If I was of Hispanic/Latino heritage, I would definitely prefer to be called LatinX. Just for the sound of it. In reality, of course, I’d have to settle for AngloX. Which also sounds fine.

If there’s an Old Testament God, and especially if that God has a wicked sense of humor, a certain pot-bellied, red-tie-wearing party has been infected with COVID-19.

“Stories about Trump’s coronavirus fears have spread through the White House. Last week Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. The source also said Trump has asked the Secret Service to set up a screening program and bar anyone who has a cough from the White House grounds. ‘He’s definitely melting down over this,’ the source said.” — filed earlier today by Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman.

Airport pickup areas usually smell like asphalt and shuttle-bus fumes, maybe a faint whiff of cigarette smoke or fast-food wrappers. The outside of terminal #1 at Austin airport is different. Like a wolf, I’m sniffing traces of soil, grass, leaves. I’d like to roam around during my stay here. Maybe drive down to the gulf, maybe the hill country.

I feel very badly for all those broken-hearted filmmakers who were hoping to make a splash at SXSW.

I haven’t much time before boarding my 7:15 am Southwest flight to Austin, but all hail the classic majesty of the late Max Von Sydow, who passed earlier today at age 90. He had a timeless face in that he looked the same age for 40 or 50 years. (I actually told MVS this when I met him a decade ago.). The Ingmar Bergman films come first, of course (opposite Liv Ullman in Shame/Skammen, lashing himself with birch branches in The Virgin Spring), but three English-language performances stand out: (a) Joubert, the refined, gentle-voiced assassin in Three Days of the Condor (‘75), (b) the bitter Soho painter in Hannah and Her Sisters (‘86) who declared that a resurrected Jesus “would never stop throwing up”, and (c) his mostly silent Father Merrin performance during the Iraq prologue in The Exorcist (‘73).

Despite Hachette having recently cancelled a planned publishing of Woody Allen‘s Apropos of Nothing in this country, the company’s French branch has announced that its Grand Central Publishing subsidiary will release Allen’s book in the U.S. on 4.7. Are we talking a French-language version or…?

RTI France: “Hachette chief executive Michael Pietsch on Tuesday defended the decision, telling The New York Times that “a large audience” wanted to hear his story.

The publisher had described Allen’s book as “a comprehensive account of his life, both personal and professional”.

I’m flying Southwest to Austin this morning (7:15 am departure) to visit my son Dylan, who recently moved there with his dog Rudy. I’m bringing two pairs of tight surgical gloves and ten all-but-worthless face masks. I’ve never taken such precautions before. I know they’re prudent measures, but we also know they’re slightly hysterical. Update: I’ve got the sniffles, and am occasionally sneezing. I guess that settles it…face mask!

Obviously Joe Biden will need to pick a vp running mate to counter-balance concerns about his cognitive command — someone 20 or 30 years younger, extra-sharp, detail-minded, etc. Naturally I thought of Mayor Pete. A friend snuffed this out: “The Democratic ticket can’t be two white guys…not a chance.” Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams then?

All the gossipers are reporting that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who both recently costarred in Adrien Lyne‘s Deep Water, are frolicking. As previously noted Affleck looks good these days — the “fat bearded boozer” thing has fallen by the wayside. Life is always best when the aroma of possibility is in the air.

I’ll never get past my burning anger at Hillary Rodham Clinton for giving us Donald Trump, but I’ve alway respected her brains, candor and toughness. And so last night I felt I had to see Nanette Burstein‘s Hillary doc on Hulu.

We’re talking 253 minutes broken down into four chapters — “The Golden Girl”, “Becoming a Lady”, “The Hardest Decision” and “Be Our Champion, Go Away”. And it just moves right aong. It’s all so familiar, of course, because most many of us have lived through the whole Clinton saga, step by step, trauma by trauma. And yet I was engrossed and fascinated, and I’m glad I submitted.

I was never bored — it’s a smart, first-rate epic. I think it’s too friendly by half, but that was the shot going in — be kind, let Hillary tell her side, listen to her and consider the fact that she’s quite the remarkable figure, etc. (Which she is.) I admired Burstein’s decision to cut back and forth between the straightforwqrd biopic portions and the climactic and altogether tragic 2016 campaign.

There’s no mention of Susan Sarandon or Jill Stein or Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors or Hillary collapsing like a sack of potatoes that that World Trade Center ceremony. Or Hillary voting for the Iraq War invasion in ’03 (or so I recall). Or her husband’s friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

There’s so much that is glossed over and ignored. Because it’s basically friendly. It goes easy.

I would have preferred an in-depth doc that stuck to the approach of Carl Bernstein‘s “A Woman in Charge“, which was respectful but at the same time tougher and revealing.

During the Monica Lewinsky-Ken Starr portion Hillary once again conveys how shocked and appalled she was when her husband, after previously lying to her, confessed all. For the 47th time nobody believes that brilliant Hillary didn’t know Bill was a hound from the get-go. Her deal with him was “we’re in this for the long haul and you know I’ll stand by you no matter what, but don’t be sloppy and don’t embarass me.” But of course he did time and again during his time as Arkansas governor, and again in the White House, and later with his Epstein association.

Not allowed to say this I’m saying it anyway: Looks matter in any walk of life, and Presidential candidates have to somehow exude the aura of glamorous rock stars. Hillary didn’t during the ’16 campaign (she looked well-tended but dowdyish), and she really needed to look extra-special because she’s never had the natural charisma thing. The doc reminded me that Hillary, who’d been slender and youngish-looking during her first 60 years of life, started to put on weight before the ’08 campaign. She seemed to have “stopped trying” (as a friend put it this morning) when she became Obama’s Secretary of State.

Before running in ’15 she really should lost some weight and had some work done. If she had somehow reclaimed a semblance of the appearance she had during her six-year term as New York’s U.S. Senator (’01 thru ’07) I think she would have beaten Trump. I really do. A lot of older male voters didn’t like her, but some would have gone along if she’d looked…well, a bit more like Jill Biden. I’m sorry but does anyone think Barack Obama would have done as well if he looked like Forest Whitaker as General Idi Amin? Would JFK had performed as well if he had thinning hair or looked like Tip O’Neil?

We all deplore reckless or drunk driving, but timid drivers, I feel, are the worst of all. By this I mean slow, overly cautious, indecisive, scared of the shadow of their own car. Any way you slice it they’re infuriating. One of the glorious things about rumble-hogging is that I can easily go around these stooges. But sometimes they get you anyway.

The night before last I making a left turn at a traffic-lighted intersection on Fountain Ave., which is a four-laner. The light was green so people behind me were good to pass. My left-turn signal was on, of course, and I was positioned as far as possible on the left side of the left lane. Nonetheless a white coupe (Accord or Jetta) behind me was stopped, seemingly waiting for me to make my turn before proceeding. And of course three or four or five cars were also stopped behind him/her. All because the Accord/Jetta was too chicken to make a move. All this lily-livered driver (and the drivers behind him/her) had to do was swerve very slightly to the right, which would have been simple because, as noted, I wasn’t blocking the lane but sitting on top of the double line. Plus the Fountain Avenue traffic was mild with openings here and there. But the Accord/Jetta just sat there.

Par for the course. Timid drivers slow things down and make many of us crazy. Sometimes people get so impatient that they wind up making a mistake and then wham. Not that this has ever happened to me but still.

Twitter assaults are unfortunately par for the course if you write any kind of opinionated column. The toxicity is such these days that you’re almost certainly doing something wrong if you don’t get hated on now and then. So I’m used to slings and arrows. But once in a blue moon and in a weak moment I’ll temporarily succumb to a fantasy in which I’m Jake LaMotta destroying Tony Janiro. But it never lasts for more than a few seconds. Because of I always think of that moment in Barry Lyndon when Ryan O’Neal is coolly shunned by a certain fellow of wealth and position after that concert recital in which he beat the hell out of Leon Vitali in front of several powdered-wig guests.

When I posted yesterday’s “Loathsome Windreaker” thing (i.e., Stanley Kubrick‘s repulsive olive-drab-plus-orange thermal hoodie) I’d forgotten that I posted a similar riff last June called “Dress Sense vs. Directorial Expertise.” It was basically about how genius-level directors seem indifferent to fashion or style, and that “being a terrible dresser is more the rule than the exception.”

In that 6.19.19 piece I described director-writer Robert Eggers as he appeared after the first screening of The Lighthouse in Cannes — “jerkwad sneakers, white socks, shiny black chinos with cuffs above the ankle, an oversized Target sweatshirt and a dorkmeister whitewall haircut.”

It struck me this morning that, of course, like the always-ahead-of-his-time Kubrick, Eggers is a normcore guy — an embracer of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire.

A female tangent of normcare is menocore. The term came from a 2018 Man Repeller piece.

“Normcore is a little dated but still relevant,” Jett says. “My best friend’s girlfriend is very normcore. She wears cheap-looking golf attire when going out on the town. but it also has something to do with some women preferring baggy clothes as a kind of ‘fuck u to the patriarchy’ [statement]…like Billie Eilish does. Which I guess is noble as long as they can appreciate clothes on a basic level.”