From "What's Your 1619 Beef?', posted three and one-third years ago (7.30.20):
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I feel a certain investment in the just-concluded Montclair Film Festival. Montclair is a hop, skip and a jump from Jett, Cait and Sutton's place, and two weekends ago I attended a screening of The Holdovers there. The festival's audience awards have been announced, and as you might expect Alexander Payne's yesteryear New England dramedy won the top prize in the fiction feature category. Likewise The Taste of Things won the World Cinema audience award. The documentary feature award was won by Matthew Heineman's American Symphony.
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This i-d.vice headline infuriates me. It really burns my ass. Seriously..."It's North West's World -- We All Just Live In It"?
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I was impossible not to respect Leonardo DiCaprio's intense, go-for-broke performances as loose-cannon tupes in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which he performed at age 16 and 17 or something like that. But they were "kid" performances. Next came a pulp western, The Quick and the Dead ('95), which, performed at age 19, showcased his first teenager performance. Alas, the movie wasn't so hot.
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Eddie Ginley to HE (email): "I was rewatching Wonder Boys the other night, and this scene....what Katie Holmes is saying, rather, reminded me of Killers of the Flower Moon.
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Every so often I get really sick of looking at all these lying, smiling, happy–as–a–clam faces on social media…too many damn blissful photos in too many flush locations, I’m tellin’ ya…well-heeled older folks using Hawaii and Paris and Sicily and Turks and Caicos or some midtown Manhattan restaurant as backdrop statements or general affirmations of comfort and contentment…happy and beaming and seemingly overjoyed…time of our lives!
These are presentations, of course, and naturally they’re not truthful. Advertisements For Ourselves. We all understand this, of course, but this doesn’t stop the infinite ecstasy people from posting these ads 24/7. Every Instagram day is a deluge of feigned fucking delight.
Do I blame people for trying to flood my feed with relentless happyface messaging? I guess not but on the other hand and to be perfectly honest I’m feeling more and more resentful, ya wealthy, well-fed, nicely tanned and well-dressed pricks ya.
If I was hanging today in Turks and Caicos would I take the same kind of “hah!..look at how wonderful my life is!” selfies and post them all over? No, I wouldn’t — I would post handsome photos, sure, but of anyone or anything other than myself because I no longer look like the handsome glammy guy of yore** and I don’t particularly want to advertise this fact.
** Even though I look half-decent for a “seasoned” guy with my Prague touch-ups, relatively trim physique for a guy who sits and writes every damn day, CVS whitened teeth and dark Prague hair.


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