And arguably Luca Guadagnino‘s greatest film…seriously.

“Queer is much more transformative than Call Me By Your Name…it may be Luca’s best film ever, or his most out-there or whatever…I’m not sure how to label it but Craig’s performance is staggering…purely a matter of heart and spirit and twitchy emotion…all I know is that he’s uncovered something fresh and alive…really something else.” — from my 10.7.24 NYFF review.

Queer will allegedly open in the U.S. on 11.27.24, but you’d never know it from the absence of hype and promotion.

Deadline‘s Matt Grobar is reporting that Frank Marshall will be producing some kind of definitive, fully-authorized Fleetwood Mac doc.

Long-of-tooth or passed-on band members Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks will “reflect on their fortuitous meeting in 1974” and the “50-plus-year history that’s followed, from their record-breaking recordings and tours to their trials and tribulations, personal resilience, musical dexterity,” etc.

In other words, the doc will mainly cover the super-hot, mid ’70s heyday (Fleetwood Mac (1975–1976) + Rumours (1977–1978), and the still-hot-but-slowing-down period (Tusk (1979–1980) and Mirage (‘82).

And if I know Marshall, the doc will barely acknowledge the scruffy, struggling early years (the first FM album was released in ’68) and may even possibly ignore one of the late Christine McVie‘s best songs ever — the melancholy, raggae-flavored “Did You Ever Love Me?” (’73), which was from the Penguin album (’73).

“Did You Ever Love Me?” was written by McVie and Bob Welch and recorded by them, with McVie delivering a sad and soulful lead vocal. It was also released as a single.

President-elect Donald Trump appears to be throwing in in the towel as far as Matt Gaetz‘s chances of becoming Attorney General are concerned.

On top of which the N.Y. Times is reporting than an unidentified hacker has gained access to a file shared in a secure link among lawyers with clients who have given damaging testimony related to Matt Gaetz.

Excerpt: “The file is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, in addition to testimony by a second woman who said that she had witnessed the encounter. The material does not appear to have been made public by the hacker.”

There are seven states in which the legal age of consent is 17: Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Texas, Wyoming.

There are quite a few more states in which the legal age of consent is 16: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, etc.

In short, there are roughly 35 states (more?) in which an adult male having sex with a 16- or 17-year-old, however distasteful or odious this might be if the male is significantly (more than ten years) older, is not illegal.

There are 12 states in which the age of consent is 18 — Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.

HE’s personal view is that a woman is obliged to examine and scrutinize for herself when she hits 20. Once she’s experienced two full decades on this planet, she’s on her own. Before that age her judgment may not be what it could or should be.

What Bob Woodward meant, more precisely, is that Trump is an animal, and that we’e all condemned to cope with his snorting, territorial jungle behavior for the next four years and change. And so, from the bottom of our hearts, “thank you, bumblefucks!…thank you so much.”

Bret Stephens, posted 11.18.24: “Through hubris, Joe Biden destroyed his single greatest accomplishment, which was the defeat of Donald Trump.

“Through diffidence, he failed to achieve what might have been the most impressive goal of his term, which would have been Russia’s battlefield defeat in Ukraine, thanks to rapid and overwhelming U.S. assistance.

“Through inattention, he allowed a preventable immigration crisis to unfold, along with a huge spike in inflation that was the predicted result of his reckless overspending.

“Through imprudence, he permitted the Justice Department to prosecute his predecessor in a way that did more to resurrect Trump’s political fortunes than it did to bury them.

“Through self-delusion and the dishonesty or silence of his close confidants, he covered up the extent of his mental decline.

“Through political malpractice, he anointed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee instead of encouraging a more open process that could have yielded a better candidate.”

A riff about depression and escape from depression in the midst of the pandemic, originally posted on 8.17.20:

Yesterday it was hot all across the Southwest, Los Angeles included. Hot and somewhat humid. I showered quickly around 5 pm, and despite the air-conditioned living room climate I had to wait and wait for my hair to dry.

I needed a drive on the rumblehog, I decided. I went downstairs, turned the ignition key, revved the engine. I then decided on the spur that it was too hot to wear headgear. So I took off with my white helmet under the seat….”fuck it.”

With my faintly damp hair getting whipped around as I motored north through quiet, tree-lined streets, it was one of the most glorious sensations I’ve felt in months.

The angel on my right shoulder was saying “okay, you’ve had your fun, now pull over and put the helmet on.” But the devil on my left shoulder said, “No, don’t…this is way too pleasurable, let’s keep going.”

Block after block, slowly cruising, my eyes peeled for the bulls. I became braver and braver. I crossed La Cienega and ducked into another side street. I was ecstatic about the wind fluttering through my Prague follicles; the feeling of coolness and the scent of this and that…absolute heaven.

After a while I began to think that getting a ticket might not be so bad. Well, it would have been but I was so delighted to re-experience a portion of what it was like to be 16. It used to be okay to ride around without a helmet. California’s mandatory helmet law kicked in on 1.1.92. Warren Beatty rides his Triumph without one in Shampoo.

Posted eight years ago: One of the healthiest things you can say about anything that’s over and done with is “okay, that happened.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about a stretch in a World War II concentration camp or something equally ghastly. Otherwise you have to be accepting, past it.

Especially when it comes to ex-girlfriends. We went there, it happened, nobody was right or wrong, that was then and we’re here now…let’s get a coffee and catch up.

All my life I’ve been friends with exes, or have at least been open to same. And they’ve been open to ease and friendship with me. Except for one.

She was (and most likely still is) a whipsmart blonde with a great ass, a toothy smile and a kind of young Katharine Hepburn vibe. She’d been raised in Brooklyn but always reminded me of a Fairfield County gal.

She’s married now and living in Pasadena; her husband — a slightly stocky, gray-haired guy of some means — doesn’t resemble me or her first husband (a doobie-toking small-business owner who owned a Harley) at all. Whatever attributes or nice qualities he’s brought to the table, he’s clearly a swing away from the past.

I gave up trying to be in touch with her toward the end of Barack Obama’s first term. She really wants to erase that part of her life — the first marriage (which began in the summer of ’96) and the affair with me that began in early ’98 and lasted two and two-thirds years, ending in late September 2000.

We last spoke in ’12. The most emotionally significant thing that happened before that was her friending me on Facebook, but what is that?

Our thing began at the ’98 Sundance Film Festival and finally ran out of gas in late ’00 when her husband found out.

Do you want a truly affecting parable about otherness and suffering derision for being different?…a sad, affecting, human-scaled drama about a young person bullied and ostracized for having shamrock green hair? Watch Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948).

Idina Menzel and Cynthia Erivo? Meet 12-year-old Dean Stockwell.

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“The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you touch with your hand, and the kind you feel in your heart, your soul…the spiritual side. And you know, the worst of the two is the spiritual.”

I used to constantly argue with myself which parent was the worst, dad or mom. They were both punishers, prison wardens…”no” was their mantra, their middle name.

Imsgine seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master for the first time, and just blurting out tweets as you walked home…just pouring it out, fast and unrefined.

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This is probably a minority opinion, but speaking as one who’s been dropped cold or given the casual brush-off by several women during my hound-dog heyday (mid ’70s through late ’90s, not counting my four-year marriage from ’87 to ’91), it’s a bit more painful to dump than to get dumped.

I can think of eight or nine times when I suffered terrible heartache after getting the heave-ho. Bottom of the well, my life is over, “Can’t live if livin’ is without you,” etc.

I can recall at least two times when I was so devastated by “love lost at such a cost” that I succumbed to something close to clinical depression. One time in late ’79 I was so bummed that I slept in my West 4th Street apartment for a whole week straight, getting up only for meals or to watch an occasional TV show.

I gradually learned after suffering through these breakups that you can’t negotiate or plead or beg your way out of them. When you’ve been dumped by a woman of character or conviction, the game is over. Nothing you can say or do will change her mind.

The best you can hope for is to persuade her to agree to continue having sex while you both hunt around for the next romantic opportunity. But even that rarely happens because by the time she’s told you she wants to fly solo or see other people she’s probably already found a replacement.

In the spring of ’79 I was seeing a foxy West Village woman on an off-and-on basis. He or she who loves less always controls the relationship, so I guess I was the controller as my feelings for her were on the somewhat casual, come what may, comme ci comme ca side. Her feelings for me were more ardent, or so it seemed.

Then I met someone else who was prettier, hotter, sharper, classier — definitely a better catch. When the new thing began to happen I knew I had to tell the West Village lady. I wouldn’t dare try to two-time anyone. I wanted to play my cards honest and clean. No messing around.

Except when I visited the West Village, off-and-on apartment and lowered the boom, I felt awful. She began to cry a little bit and lament her awful luck with men, and all I could do was stand there and say “I’m really sorry.”

The difference between this and the terrible feeling of being dumped is that dumpees don’t feel guilty — all they have is the ache. But if you drop someone you feel guilty about having caused great emotional harm, or at the very least a bad bruise. You feel like a bad person.

Guess what? The woman I left her for dumped me six months later.

The only other time I felt like this was when a woman I’d been seeing on a fairly serious basis became aware of a little side dalliance with a married woman. (We’d met while performing in a community theatre play.) The serious relationship woman began to quake with weeping, and all of a sudden I felt like a beast who needed to be whipped. I’m sorry so sorry sorry…I’ll never do this again…please, forgive me…so sorry.

Boiled down, hurting someone feels much worse than being hurt.

Specific thoughts will be tapped out later this afternoon…