I’m this, I’m that, I’m all over the map. I’m solemn, spiritual, fickle as fuck. I sing songs, fuck around, ride a proud rumblehog, write all day, imitate coyote howls, paint walls, love vegetable korma, give neck and foot massages, etc.

Standing six feet apart, the Rolling Stones (Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wood) will play a tune during tomorrow’s two-hour telecast “Together at Home”, which begins at 8 pm (on both coasts). Other performers will include Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Elton John, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Jennifer Lopez, Kacey Musgraves, Billie Joe Armstrong, Chris Martin, Sam Smith, Lang Lang, Alanis Morissette, Burna Boy and Stevie Wonder.

All well and good but there’s no special current if a band is performing inside a closed studio or in someone’s living room or whatever. No audience or lighting effects or big arena means NO JUICE.

Participating outlets will include ABC, NBC, ViacomCBS Networks, iHeartMedia and Bell Media networks, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, Apple Music, Roblox, Tidal, Alibaba, beIN Media Group, LiveXLive, Tencent, TuneIn, AXS TV, beIN Media Group, MultiChoice Group and RTE. BBC One will air the fucking thing on Sunday night.

A streaming-only, six-hour pre-telecast special will also happen tomorrow, beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern and 11 am Pacific. Performers will include Sheryl Crow and the Killers, Adam Lambert, Andra Day, Annie Lennox, Ben Platt, Charlie Puth, Christine and the Queens, Common, Ellie Goulding, Hozier, Jack Johnson, Jennifer Hudson, Jessie Reyez, Juanes, Kesha, Lady Antebellum, Liam Payne, Luis Fonsi, Maren Morris, Michael Bublé, Niall Horan, etc.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson believes that the Oscar race or perhaps the show itself needs to somehow raise the general consciousness by focusing on raising money to support the industry. (And particularly exhibition, I’m thinking.) The ’21 Oscars need to become a spiritual fundraiser thing….the ultimate Night of a Thousand Stars.

The Academy should probably “step away from ABC,” Thompson suggests, as the network’s typical demands are not in synch with the existential pandemic reality that the industry is facing.

The Oscars, in other words, should be a little more about celebrating the industry itself and make the whole shebang into a kind of fundraiser, and the awards should perhaps be more about commercial potency and a little less about effete criteria. Or something like that. Maybe the Oscars need to delay a month or so? Sidenote: “The small indie films are going to get hurt.”

Will the 2020 Telluride Film Festival in fact be adding an extra day because they’ll have many more films to show this year than they’ll know what to do with? If so I need to reserve an extra day at the Mountainside Inn, the poor man’s Telluride lodging option. If this happens they’ll probably start a day early rather than a day late.

If you were running a film distribution company that was having a hard time of it, would you merge with an India-based Bollywood company called Eros International? I might want such a merger for the usual reasons, but I would say to the Indian guys, “Look, no offense but as far as our newly merged company is concerned we need to drop the Eros. Because it obviously suggests that our bread and butter is making and distributing hard-R erotica or even porn. By all means keep your company name for domestic business purposes but we need to to call our new outfit something else. Something cool and crisp and edgy and minus the erotic aspect.”

A month ago Seth Rogen went on a great Twitter riff as he watched Cats, which he’d never seen on stage. His remarks reached a peak when he got into the rumor about all the cats having had their buttholes erased, and about some guy having to accomplish this feat fairly late in the game. I’ve been living with felines my entire life, and I’ve never taken special notice of their anal regions because they’re not a significant visual feature. They’re “there” but who cares? So why did director Tom Hooper give the order to erase all buttholes at the last minute, as indicated by reporting?

Rogen got into it all over again yesterday with Jimmy Kimmel, starting at 6:10.

Reporters understand that they’ll get into trouble if certain indications about the pandemic are reported. Nonetheless…

Reported on 4.16.20: “Obesity may be one of the most important predictors of severe coronavirus illness, new studies say. It’s an alarming finding for the United States, which has one of the highest obesity rates in the world.

“Though people with obesity frequently have other medical problems, the new studies point to the condition in and of itself as the most significant risk factor, after only older age, for being hospitalized with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Young adults with obesity appear to be at particular risk, studies show.

“The research is preliminary, and not peer reviewed, but it buttresses anecdotal reports from doctors who say they have been struck by how many seriously ill younger patients of theirs with obesity are otherwise healthy.

“No one knows why obesity makes Covid-19 worse, but hypotheses abound.” — from “Obesity Linked to Severe Coronavirus Disease, Especially for Younger Patients” by Roni Caryn Rabin.

Producer pally (reacting to yesterday’s “The Draining“): “Sheesh. Can you start your column with a more depressing headline and opening? Are you trying to drive readers away? Give us a break!”

HE to Producer Pally: “So the recipe for vigorous readership is fantasy, nostalgia, sweet music, re-voting past Oscar competitions, fairy tales and the like? We’re living through a cross between a Steven Soderbergh and a George Romero film — an open-ended pandemic nightmare with bumblefuck zombies howling about Gretchen Whitmer — life in a vast, shrouded minimum security concentration camp with wifi and streaming at home.

“On one hand I’m happy and counting our blessings — Tatiana and I are both healthy, working hard, taking occasional walks and watching a lot of streaming, and on the other hand I occasionally dream about snorting heroin. Because ‘life’ (that once-familiar state of natural being that occasionally included joy and rapture and various states of wonder **) has basically stopped.

Producer pally: “Stop the drama. It’s easy enough to find the middle ground without declaring an apocalypse.”

** As well as grimacing as young wine-drinking women shrieked with Irish banshee laughter in restaurants and bars…that was part of the symphony back then.

The vitality of American life is dying everywhere. The nectar is drying up, the adventure evaporating, soil turning to sand. A slow strangulation, culture grinding to a halt. I keep thinking of a line from a recent Rick Wilson piece about a coming “wave of financial despair that will make people crave the tender mercies of the Great Depression.”

Important: 3% of Republicans polled by USA Today believe that Trump acted too quickly in responding to the COVID plague.

From “Trump the Narcissistic Authoritarian Statist Declares He Has ‘Total’ Authority,” posted by Rick Wilson on 4.15.20:

Only healthy teenagers and track and field athletes in their 20s are shaped like Michelangelo’s David. Then again this 17-foot-tall statue was carved 520 years ago. Diets have changed. Today most American males and females (around 70%) resemble Fat David.

The terrible Notre Dame fire happened a year and a day ago — on 4.15.19. I visited the site roughly five weeks later. The fire was almost certainly caused by some guy working for a scaffolding company but we’ll never know who or how because the government of President Emanuel Macron won’t want to prosecute anyone, which would provoke the proletariat.

Wiki excerpt: “Macron has announced that he hopes the reconstructed cathedral could be finished by Spring 2024, in time for the opening of the 2024 Summer Olympics. The first task of the restoration is the removal of 250 tons of melted metal scaffolding tubes. This stage began in February 2020 and was to continue through April 2020. A large crane was put in place next to the Cathedral to help remove the scaffolding. The stained glass windows have been removed from the nave, and the flying buttresses have been reinforced with wooden arches to stabilise the structure.”

On 3.15.20 the work was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. No date has been set for starting up again.

Initially posted on 8.30.15: Whenever I eat alone in public I’m always checking or posting tweets or reading articles or whatever on the iPhone. (I almost typed “reading a newspaper” but when’s the last time I did that?)

One of the reasons I’m always reading is that I’m terrified of being one of those guys who just sits there and stares at his food, just eyeballing it like some hungry gorilla or a baboon under a tree. Guys who never once look up or regard their fellow diners or savor the atmosphere or take out their phone…none of that. Guys who just stare at the grub, examining the steamed mishmash and deciding which clump of broccoli or sliced baked potato or radish or red lettuce leaf to fork into next.

I watched a guy do this a couple of nights ago. “Gotta study this, keep on top of it,” he seemed to be saying to himself, “because I want to eat this right. Because I’ve been waiting for this moment for a couple of hours now and now it’s here, and the food is nice and warm…my bowl of vegetables, my sustenance…mine. And this is all I care about until I’m done.”

I sat there shaking my head and telepathically muttering to this guy, “You look like a wild dog eating a baby wildebeest, you know that?” The worst is when these staring-at-their-food guys are out with their wives or girlfriends and they still won’t avert their gaze from their plate. A worldly fellow with a date always chats, looks up frequently, eats small bites, asks questions, considers the architecture, smiles, etc. And if he’s dining stag he always reads something. Trying presenting a cultivated front, ya mutt.

As a proud owner of a Presbyterian Church Wager poster (along with Larry Karaszewski, Anne Thompson and Svetlana Cvetko), I’m wondering if anyone has ever seen this French-market poster for sale (can’t find it online) or if they know somebody who has one on their wall? How odd that the designer decided to change the last name of Warren Beatty‘s character from John McCabe to John Mac Cabe.

Posted on 5.6.19: A couple of days ago on Facebook, Larry Karaszewksi, the renowned screenwriter (along with partner Scott Alexander), director, producer and co-chair of the Academy’s Foreign Language Oscar executive committee, posted a photo of a rare cultural artifact — a framed poster for Robert Atman‘s The Presbyterian Church Wager, which later became McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Until Larry posted this I was under the impression that only three Los Angelenos owned mint-condition TPCW posters — Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, myself and dp Svetlana Cvetko. The poster hanging in my living room is an expensively scanned digital copy of an original that Thompson loaned me several years ago. Three copies were made; I persuaded Warren Beatty to sign them.