I’ve no idea who the mysterious “owner of a large hotel chain” could be. Said owner was mentioned in witness testimony in the Ghislaine Maxwell documents that were unsealed this evening. The four biggest hotel chains are Wyndham Worldwide, Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide and Best Western.
You can find all kinds of clips and audio recordings from ’50s and ’60s TV shows on YouTube. Damn near anything and everything. But I can’t find a single clip of a falsetto-voiced Steve Allen saying “schmock, schmock!” And that’s a huge deal. “Schmock, schmock!” was arguably Allen’s signature line, certainly when he was hosting his Hollywood-based talk show in the early to mid ’60s.
After chatting with Allen at the House of Blues some 27 or 28 years ago, I bade farewell with my own falsetto-voiced “smock!” There was no one else in the entire world I would have dared speak to like a three-year-old, but I did so with Allen without blinking. He chuckled right away and gestured approval.
If only newspaper editors, college deans, liberal politicians and Hollywood producers had the character and balls shown on 7.24.20 by the Trader Joe guys.
Key passage: “A few weeks ago, an online petition was launched calling on us to ‘remove racist packaging from [our] products.’ Following were inaccurate reports that the petition prompted us to take action. We want to be clear: we disagree that any of these labels are racist. We do not make decisions based on petitions. We make decisions based on what customers purchase, as well as the feedback we receive from our customers and Crew Members. If we feel there is need for change, we do not hesitate to take action.”
Bert Stern‘s Jazz on a Summer’s Day is a warm, colorful capture of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Not just a medley of performances but a portrait of an era and a cultural mood that was primarily defined by complacency and amber shadings and waiting for whatever the next thing might be.
Stern’s 85-minute film “is largely without dialogue or narration…it mixes images of glistening sea water and the America’s Cup yacht race… architecture, backstage footage, folding chairs, sunshine, people’s faces….trombonist Roswell Rudd driving around Newport in a convertible jalopy and playing Dixieland,” etc.
Performances by Jimmy Giuffre, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan, Chuck Berry (allegedly delivering a “scandalous” set), Chico Hamilton, Louis Armstrong, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Armando Peraza, etc.
Partly because of the “signing” scene, partly because Day of the Soldado didn’t have the irritating Emily Blunt to contend with, partly because the shoot-out sequences are cooler, and partly because it’s satisfying to watch an entitled brat rich girl (a drug lord’s daughter, played by Isabela Moner) get an education in the realities of the drug trade.
My favorite moment in Platoon is when Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and King (Keith David) are talking about their U.S. backgrounds and core identities. I don’t remember it verbatim but King asks Taylor if he comes from a wealthy family and Taylor sidesteps a response. Soon after Taylor offers some kind of poetic or idealistic reason for having volunteered for Vietnam duty (“I wanted to see the injustice and conflict first-hand”), and King says, “Well, you gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.”
I fell for King at that very moment.
I naturally loved Willem Dafoe‘s Elias (and so did Martin Scorsese — soon after he offered Dafoe the lead role in The Last Temptation of Christ because of it) and identified with the potheads. And I hated the rugged whiskey-drinkers (Tom Berenger‘s Staff Sergeant Barnes, Kevin Dillon‘s Bunny, John C. McGinley‘s Sergeant O’Neill).
I’ve seen Platoon six or seven times, but I never once spotted Johnny Depp (and he’s definitely in it, according to credits).
Sometime this morning Glenn Kenny challenged HE to get specific about arguments with “The 1619 Project.” I tapped out a response on the iPhone while lying on my foam-fortified IKEA couch and attending to the emotional needs of Anya, our two-year-old Siamese cat:
“Slavery has always been an ignominious chapter in the first 245 years of US history (1619 to 1865) and racism has stained aspects of the culture ever since, but to assert that slavery and racism (which other cultures have shamefully allowed over the centuries) are THE central and fundamental definers of the immense American experience strikes me as a bridge too far.
“One stone in the shoe is the 1619 Project’s contention that the American revolution against England was significantly driven by colonist commitment to maintaining slavery.
“Many factors drove the expansion and gradual strengthening & shaping of this country, and particularly the spirit and character of it — immigration, the industrial revolution and the cruel exploitations and excesses of the wealthy elites, the delusion of religion, anti-Native American racism and genocide, breadbasket farming, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick C. Douglas, the vast networks of railroads, selfishness & self-interest, factories, construction, the two world wars of the 20th Century, scientific innovation, native musical forms including jazz, blues (obviously African-American art forms) and rock, American literature, theatre and Hollywood movies, sweat shops, 20th Century urban architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, major-league baseball, Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig, family-based communities and the Protestant work ethic, fashion, gardening, native cuisine and the influences of European, Mexican, Asian and African cultures, hot dogs, the shipping industry, hard work and innovation, the garment industry, John Steinbeck, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, JFK, MLK, Stanley Kubrick, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Malcom X, Taylor Swift, Charlie Parker, Elizabeth Warren, Katharine Hepburn, Aretha Franklin, Jean Arthur, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol Lombard, Shirley Chisholm, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, barber shops & manual lawnmowers, the auto industry, prohibition & gangsters, the Great Depression and the anti-Communism and anti-Socialism that eventually sprang from that, status-quo-challenging comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Steve Allen (“schmock schmock!”), popular music (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles), TV, great American universities, great historians, great journalism (including the National Lampoon and Spy magazine), beat poetry, hippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, pot and psychedelia, cocaine, quaaludes and Studio 54, 20th & 21st Century tech innovations, gay culture, comic books, stage musicals, Steve Jobs, etc.
“Don’t tell me that slavery & racism is and always has been this country’s central definer. The 1619 Project’s revisionist zealotry rubs me the wrong way in more ways than I’d care to elaborate upon.”
