#87: In which I make you picture Bernie Sanders orgasming
Death By Consumption
1/27/26 - 2/2/26
I’m regretfully back from the Bahamas, and I, like the rest of New York, am now furious at Zohran for not getting rid of all this snow yet. Bitch, you’ve been mayor for a month, why is it not WARM outside yet?? I voted for change! Anyway, whatever, we’re suddenly in February and I’m back in the consumption mines, but this will be another slightly shorter one, because I’m going to spare you the envious details of my week of sitting in glorious sunshine and drinking rum and not being on my computer. Someday, when AI is doing all of our jobs, that will be the life us humans get to live every single day, and it’s going to be so great!!!!!! Hurry up, Sam Altman!
This week: I saw the Kate Hudson Oscar-nominated (??) movie about Neil Diamond impersonators (???) and was charmed by it (??????); I was forced to visualize Bernie Sanders having a cosmos-shattering orgasm; and I was tortured by the freaks of Wuthering Heights.
Song Sung Blue (2025) — on Apple TV
When I first saw the trailer for Song Sung Blue, all I felt was confusion. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson were in a movie about... Neil Diamond? I mistakenly believed it was a Neil Diamond biopic, which raised even more questions. Has Neil had an exciting life I didn’t know about? Is there a huge story involving Neil Diamond I’ve somehow missed? And what the hell is Kate Hudson even doing here? It all felt like the kind of fake movie they’d cut to on 30 Rock for a quick joke, so I promptly forced myself to forget about it. Whatever Song Sung Blue was, it was not my problem. And then the Oscar nominations came out, and Kate Hudson was nominated for Best Actress, and I had a sinking feeing: oh no... I’m going to have to watch Song Sung Blue.
Thankfully, the movie is not about Neil Diamond, but rather about Lightning & Thunder, a married duo of Neil Diamond impersonators (or, as they call themselves, “Neil Diamond interpreters”), who were a real sensation in Milwaukee in the 80s and 90s. That’s exactly when I was growing up in Wisconsin, so I was surprised to have never heard of these two, but I did feel like there was a shocking amount of Neil Diamond music in the air around me as I was growing up — and, without even knowing it, I realized I had kind of always thought of Neil as a Wisconsin-specific sensation, for some reason. So now I wonder: was Neil’s music more prevalent in Wisconsin in my childhood because of these two? Had I been affected by Lightning & Thunder without even knowing it?
The first hour of the film I found surprisingly charming, while thinking, I can’t believe I’m being charmed by this shit right now. Kate is very good in this, sporting a surprisingly decent Wisconsin accent that just borders on parody, and it’s genuinely lovely to see her on screen again, a warm and strong presence opposite the larger-than-life mania of Hugh Jackman. And you wouldn’t think this about a gigantic, superhero-jacked Australian, but it turns out Hugh was actually born to play a Wisconsin alcoholic obsessed with Neil Diamond — he’s somehow electric and perfectly fits this silly, strange role. The man was simply destined to put on a sparkly shirt and sing, what can I say!
This isn’t a great movie, by any stretch, and it remains insane that it is now an Oscar-nominated film, but it is a reliably old-school Hollywood movie. It hits extremely traditional story beats, despite following the real twists and turns of the character’s lives, so I see why it appealed to a certain sector of the Oscar electorate (old people). When the tone shifts halfway through, it’s predictable and a little schlocky, but it is still effective, if only because it’s somewhat comforting to see a movie that still follows the traditional story arcs we all grew up on. In lesser hands, this would be a Lifetime Original, but it is well-directed, well-choreographed, and well-acted, so as a whole it rises above kitsch. I don’t know what to say: I’ve been charmed by Song Sung Blue! Give Kate Hudson the Oscar, why not, it’s not like anything really matters anymore! Fuck it, give Hugh one, too!
“EXCLUSIVE: How Bernie Sanders built a device to give himself ‘cosmos-shattering orgasms’” — in the Daily Mail
Look, if I had to read this headline, so do you. (Full article without a paywall can be found archived here, because no one should be paying the Daily Mail to read about Bernie’s orgasms.)
This appears to be pulled from some sort of book about Bernie, in which we all have to learn the unfortunate fact that, in his 20s (so: in the 1800s?), Bernie built a device called an “Orgone Accumulator,” which sounds like it was basically an electrified box you sat in that, somehow, channeled energy into your body that would result in stronger orgasms???
Look, the grossness of picturing Bernie’s “cosmos-shattering orgasms” aside (imagine the yells! Sorry!), this is classic Daily Mail behavior. Of course — on a weekend in which millions more Epstein documents were dropped, revealing some absolutely horrific things done to children by seemingly every single rich person and politician alive — these reporters spend their energy digging through a random book for the details on Bernie’s college gooning phase.
Like, sure! This is kind of weird and gross and silly! But, uh....... have you seen what the President and his friends have been up to??? SEEMS WORSE! Honestly, not to go full Bernie Bro on you, but I don’t even see what’s bad about this! You’re telling me Bernie wanted to have stronger orgasms in his 20s, and instead of trying to achieve that by, say, pinning a woman to the bed and covering her mouth as she screamed, or raping a woman in Bergdorfs, or transporting underage girls across state lines in order to have sex with them — he just strapped some electrodes to himself and meditated? Sounds pretty normal, by comparison! They probably have these devices at Equinox these days! All I’m saying is: maybe some of Bernie’s colleagues should try sitting in an Orgone Accumulator instead of all the awful shit they’ve been doing to women and men and literal children! Maybe Bernie should build Orgone Accumulators for everyone in the Administration and they’d leave future victims alone! Probably not, but anything is worth a shot at this point, right?
I, as much as anyone, love and crave salacious details about politicians’ freaky little sex lives (my inbox is always open for tips on whatever gets Hakeem Jeffries going — I know deep down that guy is into some crazy BDSM), but this is the funniest example of it we’ve had in a while. Especially because the Daily Mail also takes this opportunity to try to soft cancel... Albert Einstein???
This lazy, hilarious journalism is made worse by the fact that we get no updates on the story. We’re left on a cliffhanger, stuck at the very beginning: 60+ years ago Bernie sought stronger orgasms, but what about now? Has he continued the search? Or has he been victorious, and finally achieved the stronger orgasms of his dreams? Are his earth-shattering cries of pleasure rattling the walls of power up in Burlington? Is he still tinkering away in his garage, trying out new and stronger voltages on his Little Bernie Bro in an elusive search for the perfect O? Or has he sadly given up his lifelong quest, forced to accept a life of orgasms that barely even dent the cosmos? Enlighten us, Bernie!
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (1847) — paperback
“Are you buying this because of the movie?” the older woman scanning my purchases at McNally Jackson asked, before continuing without waiting for an answer: “It’s such a good book, but that Emerald Fennell lunatic is going to ruin it. They’re going to be engaging in homosexual affairs on the moors for no reason.”
Not to quibble with this bookseller, my new favorite NYC icon, but, after reading Wuthering Heights (for the first time!): I don’t think homosexual affairs would stand out much in this story. They pretty much already do everything else!
Wuthering Heights is, I was surprised to learn, a deeply insane book. Not knowing much about it before I started, I had been imagining the book was simply a lot of sad, quiet pining for lost love, with lots of ruffled dresses and misty moors. I did not expect it to, in actuality, be a twisted book about horrible people trying to kill each other pretty much constantly.
In Wuthering Heights, everyone hates everyone else. Any time you enter a room, 5 people immediately are disgusted with you, and each starts imagining how they could murder you most painfully. Children are there to be slapped and thrown into walls, women are likely to scratch and bite men, husbands are one bad day away from strangling their wives, and servants find any excuse to tell their masters how ugly and stupid they are.
One servant, describing her teenaged master, Cathy, says, “I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past. ... I’ve had many a laugh at her perplexities and untold troubles, which she vainly strove to hide from my mockery.” This old woman hates this little bitch, and rightfully so — a few pages later, Cathy pinches and slaps her for no reason.
Even the “love” in this love story is twisted: to love someone means to keep yourself away from them, for whatever reason, and then to slowly let yourself starve to death out of misery. All these people are sickly, coughing and withering away, while pining after their one true love, only to finally confess their feelings after the object of their desire has passed away (most iconically, Heathcliff demands that when he dies, they are to remove one wall of Catherine’s coffin and connect his to hers, to make it a double-wide — I can see why this book has been a favorite of goth girls for centuries). In Wuthering Heights, love is a death sentence, even when it doesn’t have to be. These people are simply obsessed with torturing themselves and others!
As a reading experience, it is quite a slog, with a lot of repeating drama and outrageously dense anachronistic prose, so I spent most of the book being annoyed with it. Why was I working so hard to get through a book full of characters I hated? And then, at the end, I unfortunately realized I had enjoyed it. It felt like an accomplishment, but also like I had been let in on a disgusting, twisted little world of freaks — reading the book is like having the most fucked-up gossip session with someone who died 150 years ago.
And, now that I’ve endured it, I don’t think I see all the fuss about Emerald Fennell adapting it. If not her, who? This is a monstrous little book, full of sexual deviants and emotional basket cases, with a story that’s absolutely primed to – in the iconic words of Tina Fey summarizing Emerald Fennell’s work – take a “sexually violent turn, and you have to pretend to be surprised by that turn.” In fact, now that I’ve read it, I think she might be the only person who can give us a faithful adaptation of Wuthering Heights! If Heathcliff and Linton start engaging in “homosexual acts on the moors,” it may not be faithful to the literal plot from the 1800s (though, reading between the lines, there were definitely homosexual acts happening on those moors), but it will probably feel emotionally true to the spirit of the novel. Either way, it’s probably going to mirror my experience with the book: an exhausting experience, full of people I hated, and one I’ll be thinking about for a long time.