One of the most quietly thrilling episodes of my teenaged life…okay, stop right there. Let me assure before continuing that this story won’t get icky. Okay? I was in eighth or ninth grade, about 14 or 15, and I hadn’t done a damn thing with a girl. No flirtations to speak of, no dates…nothing. Nudie magazines were the extent of it. It was 9:30 pm on a Friday night (or so I recall — it might have been a Thursday), and a friend and I had walked a couple of miles to the home of a cheerleader who was going out with a jock-type dude we were friendly with. The names of my friend, the jock and the cheerleader were Jack, Chip and Pam.

It was a surreptitious arrangement so Jack and I didn’t knock on the front door but waited for Chip outside of a basement den room on the side of the home. I remember we were playing around with Pam’s dog for a bit. It was a coolish evening. We were wearing sweaters or fall jackets…something like that. As as the hour began to approach 10 pm, we began to wonder what was up. Chip had told Jack he’d meet us at Pam’s home around 9:30 or 9:45.

I’ve always believed that Travis Bickle died on the couch after that East Village shoot-out. Everything that happens in the aftermath — the newspaper articles praising him for having murdered a couple of pimps, Iris’s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shephard looking at him dreamily after he drops her off at her Grammercy Park apartment — is Travis’s dying fantasy. And then in the last shot he’s driving along and looks into the rearview mirror with a slight look of alarm, apparently sensing that something’s wrong and then…zhhhoop! Bickle disappears. It seems obvious as hell, but no one has ever agreed with me.

I’ve been talking for a long, long time about how the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies. Basic levels of scriptwriting have been dropping, certainly when it comes to CG-driven tentpolers, for a good 10 or 15 years. Six or seven years ago I wrote that relatively few big-studio whammers are as well-ordered and “professionally” assembled as Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy, as silly and inconsequential as that 1955 film was. Two days ago the great Devin Faraci chimed in along similar lines, and with excellent drillbit phrasing.

“I think every movie should be ‘good.’ Especially really big, expensive ones that were worked on by thousands of people. And I don’t mean great, or perfect or transcendent or Oscar-worthy. When I say ‘good’ what I really mean is ‘competent.’

“Yet this bar, low as it is, is seen as excessive by some. Demanding basic competence — that a movie be adequately made on a fundamental level — is a sign of elitism. This bums me out [because] this tyranny of low expectations is why big movies can be, and often have been, so terrible. Why get the story right when the audience simply does not give a shit about it?

Last night a producer friend invited me to a birthday party being thrown in her honor. A two-stage affair, she explained. It’ll begin with a sit-down dinner around 8 pm and then a second wave of friends will arrive for a stand-around-and-drink party at 9:30 pm. A filmmaker friend is hosting, she said, but his home is not a McMansion so the dinner invitees will have to be restricted to ten or twelve. (There’s a concern about seating plus his ex-wife is coming.). She asked me to please drop by at 9:30 and bring my party hat. “So I’m a second-waver?,” I said. “On one level I don’t care but on another level it’s a wee bit insulting. Not horribly insulting — I’m an adult and it’s really not that big of a deal — but you are ranking me…you’re telling me that I rank below others and that casting-wise I’m a supporting player.” She said that’s the wrong way to take it, that she’s just going along with what the host told her, etc. “Can I make a suggestion?,” I said. “Invite the ten or twelve you had in mind for the dinner and leave it at that. Don’t invite the second wave. Because they’ll all feel vaguely, slightly insulted…trust me. It’s better not to invite them than to graciously label them as coach-class.” Thoughts?

Update: On 6.28 Joni Mitchell’s conservator, Leslie Morris, posted the following about Mitchell’s condition following a HuffPost quote from David Crosby that said (a) Mitchell had suffered an aneurysm and (b) was not able to speak. To my knowledge Morris never used the word “anuerysm” before Crosby mentioned it, and you could bet she wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise.

“Joni did in fact suffer an aneurysm,” Morris’s statement says. “However, details that have emerged in the past few days are mostly speculative. The truth is that Joni is speaking, and she’s speaking well. She is not walking yet, but she will be in the near future as she is undergoing daily therapies. She is resting comfortably in her own home and she’s getting better each day. A full recovery is expected.”