Day: May 9, 2021

…it would sorta kinda look like this. I don’t know what to say or think. All I can do for now is (a) gulp and (b) go “hmmm, maybe but I dunno.” It’s certainly simpler and cleaner, but right now I live in my own home, dammit — a place with a certain weather-worn history, a certain personality and attitude…a brand and a tradition that’s been around for 17 proud years.

My honest reaction is that HE Substack…a place I’m thinking of moving into…looks and feels like a modest, freshly-painted condo unit in a large sprawling complex, but at least it has a soft-drink machine off the main lobby, a large basement room for washing and drying, and of course underground parking.

I’m not saying it isn’t the right way to go (maybe it is), but right now I’m in shock. 17 years of blood, sweat and tears, and this is what it’s come to…a condo unit.

Writing is never easy — demanding, tiring, draining. Sometimes the spirit is upon me, and other times not. But it’s nowhere near as difficult as it was during the old Olivetti manual and IBM Selectric days of the ’70s and early-to-mid ’80s. Back then I would tell friends “I despise the process, but I love having written.” In my early Manhattan days (late ’70s) writing was like pushing a loaded wheelbarrow uphill, over gravel. I would spend way too many hours composing a 400-word film review, partly because it’s more difficult to write shorter than longer.

In Julia Lilian Hellman (Jane Fonda) threw her typewriter out the window. I got so crazy one night in my Bank Street apartment that I smashed a glass jar of peanut butter against the kitchen wall and cut my palm open. I damaged some nerves, but they gradually regenerated,

I don’t mean anything by mentioning Darren’s film — I just wanted to allude to Mother’s Day without sounding sentimental.

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You could argue that this standoff scene between Eddie Albert and Charles Grodin in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (’72) is Albert’s career-best moment. He’s playing an utterly humorless Midwestern banker who smells deceit and calls it out …and it’s beautiful.

Surely there are other noteworthy scenes in which an older, wiser, sharper character (man or woman) tells a young hustler (either gender) to cut the crap.

Written by Neil Simon: “I see through you. You don’t think I see through you? You could wear two wool sweaters and a raccoon coat, I’d still see through you. ‘There’s no deceit in the cauliflower’? Where do you get ideas like that? Do they just…do they just come out of that New York head of yours?”

During the last 20 or 25 minutes of Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), professional thief John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) arranges for a deep-voiced hypnotist named Miasmo (Lynne Gordon) to put an unsuspecting safe-deposit-box teller into a kind of waiting trance state.

The trigger term that will make the teller obey any command is “Afghanistan bananistan”, a deliberately silly invention (presumably dreamt up by screenwriter William Goldman)…a noun-switch takeover in the same vein as “Oscar schmoscar”…obviously.

It goes without saying that there’s no reason on earth for Miasmo to have invented a similar-sounding term, “Afghanistan banana stand.” Why would she do that? Even with a silly attitude what do bananas have do with Afghanistan? Has anyone ever heard of a Kabul fruit seller restricting his goods to just bananas? It’s lame — a needlessly literal term when the much simpler “Afghanistan bananistan” will suffice.

And yet the Hot Rock Wikipedia page nonsensically claims that Miasmo says “Afghanistan banana stand”, and now a copy writer for the Criterion Channel has parroted this interpretation. Can we please nip this one in the bud? “Bananistan” is standard form — “banana stand” is ridiculous.

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The wise and sensible John McWhorter feels condescended to, he said on Real Time with Bill Maher two nights ago. Robin DiAngelo‘s “White Fragility“, he complained, basically says that Black people are “hothouse flowers” and “everybody has to tiptoe around us…we’re always crying and always angry and just so very, very delicate. I don’t feel like that person. It should be used to keep the table from wobbling…that is the only use for that book.”

In a 7.15.20 Atlantic piece titled “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility,” McWhorter said that DiAngelo’s book “openly infantilized Black people” and “simply dehumanized us.”

DiAngelo, he observed, “does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching [for residual racism by white people] is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good.”

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Elon Musk‘s mom obviously takes care of herself, looks great, excellent hair…the best moment came when she said “I love you very much.”

Does the fact that Musk is worth $166 billion constitute “a moral obscenity,” as Bernie Sanders has more or less stated? Great wealth comes with the kind of creative ambition and need to dominate that propels the Musk locomotive, it seems. Would I like a small cut of that fortune transferred to my Citibank checking account? Yes, I would, but the disparity between my own personal worth and Musk’s is not his fault.

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