“Paul Landis was a twenty-eight-year-old Secret Service agent in President Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963. Though he was a witness to the events that day, he was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, and has kept his recollections private until now, including details surrounding a key piece of evidence.” — copy on Amazon page for Landis’s “Final Witness” (Chicago Review Press, 10.10.23).

If you know anything about the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission Report, you know about the magic bullet theory. A Sept. 9th N.Y. Times article by Peter Baker summarizes a startling recollection from Landis — one that strongly challenges this long-questionable assertion. Here are the key paragraphs:

“What it [all] comes down to is a copper-jacketed 6.5-millimeter projectile.

“The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Texas governor John Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh. It seemed incredible that a single bullet could do all that, so skeptics called it the magic bullet theory.

“Investigators came to that conclusion partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have held Mr. Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital, so they assumed it had exited his body during efforts to save his life. But Mr. Landis, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that is not what happened.

“In fact, he said, he was the one who found the bullet — and he found it not in the hospital near Mr. Connally but in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.

“When he spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now guesses, the stretchers must have been pushed together and the bullet was shaken from one to another.

“’There was nobody there to secure the scene, and that was a big, big bother to me,’ Mr. Landis said. ‘All the agents that were there were focused on the president.’ A crowd was gathering. ‘This was all going on so quickly. And I was just afraid that….it was a piece of evidence, that I realized right away. Very important. And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision,’ and I grabbed it.’”

“Mr. Landis theorizes that the bullet struck Kennedy in the back but for some reason was undercharged and did not penetrate deeply, therefore popping back out before the president’s body was removed from the limousine.”

“Mr. Landis has been reluctant to speculate on the larger implications. He always believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.

“But now? ‘At this point, I’m beginning to doubt myself,’ he said. ‘Now I begin to wonder.’ That is as far as he is willing to go.”

Here’s a corresponding Vanity Fair report

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Something in me doesn’t trust Shawn Levy‘s All The Light We Cannot See (Netflix, 11.2), a limited series based on a 2014 novel by Anthony Doerr. I don’t trust the concept of using a young blind girl as the main protagonist — it feels a bit cloying and manipulative. Especially with an actual limited-sight girl playing the role.

The stain of Naziism can never be erased, of course, but at the same time a voice is telling me that relatively few in this day and age are willing to see it for what it was. I don’t get the feeling that Levy and his creative collaborators have really grappled with the roots of what happened in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s.

The teaser for Levy’s film feels too 21st Century…too morally smug and self-righteous. As if to say “if we had been living in Germany back then we would have known better…we would have stood up and refused.”

“Shameful Heritage“, posted on 10.26.20: Almost every day I get scolded and shat upon. An opinion or confession that would barely raise an eyebrow in private conversation a week or a decade ago will often as not get you lynched today. Such is the fate of semi-honest fellows in this wonderful wokester age we’re living through.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was grateful for my health (i.e., my body’s ability to rebuff infections), which I’d been told all my life by my mom was due to “strong German genes.” I should have said strong family genes but mom always said they principally came from her German-descended dad and German-immigrant granddad. This, of course, led to some branding me as an Aryan supremacist. So I posted the following to address this:

There’s no ignoring the horrid legacy and cultural associations between early to mid 20th Century Germany and horrific Nazi genocide. The stain was embedded 80-odd years ago, and will never be forgotten. Nor should it be.

My mother was filled with such revulsion by what happened between 1920 and ‘45 that she never once visited Germany her entire life.

That said, Germany is a rich and stirring culture (the beers, the cuisine, the desserts, the singing in the pubs, the historic operas, the architecture, the medieval remnants in Rothenburg) and the people I’ve met and dealt with there are as recognizably human as anyone or anywhere else.

The horror of Naziism and the Holocaust is a lasting national disgrace, and yet in a certain progressive sense it’s been scrubbed clean and built upon. It’s also been acknowledged all over in Germany — officially atoned for from the top down. There are memorials, moral messages and reminders all over Berlin, for example. There’s a huge Holocaust memorial right smack dab in the center.

In 2012 the boys and I visited Dachau, which is northwest of Munich and only a 20-minute train ride away. Talk about a lingering after-vibe.

Does anyone expect that any kind of similar atonements will happen here in the wake of the Trump administration? That some kind of institutional recognition of our ghastly racist history will be built? Don’t hold your breath.

All to say there’s nothing inherently evil or odious about being partly descended from Germans. Just as no one is saying there’s something inherently evil or odious about J.D. Vance having grown up in a small MAGA community in southern Ohio.

Four and 2/3 years ago (2.3.19) I posted a piece about Bradley Cooper‘s then-forthcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic. The title of the piece (“Bernstein’s Melodies Are Everything“) accompanied the news that Cooper’s film had secured music rights from the Bernstein estate.

Excerpt: “I respect Cooper’s intention to both direct and star. A comprehensive Benstein biopic would naturally focus upon Bernstein’s creative saga with West Side Story, and also upon his closeted life and conflicted marriage to Felicia Montealegre. A heavy smoker and emphysema sufferer, Bernstein died at age 72 in 1990.

“Presumably Cooper’s pic will include the Black Panthers episode that Tom Wolfe wrote about in “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” (6.8.70). A Black Panther fundraiser was held at Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment, and was attended by Donald Cox, a Panther “field marshal” from Oakland. Wolfe‘s famous New York article was more or less about the guilty-liberal syndrome among Bernstein’s social crowd.

“A friend writes: ‘Don’t count on Cooper’s Bernstein biopic to include Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic’ tale. It’s an anecdotal incident, and would cast too negative a light on Lenny. The tone of Wolfe’s piece is one of utter mockery of the Bernsteins and their wealthy liberal ilk.'”

Well, guess what? Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson reports that “the famous Black Panther Party event that Felicia Montealegre held at the family’s apartment in 1970, which led to the writer Tom Wolfe sneeringly coining the term ‘radical chic, is not mentioned at all in the film.”

WHAT??? The Wolfe piece is the first thing I’ve thought about for decades whenever I’ve thought of Lenny and Felicia. ‘Radical chic’ is VIRTUALLY SYNONYMOUS with their legend.

A friend informs that Maestro “leaves out a great many things. It’s an audacious and highly idiosyncratic movie, but you’ll never see Lenny up on the podium conducting in his ’50s and ’60s heyday.

“There’s a great, very extended scene of him conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony in a London cathedral — the film’s big conducting set piece, and truly magnificent. But the film is mostly set in the ‘70s, and Bernstein launched his celebrity as America’s first iconic world-class conductor in 1943. You never quite see him becoming Leonard Bernstein on the podium.

“So yes, it’s an intimate Leonard Bernstein biopic that leaves out many things. Hell, it leaves out West Side Story, for God’s sake! Because the focus is on Lenny and Felicia’s marriage from the inside out. [It is my opinion that] the movie does fine without it. It all works.”

Differing opinion from friendo #2: “Maestro is pretty weak tea at the end of the day.”

Felicia and Leonard Bernstein and their guest of honor, Black Panther “field marshal” Donald Cox, during a 1970 fundraiser held at Bernstein’s Park Ave. apartment. The event was famously written about in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s“:

Emma Stone‘s Poor Things performance is an all-but-certain lock for a Best Actress nom, and the big Venice win for Yorgos Lanthimos‘ emphatically carnal, Terry Gilliam-like fantasy makes a Best Picture Oscar nom all the more likely.

But don’t kid yourself. The New Academy Kidz will adore Poor Things, but the Searchlight release (opening on 12.8) flirts too closely with hard-R exploitation to win. The over-45s will cultivate reservations. The flagrant bizarre-itude is exciting in a festival environment, but Venice and Telluride elitists need to calm down.

Posted from Telluride: “Poor Things was the biggest conversation flick, but the gymnastic ‘furious jumping’ scenes and the generally bawdy Bride of Frankenstein sexuality will probably diminish enthusiasm among older industry audiences.”

Dissenting viewpoint: Remember a Telluride friendo’s recent opinion that Poor Things is “like Barbie directed by the Marquis de Sade“? He thinks it’s stilted and didactic, and feels profoundly depressed by Poor Things‘ ascension, starting that it affects him “the way the triumph of EEAAO affected you last year.”

HE to Barbie and Poor Things lovers: Are your heads exploding yet, or do you need more time? Don’t look now but both are problematic.

I returned last night to the Wilton homestead, and am only now catching up on stuff.

Item #1, for me, is the appalling decision by some slithering, thoughtless animal to try and destroy the classic hacienda-style bungalow bought by Marilyn Monroe in February 1962, or roughly six months before her (possibly accidental) barbituate death in August of that year.

A presumably thoughtless, soul-less life form recently bought the place for $8.5 million a while back, and wants it demolished.

A formal demolition permit is yet to be granted, but we know how this shit almost always plays out. It would be disgusting to destroy a place with this kind of haunted history, not to mention a place that exudes a vibe of understated class and simplicity.

The one-story bungalow is located at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive.

Built in 1929, it sits at the end of an inauspicious cul-de-sac not far from Brentwood’s San Vicente Boulevard.

The architectural heritage of the Monroe home was and is classic Mexican adobe (overhead beams, classic brick patio, backyard pool). She had bought a few pieces of Mexican-made furniture earlier that year when she visited Mexico City.

On or about 3.1.62 she dropped by the set of Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel, which was finishing shooting at Churubusco Studios. It played in Cannes less than three months later.

I’ve never been inside the Monroe home, but I’ve visited two or three times and peeked through the fence, etc.