Month: January 2025

Peter Yarrow, Adieu

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All hail fond memories of Peter, Paul and Mary as we lament the passing of Peter Yarrow, who had a gentle spirit within him. Or so I always felt.

Peter, Paul and Mary peaked for roughly a decade — between the early to late ’60s. But they’re regarded as a classic evergreen act, or they were for a long while.

Peter had the gentle soul, the late Mary Travers had great pipes and the blonde folkie hottie glamour thing until (I’m sorry but there’s no sidestepping this) she turned into a whale, and Paul Stookey had the folkie smartass thing.

When I think of Yarrow I think of “Puff, The Magic Dragon” (’62), which he wrote based on a Leonard Lipton poem. And when I think of Mary I think of her excellent 1969 recording of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”, which was written by John Denver. And when I think of Paul I think of “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” (’67), which he co-authored.

I don’t like admitting this, but when I look at YouTubes of Peter, Paul and Mary, I vastly prefer videos recorded when they were young, slender and attractive. Old bald Peter is okay because his kind-heartedness comes through at any age, but I still prefer the guy he was in the ’60s. But I really don’t like looking at…uhm, I prefer looking at videos of young, rail-thin Mary.

Rephrased For Clarity’s Sake

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John Ford’s The Searchers, which is back in the stream of things with a brand-new 4K restoration, is not the greatest American movie or even the greatest American western.

It goes on and on and on. Episode after episode after episode. Runs 119 minutes, but feels like 150 minutes if not three hours.

The visual compositions are magnificent start to finish and the iconic John Wayne is excellent in a caustic and ferocious way, but oh, God, the story and the supporting performances drive you crazy

Jeffrey Hunter’s over-acting is deeply painful (I’m sitting there begging him to effing tone it down); ditto Vera Miles.

Hunter’s Martin Pawley writes Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen ONE non-romantic letter over a five-year period and is surprised that she gets engaged to someone else?


The over-spirited Ford ensemble celebration scenes amount to a kind of cornball endurance test. Hank Worden‘s acting as village idiot Mose Harper is silly and cartoonish.

The simplistic racist depictions of Comanches as mere bloodthirsty savages, not to mention that poor overweight Indian woman who is treated like garbage and then killed by U.S. troops and especially the wailing delirium of those white women who had been kidnapped and raised by Native Americans…all deeply repulsive.

The film offers no explanation why Natalie Wood’s Debbie has no children by Henry Brandon’s Scar, who has been fertilizing her for years on end and probably prior to puberty as Lana Wood was eight or nine when she played adolescent Debbie at the time of her abduction.

Ethan Edwards’ last-minute abandonment of racist fanaticism is just thrown in there without rhyme or reason — his character arc is basicallly “Indian hate and revenge, hate and revenge, hate and revenge, hate and revenge…hate, hate, hate” and then “let’s go home, Debbie.”

Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (‘59) is much more realistic and just as sad and even poetic and far less arduous.

Dachau Drop-In

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Posted on 6.23.12: The boys and I visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial early yesterday afternoon. It’s located 9 miles to the northwest of Munich. You take a subway (about a 20 minute ride) and then grab a bus or a taxi when you hit town. It’s surprising when you reach the entrance, which is located on a fragrant, curving, tree-lined street. Maybe 150 visitors were there, some with tour guides. At first it feels like you’re walking into a large, well-tended city park. It’s attractive. And then you get to the main gate.


The words on the base of the statue, translated into English: “To honor the dead, to admonish the living.”

How can you visit a place like this and not feel sickened and somewhat depleted? I felt like I wanted to nap minutes after I began walking around the grounds. My system was feeling the odious signals and just wanted to shut down and escape, I guess. Obviously going there was not about me but about them. But I was thinking all kinds of tedious and banal thoughts. Some kind of blocking mechanism?

The main pebble-covered yard separating the German command and SS barracks and the area where the prisoner barracks stood is flat and wide and quite vast. Only two barracks — simulations of the actuals — remain on the grounds; only the gravel-based foundations of the rest remain. We saw it all and felt as much as we were able. Some 31,000 people were killed there. I was imagining what it might have felt like to be stuck at Dachau in the ’30s and ’40s, and how it might’ve felt to survive on a day-to-day basis. I can never know, of course, but my imagination was aflame and then some.

The ceiling on the gas chamber in the main crematorium building, located on the extreme southwest corner of the grounds, is quite low. The gas-dispensing “shower” holes on the ceiling were only eight or nine inches from the top of my head. There was one small window near the cement floor, covered with hard-metal chicken wire.

I couldn’t take any shots. The thought of raising my camera occured two or three times, and then it went away. At the end I forced myself to take a shot of a statue of an inmate (the model was Kurt Lange, a gay guy who served two “rehabilitation” sentences), and then one of the entrance.

Last night I read about the Dachau massacre, and I felt very, very gratified to read that after the camp was liberated in late April 1945, some U.S. soldiers gave handguns to some of the prisoners and allowed them to go to town on some of the SS guards.

We met a young Turkish guy at a food stand near the Dachau train/subway station, and his friendly personality and general vibe were really nice. “You from California?,” he asked. “Yeah, Los Angeles.” He has a brother in California, he said. “What town?,” I asked. “I don’t know, just California,” he said with a shrug and a smile. He’d obviously love to visit. It could have been anyone, but it was just beautiful on a certain level to meet and talk with him a bit. Some people just have an aura.

Adhering to Democratic Procedure

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Donald J. Trump is a brutish sociopath who had permanently soiled his reputation well before the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But the Capitol MAGA riot that happened exactly four years ago today sealed his rep for good.

Trump is a criminal — an anti-democratic, would-be dictator in the mold of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and the recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. U.S democracy has been permanently bent and dented by Trump, and it’ll take many years to recover or restore any sense of normalcy because of his pathology.

I hate wokesters as much as the next guy, but the forthcoming Trump solution will be worse than any kind of crazy Kamala Harris wokester regime.

Posted by N.Y. Times editorial board on 9.30.24:

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Best & Worst Nikki Glazer GG Jokes That Were Tossed

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Best un-used Glazer joke: “If Adrien Brody could go back in time, he would thank baby Hitler for his career.” A mostly spot-on joke because Brody does owe his career to a pair of holocaust-survival movies, The Pianist and The Brutalist. And yet the idea behind the joke is appallingly unfunny. The evasive reference to “baby” Hitler is what might have saved it.

“Baby” was used because if a time-travelled Brody were to reach out to an adult Hitler — the 34 year-old Beer Hall Putsch Hitler of 1923, let’s say — and say, “Herr Hitler, you don’t know me and you’re probably flinching at the thought of talking to me as I’m half-Jewish and you’re an anti-Semite, but I just want to thank you in advance for bringing about the future Holocaust because this horrific systematic mass slaughter will inspire two movies that will prove beneficial to my career in the 21st Century”…see? Not a laugh line.

Glazer told Howard Stern that she didn’t use the joke because “my assistant is GenZ, and she was like, ‘I don’t get it.’ And we’re like, ‘Well, there’s this whole thing where you could, if you have a time machine, you go back and kill Hitler and you prevent the Holocaust.’ And so it’s like, oh, we’re gonna lose a whole demo of people that don’t know [about Hitler and the holocaust]. And then I just said Hitler for nothing.”

There’s “a whole demo of people” who honestly don’t know about Hitler and the holocaust? Consider that assertion for a few seconds.

Worst un-used Glazer joke: “Glen Powell is nominated tonight for Hit Man. Who would have thought that by the end of the year, he’d only be the second hottest hit man in America” — a reference to United Healthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione. Initially half-funny until you think about it for two seconds. Hit men are hired killers — they do it for money. Mangione was a lone gunman who was vengeance-driven — nothing whatsoever to do with brown-bag money or Swiss bank accounts.

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Netflix Basically Bought It

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Last night at 11:14 pm I wrote the following apoplectic paragraph:

I’ll tell you what happened. Netflix spent and spent and spent some more. A whole lot more. And the Globe voters just kind of folded…whatever.

From Variety’s morning-after-the-Globes-Emilia Perez-embarrassment story by Elsa Keslassy and Alex Ritman: