On Friday afternoon Jeff and Sasha faced the music…uhm, the issues of the moment. Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein schnozz. Rachel Zegler’s woke Snow White flick. The sad finances behind the “Blind Side” situation. “The Pot au Feu” (aka “The Taste of Things”) and other Telluride forecastings.

Again the link.

In the thread for yesterday’s “Speaking of Blind Sides,” Seasonal Aflac Disorder mentioned that the young Steven Spielberg was a film nerd “so you’d expect he’d be listening to film scores as a young man.”

To which I replied that I, too, was listening to film scores as a lad — Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rosza, Maurice Jarre, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman. Bronislau Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Hugo Friedhofer. Except I never bought a compilation album of Freidhofer’s best film music, and I dearly love his scores for One-Eyed Jacks, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Young Lions, Hondo, Vera Cruz, Soldier of Fortune, The Harder They Fall, The Sun Also Rises, An Affair to Remember, etc.

Two…no, three observations abut the bizarre persistence of the Bradley Cooper-Leonard Bernstein-Maestro nose thing, which really didn’t warrant much attention in the first place.

One, the Maestro makeup team obviously wanted to create a strong resemblance between Bradley Cooper and Leonard Berstein, which partly meant creating a correctly proportioned Bernstein prosthetic nose. They just wanted the resemblance factor to stand out in the right way, and that’s all — nothing more. I find it astonishing that anyone would ascribe any ulterior motives of any kind.

Two, it is beyond bizarre that the Maestro makeup team nonetheless got the nose wrong. It’s close to the Bernstein original but a bit too extreme — almost Pinocchio-like from side angles.

And three, what possessed Mark Harris to want to write such a long Slate piece (11 heavyweight paragraphs) about this kerfuffle?

Just a slight reminder about Disney’s woke-feminist Snow White (’24), which everyone hates thanks to Rachel Zegler‘s remarks about how profoundly tiresome the 1937 animated version was (who wants a sappy love story featuring a stalker Prince Charming?) and how the forthcoming version is about Snow White becoming a progressive leader of some sort (perhaps vaguely similar to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman)…just a slight reminder that this proto-feminist version was co-written by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson. in other words, a fairy-tale version of manosphere pissnado…right?

Two days ago I was standing next to a Bridgeport shopping complex, waiting to meet Vinny-the-mechanic so he could fix my injured car window. To pass the time I decided to visit a sporting goods store. The glass door opened out and was manual.

As I opened it two middle-aged women of color were close and approaching, so I stepped back and gave them full leeway. The glass door had one of those cylindrical metal-washer devices so it was slowly closing (i.e., not slamming) in their direction.

Naturally one of the women got huffy about this — offended that I hadn’t quickly stepped to my right and held the door open like Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan England. “You don’t hold doors?” she snorted. If I had said a single questioning word in response, it would have been a whole big thing. It could’ve been a TikTok or YouTube video. Lucretia McSnippy was ready to get down and have it out…I could feel it.

I thought I was doing the right thing by getting out of their way…not actually! What I should have done was disappear into thin air.

Yesterday afternoon I met Vinny-the-mechanic at the same vaguely-down-at-the-heels Bridgeport shopping center. It took him about 90 minutes to take everything apart and repair the up-and-down driver-side window, which involved replacing the whirring, battery-driven electric motor that controls the movement.

Everything apparently back to normal…great! I paid Vinny, thanked him, drove back home.

25 minutes later I pulled into a Balducci’s parking lot in Southport, and pulled the latch that opens the door. Nothing…door wouldn’t open. Vinny had forgotten to connect the inside-the-door whachamacallit. I crawled over the console and escaped through the passenger side door. To my relief the outside driver-side door latch still worked, but the inside latch was kaput.

I called Vinny…silence. He made a mistake, okay, but he’s still a smart, methodical mechanic. Having a bad day, I presumed.

Nonetheless a sixth sense told me I should hire someone else to fix the door-latch problem. This morning I drove the VW Passat up to a Georgetown Shell station, as I know and trust the mechanic. I dropped it off around 8:30 am. Two hours ago they told me I’m good to go.