Jeffrey Wells

Or was the Burg Kino marquee letter guy confused?

I haven’t seen The Outrun at all (partly because it’s been repeatedly described as a dreary slog) so I’m way behind. It’s streaming; I’ll get to it.

How do you “fall off” a moving vehicle? Even if the vehicle is a motorcycle and you’re a rear passenger who’s had a few, it’s fairly hard to fall the fuck off.

You’d have to be so drunk that your arrogance has over-ruled basic survival instincts, and that’s pretty damn stinko.

Have the reports about the death of Hudson Joseph Meek mentioned booze? Have they stated whether or not Meek was on a friend’s motorcycle or riding on top of someone’s car or on the bed of a pickup truck? Of course not.

I have a slight insight into this careless tragedy as I once rode spread-eagled atop a Ford LTD station wagon in the dead of night. I was in my late teens and half-bombed, but held on to the chrome luggage rack for dear life. It wasn’t that physically hard but my full attention and concentration were not a subject for debate — they were fully required.

Posted on 4.15.15, starting with paragraph #11:

The Us magazine report about Meek’s death didn’t synch up. Last time I checked “falling off” a vehicle was different than being “ejected” from it:

…on talk shows and inside sound stages and even restaurants and department stores as long as they have truly nice, attractive, well-pedicured feet.

Unfortunately that holds true for only a relatively small percentage of specimens. I’m sorry but I’ve been eyeballing women’s feet for decades and that’s just how it is.

Men are not allowed to stroll around barefoot anywhere except for beaches and pool areas, and sometimes even that’s a really bad idea. It goes without saying that mandals and flip-flops are totally verboten.

I wrote the following a couple of years ago: “Sex positive’ sounds a little too nice…a little too much like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Tame and tidy, not skanky enough.

“Because the best heteronormative sex is usually untidy and semi-objectionable in some way — rude, hungry, raw, animalistic, runting, howling, a tad pervy.”

There’s an old Woody Allen line (probably from Annie Hall or Manhattan) that answers a question about whether sex is dirty or not. Reply: “It is if you’re doing it right.”

In the mid ’80s I was “seeing” a pretty British woman in her early 30s. She had apparently come from a conservative family, or had gotten the idea from her mother that when it came to sexual congress and the “yes or no” moment…Christian momma told her that behaving in a cautious or conservative or even prudish manner was the only way to go.

But I’m telling you that one of the hottest things I’ve ever heard a woman say at the moment of peak surrender came out of this lovely lady — “oh, God, I love it!”

It wasn’t so much the “I love it” (which was fine) as the “oh, God” part that got me. What this meant, I determined, was that deep down she was apologizing to God the Father for enjoying being harpooned. “Oh, God” meant “dear Lord, I’ve tried so hard to be a more virtuous woman and here I am failing again…I can’t help myself…send me to a convent for I have no self-control!”

New York City isn’t about beauty. Never has been. Some nabes are aesthetically pleasing, of course, and the echo of history is unmistakable all over but NYC can’t hold a visual candle to Paris, Rome, Bern, Prague, Barcelona, Marrakech, London, Zurich, etc.

NYC is about the power and the glory…it’s about the bolt and the buzz and the very best (okay, hungriest) people clashing and harmonizing…a chorus congregated, the music of activity…the commerce and the juice and lots and lots of mad money, etc.

…I Saw The TV Glow has been strong within me since it opened last May. Egg-crack, transgender, persistence of “Pink Opaque”, bury me alive, Tara and Isabel, Midnight Realm…later.

Friendo: “A middling, awkward, tiresome movie. That anyone could actually think it’s good is a sign of liquified brain matter leaking out of woke people’s ears.”

I’ve acknowledged from the get-go that the lively and engaging Wicked has been very efficiently produced, shot, performed, and choreographed. It is also a vessel of assertive feminist propaganda (i.e., social image enhancement)

There’s a massive, alternate-universe disconnect, of course, between Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West and Cynthia Erivo’s misunderstood Elphaba, but that’s part and parcel of the new (21st Century) feminist mythology.

Throughout the 20th Century American culture had the WWotW all wrong, Wicked is saying. This has been especially true since the redefining of female perspective and identity by the #MeToo revolution of 2017.

The demonic cliche of wicked witches goes way back, of course. It probably originated with the Brothers Grimm and had certainly been intensified by the Salem witch hysteria of the 17th Century. It was then furthered by Frank L. Baum’s fabled, written-for-children fantasies and then by the MGM dream factory of 1938 and ‘39 and the resultant impression of the mean, shrewish, Victorian-minded Almira Gulch.

Either you’ve been fed this crudely condemning concept (boomers and GenXers grew up with it) or you haven’t been.

21st Century mythology has reversed this, of course. Spirited notions of feminine self-empowerment in response to entrenched and oppressive male sexism is the only allowable narrative these days — obviously a much more positive and socially constructive thing than the old Almira Gulch model.

…before catching an IMAX presentation of A Complete Unknown than HE’s own Perri Nemiroff interviewing the Wicked guys…bringing me down, bad for the soul.

And why isn’t she dead? And why after all these years would any film lover with even a smidgen of taste want to wade into this stupid-ass, mind-numbing franchise?