Monthly Archives: January 2019

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 2 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right


I worked with Kurt at Newsweek. He’s super plugged-in. Read the whole thread on his timeline.

Starting Five

The money’s on the bedside table

1. Agent Orange?

The problem with investigating whether a father is molesting his daughter or a mother beating her children is that once the accusation is leveled it cannot be retracted. And unless there’s sufficient evidence, that potential victim has to return to live with the parent and face even harsher music. At least for awhile. This is why Child Protective Services always try to separate the children from the parents, especially during the investigation.

The problem with the FBI investigating whether the President of the United States is in league with a foreign adversary is somewhat analogous. The Director of the FBI works for the President, hence to launch such an investigation is to betray your boss. Which puts you in sort of a Catch-22 situation: If you’re wrong, you’re done. And if you’re right, you may also be done because he’ll do everything in his power to discredit you and call YOU the traitor as a means of playing the last card in his hand. The….um….Trump card.

What we do know now, via Greg Miller of the Washington Post: “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.”

We also know that “President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.”

Fishy, at best.

Then there’s this. It was a “Yes” or “No” question, and he was unwilling to provide a definitive answer:

The New York Times piece about how the FBI initiated its investigation into Trump and a possible Russian compromise ends with these two paragraphs:

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Donald Trump isn’t as smart, nowhere near, as Richard Nixon was. And he’s even sloppier.  As far as we’re concerned, it’s only a matter of time before Robert Mueller’s investigation is released and, given how thoroughly this has likely been done, given how many accomplices of Trump’s have already copped to plea deals, the evidence will be overwhelming. After that it’s just a matter of whether Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham want to do their jobs or if they choose to go out like the warden in The Shawshank Redemption.

But it’s going to happen. And the stain of the Trump name will last for a long, long time. Barron, we suggest changing your name and perhaps moving to Saudi Arabia.

2. Homeland

The Chiefs last hosted an AFC championship game in 1970.

Kansas City. Los Angeles. New England. New Orleans. All four home teams won. The AFC teams won by blowouts, the NFC games were closer. But all were mostly a snooze. Now we get conference championship games that were sequels of two of the better games played all season (Pats 43, Chiefs 40; Saints 45, Rams 35) and a potential KC-LA Super Bowl that would be a leftover from the most exciting game of this or most any season (54-51, Rams).

Bree wears the same colors in his Hall of Fame NFL career as he wore in college at Purdue

The most intriguing potential non-2018 wrinkle would be a New England-New Orleans Super Bowl pitting a pair of legendary 40-something QBs who are among the most prolific passers in NFL history: Tom Brady, 41 and gunning for his sixth Super Bowl ring, is No. 3 all-time in passing  touchdowns and No. 4 in passing yards and pass completions. Drew Brees, 40, is No. 2 in passing TDs and No. 1 all-time in passing yards and pass completions.


The Colts lost, but this was the highlight of the divisional round.

Hosts next Sunday: K.C. and New Orleans.

3. Wall War I 

This was Donald Trump’s words of advice to the graduates at Wagner in 2004. You don’t say, Donald…

Interesting. Here’s what sort of escapes our understanding. Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that we need to do a better job of border security. An effective president, one who understands that this nation operates under the rule of law, could simply appeal to the electorate by saying, “We need a wall in order to effectively fight the rampant breaking of the law that is illegal immigration.”

Now, some of us may not agree with him that a wall is a necessary strategy, but it’s impossible to dispute that the border is porous and that a large number of people illegally cross it each month. You or I may not consider that unethical or even harmful in any way (or you may), but the facts show that there are laws and they are broken daily. And liberals supposedly love the whole “rule of law” deal, so to deny this is to be a hypocrite.

The problem with Trump, and the Republican Party, is that it cannot stop there. He and, by its complicit silence, the GOP, needs to make these people your bogeyman. Rapists. Cold-blooded killers. Drug dealers. Those types are by far the aberration.


Consider: Using this logic we should be eradicating Catholic priests and Christian pastors because a good number of them are pedophiles or child molesters or perverts or adulterers. Now, you may argue, but those are the aberrations. Bingo. So is the MS-13 gang member.

The wall is not an effective weapon, it is a large waste of money, and the reason Trump is using to trumpet it–NATIONAL SECURITY—is a canard. The worst thing you can say about 90% of illegal immigrants, if not greater, is that they are technically breaking a law.

What the wall represents, for most of its supporters, is a stopgap between white, Christian chauvinist America and the future (if not the present). There’s no wall big enough to prevent the inevitable. Get over it.

4. Travel 2019

Zadar

Tahiti and Wyoming, Costalegre and the Paparoa Track, Gambia and Uzbekistan…

Every year we look forward to the New York Times telling us where we should travel across the globe, even if we haven’t had the opportunity to use our passport since 2010. True. Sad. That changes this year, hopefully.

Here are the paper’s 52 Places To Go in 2019 and we’re already ahead of the game because we live in one of them (31). One down, 51 to go. Can’t wait to see ya, Gambia. We have you on our radar, Zadar.

Eilat, Israel. Good diving at the top of the Gulf of Aqaba.

Two more things: You could take a good three months, if not an entire year, just to visit places west of the Texas-Oklahoma-Kansas-Nebraska-Dakotas western borders here in these United States, plus Alaska and Hawaii, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. I could easily come up with a “52 Places To Go” in just that admittedly large region.

Two, here’s the lucky schlub whom the Times is giving the gig to travel to all these places this year. As we happen to be a straight white middle-aged male with a senatorial-type name and no disturbing back story or religious cult affiliation, we highly doubt we will ever be selected for this duty. Alas…

5. Laine-y!

Did you have Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Seinfeld cast member who would graduate to the most successful post-Seinfeld comedy career (with maybe Bryan Cranston going on to the most overall success)? We missed this when it happened, but here JLD, who is not a stand-up comic per se, delivers an address both heartfelt and hilarious. The dig she gets in on Veep co-star Tony Hale may be our favorite moment.

Second favorite? When she points out just how hard Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David, worked on his eponymous show as her voice cracks a little. I don’t think people ever appreciated just how much effort went into that. Half, if not most, of being a genius is just putting in the overtime.

Reserves

Believeland > La La Land

We’ll admit we’re mostly bored with the NBA (blame us, that’s fine) but it was a bizarre weekend: On Friday or Saturday—we forget—the Phoenix Suns, the worst team in the West and missing their top player, Devin Booker, beat the Denver Nuggets, the top team (by record) in the West. On Sunday the Cleveland Cavs, the worst team in the NBA,  abetted by all five starters scoring between 15-20 points, beat the Los Angeles Lakers (minus LeBron) at Staples.

Music 101

Jump

In high school there were bands we loved, we liked, we didn’t think twice about and then, a couple that we actively despised. Put Calgary-based Loverboy in that final group (the headband, the scarf, the 2-sizes-too-tight red pants: What were you thinking, or hiding, Mike Reno?). This was their most redeeming effort, even if it was the second-best tune with this title released during our those years.

Remote Patrol

Syracuse at No. 1 Duke

8 p.m. ESPN

Cam Reddish’s last-second three-pointer in Tallahassee on Saturday preserved Duke’s No. 1 ranking (not that it means much of anything) (especially in mid-January) (no, we’re not cynical) (no, you shut up!)

Okay, the Cuse isn’t all that good this season, but here are the numbers combined for coaches Jim Boeheim and Mike Krzyzewski: 80-plus seasons, three schools, 1,978 victories and six national championships. This will almost certainly be their last meeting at Cameron Indoor.

CHRIS PICKS! DIVISIONAL ROUNDS AND DALLAS COWBOYS

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by Chris Corbellini

Divisional Picks: America’s Team … and some other teams that play this weekend

(SITTING HERE ON A FRIDAY NIGHT, TRYING TO ENCAPSULATE A LIFELONG SPORTS OBSESSION)

(SITTING HERE)

(SITTING HERE)

(ABANDONED A LEDE WHERE I SAY MY NAME AND ADD I AM AN ADDICT — OF A SPORTS TEAM)

(OK, I’LL USE THE GOODFELLAS OPEN)

(YOU CAN’T GO WRONG WITH THE GOODFELLAS OPEN)

(ALRIGHT, HERE GOES)

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy.

Given my upbringing in suburban New York, and the stone-cold fact that I’ve never lived within 1,500 miles of Dallas, this makes as much sense as a platypus dry-humping a volleyball. That’s quite a visual for you, I’m sure — and almost as bizarre as a kid wearing a Herschel Walker jersey down the hallways of a Big Blue Central School District. Yes, I follow and have a rooting interest in the rest of the iconic NYC sports teams – Rangers, Knicks, Yankees, St. John’s in March – and yet in pro football, where I’ve spent most of my career, I bleed Dallas Cowboy.

If I made a list of things worth living for, Amari Cooper’s sublime double moves would be on there, side by side with steaks at Peter Luger’s, the view from Diamond Head, St. Mark’s Square in the moonlight, and the Heather Thomas poster from the 1980s.  Just today, I walked through Grand Central Station and mused how it’d be great to see the Cowboys Star dead-center on the main floor, replacing the info booth. Again, my blood type is Cowboys-positive. I’ve had it checked.*

And it’s not like I’m hiding vodka in the broom closet here. My hometown and college friends know my allegiance lies with a Texas team, so whenever the franchise takes a hit (T.O. crying about Romo, the ‘07 divisional playoff, the Dez non-catch in Green Bay), I’ll inevitably get a text from someone I haven’t heard from in awhile, or receive a smarmy-as-f-ck Facebook post. Which is certainly fair, because I can be the smarmiest of all if the Cowboys beat the Giants – which, by the way, happened twice this season. And that’s a shame, Giants fans. Truly. Be careful now … you’re getting failure all over my floor before I have visitors over for the playoffs.

And yet, even had I grown up a Dallas hater, I’d still have to concede that the Cowboys have been a big part of my career, perhaps more so than any other franchise, in any sport. To wit:

-In May of 2004, during my final NFL Films job interview, the shop’s coordinating producer asked me what I thought of the Dallas Cowboys draft. Here was my first test of football knowledge, and certainly not the last over the years that followed. I told him it all hinges on the development of their second rounder, Notre Dame running back Julius Jones. It didn’t work out that way (Jones had just one 1,000-yard season), but I got the job regardless.

-For seven seasons I worked on the HBO series “Inside the NFL,” led by legendary producer Bob Ryan, who produced the Cowboys highlight films in the 1970s and actually nicknamed them “America’s Team.” Bob also reviewed my spec screenplay that was part of an application care package I sent to Films (I taped that script, a resume, and a photo of my undefeated Pop Warner team atop a picnic cooler with cold beers inside, and then FedEx’d it to their offices) — and I later discovered he awarded me a B+. The grade was circled in red with an exclamation point on the script’s front page. Considering his standards, I consider that a personal triumph.

Middle linebacker Lee Roy Jordan: If that name doesn’t scream “COWBOY!”, what does?

-I was a segment producer for the Cowboys Hard Knocks season in ‘08, and my storyline was about an undrafted, undersized and lion-hearted receiver named Danny Amendola. As one former ex-player told me later: “You put that guy on the f-cking map. He should be paying you.”

-I did several NFL international spots in one five-minute burst with a young Pro Bowl QB named Tony Romo, and thought as I walked away “That dude’s gonna be a TV star someday.”

-I produced a Peyton Manning feature for the NFL Network with Michael Irvin as my talent. The former Cowboys great did a terrific job — willing to do as many takes as necessary to get it right.

-Last year I produced my first NBC Sports piece with one of my favorite NFL writers, Peter King, on Dallas tight end Jason Witten.

-A few weeks later, right after Thanksgiving, I returned to Dallas to direct a piece on Roger Staubach – fitting because he’s the one who started the entire Corbellini Cowboy Fan Club. Staubach is my father’s favorite football player, following his career at Navy and then with the Cowboys after his military service, and when I mentioned that to the former Dallas great after our interview, he then asked if we were related to a “Bill Corbellini,” who was a close business associate of his in the area. Staubach and his son both remarked the name was so unique we had to be related somehow (the real estate titan also asked me about undeveloped property near the Javits Center; the man is still hustling).

Tom Landry: Sharp-dressed man

Sports heroes often let you down when you first meet them, but my first and final impression of Staubach was he had a stately quality to him – a quiet, as he sat at his corner office and went through the tasks of his day. I’ve called my father just twice in 20 years after a meet-up with a pro athlete: post-Staubach, and post-Muhammad Ali. That’s the list.  We’re Cowboys fans. You have to be one to understand.

You get older, and you get lost in your day-to-day, and you feel the burden of life being a little unsatisfying like anklets made of stone, and so you must find the joys where you can. Not doing so is wildly irresponsible of you. And a big Dallas Cowboys game still lights me up.

And BTW, I like the Cowboys to beat the Rams in LA this weekend.

(LONG SIGH)

I can’t help myself.

If you still don’t get why, go dry-hump a platypus.

OK, here we have the divisional playoffs. The best NFL weekend of the year. As usual, I have William Hill odds listed, with the home team in caps.

CHIEFS (-5.5) beat the Colts

The Chiefs can’t stop an opponent’s run game — an oddity for a team in the second round of the playoffs — and they’re up against a very good runner-receiver this weekend in Marlon Mack. Mack has become a poor man’s Edgerrin James for the Colts — more than capable of pounding the Chiefs defense senseless. If this game is close Mack could be the difference-maker, with his 10-12 touches in the fourth quarter serving as punches to the kidneys of the Chiefs defense.

Right, right, but this game won’t be close. Both Sammy Watkins and Tyreek Hill feast on zone defenses – and the Colts play zone more than any other team in the NFL. Watkins, admittedly, is questionable due to injury, but how do you not play in this one at Arrowhead?

Cowboys (+7) beat the LA RAMS

Moving on.

Chargers (+4) beat the PATRIOTS

The Chargers defense definitely checked out late in the Ravens wild-card game, allowing rookie QB Lamar Jackson to throw a pair of fourth-quarter TD passes to Michael Crabtree. That can’t happen again against the Belichick-Brady Patriots. And besides the occasional defensive lapse, the Bolt’s weakness is stopping pass-catching running backs (Hello, James White), but that can be game-planned around. Plus, like I mentioned here last week, the Chargers have a rally cry to get behind: Get Philip Rivers a Ring.

Rivers hasn’t forgotten his playoff losses to the Patriots back in his 20s, and I think he’ll really grip it and rip it from his opening offensive series. Never underestimate an elite QB who’s been given a second chance late in his career. The Chiefs and maybe even the Colts would be a greater challenge athletically than the Pats, but New England in New England is the mental hurdle Rivers needs to leap over to ready himself for the Super Bowl. I think it happens.

Eagles (+8) beat the SAINTS

I know. I know. New Orleans absolutely smoked Philly during the regular season. But the Eagles have all the momentum here after that black-and-blue, double-doink victory in Chicago, and the Saints are so much weaker defensively than the Bears. New Orleans ranks 30th in the NFL against an opponent’s No. 1 receiver, 31st against the No. 2 wideout, and 29th against pass-catching running backs (stats courtesy Pro Football Focus). Nick Foles has been locking onto Alshon Jeffery, the team’s No. 1, ever since last year’s Super Bowl run, so this go-around he’ll be a decoy and it’ll be Darren Sproles’ time to shine, with Nelson Agholor also getting involved.

Last week: 2-1-1
Playoffs: 2-1-1

Total: 26-38-1

*(Editor’s Note:  I’m a little older than C.C., but we grew up in suburban New Jersey and same. For me, it was Roger Staubach. I got a Dallas Cowboys helmet for Christmas when I was six and it was like the rapture. Wrote Tom Landry a letter and got a reply.

At age nine Santa gave us an early Christmas present: four tickets to Cowboys at Jets, Shea Stadium on December 21. America’s Team vs. Joe Namath. We sat in upper deck seats in Flushing, huddled under blankets we’d brought, and froze our tushes off for three quarters  before our dad said, “Let’s go. Gotta beat the traffic.”

One week later I was in my bedroom, bawling my eyes out because the Cowboys were about to lose to the Vikings in the playoffs. The rest of my family did not abandon the TV set, and then I heard a loud roar from the den, and that’s how I missed the Immaculate Reception. That season, 1975, the year the Steelers beat Dallas in the best Super Bowl yet up to that moment, was Peak Cowboys Obsession for me.

When, at age 28, I saw Texas Stadium for the first time, I was vastly disappointed. A local who had witnessed this type of letdown from other visitors over the decades tried to explain it to me: It’s not a football stadium, it’s a TV studio. It was designed as such.)

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 2 Comments

by John Walters

 

Starting Five

Lost And Found

“Ohhhhhhhhh, I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I’m still alive/Yeah, I-I-I-I-I-I’m still alive” The 13 year-old Wisconsin teen, Jayme Closs, who’d been missing since the mid-October evening when her parents were murdered in their home, is found, ALIVE and well as can be suspected, in a remote northwestern Wisconsin town.

Late yesterday afternoon, Closs walked out of the woods near the town of Gordon, about 70 miles north of where she’d been abducted on October 15, and approached a woman walking her dog. She asked for help. The woman immediately knew who she was and they ran to the nearest home. When the lady at the house, Kristin Kasinskas, opened the door, she said “it was like seeing a ghost.”

They phoned 911 and within 10 minutes the suspect was abducted. At the moment all that is known about him is that he is 21 years old.

UPDATED: This is the loser who abducted Closs and killed her parents. He doesn’t look like someone who illegally crossed the border from Mexico.

2. Lord Wall-demort

Did someone erect a wall around Ted Cruz’s shaving kit?

In a potential maneuver that could only be described as wildly popular among his MAGA base, President Trump is considering diverting funds that are slated for disaster relief in Puerto Rican (brown people) and California (libs!) in order to construct his southern border wall.

We’re anti-wall, but we almost want to see it constructed just so MAGA land can learn that the drug situation won’t change one bit because of it. The wall’s chief function would be to keep a few walk-thrus who would probably wind up working as the best domestic servant, landscaper or back-of-the-house kitchen help you’ve ever had, from getting through.


You can keep out a few people who are risking everything for a better life with a wall. You can’t keep out the future.

3. Spurs 154, Thunder 147 (2 OT)

In case you missed it…the 301 points are the most in an NBA game since December of 2006, when the Suns beat the Nets in double OT, 164-157…LaMarcus Aldridge scored a career-high 56 points without attempting a single three-pointer. That’s the first 50-point game without a three since Shaq did it in 2000…the Spurs made their first 14 threes and finished 16-19 from beyond the arc, setting an NBA record for proficiency (minimum 15 attempts) in a game at 84.2%…Russell Westbrook had an insane triple double (24-24-13) but it wasn’t enough…Aldridge finished 16-16 from the free throw line while teammate Marco Belinelli was 5-5 from beyond the arc (the Spurs just refuse to play without an off-guard of Italian descent, don’t they? Will Sir Charles start proclaiming, “Be-li-NEL-li!?”

–Elsewhere: UCLA overcame a 9-point deficit in the final minute in Eugene and Bill Walton was calling the game (we switched away when the Ducks were up 65-50 with about five minutes left). Can ESPN simply air that final minute on a continuous loop today?

4. Buster And Friends

Root is one of the five best character actors of the past 15 years or so, no?

A day later and we are still marveling over Buster Scruggs‘ six tales of the Old West, served up Coen Brothers style. We’ve decided to rank our top 10 favorite characters from the film:

–Bank Teller (Stephen Root) in “Near Algodones”

–Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”

–Artist (Harry Melling) in “Meal Ticket”

–Mr. Knapp (Bill Heck) in “The Gal Who Got Rattled)

Buster (Nelson) may be the most charming character on film this year

–Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill) in “The Mortal Remains”

–Prospector (Tom Waits) in “All Gold Canyon”

–Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines) in “The Gal Who Got Rattled”

–The Canyon (Telluride Valley) in “All Gold Canyon”

–Alice Longabough (Zoe Kazan) in “The Gal Who Got Rattled”

–Trapper (Chelcie Ross) in “The Mortal Remains”

Mr. Arthur (Hines) epitomized the laconic, get-‘er-done frontiersman

You’ll notice we left out almost all of the famous actors attached to the project: Liam Neeson, James Franco, Tyne Daly, even Brendan Gleeson. All good, but it was almost better not having much prior recognition of them.

Ranking the vignettes (and this is not an easy task): The Gal Who Got Rattled, Buster Scruggs, The Mortal Remains, All Gold Canyon, Meal Ticket, Near Algodones.

An unofficial 11th-best character, by the way? The jargon. If you are a lover of language (and we certainly qualify), the script here is gold. “My cognomens” or “pardon my apothegm” or “I’m comin’, Mr. Pocket!” I don’t know if Oscar will ignore this film, even though it’s the Coen Brothers, because it’s mostly on Netflix and it’s six separate pieces, but I’d give it Best Screenplay (and Best Score, as well).

5. Yakt-y Yak

Go pull up your Google. We’ll wait. Now type in “Yakt, Montana.” There it is, see, right along the Kootenay River in the northern part of the state. Now scroll up and to the right and you’ll find “Yaak, Montana.” See the Yaak River Tavern?

So far, so good. Now scroll up and to your left, over the border into Canada, in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, and you find Yahk, B.C.

Yakt, Yaak, Yahk.

Obviously, you’d recognize this as Yakt and not Yahk or Yaak

So we’re announcing the First Annual Medium Happy Field Trip (TBD) on which we travel to the trio of Yakt/Yaak/Yahk and get the what-for on this. Bring your passport.

Or you can kick back in Yahk.

Music 101

Bust A Move

This 1990 tune by Young MC won a Grammy for Best Original Rap performance and remained in the Top 40 for 20 weeks. Sure, the rhymes are rather pre-pubescent (She’s dressed in yellow/She says hello/Come sit next to me you fine fellow)  but you keep listening, no? An undeniable classic in the early years of hip-hop.

Remote Patrol

Young Mr. Lincoln

8 p.m. TCM

Young Winston

10 p.m. TCM

I’d argue the singular greatest men, in terms of what they did to advance the highest ideals of freedom and liberty, of their respective centuries. Lincoln here is played by a young Henry Fonda, in a breakout role. Churchill is portrayed by Simon Ward, and if you don’t already know his story as a young man, by the time he was 30 Churchill had fought in Cuba, India, northern Africa and South Africa. He also succesfully escaped from a POW camp in South Africa. For years I’d advocated that someone should make a film about his early years. Turns out Sir Richard Attenborough already had in 1972. My bad.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 5 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right


Unless you’re an obsessive college football/Jalen Hurts/astronomy fan, this tweet may be a little too abstruse. We laughed.

Starting Five

1. All In The Family*

*The judges will also accept “Mobster’s Ball”

It was twenty years ago today…A cold January Sunday evening in New York. We decided to give this new HBO show a try, although we thought the name sounded a little weak. One hour later, we were hooked. This Tony Soprano fella, he wasn’t like any other mobster we’d seen. He wasn’t dapper. He wasn’t particularly well-spoken. He reminded us of the Italian-American dads we’d grown up with in our Middletown, N.J., neighborhood, dads like Carmine Valardi and Sal DeMarco.

Tony was vulnerable. But on a dime he could turn vicious. The show. One moment it was heartless, the next, hilarious. It cared about food.

The next day, a Monday, I told some of my SI friends about it. No one else had seen it. Within three to four weeks all of us, whenever something did not go our way, would be saying, “What? No (bleeping’) ziti?”

Was The Sopranos the best TV show of all time? I don’t know about that. It was the most ground-breaking show, however, since All In The Family. It opened the door for all the great dramas and series (most of them on HBO or AMC or Netflix) to follow: Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men (created by a writing alum of the show), True Detective, The Americans, Game Of Thrones, The West Wing, Friday Night Lights, Deadwood. Maybe it killed network TV (I’m not the only one to say this; it’s not that original a thought). It definitely made TV cooler than the movies.

As for the finale, whatever creator David Chase was trying to do with it (and he’s not telling), the unintentional error of it is how much air that scene has sucked up relative to the other 85 1/2 episodes that preceded it. The NYT writer suggested to him that if anything the scene was hopeful. “There is some hope in it,” Chase replied. “Don’t Stop Believin is the name of the song, for Christ’s sake. I mean, what else can you say?”

Final scene. About 12 to 15 Sunday nights after the series premiere. Three of us are sitting in The Emerald Inn (the old location on Columbus) and in walks the hulking, ursine presence of James Gandolfini. He’s got a bag of recently purchased books from the Barnes & Noble two blocks down. He sits by himself and orders a beer. The three of us watch in awe but we know: don’t bother the famous people. So we leave him alone. About 5 minutes pass and yes, some other bro has to ruin it and approach him to tell him how much he loves the show. Gandolfini shoots him a pained smile and thanks him. Takes a quick sip of beer, gathers his things, and exits. He looked miserable. And that was at the end of Season 1.

2. Premature Exasperation

Remember, he doesn’t have temper tantrums

Whether or not President Trump stormed or Stormied out of the Situation Room yesterday during a bipartisan meeting regarding the government shutdown and border security, he did leave it prematurely. The Dem leaders asked him if he would end the shutdown, now in its third week, while they negotiated, and he said no because “then you won’t give me what I want.”

So when the Chuck & Nancy Show said they would not relent on the wall, he waved his palms in the air and said, “Bye bye” (I mean, you can easily picture this, no?) and walked out. Pelosi afterward, expounding on the disconnect between the president and the 800,000 government employees not being paid, on the White House lawn: “He thinks maybe they can just ask their father for more money.”

Sick burn, Nance. Sick burn.

3. Kliff Notes

Lots of stuff to unravel here: Kliff Kingsbury was interviewing with the New York Jets and Arizona Cardinals last week while still with USC…Kliff said he’d pick Kyler Murray No. 1 overall, which was wild because the Cards have the No. 1 pick and Murray, the ninth overall pick in last June’s MLB draft, just made himself available for the NFL draft…Kliff is dating Fox sideline reporter Holly Sonders, who has filed for divorce from Eric Kuselias (who’s well, kind of a capital D D-bag himself)…Kliff is 39 years old and four of his six seasons at Texas Tech were losing seasons (his best, 8-5, was his initial season) despite having two first-round QB picks play for him (Baker Mayfield and Pat Mahomes, who may be the NFL’ ROY and MVP, respectively, this season)…Is he a better QB coach/OC than HC? We’ll see.

4. Isn’t It Ironic?

We thought this was funny and curious. Perhaps you will, too. In yesterday’s Bubble Screen for The Athletic I noted that on Tuesday, ESPN host Rece Davis mentioned on a couple of occasions that Levi’s Stadium, which opened in July of 2014, has been the site of a Grateful Dead show but that he never mentioned its signature moment, below. Explicitly, verbatim, this is what we wrote: “The B.S. wonders…if you noticed that while Rece Davis mentioned multiple times that the Grateful Dead had played at Levi’s Stadium, he never referenced the venue’s signature moment: Colin Kaepernick taking a knee (If you had “Coldplay performing with Beyoncé,” move three spaces back).”

We weren’t admonishing Davis, although a few readers suggested that we were implying as much. We were honestly wondering why.

Let’s delve further: First of all, the Grateful Dead minus Jerry Garcia is hardly the Grateful Dead. Second, be opposed or in favor or Kaepernick’s gesture if you like, but it is by far the most-discussed moment in that stadium’s brief history. Why wouldn’t ESPN even mention it? My guess is for the same reason readers came at me in the comments for even mentioning it.

But here’s where it really gets funny. The fact that the Grateful Dead doesn’t bother readers in 2019 but Colin Kaepernick does demonstrates how counter-culture eventually becomes culture. Fifty years ago the Dead were seen as every bit as dangerous to mainstream, Flyover America as Kaep is now. If you didn’t already know, the Dead got their start as the house band for Ken Kesey’s infamous and legendary acid test, which were at the vanguard of the hippie/psychedelic movement. They were the soundtrack to the “long-haired, freaky people.”

A must-read for any fan of American history or culture in the 20th century

If you don’t already know about the acid tests (read Tom Wolfe’s outstanding The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), these were all-night and beyond dance parties where a giant drum of Kool-Aid was placed somewhere and LSD was dropped into it. This is literally where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated.

So there’s the irony. You have a segment of the population drinking the Kool-Aid, defending Trump’s misrepresentation of Kaepernick’s gesture, defending ESPN’s right to be inoffensive as opposed to transparent, thinking of the Grateful Dead as more sacrosanct to Git ‘Er Done America than Kaepernick. And yet the Dead were FAR MORE counterculture than Kaep and it is they who helped make “drinking the Kool-Aid” a part of the lexicon.

Gotta love reality. You could never make this stuff up.

5. Slim Fast

So we’re still reading that book (Hank & Jim, by Scott Eyman) and we are reminded how humbling it is to read: The more you learn, the more you realize how much you never knew. And you may say, ‘But, Jdubs, all you’re learning about is celebrity lives and dirty laundry.’ And? We think our friends Mike & Katie would agree that there is nothing more worthy of being learned about.

Anyway, yesterday we came across, Mary Raye Gross, who would later be known as Nancy “Slim” Keith, who is purported to be the Original California Girl. Blonde and blue-eyed, Slim was born in Salinas, Calif., in 1917. At age 16 she traveled to Death Valley where, at the Furnace Creek Inn, she met movie star William Powell (of the Thin Man series). Powell introduced her to William Randolph Hearst and from there it was on.

Clark Gable pursued her. So did Ernest Hemingway. She was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar by age 22 and befriended another young model, whom she would introduce to her by-then husband Howard Hawks (famous film maker: Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, etc.). That model was Lauren Bacall.

Slim, Jim

Kieth/Hawks would never go into the movies, but she would amass husbands (she left Hawks for agent/producer Leland Hayward, who then left her for Pamela Churchill, who then left him for Averill Harriman…and the beat goes on), but she became legendary as a socialite of the Hollywood and 5th Avenue scene. Truman Capote would later lampoon her in an unfinished novel of his and when she got word of it, she never spoke to him again.

One line, casually thrown out by Eyman in his book, made us chuckle. He wrote that Slim was “prone to sarcasm and adultery.”

Music 101

Arnold Layne

This was the beginning for one of the most successful rock groups of all time. The single, released on March 10, 1967, did not exactly catapult Pink Floyd to stardom, but there was a lot more than songs about transvestites who steal women’s mannequins to come.

Remote Patrol

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs

Netflix

Six Western vignettes courtesy of the Coen Brothers, and well worth your time. In the first two death is a punchline, but then it gets a little more serious. We were overwhelmed by the scenery and particularly in the fourth vignette, above (that’s Tom Waits, by the way), it is stunningly obvious to us what a better planet this is without us than with us. Don’t @ me. Do you think the Coen brothers were perhaps maybe trying to imply the same thing? Wait until you watch it before you reply. This is flat-out outstanding stuff, and the fifth vignette could easily have been extrapolated into a feature-length film.

 

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 4 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right


He has friends? No one allows me to hand down sentences, but if I could I’d leave Don Jr. alone and unarmed in a large pen with one animal from every species that he’s killed. That would be fun. And I’d honestly love to see that.

Starting Five

Dabo’s No Dumbo

“S-E-C!”, meet “A-C-C!”

Clemson 44, Alabama 16, and it was really only close for the first 25 minutes. Takeaways:

–Clemson and its folksy, self-effacing coach Dabo Swinney have shrewdly positioned themselves as the Kinder, Gentler Bama (though, who isn’t?). And while you weren’t looking, the revolution already occurred. In the past four years, the Tigers have the same exact record (55-4) and the same number of national championships (2) as the Crimson Tide.

–True freshman quarterback Trevor Lawrence (a.k.a. Sunshine, Fabio, Spicoli, Avatar and Young Roger Waters) validated Dabo’s September faith in him (and by acting when he did, Dabo also saved Kelly Bryant a season of eligibility, so good on everyone) and has a chance to be the closest thing to John Elway we’ve seen since John Elway. Fellow true freshman Justyn Ross (12 catches, 3 TDs, all on home run balls and 301 yards receiving in two playoff games) is miraculous. We’re looking at a Heisman and Biletnikoff Award winner, respectively, here.


–That fake field goal!?! Gah! Nick, what were you thinking? Sure, the score was 31-16 in the second half and Bama likely would have lost anyway, but that had no chance. I mean, when Chris Fowler is calling it out before the snap…Take the points (and we know the kicker was iffy, but you gotta try). That or give Tua a shot. About that…

–Before kickoff Todd McShay said that Tua and Lawrence were both future No. 1 overall draft picks. Maybe simply to save face he’d maintain that even today, but would any GM really take Tua number one overall after that wretched performance (including the early pick six where he threw between his two receivers?). Don’t think so.

Ross goes full Michelangelo on this grab

–Is this a “Tide-al” shift game, a la Bama pantsing indomitable Miami in the 1993 Sugar Bowl but in reverse? Is the Saban era beginning to wane? We’ll see. The Tide do bring in the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class, but ol’ Saint Nick (not jolly) will be 68 and he’s gone through a slew of coordinators in recent years.

–I have more on ESPN’s coverage, etc., but it’s in The Bubble Screen in The Athletic. So why not subscribe, read the story, put in a comment like “The only reason I subscribe to this rag is because JW writes for it…occasionally,” and make my day? I mean, if you’ve been reading this drivel here free for six-plus years, maybe good karma (Or guilt? Guilt work just as well for me) will persuade you to part with $3.99 per month in support? And don’t say, “I’d rather give that money to you, JW,” because we both know you won’t. So that’s today’s screed. Am I buggin’ ya? Edge, play the blues…

2. Wall-To-Wall-For-Wall Coverage

The good news? Donald Trump did not declare a “national emergency?” The bad news? Stephen Miller is still a hackneyed writer and he was playing all of his old material.

If you missed President Trump’s 9-minute barrage of “We Need a Wall Physical Barrier,” which was covered on all three major networks (but thankfully, not TCM), think of it as “Man With Iron Will Wants Steel Wall.” We’re not going to fact-check it here; you can read  that here.


As for Chuck and Nancy’s Democratic response, we can’t beat Charles Pierce’s observation.

Our solution? Let’s build a Wonderwall. Maybe (maybe), it’s gonna be the one that saves me (saves me).

3. Sears Is No Longer Where America Shops


When we were kids growing up in Middletown, N.J., the Sears on Highway 35 was THE department store. It’s where you’d buy the family TV, or a coat or a lawnmower. My sister reminded me how we’d use the carpet displays like slides.

Anyway, Sears, which opened in 1886, is most likely going out of business very soon. There’s a hedge fund and a last-minute bid and some business muckety-muck, but the end is near. Sears was an anchor store at American malls for generations. Its demise is a metaphor for malls in general.

4. Parks and Wreck

Want to be even more depressed about how evil the Trump administration is when it comes to protecting our beautiful natural wonders, our national parks? Here’s Outside with a report on how the shutdown is doing serious damage to them (visitors are still flocking to them and POOPING in them as toilets overflow while workers are furloughed) and asking why the parks remain open (because no one in the White House cares about anything besides money and power).

Oh, and already seven people have died in national parks since the shutdown began. Seven. In two weeks! Maybe we ought to build a wall around our national parks?

5. Jimmy Thing

We’ve always admired Jimmy Stewart as an actor, an American and just an overall decent fellow. Now we’re reading Hank & Jim, by Scott Eyman, which profiles his 50-year friendship with Henry Fonda, and we admire him even more.

The Jimmy Stewart you see in The Philadelphia Story and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a recent Hollywood arrival, a bachelor, who has a fascination with planes and flying and earns his pilot’s license in his spare time. The Stewart you see in It’s A Wonderful Life is a seasoned World War II veteran, a B-24 pilot who flew roughly 20 missions into Europe from England.

Moreover, the Army Air Corps had made Stewart an instructor and wanted to keep him as such doing work in Idaho. They understood a dead Jimmy Stewart might be bad for national morale. But Stewart insisted on flying missions and at last Uncle Sam relented.

When you read the sections of Eyman’s book that relate to this period of his life, you see a Jimmy Stewart who, well, behaves exactly as you might expect a Jimmy Stewart-like character to behave in a film. His crew loved him and he was both humble and heroic. Once he volunteered for a Christmas eve mission. Another time German strafing fire literally went through his seat and between his legs before exiting the ceiling of the cockpit. Stewart even flew a pre-dawn mission over Normandy on D-Day.

The next time you watch It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), take a moment to consider all the things Stewart had just experienced before making that film. And that he was George Bailey, sure, but he was even more his war hero brother.

Music 101

Blister In The Sun

Few bands achieved greater cult status in the Eighties without their fans having no idea what they looked like or who their lead singer was (Gordon Gano) than Violent Femmes. The Milwaukee-based band hit it big in 1983 with their eponymous debut album, released when Gano, the trio’s principal songwriter, was just three years out of high school.

Remote Patrol

A Face In The Crowd

11 p.m. TCM

“They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do, but they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em.” Sound familiar? Andy Griffith stars as a megalomaniacal entertainer whose charismatic facade wins him as many converts as fans. Based loosely on Wil Rogers,  whose son would later admit dad’s folksy charm was largely a facade, this 1957 Elia Kazan film also unknowingly presaged at least one future American leader.