A day or two ago David Ehrenstein complained that Bob Dylan‘s “Murder Most Foul”, a 17-minute long meditation about the brutal murder of the nation’s 35th president, was “mind-bogglingly banal.”

Not Dylan’s vocal performance or the musicianship, I presume he meant, but the lyrics. Lines and passages that are flush with familiar cliches and rueful reflections, well-baked recollections, ’60s pop-culture references, etc.

Ehrenstein is missing the forest for the trees. The lyrics aren’t as important, I feel, as the tired and resigned way in which Dylan half-sings and half-mutters them, and more particularly why he’s released the song now.

I don’t know when “Murder Most Foul” was written and recorded but deep down I don’t think it’s about JFK’s last day on the planet as much as Dylan’s contemplation of his own mortality, and how he’s evolved into a wizened old coot who regards the gift of life with absolute reverence (age does that to you).

Simplistic as it sounds, he’s basically horrified by the idea of conspirators abruptly destroying everything that JFK had been and could be. Horror magnified in his mind. Along with the sadness. Dylan’s sense of his own mortality is undercurrent #1.

In late ’63 or early ’64 Dylan, then 22, said something about partly understanding where Lee Harvey Oswald was coming from, not to the point of agreeing with what he’d done but in terms of sensing his underlying despair. Dylan reportedly walked that statement back fairly quickly, but it was exactly the sort of thing that a brilliant iconoclast in his early 20s might’ve passed along.

Now Dylan is 78, and he sees things differently. The point of the song (one of them anyway) is that JFK’s murder, like that of Tom Dooley or Fred Hampton or Martin Luther King or any illustrious victim of a ruthless political agenda, was at root an act of terrible cruelty, and Dylan is simply saying that this particular act of malice has burned deep, and that 56 years later the after-shocks still register from to time, and that he can feel them more today than he did in the fall of ’63. Or something like that.

Above and beyond the lyrics, the song is basically a meditation about the horror of suddenly becoming lifeless tissue, at any age.

Most of us understood from the get-go that Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing” would be regarded through #MeToo-tinted glasses. Some in that camp are saying “I don’t think I can read this thing” (an actual Dana Harris tweet) and that’s fine. They’re excused. Nobody expected them to be attentive or fair.

Certain resentful, pissy-minded book reviewers are coughing up the usual bile. USA Today‘s Barbara VanDenburgh: “As if coping with the ravages of a global pandemic hasn’t made life unpleasant enough, now we’ve all got to talk about Woody Allen. Again.”

People aren’t calling his autobiography totally banal or shallow or both, but they’re saying large chunks of it are. Some have written that when he gets into the Mia-and-Dylan accusation thing that it feels like too much of an obsessive, woe-is-me pity party. Some have faulted Allen for not aping the meditative prose of Rainer Maria Rilke or William Styron.

Their beefs boil down to “how dare Woody write in his own unaffected voice? How dare he process life in the same way he’s been doing since he began writing jokes for Manhattan newspaper columnists in the early ’50s?”

Woody Allen is who he is. His voice is his voice. If you can read “Apropos of Nothing” with that in mind, you’ll have a better-than-decent time with it. And by that I mean diverting, chuckly, passable, fascinating, occasionally hilarious, nutritional as far as it goes.

“Apropos of Nothing” isn’t the deepest or the most probing piece of literary self-excavation or self-examination ever published, but it does contain a wonderfully ripe and buoyant recollection of Allen’s Brooklyn childhood and early teen years. It flattens out a bit when he becomes successful in the mid ‘60s, and a certain banality creeps in. But I weathered the mundane or underwhelming parts. Allen has a voice and a style and a certain shticky attitude, and much of the book is like listening to some streetcorner wise guy tell a story from a bar stool.

I am convinced that the section that exhaustively covers the ‘92 child-abuse accusation plus the Soon Yi furor is almost entirely truthful, if not 100%. Try reading Moses Farrow’s essay — it synchs up perfectly with Allen’s understanding of Mia Farrow‘s history and psychology and what probably happened.

Does Allen burrow in too deeply or obsessively in this section of the book? Not in my view. He’s talking about events that have shattered his life in some respects. If you had gone through the same thing and knew you were innocent when it came to Dylan and Mia’s accusation, wouldn’t you mount your defense with vigor and exactitude and leave no stone unturned?

The union with Soon Yi did seem odd and ill-advised at first, true, but they’ve been a loyal and loving couple for 27 or 28 years now. Two adopted college-age kids, etc. Does anyone recall Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues? The facts are the facts. Things are as they are.

The more I descend into the silent, quietly creeping hell of our current situation, the closer I’ve gotten to submitting to Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. Joe vs. Carol, etc. I tried watching episode #1 last night, and turned it off around the half-hour mark. Boredom. I’ll give it another shot today.

I’ve been grieving over the fact that a series about a motley crew of scurvy low-rent Oklahoma bumblefucks has become as popular as it has. But this is the country that millions live in, God help us. And you know these appallingly attired, absurdly coiffed animal enthusiasts are almost certainly Trump supporters…that’s another rub.

I never watched Duck Dynasty either…eff those backwoods beardos.

From Variety‘s Todd Spangler: “Netflix has a tiger tale that has punched into the zeitgeist with Tiger King, stocked with a cast of real-life bizarre personalities and sinister plot twists.

“A true-crime-style docuseries that debuted March 20 on Netflix, Tiger King ranks as the most popular current TV show, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 97% critic’s rating and a 96% audience score — putting it at the top of the site’s most-popular TV shows list, ahead of Netflix’s Ozark Season 3; USA Network’s Queen of the South Season 4; and USA’s The Sinner Season 3.

“And according to Netflix’s own daily rankings, Tiger King is the No. 1 most-watched title in the U.S. for March 29 on the service — both overall and among TV shows — and has been in the top 10 for the past week.”

Hat tip to “MisterMorris55”.

Michael Crichton‘s Westworld is no one’s idea of a great or even a first-rate film. It’s a primitive sci-fi formula flick. But at least it’s lean and trim and doesn’t tax your patience, which is more than you can say for HBO’s endlessly infuriating Westworld series.

Better yet, the Crichton doesn’t ask you to hang out with an actor like Tennisballhead. And the HBO series doesn’t offer one single moment like the one in which James Brolin and Richard Benjamin groan in irritation when Yul Brynner‘s robot says “draw.” Not one.

When I’m 103 and on my death bed (because I have the constitution of Kirk Douglas), someone will say “what did you do in your life that was good and redeeming?” And I’ll answer, “I hated Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy‘s Westworld with a passion, and I tried to spread that view frequently.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 2,813,503 registered deaths in the United States in 2017. The age-adjusted death rate, which accounts for the aging population, is 731.9 deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S. This is an increase of 0.4% over 2016’s death rate.

If Dr. Fauci’s speculation about the coronavirus causing 100,000 to 200,000 deaths turns out to be accurate, the overall fatalities for 2020 could be in the vicinity of 3 million, give or take.

America First is the Trump campaign slogan pic.twitter.com/KwGTOnWoDm

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) March 29, 2020

Personal note: I’m reading that 89K COVID tests have been administered in California thus far. But my getting tested is still out of the question because I’m asymptomatic.

Two nights ago I started experiencing a sore throat and a slight tightening in the chest…a slight achey feeling. “Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “Is this the beginning of COVID?” Yesterday both had totally disappeared. No sore throat, no nothing

You know why? Because I have great genes. No one is bulletproof but some of us have been gifted with exceptional coats of armor. I know — it’s bad form to mention this.

Video of Dr. Fauci telling @jaketapper that “Looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases… excuse me, deaths. I mean, we’re going to have millions of cases.” #CNNSOTU

These next few weeks could be pretty rough.pic.twitter.com/Vh6xB4Fele

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) March 29, 2020

18 days ago (i.e., before the coronavirus had even begun to destroy American life as we know it) I posted a piece about Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan‘s “Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies” (Rutgers University Press). It was titled “1962 Was The Year.”

Today Deadline‘s Pete Hammond posted a piece about same, titled “From Lawrence Of Arabia And To Kill A Mockingbird To The Debut Of James Bond, Was 1962 The Greatest Movie Year EVER? A New Book Says Yes.”

The paragraph that grabbed me was a suggestion that not only was ’62 a great year but also the last great annum for black and white films.

For mainstream monochrome features began to fade soon after. Fewer and fewer appeared in ’63, ’64 and ’65, which is precisely when color TVs were beginning to become more and more common in middle-class households. 1966 was the last year that the Academy awarded an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black and White. The nominees were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Fortune Cookie, Georgy Girl, Is Paris Burning? and Seconds.

Hammond: “[The authors] point out that so many of 1962’s best were in black and white (anathema for millennials today), and in fact only two of the ten lead acting Oscar nominees were in color. Thus it might be the last hurrah of black and white, followed by its ultimate decline before a little more than half the decade was out.”

Here’s my rundown of 40 exceptional 1962 black-and-white films: John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bryan Forbes‘ The L-Shaped Room, Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player, Francois Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, Agnes Varda‘s Cleo From 5 to 7, Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel; Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd; J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear; Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa. (10)

John Frankenheimer‘s Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and All Fall Down, the Blake Edwards‘ duo of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses, Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa, Pietro Germi‘s Divorce, Italian Style; Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, the great Kirk Douglas western Lonely are the Brave, John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving. (10)

Robert Mulligan‘s To Kill a Mockingbird, the internationally-directed The Longest Day, Arthur Penn‘s The Miracle Worker, Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water (released in the U.S. in ’63), Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse, Sidney Lumet‘s version of Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent; Jules Dassin‘s Phaedra, Don Siegel‘s Hell Is For Heroes. (10)

Tony Richardson‘s The Loneliness of the Long–Distance Runner; Ralph Nelson and Rod Serling‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight; Serge Bourguignon‘s Sundays and Cybele (a.k.a., Les dimanches de ville d’Avray); Orson Welles‘ The Trial; Denis Sanders‘ War Hunt (which costarred Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack); Philip Leacock‘s The War Lover; Masaki Kobayashi‘s Harikiri; Andre Takovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood; Robert Wise‘s Two for the Seesaw; Herk Harvey‘s Carnival of Souls. (10)

Comedy is a deadly serious business. We all understand that the best comedies are those that are played absolutely straight, and the worst are those that send signals to the audience that something is intended to be funny. Goofing off, self-pranking, going too broad, etc. It follows that actors must never laugh at anything the audience may or may not laugh at. Signalling that something is funny is called “breaking character” — a violation of the code.

It’s significant, therefore, that in this scene from Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove, perhaps the greatest straightfaced comedy ever made, a serious actor can be seen dropping the ball.

Peter Bull, as Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky, is the violator. It happens at 1:26 or thereabouts. Peter Sellers‘ titular character repeatedly beats his rebellious Nazi arm and Bull, standing nearby with a group of U.S. military officers, can’t help himself — he starts to grin very slightly but then reverts back to sternface. It’s surprising that Kubrick didn’t call for a retake.

I’m sorry but I’ve spent the last six hours painting the living room. Which of course involved more than just painting. I had to remove paintings and photos from the wall, tape off door jams, floorboards and light sockets, spread the plastic covering over floors and furniture, paint the main portions with a roller and then brush-paint the tops, bottoms and corners, which takes forever to do correctly.

In a 3.18 AP interview with Jake Coyle, legendary director Brian DePalma was asked to name his peak career period.

You naturally assume he’ll say either (a) the late ’60s to mid ’70s or (b) the late ’70s to late ’80s. Nope — the sweetest career chapter was between the early to mid ’90s, he claims.

De Palma: “In my mid 50s [actually his early to mid 50s], doing Carlito’s Way and then Mission: Impossible. It doesn’t get much better than that. You have all the power and tools at your disposal. When you have the Hollywood system working for you, you can do some remarkable things.”

I’m sorry but DePalma is wrong. He was a truly exciting, must-watch director from the late ’60s to mid ’70s (Greetings, The Phantom of the Paradise, Sisters, Carrie), and an exasperating, occasionally intriguing director from the late ’70s to late ’80s (Dressed To Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables). His ’90s films certainly don’t match those of the previous decade, and his ’70s output, as noted, reigned supreme.

As I noted five years ago, De Palma is “one of the most committed and relentless enemies of logic of all time. For a great director he has an astonishing allegiance to nonsensical plotting and dialogue that would choke a horse. I tried to re-watch Blow Out last year — I couldn’t stand it, turned it off. The Fury drove me crazy when I first saw it, although I love the ending. I found much of Dressed To Kill bothersome when it first came out 35 years ago, and to be honest I haven’t watched it since.”

On one hand we have a temperamental sociopathic president mishandling the pandemic to a mind-boggling degree, and an upcoming presidential election in which the aging but decent-hearted Joe Biden may prevail, God willing. On the other hand we have former Biden aide Tara Reade claiming that Biden sexually assaulted her 27 years ago (“kissed her and penetrated her with his fingers without her consent”) and that he became annoyed and reacted with hostility when she rebuffed him.

If it happened, it happened. But why talk about it now? Long suppressed trauma needs closure and healing — we all understand this — but has Reade considered the possibility that what she may or may not have endured during the first year of the Clinton administration isn’t quite as important as Donald Trump being unseated next November? Biden may or may not be guilty but he hasn’t been similarly accused by anyone else, or not to my knowledge.

Reade was presumably in her early to mid 20s in ’93 and is now 50 or a bit older. She said yesterday she’s “a lifelong Democrat” who voted for Barack Obama twice as well as for Hillary Clinton. She didn’t come forward about Biden earlier because she had a young daughter at the time. But she’s out there with her story now, and in so doing giving the Trump campaign a weapon.

Again — who would decide that settling a score or attaining closure about an undoubtedly traumatic episode (if in fact it actually happened, and I’m not trying to dismiss or minimize anything or anyone if it did)…who would conclude that this is more important than the fate of an entire nation?

And by the way, what was that Russian thing she wrote a couple of years ago? **

The HE commenters who recently told me to “man up” because of my coronavirus melancholia are hereby advised to rethink their stinkweed views.

On yesterday’s “Amanpour & Co.” grief expert David Kessler (“Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief“) explained to NPR’s Michel Martin what a lot of people are feeling now. Here’s the opening passage:

“What I’m hearing from people is, ‘I woke up with this heavy sadness’ or ‘I was going to bed with this heavy sadness.’ Or ‘I just feel this heaviness.’ They’re all describing grief. We are grieving for the world we have now lost. Our normal life, our work, our routine…everything has changed.

“We’re a society that always wants quick fixes, so we want this to be over quickly. But it’s been [recently] sinking into us that next week or next month, our world’s not gonna go back to normal. And in fact, that our normal world is probably gone forever.

“Grief is [almost always] about change that we didn’t want. We talk now about ‘remember what airports were like before 9/11?’ I think one day we’re going to have discussions about ‘do you remember what life was like before the pandemic? Do you remember how we used to shake hands?’ I think we’re seeing the loss of our world, and we are feeling the grief that goes along with that.

“This is grief. This is loss. The world that we knew has died, and we’re feeling the sadness. And our emotions need to be felt. Suppressing them isn’t going to work.”

Kessler’s riff begins at the 54-second mark.

In order to complete my feelings of numbness and despair, I need to watch a Netflix true-crime series about a crew of scurvy redneck eccentrics living on an outdoor big-cat zoo in Bumblefuck, Oklahoma.

Flamboyantly toothless lowlifes and a murder-for-hire plot that gradually takes precedence, and the poor, sad, eye-rolling tigers who have to endure their company because they have no choice. God, how I despise hinterland low-lifes and their appalling lack of taste in everything, clothing and hairstyles in particular.

The lead characters are Joe Exotic (aka Joseph_Maldonado-Passage), Bhagavan “Doc” Antle and big-cat enthusiast and Tampa-based zoo owner Carole Baskin.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness began airing on 3.20.20.