Day: October 6, 2019

Monday, 10.7 bulletin: I’ve cancelled our Red Fox “tasting menu” reservation. Per Dave Billet‘s suggestion, we may order something in the pub, which has a separate a la carte menu.

Sunday, 10.6: I’m not into eating big, gut-busting meals these days. I’m not Mr. Creosote, and I never have been. But after making a reservation for Tatyana and myself at Middleburg’s Red Fox Inn & Tavern for Friday, 10.18, management called to make sure I understood the all-or-nothing terms of eating there that night.

The situation is that you’re either down for a three-course “Autumn tasting” dinner (roughly $100 per person with wine, not counting tip — $125 plus tip if you’re including dessert) or you might as well not come. Sorry but no budget-watchers or cheapskates.

HE response: “And what if I don’t want to stuff myself with your delicious, exquisitely prepared vittles…what if I just want to absorb the storied colonial atmosphere while eating a light salad and maybe sipping a bowl of soup? Why do I have to go along with your, no offense, totalitarian demand that I eat the locked-and-loaded dinner you’ve chosen to serve me, come hell or high water?”

Response from Red Fox courtesy lady: “Well, you don’t have to come to our restaurant, sir.”

Me: “Oh, I have that option, do I? Thanks — good to know.”

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Posted on 11.6.12: “I always got a bigger charge out of Keith Moon‘s pounding and crashing than I did from Ginger Baker‘s, great as he was and is. Partly because Moon was crazier. But also because Moon’s snare-drum hits always struck me as metronomically, mathematically and microscopically more precise and highly charged than Baker’s…just by a tad. To me great drumming isn’t about being a wild man from Borneo…it’s about hitting the beat exactly dead center and exactly right according to universal law, over and over and over.”

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A second whistleblower has come forward, presumably providing corroboration to the assertions of whistleblower #1 and weakening the Trump claim that whistleblower #1 can’t be trusted because he’s pushing second-hand information, etc.

And you know what? None of it matters in terms of the 2020 election because the pathetic backwater bumblefucks don’t care. They don’t care about rancid Trump behaviors because he’s the last (only?) bulwark against the cultural encroachment of people of color + LGBTQs. Or so their instincts tell them.

Read Monica Pott‘s “In The Land of Self Defeat” (N.Y. Times, posted on 10.4) and weep. These people are born to lose. They need to die out — that’s the only real solution.

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Greta Thunberg‘s week-old, scrunched-face regarding of The Thing…perfect.

Variety critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge haven’t engaged in a genteel, hail-fellow-well-met, Marquis-of-Queensbury dispute about Joker — they’ve gotten into an actual argument. It’s like a mid ’60s slapdown between Pauline Kael and Bosley Crowther about Bonnie and Clyde. Gleiberman loves Joker‘s mad disturbing provocations while Debruge finds them rash and exploitive and even dangerous (i.e., “Phillips has given incel types a poster boy for the kind of toxic ‘it’s everybody’s fault but mine’ mentality“).

Favorite OG excerpt: “If you say you have trouble with films that create ‘sympathetic portraits of sociopathic characters,’ I guess that’s an argument. But it’s a terribly conservative one. The same argument, and outrage, was once used as a weapon against movies like The Public Enemy and Scarface, and you could easily wield it against a work of art like Bonnie and Clyde — as, indeed, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther famously did at the time.”

“But when you call Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck a ‘poster boy’ for angry self-pitying incel types, I do think you’re onto something — not about whether he’s going to become a hero to the basement-dweller brigade, but about the true, underlying reason why there’s been so much hostility to Joker on the part of film critics who routinely greet utterly processed comic-book films with a wan shrug of approval.

“The movie is being treated by those critics as if it were a two-hour advertisement for the toxic white male. It almost doesn’t matter whether the film is glorifying or condemning Arthur’s violence. Everyone knows that Joker is going to be a huge hit — and, more than that, a phenomenon — and the fact that it places a toxic white male at the center of the conversation is somehow being slammed as a violation of the New Woke Rules.

“The critics are saying: We’re done with characters like this! But they’re trying to wish away something that can’t be wished away. In doing so, they’re treating the rare piece of popular art with a genuine emotional danger to it, as if it were the enemy.

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