The journeyman who became Mr. Baseball

My father said his delivery reminded him of W.C. Fields—particularly in that great Miller Lite ad where he gets comps to a game and obliviously bothers everyone getting to his seat—only to be told, no, buddy, you're in the wrong seat. To which Bob Uecker says “Oh, I must be in the front roooow!” Dad could totally hear the W.C. Fields there. The final moments of the commercial are Uecker in the deepest section of the bleachers, far away from the action, enthusiasm undimmed.

Major League Baseball has had its share of clown princes, it's a tag you hear a lot, but I wouldn't tag Uecker with it. Neither clown nor prince seems right. He was just the funniest everyman to ever play the game.

I read his memoir, “Catcher in the Wry,” nearly 30 years ago now, and every so often I'll think of one of the cutlines in the photo section: Uecker, grimacing, as he slides into homeplate. “Here I am trying to score from second on a three-base hit; out on a close play.” He was master of self-effacement. He was famously a not-great player—six seasons, .200/.293/.287 in six seasons—and played for three teams in four cities: Braves (Milwaukee), Cardinals, Philllies, Braves (Atlanta). This is from his memoir:

When a player gets cut, well, the news is traumatic. He is face to face with that moment of final truth, that he will never put on a big league uniform again. Nor is it easy on the manager who has to break the news. ... I'll never forget how it happened to me. I went to spring training with Atlanta in 1968. The manager was Luman Harris. I opened the door to the clubhouse and Luman looked up and said calmly, “No visitors allowed.”

This story is via Joe Posnanski. Ueck was on the '64 Cardinals who came from 11 games back to win the pennant, but he didn't play in the World Series.

“I was on the disabled list,” he told Bob Costas and Joe Morgan in the booth during Game 6 of the 1995 World Series.

Costas: Fouled to the screen. Why were you on the disabled list?

Uecker: I got hepatitis.

Costas: Swing and a miss. How did you get hepatitis?

Uecker: The trainer injected me with it.

Pos says Uecker was everyone's favorite teammate: Dick Allen, Phil Niekro, Bob Gibson. He and Gibson were fined $100 each by the St. Louis Cardinals for necessitating a reshoot of the team photo. In the first version they were holding hands. In '65, Lou Brock set a then Cardinals record by stealing 60 bases and was given a plaque in a ceremony in the team clubhouse, during which Uecker turned to Tim McCarver and whispered: “If I had been in the lineup every day, that could be me out there.”

After his career he became a regular on “The Tonight Show,” beloved by Johnny, who gave him the nickname “Mr. Baseball.” He became the Milwaukee Brewers announcer in 1972 and never stopped. He did the Lite beer commercials and got his own sitcom in the '80s. He became one of the most famous fictional announcers of the game when he played Harry Doyle in the “Major League” movies: “Juuust a bit outside!” 

I like this from Bob Costas: “Baseball kept him alive. Even in his last year, when he was so ill, when he got to the ballpark and stepped on the elevator up to the press box, he would come to life. He was just happier and healthier at the ballpark.”

Touch 'em all, Ueck.

“I must be in the front roooow.” 

Now I remember why I haven't re-read Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” in decades and decades: Everyone in it is kind of awful. You get the feeling that even Mr. Vonnegut doesn't like them, and you never want to get that feeling from an author. Eliot Rosewater, the main character, yes, is sympathetic, but he's also dealing with severe mental problems—triggered by the death of his mother, along with service in World War II, along with having wealth and fame he feels he didn't earn. Which he didn't. So there's that. But everyone else is just small and awful.

That said, a passage near the end blew me away. It's a description of a Kilgore Trout science fiction novel entitled “Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass,” about (shades of ST:TOS's “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) an intergalactic group coming to the edge of the universe and trying to figure out if there was anything else “in all that black velvet nothing out there.” Its main character, Sgt. Boyle, an English teacher, was the only Earthling on the expedition. Vonnegut writes:

The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known Universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time—to start thinking in terms of projects.

That's what blew me away. That description of telepathy, “with everybody constantly telling everybody everything,” which then “produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information,” well good god if that doesn't describe this thing that we're all on, this disaster of the world wide web and social media and all of it. He's describing the effects of the internet. In 1965. 

Time to start using language again. Time to get unstuck.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Apparently Robert Eggers wanted to remake “Nosferatu” rather than “Dracula” because he thinks F. W. Murnau’s silent classic is the best distillation of the story. Sure. But why remake any of them? Aren’t they shambling 19th-century things?

This is the basics of anything culled from Bram Stoker's work. A solicitor travels to Transylvania to get Count Dracula/Orlock to sign papers for a property in England/Germany and enters a nightmarish landscape where he realizes his client is a vampire/nosferatu. Somehow Dracula/Orlock sets his sights on the solicitor’s wife/fiancée, with whom he develops a symbiotic relationship, leaves the solicitor behind to die, and travels by schooner to England/Germany. By the time it arrives it’s a ghost ship and a plague is visited upon the seaport town. As Dracula/Orlock pursues the wife/fiancée, forces are marshalled against him led by the solicitor (now returned) and an elderly scholar, and either they save the wife/fiancée or she saves them by sacrificing herself. The end.

Not exactly tight. Basically it's a real estate deal gone bad.

Moustaches
So what did Eggers add? Motivation!

About time, really. I’d never understood why Dracula/Orlock wanted to move to England/Germany in the first place, but in Eggers’ version the symbiotic relationship with Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) begins when she’s 9 years old. Yes, creepy. But it’s also why Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) buys the property in Wisborg, Germany: to claim her. And it’s why the enslaved Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) for the paper-signing—to get hubby out of the way.

All of which raises more questions:

• Since Orlock seems able to control or at least influence Ellen’s thoughts/desires from afar, why didn’t he just order her to Transylvania?
• How did Knock—this universe’s Renfield—become enslaved? Did he meet Orlock or is that long-distance mind-control, too?
• Exactly what body of water is Orlock traversing to get from Romania to Germany?

Eggers, who directed “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” and “The Northman,” does the nightmarescape of Orlock/Nosferatu’s world well, that odd logic/illogic of dreams—how space is circumvented or drawn out. Is Ellen rising from the bed or levitating? He also shrouds Orlock in perpetual darkness. We never see him clearly until the very end when the sun rises on his post-coital bed and poof. I also like that he didn’t just rubber-stamp a Max Schreck look; this Orlock looks more like Vlad the Impaler, an apparent source for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, moustaches included.

But how did Eggers blow the plague? Murnau’s version was released four years after the 1918 influenza epidemic, while Eggers’ version comes to us four years after COVID, but he doesn’t seem to do much with it. It should’ve resonated more. 

Depp has been praised, and it’s a brave performance. She’s not just the victim. She’s the one, who, at age 9, summons the demon in the first place, and she often revisits her own nature/nurture question. “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” she asks. But she also flips on a dime too much—one minute mocking hubby as inferior to Orlock and the next standing up toOrlock for hubby. And no handwringing on being Patient Zero? She’s the reason the entire town is dying—including her great friends Anna and Friedrich Harding (Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their children. Mea culpa? Nada.

You know what might be interesting? This story written and directed by a woman. Have we had that yet? In all the versions that have been made? Kind of cries out for it, doesn't it?

Taming succumbing
Hoult does a great job in a thankless role, while Skarsgård is again unrecognizable as evil personified. I liked McBurney as Knock, though could’ve done without the Ozzie Osborne stunt. I think I shielded my eyes about five times watching the movie. 

Willem Dafoe, who played Max Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire,” turns up as the Van Helsing of this universe, named Prof. Albin Everhart von Franz, but his acting felt a bit over the top. “I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!” he cries, a line which made me laugh out loud. He also says, “If we are to tame the darkness, we must first face that it exists!” Please send that quote to members of the Republican caucus, or to the legit media, as we tame or succumb to our own darkness.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the early 2010s, Jacques Audiard made some of my favorite movies, particularly “Un Prophete” and “Rust and Bone,” but since then we’d lost touch, and I wanted to get reacquainted. As the man said, “We should talk, we should always have talked.” So I watched this.

I also watched it because Zoe Saldana won the Golden Globe—and because she’s Zoe Saldana. I guess the movie won awards, too? Wait, Zoe won for supporting? Isn’t she lead? She’s top-billed, and she seems to have the most screen time. On the other hand, she does feel supporting, since the story isn’t about her. She’s there as facilitator and observer. The story is someone else’s. The title character’s.

I get why Audiard went musical with it. There’s something operatic about the story: huge twists and turns.* If you did it straight, it would seem over-the-top. Or more over-the-top.

(* Per Wikipedia, yes, Audiard originally wrote it as an opera libretto.)

I just wish I liked it more.

The whole nine yards
Rita Castro (Saldana) is second-chair to a less-competent criminal defense attorney in Mexico City, and while helping acquit a drug-cartel figure she wonders (though song and dance) if this is the life she wants. Saldana has the moves and pipes, by the way. You can tell she’s trained. And her acting here is a revelation. For God’s sake, Hollywood, get this woman away from green screens and into better scripts!

After the acquittal, Rita gets a phone call from a mysterious, gravely voiced man, offering work. She’s told to go to a newsstand, does, and is promptly kidnapped: bag over the head, car ride to nowhere, the whole nine yards. Who’s responsible? Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the most powerful drug cartel leader in the country. What does he want? He wants to be a she. He wants gender-affirming surgery and he wants Rita to facilitate it so that it happens soon and nobody knows. Manitas will disappear and Emilia Perez will be born.

So it’s off to Bangkok and Tel Aviv. I don’t get why, when they need to cut through the red tape, they don’t go the Bangkok route—where the red tape is, I assume, almost nonexistent—but no, that’s when Rita goes to Israel. There she finds a sympathetic ear in Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), who is serious, quick and by the book. He actually flies to Mexico City and does the whole nine yards (bag over the head) to ensure the patient’s psychological profile is fine. Despite Manitas being who he is (a mass murderer, etc.), he passes, and the surgery goes forward.

Four years later, Rita is lawyering in London, or at least hobnobbing with the jet-set crowd, when, at a fancy dinner party, she’s introduced to another woman from Mexico City. It takes a minute for the other shoe to drop. “It’s you.” “Bingo.” What does Emilia want? She wants her wife and children, safely stored in Switzerland, to return to live with her, Manitas’ “sister,” in Mexico. 

Me: Wait, she’s not going to become a better person because she’s a woman, is she?

Bingo. During lunch at an outdoor café, Emilia is handed a missing persons notice by a distraught woman whose husband was disappeared by the cartels, and, with her inside info, Emilia gets the answer. Then she helps another and another. An NGO is created. Most of these men are dead but at least the women have answers and can move on with their lives. As a result, Emilia becomes a beloved national figure. She also begins a romantic relationship with one of the women, Epifania (Adriana Paz), who was terrified her abusive husband wasn’t dead but still alive.

So where’s the drama now? With Manitas’ wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), who seems less interested in rearing her children than partying with new BF Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). The real problem occurs when Jessi announces she’s going to marry Gustavo. And the children? Well, they’ll come live with her, of course. 

That’s when we see the Manitas in Emilia. She erupts, rages at and physically attacks Jessi, calling Gustavo a pimp. She has her men beat up Gustavo and toss money at him to leave town. He doesn’t. He kidnaps Emilia, cut off three fingers, and hold her for ransom.

During a third-act firefight, Emilia finally confesses to Jessi who she is but by then it’s too late. She’s stuffed into the trunk of Gustavo’s car, and, when Jessi pulls a gun on Gustavo to get him to stop, they fight, go over an embankment and the car burst into flames. In the aftermath, songs are sung, and the image of Emilia as folk saint is paraded through the streets of Mexico.

Nice Jewish doctor
Some songs were catchy—the sweetest, I thought, was when one of the children sang how Aunt Emilia smelled like their father—but I never got into the characters. Rita is only briefly the main character, then her story is subsumed by Manitas’/Emilia’s, who is (for me) a little needy as a woman. Jessi is a shallow thing and Gustavo a nonentity. I actually liked Dr. Wasserman—who only has a bit part. When Rita was wondering why she couldn’t find a good man, I wondered about him. When it doubt, go nice Jewish doctor.

Has enough been written about the diversity in Audiard’s stories? This isn’t your father’s French cinema:

• A Muslim kid rises to power in prison
• A Sri Lankan Tamil warrior becomes a caretaker in Paris
• A Mexican cartel leader has gender-affirming surgery

The U.N. should be so diverse.

“Emilia Perez” isn’t a bad movie and I hope people see it and lessons are learned. My main takeaway? Get Zoe Saldana better scripts.

Unfortunately, they didn't scoff at love, laugh at marriage or live for luxury alone: 0-3.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The women of “The Public Enemy” (Harlow! Clarke!) are reunited here as small-town girls who go to the big city to earn money and avoid assholes. They do better with the former.

As the movie opens, Gladys (Mae Clarke) is already in New York, and showers mom back in Chillicothe, Ohio, with gifts from her $200-a-week gig. Meanwhile, Cassie (Jean Harlow) is making $15 as a soda jerk, and that ain't cutting it, so she goes, too. The move merely gets her a different soda-jerk job, where, one day, she makes a Bromo-Selzer and engages in weak repartee with a hungover Jerry (Walter Byron), whose redeeming quality is he’s not handsy:

Jerry: Oh, go away. I hate blondes.
Cassie: Well, I hate drunks, so that makes us even.

One Frenchman
Eventually she seeks out Gladys, who is working as a model for a department store, and who gets a swell idea. Why doesn’t Cassie work with her! This is less runway modeling than showing off clothes to dept. store customers. Amusingly, the snooty French boss rejects Cassie—who is, after all, Jean Harlow—when she overdoes the hips in her tryout. But Gladys is determined. “Listen, when you walk, forget you have hips,” she says. “Let them take care of themselves—they always do.” She also plays off the big Sophie Tucker hit of the day. “I’m going to show him there’s one Frenchman that can be wrong.” Then she dresses up Cassie in haute couture, Frenchie is amazed, gig gotten.

So where the drama for the rest of the movie? Love, love, love.

Gladys has fallen for Arthur (Jameson Thomas), who looks like a B-movie villain and acts accordingly. He’s a real lout, who’s already married but claims he’s trying to get out of it. Except when Gladys innocently/stupidly introduces him to Cassie (who is, after all, Jean Harlow), he makes a play for her.

Meanwhile, Jerry returns to the picture. He’s the nicer version of Arthur, and, even with Gladys warning her all the while about men and love, Cassie falls for him. Guess what? He’s married, too! To the patrician Ruth (Natalie Moorhead, the awful wife of “The Office Wife”), who refuses to grant him a divorce now that he wants one. She’s that type.

Get it? Gladys, who's fallen for a lout, keeps warning Cassie about men, even though she's fallen for a not-lout. That’s the movie. Gladys wrings her hands, Cassie snaps her gum, and Cassie’s roommate Dot (silent movie star Marie Prevost) tries to provide comic relief as the plain girl with the work-from-home typing job who falls for Jerry’s chauffeur (Andy Devine). She also reminds Gladys that there’s a Depression going on:

Dot: Say, the trouble with you is, you’ve forgotten how awful it is to live in a dump like this. You don't know what it means to have to cut down on your food, so you can scrap together the rent or else old horse-face downstairs will throw you out on your whatsit. Listen, did you ever have to eat liverwurst seven days a week, cause you couldn't afford anything else? Well, try it sometime, you'll be nuts about it.
Gladys: You got to hang onto your self respect, Dot. And that's important.
Dot: Aw, what's your self respect when your hungry? It won't get you a porterhouse, will it?

Dot doesn’t listen. And when crummy old Arthur renews his vows to his wife (which somehow makes the front page of The New York Sun), she takes poison and kills herself. That prompts Cassie to return to the soda fountain at Chillicothe, where, behind a newspaper, a man orders a Bromo-Seltzer. Guess who? And guess what the newspaper headline reads? Yep, it’s Jerry, the hed is all about his divorce. Big smooch. The end. 

Two deaths
It’s Columbia Pictures—apparently the last time MGM loaned out Harlow—and the movie doesn’t have the wit or snap of precode Warner Bros. Probably doesn’t help that it was directed by William Beaudine, who made 179 features during his career, and was famous, or infamous, for doing them quickly. This one took three weeks in October 1931, per AFI.

Even the title is bad. “Three Wise Girls”? What’s wise about them? The novel is called, “Blonde Baby,” way better, but apparently the Hays Office nixed it and Columbia caved. Or maybe Columbia was worried about the many “blonde” titles from the period: “Platinum Blonde” (with Harlow), “Blonde Crazy” (with Cagney), “Blonde Captive” (exploitation doc from Lowell Thomas). They also turned Cassie into a good girl—in the novel, she knowingly sleeps with a married man. But it is precode so everyone and Cassie’s mother tell Harlow to take off her clothes. And she obliges. Within limits, Poindexter.

The one wise girl who dies young here, Clarke, lived longest in real life—until 1992. The other two ended tragically. Provost had been a silent leading lady but gained weight in her thirties, relegating her to roles like this; and when she tried to regain her figure, she died from a combination of malnutrition and alcoholism. That was in January 1937. Six months later, Harlow died suddenly of uremic poisoning—the same disease that would get director Beaudine in 1970.

It's been a week, hasn't it? Cue R.E.M.

I thought it was bad on Tuesday when we got a Trump press conference out of Mar-a-Lago, and Fuckstick didn't rule out military-economic force to take over the Panama Canal and/or Greeland and/or Canada, which led to a New York Times headine about a “reinvigorated” Trump, or some such bullshit, because there's never been a right-wing politician whose boot the Times wouldn't lick, or whose false machismo it wouldn't pump up. (See: “confident” Rick Perry and his “shot of vigor” from 2011.) This was also the day Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the release not only of Jack Smith's special report on the classified documents case (her jurisdiction) but Smith's Jan. 6 case (not). She's obviously doing what she can to run out the clock and tarnish and weaken the rule of law in this country. Where is she from again? Colombia? Can we send her back with the first wave? That'd be some nice irony. How do you like them manzanas? We're truly sending back all the wrong people.

Oh, right. That was also the day Mark Zuckerberg got rid of fact-checking on his platforms—a policy implemented by him in 2017—in advance of Trump's presidential lies. What a worm. The more money the man, the weaker the spine, apparently. Some have argued it's less kowtowing to Trump than using the election as an excuse to do what libertarian, “open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science” Silicon Valley wants to do anyway. Either way, I prepared, yet again, to leave Meta, this time Instagram and Threads, as I'd done with Facebook in 2019, as I'd done with Musk and Twitter in 2022. Some people have to flee countries, I just have to flee social media platforms. I count my blessings. You can find me at: @elundy.bsky.social.

And then we got the LA wildfires. I have friends and relatives living there, including in hard-hit neighborhoods, and though their homes haven't been destroyed, as of now, their lives have been upended. We can't go a month, it seems, without some natural disaster hitting us, but this one hit me harder than most. It was the friends and relatives, sure, and the impotence we all felt, but it's also what LA means to anyone who cares about movies. It's the birthplace of our national stories. That night and the next, I watched “Chinatown,” as I tend to do when the Trumps of the world rear their ugly heads, and I wondered what neighborhoods I was watching that might be gone now. The fact that the movie is about the politics of water—who gets it and why and how money is made from it—as modern LA was a tinderbox—well, that just underscored everything.

But the news that hit hardest was personal. On Tuesday, the prosecution in my my brother's murder let us know that they now agreed with the defense that the accused is incompetent and won't stand trial. It's not unexpected, it's just ... “So that's it?” Yes. For now. It will be reviewed again in six months. The notice made me imagine the final moments again, and ... He's gone, and that's it. I could go on and on about this but I won't. Intellectually I get it. Emotionally, it's something else.

Anyway, that's one week down in 2025. Stay safe, as they say.

Some posited Obama was running interference for the Bushes but the seating appears chronological. As for Michelle?  

Earlier this week, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, put out the following statement following the death of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States.

"James Earl Carter, Jr., was a man of deeply held convictions. He was loyal to his family, his community, and his country. President Carter dignified the office. And his efforts to leave behind a better world didn't end with the presidency. His work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center set an example of service that will inspire Americans for generations.

Nicely said. I also can't help but read it as throwing shade at (on?) the 45th/47th president of the United States. Carter was loyal to family, community and country? Trump is only loyal to his own sad self. Carter dignified the office? Yeah, as opposed to You Know Who. Carter's efforts to leave a better world didn't end with his presidency ... while Fuckstick there hasn't even begun. The opposite. He will leave the world much diminished. If Clarence the Angel showed DJT what the world would be like if he'd never be born, I can only imagine a much happier place.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

I liked the Nebraska of it all. It was written and directed by Adam Rehmeier, who grew up in Nebraska City, Nebraska (current pop., 7,222), right next to the Iowa border, and the movie opens with the boys betting at a … is it horse track? No, off-track dog racing. In Iowa. Where it’s legal. We learn, by and by, that they’re on a field trip, and played hooky to gamble, but since we’re in media res, and the boys are too busy arguing with each other to explain anything to us, it takes a while to come up-to-speed. I liked that. I thought I was going to watch some dumb coming-of-age movie and I actually had trouble keeping up.

OK, it was a movie recommendation via The New York Times, so I figured it wouldn’t be “dumb.” But it’s still teenage boys. How hard is it to keep up with teenage boys? Turns out, a little hard. Because Rehmeier didn't put exposition ahead of realism. Good for him.

I also assumed the movie would be like “Adventureland”: a kid gets a shitty summer job with a shitty boss and falls for a pretty girl. Instead, two kids bankroll their gambling earnings to lease the titular shack at the local pool for the summer. They’re the shitty bosses. And then they fall for the same girl. 

Gone girls
The same-girl thing felt odd, to be honest. We spend a summer at the local pool, and there’s no other girls? It’s just the one girl and she’s kind of an asshole. In the 1980s, you couldn’t make a movie like this without showing tons of T&A, and now you can’t even show the girls? As if they’ve been #MeTooed from existence? Wrong lesson there, fellas.

Our two leads are Moose and A.J., 14 going on 15, and they’re played by actors who are 22 (Gabriel LaBelle) and 24 (Connor Sherry). I’m curious if Rehmeier wasn’t mocking the trope of older actors playing younger ones. Because it’s so fucking obvious.

The casting is interesting. The Persian Gulf vet/Fonzie protector, given the cinematic name of Shane, is played by Nick Robinson, who went through his own spate of coming-of-age movies 10 years ago (“The Kings of Summer,” “Love, Simon”). Sherry as A.J. bears a remarkable resemblance to Michael O’Keefe, who did this shit in the early 1980s (“Caddyshack,” “The Great Santini”), while LaBelle as Moose kept bugging me. Where do I know this guy from? Then the other shoe dropped. He played a young Spielberg in “The Fabelmans” and a young Lorne Michaels in “Saturday Night.” Helluva range. In one year, he played the 31-year-old producer of “Saturday Night Live” and a 14-year-old Nebraska kid. The latter, by the way, is way more interesting.

It's 1991, the school year is ending, and these two need summer jobs they can’t find. That’s when Shane mentions the Snack Shack. The two bullies of the high school plan on leasing it but A.J. and Moose outbid them by a dollar. Or they think. Turns out they outbid them by 10 times their bid plus the dollar, and everyone on the city council laughs. But the joke is on the council; the kids make a mint. They do even better when A.J. sees Moose flirting with lifeguard and literal girl next door, Brooke (Mika Abdalla) and writes “FUCK” with ketchup on the hot dog he’s serving, and it becomes a hit. Kids are willing to spend 75 cents over the hot dog price to get a “fuck dog.” Great bit.

Brooke’s dad is in the Air Force and they’re in town temporarily, but A.J. is quickly enamored, while she is teasingly upfront and insulting. She calls him “Shit Pig” and takes his photo at embarrassing moments—like when he’s suffering hay fever from mowing the lawn. Then she winds up snogging Moose because he makes the move? Even though she likes A.J.? I get the feeling the movie forgives her all this because she’s the girl. I didn't.

And that’s their summer: navigating parents and bullies and girls while running the titular Snack Shack. At one point I wondered if the movie would just be that, or would it turn serious. Like would Shane die?

Shane dies. Car accident. He survives the Persian Gulf War but not American roadways. It’s what reunites our boys after Brooke breaks them up.

Is enough of the movie felt? Skims the surface too much, doesn’t it? I wanted deeper. I wanted deeper Nebraska.

Nevermind
The soundtrack is just meh for me, even though they’re apparently songs from the summer of ’91—like EMF’s “Unbelievable.” Which is the problem. All of those songs are forgotten in a flash because in September Nirvana releases Nevermind. And that changes everything.

You know what’s truly odd? It’s set 33 years ago and yet the clothes and the fashions don’t feel that out of place with today. Either they didn’t nail 1991 (maybe) or it’s part of that cultural stagnation the world is seeing (more likely). Imagine a movie from 1991 set 33 years earlier. That would be 1958. Not only would everything look different, but you would’ve passed through four or five cultural upheavals before you got to that specific difference. It’s shocking how stagnant we’ve become.

Hollander as Capote (amazing), Chalk as Baldwin (miscast)

Last month my wife and I watched Hulu's “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” part of Ryan Murphy's series of shows about women and gay men behaving badly, and Tom Hollander amazed in the lead; but I was disappointed that Norman Mailer never made an appearance. I don't mean physically. I mean his words.

Back in the late 1950s, in his seminal “Advertisements for Myself,” Mailer wrote a chapter called “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” a straightforward look at his literary contemporaries. He probably did this on a dare to himself because it wasn't smart. Easy way to make enemies. On the plus side, he couldn't stand bullshit—particularly his own—and he had a large enough spirit to tip his cap when he felt it was deserved. That's what he did with Truman. He also nailed what was missing in Capote's work. And then, amazingly, he predicts exactly what will happen to Truman in 17 years—the stuff detailed in the Ryan Murphy series:

Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's, which will become a small classic. Capote has still given no evidence that he is serious about the deep resources of the novel, and his short stories are too often saccharine. At his worst he has less to say than any good writer I know. I would suspect he hesitates between the attractions of Society, which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and the novel he would write of the gossip column's real life, a major work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world. Since I have nothing to lose, I hope Truman fries a few of the fancier fish. 

I don't know how I would've included it in the series. As an epigraph? An early moment of foreshadowing that Truman dismisses in 1958 only to live in 1975? I don't know. But c'mon. How is it not in there?

Mailer is referenced in the fifth episode, the one where James Baldwin (Chris Chalk) shows up to remind Truman of his legacy. In the show, Baldwin says Mailer called on him to call on Truman, and the two make a day of it in the cafes and bars of New York in 1975-76. It's a fictional episode and I didn't buy any of it. I didn't buy Chalk as Baldwin, I didn't buy their conversation, I particularly didn't buy a mid-1970s James Baldwin listening to Truman whine about how others perceived him without bringing the hammer down. Baldwin forged himself in the smithy of other people's contempt of him—if he'd let other people's perceptions get to him, he wouldn't have lived past 20—so if you're doing this, if you're creating this meet-up, get into that. The series didn't. They didn't go there. Meanwhile, Mailer is in the wings, with a prescient quote explanining everything. They didn't go there, either.

Anyway, Hollander, and most of the swans, did amazing work.

I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” which I think I last read back in 1980 or so, and it's much better than I remember. Yesterday I came across the following. It reminded me of us today:

Samaritrophia, he read, is the suppression of an overactive conscience by the rest of the mind. “You must all take instructions from me!” the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience had demanded. They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more.

In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, “The hell with you, Jack, I've got mine!”

The conscience is woke people, whom MAGA people throw into a hole while following their new leader, the “Hell with you” guy. One problem with the metaphor is the “enlightened” part. Doesn't fit today. Now we're benighted* self-interest. Enlightened self-interest, at this point, would be a breath of fresh air. 

* Yes, I've been using 'benighted' a lot lately. I think it's going to be a theme.

Last fall, the place I work and all its people were sold to a corporation in California, and with the transition came a change in insurance. We went from Insurance A to Insurance B. Let's call Insurance B “Benighted Health Care.” This insurance began for us on Jan. 1. I'd already chosen which insurance plan I wanted (basically I'm paying more for less), but I also had to sign up on Benighted's website. I did that yesterday.

Afterwards, I noticed an oddity: It knew my prescriptions (levothyroxine, etc.) but not the name of my primary care provider or PCP. In fact, the one designated to me was incorrect—a doctor I'd never heard of. “How did I get Dr. Z?” I wondered. “Where's Dr. A?” I attempted to change my PCP to Dr. A., who was in-network, but the website wouldn't let me do it. Why? Because, I was told, Dr. A. wasn't accepting new patients.

“But I'm not a new patient,” I muttered at the website. (More and more of my days are spent muttering at websites.) 

Eventually I had to call Benighted. 

Turns out assigning a doctor I'd never heard of isn't a bug at Benighted, it's a feature. Dr. Z was “chosen” for me by proximity and availability. As for changing the PCP back to Dr. A? That took work. The poor schmuck I got at Benighted tried to help, but he seemed to be doing what I'd tried to do, and failed like I failed, and then blamed my doctor for not accepting new patients rather than the insurance company for assuming new Benighted customers didn't have existing PCPs. To be honest, I didn't even know who to blame. Benighted? The new boss? The medical corp. to which Dr. A. belonged? All I know is it took an hour. 

Meet the new year, same as the old year.

In the fall of 1976, at Bryant Junior High School in South Minneapolis, Ms. Hebert's homeroom class held a debate about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and two students were chosen to argue the cases for the two candidates. I was tapped to defend the challenger, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, which seemed like an easy task. His Republican opponent, Pres. Gerald Ford, was a clutz who took office only because the previous Republican president and vice-president were both corrupt—and corrupt in different ways. Ford became VEEP when Spiro Agnew resigned for tax evasion; and he only took over when Nixon resigned because of the Watergate break-in and its year-long cover-ups. Then Ford promptly pardoned Nixon. Not a popular move. Plus Ford was lampooned weekly by Chevy Chase on this new show “Saturday Night,” and everyone liked that. So my task seemed an easy one. Problem? I wasn't as smart as Ms. Hebert (or I) thought. I was a kid who knew the big stories (Watergate), and the pop-cultural ones (Gerald Ford always falls down), and that was it. I did so poorly talking about actual political matters that Ms. Hebert tried to help me along toward better answers. It was embarrassing. I didn't do my job. I didn't defend Jimmy Carter well. 

You could say we've spent the last 50 years not defending Jimmy Carter well.

He was our the first rock 'n' roll president, digging the likes of Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers and quoting their lyrics. He was the first serious presidential candidate with long hair—hair that went past his ears—and that wasn't slicked into place with Vitalis or some shit. He was a deep Southerner (and we hadn't had one of those in a while), and overtly religious (ditto). He also took advantage of the new primary system to come out of nowhere to win it. Didn't I see a “60 Minutes” piece about Carter going door-to-door in the snow of New Hampshire a year before the primaries? That was his idea: win the early ones, gain attention, and ride that all the way to victory. Which is what he did. What's standard operating procedure began with him.

What happened on his watch? Stagflation, a second oil crisis (this time with long gas lines), and the Iranian hostage crisis. Oh, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and we bowed out of the Olympics. Oh, and a rabbit attacked Carter while he was on vacation. A rabbit! This was the guy leading our nation—someone even rabbits knew was fair game. The nation felt dispirited—that was the big issue. We had a hole in the national soul you could drive a mack truck through. The liberal press didn't help—they really played up the “killer rabbit” story. Liberal Hollywood didn't help, either—they released movies like “Americathon” (1979), in which, in the near future, America has run out of oil, Americans are living in their now-useless cars, and the national government, long bankrupt, holds a telethon to raise money to in order pay back a Native American who wants to foreclose on the country. That was the mood.

Carter detailed our troubles in his infamous “malaise” speech, for which he got flak, since he got flak for everything, but I don't know if the speech should be infamous. If you watch “20th Century Women,” and you should, you get a great chunk of that speech, and boy if he didn't nail what was (and is) wrong with us:

There is a growing disrespect for government, the schools, the news media, and other institutions. ... Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself, involved in the search for freedom. We are at a turning point in our history. The path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest, down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.

My father interviewed him once. This was in 1988, Carter had a new book coming out—post-presidency, he always had a new book coming out—called “An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections.” My father actually tried to get out of the assignment. “I'm not an outdoorsman,” he told the editor. “Well, talk about something else, then,” the editor replied. “I hear he likes poetry. Talk to him about poetry.” Which is what Dad did. They met at the Rose Gardens by Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis, and the two men talked poetry. Dad said Carter recited from memory Dylan Thomas' poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and talked about the ambiguity of its last line: “After the first death, there is no other.” As a young man, he said, that line hit him hard and made him pay attention. 

Dad also talked to him about another outdoor adventure—the killer rabbit story. Carter said it was what we'd now call fake news:

“That was a story that was created by the Washington press corps,” the former president said with the genial nature that hasn't deserted him, even in retirement. “What actually happened was that I was fishing one day in my little pond, by myself, and a little bunny rabbit was chased by dogs. As any outdoorsman knows, any animal can swim well, and the rabbit, in order to escape the dogs, jumped in the pond and swam across about 10 or 15 feet from my boat, came out the other side and kept running.

”About six months later, (press secretary) Jody Powell was talking to some reporters in a tavern and telling them about this rabbit. They doubted whether rabbits could swim, and out of that came a completely fabricated story that a killer rabbit had attacked me.

"It's one of those things that you don't know whether to let it ride and treat it as a joke, which we did, or to call a press conference and announce officially that a rabbit did not attack the president of the United States.

There is a third option. You can denounce the press as a bunch of partisan liars. That's what the other side would've done, but Carter was more genial than that. He thought we were part of a great movement of humanity itself.