Day: May 11, 2025

Glenn Kenny’s toxic acidity is a really ugly thing to endure (especially in my case), but it’s to his credit that he was able to put his snide anti-conservative prejudice to one side while reviewing David Mamet’s Henry Johnson.

Posted on 6.9.15: “Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre.

“She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is.) But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy. “

My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Maugham‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “

She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit she didn’t even open her eyes). Now, at last, her peace is absolute.

Take it or leave it.

I don’t care for stories about kids, but I will always sit up straight for a Fatih Akin film. A child’s tale of World War II, Amrum is based on the childhood memories of co-screenwriter Hark Bohm. Occasional Akin collaborator Diane Kruger costars. Eight years ago she starred in my favorite Akin film, In The Fade (’17) — her performance won her a Best Actress award in Cannes.

Besides being “offensive”, offensive humor is, on a certain level, good for the soul. Almost on a level of “the more offensive, the better”. Because any jokes that piss off wokesters are, on a certain level, quite soothing. I’m not saying that the actual import of racist humor is literally funny, but the howling and abusive spectacle of it all is, on a certain level….I don’t know what I’m saying.

Insult humor is often funny, okay? To sensible center-left types, I mean. I’m sorry but it is.

We all remember how Tony Hinchcliffe infuriated AOC and many other lefties after trashing Puerto Ricans at a Donald Trump campaign rally in Madison Square Garden on 10.27.24. He described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, and joked that “these Latinos, they love making babies, they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that, they come inside, just like they do to our country”.

He also riffed about “carving watermelons with Black people” and “making a rock paper scissors joke involving Palestinians throwing rocks, and Jews “[having] a hard time throwing that paper.”

This is still a very catchy and agreeable song….nice harmonies, easy 4/4 rhythm. Primarily written by John Lennon in early ’62, “Ask Me Why” was initially recorded at Abbey Road studios on 6.6.62….with drummer Pete Best.

Sure enough, Best got the axe nine weeks later — 8.16.62. Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison didn’t have the stones to lower the boom directly, so their 28-year-old manager, Brian Epstein, stepped up and did the deed.

“Ask Me Why” was recorded again, along with “Please Please Me”, on 11.26.62 with Ringo Starr on drums.

Best is still with us at age 83.