As I mentioned last week I’m in the midst of selling the rumblehog and trying to buy a nice little tool-around car — $4K or less. No daily commuting, no long trips, steady as she goes. I’ve looked at several modest vehicles that seemed promising, but which were quickly sold before I had a chance to clear my throat and make a move.

The basic rule is “take a test drive, look the seller in the eye, and then buy with your gut.” That’s because sellers are always evasive when I ask for the VIN# (basic history search), which of course makes me suspicious. And with most of the sellers living in outlying burghs like Compton, Bell Gardens, Long Beach, Santa Ana or Camarillo, arranging to show the vehicle to my West Hollywood mechanic (standard procedure for any sensible person) is damn near impossible.

I’ve been seriously focused on six or seven cars over the last ten days and they were all sold before I had a chance to talk turkey. So if I’m willing to buy a car without having time to search the VIN# (buyers have been resisting this request during initial texting) and I’m willing to buy it without my trustworthy local mechanic (Carlos at the corner of Fairfax and Melrose) having a looksee, I might be able to make the deal.

But if I think cautiously or methodically and meticulously — any stalling or any kind of step-by-step inquiry, or even trying to arrange for a mere verbal conversation — if I do or say anything other than “Yes, I’ll be right over with the money!” — somebody else will swoop in and buy it within a day, and sometimes within hours.

Compton seller last week: “Everyone knows that if you buy a ten-year-old car, you’re buying a car that will experience a few problems. There are no whistle-clean deals…no blemish-free, pure-as-the-driven-show used cars. You just have accept that and go with your gut…”

Exactly three years ago I slipped on some ice in the Sierra foothills, just south of Mt. Whitney. It was totally my fault for having worn my brown suede Bruno Magli lace-ups in a sloping area that was experiencing an icy snowfall at the moment.

Nothing was broken but over the following three or four weeks I was agony. Sleeping was quite difficult; so was breathing at times. A cane was my constant companion. From the instant I fell I was the antithesis of Lee Marvin toughness. I even wept a couple of times.

Posted on 2.17.19: It was chilly and gently snowing as Tatyana and I trudged around a snow-packed area near a blocked-off road in the Sierras, south of Mt. Whitney. Took some nice shots, a good slow-pan video, satisfaction.

On the way back to the car I stepped on a harmless-looking patch of snow which had suddenly become icy. Total slip-out, feet in the air and a terrible crashing collision.

I literally heard a slight snapping or cracking sound as I hit the ground. I half-landed on my right arm and half on my right rib area. It hurt like a bastard plus my wind was knocked out. For five or ten seconds I whined and moaned like a candy-ass. If Lee Marvin had been there he would’ve been ashamed of me. Or for me.

I eventually got up and managed a brusque “I’m okay.” 100 feet later I fell again. Fucking 25 degree downward angle plus that icy snowfall. Then we couldn’t get the car out of the parking lot due to the same slick ice. After some struggling we figured it out. Jesus.

No broken wrist or broken arm, no leg bruise, 100% arm, hand, leg and neck mobility, no lung damage and just a couple of small cuts on my right hand. But my right rib cage aches like a sonuvabitch.

As we speak Tatyana is driving me to a Cedars Sinai Urgent Care clinic on Wilshire near La Cienega. What are they gonna do if I have a cracked rib? Wrap my mid-section in one of those high-tension bandages? Prescribe some pain pills?

X–Ray Result: No cracked ribs. But at the risk of sounding repetitive, it fucking hurts.

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Erik Anderson‘s kneejerk, groaningly familiar view of Elvis Presley and, by current extension, Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis is going to be with us for several months to come.

Racism is obviously alive and well in many pockets of the country today, but the kind of racism that penetrated most of the USA in the early to mid ’50s was more virulent and less modified. People of color were saddled with all sorts of unpleasant associations, and one of the offshoots was that rhythm and bluesy versions of “race music”, or what came to be known in the ’50s as rock ‘n roll, were regarded askance, particularly by the parents of baby boomers.

Teenage kids of the James Dean generation loved Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino (ditto the younger boomers who were tweeners at the time), but their parents were appalled and many radio stations were concerned by the implications of raw, lewd sexuality that black music seemed to contain.

Hence the famous Sam Phillips quote: “I always said that if I could find a white boy who could sing like a black man I’d make a million dollars.”

Presley may have grown into a drug-dependent asshole when he get older and perhaps less and less respectful of his roots, but by all accounts he genuinely loved “negro” spiritual music as a young kid.

“A lot of people in retrospect attack Elvis for stealin` the black music and making it white. I say Elvis Presley had a black soul with a white face” — Michael Ochs.

“I don’t think he [Elvis] ripped ’em off,” B.B. King said. “I think once something has been exposed, anyone can add or take from it if they like. He was just so great, so popular, and so hot — and so anything that he played became a hit. To me, they didn’t make a mistake when they called him The King.”

In the ’50s Presley’s music was popular in the black community. As noted by Michael Bertrand, author of “Race, Rock and Elvis”, between April 1956 and September 1958, Presley had 22 songs among the Top 15 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues charts — charts that were “meant to capture the tastes of black listeners and buyers.”

“A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man’s music,” said soul singer Jackie Wilson, “when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis.”

Presley to Jet‘s Louie Robinson: “A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it –I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid — like Rev. Brewster’s church [in Memphis].”

Quote: “Presley’s genius was his ability to mix multiple styles of music from the white and black cultures. Early in his career, a Memphis columnist summarized Presley’s singing style: “He has a white voice [and] sings with a negro rhythm which borrows in mood and emphasis from country style.”

Post-Tik Tik…BOOM! and especially post-swooping down to save the falling Zendaya in Spider–Man: No Way Home, Andrew Garfield is in a more-or-less excellent place these days. Or he was, rather, until this Vanity Fair cover appeared.

Garfield needed to dress down or otherwise butch up (i.e., stressed leather motorcycle jacket, jeans, boots, torn T-shirt) to counter-balance that overly sensitive emoji thing that has been his brand for years, but instead he’s doubled down. What color is the suit, arterial pink? The flared slacks are so slave-to-fashiony. And those pink and blue lace-ups…my God! No Mickey Mouse watch — that helps.

The late Gordon Willis‘ visual signature was “the Prince of Darkness” — deep, inky, mine-shaft blacks. And yet his Washington Post newsroom in All The President’s Men was accented with bright, eye-poppy colors. Because Willis had adapted to the reality of the setting (or so I’m assuming), and he wasn’t an obsessive.

Janusz Kaminski‘s visual signature is subdued, grayish colors with streams of milky white light. When he shot the same newsroom for The Post, everything looked — surprise! — grayish, subdued, drained out. Because Kaminski is an obsessive. He also didn’t want people saying that had merely replicated the Willis color scheme, at least as far as the newsroom was concerned.

I decided a week or two ago that I wouldn’t be watching any episodes of Jeen-Yuhs, the biographical Kanye West kiss-ass doc by Clarence Simmons and Chike Ozah (aka Coodie and Chike).

From Sasha Frere-Jones’ 2.16 Observer review, partially titled “Four Hour Timesuck”…

Excerpt #1: “Kanye is such an inconstant and fragile character that I’m not sure what a diehard Kanye fan would even look like at this point. He has destroyed any sense of trust with his audience. Whatever community he’s being tied to, the deal falls through. With an outright fabulist like Trump, there is an underlying cause: white supremacy and fascism. If you roll with the embarrassment, you are at least playing a long game. But if you accept Kanye’s complete incoherence, what are you rooting for?”

Excerpt #2: “If you were hoping someone would play Frost to Kanye’s Nixon, that person is not Coodie. He’s a hype man precisely where you want the opposite, narrating this entire mess like Quick Draw McGraw pitch-shifted down, and constantly stroking his benefactor’s ego or talking about his own life.”

Excerpt #3: “In a 2002 clip at the beginning of the third episode, Kanye tells the viewer that he feels Rhymefest has disrespected him by saying that Kanye isn’t a genius yet. Rhymefest, perhaps the only person not constantly kissing Kanye’s ass in this movie, says what maybe everyone has been thinking in the eighteen years since The College Dropout: ‘Who are you to call yourself a genius? It’s for other people to look at you and say. ‘That man’s a genius.’ For you to feel disrespected because somebody doesn’t think of you as something, you gotta get yourself together, man.’

“Startled by the rare pushback, Kanye lamely tries to pretend he is joking, again. He has, as of today, not gotten himself together.”

I’ve been searching for this Ben Stiller Show clip for years, and it’s been sitting on YouTube since August 2020. But not in the right aspect ratio…of course!

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Remember those woke nutcase San Francisco school supervisors who made headlines in early ’21 by announcing plans to remove the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln from local schools (among others), and who were also big equity supporters (i.e., make the grading system easier for BIPOC students in order to address allegedly unfair advantages enjoyed by smarter kids who get better grades)?

And remember how Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia Governors race because McAuliffe endorsed the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools, and particularly because he implied parents who shared concerns along these lines were racist?

Well, the same thing has happened in ultra-liberal San Francisco, of all places. Those woke school board members — school board President Gabriela López, members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga — have been removed from their positions “over a failure to reopen schools last year” due to virus restrictions and particularly due to “unpopular actions aimed at advancing racial justice.”

The San Francisco results are another warning for wokester Democrats — (a) a majority of parents (especially Asian parents) think equity programs are bullshit, (b) they’re into merit, or good grades counting more than enforced social justice policies, and therefore (c) they are going to kill you in November.

Preliminary results showed the vote to oust each of the school board members topping 70 percent. Parents to López, Collins, Moliga: “It feels soooo good to say fuuhhhhhhck you!”

Washington Post: “The board had engaged in moves aimed at advancing racial equity that critics said were divisive and ill-advised, particularly for a period when schools were closed and academic and emotional damage to the city’s children was accruing.

“The board also argued that Lowell High School, an elite program populated overwhelmingly by Asian American and White students, needed an admissions system that would better represent the city’s Black and Hispanic residents. The board’s abrupt decision to alter the admission rules, switching to a lottery, incensed San Francisco’s large Chinese American population as well as others in the Asian community, who read the change as hurtful to students from their community who worked hard and got the top grades and scores.”

If you needed a new TV on 3.16.72, or the day that The Godfather opened in five Manhattan theatres, you could take advantage of a special Macy’s sale and get a 25-inch console color set for only $399 — an exciting $150 reduction from the usual price of $549!

In 1972 $399 was equivalent to $2,623.15 in 2022 dollars.

And if you were on a budget you could snag a black-and-white TV for only $169 — $1,136.70 in 2022 dollars.

I watch the Godfather films (Parts I & II but not Part III) every three or four years. I’ll probably pop open the 2008 restored versions over the next two or three weeks. All hail this mecca of American cinema…this church, this temple, this place of worship and meditation, this wailing wall, this well of souls, this visit to a chapter in the young movie-nurturing life of Jeffrey Wells, this movie-comfort blanket to end all movie-comfort blankets.

Last weekend I watched Kim Aubry‘s Emulsional Rescue, a 19-minute doc about the restoration of the first two films. God, it’s so glorious to just settle into this tale of heroism and devotion and nobility — a story of a team of good guys (led by blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris) saving the Godfather films and making them look better than ever before. And ohhh, those earthy ambers and Gordon Willis blacks!

If you’ve never had the pleasure, please set aside 19 minutes and dive in…

With the 50th anniversary of the theatrical debut of Francis Coppola‘s original Godfather less than a month away, I’ve been asking myself why there’s still no Bluray version of the chronological, extra-long Godfather saga — a 269-minute version of Part I (young Vito in Sicily to Michael murdering the heads of the five families in 1955) and a 149-minute version of Part II (strictly Michael from Lake Tahoe to Miami, Havana, New York, Las Vegas, Washington and back to Tahoe). That totals out at 418 minutes, or 2 minutes short of 7 hours. And that’s without Part III, which no one cares about.

This fan edit DVD version looks like hell, of course. So to properly celebrate the 50th why doesn’t someone get the lead out and issue a 1080p version? Or am I missing something?

Yes, I’m aware that the Coppola-approved The Godfather Saga — A Novel for Television, which aired in 1977 and obviously encompassed only the first two films, ran 435 minutes — 7 hours and 15 minutes or 17 minutes longer than the above-mentioned DVD set. A Coppola-sanctioned Bluray version of this one-time-only presentation would be a great thing to have and hold.

Emotional Rescue talking heads: Coppola, Harris, Steven Spielberg, director of photography Gordon Willis, consulting restoration cinematographer Allen Daviau, Paramount Post Production executive vp Martin Cohen, MPI senior technical advisor Daniel Rosen, MPI scanning technician Chris Gillaspie, senior digital artist Steven A. Sanchez, digital artist Valerie V. McMahon, and MPI technical director and senior colorist Jan Yarbrough.