Day: November 12, 2024

After innumerable savorings and re-savorings of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone over the last several decades (no one ever seems to speak all that fondly of Night Gallery) and almost 50 years after Serling’s untimely passing at age 50, where is the acute hunger for a family-approved Serling documentary?

I’ve read all about Serling’s pre-Twilight Zone life and have seen Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight a couple of times and have watched all the noteworthy Twilight Zone episodes (which I own on Bluray) over and over…so what’s the idea exactly? To reach Millennials and Zoomers who’ve never heard of him?

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way will produce the Serling doc; Jonah Tulis will direct. Serling’s daughters, Jodi and Anne, are in for a hefty slice of the action as executive producers.

“They do what they want to do / say what they want to say / live how they want to live / play how they want to play / dance how they want to dance…kick and slap a friend, eeyo!…the Addams family!”

Consider the facial expression on 6′ 9″ Barron, a.k.a. “Lurch”.

…except for the $475 price tag plus shipping…can’t do it. Made in Italy, of course. If I was in Florence or Venice or Milano I could buy these for roughly half the price.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a personalized jean jacket to give to Sutton for her third birthday (11.17).

I bought it from a Chinese company called Woodemon. The package was shipped and tracked by SF-international.

Two days ago (Sunday, 11.10) the SF tracking info said the package had been delivered to HE’s Wilton abode…except it hadn’t been.

The delivery company was closed yesterday for Veterans Day, but after much online searching and suffering I managed to discover three photos taken by the delivery person — photos that made it clear the jacket had been delivered to the wrong location — a home painted bluish-gray with a grassy front yard plus a white mailbox with the street number and a tiny red flag. The carrier also took two photos of the package and the shipping label.

As the name of my condo community begins with the name “Wilton”, I went searching around for streets with that name…two of them…zip.

This morning I went to the Wilton post office and showed the boss (40ish dark-haired woman) the messenger photos, and asked if she or any of the mail carriers recognized the home in question. She said it looked like it was located on a street I hadn’t inspected — Wilton Acres. I went right over there and bingo…mystery solved! Two cars parked in the driveway. A small dog barking inside.

I rang the bell next to a shed door two or three times, and then rapped loudly on it. I noticed that the door was very slightly ajar so I opened it and stepped inside and knocked on the kitchen-adjacent house door three or four times. No response except for the dog.

I went back to my car to search for the occupants on Facebook (their names were on address labels inside the shed), and then all of a sudden a moustachioed Wilton cop was rapping on my passenger window. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

I got out, explained the basics, showed him the delivery photos and my ID etc. It turns out the occupant had a video security system that sent her video footage of me poking around, and so she called the fuzz.

The satisfied, calmed-down cops spoke with the home owner at her place of employment. Ten minutes later she drove up and went inside and gave me four white plastic packages — the jean jacket plus three others that contained scarves that also hadn’t been delivered to my address earlier this month and last month, despite notices saying they had been.

My name, address and phone number were clearly printed on the labels. If the Wilton Acres woman had any good-neighbor inclinations she could have easily called or texted and explained that she had some of my stuff, etc. I would have gratefully come over and picked them up, or we could’ve met somewhere. That’s what I would’ve done, trust me, if someone else’s deliveries had been left at my place.

But over a period of a week or two she did nothing. In her defense she leads a busy life and has kids and a dog and all, but still.

Five days ago (11.7) I posted a piece titled “How Will Trump’s Victory Affect Oscar Noms?” My basic take was that any award-worthy film that defies or argues against Trump or Trumpism (Emilia Perez, Karla Sofia Gascon‘s sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated “lead” performance, The Apprentice, Conclave) will probably win favor among the Academy’s hardcore progressives (i.e., the Jamie Lee Curtis branch).

Yesterday (11.11) former IndieWire guy and current @EDGLRD hotshot Eric Kohn addressed the same topic in a Hollywood Reporter piece (“How the Oscar Race Responds to Donald Trump“) and offered roughly the same conclusion.

With most of America not so much saying “yay, Trump!’ as “fuck the wokey,” Kohn believes that Hollywood’s leftist vanguard will push back strongly against Joe and Jane Bumblefuck by saying in effect “screw you guys…more wokey-wokey…we’re digging in!”

Kohn: “The 2017 Best Picture win for Moonlight both reflected and influenced a Trump-era bid for change…the choices the Academy will soon make can only do the same.”

Kohn, however, seems to think that Sean Baker‘s Anora presents some kind of anguished portrait of struggling have-nots. Anora, he says, is “a paean to the struggle of finding stability in a country that forces its lower-class survivors to hustle at all costs,” and that it serves as “a barometer of the mood of the many unsure or uneasy about the election results — right down to the teary exhaustion of its closing moments, when two characters drawn together by happenstance melt into the frustrations of their shaky futures.”

The joy and rapture of Anora lies is the glorious and obvious fact that it’s not wokey-wokey in the least, and thank God Almighty for that heavenly blessing.

Kohn’s article also states that Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist, a 1940s saga of a tobacco-and-heroin-addicted Hungarian architect struggling to adapt to American capitalism, is “a sobering and uncannily timely testament to the contradictions between American immigrant promise and the inequalities that keep it unfulfilled for so many,” blah blah.

Kohn more or less concludes that if you’re against the cruel exploitation of immigrants you may want to think about giving Corbet’s film a Best Picture Oscar (or something like that).

The funniest part of Kohn’s piece states that Trumpies will have difficulty with the egalitarian spirit of The Brutalist. “Those who view Donald Trump as a cartoonish reality-TV character now threatening an American way of life will find much to identify with in the wakeup call endured by Adrien Brody’s Laszlo Toth,” Kohn opines. “Others who crave Trump’s more draconian approach to border control may not make it through The Brutalist.”

That’s me he’s talking about! I hated The Brutalist and found it so off-putting that I bolted during the intermission. Kohn is therefore implying I’m a Trumpie, but as much as I despise the woke mind virus, I voted for Harris because I considered her far less problematic than Trump.

The Brutalist is an agonizing film to sit through, and I’m predicting across-the-board rejection by Academy stalwarts. I hated it.

Excerpt from my 11.7 articl4: “I also think that more people will suddenly want to stream Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, a well-written, superbly acted drama about young Trump’s relationship with rightwing pitbull attorney Roy Cohn. If they have any respect for the grade-A artistry involved, they’ll certainly want to consider Best Picture and Best Director noms as well as a Best Supporting Actor nom for Jeremy Strong, at the very least.

“I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s also…how to put this?…a sign-of-the-times, wokey, gender-fluid acceptance factor to be found in Conclave. Which should help it among the Jamie Lee Curtis “we all need to lock arms and tell Trump to go fuck himself” crowd. [Note: The Conclave thing has nothing to do with gender transitioning.)”

I’m probably beyond the reach of psychotherapy, but thanks to all for the birthday greetings.

Here’s a link for an L.A. Times Calendar piece that I wrote 31 years ago about Dan Richter, the ’60-era mime who played the bone-tossing Moonwatcher in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here are three scans of the original article — #1, #2 and #3.

My father met Dan at a Connecticut AA meeting in ’91 or thereabouts, and at my dad’s suggestion I called a while later and visited Dan at this home in Sierra Madre for an interview.

I remember he was dealing with chemotherapy at the time and not walking all that well, but he’s still here and doing fine.

In 2022 Richter published a 2012 memoir — “The Dream Is Over” — that’s mainly about a four-year period that he spent off-and-on with John Lennon and Yoko One (’69 to ’73).

Nancy Porter, an old childhood friend who was also living in Sierra Madre in ’93, came with me to visit Dan at this mountainside home. She later complained that he talked too much about himself. “But he’s the guy who picked up the bone to the strains of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrusta’,” I replied. “And…you know, he hung with Lennon all those years and his stories are fascinating.”

If you’re hanging with someone who has lived large and touched serious history and has several first-hand recollections to share, you sit and absorb and give thanks. Either you get that or you don’t.