I naturally want Biden to win, but the truth is that I devoutly wish that somehow or some way New York State governor Andrew Cuomo could just step in and become the Democratic nominee.
In her 3.27 column titled “Tough Love For Andrew Cuomo,” Maureen Dowd quotes Bill Maher: “I see Cuomo as the Democratic nominee this year. If we could switch Biden out for him, that’s the winner. He’s unlikable, which I really like.”
Initially posted on 9.4.15 but revised: I took part in a paintball game when I was working at Cannon Films in the summer of ’87. What happened was hugely embarassing, certainly from my vantage point
As we all know the basic objective in any paintball game is for somebody on your home team to steal the opposing team’s flag and make it back to your side without getting killed.
I had suggested a bold kamikaze strategy to my fellow warriors. Instead of individual skirmishing and taking cover behind trees and bushes while trying to “kill” guys on the other team, I suggested winning the battle in less than three or four minutes.
The idea was for nine or ten of us to charge into enemy territory as a tight group — a Toshiro Mifune-style flying wedge. Three guys on both sides (6), one guy in the lead forward-thrust position, another guy in the rear-center position, and a guy in the middle. We come out guns blazing and just go for it.
Shock and surprise on the part of the enemy, I was thinking. Five or six of us might get killed right away, but in the process they could also shoot back and kill some of the enemy. Hold the formation, hold the formation. There might be only four or five of us left when we grab their flag, but at least we’d have it and could run right the hell back.
I was basically suggesting an Inchon invasion strategy. Nobody plays paintball with this kind of Douglas MacArthur-style determination. If we do it immediately when the whistle sounds, the enemy will be so surprised and off-balance they won’t be able to kill us all. Perhaps half or even two thirds, but they wouldn’t get all of us and we could definitely inflict harm on them while capturing their banner.
Alas, my flying wedge idea wasn’t unanimously supported. It couldn’t work unless we were all on the same gung-ho page, so that was that.
Plus when you actually get out there with your paintball gun in that sticky and sweltering Los Angeles heat and you’re dealing with dust and sweat and the sobering fact that you’re not exactly Steve McQueen in Hell Is For Heroes, things are a little different.
Trump’s Freudian slip arrives at the 7:10 mark. He meant to say “I don’t have to call” but instead revealed his smug egoistic mindset. The implication is that calling this or that Democratic governor or official would be, in his mind, a form of submission. Me me me me me me…”Be nice.”
A day or two ago David Ehrenstein complained that Bob Dylan‘s “Murder Most Foul”, a 17-minute long meditation about the brutal murder of the nation’s 35th president, was “mind-bogglingly banal.”
Not Dylan’s vocal performance or the musicianship, I presume he meant, but the lyrics. Lines and passages that are flush with familiar cliches and rueful reflections, well-baked recollections, ’60s pop-culture references, etc.
Ehrenstein is missing the forest for the trees. The lyrics aren’t as important, I feel, as the tired and resigned way in which Dylan half-sings and half-mutters them, and more particularly why he’s released the song now.
I don’t know when “Murder Most Foul” was written and recorded but deep down I don’t think it’s about JFK’s last day on the planet as much as Dylan’s contemplation of his own mortality, and how he’s evolved into a wizened old coot who regards the gift of life with absolute reverence (age does that to you).
Simplistic as it sounds, he’s basically horrified by the idea of conspirators abruptly destroying everything that JFK had been and could be. Horror magnified in his mind. Along with the sadness. Dylan’s sense of his own mortality is undercurrent #1.
In late ’63 or early ’64 Dylan, then 22, said something about partly understanding where Lee Harvey Oswald was coming from, not to the point of agreeing with what he’d done but in terms of sensing his underlying despair. Dylan reportedly walked that statement back fairly quickly, but it was exactly the sort of thing that a brilliant iconoclast in his early 20s might’ve passed along.
Now Dylan is 78, and he sees things differently. The point of the song (one of them anyway) is that JFK’s murder, like that of Tom Dooley or Fred Hampton or Martin Luther King or any illustrious victim of a ruthless political agenda, was at root an act of terrible cruelty, and Dylan is simply saying that this particular act of malice has burned deep, and that 56 years later the after-shocks still register from to time, and that he can feel them more today than he did in the fall of ’63. Or something like that.
Above and beyond the lyrics, the song is basically a meditation about the horror of suddenly becoming lifeless tissue, at any age.
Most of us understood from the get-go that Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing” would be regarded through #MeToo-tinted glasses. Some in that camp are saying “I don’t think I can read this thing” (an actual Dana Harris tweet) and that’s fine. They’re excused. Nobody expected them to be attentive or fair.
Certain resentful, pissy-minded book reviewers are coughing up the usual bile. USA Today‘s Barbara VanDenburgh: “As if coping with the ravages of a global pandemic hasn’t made life unpleasant enough, now we’ve all got to talk about Woody Allen. Again.”
People aren’t calling his autobiography totally banal or shallow or both, but they’re saying large chunks of it are. Some have written that when he gets into the Mia-and-Dylan accusation thing that it feels like too much of an obsessive, woe-is-me pity party. Some have faulted Allen for not aping the meditative prose of Rainer Maria Rilke or William Styron.
Their beefs boil down to “how dare Woody write in his own unaffected voice? How dare he process life in the same way he’s been doing since he began writing jokes for Manhattan newspaper columnists in the early ’50s?”
Woody Allen is who he is. His voice is his voice. If you can read “Apropos of Nothing” with that in mind, you’ll have a better-than-decent time with it. And by that I mean diverting, chuckly, passable, fascinating, occasionally hilarious, nutritional as far as it goes.
“Apropos of Nothing” isn’t the deepest or the most probing piece of literary self-excavation or self-examination ever published, but it does contain a wonderfully ripe and buoyant recollection of Allen’s Brooklyn childhood and early teen years. It flattens out a bit when he becomes successful in the mid ‘60s, and a certain banality creeps in. But I weathered the mundane or underwhelming parts. Allen has a voice and a style and a certain shticky attitude, and much of the book is like listening to some streetcorner wise guy tell a story from a bar stool.
I am convinced that the section that exhaustively covers the ‘92 child-abuse accusation plus the Soon Yi furor is almost entirely truthful, if not 100%. Try reading Moses Farrow’s essay — it synchs up perfectly with Allen’s understanding of Mia Farrow‘s history and psychology and what probably happened.
Does Allen burrow in too deeply or obsessively in this section of the book? Not in my view. He’s talking about events that have shattered his life in some respects. If you had gone through the same thing and knew you were innocent when it came to Dylan and Mia’s accusation, wouldn’t you mount your defense with vigor and exactitude and leave no stone unturned?
The union with Soon Yi did seem odd and ill-advised at first, true, but they’ve been a loyal and loving couple for 27 or 28 years now. Two adopted college-age kids, etc. Does anyone recall Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues? The facts are the facts. Things are as they are.
The more I descend into the silent, quietly creeping hell of our current situation, the closer I’ve gotten to submitting to Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. Joe vs. Carol, etc. I tried watching episode #1 last night, and turned it off around the half-hour mark. Boredom. I’ll give it another shot today.
I’ve been grieving over the fact that a series about a motley crew of scurvy low-rent Oklahoma bumblefucks has become as popular as it has. But this is the country that millions live in, God help us. And you know these appallingly attired, absurdly coiffed animal enthusiasts are almost certainly Trump supporters…that’s another rub.
I never watched Duck Dynasty either…eff those backwoods beardos.
From Variety‘s Todd Spangler: “Netflix has a tiger tale that has punched into the zeitgeist with Tiger King, stocked with a cast of real-life bizarre personalities and sinister plot twists.
“A true-crime-style docuseries that debuted March 20 on Netflix, Tiger King ranks as the most popular current TV show, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 97% critic’s rating and a 96% audience score — putting it at the top of the site’s most-popular TV shows list, ahead of Netflix’s Ozark Season 3; USA Network’s Queen of the South Season 4; and USA’s The Sinner Season 3.
“And according to Netflix’s own daily rankings, Tiger King is the No. 1 most-watched title in the U.S. for March 29 on the service — both overall and among TV shows — and has been in the top 10 for the past week.”
Michael Crichton‘s Westworld is no one’s idea of a great or even a first-rate film. It’s a primitive sci-fi formula flick. But at least it’s lean and trim and doesn’t tax your patience, which is more than you can say for HBO’s endlessly infuriating Westworld series.
Better yet, the Crichton doesn’t ask you to hang out with an actor like Tennisballhead. And the HBO series doesn’t offer one single moment like the one in which James Brolin and Richard Benjamin groan in irritation when Yul Brynner‘s robot says “draw.” Not one.
When I’m 103 and on my death bed (because I have the constitution of Kirk Douglas), someone will say “what did you do in your life that was good and redeeming?” And I’ll answer, “I hated Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy‘s Westworld with a passion, and I tried to spread that view frequently.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 2,813,503 registered deaths in the United States in 2017. The age-adjusted death rate, which accounts for the aging population, is 731.9 deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S. This is an increase of 0.4% over 2016’s death rate.
Personal note: I’m reading that 89K COVID tests have been administered in California thus far. But my getting tested is still out of the question because I’m asymptomatic.
Two nights ago I started experiencing a sore throat and a slight tightening in the chest…a slight achey feeling. “Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “Is this the beginning of COVID?” Yesterday both had totally disappeared. No sore throat, no nothing
You know why? Because I have great genes. No one is bulletproof but some of us have been gifted with exceptional coats of armor. I know — it’s bad form to mention this.
Video of Dr. Fauci telling @jaketapper that “Looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases… excuse me, deaths. I mean, we’re going to have millions of cases.” #CNNSOTU
