I couldn’t file today (Tuesday, 9.1) because we got up at 5 am and hiked all morning, and then we returned to the Jacob Lake Inn for a fast snooze which turned into a two-hour hibernation. For me, I mean. Tatiana can’t nap.

At 4pm we impulsively decided to shift gears and head for Monument Valley. We arrived around 9 pm this evening. What with errands, unpacking and general driving fatigue we crashed at 11 pm.

The San Juan Inn in Mexican Hat has turned its wifi signal off to save money. (“Covid!”). I tried to utilize my phone as a hot spot, but that barely worked as the local 3G signal hardly exists. It took three attempts to post this.

A sunset-hour horse ride will be tomorrow’s highlight. We’re meeting the guide at Forrest Gump Hill at 4:30 pm.

What did I miss?

Journo pally: Did you see Biden’s speech today? Fuckin’ grand slam. You’ve got to watch the whole thing. This is a Biden who could actually win.

“I’m totally with you on every one of those posts you’ve done about Portland, the woke shitheads, etc., and the potential that has to add up to a right-wing mythology — the kind of fake-news meme (‘America is under attack!’) that ushers in guys like Trump.

“This speech answers all of that. It attacks Trump right in his sick heart, yet it also articulates a vividly hopeful image of the future the way that Obama and Reagan did. I say this with fingers crossed, but with this speech I’d say that Joe’s now got what all the middling Democratic candidates (Dukakis, Mondale, Kerry, Hillary, etc.) lacked. He’s got…the vision thing.”

You can’t stay at the historic Jacob Lake Inn, a nearly century-old community of cabins with a restaurant, general store and gas station, with a Kim Kardashian attitude. The cabins are spic and span and totally fine, but they’re simple and old-timey with a transporting Herbert Hoover or FDR vibe. (The place was built sometime in the mid 1920s.) Good wifi but no TVs. I love it here. Cool air, 8000 feet high and shrouded by towering pine trees, the Jacob Lake Inn is 55 minutes north (i.e., 42 miles) of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Which is where we’re headed early tomorrow morning.

Jacob Lake Inn, cabin #19 — Monday, 8.31, 10:30 pm.

Our Telluride ‘20 plan was to fly round-trip to Flagstaff, AZ and then (a) rent a car, (b) briefly visit the Grand Canyon, (c) do the festival, (d) hit Monument Valley (which American tourists don’t visit much as a rule) on the way back, etc. When Telluride went south we decided against cancelling the flights and sticking with the scenic stuff. So the first leg of our American Airlines journey (LAX to Phoenix) has just landed…

My first thought was that besides fighting disease and whatnot, an Elon Musk Neuralink brain chip could be used to instill good taste in movies.

Once surgically inserted, the chip could conceivably dissuade the host from wanting to see Bill and Ted Face The Music and lead them instead to the Criterion Channel and Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence.

Call it the HE chip. Or, if you will, the David Ehrlich chip. Or the Jessica Kiang, Bob Strauss, Peter Howell or Glenn Kenny chip.

Millions would suddenly be interested in seeing Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War or Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero (’73) or…well, that line of country. Don’t get me started but you get the idea. Cultural benefits!

In my book an 80% Rotten Tomatoes rating spells trouble. Couple that with the reality-face-slap of a 66% Metacritic rating and you’ve come to the final truth of things.

THR John De Fore excerpt: “Dean Parisot‘s Bill & Ted Face the Music is almost exactly as good as its two big-screen predecessors — make of that statement what you will — while cleaning up some, but not all, of the things that might make an old fan of those films cringe today. Despite a dicey opening, the pic should please those looking forward to it, and, with the addition of a new generation (the duo’s daughters), attract a new fan or two as well.”

“Pic should please those looking forward to it“?

Frank Pierson‘s “My Battles With Barbra And Jon” is/was a New West article that was published just after the 12.19.76 opening of Pierson, Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters‘ A Star Is Born.

I mentioned Pierson’s piece in yesterday’s “Soggy Speculation Thickens” post, but a link on the Barbara [Streisand] Archives website has been removed.

Last night I found the Pierson piece on the Wayback Machine. It’s a longish read.

Key passage: “For us, the picture cost $6 million and a year of our lives. For the audience it’s $3.50 and an evening out. If it’s a bum evening, it doesn’t make me any better or worse as a person. But if you think the film is you, if it is your effort to transform your lover into a producer worthy of a superstar [and] if you think it is a home movie about your love and your hope and your deepest feelings, if it’s your life that you laid out for the folks and they don’t smile back, that’s death.”

I’ve pasted it forthwith:

In the summer when school is out, Instamatics and flashcubes at the ready, they wait outside the homes of the stars. Hoping for a glimpse of Paul, or Clint, or Steve, or Barbra. A glimpse of a radiant life, full of wealth and fame and sex and happiness.

Pursuing in their lemming way this fantasy of stardom, they have driven Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, her ex-hairdresser, now her partner in life’s adventure, as far as they can retreat, up a narrow country road, overhung with great oaks and eucalyptus, to a rustic ranch house buried in the Malibu mountains.

But the fans are already there, lurking outside the gate, glaring at visitors. Jon is not dismayed. He roars with exuberant laughter — “We’re training the dog to attack.”

Barbra is not happy. Her brow is furrowed and her eyes are full of hurt. “What do they want from me?” she asks. And yet they’re the paying customers whose unending eagerness to pay $3.50 and up to see Barbra show emotion is making all this possible.

All this is a golden forest, where Barbra and Jon are at play like children of the gods. The ranch house is all earth tones and artfully aged wood, peopled with Art Deco statuary, every corner filled with antiques, pictures, elegant rugs and throws and shawls, lamps, plants, objets d’art of every description, none of it going together, in such profusion only an impression of magnificence is generated. For some reason it doesn’t seem cluttered, which is perhaps part of Barbra’s secret. It is like a magical attic, in which every trunk and old discarded hat rack or moose head has a sentimental history, printed on a card. Nooks and crannies abound, a great house for hide and seek. It is completely satisfactory; I believe Barbra Streisand lives here.

A new garden is being started today, during my first visit. It arrives on a truck, and the entire thing is planted before lunch, with everything in bloom. It reminds me of an old Hollywood joke about Cecil B. De Mille and his extravagant film vision of the Bible: “This is what God would do, if he had the money.”

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The nation’s moral conscience needed to be challenged and goaded after the 5.25.20 George Floyd murder. Nobody’s ever questioned that. But then the challengers and goaders wouldn’t leave, and it’s been going on for nearly three months. Yes, it happened again with Jacob Blake, but that wasn’t quite as open-and-shut. Either way I think most of us kinda get it now, but maybe not. Maybe we need to keep being prodded and reminded and shouted at while eating on a permanent ongoing basis because, you know, a lot of us are slow.

Maybe we should drop to our knees and thank all the wokester shitheads out there for refusing to back off in the Northwest and Chicago and occasionally D.C.? Because America needs this element (nightly agitation, rightwing militias, shootings, storefront trashings) in our lives, and especially because we need to prod as many rurals as possible into thinking about not supporting Joe Biden. This is our charge.

People in the crowd are setting off firecrackers and shining flashlights into homes here in DC as the march continues pic.twitter.com/mZ2xGXr6go

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) August 31, 2020

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“I’ve been kinda down, as you know. Last two or three years, maybe longer. But I gotta tell ya it feels great to be doin’ better, at least as far as tonight is concerned. And I’ll tell ya one thing — even if you’re down you still gotta put on the brave face and bring the old kezazz. ”

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix, 9.2) is one of the most interesting creep-outs I’ve come across in quite some time. Please try to see it this coming weekend as I’d love to hear some reactions.

As I mentioned in my 8.27 review, I made a decision to more or less blow off the “what’s really going on here?” aspect and process it through the filter of my own push-pull feelings about my parents and my upbringing, and those little flashes of high-school trauma and heartache that have never really gone away.

The film basically conveys a feeling of being awash in a flood of suppressed memories that won’t quit lapping against your pilings. You might be unsure what to make of it. You might hate it or find it fascinating or somewhere in between, but it’s certainly not a trifle. I think that “psychological horror film” is an overly reductive way to describe it.

You’ve probably read that Rodgers & Hammerstein‘s Oklahoma! figures prominently in the film’s second half. Near the end a song called “Lonely Room“, sung by the Jud Fry character in the original 1943 production but cut from the 1955 film version, is performed in a surreal high-school production of the play. I had never heard it before seeing Kaufman’s film a few days ago. “Lonely Room” was restored for the 1980 and 1998 Broadway and London stage revivals of “Oklahoma!“.

The original Broadway production opened on 3.31.43 at the St. James Theatre.