Day: May 8, 2014

Earlier today entertainment reporter, stand-up comedian and advertising exec Bill McCuddy persuaded me to visit Bergdorf Goodman and buy a nice tube of Supersmile toothpaste ($25), which is supposed to be a good whitener. I also popped for a Supersmile toothbrush ($15). I then walked over to the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store just to mosey around. I saw an attractive scarf and asked a salesman for the price. In a normal store a really cool scarf would cost $75 so I figured the BG price would be $225. The salesman looked at the tag, looked me in the eye and told me the price: $725.

In Robert Schenkkan’s stirring but somewhat limiting All The Way, which I saw last night, Bryan Cranston captures the cagey manipulation and animal spirit of Lyndon Baines Johnson without really sounding like him or even adopting the drawly laid-back accent that the 36th President used. But he’s a locomotive, all right — a ball of spit, piss, gravel and fire. All my life I’ve thought of Johnson’s five-year presidency as tragic — the big man who had it all and then lost it all. The play ignores all that in order to focus on LBJ’s more-or-less triumphant phase from November ’63 to November ’64 when he calmed the nation in the wake of JFK’s murder, managed to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then was elected President by a landslide. Honestly? I felt engaged but not enthralled. Respect and interest start to finish, and delight and amusement from time to time. But I wasn’t emotionally engulfed. And yet it’s an expertly written ensemble piece and a crackling political drama. Good enough, money well spent, not worth going after.

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Quentin Tarantino‘s Hateful Eight copyright infringement script-leak lawsuit against Gawker has always seemed primarily emotional in nature. By that I mean entitled and tantrum-y. Now, a week after amending his original complaint, he’s done another spoiled-child mood swing and more or less dropped the lawsuit altogether. What a fucking child, what a wuss…a big, pot-bellied, ego-strutting enfant terrible who’s bored and wants to move on to something else.

In the wake of a new U.S. government climate change study, a 5.6 N.Y. Times article by former Utah governor Jon Huntsman quoted a Pew poll that said 41 percent of Tea Party Republicans believe “that global warming was not happening” and that “another 28 percent said not enough was known.” A related Times article by Megan Thee-Brenan reported that Americans are generally the most denial-prone among all the industrialized nations regarding climate change. At what point should climate-change deniers and disputers stop getting a pass? 10 or 15 years hence if not sooner they’ll be gone from news-channel discussion panels. Their views will be deemed so absurd as to not even merit passing consideration.

The more pernicious and threatening this situation gets, the less radical my green reeducation camps idea will seem. If you don’t want any kind of future for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, fine…let’s just cruise along and do nothing. But there’s really no way to argue against the notion that rural yokels and their Congressional reps are, no exaggeration, the most malicious villains of our time. Public enemies in every conceivable sense of that term. I explained it all in an 8.5.09 piece called “Argument Over Beers.”

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It’s close to 20 years ago, man, when Mr. Othello Complex nearly sliced his wife’s head clean off. The DNA and blood trail evidence was pretty close to irrefutable, but the “downtown” jury (including the infamous “Brenda Moron“) found the accused innocent because they wanted to push back at (i.e., balance out) the railroading of African-American perpetrators and defendants for decades and decades by the LAPD. The jury basically said to us and themselves, “We’re horrified at the murder of two innocent people (Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman), but the glove not fitting gives us a way of dodging the truth in the service of addressing something bigger…an issue that matters more to us personally and culturally.”