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And in fact stood up while doing so. Good souls, all.

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I flinch every time I buy Gillette Proshield replacement cartridges. Because they cost too much for what I’m getting.

The first shave is always very pleasurable, granted, but you can feel a very slight diminishment during the second shave — not as sharp or clean. And the third shave is the same or even slightly worse. The fact is that cheap plastic razors (also made by Gillette) work almost as well over the course of, say, eight or even ten shaves.

Why do I keep shelling out for these shitty, over-priced Gillette cartridges that are good for only one great shave? Because I like holding the metal Gillette shaving device. (What should I call it?) It feels good in my hand. I like the weight of it, and the little grooves and micro-bumps allow for a better grip. Otherwise the cartridges suck eggs.

From the fearless Susan Orlean, author of “The Orchid Thief”…..

Posted on 2.16.17: Paris is probably the greatest aroma town I’ve ever sunk into. A feast wherever you go — Montmarte, Oberkampf, Montparnasse, Passy. The Seine at night, outdoor markets (especially in the pre-dawn hours), the aroma of sauces and pasta dishes coming from cafes, warm breads, scooter and bus exhaust, strong cigarettes, strong coffee, Middle Eastern food stands (onions, sliced meats, spices), gelato shops, etc.

And the only way to really savor these aromas, obviously, is to do so in the open air and preferably on a scooter or motorcycle so you can enjoy them in rapid succession. It’s the only way to travel over there, certainly in the warmer months. I’ve never felt so intensely alive and unbothered as during my annual Paris scooter roam-arounds.

Posted on 3.16.15:

“When I let my cat Zak outside in the morning, the first thing he does is hop onto the fence and raise his head slightly and just smell the world. He’s revelling in the sampling of each and every aroma swirling around, sniffing and sniffing again, everything he can taste. I was thinking this morning how delighted and fulfilled he seemed, and how maybe I should do a little more of this myself. Take a moment and sample as many scents as possible.

“The problem with so much of Los Angeles today, of course, is that too much of it has been smothered by massive shopping malls and buildings and parking lots, and dominated by the faint aromas (if you want to call them that) of asphalt, plastic, trash bins, concrete, sheetrock and car and truck exhaust — which doesn’t smell like very much of anything.

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Satirizing an alleged Native American tribal tradition…no one would dare shoot a scene like this today.

“We are coming towards a great reckoning of our past. The more that these stories can be told in a truthful way, the more it can be a healing process.” — Lily Gladstone quoted in U.K Vogue.

It was three long–ass years ago when news broke that Timothee Chalamet would play the creatively transitioning (acoustic folkie to electric poet-with-sunglasses) Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Now it’s actually, finally going before the cameras sometime in March.

This is Chalamet’s big chance to step out of the not-quite-happening place he’s been standing in for the last six years (throwing Woody under the bus, Little Women, Beautiful Boy, Bones and All, the Dune franchise, Wonka) and do something cool and provocative for a change. Maybe.

Posted last spring…

Originally posted on 3.21.11, updated on 9.17.16:

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 11 years ago, or towards 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.

I took the hurt and the lumps. I was dropped six or seven times. It was easily the most painful and frustrating relationship of my life. Whether things were good or bad between us was entirely about her shifting moods. Her father had been a philanderer when she was fairly young and this had caused a lot of family pain, so she felt badly about following in his footsteps. But she kept coming back and oh, the splendor.

The bottom line, obviously, is that she’s not at ease with having been a beloved infidel in the waning days of the Clinton administration. Easing up and looking back by way of occasional contact or e-mails just isn’t a comfortable thing for her.

I could write a Russian novel about what happened during our fractured romance. I once flew to NYC just to hang with her for a couple of days without the nearby presence of her husband. Toward the end we had a blissful rendezvous in Las Vegas.

But when all is said and done I’m basically a Woody Allen type of guy — the heart wants what it wants and all’s fair. Even if nothing hurts quite as badly as being the on-and-off boyfriend of a not-very-married woman.

But I’m past it. I’m not sorry it happened. And I’ve always liked her besides. She’s smarter than me. And a good judge of character, more practical, more planted, etc. But I’m deeper, stronger in terms of handling rough seas, and a better writer.

Obviously my love for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro has become a minority viewpoint. Obviously the tide of public opinion has turned against it. I was completely swept up by Cooper’s stylistic audacity and particularly by Carey Mulligan’s performance as Felicia Montealegre, but you can’t fight City Hall or at least you can’t instruct or badger people into broadening their aesthetic horizons. All I can say is that I’m very sorry.

Partly because it sounds like woke gobbledygook, I suppose. Because it suggests that the simple bedrock concept of gender (as in primarily two, as in male/female) has been imposed by a foreign power to establish political control over a native culture. Which is bullshit, of course.

Thank you, God, for sparing me from the burden of such terminology throughout most of my life. Thank you for that blessing.

At the same time I felt curiously charmed by the “Little Horse” character in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (‘70), and I loved Chief Dan George’s “Old Lodge Skins” character (a performance that was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and his “live and let live” approach to life.

We all understand how the Oscar game works. If you want your indisputably excellent film to be regarded as a Best Picture contender, you have to release it during award season (late October to Christmas).

Yes, there have been exceptions. Everything Everywhere All At Once was released on 3.25.22, and it wound up winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.12.23 — nearly a full year later. The Silence of the Lambs opened on 2.14.91, and collected five major category Oscars 13 and 1/2 months later, including Best Picture.

Timing is nonetheless a huge factor (at least in most people’s minds), and so let’s play a game, shall we? Let’s pretend that Ben Affleck and Alex Convery‘s Air, by any yardstick an excellent character-driven sports film with at least two Oscar-calibre performaces (Matt Damon‘s Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis‘s Deloris Jordan) and a terrific finale that really sinks in…let’s pretend that Amazon didn’t release it on 4.5.23 but during award-season prime time.

You know it would be sitting on the Gold Derby best-of-the-year rosters and possibly might have prevailed among one or more the critics groups. You know it would have. So let’s cut Air a break and pretend it was released six or seven weeks ago. We’d be looking at a whole different ballgame.

Wiki: “Air was originally slated for a streaming-only release on Amazon Prime Video, but Amazon Studios eventually decided to release it theatrically following strong results from test screenings. It was the first Amazon title since Late Night to be given an exclusive theatrical release, and $40 to $50 million went into promoting the theatrical. It began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on 5.12.23.”

And here we are in late December 2023, and the world has obviously changed since last spring, but Air is still a first-rate, dialogue-driven sports film. As well as being an excellent “dad” film. (No shame in that!) It’s a very human, inside-baseball sports drama that feels honest and relatable every step on the way. Cut from the Moneyball cloth.

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For nearly a quarter-century Michael Mann made a series of intensely male-ish, high-stakes grand-slammers — hardcore films about headstrong fellows forging their own paths, sometimes outside the bonds of legality but always single-mindedly. And man, did they hit the spot!

The hot streak began with 1981’s Thief and ended with 2006’s Collateral, and also included Manhunter (’86), The Last of the Monicans (’92), Heat (’95), The Insider (’99) and Ali (’01) — seven films in all.

Then came the “excellent work but not quite a bell-ringer” period…Miami Vice (’06), Public Enemies (’09) and Blackhat (’15)…movies that registered as ground-rule doubles or triples. Which felt disorienting to Mann-heads given his 23-year home run history.

Now comes Ferrari (Neon, 12.25), which is made of authentic, bruising, searing stuff. In my eyes it’s another grand-slammer but what do I know? Obviously the reaction so far has been mixed-positive — many admirers but also a modest-sized crowd of dissenters.

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There’s no disputing that The Iron Claw is coarse, bruising and emotionally shameless — a death-trip family flick with an arch-villain of a paterfamilias (Holt McCallany’s Fritz Von Erich) whose malice is barely addressed by his sons and never confronted.

And all of it colored by the fraudulence of the “sport” of wrestling itself — a rancid charade that makes you want to barf or at least turn away.

And the grotesque, eye-rolling spectacle of one son after another almost comically succumbing to the black void like Radio City Rockettes dancers performing choreographed splits…it’s somewhere between nauseating, hilarious and ludicrous.

There’s another thing that’s beyond dispute, and that’s the fact that those who are earnestly praising this beyond-bizarre, blue-collar soap opera should never, ever be trusted.

I’m dead serious — the critics and HE commenters who’ve given Sean Durkin’s film a gold star and a back rub are dishonest people, or at the very least completely unmitigated and certainly undisciplined by what most of us would call “taste”.

For the rest of their lives these knaves, these one-eyed jacks, these human-sized hunks of gravel will have to answer for their praise for this garbage dump of a film…it will stalk them in perpetuity.

Chicago Reader critic Micco Caparale, 12.19:

N.Y. Post critic Johnny Oleksinksi:

Incidentally: Before yesterday’s screening of The Iron Claw I hadn’t realized how short The Bear ‘s Jeremy Allen White is. The guy is only 5’ 7”, or seven inches shorter than the late Kerry Von Erich (whom he plays in the film) and an inch shorter than Humphrey Bogart.