Bari Weiss‘s five-day-old FP interview with Woody Allen delivered, for me, a wonderful current of calm…a soothing and settled feeling of luscious well-being. It made me feel as if I understand everything…all of it. I felt like I was cruising on a Lemmon 714. I could have listened to a three- or four-hour version.
The only thing I didn’t care for was Allen’s refusal to condemn the woke insanity wave of 2019 to 2024…five or six fucking years of red-book-waving, career-destroying terror, and to this day 90% of the perpetrators STILL don’t even acknowledge that it happened. Of all the cancelled people in the world, Allen shrugs it off and says that “doesn’t affect me” or words to that effect. It does, of course — Allen mined his anger and outrage over the Mia-and-Dylan accusation quite throughly in “Apropos of Nothing“. But he doesn’t want “that” conversation to color his mind, mood or basic attitude, so it gets tossed.
Earlier this morning I watched two Charlie Rose Show interviews with the late, great Lou Reed — a 2003 interview that included his wife Laurie Anderson, and a 1998 solo interview. More bliss.