Jeffrey Wells

For years Sean Combs repeatedly told himself (a) “my schlong wants what it wants and that’s the bottom line” and (b) “they can’t touch me for this shit…of course I can skate…that’s what being loaded is all about”. And now the chickens have come home.

Somewhere during One Battle After Another’s second act, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is fleeing the bad guys at night as he runs and leaps over a series of urban rooftops. Then he falls from one, crashing into a drooping tree branch on his way down (a drop of roughly 15 feet) and landing flat on his chest.

There’s no way Leo’s stunt guy could’ve jumped and landed like that. Too dangerous. (A 15-foot fall recently killed a female trapeze artist in Germany.) I’m guessing he was speedily lowered on a wire, which was then digitally erased. But the fall happens so quickly and is sufficiently obscured by the dark that the trickery isn’t noticed. This is the kind of clever, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stunt that I really admire.

“Peacock acting”! Name other examples of this over the decades? Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, etc.

A well-educated friend mentioned the other day that within certain professional circles LSD is available as a spray…a misting spray that one can squeeze into the mouth or perhaps even the nostrils. She said it was “legal” in certain European countries, although Google disputes this.

When I contemplate the phrase “deep inside your mind and soul” I tend to think of thoughts, feelings and fleeting insights that are rooted in (a) the life experience and (b) the biological constitution of one Jeffrey Wells….all rolled up into one softball-sized wad of soft clay.

But to me the ultimate transportation enabled by LSD — satori, enlightenment, Godhead consciousness — is not about the personal but…put it any way you prefer but I’m calling it the universal, cosmic, eternal realms of forever.

It’s about transcending the psychological and sailing into the mystic. The chains fall away, and you become one with the sky and the stars.

It’s not about discovery as much as submission and acceptance. Not about “break on through to the other side” (Doors, Huxley) as much as “slip your piece under the towel, slip the key into the lock and just open the door and click…walk on through.” The general presumption is that the seeker needs to somehow “think” himself or herself way into the Godstream…nope. It’s more about just kicking back and letting it in.

Fuck me hard and long, not to mention all squishy and sweaty, and I mean Emerald Fennell-style…shrieking like pigs and salivating like hungry dogs. But no accidental farting.

Remember the old days when typical ComicCon devotees tended to be schlubby, dorky-looking straight guys with a generally horrific dress sense (shorts, low-thread-count T-shirts, black socks, sneaker slip-ons) and a tendency towards corpulence?

Last night around 10-something I was chilling at the arrivals area at JFK’s Terminal 1, idling in a black, snappy-looking Lincoln SUV.

A 40ish blonde woman had just popped the trunk of a newish black coupe that was maybe 15 feet away, and a middle-aged bearded guy in a cream-colored sweater and a dark baseball cap was loading his suitcase.

I was saying to myself “wow, that guy with the cap and beard sure looks like Luca Guadagnino….oh, but it can’t be! Too much of a coincidence.”

But my curiosity had been aroused. I’ve had Luca’s Italian cell since that introductory lunch we shared near Spezia in early June of ‘17. So what the hell…I texted a message: “Are you wearing a cream–colored sweater and a baseball cap?”

Immediate reply: “Yes! Where are you?” HE: “Right behind you.” Hug, smiles, joyful greetings.

Sometimes the world is actually as small as we imagine it to be.

You can believe or not believe in coincidences, but they happen anyway from time to time.

I’m on my way into town and the NYFF to catch my second viewing of After The Hunt. Repeating once again: Don’t trust the fiendish wokey critics.

— from Harmin’ Armond’s 9.26 National Review piece on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

…except in two respects.

One, the political tone of her review — the theological undercurrent — sounds like it was penned by the critic for Ramparts or even The Berkeley Barb in the late ‘60s. So she’s clearly in the tank for Paul Thomas Anderson’s empathy for (or excitement over) lefty, insurrectionist, down-with-whitey politics as well as the propulsive cinematic chops.

And two, Dargis doesn’t even allude to the charged political climate out there — to the fact that (a) within the last two weeks lefty nihilists have fired bullets at government-allied, conservative-minded figures (Charlie Kirk being the most tragically prominent) and (b) — hello? — the fact that OBAA is a film about lefty revolt, insurrection and bullets.

…and yet when it finally began streaming last weekend, I “forgot” to watch it. Because the reviews have been so shitty.

Friendo who watched it yesterday: “Eden is no one’s idea of good.”

HE: “Owen Gleiberman called it ‘terrible.’”

Friendo: “There’s a surreal scene in which Sydney Sweeney’s Margret Whitmer, all alone in a cave, goes into labor just as her cabin is being robbed by Ana de Armas’s boy-toy lovers.

“On the brink of birth a pack of dogs arrive and begin to attack Sweeney. Cut to the two robbers escaping with canned foods, and then just as the baby drops Sweeney screams at the dogs until a rescuer artives with a gun and starts shooting them. All of this happening at once — a scene that lasts nearly ten minutes. The dogs!”

HE: “My bad for not watching it. I knew it would give me annoyance and frustration, and my spirit wilted. But I’ll sit through it later today or tonight.”

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
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