Day: June 3, 2024

6.4.24, 7:15 am: I’ve just hit upon a great Biden campaign theme, inspired by Dido’s “Thank You.”

No joke, not being satirical…this could really work.

His campaign chiefs need to buy the rights and persuade Dido to record a Biden version with re-written lyrics, in the exact same way the JFK campaign got Frank Sinatra to record a new version of “High Hopes” in 1960.

Nobody’s going to vote for Joe with super-high enthusiasm or expectations, but everyone knows that the alternative is a sociopathic, foam-at-the-mouth, anti-democratic authoritarian felon.

The Biden trick is to plant a mild but attractive idea, which is that he’s sane and steady and, at the end of the day, he’s “not so bad…he’s not so bah–hah–hah–hahhd.” Play the song, play the song…over and over and over.

Last night…

Some Biden campaign slogans, provided by N.Y Times columnist Bret Stephens in a 6.3.24 “Conversation” column:

“I sometimes forget the names of foreign leaders, but I didn’t forget my oath to the Constitution.”

“Whaddya want, a little bit sleepy or full-blown crazy?”

“This election isn’t just a choice. It’s a choice about having a choice.”

“I might lose, but at least I’ll admit it.”

5.4.24, 5:45 am…

HE variation #1: “I may look like a walking cadaver from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but I’m healthy and vigorous as far as it goes. Inside I feel like I’m 55. Hell, 50!”

HE variation #2: “I may remind you of a drooling assisted living resident being helped to the dining table, but I feel fine…really!”

HE variation #3: “C’mon, you know I’ll never do anything rash or foolish, job-wise. I’m a normie, and I have sharp, woke-minded staffers.”

HE variation #4: “Steady as she goes, even while napping. And definitely more engaged than Reagan was in his late-second-term zombie phase.”

HE variation #5: “I could have withdrawn and allowed younger contenders to compete to succeed me, but my big-time politician ego wouldn’t allow that. I am what I am, but I’m not so bad…I’m not so bah–hah–hah–hahhd.”

HE variation #6: “I might well turn out to be Ruth Bader Biden, but then again I might squeak through. And I need your help to get there!”

HE variation #7: “Whadaya want, some kind of snappy, vigorous, nattily-dressed, JFK-resembling charmer with a Pete Buttigieg mind and a sensibly moderate agenda? Somebody like that instead of me? Okay, I get that on a certain level but it’s not happening, man! I’m it!”

Seriously? The best of them all and certainly the catchiest is the Dido option…”I’m not that bad…I’m not that bah–hah–hah–hahhd.” It has a ring. It’s honest. It touches a chord.

Because Biden isn’t that bad, and if you overlook the border and his administration’s winking at wokesters in general and specifically at hastily-advised trans surgeries for minors, his record has been pretty good. Inflation sucks and CEOs are making 200 or 300 times more than working schmucks, but no Oval Office resident is going to turn that situation around. The world is for the few, but at least doddering Joe Biden believes in and practices democracy.

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Politician, scientist and academic Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, is now the President-Elect of Mexico. She won the election with 58% of the vote, succeeding president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

A member of Morena, Sheinbaum served as Head of Government of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023.

She was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her paternal grandparents (Ashkenazi Jews) emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s; her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust.

Wiki: “A scientist by profession, Sheinbaum received her Ph.D. in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She’s authored over 100 articles and two books on energy, the environment, and sustainable development. Sheinbaum contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 2018 she was listed as one of BBC’s 100 Women.”

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HE respects George Conway for calling paid CNN commentator and Trump apologist Scott Jennings a liar. This kind of candor rarely surfaces. Go to 5:30.

Conway: “Scott’s lying, and that’s the problem with the Republican Party…it is continually addicted to lies.” He also lamented “the degree of moral rot we have on the conservative side in politics today.”

When Jennings asked what he was supposedly lying about, Conway said “you’re lying about the law…you’re lying about what the jury was charged to find…they didn’t have to find an underlying crime…they [had to be persuaded] there was an intent to cover up an underlying crime, and the underlying crime was pretty obvious.”

Returning to the Jennings, Conway repeated that the Republican party is “suffused with lies, [and] I don’t know why this network is paying Scott to say these lies on this show…it’s ridiculous.”

This happened three days ago — sorry for not paying atttention.

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Since the ’50s and more particularly the advent of ironic, put-on cinema (which arguably began with John Huston‘s Beat The Devil), there have been two kinds of movies — (1) the just-described kind in which the viewer is repeatedly told that they’re watching a half-serious, half-goof-off enterprise “in quotes”…some kind of dry jape or half-real fantasy or alternate world wank-off that sophistos can certainly enjoy (we hope you do!) but which you’re not really expected to “believe” in, and (2) classically immersive stories that have been constructed and sold as “realism” within the usual cinematic boundaries.

Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Michael Bay, the Russo Brothers and a whole battalion of like-minded filmmakers have never made a classically immersive movie in their lives, and they never will.

But throughout much of the 20th Century immersive realism was, for the most part, scrupulously adhered to up and down the line. With the exceptions, of course, of surreal fantasies (Disney, Alexander Korda, Michael Powell, Luis Bunuel) and animated features and adventure films with occasional applications of Hal Roach-styled physical humor (George Stevens‘ Gunga Din), it was the only game in town.

I’ve always responded more to immersive cinema than to jape movies, but I’m wondering what the general preference may be these days among movie fans.

When I sit down with a film I’m ready for whatever (really), but in my heart of hearts I mostly want to submit to a world that reminds me in a thousand different ways of the world that (I know this makes me sound old-fogeyish) actually exists outside the theatre doors, the one that I live and struggle in on a daily basis. Or at least a film that strongly echoes that world.

Which is why I’ve always tended to have a problem with films that defy basic rules or natural law to such a degree that it’s impossible to sink into them. (Even if they’re fantasies.)

I’m talking about superhero bullshit, of course, and family-friendly animation and supposedly realistic dramas or dramedies that are written with a tone of such ludicrousness that the characters don’t behave in any sort of semi-logical, reality-based manner, and especially robo-action films in which guys crash through windows, fall three or four stories, land on pavement, loudly groan but nonetheless get up, shake themselves off and run off to the next adventure.

It’s funny to consider that in 1946 Howard Hawks made one of the greatest immersive, super-realistic adventure films ever (i.e., Red River) and yet a mere 13 years later had completely tipped over into the realm of self-acknowledged fake-itude with 1959’s Rio Bravo, which basically said to audiences, “Okay, guys, it’s chill time…which means, of course, that you’re watching a laid-back movie and that we’re conversing with the aid of obviously scripted dialogue and also taking an occasional time-out for a musical number.”

Hawks went back to realism with Hatari! (’62) but went completely crazy with the sound-stage, wank-western aesthetic when he made El Dorado (’66) and Rio Lobo (’70).

From David Thomson‘s “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies,” page 318:

Owning a pair of white Mickey Mouse gloves (three fingers and a thumb) used to be a cool thing, but no longer, I fear — not in this century.

Mickey Mouse was a seminal 20th Century cartoon character, but culturally he mattered for only about 40 or 50 years. He began with Steamboat Willie (’28), grew in stature with Fantasia (’40), peaked with the Mickey Mouse Club TV series and the building of Disneyland in ’55.

I was going to buy some Mickey gloves for Sutton, but I don’t think she’d “get it.”