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Saturday November 30, 2024

'The Shit-Crust of Need His Being Continually Sheds...'

“One of the most dread-inducing things for me about the impending Trump presidency is the way he and all the insect people who feed on the shit-crust of need his being continually sheds (like harlequin icthyosis) form a secondary crust that is always, sometimes aggressively more often passive-aggressively, advising anyone who disapproves to be quiet about what's true. I'm thinking of the Horta from the O.G. STAR TREK episode THE DEVIL IN THE DARK — that's how TrumpWorld looks in my head; and TrumpWorld, like the Horta (that's what that fictional space creature ”is“), left to its own devices, can do a lot of damage to soft human beings out there just exploring their galaxy.”

-- Craig Wright, “Dry Turkey,” on his Substack. Craig and I are both fans of Salinger, and when I read this I think of that intro to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” when Buddy Glass recounts older brother Seymour reading a bedtime story, the one about Po Lo and looking for horses, and seeing the essence of things rather than their coverings, and how Buddy ends the section by writing of Seymour, now deceased, “I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead.” That's how I often think of Craig, and maybe even more so its martial opposite: I can't think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to do battle with all of the liars and misinformers and yuck of the GOP than him. I see him cutting through their bullshit like a phaser. 

Posted at 10:05 AM on Saturday November 30, 2024 in category Quote of the Day   |   Permalink  

Friday November 29, 2024

20th Century Babies

The week after the election, I posted this on Threads:

Someone born in one year, 1946, has led this country for 20 of the last 32 years—and if Tubby lasts his term it'll be 24 of 36. All from one year. All from a few summer months. All from some postwar fucking in the fall of '45. And we've been fucked ever since. 

In the post, I mention '50s babies because my wife is one, but '30s babies (my father) haven't exactly been represented, either. If you expand it to incude every U.S. president born in the 20th century, you get this by decade:

  • 1900s (1): LBJ (1908)
  • 1910s (4):  Reagan (1911), Nixon (1913), Ford (1913), JFK (1917)
  • 1920s (2): Carter (1924), H.W. Bush (1924)
  • 1930s (0)
  • 1940s (4): Biden (1942), Clinton (1946), W. Bush (1946), Trump (1946)
  • 1950s (0)
  • 1960s (1): Obama (1961)

JFK was famously the first 20th century president, “born in this century” as he stated in his inaugural address in January 1961, which is pretty crazy. We're 61 years into the 20th century before getting a 20th century baby? Even crazier: four of the next five presidents were older than him. We went young in '61 and then ... “Nah.” That's our story. Great leap forward, retreat. Progress, regress. Change we can believe in, make American great again.

The regress has gone from Nixon to Reagan to W. to Trump. The arc of American history is short but it bends toward stupidity.

Posted at 08:42 AM on Friday November 29, 2024 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Saturday November 23, 2024

Quote of the Day

“Please note that the swagger of Trump and those who love and serve him has rarely anything to do with well-earned rights or with having achieved by your own lights anything, it has only to do with privilege. To get your trophy for completing a Trump marathon, you don't have to run 26.2 miles, you don't have to do anything but assert your willingness to trip someone else.”

-- Craig Wright, “When We Fight, We Fight”

Posted at 11:53 AM on Saturday November 23, 2024 in category Quote of the Day   |   Permalink  

Friday November 22, 2024

Kafka Smiles: On Being Banned from Instagram

Someone must have traduced erikl1963 because without having done anything wrong he found his Instagram account permanently suspended one fine morning. 

Well, apparently I did do something wrong. My account, or activity on it, wasn’t following Meta’s “Community Standards on account integrity.” I know. Meta has Community Standards? That are important enough to use the title case? But there it is, in the email, with a link to a page that explains nothing. 

There’s also a “Review details” button that leads to a webpage:

How we made this decision
Our technology found your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules. As a result, our technology took action.

Our technology found out so our technology took action? Yeah, we’re doomed.

But like Josef K., I was allowed to appeal my case—whatever it was. First, I was asked for my email address so a confirmation code could be sent. So a robot could determine I wasn’t a robot, as John Mulaney succinctly put it six years ago.

Then it asked for my phone number. At this point I triple-checked the email addresses and URLs to make sure everyone was who they said they were. At this point, too, I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a scam, by Instagram, to get me to give up my phone number. Or had I already given it up? I didn’t remember.

I’ve only been on Instagram since Sept. 1, 2023. I left Facebook in 2019 because Meta is awful, and I left Twitter in 2022 because Elon Musk is awfuller. I experimented with other social media sites, hating myself all the while—that I actually have this need now, this daily need, to engage without engaging, to see what’s going down, kinda, to drink the salt water because I’m so, so thirsty, and these other sites, sadly, pathetically, didn’t help much with that thirst, not even in the awful salt-watery way that Twitter or Facebook had, which is why, eventually, I re-upped with Zuckerberg, opening an account on Instagram, tail tucked between my legs.

I wasn’t a fan. I’m a word guy, it’s a picture site. It’s worse than a picture site, it’s a video site. It’s worse than that as we all know and for all the reasons we know. But once in a while someone I like posts a picture I like.

I tried to do the same. It was on Instagram that I posted photos of my older brother Chris and I at Mount Rainier when he came to visit me in Seattle in Oct. 2023. And it was on Instagram that I posted childhood photos of Chris and I with a link to his obituary after he was murdered in a random attack at a busstop in Edina, Minn. on November 22, 2023. And it was on Instagram that I posted various photos of my 16-year-old cat Jellybean in the hallway of our condo. And it was on Instagram that I posted a link to Jellybean’s obituary when we had to put her to sleep—kill her—in December 2023 after she continued to suffer following a cancer diagnosis. And it was on Instagram that I posted photos of our new kitten, Clem, short for Clemente, in Feb. 2024. And it was on Instagram that I posted a link to Clem’s obituary after 11 days of dysentery and four vet visits with 4-6 different vets, none of whom realized the scope of his problem, the last of whom couldn’t stabilize him at 5:00 on a Saturday morning. 

Yeah, it hasn’t been a good year. Oh, and the notice of my permanent suspension on Instagram came one year after my brother’s murder. To the day. Nice touch, Meta. 

Anyway, I entered my mobile number so its technology could send me a confirmation code to prove my identity to its technology one more time. Nothing happened. Instead, beneath the fill-in box, there appeared a little red message:

Code not sent: Try again later or use a different mobile number. 

Somewhere, Kafka smiles.

If I ever find out what I did to warrant permanent suspension from a social media platform I don’t like, I’ll let you know. But at this point, it feels like a gift.

**

UPDATE: Same day, evening, the “Code not sent” glitch—if it was a glitch—was fixed, Instagram sent me a code to verify my account, I did, and for one brief shining moment it let me know I was appealing its decision. And then this, literally a second later. 

As I suspected, it just wanted the phone number. “Sometimes we need to take precautions to ensure that everyone's data on Instagram is safe and usable and sellable by Instagram.” 

Posted at 07:19 AM on Friday November 22, 2024 in category Technology   |   Permalink  

Sunday November 17, 2024

What is Jane Russell 'Known For'?

I know: It sounds like the setup for a Bob Hope joke. Instead, it's just another IMDb joke:

“The Outlaw,” kids. She's known for “The Outlaw.” Good god, know your cultural history.

Posted at 08:06 PM on Sunday November 17, 2024 in category Movies   |   Permalink  

Saturday November 16, 2024

Movie Review: Macao (1952)

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s not a bad premise. In the titular Portuguese-Chinese colony, we see a man being pursued by crime lord Vincent Halloran (Brad Dexter) and several henchmen, including Itzumi (Korean-American actor Philip Ahn), who delivers the fatal blow, tossing a knife into the man’s back. Except the dude was a cop. Now New York is sending another cop to bring Halloran to justice. (Not Itzumi? It’s almost an insult.)

Cut to: a boat making its way from Hong Kong to Macao, where we run into three Americans:

  • Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum), a down-on-his-luck adventurer
  • Julie Benton (Jane Russell), a down-on-her-luck chanteuse
  • Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), a happy-go-lucky salesman of coconut oil, stockings and cigars

One of them, of course, is the cop.

That’s the fun part—trying to guess. The crime boss assumes it’s Nick, and who wouldn’t? Look at him. I assumed it was Trumble/Bendix, because he’s comic relief, but I was holding out hope the cop was Jane Russell. Wouldn’t that be amazing? The movie would be so ahead of its time.

Nope. Of its time.

The nonsense crescendo
Another example: They were still doing the post-WWII narration thing. That was disappointing—hearing Truman Bradley’s stentorian voice at the open over nondescript establishing shots:

This is Macao, a fabulous speck on the earth’s surface, just off the south coast of China, a 35-mile boat trip from Hong Kong. It’s an ancient Portuguese colony, quaint and bizarre. The crossroads of the Far East, its population is a mixture of all races and nationalities—mostly Chinese. Macao, often called the Monte Carlo of the Orient, has two faces: one, calm and open; the other, veiled and secret. Here, millions in gold and diamonds change hands, some across the gambling tables, some mysteriously in the night. Macao is a fugitive’s haven, for, at the three-mile limit, the authority of the International Police comes to an end.

A lot of unnecessary info amid that mess.

On the boat to Macao, the first person we see isn’t any of our three stars, but a guy dancing—not badly but somewhat comically—in his stateroom. He’s dancing before Julie, on whom the camera slowly pans up until we see her face, looking bemused and sardonic in that great Jane Russell way. She’s taking the boat to Macao on his dime and he wants a little something-something in return. A dance? Nah. Another drink? Nah. That’s when he gets all handsy. She takes off her shoe as a weapon but her aim is off: it goes through the ship portal and hits a passerby—Nick. That’s their meet-cute: attempted rape. The whole thing is treated lightly. When Nick saunters in, for example, Handsy is still getting handsy. 

Julie (fending the dude off): Do you mind giving me a hand!
Nick (staring at her appreciatively): Don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy that.

Yeah, Nick isn’t exactly a knight in shining armor. Even after he knocks out Handsy, he notes the whisky, the private stateroom, and suggests they stick around. “One side, Clyde,” she says, but allows herself to be kissed, long and slow, so she can pick Nick’s pocket.

It's out on deck that she meets the gladhanding Lawrence C. Trumble and his suitcase of wares, and all three meet up again before customs, where they’re questioned by Lt. Sebastian (Thomas Gomez). Nick is even more down-on-his-luck now: Julie took his dough and tossed his passport overboard. They still let him into the country. Kinda.

Sebastian actually works for Halloran, and since they suspect Nick is the cop, they try to kick him out of the country for vagrancy—which makes sense—but Julie slips him some of his dough back. So then they try to kick him out for not having a passport. Kidding. That’s never raised again. Instead, we get a crescendoing of nonsensical actions. Halloran lets Nick win at craps, ratcheting it up to $12k before taking it all away. Why? That just leads to a sampan boatride between Nick and Julie, where they canoodle and talk about a life together—though Nick says he wants to support her first. That leads to Julie assuming she’s getting the ol’ brushoff again—as if 1950 Jane Russell was always getting the ol’ brushoff.

More nonsense: Trumble asks Nick to show Halloran a diamond from a necklace that’s in a hotel safe in Hong Kong, in case he’d like to buy it. I’ll cut to the chase: Trumble is the cop and he’s trying to lure Halloran outside the three-mile limit so he can be arrested. Why doesn’t he do it himself? Why does he risk a civilian’s life? Exactly. And Nick’s life is risked. He’s kidnapped, basically, and when Julie tries to spring him, he pretends he’s shacking up with Halloran’s assistant Margie (an underused Gloria Grahame) because he’s got a gun at his back. More misunderstandings. When Nick does bust loose, he’s chased around the waterfront by Itzumi and another hood (Spencer Chan, I believe), but the one who gets the knife in the back is Trumble. Yeah, they accidentally kill the right guy. All of which is foreshadowed by an earlier line: “I'll go back one of these days or my name isn't Lawrence C. Trumble.” It isn’t and he doesn’t.

It's Julie who finally lures Halloran past the three-mile limit, but even here the International Police aren’t much help, flashing lights around and alerting Halloran, so Nick has to duke it out with him. But: bad guy caught, and good-bad guy winds up with good-bad girl. Just like we wanted.

Anyway, it’s not much. 

Sitting out the war
Most cinephiles know Howard Hughes discovered Jane Russell for “The Outlaw,” which had a much-delayed release, mostly because of Production Code and local censorship board difficulties. It was filmed during the winter of 1940-41, had reshoots that spring, but didn’t premiere until two years later, in February 1943, in San Francisco. It set house records but Hughes couldn’t find other theaters to run it, so it didn’t get a wider release until spring 1946. Basically, between when it was filmed and when people got to see it, all of World War II happened.

That’s less bug than feature for Hughes. He was a tinkerer. “Macao,” for example, was filmed in August-October 1950, then additional scenes were shot six months later, and then again six months after that. And even then it didn’t premiere for another eight months—in April 1952. “The Outlaw” sat out WWII, “Macao” the Korean War.

This is Josef von Sternberg’s first feature since “The Shanghai Gesture” in 1941, and one of his last features ever, and it wasn’t even all him; the retakes were done by Nicholas Ray and Robert Stevenson. Nothing really stands out except a shot where the principles’ reflection on the water is filmed rather than them.

I liked seeing Philip Ahn again even though he isn’t given much to do. Ditto Thomas Gomez, who had that great scene in “Force of Evil” but usually plays gangster flunky. Mitchum is his usual seamless self. And then there’s Russell. She’s great when she’s saucy and sardonic—her pouty lip curl is like Elvis before Elvis—but she's even more beautiful when she softens a bit. She’s got beautiful eyes. They probably didn’t get noticed much.

The eyes have it: Elvis before Elvis, Hoffs before Hoffs.

Posted at 10:27 AM on Saturday November 16, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 1950s   |   Permalink  

Wednesday November 13, 2024

Movie Review: Heaven Can Wait (1978)

WARNING: SPOILERS

The way Warren Beatty looks on the poster and throughout half the film—that gray track suit and zipper hoodie—may be the first movie “look” I actively pursued for myself. I thought, “That looks good, I could look good in that.” No. Just 15, with a concave chest and narrow shoulders, the track suit I bought was thick and cumbersome and bulged in all the wrong places. I was practically swaddled in it. I looked less Warren Beatty and more Michelin Man.

Back then, I remember my father trying to tell me the movie’s lineage but merely confusing me. It’s a remake of a 1940s film, he said, but not the one called “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a man reviewing his life in Hades. No, it’s actually a remake of “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” (1941), about boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), plucked from life 50 years before his time. Turns out it’s even more confusing than Dad knew. “Mr. Jordan” was based upon a play, “Wonderful Journey” by Harry Segall. Segall’s original title? “Heaven Can Wait.”

Initially, Beatty, the producer, wanted Muhammad Ali to star. At one time, he wanted Cary Grant to return from retirement to play Mr. Jordan. He sought Arthur Penn, or Mike Nichols, or Peter Bogdanovich to direct. He didn’t get any of his wishes.

Instead, he just made a great movie.

March 20, 2025
“Heaven Can Wait” is poignant without dragging you down, a love story without hardly seeming to try, plus a not-bad sports movie—football rather than boxing, because Beatty was more footballer than boxer. A box-office hit, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including four for Beatty: producer, actor, director, screenplay. It won zero. For some reason, current IMDb users give it a 6.9 rating. Fucking kids.

Is this really Beatty’s first directing credit? Part of me thinks Beatty was always directing. But yes, it is. He’s co-director with Buck Henry. Equally shocking, he directed only five feature films in his entire career:

  1. “Heaven Can Wait” (1978)
  2. “Reds” (1981)
  3. “Dick Tracy (1990)
  4. “Bulworth” (1998)
  5. “Rules Don’t Apply” (2016)

Joe Pendleton (Beatty) is a Los Angeles Rams quarterback on the wrong side of 30 trying to make a comeback via perpetual fitness and a very 1970s So Cal diet of liver and whey. It’s working. “He’s looking awful good” the various coaches say on the sidelines as Joe airs out another pass. One of those coaches, Max Corkle (Jack Warden), is already on his side, and eventually the others come around. Max gives him the good news: The following Sunday he’ll start for the Rams rather than Tom Jarrett. Joe receives the news more worried than happy and goes for another bikeride in preparation. We see him ride into a tunnel and a reckless driver revving it from the other side. Joe doesn’t come out.

Cut to: puffs of clouds, a whimsical score from Dave Grusin (also nom’ed), and Buck Henry leading the track-suited and thoroughly confused Joe toward an airplane to take him (one assumes) to heaven. Joe ain’t having it. He’s starting on Sunday. The manager, Mr. Jordan (James Mason—a helluva backup to Cary Grant), comes over, and amid the back and forth, including Joe doing pushups in the clouds, asks when Joe Pendleton is due to arrive. He’s told: March 20, 2025, 10:17 a.m. The Escort, a newbie, thought the crash looked brutal, wanted to spare him pain, and removed him prematurely. “So just put me back,” Joe says.

Too late. He’s been cremated.

Now it’s a matter of finding a new body for him. And not just any body—one that can play quarterback. Who do they see? 1) A tightrope walker, 2) a German racecar driver, and 3) a millionaire industrialist, Leo Farnsworth, whose wife Julia and right-hand man Tony (Dyan Cannon, with Farrah hair, and Charles Grodin, impeccable), have just poisoned him in his bathtub. Nah, Joe says. Then Betty Logan (Julie Christie) shows up, trying to save the township of Pagglesham, England, where her father lives, and where Farnsworth Industries is threatening everyone’s health. 

Joe: Somebody oughta help her.
Mr. Jordan: You can help her, Joe. You can be Leo Farnsworth.

(I can’t help but hear James Mason’s voice with that line.)

So he agrees—conditionally, temporarily—and Leo’s reappearance causes the wife to scream, and the right-hand man to wonder what games he’s playing as, over the days, his wheeler-dealer boss asks questions that a Business 101 student would be embarrassed to ask. (Ex.: “What’s a stockholder?”) More than pursuing Betty, Joe/Leo, who looks to us like Joe but to everyone else like Leo, tries to get his body in shape so he can quarterback for the Rams. Yes, that dream doesn’t die. When he can’t get a tryout with the team, he buys it for 10 times its value—and a fraction of its current value. And in one of the movie’s most poignant scenes, Joe/Leo brings Max to the estate and convinces him that he really is Joe Pendleton: He fixes his neck as Joe always did, he tells him secrets only Joe knew, and he repeats the line Joe heard Max say at Joe’s gravesite: “They don't have a football team in heaven, so God couldn't make me first-string.”

Did Jack Warden play everyone’s older pal/mentor in the 1970s? Feels like it, but I guess it’s mostly this and “All the President’s Men.” He got nom’ed for this as well as Beatty’s previous film, “Shampoo.” I would’ve given him the nom here just for his reaction shot when Joe says the above line. Beautiful. 

There’s also a love story, seeming effortless, and Julia and Tony are still trying to kill Leo, and eventually succeed. At which point Joe pops up wearing the track suit again and carrying his clarinet. So whose body does Joe get now? Tom Jarrett’s. During the big game, Jarrett goes down and would’ve died; instead, Joe takes his place and leads the Rams to a Super Bowl victory. And then he gets the girl. Well, someone does.

Dazed and distracted
You see, the powers that be, Mr. Jordan, et al., take away his memory of ever being Joe Pendleton. I guess you could say Joe’s essence winds up in Jarrett’s body and with Jarrett’s life history. He thinks he’s Tom Jarrett, but there’s something in his eyes that reminds Betty of Leo Farnsworth—who was, of course, Joe Pendleton. She sees the Leo/Joe in him. It’s a bit of a cheat but I suppose it says something about the eternal aspect of love—if one buys into that kind of thing. 

Anyway, it’s lovely. And smart. Beatty has never gotten enough credit for casting smart actresses in smart roles opposite him, while he always played dumb. The women opposite him were the ones who knew the way the world worked: Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie, Annette Benning, Halle Berry. Compare this with, say, Robert Redford forever showing women the ropes. As a producer, Beatty is a feminist, but since he also loved schtupping them he’s not viewed this way.

As an actor, Beatty’s got a nice light comedic touch. He gives a great line reading on “I’m not really Leo Farnsworth!” with that slight snort. As usual, he plays dazed and distracted throughout. The true revelation for me this time is Charles Grodin. Every line, every look, is funny. How he turns an underling cuckolding and murdering his boss into comedy gold needs studying.

Posted at 06:22 AM on Wednesday November 13, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 1970s   |   Permalink  

Monday November 11, 2024

A Gloriously Perverse Justification of Our Democratic Form of Government?

The day before the election, on social media, I posted this year's I VOTED image along with a 20-year-old quote from Norman Mailer—back when he was on Charlie Rose's show during the runup to the Iraq War:

“Democracy has a fundamental assumption: that if you allow the mass of people to express their will, more good will come out of that than bad. That means that democracy can always fail. And the best of democracies can fail. We have probably the greatest democracy that ever existed: We can go down the tubes; we can turn into a totalitarian country, too.”

And here we are.

So was democracy a good idea in its day and America too stupid/greedy/spoiled/awful for it now? Let me quote another postwar Jewish-American writer, E.L. Doctorow, from his essay “The Character of Presidents,” which is in that book to the right. He's writing about the unlikely return of the thoroughly unlikeable Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon was down, and humiliated, and then he was back in the Oval Office, the most powerful man in the world, and Doctorow gives us this long, beautiful sentence about what that may mean. Please read it in full. See if it reminds you of someone:

“That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spirtually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics as if were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.”

You'd need to lose “...living only by pure politics” because that's Nixon not Trump—with Trump, it's money money money, and power—but otherwise much of the quote actually fits Trump better. Certainly “lurchingly stumbling up from his own wretched career...”

But then there's “a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.” Doctorow wrote that in the 1990s when Nixon was history. So maybe when Trump is history (and c'mon, history!), I may feel the same way about him. But right now? He's remains the greatest threat to American democracy and American rule of law in my lifetime.

Posted at 10:34 AM on Monday November 11, 2024 in category Books   |   Permalink  

Sunday November 10, 2024

Nov. 5, 2024

I'm mostly sorry for Ukraine. We did this to ourselves but Ukraine is out there fighting for its life, fighting for democracy, and wasn't that something the U.S. once promoted? Something the U.S. once stood for? Making the world safe for democracy, the arsenal of democracy ... Well, we've got a brand-new brand now.

It's been a rough 12 months for me and I didn't really have the emotional bandwidth to follow along with this election, the awfulness and lies, the lies and insanity. I was so out of it that I felt not-bad about the election a month ago. But as the days dwindled down even I was picking up on the signals. The Washington Post and LA Times and USA Today not endorsing a candidate, for example. This was no new moral stance for them, some greater-than-great objectivity for even their Op-Ed pages. It's: They thought he would win. It was a cowardly move that won them nothing but contempt. Like all cowardly moves.

Even the night of I was more detached than normal. Our friend Ward had a few close friends over to either celebrate or commiserate. Some professed to be, in the phrase of the day, nauseously optimistic. Soon they were just nauseous. My immediate thought, which I said out loud, was the Democratic party needed to nominate more straight white men since the woman thing wasn't working. As Bill Burr said last night on SNL, “Alright, ladies, you're 0-2 against this guy: Oh and two!” That pissed people off but he wasn't wrong. One guy's beaten him, Biden, and that took a global pandemic. One guy from either party, by the way. Republicans had 10 other options back in 2015 and they all fell down. They could've taken him out after Jan. 6 but they all fell down.

But I don't know if the straight white men thing is the answer. I don't know if we're just too sexist and/or racist a country, or if there's just too many masters of misinformation out there, the Fox Newses of the world, or if the legit media keeps failing us by normalizing the roughest edges of the roughest major party candidate who ever feigned fellating a microphone, or if it's the new technology allowing the new propaganda to seep into our lives and brains and souls. I don't know if the Democratic party is just too polite. I suspect so. They're playing tennis at Wimbledon when it's rugby on a muddy field in the middle of winter. With cheaters.

I do know that if you voted for Trump because you're worried about the price of eggs, you're an idiot. If, however, you voted for him because you're racist and/or sexist, well, you backed the right person. You're getting what you wanted. Ditto if you're rich and want a tax cut, or if you love Putin or don't care about Ukraine. Or if you just don't like American democracy. I'm not a huge fan of it myself these days. When Biden won in 2020 I began to think of the Trump years as an aberration. Now the Biden years look like the aberration. We laughed at Trump when he put his stupid name on all of his buildings. Now he's doing it to the times. He went from hotelier to era.

I like something the actor Jeffrey Wright posted recently:

Fuck it. Hard week. Let's go. Right is right. History will applaud us.

Good attitude. I like something my friend Craig Wright posted the day after:

Everything that was true yesterday is true today. Some of it is more evident now, and more present; and some is less evident now, and less present. But it's a closed system, this world. The good always goes somewhere. Find it. 

Two Wrights don't erase a massive wrong. But it's a start. 

Posted at 01:45 PM on Sunday November 10, 2024 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Tuesday November 05, 2024

Vote

The legit media has been one of the great disappointments of the Trump era—even now, 10 years into it, they still haven't figured out a way to cover the guy correctly, and in some ways have actually gotten worse—but Peter Baker's piece in The New York Times last month deserves some praise. Entitled “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment,” and subtitled “No major party presidential candidate, much less president, in American history has been accused of wrongdoing so many times,” the piece is exactly that: a tallying up of all the shit the fucker's done over the decades. If you have anyone sitting on the fence in this election, or a favorite relative you can't believe believes in the guy, send it to them. Or just send them paragraphs 5-7 about “the record of scandal stretching across his 78 years,” which includes “so many acts of wrongdoing” that “it requires a scorecard to remember them all”:

His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Which is still only scratching the surface. And yet he's still there, still holding onto power, still transforming the “Grand Old Party” into a club for hucksters and scumbags, opportunists and cowards, with the Federalist Society trying to work levers in the background, and looking increasingly like scumbags and cowards themselves. Tonight, or tomorrow, or some time this week, we'll begin to see how much longer “the Trump era” might last. And how it might end. And what America might look like at the end of it.

Vote. 

Posted at 08:29 AM on Tuesday November 05, 2024 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Saturday November 02, 2024

Things I Learned While Reading 'George Lucas: A Life'


  • Lucas' favorite comic book character wasn't Superman or Batman but Scrooge McDuck, “the money-hoarding, globe-trotting uncle of Donald Duck.” (Foreshadow alert)
  • He wasn't really a movie-loving kid like Steven Spielberg. “While Lucas recalled seeing a few memorable films either on TV or in the Modesto movie theaters—Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, The Bridge on the River Kwai—for the most part, movies were simply a pleasant diversion.”
  • I'd long read that Lucas wanted to remake “Flash Gordon,” which he'd supposedly seen as a kid, and I couldn't understand why. He was born in 1944, serials were dead or dying when he came of age, and no “Flash Gordon” had been made for decades. Answer: “The TV shows that Lucas remembered the most fondly were those 30-minute blocks of local programming in the late afternoon and early evening that broadcasters, looking for content, simply filled with installments of old movie serials. ... 'I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials,' Lucas said.”
  • At odds with this? At USC film school, he was a huge fan of foreign and avante-garde filmmaking and into “tone poems” rather than straight storytelling.
  • At the same time, Lucas' classmate, future Oscar-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch, remembers that the USC film school didn't think much of the future of film: “The very first thing our film teacher told us... was, 'Get out of this business now. There's no future in it. There are no jobs for any of you. Don't do this.'”
  • Lucas made “American Graffiti” out of spite. His previous film, “THX-1131,” had failed utterly and everyone was telling him to make something that wasn't so cold and impersonal. “Don't be so weird,” Coppola told him. “Why don't you try to write something out of your own life that has warmth and humor?” Lucas responded, as if through clenched teeth: “I'll give them one, just to show that I can do it.”
  • While he was struggling to write “Star Wars” (writing was always a chore for him), he saw his wife Marcia driving away with their dog, an enormous Alaskan malamute, sitting in the passenger seat. “Lucas thought the dog, nearly as big as a person, looked like Marcia's copilot,” Jones writes. Yes, that's what led to Chewbacca.
  • That malamute inspired an even more famous movie character: His name was Indiana.
  • Though he'd cast Harrison Ford in “Graffiti,” Lucas didn't want him for “Star Wars,” but casting director Fred Roos got him into casting sessions by hiring him as a carpenter and then suggesting, “Hey, why don't we get this guy to help them out?”
  • Lucas would create casting sessions in groups so he could see which actors had chemistry together. In one, Christopher Walken was Han, Will Seltzer Luke, and Teri Nunn Leia. But Seltzer's Luke was a bit intellectual, while Nunn was still a minor. Plus this group was a bit serious. So he went with the other, more fun trio.  
  • Lucas didn't want to use Anthony Daniels voice for C-3PO or Frank Oz's voice for Yoda. For the former he envisioned a Brooklynesque used-car salesman(!), and for the latter, who knows? But he realized what he had was better than what he envisioned and kept it in.
  • One of LucasFilm's first hires was a computer scientist named Ed Catmull. Lucas wanted him developing tools to make digital movies but Catmull was intrigued with computer animation—so he and team did it on the sly. What they worked on eventually became a company: Pixar.
  • Lucas never saw the value in Pixar and sold it in the mid-1980s for $5-10 million. It was eventually worth billions. And counting.
  • I never delved into the “Han shot first” discussion, which I assumed was just a contentious matter within the first “Star Wars” movie. Not quite. In its 20th anniversary update, along with cluttering the screen with gimcrackery, Lucas manipulated what he'd originally filmed in the barroom showdown between Han Solo and Greedo so Greedo shoots first rather than (as in the '77 original) Han shooting first. Lucas wanted his famous characters nice now, while fans felt it ruined Han's arc—from a ruthless solipsist to a semi-true believer. The fans are right. Again.

I still think you can make a good movie about the relationship between Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. The larger-than-life Coppola takes the young, quiet man under his wing, and Lucas, with “THX,” all but sinks Coppola's production company, and then with “Star Wars,” revolutionizes the industry away from the very types of films that Coppola was made to make. It's Frankenstein.

The book by Brian Jay Jones is recommended.

Posted at 10:16 AM on Saturday November 02, 2024 in category Books   |   Permalink