Day: March 14, 2020

Dylan and I have decided to risk death by driving down to Rockport, a beach town to the northeast of Corpus Christi. I’ve never once seen the Gulf of Mexico from Texas soil although I once swam in it when my ex and I visited Belize in ’90.

Tomorrow night we’ll stay in Laredo, which I haven’t seen since visiting the set of Eddie Macon’s Run for a N.Y. Post Kirk Douglas interview, way back in ’82. We’ll head back to Austin early Monday morning.

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“…like brute beasts.”

I believe that Murray Melvin‘s performance as Reverend Samuel Runt is almost entirely about brittle innuendo, and that his officiating words in the wedding ceremony scene are mildly hilarious. A constricted and self-loathing ascetic portrayed to satiric extremes.

Keep in mind that the marriage ceremony between Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) and Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) happens in this clip around the 50-second mark, and that 110 seconds later he’s blowing smoke in her face. That’s not much of a honeymoon. It’s also one of the ugliest martial moments ever portrayed in a major motion picture.

As I pointed out 13 years ago, the smoke in the face moment kills Barry Lyndon‘s sense of muted joie de vivre (such as it is) and in fact signals the beginning of the “dead zone” section. It lasts for a good 40 to 50 minutes until the duel scene comes along and saves the film from itself.

I was all but unanimously slapped down after posting this opinion during the late Dubya era.

What kind of troglodyte would create a racism-deploring twitter poster using these ludicrous dayglo colors? (Alyssa Milano posted it, but I can’t believe she designed the art…I mean, good effing GOD.) The way to present this message, obviously, is to do it Woody Allen-style — white Windsor Light font against a black background.

At the same time, a certain distinction. Yes, it does seem vaguely racist to call COVID-19 a “Chinese virus”, as the coronavirus is obviously international at this stage. And yet there’s no denying that the virus is widely believed to have originated in a open-air wildlife market in Wuhan, and specifically from bats. That’s not racism — that’s almost certainly what happened.

Nor is it racist to acknowledge that the Ebola virus partly originated in Yambuku (Democratic Republic of the Congo), “a village near the Ebola River from which the disease takes its name.” Or to say that the Zika virus came “from the Ziika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947.” Or to say that the West Nile virus “was discovered in Uganda in 1937 and was first detected in North America in 1999.”

Nor is it an anti-white-people legend to state that Lyme disease “was diagnosed as a separate condition for the first time in 1975 in Old Lyme, Connecticut.”