Day: June 13, 2019

In my 20s I worked as a tree surgeon. Shitty money but at least I was in great shape. I did it all — shaping, pruning, tree removal (or “takedowns”), cabling, spraying. As a former professional I laughed out loud at the idiots in these videos. I always removed trees in a careful, methodical fashion. I would always climb to the top of a tree, tie in with my rope, saddle, spikes and chain, and then take the leaders and branches off one at a time, until the tree became a telephone pole. And then I’d start chainsawing chunks of it, one by one from the top and slowly working my way down.

If there was the slightest chance of any falling pieces hitting a shed or a swimming pool or (God forbid) the main residence, I would tie a rope to the piece I was about to cut and loop the rope over a nearby leader and have the ground crew slowly lower it down. And when it came time to drop the “telephone pole”, we would always make sure it would fall upon a bouncy bed of cut branches. There would always be a rope tied to the top with a couple of guys maintaining tension, and then I would carefully cut a pie slice at the base of the tree. The tree would always land exactly where I planned.

The guys in these videos (i.e., no women) are morons.

I’ve never owned a pair of white bucks, but I can feel myself warming to the possibility. I generally steer clear of preppy apparel, but I’ve got this idea that wearing these things (remember when people used to call high-style shoes “kicks”?) will make me feel good about life — that I’ll feel like some kind of special-aroma Great Gatsby guy if I wear them to screenings and restaurants and…whatever, to the West Hollywood Pavillions.

I can imagine wearing a pair as I stroll into a nice open-air rooftop bar (the Waldorf Astoria, say) while listening to Eric Clapton‘s “Anyone For Tennis” on my Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones.

I can foresee two problems. One, being snickered at or, you know, people calling me a clueless poseur. Two, the Robert Redford-as-Jay Gatsby thing only lasts for the first week or two, for once they get scuffed and beaten up the special aura evaporates.

I was looking online this morning and none of the white bucks I liked (like the ones for sale at the Brooks Brothers site) were in my size — i.e., 13. In the guy realm 13 isn’t all that unusual, but shoe sellers treat you like a carnival freak if your size is larger than 12. Plus a sales rep told me this morning that white bucks are regarded as seasonal accessories (in Southern California?), but summer is just beginning and they’re already running out. All right, forget it…a bad idea from the start.

Earlier today Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin and Matt Donnelly posted a story about Amazon’s release strategy for Scott Z. Burns‘ The Report, a fact-based whistleblower drama that I saw five months ago at Sundance.

Set in the late aughts, it’s about real-life Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) investigating, authoring and releasing a massive report on CIA torture, and in so doing exposing Bush-Cheney flim-flammery about the waging of the Iraq War.

The Variety story was fine except for the headline, which described The Report as an “awards hopeful“. That, trust me, is not in the cards. Burns film is plodding, sanctimonious and a chore to sit through — precisely the kind of self-righteous, moral-breast-beating drama that I can’t stand.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro posted the same story with a headline that said The Report would be getting an “Awards Season Release.” That, at least, was technically accurate as The Report‘s 9.27 theatrical release date falls within award season. The film’s streaming release will launch two weeks later (i.e., 10.11).

Industry pally: Why are you not writing at length about this Sienna Miller performance?

HE: Because I haven’t seen it. It played at the ’17 Venice Film Festival and the Oldenburg International Film Festival a year later, and that was it. Even if I had seen it, the #MeToo brigade would have me killed or at least shunned if I were to so much as mention a film by Jim Toback.

Industry pally: I’m sure you can find a link. As for this Crucible-like atmosphere of which you speak, it’s news to me! 🙂

HE: Are you kidding? It’s the French “terror” out there.

Industry pally: My sense of humor is sometimes a touch too dry.

The daily toxins finally became too much, and so Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving the White House at the end of the month. Strange as this may sound, she’s probably looking a great future.

All employers look for smarts, discipline, dependability and good political skills. And loyalty, of course. They don’t want someone with an independent mind or who marches to his/her own drum — they want a Good German who will do or say whatever the employer wants. By this standard old “Smokey Eye”, who’s been dutifully lying and obfuscating for Donald Trump since July 2017, should be able to find a flush new gig in the conservative community.

Some believe that every time you lie you inject a tiny amount of poison into your system, and that it stays there until you admit to it. And that you add to the general communal illness in the bargain. Think of the hundreds of blatant falsehoods that have come out of SHS over the last 23 months, and yet she’s apparently in good health. The applicable phrase is “when good things happen to bad people.”

Peter Wehner: “[This is] a window into the inverted moral world of Donald Trump. What he was arguing is ‘what helps me is, by definition, right, and what hurts my opponent should be done, and what hurts me is, by definition, wrong.’ That is the ethical construct that he operates upon. It’s a kind of moral narcissism. When you get a person with that kind of distorted moral world with the tremendous power of the Presidency, it does great damage to the country. This guy is a daily battering ram against norms, against ethics and integrity.”

Read more