With the recent departures of submissions editor Jack Butler to the Wall Street Journal and economics editor Dominic Pino to the Washington Post, I had begun to get a little worried that National Review‘s stable of young, brilliant, eccentric weirdo writers in their twenties was running a bit sparse around here.
Well, I shouldn’t have been worried, and I can’t tell you how pleased I was to look up this afternoon to see that Guy Denton — an NRI Buckley Fellow and a vagabond Englishman — had written 1,000 words on Ace Frehley and the meaning of the rock band KISS.
Why is Guy obsessed with KISS? I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. But here’s a little bit of what he has to say:
Ace Frehley propelled rock and roll to a new dimension of ostentatious excess. An entirely self-taught musician, he mastered his craft through pure dedication. In 1972, he became a member of KISS when he answered an advertisement in the Village Voice: “Lead guitarist wanted with flash and ability.” No two qualities better defined his work. With his bold theatrics and effortlessly inventive guitar licks, he exhibited a kind of otherworldly showmanship. Appropriately enough, he believed that he wasn’t from this planet.
“Appropriately enough, he believed that he wasn’t from this planet.”
Ahh, yes, now that’s the eccentric-weirdo writerly good stuff that makes NR such a special place.
Dominic Pino arrived at NR in 2021, and a search of our archives tells me that he’s written 1,648 articles for National Review since then. And it was six years ago now — in the summer of 2019, while speeding down I-95 toward Quantico — that I bullied the young and wayward “Jackie Butts” into applying for an associate editor position at NR rather than go off and make his fortune in law school or high finance or as a lobsterman in Maine. (I’m pretty sure, if memory serves, those were the options Jack was actively considering.)
Butler knows more about conspiracy theories, CIA front organizations, and National Review lore than anyone I’ve ever met. If I needed to send a writer to go take a look at what 42 giant presidential heads were doing in a field in Croaker, Va., or investigate the truth about the mysterious Mothman, I’d pick up the phone and call Jack. Pino understands his economics as well as anyone, but he also played the organ in church — for a long time, this was a closely held secret — and he could analyze the varieties of Wisconsin cheese and cheese-like dairy-derived subproducts as well as any train spotter knows his locomotives. (As one of the editors heavily involved in the production of NR’s The Week, in both the magazine and newsletter formats, I can tell you that Butler’s and Pino’s eccentric, drier-than-dry-ice wit, and loremastery were very useful to us on a weekly basis.)
For 70 years, it’s always been a very important — though frustrating — tradition at NR for our organization to find and mentor promising young conservative journalists, allow them to spread their wings and make a name for themselves in our pages, and then launch them out into the world so that they can be conservative subversives at mainstream press outfits, infecting newsrooms nationwide with a little bit of respect for free markets and love for the Constitution. With Butler and Pino, we’ve done that yet again — and I’m certain they’ll do great work at the Post and Journal.
So does NR need a KISS aficionado on staff? Well, no — not necessarily. But beggars can’t be choosers! And I suppose Guy, Kamden Mulder, and their particular eccentricities will have to do as we stand athwart into our next decade.