We all know how a “death of someone famous” story is expected to read. Family, friends and colleagues describe the deceased as God’s gift to humanity who left a glorious legacy, and was a vessel of pure love, industriousness and boundless energy. And at the moment of departure the entire family was at bedside. No family members were in the bathroom or in the downstairs cafeteria or taking a shower back at the homestead…the family is always there en masse and without exception, standing or praying in a perfect half-circle.

And we all know what we’re expected to say when we read about the death of a noteworthy person. Second verse, same as the first.

I’ve taken some heat three or four times for posting overly candid obituaries. The truth is that I posted only one that could be fairly accused of being a tad insensitive. I’m referring, of course, to the Bob Clark piece that appeared on 4.4.07. The consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t so much what I said (“Very few directors have offended me as much as he did over the years”) as not waiting a week or two before posting. Clark had only died 12 hours earlier.

This morning I came upon a highly unusual post-mortem assessment of Peter Sellers, who died of a heart attack in 1980 at age 54. The speaker was his old friend and Goon Show colleague Spike Milligan, quoted in Ed Sikov‘s “Mr. Strangelove“: “It’s hard to say this, but [Peter] died at the right time.”

That’s the kind of searing observation that only a fellow artist could share or even think. A variation of this sentiment could be that the deceased didn’t die soon enough.

Nine years ago Scott Feinberg‘s posted a 7.25.11 piece about the death of Amy Winehouse (“The Art of Dying Young“). The idea was that it’s not such a terrible thing to check out early if your legend is going downhill anyway. Biological shutdowns will always be traumatic to friends, fans and loved ones, but it may be worse, Feinberg said, to hang on past your peak point.

But how do you know when you’ve peaked? Answer: Nobody ever does. Everyone goes through life saying, “I’ll find a way to turn things around…after all, tomorrow is another day.”

“Most [performing survivors] overstay their welcome,” says Feinberg, “and simply begin to evaporate from the public’s consciousness, either because they find themselves (a) unable to maintain the performance-level that first garnered them fame, (b) are creatively limited by the public’s limited perception of them, (c) are distracted and/or deterred by fame and its trappings, (d) no longer able or willing to compete with ‘fresher’ faces.”

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Joe Rogan and James Lindsay combined: “That’s one of the things going on now. People getting retroactively cancelled for things they did [in the relatively distant past]. We can talk about the psychological side of it…the moral purity thing that’s going bonkers. You’ve gotta think of woke as kinda like a church. ‘Everybody’s a racist‘ is the vibe of the new thing. So you’ve got the woke academics…the woke people who are teaching it to kids, as critical race theory. They’re making the nonsense, and you get this feeling they’re wrestling with their inner demons?

“There’s this book, Robin DiAngelo‘s ‘White Fragility‘…the one Matt Taibbi destroyed…and if you read the book there are all these weird vignettes, [and you can sense that basically the woke nutters] are wrestling with the racism within themselves. Rigid ideologies, can’t be challenged, you cannot in any way veer from the course…this is cult shit, straight-up cult indoctrination stuff.”

HE conclusion: When the woke insanity thing finally subsides and goes away, sensible people everywhere will come for the Khmer Rouge fanatics, and it will be beautiful. Wokesters will have to hide in the shadows like Jean-Louis Trintignant did at the end of The Conformist. Today’s retroactive cancellers will themselves be retroactively cancelled, and then they’ll be forced to eat their own poison. I for one cannot wait for that to happen. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

I feel a little funny about re-posting a piece from the satirical Babylon Bee, a kind of rightwing Onion. I hate the idea of chuckling at any kind of conservative humor, but the Khmer Rouge has become so toxic, so deranged, so over-the-waterfall that, in the words of Richard Gere’s “Mayonnaise” in An Officer and a Gentleman, “I got nowhere else to go.”

I’ve been a Los Angeleno for 37 years, and I’ve never seen or heard a July 4th spectacle like the one that happened last night. It just kept going and going.

@HighSierraMan Thnx @VictorRocha1 for alerting me to this Ghislaine Maxwell update, which drastically changes the over/under bet on how many days before "something" happens. pic.twitter.com/ZfyW2rB4ov

— Steven Gaydos (@HighSierraMan) July 5, 2020

Fans aside, who would be dumb enough to vote for Kanye West for president? Conservative-minded African Americans who might otherwise vote for Trump? Not that anyone will regard his candidacy as anything more than a dopey ego-trip. He didn’t even have the resolve to announce during primary season.

So Thomas Vinterberg‘s Another Round, which would have screened at the cancelled 2020 Cannes Film Festival and might screen at the 2020 TIFF, apparently serves to remind that drinking too much will destroy your life? Okay, agreed, check.

From Bret Stephens‘ “Reading Orwell for the Fourth of July,” posted on 7.3.20: “Right now all the Twitter furors, the angry rows over publication decisions, the canceled speeches and books, the semantic battles about which words take an uppercase and which don’t…[all of this] may seem remote to those who care about more tangible issues: depression, disease, police abuse, urban decline.

“Yet the issue that counts the most is whether the institutions that are supposed to champion liberal ideals will muster the moral confidence to survive. On this July 4, it’s very much in doubt.

“As in so much else, George Orwell was here before us. In connection to the recent vandalism of monuments and destruction of statues, a line from “1984” has been making the rounds — ‘every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.’

“[This] problem today comes from the left: from liberal elites who, when tested, lack the courage of their liberal convictions; from so-called progressives whose core convictions were never liberal to begin with; from administrative types at nonprofits and corporations who, with only vague convictions of their own, don’t want to be on the wrong side of a P.R. headache.

“This has been the great cultural story of the last few years. It is typified by incidents such as The New Yorker’s David Remnick thinking it would be a good idea to interview Steve Bannon for the magazine’s annual festival — until a Twitter mob and some members of his own staff decided otherwise. Or by The Washington Post devoting 3,000 words to destroying the life of a private person of no particular note because in 2018 she wore blackface, with ironic intent, at a Halloween party. Or by big corporations pulling ads from Facebook while demanding the company do more to censor forms of speech they deem impermissible.

“These stories matter because an idea is at risk. That’s the idea that…no society can long flourish when contrarians are treated as heretics.

“That idea, old as Socrates, formerly had powerful institutional defenders, especially in the form of universities, news media, book publishers, free-speech groups and major philanthropies.

“But those defenders are, on account of one excuse or another, capitulating to people who claim free speech for themselves (but not for others), who believe all the old patriarchal hierarchies must go (so that new “intersectional” hierarchies may arise), who are in a perpetual fervor to rewrite the past (all the better to control the future), and who demand cringing public apologies from those who have sinned against an ever-more radical ideological standard (while those apologies won’t save them from being fired).”

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I haven’t splashed around in a pool for a long while. I’ve stood next to pools but at parties…you know. The kids and I used to swim in the West Hollywood community pool back in the mid to late ’90s. I know that if I dive into a pool these days it’s going to take me at least 45 minutes to dry my hair and fluff it up and treat it so it looks right, which is why I’m generally content to just look at pools. I love, however, the thought of clothed people falling into pools or, better yet, being pushed in, especially if they’re dressed to the nines.

I used to swim competitively at the old Mindowaskin Swim Club in Mountainside, NJ. Freestyle, breast stroke, backstroke. I wasn’t strong or disciplined enough to win any blue-ribbons. I was strictly a second- and third-place finisher. Which was the story of my life until journalism started to pan out in the early ’80s.