As I mentioned the other day, I once tried to play drums (i.e., none too successfully) in a semi-conflicted Connecticut blues band. It was fun but I was the weak link. The band had five names at different stages of the game — the Golden Rockets (which I hated), the Sludge Brothers, Blind Pig Sweat, Amos Bouldcox and Dog Breath. My problem wasn’t a lack of joie de percussion, but that I obliged to bang it out on a conventional drum set when my true gift was in the realm of thigh-slapping and coin-jingling and simulating bass riffs in my throat. Today we have sensitive-enough microphones that would permit me to do that.

Hollywood Elsewhere has to drive out to Burbank airport around 10 am in order to arrive at long-term parkling by 10:35 or 10:40 am in order to catch the shuttle and be at the gate by 11 am for a Las Vegas flight that leaves around 12 noon. Okay, I guess I don’t have to be there precisely by 11 am but why flirt with fate? Because there’s always something else I want to post, that’s why, and I’m compulsive that way.

Arriving LV at 1:05 pm. Check in at the Hard Rock by 2 pm. Off to Ceasar’s Palace on foot by 3 or 3:30 pm. Pick up badge by 4 or 4:30 pm. And then do a little filing between then and the first event.

Did I mention this is all about Cinemacon? I didn’t? Ah, well. “It’s the charge, it’s the bolt, it’s the buzz, it’s the sheer fuck off-ness of it all. Am I right?” Wells to Katherine Brodsky: Name the film, the screenplay author, the actor who said it and so on.

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) dropped acid with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Jane (Peyton List) on Mad Men this evening. It amused him for the most part. He didn’t appear to experience the exhilarating first hour (i.e., elevator in the brain hotel) and he didn’t travel inward in any noticable way, much less get “beautiful” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term. He held onto himself, kept his distance. Stared, listened. Which I found comforting and disappointing. Roger just wasn’t made for those times. And he doesn’t know or care all that much about Jane.

You don’t have to drop acid to realize that we’re all intertwined and vulnerable, so delicate and ethereal and humming the same ohhm, sharing the same pulse…everything and everyone in ways that defy strenuous attempts to explain. And all you have to do is let it in. Or not. But it’s there either way. For this and other spiritual “aha!” moments and sink-ins I have LSD to thank. I wouldn’t touch it with a 20-foot pole today, but without it I never would have known what I know or at the very least remember, for whatever that’s worth.

“I know, I know, you’ll probably scream and cry that your little world won’t let you go…”

I don’t know if Devin Faraci has been “beautiful ” or not, but he understands the LSD thing pretty well.

Sasha Stone and I had an okay time on the phone today…mostly. It all started with my telling her about Richard Linklater‘s Bernie, which I really liked after seeing it the second time last week. But I wasn’t getting through. I tried but I couldn’t explain it right. Which is a way of saying that Bernie, a perfectly made film that doesn’t fit into any one category, is probably toast.

Then we talked about the Cannes lineup, and in so doing revealed that we’ve read very little so far and haven’t thought much about the selections. But it was a start.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

For what it’s worth, I finally caught up tonight with Game of Thrones (the second episode apparently), and it might be the most intriguingly acted and smartly written drama of this type that I’ve ever seen. I loathe the idea of any medieval fantasy TV series based on a series of fantasy novels blah blah, but Thrones operates on a somewhat more refined and cultivated level. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have created a literate and semi-upscale (as far as it goes) HBO series about grimy, cynical, ruthless people walking around in tunics and carrying swords. This level of accomplishment is unusual, it seems, for a property that has a related merchandise line (action figures, etc.), two video games and a ready-to-wear Helmut Lang collection about to hit the market. Seriously — medieval CG fantasy bullshit isn’t my cup and this wasn’t too bad. And the gratuitous nudity was okay.

In a 3.26 New Yorker profile of Veep creator Armando Ianucci, Ian Parker reports that Ianucci, for research, toured the White House with Reggie Love, who was then President Barack Obama’s special assistant. And Love, Iannucci recalls, “referenced The West Wing — the show — by saying ‘This is the Roosevelt Room…this would be where Josh and C.J. would…’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why couldn’t you say this is where President Obama sat with Hillary Clinton?'”

At Seville’s Plaza de Espana, the officers’ club in Lawrence of Arabia — i.e., the palace-like buidling where T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) first arrives after being driven into “Cairo” following his trek across the Sinai desert with Farraj (Michel Ray) and Daud (John Dimech).

I’m with Reggie. I do this all the time in my head. To me famous buildings and locations aren’t so much about their own history as backdrops used by great or significant movies, or the basis for sound-stage or CGI duplications.

When I visited a section of Belgium’s Ardennes forest, site of the Battle of the Bulge, in late ’99, I didn’t say to myself ‘this is where the American troops incurred heavy casualties from the German counteroffensive” as much as “this is where Van Johnson and John Hodiak and George Murphy fought the Krauts in William Wellman‘s Battleground.” Yes, I know that film was shot on Hollywood sound stages and against locations in northern California, Oregon and Washington state.

When I visited the United Nations building in Manhattan in the early ’80s, I remember thinking, ‘These are the steps that Cary Grant walked up after getting out of the cab in North by Northwest…and here’s the main entrance hall he walked into…now, where’s the lounge where he met Lester Townsend?” I’ve never been to Mount Rushmore but that, to me, is a total North by Northwest touchstone, and secondarily a famous mountainside monument. All I would want to do after seeing the big faces would be to find James Mason‘s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home (which of course doesn’t exist).

When I visited Spain’s southeast coast with my two sons in late May of ’09 my plan was to visit the a beach called Playa del Algarrobico, which is where the seaside town of Aqaba was built for Lawrence of Arabia. Except I didn’t get there, and I deeply regret that. But I did visit other Lawrence locations in Sevilla.

In early 2000 I drove out to Glendale to visit the JFK Oval Office set of Roger Donaldson‘s 13 Days, and every last detail has been recreated even though the camera couldn’t hope to capture these particulars. Same thing with the West Wing set built to duplicate the Nixon White House in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (’95), which Stone and publicist Stephen Rivers allowed me to visit. To me visiting these sets was just as cool and in some ways better than if I’d been allowed to tour the actual West Wing.

If I ever get out to Dyersville, Iowa, you can bet I’ll visit the Ray Kinsella farm where the cornfield baseball diamond was built.

I could go on and on. Whatever and wherever, what matters to me is what film was shot here and whether or not the actual locales used for the film still exist, or if the geography of the actual locales resembles the sound-stage replications.

Veep premieres tonight on HBO at 10 pm.

“Surprisingly, it’s the Hulk who lumbers away with The Avengers,” writes Boxoffice.com’s Amy Nicholson in a mostly negative 4.20 review. “In contrast to the last two efforts to deepen Hulk with woe and wrath like a minty Brunnhilde, Mark Ruffalo plays him like a guy who just wrapped up a coffee date. His Bruce Banner is scruffy, mellow and at peace with the fact that he’s a normal-ish man doing his best not to slip into a homicidal rampage. In India, he must have done a lot of yoga.

“As he chills out in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s invisible plane, you sense his compatriots musing, ‘That‘s the living embodiment of rage against the machine?’ It is. And it’s the contrast that sells it. Give Ruffalo his own Hulk movie — hey, third time’s a charm.”

About three hours ago I found myself agreeing with and admiring a Fox Broadcasting Earth Day tweet: “Did you know that if we cut our morning shower time by 2 minutes, we’d save enough water to completely fill the Great Lakes every day?” I raised a smiliar point two years ago, and several little bitches said they need to take extra-long showers for various reasons. I argued that a real man doesn’t linger in the warm amniotic fluid of his mother’s womb and gets his showering done in three minutues flat.

It seems pretty clear that The Avengers is going to work for almost everyone, perhaps even me. (Although I can’t entirely accept the idea of Joss Whedon having hit a home run. I’m guessing it’s probably a triple that Justin Chang and others are calling a four-bagger.) But no matter how good it turns out to be, I know I’m probably going to experience issues with costar Robert Downey because he’s been bothering me ever since he went corporate and turned into a franchise whore and a Republican.

And yet when I read Downey’s views this morning in Carl Fussman‘s Esquire cover piece, he sounded like my idea of a perceptive, highly intelligent fellow. A guy I could easily talk to for hours on end. He doesn’t miss a trick. And yet I know he’s a longtime pal and admirer and to some degree a philosophical colleague of Mel Gibson (“Downey has looked up to Gibson as an older brother and authority figure and mentor for a long time,” a onetime Downey confidante told me last December). And that being a rightie Downey will probably be supporting Mitt Romney against Obama. And if he could he’d be making soul-poisoning franchise flicks like Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man and Perry Mason until he’s 75 years old.

He just bothers me these days, and I used to like his work a lot. We’re really only talking about the last two to three years and not even that because I loved it when he slugged that little kid in the stomach in Due Date (’10). But he seems to have traded in that actor he used to be and become a much slicker model. The guy who costarred or starred in Richard III, Restoration, One Night Stand Two Girls and a Guy, In Dreams, Bowfinger, Black and White, Wonder Boys, The Singing Detective, The Outsider, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, A Scanner Darkly, Fur and Zodiac has apparently left the room.

Downey used to be a drug addict in big trouble. Now he’s totally cleaned up, married, a new father, etc. He’s obviously in a better place, and good for that. But sometimes artists and performers are better at their game, or at least are more creatively interesting, when their personal lives and lifestyles are less settled. There’s something about living a wild-ass life and and wondering what and who the hell you are and going through emotional upheavals that seems to feed the right kind of creativity. Sometimes. And sometimes not. I know that unstable and angry John Lennon was more of a creative firecracker in the early to middle years (early ’60s to early ’70s) than he was in his comeback phase of ’79 and ’80, when he was a happy family man. Sid Ceasar was better when he was a live TV crazy man in the middle ’50s who ate and drank too much. Brian Wilson‘s genius period (’63 to ’68) happened when his personal life was highly unstable and drug-riddled.

It may be that Downey’s Tony Stark performance in The Avengers will be completely fine, and I’ll be able to put all this aside. But I somehow doubt it.

“Downey is in the factory business now, the manufacturing business,” the ex-confidante explained. “It’s a different business than being an actor. He’s in the cartoon business. He’s being successful in cartoons. And the way it works is, you keep doing those movies until people get sick of you and those movies are not available anymore. Bruce Willis did these movies in the ’90s until it ran out for him. He kept doing them when he could do them. This is what Downey is doing now. As long as there are offers, and the calendar has slots to fill, you just say ‘what is the deal?’ and ‘what are the dates?'”

Two days ago I was buying Aleve and some Emergen-C packets in a pharmacy, and I was waiting behind a 50ish woman who was having a couple of prescriptions filled. Except she wasn’t entirely certain or satisfied that the medicines she was getting were doing the job, and she was telling the pharmacist about all the aches and pains she’d been experiencing and asking for suggestions and yaddah yaddah. It went on and on and on. Eight, nine, ten minutes.

I’ve stood behind women like this before. She was apparently unmarried (no ring) and presumably a bit lonely, and here was a chance to have a nice nourishing session with the next best thing to the family doctor (which nobody sees any more because general practitioners don’t exist) — a pharmacist at a CVS store. And so I waited and waited and waited, as did the two people behind me. And this woman couldn’t have cared less. She needed counsel and advice, and she was a little worried and fretting and needed a friendly medical authority in her life, and she needed to talk about this and that and “are you sure because I tried this last week and if anything I felt worse,” etc.

On top of which the woman had one of those too-short quasi-pixie haircuts that so many hairdressers tell mid-50ish and 60ish women to try because longer hair doesn’t look good because their hair isn’t as thick or buoyant as when they were younger and looks raggedy if worn at a longer length and therefore emphasizes age. But this shorter cut has become so ubiquitous that if you’re a woman who’s reached that threshold (55 or beyond, let’s say) there’s nothing that makes you look older and says “timid and going downhill and planning to move into an assisted living facility ten years from now” than to wear your hair shorter.

There’s nothing more reprehensible in any men’s clothing department than Gold Toe socks. These are truly the sock of schmucks. John Travolta was wearing a pair when he danced with Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and in my mind his stock dropped about 20 points right then and there. You’d have to be awfully clueless to walk up to a display of Gold Toe socks and say to yourself, “Out of all the socks being sold in this store, these are the shit!” If someone takes their shoes off and I can see they’re wearing a pair, I would immediately write them off. Just saying.

Collider.com’s Adam Chitwood confided today that the third trailer for The Dark Knight Rises will be attached to prints of The Avengers when it opens on 5.4. This is heartening news because henceforth we’ll all have a Dark Knight trailer to look at that doesn’t begin with a boy at a football game singing “Oh, say can you see…?” God, I hate that trailer! I literally flinch when I hear that soft eunuch voice.