Jeff Wells

I made a choice during last year’s Cannes Film Festival to sidestep screenings of Wim Wenders‘ Perfect Days, which I re-titled in my head as Toilet-Cleaning Guy.

It’s not that I was afraid of the subject…okay, I was a little bit. I might be an outlier in this regard, but I’m terrified of medium close-ups of turd-clogged toilets.

The film, of course, is about the spiritual (musical, literary, emotional, cosmic) life of Kōji Yakusho‘s Hirayama, and not his day job. Naturally.

Elite critics have praised Wenders’ film from the get-go, and now it’s getting the royal Criterion treatment.

Last month Katherine Maher, 40, succeeded John Lansing as CEO and president of National Public Radio (NPR). In contrast to many NPR predecssors, Maher has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization. She is, however, an adamant wokester Millennial, or she was, at least, four years ago during the George Floyd riots.

I’m presuming that under Maher’s leadership NPR will not be reverting to that mellow, thoughtful, sensibly measured news-and-reporting outlet that many of us knew during the Obama years and before.

Like much of the liberal realm, NPR began turning into a woke-talking-points platform when Trump took power on 1.20.17, and then veered into hardcore Stalinist woke-ism when the George Floyd riots happened in May 2020.

I’m certain Ira Berliner is very sorry. Me too.

Adding insult to injury Maher is from HE’s home town of Wilton — went to Wilton High School, etc.

Maher (no relation to Bill) turns 41 on 4.18.24. She has an agreeably deep and somewhat raspy voice, and bears an obvious resemblance to Rachel McAdams.

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I’m not much of a numbers guy, but Warren Smith appears to be. This straight-talk explanation video, focused on the alleged inability of Hollywood to sustain itself, is what I intended to post yesterday afternoon…until I got sidetracked. I trust Warren’s eyes. Look at them as he’s speaking.

Hollywood is imploding… the laws of economics prove it is inevitable.

Full new episode pic.twitter.com/pXq60tBzGg

— Warren Smith (@WTSmith17) April 14, 2024

Bob Costas two days ago: “What I’m about to say doesn’t mitigate the crime that [O.J. Simpson] quite obviously committed.

“He was a hail-fellow-well-met, and everything changed on the night of June 12,1994.

“We can hold multiple truths in our head at the same time, even if some of those truths at [that] time confused people…people who are inclined to view it through an emotional prism” — i.e., O.J. murder trial juror Brenda Moran, a.k.a. “Brenda Moron” — “rather than a rational prism.

“It is simultaneously true that there’s a long history of injustice by the [Los Angeles] justice system toward African-Americans, and that continued well into the 1990s and to some extent continues today.

“Plus the Simpson situation was not long after the Rodney King situation…the beating caught on camera and then those officers acquitted…there was a lot of tension, to put it mildly, between the African-American community and the LAPD. All these things are true.

“It’s also true that Mark Fuhrman was a racist who lied about this and used the n-word. It was also presented that some of the chain-of-custody was mishandled. There were mistakes there.

“All those things can simultaneously be true, and it’s also true that it’s impossible to even postulate that anyone other that O.J. Simpson committed those crimes. The evidence, both circumstantial and hard evidence, is simply overwhelming, and there’s no other explanation.”

There’s really, really something wrong with college-age males who are into sexual choking. Ditto the young women who are also allegedly into it, as choking does nothing to heighten pleasure or bring about orgasm.

Yes, this is an actual thing, and there’s something truly foul and psychologically fucked up in the hearts and minds of the eager-beaver perpetrators. I’ve lived a vigorous sexual life for many decades, and I’ve never so much as flirted with even the idea of choking…are you kidding me?

“The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex“, posted by Peggy Orenstein — N.Y. Times, 4.12.24:

“For the past four years, Dr. Debby Herbenick — one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior and director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University — has been tracking the rapid rise of ‘rough sex’ among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking.

“Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized ‘major Midwestern university’ said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

“As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk q & a at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, ‘How come boys all want to choke you?’ In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, ‘Why do girls all want to be choked?’ They do?

“Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.”

“…is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” — Winston Churchill.

Comment #1: “It’s so strange how a song called Perfect Day is one that I find myself wanting to listen to when my day is everything but perfect.” Comment #2: “This is what having fun with depression is like.” Comment #3: “After listening to this I have a sudden urge to clean toilets in Tokyo.” Comment #4 “You made me forget myself…I thought I was someone else, someone good” might be the most relatable lyric in history.” Comment #5: “This song is like watching something beautiful die.”

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According to a Ripley transcript, Dickie Greenleaf’s spacious Rome apartment (the one Tom Ripley moves into after he kills Dickie off the coast of San Remo) is located at via di Monserrato, 34. Which is “my” street, so to speak, and a relatively recent memory.

Following the 2017 Cannes Film Festival Tatiana and I visited Venice, Tuscany (Radda in Chianti) and Rome, and then, during our last couple of days, drove north to La Spezia to have lunch with Luca Guadagnino.

During our three days in Rome we stayed just down the street from Dickie’s place at via di Monserrrato, 154, a Palazzo Farnese historical building which is only a block of so from Pier Luigi, the city’s greatest seafood restaurant and among the greatest worldwide.

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Forget the Canada part of last night’s New Rules essay and start at the 4:00 mark:

“Yes, you can move too far left. And when you do, you wind up pushing people in the center to the right. At its worst, Canada is what American voters think happens when there’s no one putting a check on extreme wokeness.

“Like the saga of American shop teacher Kayla Lemieux, whose pronouns are she, her and those. Kayla is now back to being a guy, but two years ago when ‘they’ showed up to teach children, the [Halton District School Board] said they were committed to a safe environment. Safe for who? What about the children?

“There was once a weirdo movie producer in the ’60s named Russ Meyer, who made low-budget B movies like Faster Pussycat…Kill! Kill! and Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, all featuring [big-boobed women]. His movies played in porn houses, and were featured in Hustler and Playboy, but who says ‘when it comes to huge ridiculous tits, let’s save that for the kids’?

“And this is why people vote for Trump.

“They say in politics that liberals are the gas pedal and conservatives are the brakes, and I’m generally with the gas pedal…but not if we’re driving off a cliff.”

William Shatner turned 93 on 3.22.24, and he looks pretty good. I’m wondering if he’s entered that really old guy phase when the natural thing is to appear leaner or at least lose that inflated-beach-ball face, which Shatner had for many years. It’s relatively rare to see guys with inflated beach ball faces in their 90s.

Wiki excerpt: “In the early 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969, Shatner experienced difficulty in finding employment, having become somewhat typecast as James Tiberius Kirk. With very little money and few acting prospects, he lost his home and was for a time so poor that he was reduced to living in a truck-bed camper in the San Fernando Valley. He refers to this part of his life as ‘that period’, a humbling time during which he would take any odd job, including small party appearances, in order to support his family.”

…finally stands up and says it. I understand director Alex Garland and A24 spewing the bullshit about how Civil War is actually a tribute to brave journalism — they don’t want to alienate red-state audiences — but a majority of critics saying the same thing or pretending that the film to is too vague to get a handle on….that’s just denial and cowardism.