bring up talk of Hollywood, skiing, surfing, Disneyland, or all of the above.

But I’m also from Mississippi, which often gets a very different reaction when I say that – a slight twist of the lip, widening of the eyes. Mississippi is a word which feels haunted, slippery with meaning. There’s no more evocative American state name, with all that entails. 

I visited Mississippi last month for the first time since 1999. It seemed much further from New Zealand than California where most of my family and friends live, and yet in the last year or two I’ve had a hankering to see those Southern skies again, to visit the friends and relatives still scattered around Mississippi, to get back in touch with a important chapter of my life that had started to seem so very distant. 

The roots of my family run deep there. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, in a quiet cemetery tucked away down shadowy side roads. 

I lived there myself from the ages of 18 to 25, from a freshman in college to a fumbling young working journalist. It’s a formative time in anyone’s life when you start to figure out who you’ll be. 

Oxford, Mississippi is where I became a writer, where I went from being one of those people who’d talk about being a writer to someone who actually got paid cash money for stringing words together. I was a performative oddball California kid dropped into the Deep South. 

At Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, I discovered more than the science fiction and fantasy that marked an awful lot of my reading through high school. My professors introduced me to everyone from James Baldwin to John Updike to Donna Tartt to Flannery O’Connor. I read widely, Southern lit and non-Southern lit. I wrote for a daily newspaper for the first time and I had my first paying journalism jobs there, and began avidly scribbling comic books and even a daily comic strip on the side. 

When I lived in Oxford in the 1990s I was at the end of eras, although I didn’t know it. Stark, raw Delta bluesmen like RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough would play to beer-addled frat boys, who didn’t know or care they were the last of their kind. At the local townie bar City Grocery, whiskey-soaked writing legends like Willie Morris, Larry Brown and Barry Hannah would hold court – they’re all gone now, memorialised by little bronze plaques on the bar. I took Hannah’s short story class at Ole Miss and churned out some pretty godawful tales before I realised journalism and comics were probably more my speed than great Southern literature. 

With my good old Oxford friends Bruce and Rebecca in Oxford, Mississippi, August 2026.

This year, I had a wonderful time returning catching up with old friends, mentors and co-workers, and despite the nearly 30 years that had passed in some ways it felt like yesterday that I had sat at the bars, that I’d browsed at Square Books and coffee’d up at Bottletree Bakery. Mississippi is a hell of a fun place, really.

But of course, it’s also full of shadows. 

Every place on Earth has a tragic past if you dig far enough, but Mississippi is unique in its stains and glories. I can think of nowhere else I’ve lived where the absolute worst and the shining best of a place are so deeply intertwined, where one seemingly cannot exist without the other. 

The horrors that were visited on the Black population in the 20th century still turn my stomach, the suppression, cruelty and casual dehumanisation. The story of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old boy tortured and murdered by white racists in 1955 for allegedly daring to whistle at a white woman – is as good as any to illustrate how horrible things could get.

My mother was just about the same age as Till and lived an hour or two away from where his blood was spilled. But she knew nothing about it at the time, until many years later when the story began to seep out into the wider culture. I often think about this, the two people of similar ages and totally, totally different worlds. The South endlessly romanticises itself, which can create both great stories and cover up hard truths. 

White Mississippian Wright Thompson, in The Barn, his masterful analysis of the Till killing, what led to it and the long suppression of it in history, tries to unpack the mysteries of an atrocity.

He writes that the more he looked at Till’s 1955 death, “the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view.” 

And yet, from that bloody soil has sprouted the seeds of change and art. Coming back to Mississippi, I felt loved by the Southern charm, the humidity and weedy kudzu (an invasive vine) carpeting everything, and the stories everywhere, the stories that inspired me and so many others. So much fine art and literature comes from there – William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, younger folk like Jonathan Miles and Kiese Laymon, music from Elvis to BB King that changed the world.

The best of its authors are constantly questioning Mississippi, instead of glorifying some lost cause endlessly. “Mississippi’s not an easy place to love,” Ralph Eubanks writes in Ever Is A Long Time, his excellent, deeply thoughtful memoir of growing up Black in small-town Mississippi and learning how the government actively spied on Black citizens. 

A place can have a terrible past and yet still have things to admire and love; in our everything-is-good-or-evil digital world that stokes perpetual outrage, it can be hard to explain a place that is full of troubles and pain, and still working hard to be better, and can be full of kindness, hospitality and talent. Mississippi is complicated. Isn’t everywhere?

“It is not hard to understand the fierce chauvinism of Mississippi patriots,” the late Stanley Booth wrote in his book of essays on Southern music, Rythm Oil. “To stay there, you would have to convince yourself you loved it.”

My time at Ole Miss in the 1990s was marked with endless wrestling over race in what we’d now call “culture wars” – over whether the anthem “Dixie” was racist, over the university’s white throwback plantation owner mascot Colonel Reb, over the Black editors at the Daily Mississippian and the waving of the Rebel Confederacy flag. It draws a fierce pride and at times defensiveness – lord knows I’ve had to defend Mississippi some over the years against the statements of people who’ve never been there. 

The Mississippi I visited last month felt like it was inching forward still with reconciling that past – the campus of Ole Miss was now dotted with prominent signs about the historic racial terror, and the looming town courthouse, as Southern an icon as it gets, now also features an account of the lynchings in Lafayette County. A monument to James Meredith, who became the first Black student at Ole Miss after bloody, fatal protests in 1962, now stands proudly beside the campus library.  It says “courage,” in bold letters.

Faulkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and while that’s slipped into the realm of cliche, that’s still as Mississippi a thought as you can get. 

Despite what some folks running the country these days like to think, coming to grips honestly with the past doesn’t make you weaker. It takes, like the Meredith monument says, courage.

“Confronting its many imperfections, rather than hiding from them, makes it easier to love,” Eubanks writes. 

I’d much rather have a Mississippi that accepts and interrogates its past, rather than longs for imagined perfect glory days. I lived in Mississippi, loved a lot about it, grimaced at some things, and learned so very much about stories, writing and myself that I was happy to revisit for a few sultry August days and nights.

It is still not quite like anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without a little Mississippi in my blood. 

It was 25 years ago today – One journalist’s 9/11 memories

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was eating scrambled eggs and bacon at a Rotary Club breakfast meeting in Northern California when everything went upside-down. 

There was a TV playing the early shows there in a corner of the room, and suddenly everyone was paying attention to that. I wasn’t sure why, but then I saw skyscrapers in flames in Manhattan, and even as the editor then of a tiny little weekly mountain town newspaper, I knew my job had just changed. 

Pretty much nobody over 30 will have direct memory of that day now – how has it been 25 years? – but my primary recollections of that time is how impotent we all felt. 

Something that’s hard for people to get now is that nobody knew anything for those first days. As with any mass casualty incident even now, it can take a while for details to come out, something we really chafe against in our I-want-it-all-now 24-hour news cycle. There were rumours other world cities were being attacked, there were tales of 50,000 dead. For a few shaky days, it seemed like anything could happen. 

Truckee, California was far, far away from the epicentre of the day, but I scurried back to the Sierra Sun offices where one of those absurdly tiny mobile TVs was scrounged up because we knew we had to do something that day. It barely got reception, and we balanced it on one shelf with the antennas pointing out the window and could fuzzily see a tired and strained Peter Jennings seriously narrating the news, grainy images of huge explosions that didn’t seem possible. 

The limitations of the era were clear to me – my small staff of reporters kept clicking refresh on the news websites of the time, but everything kept crashing. We listened to National Public Radio, to find out what we could. Nobody was posting on TikTik or Facebook then, of course, and only a few early primitive blogs could be found with tales of the day. 

America was so sheltered from the kind of sudden violence so much of the rest of the world had experienced through the 20th century – and still does today. In our blinkered innocence it felt like we were somehow special, which of course was wrong.

The one image that haunted me the most is the one of the second jet hitting the World Trade Center, hurtling in oh so very, very fast and just slamming into the building and through it. The speed! In an accident it would probably be slowed down some, but the total speed and deliberateness of it as it plunged through the building – unreal. 

Nobody knew what was really going on, a terrible place for a journalist to be. I trashed the plans for whatever we were leading with in that week’s paper and my reporters bashed out quick reactions from locals, about what the local airport was doing, and tried to capture a moment in time that felt impossible to capture. 

Paranoia was firmly in the air for months, years afterwards. There was the brief terrifying anthrax scare where even the smallest of post offices around America would freak out over the tiniest hint of white powder. 

I still remember this gem from one of the Tahoe papers at the time:

“Inside city limits, a man on Capistrano Avenue called police Saturday night after he noticed a white substance inside a newly opened roll of toilet paper. It turned out to be lint from the paper, said South Lake Tahoe Police Officer Brian Williams.”

It was a very different media world then – we barely had email, social media wasn’t a thing and we were still in the age when you often waited for news to be served to you, on the 6pm news or the comforting thwapp of the morning newspaper delivery. Headline news was a luxury for those with cable TV. I only bought my first cell phone – a chunky Nokia – after the attacks, when the idea of being able to get in touch with your loved ones instantly suddenly seemed a lot more important. 

Flags sprouted everywhere in the days after – hanging from buildings, flapping from awnings, attached to car antennas. Again, nobody knew what was going to happen next, a feeling I’ve only truly encountered a few times in the decades since.

It was the end of something and the beginning of something that I honestly think we’re still not through yet on this ever-turning globe. Twenty-five years from today, I guess I’ll be an old man. I wonder what the world will look like then. 

• Meanwhile, over at the day job for RNZ, I’ve written two long pieces looking in-depth about how 9/11 affected life here in New Zealand — go give them a read if you like!

Explainer: How 9/11 changed how we fly in New Zealand forever

Explainer: How did the 9/11 attacks change New Zealand?

Graceland: I’ve reason to believe we all will be received

Graceland is the nexus of the Elvis Presley multiverse. 

Elvis feels more alive than ever in 2026, closing in on 50 years since his death. He was a bit of a joke, a punch line for much of my teenage years, but it kind of feels like we’ve all moved past that a bit to appreciate the massive cultural space he filled in America’s 20th century. Sure, there’s Vegas Elvis in all his jumpsuited splendour but there’s also raw Sun Elvis, hungry and strange, and swaggering ’68 Elvis, showing the kids how it’s done. 

I hadn’t been to Graceland since the mid-1990s sometime, where it felt kind of quaintly humble, but it’s since blown up into a full Disneyland-style complex. It’s not cheap – is anything these days? – but for anyone even slightly interested in Elvis and the pop history of America, it’s a must. It’s plonked down in a rather apocalyptic, run-down section of Memphis which isn’t exactly inspiring, but once upon a time it was the suburban mansion on a distant hill that a boy rock star decided to buy as his first – and only – home. 

I suppose once the “Elvis is really still alive” jokes all started to fade (I mean, the dude would be 91 by now even if he was secretly lurking in Mongolia somewhere), I started to respect a little more the dreamy kid from Tupelo and his ascension to the top of the world, the thunderbolt effect he had on pop culture (a moment which Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis movie, flawed and rushed as it is, really captures ferociously well). 

The mansion itself remains the same as always, a kitschy time capsule of what a superstar considered fancy circa 1976. Elvis’ Graceland has survived the spins and twists of what’s fashionable to kind of be weirdly cool again with its low carpeted ceilings and brash colours and sweetly low-key touches. It remains the sort of home a poor Mississippi kid made good would have had rather than the kind of sterile megamansion an Elon Musk probably owns 10 times over. 

Here is where Elvis watched his three TVs at once (imagine how he would’ve fared in the multi-screening device age), here he played pool in a densely curtained room decked out like an ancient sultan’s lair, here in the oddly peaceful ‘Jungle Room’ he laid down some of his final songs surrounded by shag carpeting and tiki-tacky exotic furniture. 

Once upon a time, I visited Graceland with friends in the mid-1990s, paying tribute at his graveside (which sadly today now includes his daughter and his 27-year-old grandson as well). I came this time at the start of “Elvis Week,” marking the 49th anniversary the King left this mortal coil, and the memorial area was decked out with wreaths from Elvis fans around the world, Belgium to Japan. Elvis is everywhere, as Mojo Nixon famously sang. 

What’s changed the most since then is the sprawling “Elvis Presley’s Memphis” complex across the road, 200,000 feet of Presley-ania covering his entire career from the scholarly to the silly. Excess was Elvis’ brand, and the music and pop culture nerd in me adored the trips through Sun Studios, his Hollywood era, the comeback years and the final days.

Everywhere you turn there’s little bits of musical history – an acetate from Sun, the Presley family’s battered personal copy of his first record. High and low art mingle freely – an entire room devoted to Colonel Tom Parker, even a section devoted entirely to Elvis’ hats, in case that floats your boat. 

Only in Graceland would the remote control to Elvis’ television get a quirky little display case of its very own, or the handwritten letters Presley infamously wrote President Richard Nixon before their well-documented White House meeting. 

I admit, when I walked into a room where the famous leather jumpsuit from the Elvis ’68 Comeback Special sits in a glass case, I felt a bit like the time I saw Abraham Lincoln’s hat in the Smithsonian. History in black leather. 

At another point, I walked into one towering room where more than 50 bedazzled Elvis jumpsuits are stacked up 30 feet high, and I surprised even myself as I gasped out loud. As the kids say these days, Elvis was a lot. The cheesy tacky “fat Elvis” years don’t seem quite as awful as they once did to me, but the kind of last gasps of a dying lion, and the over-the-top showmanship those Vegas years displayed have echoed in music ever since – I mean, have you seen a Chappell Roan concert? 

Is Graceland “worth it”? I spent four hours there without a pause and probably could’ve done another two (I mean, you’ve got to check out every Elvis hat, am I right?). In its reinvented modern form, its big glorious slab of rock star overkill and the lingering tastes of Southern humility and hospitality, Graceland almost feels like a museum for America itself, of rises and falls and all the echoing ripples we get from our stars, no matter how quickly they fly by. 

Maybe Paul Simon put it best – in some strange way, Graceland feels a little to me like coming home. 

Maybe I’ve a reason to believe

We all will be received

In Graceland

– Paul Simon, Graceland, 1986

On the road again: How America can still soothe my soul

Oh, how I needed a road trip. 

I’ve just returned from an epic 3-week, 11-state, 3000+ mile road trip across the land of my forefathers, from Texas to Mississippi to Kansas to California. It’s the furthest I’ve travelled in America for years, and it was a much-needed anecdote to the boiling chaos of the endless news cycle. 

The road and the sky, the lines on the pavement and the clouds on the horizon – strip life back to the basics, for a few days, and hit the road, jack. You won’t regret it. 

The thing about New Zealand is, you really can’t drive 8 hours straight in any one direction without running into the ocean eventually. It can sometimes get a wee bit claustrophobic. America goes on forever, and so much that you pass through are empty vast panoramas and blindingly blue skies. 

There’s something primal about the American road trip that has stirred song and poetry from everyone from Woody Guthrie to Kerouac. You can ride along the freeways, the backroads and byways until the sun sets and still only make it a few inches on the map. 

It was a pleasure to be reminded America is far more than the dipshits currently in power, that while the country is going through a very lousy time at the moment, it is possible to put away your phone and spend several hours hurtling along the interstate with fields and mountains and endless landscapes rippling by and not think of Washington, D.C. once. 

The last serious solo road trip I took in America was, dear god, nearly 30 years ago, back in 1997 when I loaded up my Toyota Camry with supplies and CDs and rode away from my life in Mississippi to discover strange new worlds back in California. It was a weird, lonesome trip for much of the time – pre-internet, pre-Google Maps, following along on my floppy road atlas as I unwrapped the country over the miles. No mobile phone, and there were hours at a time where nobody on Earth knew where I was.

These days, Apple Music, Google Maps and diligent application of cruise control made the roads a little less empty, although I really could’ve done without my fancy-pants Kia rental car talking to me sometimes and letting me know I needed to take a rest break. A steady soundtrack of Americana kept me company, all the old favourites rolled out – a little Wilco, a little BB King, a little John Mellencamp, a little Dolly Parton. Hurtling along the interstate at 82 miles an hour, every song feels like an anthem, somehow. 

I made it through Kansas for the first time, and while I’d never want to live there, especially with some of the current political atrocities going on, Kansas is still a powerfully evocative piece in the American jigsaw. Superman came from there, after all, and the Wizard of Oz, and Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart and my “imaginary friend” the great underrated musician Freedy Johnston. I marvelled at the infinite fields and the thousands of towering windmills lining the land, spinning across the prairie. 

America is, at its heart, still the land of wide spaces, of final frontiers, and the landscape of my home country is something I’ve longed for at times despite how much I love New Zealand. I rolled through Utah’s endless geology, and I thought, “at last.” I bopped along Louisiana’s alligator-filled bayous, Missouri’s rippling Ozarks, Colorado’s steep jagged canyons and Nevada’s sturdy laconic cowboy country and even the places I’d never been felt familiar to me, somehow. 

A landscape tells its own stories, separate from all our chattering human concerns. Americans grow up steeped in their landscape’s mythology and legends, for better and for worse, and while there’s an awful lot of things that vastly disappoint me about what’s going on back home, I can still never let it go entirely. I’m always ready to get back on the road again, and see where it takes me.

Maybe I’ll learn something, maybe I’ll be different at the end, and maybe you will, too. 

The last American newspaper I worked for is about to die

I’ve been a journalist for more than 30 years now, and even as I work these days for the website of the national radio station here in New Zealand, a healthy dose of printer’s ink still flows in my veins. 

I read today that the last newspaper I worked for in the US before moving to New Zealand almost 20 years ago is ending its print edition this month, “pivoting to digital” entirely as the kids say. The Roseburg, Oregon News-Review dated back almost 160 years. It’s a damned shame, and is surely likely to lead to more of these cursed “news deserts” that are spreading across America.  

The current management is trumpeting the announcement as “the news is about to become free,” which these days, probably means it’s going to be overwhelmed by videos, AI-generated “content” slop, clickbait and regurgitated press releases. And of course, they’ve sacked the entire newsroom staff. Good luck with that free news, dudes. 

I mourn this, because it doesn’t feel good in an age when the free media is under assault, disinformation is swamping us all, grifting influencers cosplay as journalists and the entire concept of objective truth has slowly crumbled. 

The News-Review was a fine ol’ paper, where I worked from 2002 to 2006 as the features editor. We had a great team there – an editor I really looked up to, who offered reliable, smart advice but also welcomed new ideas, encouraged us when we needed it and dressed us down if we (well, me) deserved it. While there was always a lot of coming and going – the average age of most of the 10 or so reporters was probably about 25 – the N-R felt like a “team,” like all good newsrooms do, covering our little corner of rural Oregon down the road from Portland and Eugene. Journos come and go and you sometimes lose touch but I’ve kept up with a surprising number of the team from the News-Review days – they were generally all good sorts. 

It was, curiously, the first daily newspaper I’d ever worked on, having mostly done my time at weeklies or semi-weeklies. I loved the news buzz, the hustle to put the paper to bed by 10am or so (we were one of those mostly-gone afternoon rags), the juggling of local priorities from irrigation boards and logging companies with state and global news. Often on the weekends I’d act as the editor for the big Sunday paper, at the helm for breaking stories like Ronald Reagan’s death, the War in Iraq and the Space Shuttle Columbia exploding.

I also wrote a lot of long-form features then that were great practice for the eventual raggedy arc of my so-called career ending up at Radio New Zealand – stories I’m still pretty proud of now, like a profile of the local wildlife park veterinarian, an eccentric Russian painter, or interviewing Alice Cooper as he brought his shock-rock act to town. 

Sorry, I won’t be answering any calls at this number any more.

It was a gorgeous place and the town where my wife and I had our child, so Roseburg will always mean something to me, but even then it was also thick with the kind of blinkered conservatism that’s led us firmly into Trump-land, all these years later. The paper’s been bought and sold and staff chipped away over the years since and the paper already cut to barely being printed at all. I’d check in on the website occasionally long after pretty much anyone I knew had left Roseburg, because an old newshound never quite forgets a familiar scent, long after he’s left the country, even. 

The News-Review is hardly the first newspaper I worked at to fold, even – the college town free weekly in Mississippi that broke me into journalism withered away ages ago, another small paper in California faded away, even the big old New York City-produced national magazine I worked only publishes occasional special issues these days.  

It’s not a lot better here in New Zealand, really – journalists have lost jobs, outlets have dried up. I’m very glad to still be in the industry I’m in and at a place I respect, but I do miss the rumble of the presses at the back end of the building, the painstaking proofreading of printouts of your pages, the clamour and rush of daily print deadlines instead of the perpetual motion machine the news is now. 

A newspaper, in its day, provided context and coherence to the swirling world of the day’s news, wrapping it all up in a tidy package with crosswords, Blondie cartoons, Dear Abby, weird classified ads and frequently ridiculous letters to the editor. It was complete, for one day at least. Internet news, as great and useful as it is, somehow still never quite feels like the complete package in the end to me – you just keep scrolling, forever, don’t you? Maybe I’m just a physical media guy to my core.

And for those people in small town Oregon, many of whom probably haven’t read the soon-to-die paper in years and get all their news from their own internet bubbles now – I miss the things they won’t even know they’re missing, in a world without a newspaper. 

Take a deep dive with me into My Movie DNA

Hey, you dig reading me ramble on about movies on this here website? Well, now you can listen to me do the same thing, as I made a guest appearance on the new episode of Brit-turned-Kiwi Johnny Andrews’ highly entertaining My Movie DNA podcast! 

24-Hour Movie Marathon veteran Johnny has been doing this for a few years now and had guests including Wellington Paranormal star Karen O’Leary, Lord of the Rings Oscar-winning production designer Grant Major and a whole heap of prominent NZ movie creatives and fans, so it was an honour to be asked to pontificate on my movie hot takes for 90 minutes or so.

Johnny and I talk about everything from Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces to Point Break to my glimpse of the filming of One Battle After Another to David Cronenberg to the late great Catherine O’Hara, how Sinners tackles America’s history, the wacky, erratic films of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and so much more.

Have a listen at the links below and please enjoy my goofy responses to Johnny’s most excellent questions!

You can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and much more through the links here!

Forty years ago, they slipped the surly bond of earth

I remember the Challenger, coming apart in the infinite blue, 40 years ago today. 

I was in eighth grade, on January 28, 1986, and our classroom came to a chattering halt that day when we heard that the space shuttle Challenger – with a civilian teacher on board, Christa McAuliffe – was gone. 

“Gone” didn’t seem to make sense – while there had been NASA disasters long before I was born, this was something new and scary. 

I fixated some on the fact that these astronauts were, and then suddenly weren’t, that they were vanished into the sky and the sea in that unforgettable image of the shuttle’s explosion and contrails melting into the sky. I don’t think our classroom was watching it on live TV, but I feel like someone in school was, because the news spread in a quick way that seems so foreign now when everyone carries the instant news in their pocket. The fact there was a teacher on board, a woman who could’ve been one of our teachers, and that her bold adventure ended so abruptly felt like a cruel joke. 

For a good long while, all the students and teachers milled around, reacting. The normal school day stopped. I remember being pissed off that one of my friends took in the news with a laconic “well, they’re all dead” type remark. Didn’t he feel the existential horror of it all, or was I just a sensitive lad? 

I’m not a huge fan of Ronald Reagan’s politics or the way a lot of his presidency laid the groundwork for 2026’s shitstorm, but I will give him this – his speech to the nation about the tragedy was one of the finest moments of presidential rhetoric I’ve ever seen, delivered impeccably. I still think of those lines: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” Even for an avowed agnostic like me, there’s poetic comfort in those words. 

Of course, consolation is foreign to the current occupier of that office, isn’t it? 

I am often a bit saddened that lofty dreams of space seem to have taken a back seat in our current battered old world, although I have high hopes for the Artemis II mission. 

It was probably the first big, truly big news event that I paid a lot of attention to. I kept the newspaper front pages for years, and perhaps I have them somewhere still, buried in a box. Previous to that I was vaguely aware of things in the wider world – I have vague memories of the death of Elvis being reported on our tiny kitchen TV, or of Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan, but honestly, I was a kid and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to current events that didn’t involve comic books or Star Wars action figures. 

Forty years on, I remember that fierce sense of wanting to know more, and I reckon that’s kind of stuck with me ever since in my quixotic journey along the margins of journalism.

There’s been a bucketful of tragedies in the 40 years since of course, both personal and global, and one of the knottiest questions of being alive is how we process all the inevitable loss. I never knew the crew of the Challenger of course, and yet it hit a sensitive 14-year-old deep in the chest that clear January day, the brave explorers launching themselves up into the sky and never, ever coming back.