Washington-based columnist Robert Novak has described his health situation following the diagnosis of a brain tumor as “dire.” He’s immediately retiring in order to submit to treatment. Novak is now the second legendary Washington player who’s been around for decades looking at a very tough deal, the other being Sen. Ted Kennedy. One gathers there’s some kind of linkage between Novak’s diminished condition and his claiming not to have seen or noticed a pedestrian that he hit with his car a couple of weeks ago.

You have to hand it to TMZ.com — they’re always the guys to go to when somebody runs their car off the edge of a road and flips it “several times,” like Morgan Freeman did last night around 11:30 pm near Ruleville, Misssippi . TMZ may be the spawn of satan, but when stuff like this happens, they’re right there (sometimes within minutes), they’re on it and they keep digging, etc.

Freeman and passenger Demaris Meyer, both of whom were seat-belted, were banged up. One source told TMZ that Freeman has “broken several ribs and injured his knee.” But he was reportedly alert and talking to the cops at the scene. Either Freeman and Demaris had both fallen asleep at the same time, or some sort of activity distracted Freeman from focusing on the road…right?

“The most striking thing about the new Batman movie…is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days,” writes James Howard Kunstler in his “Clusterfuck Nation” column. “It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.
There is finally “the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book,” he concludes. “How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We’re so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We’re too far gone — and even without shame — to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there.”

In explaining his decision to leave the L.A. Times, William Lobdell concisely lays out the basic reasons why so many newspapers are going south. But he gets in a good one with a recent quote from a friend: “Bro, face it — you guys are the 8-track cassette of news.”
“The business model for newspapers is broken,” Lobdell writes, “and no one has figured out how to fix it, probably because it can’t be fixed. The smaller the newspaper, the longer its life span in print (four exceptions: the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Washington Post and USA Today). Technology has run laps around the print media — giving readers instant news, open-source journalism, no barriers to become publishers, and an infinite news hole.
“The idea that your daily news is collected, written, edited, paginated, printed on dead trees, put in a series of trucks and cars and delivered on your driveway — at least 12 hours stale — is anachronistic in 2008.” Yup, that point has certainly been made.
Then it gets interesting starting with #11, and pretty much stays that way through #42.

It was early and I hadn’t had yet the coffee, but my first reaction to the Pitt-Jolie twins photo, which People and Hello! reportedly paid $14 million for, was that Brad is starting to acquire a little bit of that puffy-faced, man-did-I-tie-one-on- last-night, Nick Nolte thing. In profile, at least. The second was that Vivienne Marcheline, whom I presume is on the left, is now the third family member to have those lips that launched a thousand ships (along with mom and Shiloh). The $14 million will be donated to charities.

In an 8.3 N.Y. Times piece about Judd Apatow and David Gordon Green‘s Pineapple Express (Sony, 8.6), writer Mark Harris notes that “pot comedies seem to be flourishing lately, so much so that the genre is subdividing. Those who will always view the Cheech and Chong ouevre (particularly 1978’s Up in Smoke) as archetypal can find their natural heirs in the high-and-higher flavor of the two Harold and Kumar comedies (with a third in the works).”

Harris mentions two or three others, but ignores Curtis Hanson‘s Wonder Boys, which I’ve long considered one of the most aromatic “light stone” pot movies ever made.
Getting ripped has been a standard youth rite since the late ’60s. Every generation of high-school or college-age students has been toking up since, at least on an every-now-and-then basis before growing out of it or deliberately putting it aside because, as anyone who’s ever turned on knows, pot “gets in the way” of having a semi-disciplined, semi-organized, semi-productive life. Still, the only people who have never turned on are the 65-and-older geezer generations, or the ones who grew up in the early 1960s, ’50s, ’40s and ’30s. And even a percentage of them have probably sampled here and there.
The population of the US of A is therefore 85% “experienced” these days, and there is nothing all that wild or provocative or envelope-pushy about pot comedies as a result. They’re funny (i.e., Pineapple Express) but in a “sure, okay, whatever” sort of way. They’ve acquired the taint of normality.

The more those oil guys suffer, the more likely the top-dog reactionaries are to eventually give up on denial and realize that global warming isn’t kidding around. It’s literally like Yul Brynner‘s Ramses refusal to set free the Jews and suffering one plague after another. “And yet Pharoah’s heart was not moved.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn had 89 tough, proud years on this planet, and surely knew before his death earlier today that his legacy as one of the great all-time ballsy writers of the 20th Century was unassailable. The 1973 publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a scalding account of Soviet prison camps, led to the Soviet Union giving him the boot the following year. This eventually led to a decampment in Vermont and an 18-year period as a Russian expat. His BBC obit notes that “while living [in Vermont] as a recluse, he railed against what he saw as the moral corruption of the west”…hah! A malcontent and a truth-teller wherever he hung his hat.

David Gergen, a respected right-of-center establishment and political consultant, has said in so many words that in emphasizing the “other”-ness of Obama, the McCain campaign is making a “very intentional effort to paint him” in racially-coded terms. “The McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it,” be began, “but it’s a subtext of the campaign…everybody knows it. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you when you see the big Charlton Heston ad, ‘the one’…that is code for ‘he’s uppity, he oughta stay in the place.’

“You know…everybody gets that who’s from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas’…we get what that’s about. We understand where that’s coming from. That gets across.”
Cue the Hollywood Elsewhere naysaying righties to find some way to spin this in another direction. C’mon, guys — ball’s in your court. We know you can do it. Guys?

It’s fairly well known that in Tropic Thunder (Dreamamount, 8.13), Robert Downey, Jr. plays an extremely pretentious, Oscar-winning actor named Kirk Lazarus who decides to not just “play” a black guy but almost literally become one by changing his skin color and other physical attributes. One result has been is that some of the African-American “slow kids” have taken offense at his performance. Here’s an mp3 of Downey explaining the thinking behind the role, the genesis of it, and so on at today’s Tropic Thunder press junket.

Four Seasons hotel, 2nd floor, 11:20 am

A journalist at the round table actually asked Downey “how is this performance different from 19th Century blackface?” Downey said, “Well, first it’s entertainment set up by people who are high minded enough so the film won’t be racist or offensive. Second, the whole film is based on the idea that what [our characters] do on some level is offensive and who we are on some level is despicable and pathetic. Which is the truth and not the truth. But the part of it that’s the truth is entertaining. How far-reaching can someone’s narcissism go?”
Before accepting the Lazarus role, Downey sifted it all through. “You check your gut and ask, you know, do I feel like the universe is going to support this?” Going into a standup riff, he said that “for a moment I was thinking ‘fuck Ben Stiller…[here is coming to me saying] I want to do a great big movie with you, but I want you to have the highest risk factor and I want to maybe put you up for ridicule and have people, like, hate you for something you should have known was fucking wrong to do.
“We were in rehearsal and I said, if Kirk Lazarus has himself unde the imropession that he’s black but he’s coming up against an emotional interface with a black man….what’s entertaining about this? Just about nothing. So I said, the only thing he knows about black culture as an Australian…is what everybody who doesn’t know anything about black culture but has put themselves under the impression that they know, is that he knows some stuff from some shows…from the ’70s.” He meant The Jeffersons, characters in Across 110th Street, Isaac Hayes.
Downey also indicated his political leanings. To men, anyway. “I’m not a political person by design, but where we’re at as a country, which is often where things are on a global scale…we’re on a precipice where there can be a lot of healing and advancement or things can…out of fear or design or negligence, things can kind of go in a lousy way or stay stuck…and that’s kind of on the menu for the next few months.”
Again — here’s my recording of Downey’s chit-chat

What’s profoundly depressing about the current chapter in the presidential election race is that the smart, informed, semi-educated segment has pretty much made up its mind about Obama vs. McCain, and from here to November the race is necessarily about appealing to the asleep-at-the-wheel types — under- educated podunks, racists, citizens of Bumblefuck, slow on the pickup.
And these people — say it, admit it — have a way of bringing everyone down that is truly relentless and numbing. They’re basically the slow, scowling pudgy guy in the back of the class who rarely does his homework, is always scratching himself and smells like he’s just scarfed down some fast-food chicken.
In her 8.3 N.Y. Times column, Maureen Dowd has portrayed this sinister situation by the lights of Jane Austen:
“In this political version of Pride and Prejudice, the prejudice is racial, with only 31 percent of white voters telling The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.
“And the prejudice is visceral: many Americans, especially blue collar, still feel uneasy about the Senate’s exotic shooting star, and he is surrounded by a miasma of ill-founded and mistaken premises.
“So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?
“Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?
“Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?”