"Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It's not chemical" — AG Barr uses painstaking distinctions to defend the use of force against protesters near the White House last Monday pic.twitter.com/CQbtqLwfIk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 7, 2020

Somebody was smart enough to put subtitles on this trailer for Brian Welsh‘s Beats. Let’s hope the film itself has this feature, as I could barely understand what’s being said even with subtitles. Based upon a play by Kieran Hurley, this Steven Soderbergh-endorsed period pic (’94) appears to have ample juice. Illegal raves, smile buttons, etc. And the young lead characters are straight…dare to be different!

Does anyone remember Chris Petit‘s Radio On (’79)? Subdued, cultish, zone-out black and white photography. Barely audible when I saw it at the Bleecker Street Cinema.

Lewis Beale on Facebook: “I’ve been asking people who have lived through both 1968 and 2020: Which was worse? Your thoughts, please.

HE response: “2020 is far, FAR worse. 1968 was tragic (MLK, RFK) and turbulent, but highly passionate and even exuberant and thrilling in patches. 2020 has mostly been a concentration camp. Where is the exuberance apart for the esprit de corps in the BLM marches? I take it all back if Biden wins .

The always sharp, wise and amusing Richard Rushfield did a funny thing in his latest Ankler column. He appeared to take the side of the Variety wokester snowflakes in a riff about the furloughing of editor-in-chief Claudia Eller over a Twitter argument she got into with a freelancer-of-color about diversity.

To my shock and horror Rushfield more or less said “well, she kind of deserved it because she was too crusty and flinty and huffy.” Nobody’s saying Claudia isn’t Claudia, but Rushfield thinks it’s fine that she got deep-sixed over a sensitivity issue? In the face of her sterling, decades-long career in entertainment journalism? Really?

Here are the first few graphs:

And here’s what I wrote Richard this morning:

“I know Claudia and her edgy, push-push, sometimes aggressive personality, but she’s a tough nut and a sharp journalist. She didn’t kill or sexually assault anyone or abscond with company funds or murder her dog. She got a little brusque and huffy with a freelancer who was goading her. On Twitter.

“You do understand what’s happening these days in newsrooms, right? Or do you not feel in your gut that Bari Weiss is telling it exactly like it is?

“The wokesters are what they are and standing foursquare for their convictions, okay, but they will slit your digital throat or at least sledgehammer your ankles if they’ve decided you need to be diminished or retired because you don’t respect their need for emotional and psychological safety.

“Wait, am I allowed to use the term ‘pampered, over-indulged, hyper-sensitive, falsetto-voiced, knee-jerk snowflakes’? I wouldn’t want to use a term that would, you know, offend them or anything.

“I guess you could say I feel a certain allegiance with Weiss, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan (except for his hateful dismissals of Doddering Joe Who Might Save Us All), Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and other like-minded souls who’ve visited Rogan and Maher’s talk shows.

“Anyway, do you think it’s fair to suggest that the steely and (okay) vaguely-abrasive-at-times Eller is unredeemable toast because she got snippy with a freelancer of color? Really? She gets put out to pasture for THAT?

“Please tell me you you’re not thinking of going over to the other side and signing up with the snowflake brigade. Please. Not you, not now.”

For about 22 years I’ve been a proud owner of a real-deal samurai sword, a Claymore sword from Germany, and what I’ve been told is an 18th Century Barry Lyndon sword. And they’re all in good shape. I had the samurai sword re-sharpened about 15 years ago and it’ll split a hair.

Two days ago Dylan called to suggest that I send the sword to Jett for his 32nd birthday, which was yesterday. Dylan and Jett were totally into swords during the waning days of the Clinton administration, when they were nine and ten.

Dylan’s idea was that the samurai sword would connect Jett to those days, and how we hung out and went on car trips and attended screenings, etc.. So I decided to send the samurai to Jett in Jersey City and the Claymore to Dylan in Austin.

Around 4:45 pm I took them to a UPS store but the guy said he’s not allowed to send weapons. “Well, they’re technically weapons, okay, but not really,” I said. “They’re mainly relics of a distant past. Only Mel Gibson would regard them as actual weapons.”

He suggested FedEx, which was just down the street. I had to pack them first, of course, or the FedEx guys would say the same thing.

The UPS guy sold me a couple of tall boxes and masking tape and a bag of styrofoam peanuts. But I couldn’t wrap them in the store, he said. Out to the parking lot. The wind was blowing and the peanuts were flying all over the place, but I eventually got it done.

The FedEx guys didn’t even ask what was in the boxes. A Thursday delivery was out of the question, but to ensure that the samurai would arrive at Jett’s Jersey City home by today I had to pay them $185 bills. And the box wasn’t even that heavy.

Jett’s text arrived today at 11:49 am: “Thanks for the gift…I guess. Lol.”

Last night I came upon an old NYC address book, circa 1980 and ’81. It was a replacement of an even better address book that I left in a phone booth just outside El Coyote. Four or five hundred names, street addresses, phone numbers, occasional commentary…all quaintly written with a pen. (I’m figuring the four-decades-old info couldn’t possibly apply in 2020…right?) And I was leafing through and feeling the vigor of those days. Yes, I was a shameless, never-say-die hound. But mostly I was terrified about money and worried about whether my meager writing skills would cut the mustard from a commercial standpoint, and what kind of life I might have in five, ten or twenty years. So I was poor and insecure and hugely intimidated, but somehow I had to keep going, keep pushing. Hence the necessary moxie of youth.

I don’t know this guy (which makes me an asshole, right?) or Da Poets (bigger asshole!), but I instantly warmed to his voice, looks, aura. Plus Franklin Canyon and I have bonded many times over the last three-plus years. Peace-in-the-valley moments haven’t been happening much lately, so this was welcome.

I’ve made it clear that I loathe and despise Joe Rogan‘s dismissal of Joe Biden, but this three-way conversation (Rogan + The Hill‘s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti) about the looting is worth listening to.

Last night in West Hollywood, sometime around 8:40 pm:

We’ve now witnessed two recent episodes in which New and Old Guard journalists have been sharply at odds. Believers in wokester activist journalism, a Millennial and Zoomer thing that’s about exposing racism, pollution, corruption and all the other social ills and in some cases indicting and/or cancelling old-schoolers (and particularly Trump-aligned righties), have clashed with defenders of traditional liberal journalism — basically a generational rift.

Episode #1 was about wokester N.Y. Times staffers condemning the opinion section’s decision to publish a somewhat rash opinion essay by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton (“Send In The Military“) that basically said the military should be brought in to stop looters.

Wokester staffers tweeted that running the Cotton piece “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger”…really? Most Americans believe that the looting has been horrible if not ruinous, and that it should be stopped one way or another.

N.Y. Times columnist Bari Weiss explains the clash as follows: “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40-plus) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print.’ One group” — the 40-plussers — “emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.'”

“The New Guard has a different worldview,” Weiss went on. “They call it ‘safetyism,’ in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”

Episode #2, which happened last night in Los Angeles, was about safetyism.

Variety editor Claudia Eller was forced to take a two-month administrative leave after a Twitter dispute with freelancer Piya Sinha-Roy about insufficient newsroom diversity. The flashpoint moment was when Sinha-Roy complained that “POC voices are constantly dismissed“, in response to which Eller took umbrage because she felt she and other Variety editors had conveyed an understanding of this complaint and a pledge to improve. “When someone cops to something why would you try and criticize them?,” she said to Sinha-Roy. “You sound really bitter.”

Eller surely understands that you can’t get into a Twitter dispute with any younger POC and hope to win the argument. Or at least, she surely understands that now.

American voters are starting to figure some things out also. Scratch an under-40 wokester-progressive and you may find an ideological Stalinist who’s convinced that change can’t happen without slapping a few people around or even deep-sixing them. A day or two ago I equated this crowd with Tom Courtenay‘s “Strelnikov” character in Dr. Zhivago. I’ve said 50 times that we’re living through a period that’s not unlike the French terror, at least within wokester circles.

We’re also living through a certain strain of liberal hypocrisy in which progressives had insisted for nearly three months that strict social distancing had to be observed for God knows how long. This was followed by the partial collapse of social distancing (certainly among protestors) when it came time to march against systemic racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Drive though any major city now and you’ll see a whole lot of storefronts covered with plywood, plywood, plywood. Caused by looters but also by the George Floyd protestors who’ve given them cover. What kind of impact is this going to have on Average Joe voters? The vast majority is appalled by racially-driven police brutality and support the demonstrations, but at the same time they don’t like the way plywood has totally taken over.

What would be the right proportional makeup of a properly diverse newsroom, by the way? Should the racial makeup of a newsroom reflect last year’s U.S. census figures, which stated that whites comprise 60.4% of the population with other tribes close to 40% (African Americans 13.4%, Hispanic-Latino 18.3% and Asians 5.9%, etc.). Or is journalism a different kettle of fish? How should it work exactly?

In my view, Weiss is one of the few serious truth-tellers within the N.Y. Times community when it comes to wokesters vs. traditionalists.