Get ready for “Elsewhere Live,” a twice-weekly live-internet-radio talk show with telephone call-ins and all kinds of blah-dee-blah from yours truly. It’ll start on Sunday, 11.20, and run also on Thursday evening (let’s say at 10 pm EST, 7 pm Pacific). We’re not talking about some Podcast bullshit (although the radio broadcasts will be archived and downloadable). We’re talking about something new here…real throbbing internet radio that you can listen to “live” and call in to, just like any regular-ass radio talk show. And I won’t have screeners!

My God, this is it…it’s here…Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim Word, which will hit theatres in January…oh my God, I can’t stand it…all that lovely brown skin, all those thick accents, those awful Ali Baba shoes, that lovely Iranian/Pakistani/what- ever olive-skinned woman whom Brooks hires, etc.

I know you’re not supposed to ask this and I’m sorry for the sudden loss of producer and Blake Edwards colleague Tony Adams, whom I interviewed in ’81 or thereabouts about one of the Edwards’ films…10 or S.O.B., I forget which…but who dies of a stroke at 52? What happened to the poor guy? How come obits never fill in the blanks?

Speaking of the recently and sadly deceased, filmmaker Jacob Rosenberg has forwarded a link to a short film he made called Bleach that co-starred Charles Rocket, who killed himself in Connecticut earlier this month. A very good guy who ran into a bad patch.

In the mid ’50s, before CinemaScope lenses were perfected, everything and everyone looked horizontally distorted. The joke was that actors had the “CinemaScope mumps.” But on widescreen TVs today — in bars, people’s living rooms, electronic media showrooms — the distortion is easily double what the CinemaScope mumps syndrome delivered, and nobody blinks an eye. Across- the-board high-def widescreen TV is being promised by Direct TV and Comcast, etc., but the vast majority of broadcast images are still standard-sized (aspect ratio of 4 x 3, meant to fit your mom and pop’s TV)…and yet!…the idiots who own widescreen TVs are showing everything at the 16 x 9 ratio because they want to get their money’s worth — i.e., I bought a widescreen TV, I want to see widescreen TV! Filling up your 16 x 9 TV screen (like what…a gas tank?) is the single most cretinous visual vogue afoot in today’s digital-entertainment universe, and there are hundreds of millions of widescreen TVs that are beaming this idiocy right now…horizontally bloated newscasters on ESPN, vaguely egg-shaped basketballs…the proportion of every last object pulled sideways like Turkish taffy. I’m saying this not because it’s new, but because widescreen TV bloat has become the dominant visual mode by which tens of millions absorb TV images, and I resent this moronic aesthetic being so ubiquitous in our culture.

Claire Simpson’s editing of The Constant Gardener is a kind of rhapsodic visual dance, and obviously fully deserving of an Oscar nom. It’s hard to define the difference between oppressively heebie-jeebie, ants-in-your-pants film editing..the kind that makes you grit your teeth and makes you feel like you’re swatting invisible flies (like the cutting of the action sequences in Paul Greengraass’s The Bourne Supremacy), and what Simpson and director Fernando Meirelles achieve in Gardener. But one sings and the other doesn’t, and, according to this piece by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheigh Crabtree, admiration for Simpson’s editing has been voiced repeatedly by her peers.