Month: March 2021

Consider a two-day-old 60 Minutes report, moderated by Lesley Stahl, about the origins of Covid-19 and the refusal of the World Health Organization to attempt a serious, real-deal investigation of what happened.

It focuses on a WHO excursion to Wuhan earlier this year. Technology futurist and geopolitics expert Jamie Metzl, who suspects that the coronvavirus may have came from a lab leak, is the good guy in the report. EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak is the bad guy.

60 Minutes transcript excerpt: “The question: how did SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originate? Among the leading theories examined: was it accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan or did it come from infected animals in a wet market there?

“The WHO inquiry was far from comprehensive, because, as it has done since the beginning of the outbreak, the Chinese government withheld information.

Jamie Metzl: “I wouldn’t really call what’s happened now an investigation. It’s essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour.”

Lesley Stahl: “Study tour!”

Metzl: “Study tour. Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It’s not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see.”

Metzl — former NSC official in the Clinton administration and member of a WHO advisory committee on genetic engineering — is one of more than two dozen experts, including virologists, who signed an open letter earlier this month calling for a new international inquiry with a return to China.

The letter says the WHO team did not have the independence or access “to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation” specifically into a possible accidental leak from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city where the first outbreak occurred.

Metzl: “We would have to ask the question, ‘Well, why in Wuhan?’ To quote Humphrey Bogart, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan?’ What Wuhan does have is China’s level-four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses.

Stahl: “I had seen that the World Health Organization team only spent three hours at the lab.”

Metzl: ‘While they were there they didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel.

That’s because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols.

Read more

Forty years ago today John Hinckley tried to kill President Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton. The 25 year-old Hinckley fired six shots. One hit press secretary James Brady in the head and left him with permanent brain damage. (Brady died on 8.4.14.) A bullet hit police officer Thomas Delahanty; another hit Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the chest. And another bullet ricocheted off a car door and hit Reagan in the ribs. He survived.

According to Moving Picture Blog‘s Joe Leydon, at the time an interim arts editor with the Dallas Morning News, “early reports indicated Reagan was a goner.” The paper’s film critic Philip Wuntch “was out in Los Angeles for the Oscars,” Leydon recalls, “and he filed an absolutely brilliant overview of Reagan’s movie career on about one hour’s notice.

A day earlier (or on 3.29.81) Leydon interviewed Lee Marvin, who was visiting the USA Film Fest in Dallas. Leydon: “I joked with him that he had shot the President — Ronald Reagan — in [Don Siegel‘s] The Killers (1964), Reagan’s last movie. ‘Yeah,’ Marvin responded with a wolfish grin, ‘but he wasn’t President yet when I shot him.'”

Meanwhile up in Manhattan I was working for a modest McGraw Hill company called Product Information Network (PIN). I was glad for the employment (I was working on a large report about landfill compactors) but for the most part I was miserable. I remember being alarmed by the news about Reagan, but not quite emotionally distraught on a JFK-in-Dallas level, Reagan being a Republican and all.

The 65-year-old Hinckley, by the way, has been a relatively free man since September 2016. On 7.27.16, a federal judge ruled that Hinckley could be released from St. Elizabeths mental hospital as he was no longer considered a threat to himself or others. Hinckley was released from institutional psychiatric care on 9.10.16, with “many” conditions. He was required to live full-time at his mother’s home in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Read more

John Bailey, camera operator on Days of Heaven (starting at 13:15):

“Normally the locusts would have been done in visual effects. But I think Nestor [Almendros] came up…maybe it was Nestor and Terry [Malick] but I know Nestor was instrumental in deciding that we could [shoot swarms of locusts] in actual production.

“I remember that we had the Panaflex with a reverse-run magazine. It was backloaded on the take-up side [and] we ran the camera backwards. So what happened was there was a plane that came by, full of peanut shells that were painted black. [And they were tossed out of the plane] so they were all coming down, but since the camera was running backwards it looked like [the peanut shells] were rising up into the air. And we had the actors also reverse their motion. I remember that we rehearsed it. Very carefully.”

Industry impressions of Nomadland (mostly approving with some dissenters) have settled in. They are what they are. IMAX screenings aren’t going to move the needle. You know what I’d love to see in a first-rate, real-deal IMAX theatre? Tenet. With subtitles, of course.

The daily jazz-spewings and soul-searchings of Hollywood Elsewhere have been totally free-of-charge for 16 and 2/3 years, starting in August ’04. I really wish I could keep going like this, but ad revenue has been dwindling over the last three years, largely due to Khmer Rouge wokelisting. I regrettably have no choice but to convert HE into a paywall site. It breaks my heart but the situation is the situation.

I became a significant journo player in the early ’90s when I began with Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times “Calendar” section. I became a weekly LA Times Syndicate columnist starting in the fall of ’94, and then a biweekly online columnist (Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com) in October of ’98. HE independently launched in August ’04, and the daily bloggy-blog format kicked in in the spring of ’06.

HE was a moderately successful operation between ’06 and ’09, and then a flush site between ’10 and ’17.

Alas, Wokester Robespierre-ism (i.e., pushed by the sensibilities of Millennial and Zoomer-aged agency buyers) has resulted in moderately diminished ad revenues over the last three years.

Just to be clear, HE will NOT become a Patreon site but a similar self-created paywall site of my own specific design and contouring

I’ve been working on trying to transfer HE into a total paywall site (or a mostly paywall one) for the last three months or so. In December-January my son Dylan, who’s always been super-brilliant at this stuff, created a test system with Patreon. Except I’ve decided that I don’t want HE to be a Patreon site. I want to have my own paywall revenue going straight into my PayPal account.

And yet I want to create the same kind of deal that the Patreon thing would have been. Readers would be able to read the first four or five lines of each story before it fades into grayness and then nothing….unless they’re a subscriber. Or something like that.

In ’18 and ’19 I tried a separate paywall site called HE Plus — the idea was that one or two stories would be paywalled on HE Plus. But doing this made me feel overwhelmed, like my head was a cantaloupe being split in two. I tried and tried but it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t continue it. I was ready to shoot myself.

I’m figuring that for the new thing I would charge a $5 monthly cheapie rate OR $10 monthly for an enhanced HE experience — (a) regular daily column plus (b) access to bimonthly serialized HE novel installments plus (c) a bi-weekly podcast plus (d) access to ’90s and early aughts columns archived and re-formatted and re-examined. Or a $70 annual flat rate for the highest access of everything.

This is similar to what Graydon Carter‘s Air Mail and the Daily Wire charges.

I’m currently speaking to a couple of people to help install this new system. It’s not that tricky. WordPress has a paywall function. I’m sure it will all pan out. I want to be up and rolling by May 1st or May 15th…sometime around then.

HE to loyal readers who’ve been with me since ’98: I’m very sorry that economic conditions have forced me to do this. I wish I could just keep going for free. Alas, I can’t. Ad revenue will continue (Oscar + Emmys) but as long as wokesters are making the ad-buying calls it won’t be enough.

This is an image from a film that was regarded at the time of its original release as sorta kinda scary. By the standards of ten years later (or the early Dario Argento period) the film in question wasn’t that scary at all — it was slow, ponderous, pretentious and stiff-necked. I’m betting that right now nobody will be able to identify it. Hint: the film bears a faint resemblance to The Vanishing.

58 years ago the Bronx Zoo installed an exhibit called “The Most Dangerous Animal In The World”. It was between the Mountain Gorilla and Orangutan cages. The exhibit was a barred mirror with an inscription below it — “This animal, increasing at a rate of 190,000 every 24 hours, is the only creature that has ever killed off entire species of other animals. Now it has achieved the power to wipe out all life on Earth.”

In short, Bronx Zoo management had detoured into a vein of misanthropic contemplation — an exhibit that basically said “look at yourselves” and “think it over.” And that was during the Kennedy years. It was perhaps appropriate that I experienced a similar moment of Bronx Zoo insight a few years later.

I was there with four or five friends sometime around ’71 or thereabouts, and we were all fairly ripped. And I was hit with my first “holy shit” realization about the nature of borough people — suddenly confronted with the fact that average families were icky and unrefined (not elegant, pot-bellied, compulsive junk-food inhalers) and poorly dressed (shorts, sandals, loud shirts, pork-pie hats) and not the sort of folks that, say, the Kennedy family might not invite over for brunch in Hyannisport.

I remember huddling with three or four friends who were mulling the exact same impressions, and we were all shaking our heads and muttering “Jesus, look at these people…wow.”

Roger Corman‘s Teenage Caveman (’58) has been a joke movie for decades. Long ago Robert Vaughn (who died at age 77 in 2016) called it “the worst movie ever made”, and it may still be that.

But remember that it had a decent third-act twist: the prehistoric world of the film was actually a post-nuclear holocaust realm. In short, it ended like Planet of the Apes.

Vaughn obviously didn’t look teen-aged in the film. He was around 25 when it was shot, and looked 29 or 30. He would’ve been convincing if the film had been titled 20something Caveman With a Mortgage and a Baby On The Way.

Read more

…for being male, cisgender, gender-conforming, heterosexual, a fertile parent, tall and reasonably attractive, able-bodied, healthy, not fat, a product of an upper-middle-class upbringing, urban, qualified in writing, editing and column-writing, literate, English-speaking, a former Episcopalian, descended from Anglo-Europeans and therefore white.

I realize that these traits usher in all kinds of presumptions about me being a bad person with the mark of Satan on the back of my neck. All I can say that I’m sorry…not for who and what I am, but for your asinine presumptions.