Carville transcript: “[Maine Senate candidate] Graham Platner is fucked up, he’s been shot at, he’s a veteran, he’s a little bit weird, he’s an oysterman.
“Maybe we need a combat veteran right on that Senate floor who is fucked up [instead of] his opponent, and I can hardly say her name without the utter contempt dripping, Susan Collins, whose spine reminds me of a blueberry jelly from Maine.
“If you believe, as I do, that the country is in imminent peril — I mean imminent peril — who is most likely to slow this criminal in charge? Susan ‘Blueberry Jelly’ Collins, or five-degrees-off-dead-center Graham Platner? I think it’s Graham Platner.”
The other day I was obliged to briefly leave my vehicle inside the concrete parking structure adjacent to JFK’s Terminal 4. The entrance gates will pass you through if you have a plastic EZ Pass device, but the scanner couldn’t read mine (I tried for a full minute…nothing…faulty tech) so I pushed a button and got through with a paper ticket.
When I was attempting to exit the structure there were four or five drivers who were logjammed at the gates because two drivers in the front of a pair of exit lanes were having trouble getting out. (More faulty tech.) People were annoyed and honking, but I saw no parking attendants.
And then suddenly two young male attendants appeared. I rolled down my window and said, “What’s with the gates? I tried using my EZ Pass and the gate wouldn’t rise…I was forced to pay.” One of the guys said, “You probably didn’t scan it right.”
I asked, “Why don’t you go down and help those people who can’t get out?” The bros didn’t seem interested in offering any immediate service (one of them half-chuckled) but at that very moment I noticed a third parking attendant — an overweight woman of color — duck-walking to the exit gates. There was obvious driver frustration galore but this chick refused to move with the slightest amount of haste. She didn’t run, slow-jog, speed-march or even walk with a purposeful stride…she waddled her way down there.
If I was a Terminal 4 parking attendant I would have definitely hurried down to the gates, if for no other reason than to offer a theatrical gesture that would convey to the angry drivers that I feel their pain and will be down there tout suite…”sorry for the trouble, guys…I’m comin’, I’m comin’…we’ll figure this out.” But this chick could have been pushing a food cart through the produce section of a supermarket. In so doing she was basically saying, body-language-wise, “I’m not an Olympics runner…I’ll be there when I get there…hold your horses.”
Okay, I take it all back. The parking attendant girl ran like the wind to help the trapped drivers. She was down there in a flash, in the blink of an eyelash. She was like a fat Supergirl.
This morning I was re-listening to Andrew Goldman’s 2017 podcast conversation with the late, legendary Bobby Zarem, whom I knew quite well and worked with in the ’80s and ’90s, and whom I always found fascinating and exciting to be with. Just click on the big red box below.
Bobby Zarem, the whipsmart, highly-charged, occasionally volatile New York publicist who “conceived” the “I Love N.Y.” campaign and represented a cavalcade of big Hollywood clients (Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Cher, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Caine, Sophia Loren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pee-Wee Herman) during his ’70s and ’80s heyday, and whom I dealt with as a Manhattan-based journalist from the late ’70s to ’83 and worked for in Los Angeles in ’85 and ’86….poor Bobby died today in his home town of Savannah.
Lung cancer got him. Zarem was 84. I somehow can’t imagine Bobby being in heaven or in hell. I kinda see him hovering over Savannah now, but without angel wings. That town is full of ghosts.
Somewhere along the way Zarem picked up the name “super-flack.” He certainly seemed to earn that title during his peak period. To me he became a p.r. legend when he was chased down a street by protestors during the shooting of Fort Apache, The Bronx, somewhere near City Hall. That’s when Zarem, already noted for his colorful manner and being a mainstay at Elaine’s and whatnot, seemed to become a brand…an embodiment of the spirit of rough-and-tumble, pre-corporate, pre-Giuliani Manhattan…the vaguely odorous city captured by Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City, but which no longer exists.
Bobby was a character…a tireless, Yale-educated, quintessential Manhattan operator…hustler, gadfly, human locomotive, idea man.
It’s not as if Zarem was often angry or arguing. He was primarily a charmer and an enthusiast. But when he got angry he was amazing. I remember being deeply impressed by his ability to tear people’s heads off without degenerating into sputtering incoherence. When Bobby was pissed he became a kind of dinosaur, a force of nature — the back of his neck and face would turn almost cherry red — but he was always lucid and razor-tongued.
I remember saying to myself once, “Wow, I wish I could be that intellectually commanding when I get angry.” But I could never manage it, which is one reason why I’ve always turned it down.
Zarem was driven, neurotic, larger than life, meticulous, a bundle of nerves, occasionally volcanic and every inch a New Yorker. He was a magnificent schmoozer. His hair wasn’t as frizzy as that of Larry Fine of the ThreeStooges, but I sometimes regarded him as Fine-like, if you could re-imagine Fine as the smartest stooge to ever walk the earth.
Here’s a rundown of things I’m thankful to Zarem about…things that happened or were made possible by his largesse or whim:
(a) By working with and for Zarem I savored occasionally glancing, sometimes fascinating face-time with Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Jane and Peter Fonda, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Kirk Douglas, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar, Pee-Wee Herman…more names and faces than I can actually recall off the top.
(b) I became one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82 after an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run. I was subsequently flown to Laredo to report on the shooting of that film for the New York Post. Universal publicity conveyed a certain disappointment that my article didn’t mention Eddie Macon’s Run more often, and that I spent too many paragraphs talking about Douglas’s career. Bobby dutifully called to inform me of their disappointment, adding that “this isn’t the end of the world.”
Douglas talked about anything and everything during our chats, and I remember his being fairly wide-open with his impressions about Stanley Kubrick (i.e., “Stanley the prick”), with whom he’d famously partnered on Paths of Glory and Spartacus. I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil’s Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and Lust for Life and Lonely Are The Brave.
..because for decades I’ve been constantly irked by people saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey “is great but it doesn’t really tell you what’s going on…not really.”
It’s a God movie, dingleberries…a “shaggy God story,” as John Simon wrote way back when…Stanley Kubrick even decided to help out the slowboats just before the stargate sequence by having the floating monolith and the Jupiter moons form a crucifix…in so doing Kubrick was essentially saying “do you get it now, geniuses?”
Posted on 9.3.24: The mysterious black monolith that suddenly appears before the tribe of lesser “Dawn of Man” apes (i.e., the ones who lost access to the dirty-water pond because a tribe of tougher, snarlier apes kicked them out)…the monolith is a cosmic blessing, a civilization-saver…a bringer of deliverance, transcendence, possibility.
Now hear this: the alien life forms who sent the monolith are basically conducting a massive scientific experiment by attempting to spawn intelligence on our planet…the monolith is a bringer of intelligent initiative and awareness and technological potential…an explorational sentinel sent by aliens of incalculable intelligence, the purpose being to trigger and awaken the lesser apes to evolutionary advancement and put them on the road to eventually becoming intelligent human beings.
In the 21st Century present, the very same monolith (or a close cousin of the one that fiddled with the apes) has been found buried under the surface of the moon. Once sunlight hits it, a piercing radio signal is generated…a signal aimed at the hugely insubstantial gas planet of Jupiter, easily one of the most disappointing planets in our solar system.
Light hitting the no-longer-buried monolith informs the super-intelligent aliens that humans have advanced to a certain noteworthy point in their evolution.
All the HAL vs. Dave and Frank stuff aboard the Discovery is the only plotty part of the film, and was basically generated by Stanley-the-misanthrope…look at how Bowman and Poole allow HAL to read their lips…idiots!..plus all in all artificial intelligence is just as capable of hubris and ruthlessness and self-destruction as the humans who created it.
The finale is wonderful, of course, and the basic thing that Keir Dullea‘s Dave Bowman seems to know deep down is that the glorious monolith represents damn near everything…it’s the fountain of eternity and the central engine of life…continuity, God, essence, worship, wonder and infinite expansion.
Last evening the SRO and I were heading east on Montana Avenue when I noticed that a new 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing at the Aero. It was 7:10 pm, or 20 minutes before the show would begin. I excitedly talked her into catching this 1968 classic, as she’d never seen it. So we bought our tickets, got our refreshments, sat down in the third row…and the film looked like dogshit.
Dark, muddy, no focus or sharpness to speak of, all of those exquisite values covered in shadow — a complete rip-off of the patrons who paid $15 a pop.
They were presumably showing the same freshly created 70mm print that’s been playing at the American Cinematheque Egyptian in Hollywood, which means that it probably looked like shit there also. It’s an absolute scandal that that no one’s said anything. All of these 2001 fans, paying crowd after paying crowd, watching one of the inkiest, most under-lighted prints I’ve ever seen, and they’ve all just sat there like sheep.
I went into the lobby and told the staff that the print, or at the very least the projection, was bullshit. “My 2001 Bluray looks glorious on my 65″ Sony 4K, but what you’re showing doesn’t look anywhere near as good,” I said. They reacted like cigar-store Indians. Shocked, fearful.
The manager appeared. “Have you ever seen the 2001 Bluray on a decent high-def screen?” I asked him. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, the Bluray is how it should look — what you’re showing looks like shit.” Manager: “You can’t expect a 70mm print to look like a Bluray…it’s a different thing. It’s celluloid.” Me: “Oh, yeah? I saw a clean 70mm 2001 print at the old Plitt twinplex in Century City back in the mid ’80s, and it looked beautiful. Your print looks like crap.” Manager: “You’re the first person to say anything like this.” Me: “Oh, well, that changes everything! Nobody else complained, you say? That must mean I’m full of shit then!”
I’ll soon be composing and posting my own N.Y. Times obit, knowing full well that my eventual passing will not be acknowledged by the judgmental, snobby-ass Times, despite my having written for their Arts & Entertainment section in the early ’90s and blah blah. This will be an enjoyable writing challenge, but I’ll have to give it some thought in order to lay it down right.
Accepted, agreed to: California Derangement Syndrome (CDS) is a political phrase coined by Governor Gavin Newsom and his administration. It describes an irrational, chronic obsession among political critics and conservative media outlets with portraying California as a failed, dystopian communist wasteland while ignoring measurable data to the contrary.
Without getting into the obviously bruising effect of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer’s 6.4 N.Y. Timesforensicreport about the personal romantic history of Maine’s Graham Platner, the likely Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate who is all but certain to run against Sen. Susan Collins, a non-MAGA Republican…
Without accepting or taking issue with the story’s allegations, I’d like to ask a simple question.
Who has been without sin or selfishness in their youthful or semi-youthful (20s and 30s) romantic life? Whose history hasn’t involved a certain degree of avoidance or sudden whimsy or callousness or occasional passive-aggressive ghosting?
Imagine if Gleuck or Lerer had devoted many weeks to exploring your past shortcomings or selfish behaviors or whatnot. Almost anyone’s imperfect life can be sliced and diced.
I’m certainly not saying that Platner, 41, has been an admirably behaved fellow, sexually speaking or one-on-one-relationship-wise, over the last 15 or so years. He hasn’t been a total animal by any measure, but he certainly has blemishes.
There have been reports, of course, that the younger Platner exhibited booze-impacted PTSD behavior, and has behaved like a hound and been unfaithful with this or that ex-girlfriend, and that he’s sexted certain women behind his wife’s back.
Intemperate sexual behavior is unbecoming, obviously, and quite stupid for anyone (man or woman) thinking of running for high office.
But this is mainly an issue for Platner’s wife to kick around. (She’s been supportive.) It should not be a central or even an important consideration when it comes to Maine’s Senatorial ballot, at least in any kind of fair-minded, real-deal world.
“Which is fine. That’s who she is. But Bari’s definitely not trying to do more and more pieces that fluff Trump. She may be trying to inject a little more ‘fair and balanced’ into the 60 Minutes pieces here and there,. I’m sure that’s what Scott Pelley objected to. But that’s not [necessarily] a bad goal.”
Right now the general line of thinking among the vast majority of journalists, editors and columnists out there is that Weiss is some kind of right-leaning equivocator who is in fact invested in stories that won’t adhere to what can fairly be called a classic 60 Minutes mindset. This doesn’t strike me as particuarly insightful.
The chaotic earthquaking of 60 Minutes over the last three days obviously constitutes major high-stakes drama. The blistering confrontation that happened between 60 Minutes corespondent Scott Pelley (who’s been canned), the show’s recently-hired exec producer Nick Bilton and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is a much, much stronger scenario than the bellowing argument between CBS corporate and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman…one of the scenes that make Michael Mann‘s The Insider such a classic. Obviously.
It follows, naturally, that there’s a major movie in this — a Mann film perhaps? — about the Pelley-Bilton-Weiss contretemps, and more broadly ablout the whole kowtowing-to-Trump, Paramount purchase of CBS and 60 Minutes and handing the reins to Weiss (i.e., David Ellison, son of Larry, last year took control of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, in a multibillion-dollar merger).
Love this passage from Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin’s 6.1.26 N.Y. Times story: “In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had ‘slender’ qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
“The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as part of a major shake-up at 60 Minutes. CBS fired Tanya Simon, the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an event that Mr. Pelley referred to as ‘Black Thursday.'”
