This is far and away my favorite snap of the recently passed Bob Weir. Look at him…20 years old but could easily pass for 15 or 16. And that beaming Peter Pan expression…a tripped-out, light-as-a-feather vibe that says “toodle-fucking-whoo-hoo!”
By all accounts Weir was a happy, easygoing, spiritually nourished fellow who lived an active, buoyant life, and as recently as 20 years ago he half-resembled the guy he was on those Haight-Ashbury steps. But upon hitting his early to mid 70s Weir morphed into a grizzled mountain goat…a weathered, silver-haired, Gabby Hayes-like gold prospector, making camp in the Klondike. Weir passed a week and a half ago (cancer) at age 78.
…vaguely resembles Timothee Chalamet, granted, but my immediate response was that it looks more like late ‘80s or early ‘90s Eric Stoltz. (Two months younger than Barack Obama, Stoltz is now 64 — a jarring realization.) Plus the orange ping-pong ball is the size of a tangerine.
This sculpture indicates something, methinks. It suggests that the worldwide federation of hipster cineastes has planted a flag on the lunar Marty Supreme surface while the hermetic Academy is living on its own planet while doggedly embracing the OBAAPaul Thomas Anderson theology, blah blah.
I realize, of course, that the ICE terror in Minnesota has triple-cinched an OBAA Best Picture win along with PTA nabbing the Best Director trophy. No arguing this. But the international cool cats are almost certainly more into Marty.
Each and every HE day begins with pre-dawn doomscrolling, and it mostly feels like a losing battle…a kind of slow suffocation of the spirit, and it’s all the fault of…okay, it’s mostly my fault for reading this crap, but AI–generatedcopy is truly the malicious element here.
I despise AI prose with every fibre of my being. It’s inhuman, it’s sickening, and it makes me want to throw up. The same bland but odious voice in every social-media article. It’s truly a poisonous scourge.
Wikipedia prose can also be a bit rote and deflating at times, but it’s far more precise and pared down (i.e., referenced and relatable) than AI slop. It mostly, imperfectly deals in straight facts and historical rat-a-tat-tat.
The only semi-positive bounce is that numbing AI prose inspires me to write in a way that sounds like something else — a recognizable human, let’s say…anxious, fallible, quirky, impulsive, disorderly, occasionally sentimental or irreverent, emotional, searching, imbued, somewhat erratic, peculiar, driven. So there’s that at least.
I’m not adapting to the reality of the ghastly cold. All I’m feeling is anger and resentment. Can’t stop thinking about Key West or Belize or Turks and Caicos. Which one of these?
At Davos, Governor Gavin Newsom said European leaders were “complicit” and “pathetic” in how they handle President Trump, adding that he should have “brought a bunch of knee pads for them.” pic.twitter.com/DMB2ZVTms2
I’m going to submit to Nia DaCosta‘s 28 Years Later: Tne Bone Temple sometime this evening. I’m not going in with an open mind. I’m going in with a determination to find fault, and that won’t be hard. I can’t wait to hate it. I’m already miserable and the show doesn’t start for another three hours.
6:05 pm update: I’ve thought and thought about it, and I can’t do this. And I can’t sit through Avatar: Fire and Ash either. I just can’t.
Unlike many who’ve reviewed or reacted to I’mChevy ChaseandYou’reNot (CNN Films), which I wasn’t able to see until last night, I settled into the emotional and psychological aspects with an inclination to (a) not use or reference the ayehole term or (b) use Marina Zenovich’s absorbing, skillfully shaped footage to fortify any contentious or negative opinions I may have stored up about Chase over the decades.
I went into it cleanandserene.
In a nutshell, I found it oddlytouching. It’s not an indictment piece. It obviously penetrates but not with a scalpel or a machete. It listens, reports, contemplates, empathizes to a certain degree.
And I’ll tell you this: there are few things that give me a greater sense of emotional comfort these days than to know I don’t stand with the scolds…that I’m not a shrieking offense-taker or a hyper-sensitive prosecutor.
Here’s a message I sent to Zenovich around 11:30 pm last night:
Marina — It’s an excellentportraitdoc. Very nicely balanced, very even-steven, very humane. Obviously a study of buried pain and bruisings, and a kind of sadness. The gentle piano playing got me; ditto the look of alarm that comes over Chase when told that this or that person has it in for him.
I get people like Chevy, who lives only 14 or so miles from Wilton. I expect a certain brusque callousness…not a problem. So many people are so in love with taking offense, and these are the people, I swear to God, who make life feel sounpleasant.
I always liked Jerry Lewis too, and Lord knows he was no day at the beach. Did I, like Chase, endure a rough, fearful, turbulent childhood? No, but I was certainly miserable throughout much of my tween and teen years. So I feel a certain empathy with people who’ve been dissed and suffocated or, you know, been made to feel morose on some level.
Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake is finally about to open theatrically in the U.S (2.6.26)…finally! Just under three weeks from now. Sony Picture Classics is banking on Cake being honored on Thursday, 1.22, as one of the five choice nominees for the Best Int’l Feature Oscar.
Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term…my idea of an instant classic and all but guaranteed to be nominated, etc.
I tend to be impatient with movies about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote. You can tell almost immediately that it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.
The President’s Cake world-premiered on 5.16.25 under Directors’ Fortnight at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It won both the section’s Audience Award plus the Caméra d’Or. It was thereafter selected as the Iraqi entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, and made the December shortlist.
Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion.
It’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).
The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.
…would he be a grumpy-ass liberal, a fanatical progressive leftie, a Trumpie (HST was heavily into firearms, of course) or, like me, a sensible centrist?
Well, he certainly wouldn’t have any truck with the wokeys…I can tell you that. He would despise them with every fibre of his being. Plus I somehow can’t imagine Dr. Gonzo approving of Trump…can’t go there. Maybe he’d find Trump’s perverse egoism amusing on some twisted level.
I don’t know who or what HST would be according to the bizarre social-political terms of 2026.
I read it early this morning and dashed off some reactions to the guy who sent me the link:
“Did you read this thing? It’s not just thin and coy and teasing but…what’s the term?….infuriating. The notion is that somehow Hunter didn’t shoot himself all on his lonesome. Arango dances and tiptoes around this possibility, but that’s all. He certainly doesn’t plant his feet and just say it, whatever it is. He doesn’t even offer possible scenarios.
“Plus there’s not a single mention of the fact that the Owl Farm, the Aspen-adjacent property where Thompson lived for decades, is located in Woody Creek and is quite close to the famed Woody Creek tavern, which I visited in the mid ‘90s. Yes, there are ample mentions of Aspen, which has great slopes and is top-heavy with billionaires but so what?
What is the exact evidence or even the loose-talk suppositions that indicate “something more than suicide” or “assisted suicide” may have occurred? Arango doesn’t say diddly squat.
It is faintly hinted that either Anita Thompson, Hunter’s widow, or his son Juan might not be letting on about something or other
Last year Anita, now 53, passed along some presumably compelling evidence to Michael Buglione, the sheriff of Pitkin County, and in so doing triggered a three-month-old, still-unfolding investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. The fact-digging has been simmering since last September.
But wait…whoa…two thirds through the piece Arango parenthetically mentions that Anita declined to speak with him for the article. Well, why? Anita wants some deep, dark secret to be revealed by going to the authorities, clearly, but she ducks the probing eye of the N.Y. Times? Arango doesn’t even speculate about her motive[s] in blowing him off.
Articles like this make me want to take a swing at someone. Has Arango ever heard of plain declarative sentences? Or, you know, basic instructional story construction?
AI Sez: “The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) consistently ranks as a top podcast globally, often #1 on Spotify and recently hitting #1 on Apple Podcasts in 2025, averaging around 11 million listeners per episode.”
With the 2025/26 Oscar nominations due to be announced on Thursday morning, there’s a last-minute Gatecrashers effort to rapidly post our own preferences. And yet there’s a certain lethargy in the air…the OBAA effect, I mean.
