On Friday, 9.25, Tatiana polled the readership of a Facebook site called “Russians in Los Angeles”, which has over 19,000 followers. (Try not to be confused about the fact that there’s another Facebook site with the same handle.) Her question was aimed at Russians with U.S. citizenship who can therefore vote. Many respondents have been living in this country for more than 30 years, Tatiana says.

Question: “Who do you like more in the Presidential race, Donald Trump or Joe Biden?”

I suggested that Tatiana ask this because in a general sense many Americans regard Russians as one of two things — (a) pro-Trump social media agents or potential U.S. election saboteurs, or (b) people who are traditionally or temperamentally receptive to to the exertions of a strongman autocrat. I had an idea that her poll might indicate that a cliche or two isn’t valid.

It’s 10:30 pm on Sunday, and Tatiana has so far received a little more than 500 replies, most of them more argumentative than declarative.

But the Russian-born U.S. citizens who answered are, I regret to inform, strongly in favor of Orange Plague. Out of a total of 154 voters, 135 (87.6%) of her Russian-American voters are for Trump, and 19 voters (12.4%) are for Biden.

So my expectation was wrong. Russian American voters do seem to have a liking for authoritarians, or at least the one currently in the White House. In part because the respondents were rattled by last summer’s BLM protests and want someone to get tough with that. Or so it would seem.

Tatiana has passed along a few reasons and rationales from readers. HE contends that some of these are based on bad information, a blatant defiance of fact, an apparent ignorance of today’s N.Y. Times report about Trump’s taxes and business acumen, and possible low-brain-cell counts:

(1) “The riots and the closing of small merchant businesses are only happening in the cities in which the governors and mayors are Democrats”;
(2) “Vote for Biden if you want riots, if you want to drop to your knees and kiss the feet of BLM, or if you want bigger taxes, but not if you want to stop illegal immigrants and control crime”;
(3) “Biden will move many U.S. workplaces to China”;
(4) “Democrats haven’t controlled the chaos…they’re allowing too much to be destroyed”;
(5) “Los Angeles mayor Gil Garcetti has turned this city into a trash can”;
(6) “Trump can stop the further collapse of the country”.

HE’s own Larry Karaszewksi has tweeted that the Kino Lorber Bluray of Jerry Schatzberg‘s Puzzle of a Downfall Child will pop on 12.15. Including audio commentary by Daniel Kremer and Bill Ackerman, (b) an interview with Schatzberg, and (c) an alternate studio-edit opening.

A little voice is telling me that a fair-sized portion of the stories Gianni Russo is sharing here aren’t reliable, but I love hearing them anyway. I don’t know how old this interview is, but it was only posted about two weeks ago.

The Frank Sinatra story sounds believable, especially the part regarding Sinatra immediately hanging up the phone when Russo called him back and said, “We’re friends, right? Would you turn down the [Maggio] part in From Here to Eternity if I asked you to?” The Kennedy stuff sounds familiar and is probably true to some extent, especially the stories about Joe Kennedy‘s thoughts about women and sexual favors, and Bobby Kennedy‘s hard-ass attitude about mafia guys, etc.

But there’s no way JFK told anyone that his administration would invade Cuba so the mob could get their casinos back. He felt pressured into supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion, yes, but that was a far cry from a full-scale U.S. invasion.

Wiki excerpt: “In 1988, Russo killed a man inside the Las Vegas club and casino he owned. When he tried to intervene to stop a member of the Medellín drug cartel from harassing a female patron, the man stabbed him with a broken champagne bottle. Russo, a legal carry owner, pulled his gun and shot him twice in the head. Russo was not charged with the killing because it was ruled a justifiable homicide. However, when Pablo Escobar heard about the death, he ordered a contract on Russo’s life. The Colombian drug lord supposedly only canceled it when he found out Russo had starred in…The Godfather.”

Russo has great looking teeth.

I’ve never once eaten at a Sizzler, but another familiar American brand has fallen victim to Covid, and for purely sentimental and unfocused reasons I feel badly about this. A world that once had Sizzler, California Pizza Kitchen, Souplantation and all kinds of independent restaurants as regular, comforting cultural fixtures…that world has slipped beneath the waves.

Donald Trump is a lying, raging sociopath and the boss of a New York crime family who’s been using the Presidency to enrich himself and his corrupt buccaneer pallies. We all know this, no? So learning from the New York Times that Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, and again in 2017 during his first year in the White House — $1500 total — is not what most of us would call a huge shocker. It fits a well-known pattern, is all. He’s a shyster and a grifter.

So when your average downmarket Trump loyalist reads that Trump paid a grand total of $1500 in taxes in 2016 and ’17, is he going to say “so Donald’s a big swaggering billionaire and he paid a lot less to the government than I did in those same years??…wow, amazing! I wish I could get away with paying $750 to the IRS!” Or will he say, “Okay, so he’s obviously a charlatan and a grifter, but at least he’s protecting us from Black Lives Matter and that’s all that matters.”

The 9.27 Times report, prepared by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, says Trump “paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Excerpt: “As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

“The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”

Trump has naturally called the Times report “fake news.” What’s he gonna say, that they have him dead to rights?

Key paragraphs: “The Apprentice, along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

“Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.”

Wiki excerpt: “By making himself the embodiment of virtue and of total commitment, Robespierre took control of the Revolution in its most radical and bloody phase: the Jacobin republic. His goal in the Terror was to use the guillotine to create what he called a “republic of virtue”, wherein virtue would be combined with terror.”

We all recognize that Amy Coney Barrett is going to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, and that a conservative-favoring 6-3 majority means that (a) Roe v. Wade could very well be overturned, (b the Affordable Care Act might very well be overturned, and that (c) the court, God forbid, could very well decide in President Trump‘s favor should the presidential election wind up being contested. Good God and God help us.

So wishin’ and hopin’ that Al Franken was still a U.S. Senator from Minnesota and serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee is a pipe dream because even if he was still in office there would be little material comfort. But let’s dream about it anyway.

The Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats who will presumably grill Barrett are Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Mazie Hirono, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen.Dick Durbin, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Christopher A. Coons and Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

Wiki excerpt: The Blackstone Legal Fellowship and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) are American conservative Christian nonprofit organizations with the stated goal of advocating, training, and funding on the issues of “religious freedom, sanctity of life, and marriage and family”. The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the ADF as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The SPLC has also described the ADF as a “prominent Christian legal powerhouse,” and criticized it for providing “advice to anti-gay bigots in Belize.”

Around 10 am I sat down and began to fiddle around with what I might write today. Plenty out there, just a matter of choosing. I poked, prodded, researched, surfed. After a fruitless two-plus hours I got up, staggered or stumbled into our sun-filled bedroom (mint green + lily lavender) and fell on the bed. I awoke about 85 minutes later. The reason I couldn’t write before, in short, is that my mind wasn’t working all that well due to lack of rest.

Asked by a San Sebastian Film Festival questioner about President Trump‘s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Chicago 7 director-writer Aaron Sorkin suggested a movie ending.

“If I was able to romanticize the whole thing, here’s what would happen,” Sorkin said. “On election night, Donald Trump would do what we all assume he’s going to do, which is not concede defeat, claim that the election was rigged, claim that the Democrats cheated, all of that. The nightmare scenario that’s never happened in this country — we’re very proud of our peaceful transfers of power that have been going on for 240 years.

“However, for the first time since the man was sworn in, Republicans, his enablers, his apologists, march up to the White House and say, ‘Donald, it’s time to go…you will not ruin this country, you will not start a civil war.’ I would write an ending, in short, in which everyone does the right thing.”

HE ending: A smallish group of Republican Congressional Constitutionalists, alarmed at Trump’s post-election recalcitrance, goes mano e mano with a slightly larger group of rightwing Senate and House legislators who know Trump has to leave because he’s lost to Biden, but are afraid to tell him. They don’t want to piss off his base, and they can’t quite muster the cojones to look him in the eye and say “you’re done, Don.”

This leads to a fierce, behind-closed-doors argument, with the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, etc.

Tatiana has been on a Grace Kelly kick for a couple of weeks now. Partly because she’s an admirer of three or four Kelly performances**, but mostly because she’s preparing a short video on the late actress, who was born on 11.12.29 and would be 91 today had she not been killed in a 1982 auto accident.

Today we visited two Los Angeles locations where Kelly lived — a Bel Air hotel suite rented in ’53 or ’54, and a Pacific Palisades home (321 Alma Real) that Kelly rented sometime during ’55 and perhaps into early ’56. (It’s hard to pin this stuff down.)

To make the experience complete, Tatiana wore an outfit similar to the one Kelly wore in the opening scene of Rear Window. We also figured that as long as we were exploring Bel Air bungalows, why not settle in for some vittles?

Probably my favorite photo of the late actress — zero makeup, no glam, no effort to “sell it”

Kelly rented this simple, tree-shaded Spanish-style bungalow sometime in ’55. A hop, skip and a jump away from the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon.

Bel Air hotel, 9.26.20, around 3:55 pm.

In the matter of the 50th anniversary Broadway presentation of Mart Crowley‘s The Boys in the Band, which opened on 4.30.18, the response was “okay, cool, nicely done,” etc.

But the question was “why?” — why revive a play that the gay community began to turn its back on around the debut of William Friedkin‘s film version, which opened in March 1970. That was nine months after the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion, and the sea-change in gay consciousness and values that happened in its wake — pride, solidarity, political militancy — had no room for a rather acidic drama about a group of Manhattan gays gathered at a friend’s birthday party in the West Village, and with three or four consumed by loneliness, misery and self-loathing.

The answer was “uhm, well, it’s a very well written and highly engaging classic play, and where’s the harm in looking back a half-century? Plus we’ll probably do good business.”

In the matter of Joe Mantello’s Netflix feature version of same, costarring all the members of the 2018 revival, the response is “okay, cool…those of us who didn’t catch the 2018 play can sample the wares and once again sink into the whole magilla.”

But the question is “why?” — why make another film version that will naturally be compared to the excellent Freidkin adaptation? Why remake it if it’s not clearly better than the 50-year-old chestnut? Or if you don’t have something new to say in a textural or cultural sense?

I’m mentioning this because Mantello’s film (debuting on 9.30) is good enough or “fine” or whatever kind of “attaboy” you want to apply. I liked it as far as it went, but it’s not as good as the Freidkin version. I’m sorry but it’s not, although it isn’t half bad. The fact of the matter is that the Friedkin is funnier, smoother, more touching, better edited and definitely better performed in terms of the two strongest characters, Emory and Harold.

I’m not dismissing Robin de Jesús‘s Emory in the newbie — he especially catches fire during the telephone confession section — but Cliff Gorman‘s Emory is at least two of three times better. Nobody has ever said or ever will say “sort of makes you want to rush out and buy a slide rule” better than Gorman; ditto “hot cross buns!” and “who do ya have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

And despite the amusing, often riveting performance by Zachary Quinto as Harold, the bitter, acidic “32 year-old pockmarked Jew fairy”, he’s just not the giddy but wicked tongue-snapper that Leonard Frey was in the Friedkin film. Quinto is very good — Frey was great. I’m sorry but that’s how it seems.

Plus I found Frederick Combs‘ performance as the droll Donald somewhat more engaging than Matt Bomer‘s opaque version in the Mantello. And Robert La Tourneaux‘s “Cowboy Tex” definitely outpoints Charlie Carver‘s in the Netflix version. Ditto Peter White‘s closet case (i.e., “Alan McCarthy”) in the Friedkin, who’s a bit more compelling than Brian Hutchison in the newbie.

On the other hand I felt a bit more empathy for Jim Parsons‘ Michael than the overly acidic Kenneth Nelson in the ’70 version. Ditto Tuc Watkins‘ “Hank”, who sinks in a tiny bit deeper than Laurence Luckinbill‘s performance in the Freidkin — both are fine, no fault, no foul. Keith Prentice‘s “Larry” is just as good as Andrew Rannells in the Mantello. And I would rate the two “Bernard” performances — Michael Benjamin Washington in the oldie, Reuben Greene in the Mantello — as roughly the same.

The only added element in the Mantello are some memory vignettes from the telephone confession portion — fleeting images of men whom this and that partygoer has always loved and never forgotten.

Filed on 5.31.13 from Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland: I clench up every time a table of three or four people erupts in loud sustained giggling. Laughter is basically about the releasing of feelings that you’ve kept bottled up for whatever reason. Freeing these suppressed judgements and emotions from the cage is exhilarating — an occasion for pure joy.

I’ve been there a few thousand times in my life, and will hopefully go there again very soon. But it’s over within five or ten seconds, max. And then I settle into “the space.” Because I don’t have that much bottled up to begin with. No healthy person does.

What good are you if you can’t be Zen about things? The Zen guy or the Bhagavad Gita gal lives 24/7 with the hum of the universe animating his/her spirit and zapping every molecule, and therefore he/she doesn’t explode in spazzy giggling fits at breakfast tables…on and on and on, dropping silverware on the floor, getting louder and louder.

It’s not “she knows too much to argue or to judge” — it’s “she knows and feels too much to giggle for 30 or 40 seconds straight.”

The fact is that anyone who succumbs to boorish and sustained giggling fits means they’ve probably got a shitload of bottled-up feelings and rage and bad memories, which obviously indicates they’re living in a fairly conflicted or repressed place, and are therefore probably miserable to some degree, not to mention immature. So if you’re the type of person who giggles in loud, prolonged, hyena-like bursts in a Swiss breakfast room at 8:25 am you’re probably a bit of an asshole. You probably need years of therapy, but if you haven’t done the therapy by now you probably never will.

Does it matter that you’re irritating others with your gales of hideous gaiety? Of course not. Why should it? You’re on your vacation and you worked hard to pay for it and so you can do what you want, whenever you want…right? So you’re a sociopath to boot.

Note: The below video was taken during a forest hike near Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland in late May 2013. Rather than take a late-afternoon train ride from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen I decided to hike up a trail alongside the Lütschine river.