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 Vaughn‘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 in early May she didn’t even open her eyes). Now, at last, her peace is absolute.”

HE has always been about will and experience and egotism, about instincts and convictions and half-serious samurai values…the Nick Nolte as Ray Hicks kind, I mean. I once listened to a short speech by William S. Burroughs (delivered in Madison Square Garden) and I’ve never forgotten him saying that “some people are shits.” That goes double if not triple if you’re taking about the last four or five years…thanks, woke mafia!

HE, in short, feels like a never-ending series of “tells” (in the David Mamet sense of that term) and reviews and carvings and mood pockets, all dispensed from a moving train, and now and then (okay, semi-frequently) drawing the usual lashings and denigrations.

I’m not saying I’m incapable of being unfairly dismissive or blustery or asinine or too shoot-from-the-hip…I’ve occasionally gone there, and have been called out for said blunders (not to mention blinders) every damn time.

All that said and acknowledged, I was grateful yesterday to read the following, written by HE’s own Sasha Stone…yes, this is a humblebrag post. All I know is that it felt awfully nice to marinate in the warmth, exaggerated and emotionally biased as it may be, our being friends and all.

Originally posted on 8.19.15: “But Tony, with his impulsiveness and selfishness…he’s locked up in that fucking head of his.” — Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese) in “The Knight in White Satin Armor,” the 25th Sopranos episode and twelfth of season #2, originally aired on 4.2.00.

When I first heard this line I laughed, and then I asked myself to what extent it applies to Scott Foundas or myself or George Clooney or Alejandro G. Inarritu or whomever.

I like to think of myself as a free man in Paris who’s just dropped a tab of mescaline, but the unfortunate truth is that I’m probably “locked up” as much as Tony Soprano or anyone else ever was. It doesn’t feel good to admit this, but it’s probably true.

I know that I’m theoretically open to the concept of an emotional and psychological jailbreak, and that I live for that possibility on a daily basis. I could name a lot of journalists in my circle who are totally locked up (or more precisely locked down) but what would that accomplish?

I know that the line struck me as hilarious when I first heard it, and I’m chuckling at it right now.

The sudden eruption of publicly-witnessed female sexuality in the mid ’50s…we get it. The damp, vulgar, pelvic-region kind. Which is why so many thousands of conservative-minded viewers of Elvis Presley‘s first-ever televised performance on The Milton Berle Show (4.3.56) wrote in to say how appalled and even horrified they were.

All-new clip from Baz Luhrmann’s #ElvisMovie, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks. pic.twitter.com/DbREogMFCq

— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) May 6, 2022

It’s way too wet and miserable outside — too damn miserable for me. Indoor huddling is the only viable option.