Around 2:30 am Tuesday morning a trio of guys wearing dayglo green hoodie parkas plus the usual snow gear were shoveling out the driveway of my Wilton condo community. I was awake anyway as I’d just updated my Web.com nameserver codes, but the sound of their snow shovels scraping the driveway surface…”guuhhrrutt!…guuhhrrutt!”…was an eye-opener.

…which is why many of us, probably a large majority, regard Everything Everywhere All At Once, a movie that stinks of pulp Marvelism and rancid Millennial mythology by way of couch-potato product, as a plague movie…the new ruin, the new pestilence, the new terrible normal.

I was tapping out some thoughts about Rupert Murdoch’s sworn admission during testimony over the Dominion lawsuit trial against Fox News. And then I happened upon Rick Wilson’s 2.27 thoughts about same. He fails to note that Maoist woke terror on the left is…okay, not quite as bad as blind Trump denialism about the 2020 election having been rigged, but….okay, let’s not get into that now.

Wilson: “So the Dominion lawsuit depositions from Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are lighting up the internet tonight, and there’s a true frenzy over the revelations that the entire network, even the performative nightside trio of terror.

“They knew Trump lost. They knew there was not then (nor is there now) a scintilla of fraud. They knew, and lied. Over, and over, and over. They chose guests they knew were lying. They allowed story meetings promoting a massive, dangerous lie that reduced faith and belief in the American system. The entire top level of Fox management knew their lies were leading to danger for this nation.

“Just as the GOP once ruled the base and now the base rules the GOP, a slavering, inchoate rage beast demanding more and more…so to is Fox owned by its base. Rupert and Roger’s machine ran off the rails, and they fear their audience will follow the conspiracy crack at OAN or Newsmax or some damn Telegram channel.

“They knew the lies were lies. They fed and fed the beast. The Fox audience is, let’s be honest, unsophisticated.” [HE insert: Undereducated and incurious.] “They’re addicted to ‘hot women with great hair, big tits and degrees from cheap J-schools’ (as Roger Ailes used to say) and ragey bros telling them that their hatred of immigrants, blacks, gays, readin’ and ideas is logical.
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“The question the Fox audience should but won’t ask is, ‘What else is behind the curtain? What else is a lie? What else do they say about us off-camera?’

“Here’s your answer: it’s [mostly] all a lie. The entire thing is a big, dumb, loud performance piece.
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“They’re lying about Ukraine. About Biden (at scale). About all the catalog of imaginary culture war demons. (TONIGHT ON TUCKER: ‘Will Transtifa Terrorist Drag Queens FORCE your kids into Gay Sharia Marriage Veganism?’)

“This is Rupert and Roger’s model at its end state…a seething, metastasizing cancer consuming the minds of millions of Americans convinced by the cynical playhouse of a network of liars, arsonists, and enablers.

“Dominion called their b.s. Fox will lose. They’ll settle and offer a fat check and an elliptical apology.

“If their viewers had the slightest curiosity they’d start asking what Fox is lying about to them now…and tomorrow…and the next day. Because one thing is certain. The lies will continue.”

Hollywood Elsewhere will be switching domains starting around 1 am eastern or 10 pm Pacific. It may take a few hours to populate — be advised. I’ve been with Siteground for two or three years, but I’m heading back to Liquid Web. Here’s hoping it all goes well.

Update: The domain migration (technically a re-migration) began at 1 am on Tuesday, 2.28. I updated the new nameservers about a half-hour later. So far it all looks fine, although “they” say the full worldwide propulgation can take as long as 24 to 48 hours.

[Posted twice before — 6.25.11, 3.10.18] You can make fun of the San Francisco touch-down scene in William Wellman‘s The High and the Mighty (’54), and particularly Dimitri Tiomkin‘s choir-of-angels music, etc. You can call the Christian symbolism tacky, I mean, but I went through something similar once in a private plane as we landed in St. Louis under heavy fog, and it looked and felt exactly like this.

It happened in the mid ’70s. I had hitched a ride across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir, and he agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway…

The fog was so thick as we approached St. Louis that the air-traffic-controller had to talk us down. I was sitting shotgun and the air was pure soup, and I quickly fell in love with that soothingly paternal, Southern-accented voice, telling us exactly what to do, staying with us the whole way…”level off, down 500, bank right,” etc. When we finally got close to the landing strip the fog began to dissipate and the landing lights looked just like this, I swear. And the feeling was the same.

Talk about the welcoming glow of Christianity. It was almost enough, during that moment and later that night as I thought about it, to make me think about not being a Bhagavad Gita mystic any more and coming back to the Episcopalian Church.

…and yet from an opposing perspective it all feels fine. You just have to hang on tight to what you know and are sensing all around, and what you deeply believe.

The EEAAO sweep (I’ve actually just typed those words!) is about cultism and political industry upheaval and a dynamic assertion of Millennial and Zoomer power by the under-45s along with various older lapdogs who want to profit by or otherwise get in on the action.

EEAAO worshippers know that the Daniels film is a peculiar head-trip thing and VERY pulpy, Marvel-esque and Millennial-minded and therefore a huge turn-off for tens of millions of over-40s or over-45s (the loathing for this film is, make no mistake, intense) or anyone, really, who’s acquired a semblance of classical taste.

And they don’t care. They love the fantasy tropes and the hip urban minority identity stuff (queer daughter, Asian family, Jamie Lee Curtis‘s crabby neurotic white woman representing the IRS) and they know it’s a film that has confounded, alienated and/or infuriated the majority (including moderate people like myself as well as your generic flyovers).

The whole woke Oscar brand of the last four or five years (i.e., films that are into apologizing for the venality of Anglo Saxon culture or at the very least are seeking to minimize its presence in films while simultaneously branding those who may object to the venalizing of their identity as the carpings of racists…quite the rhetorical imprisonment mechanism you’ve created there, fellas!) means little or nothing to most Average Joes, hence the plummeting viewership.

If it wasn’t certain before, James Hong locked in Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Best Picture win at the Oscars with this part of his speech pic.twitter.com/qsaSPjEVyk

— Karl Delossantos (@karl_delo) February 27, 2023

EEAAO fans know that the viewing public regards industry voters as curious or eccentric or myopic and to a large extent unconcerned about (or even hostile to) anything except their own cultural power — largely an island unto themselves…a largely anti-straight, anti-white-majority (at least in a rhetorical or social-fashion sense), mostly or at least significantly woke. The in-crowd know this is why the show has no across-the-board cachet, and why there’s no general interest in the Branch Davidian aspects of wokeism, and they absolutely love this state of affairs.

They’ve decided that emphasizing their apartness is a way of emphasizing their moral superiority, which they regard as the only path, the only way. [See “the David Ehrlich bubble”.]

Enough of straight, women-suppressing Anglo-Saxon white male dominance, and up with non-white or multicultural or women-favoring, LGBTQ-trans-embracing identity and stories about same, hence the Best Picture celebrations of Moonlight (anti-“Oscars so white”), Nomadland, Parasite, The Shape of Water, CODA, EEAAO. Six movies that — are you listening? — have ridden on the back of the woke tiger and thereby seized the brass ring.

I latched onto the Ukraine situation yesterday (“Shattered Into Shards”) because from a moralistic perspective it’s a no-brainer. Moral clarity = lacking in moral ambiguity. There is similarly no ambiguity in the essence of what EEAAO is deep down. You either (a) understand what it’s saying and what it represents, or (b) you don’t, or (c) you’ve chosen to ignore the obvious because you don’t want to be seen as an anti-woke contrarian because that might challenge or weaken your political standing and therefore your economic security.

This is what motivates so many out there, including (and I mean no offense in mentioning this) HE’s own Bob Strauss, whom I love like a brother. I feel for him and his situation. I feel for everyone in a sense. Except for the Ehrlich bubble fanatics on Twitter. I really hate those guys.

This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a delusion. This is actually happening. What I’ve described here is as real as the behaviors in Emily The Criminal or the Sicily episodes of The White Lotus.