We all know what “learn” means in this context. Bryan Cranston seems to be more or less saying “forgive my privileged white guy sins, which we all know are considerable. Should I list them alphabetically? My shame is absolute.”

Decades ago I read a Charles Bukowski recollection about the glorious results of a long, deep sleep. The author-poet had slept for two days straight, and when he finally awoke he felt wonderful. Bukowski’s body felt like $10 million bucks, etc. So I decided to follow suit. Lights out at 9 pm, a good 10 or 11 hours.

I woke up at 1:30 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I studied my Twitter feed for an hour or so, and then decided to re-watch Steven Spielberg‘s The Post (’17) on the phone. My reaction was roughly the same as it was four years ago — respected the effort, loved the performances, admired Liz Hannah and Josh Singer‘s well-honed script, felt a certain emotional poignancy toward the end.

The Post was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress (Streep) at the 90th Academy Awards, but Academy members mostly ignored it — identity politics and representation of historically devalued groups were the big concerns. If you ask me The Post didn’t deserve to be dismissed as a self-congratulating, middle-class, big-studio film about journalistic integrity, made by and for well-off, well-educated whiteys. But that’s how a certain percentage of the Academy saw it.

The Post isn’t a journalistic procedural as much as a feminist parable — a story about how Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep), who initially saw herself as less than ideally suited to the task and little more than a blandly embedded figure in Washington social circles, gradually grew some courage and a sense of journalistic purpose during the Pentagon Papers episode, which transpired over a 17-day period in June 1971.

In this light, the key scene — Spielberg’s signature moment — comes when Streep emerges from a historic Supreme Court session about the legality of publishing the Pentagon Papers, and several women on the steps gaze with admiration as she passes by.

On the other hand I found myself distracted by those klutzy moments that Spielberg always puts into his films — little errors of judgments that normalize characters by making them seem vulnerable. Graham waking up in her bedroom with several books and files on her bed, and of course they all fall from the bed and onto the floor, loudly. Graham meeting Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) inside a posh Washington restaurant, and of course she stumbles and accidentally knocks over a chair. An open-mouthed Washington Post intern visits the N.Y. Times building on West 43rd street, and as he starts to cross the street you just know he’ll almost get hit by a taxi…sure enough, that happens. (I’m fairly sure that another cab screeches to a stop later on.)

I finally got back to sleep at 5:30 am. The Bukowski sleep-in thing will have to wait.

Exactly three years ago I slipped on some ice in the Sierra foothills, just south of Mt. Whitney. It was totally my fault for having worn my brown suede Bruno Magli lace-ups in a sloping area that was experiencing an icy snowfall at the moment.

Nothing was broken but over the following three or four weeks I was agony. Sleeping was quite difficult; so was breathing at times. A cane was my constant companion. From the instant I fell I was the antithesis of Lee Marvin toughness. I even wept a couple of times.

Posted on 2.17.19: It was chilly and gently snowing as Tatyana and I trudged around a snow-packed area near a blocked-off road in the Sierras, south of Mt. Whitney. Took some nice shots, a good slow-pan video, satisfaction.

On the way back to the car I stepped on a harmless-looking patch of snow which had suddenly become icy. Total slip-out, feet in the air and a terrible crashing collision.

I literally heard a slight snapping or cracking sound as I hit the ground. I half-landed on my right arm and half on my right rib area. It hurt like a bastard plus my wind was knocked out. For five or ten seconds I whined and moaned like a candy-ass. If Lee Marvin had been there he would’ve been ashamed of me. Or for me.

I eventually got up and managed a brusque “I’m okay.” 100 feet later I fell again. Fucking 25 degree downward angle plus that icy snowfall. Then we couldn’t get the car out of the parking lot due to the same slick ice. After some struggling we figured it out. Jesus.

No broken wrist or broken arm, no leg bruise, 100% arm, hand, leg and neck mobility, no lung damage and just a couple of small cuts on my right hand. But my right rib cage aches like a sonuvabitch.

As we speak Tatyana is driving me to a Cedars Sinai Urgent Care clinic on Wilshire near La Cienega. What are they gonna do if I have a cracked rib? Wrap my mid-section in one of those high-tension bandages? Prescribe some pain pills?

X–Ray Result: No cracked ribs. But at the risk of sounding repetitive, it fucking hurts.

Erik Anderson‘s kneejerk, groaningly familiar view of Elvis Presley and, by current extension, Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis is going to be with us for several months to come.

Racism is obviously alive and well in many pockets of the country today, but the kind of racism that penetrated most of the USA in the early to mid ’50s was more virulent and less modified. People of color were saddled with all sorts of unpleasant associations, and one of the offshoots was that rhythm and bluesy versions of “race music”, or what came to be known in the ’50s as rock ‘n roll, were regarded askance, particularly by the parents of baby boomers.

Teenage kids of the James Dean generation loved Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino (ditto the younger boomers who were tweeners at the time), but their parents were appalled and many radio stations were concerned by the implications of raw, lewd sexuality that black music seemed to contain.

Hence the famous Sam Phillips quote: “I always said that if I could find a white boy who could sing like a black man I’d make a million dollars.”

Presley may have grown into a drug-dependent asshole when he get older and perhaps less and less respectful of his roots, but by all accounts he genuinely loved “negro” spiritual music as a young kid.

“A lot of people in retrospect attack Elvis for stealin` the black music and making it white. I say Elvis Presley had a black soul with a white face” — Michael Ochs.

“I don’t think he [Elvis] ripped ’em off,” B.B. King said. “I think once something has been exposed, anyone can add or take from it if they like. He was just so great, so popular, and so hot — and so anything that he played became a hit. To me, they didn’t make a mistake when they called him The King.”

In the ’50s Presley’s music was popular in the black community. As noted by Michael Bertrand, author of “Race, Rock and Elvis”, between April 1956 and September 1958, Presley had 22 songs among the Top 15 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues charts — charts that were “meant to capture the tastes of black listeners and buyers.”

“A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man’s music,” said soul singer Jackie Wilson, “when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis.”

Presley to Jet‘s Louie Robinson: “A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it –I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid — like Rev. Brewster’s church [in Memphis].”

Quote: “Presley’s genius was his ability to mix multiple styles of music from the white and black cultures. Early in his career, a Memphis columnist summarized Presley’s singing style: “He has a white voice [and] sings with a negro rhythm which borrows in mood and emphasis from country style.”

Two days ago I wrote that Austin Butler doesn’t look enough like Elvis — at best he’s a young John Travolta. The new trailer suggests that Butler doesn’t have the surly Elvis drawl either. (Kurt Russell‘s Elvis voice was ten times better.) It’s one thing to not resemble Elvis but to sound like him, and another thing to not have the voice but to own a serious look-alike thing, but to come up short on both counts is a huge problem — it really is.

Forget reanimating the actual long-gone Elvis of yore — Butler doesn’t even seem like a good Elvis imitator. He just doesn’t have it.

And yet Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis trailer gets one thing absolutely right — it conveys the effect of Presley’s explosive sexual current and how the wiggles and pelvic thrusts made young girls pant, or at the very least pause.

All this time I’ve been wondering if the Elvis guys (director-writer Luhrman, screenwriters Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner) would be including the “fat Elvis” chapter, or roughly the last three years of his life. Unless the trailer is lying by omission, the apparent answer is “no.”

There is, however, a seriously fat Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, and he’s wearing one of the best fat suits I’ve ever seen in a film…seriously, hats off. Or do I mean “fats off”?

I can’t seem to identify the fair-haired kid who plays 11 year-old Elvis in Tupelo, but this is almost exactly what Elvis looked like as a tweener. Odd that Luhrmann chose correctly in this realm, and yet totally dropped the ball with the adult-sized version.

Post-Tik Tik…BOOM! and especially post-swooping down to save the falling Zendaya in Spider–Man: No Way Home, Andrew Garfield is in a more-or-less excellent place these days. Or he was, rather, until this Vanity Fair cover appeared.

Garfield needed to dress down or otherwise butch up (i.e., stressed leather motorcycle jacket, jeans, boots, torn T-shirt) to counter-balance that overly sensitive emoji thing that has been his brand for years, but instead he’s doubled down. What color is the suit, arterial pink? The flared slacks are so slave-to-fashiony. And those pink and blue lace-ups…my God! No Mickey Mouse watch — that helps.