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Feb. 22nd, 2021 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Found on Twitter, which has for reasons that escape me, gotten bored of the whole Whedon thing and felt the need to resurrect the Woody Allen thing. Allen is 85. He's not on Twitter or social media. You can yammer your little self-righteous head off - and get nowhere.
Nor does it erase the quality of work he's accomplished. As I told one friend, sure Woody did something horrible - but I wouldn't throw his entire body of work on the dumpster fire.
"Woody Allen is bad and so are his movies!"
Some of them are actually pretty good and interesting. Say what you will about Allen's actions, he was an brilliant play write/screenwriter, and director. The man knew how to write good comedic dialogue. I know I read all of his plays in High School and seen most of films. I've skipped over the ones that...I felt were unsettling and skeevy such as Manhattan. But I'm not going to feel bad for loving Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Take the Money and Run, Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway. And I enjoyed them before all this came out.
Just because somebody did something horrible doesn't make all their films and work horrible by association. The ability to look at a work of art outside of its creator - is important. Particularly in regards to collaborative works.
Nor should you be judgemental of those who love them. Nor does it make them horrible. Stop demonizing people and art - demonize the act.
Honestly, I wonder about people sometimes. Self-righteousness annoys me in myself and everyone else.
As an aside?
Ricky Gervais recently nailed twitter -
Gervais on Twitter
2. This article is an interesting read - The True Story Behind the Zack Snyder Cut - its interesting from a pure film-making perspective. Depicting how something can go blatantly wrong - when the distributors and financiers lose faith in the artist's vision at the last possible minute.
Zack Snyder, the director of Justice League, has never seen Justice League. His name is in the credits as the filmmaker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to.
In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just…it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: a team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left the Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded.
On November 17, 2017, the team-up between Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aquaman, and The Flash didn’t so much debut in theaters as crash into them. It was sneered at by critics, shrugged at by baffled moviegoers, and all but disowned by those who created it. Whedon has since been accused of unprofessional and abusive behavior on set. (The director declined repeated requests for a comment.) He left his name off the movie except to claim a shared writing credit with Chris Terrio, who had written Snyder’s previous installment, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice..
ublicly, everyone close to the movie practiced their smiles and rehearsed their talking points in the hopes of doing no further damage to the project, not that it helped much. The movie earned $657 million globally, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider the nearly $300 million budget, including the reported $25 million for Whedon’s reworking, plus a conservative estimate of $100 million to $150 million in marketing costs. Factor in the sizable cut theaters take from the box office, and a return of only $657 million is a clear money loser. Six months later, Justice League’s box office was dwarfed by Marvel’s own all-star showcase Avengers: Infinity War, which flexed its muscles at $2 billion.
Professionally at least, things have vastly improved. For years, DC fans and Snyder enthusiasts—who worshipped his high-octane brawn-fests like his Dawn of the Dead remake, his ancient Greek battle saga 300, and his twisted Watchmen adaptation—beat a drum on social media demanding, demanding, demanding that Warner Bros. return Justice League to its original filmmaker and allow him to share his version of the movie. They dubbed it the #SnyderCut. The fans could be clever, but many were horrifically toxic. All of them were relentless, and they grew more numerous over time. Last May, they finally got their wish when Warner saw the potential to leverage all the free publicity and do something unprecedented on its upstart streaming service, HBO Max.
It’s not uncommon for directors to lose creative control of big-budget studio spectacles, or for other filmmakers to step in. But it’s unheard of for a studio to return to an exiled filmmaker and offer back the power and creative freedom it has yanked away, especially when some of the most beloved and lucrative characters in pop culture history are involved.
Another excerpt..
Autumn had been in therapy and on medications, but the depression remained brutal. “She was always wondering about her worth. ‘What is my worth? What am I supposed to do? What am I about?’” Snyder stumbles on his words, his eyes glassy. “The conversation was like, ‘Of course you’re amazing! What do you mean your worth? You’re worth more than anything in the world!’ And she would just be like, ‘…yeah.’”
Snyder says Autumn used writing to vent her pain, to channel it into words that might contain it, or explain it. She adored sci-fi. “Her main characters are always in this battle with things from another dimension that no one can see,” says Snyder. “But it’s a serious war. And that war was happening to her every day. I think so many people are in that battle, and they smile and nod at you.”
The fact that a studio had lost faith in Snyder’s ability to make Justice League seemed mundane and pointless after Autumn’s death. “It’s such a lightning strike in the center of this whole saga,” says Snyder. “And in a lot of ways it has informed everything we’ve done since.”
The Snyders tried to keep going for two months after Autumn’s death, finding solace in finishing Justice League. But by then the situation with Warner Bros. had imploded. The official story was that the Snyders were voluntarily leaving the movie due to their family tragedy, and that Zack had handpicked Whedon to complete the movie he had planned. Only half of that was true.
And..
The studio gave Snyder the power to go anywhere he chose with its most valuable characters, and he always went somewhere other than… “than what they wanted,” the director says. Still, to his credit, all the recent DC films have used Snyder’s universe as a foundation, even Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, which take place in his version of Gotham City. The upcoming Flash film will connect all the disparate DC films by ricocheting through multiple universes, with Michael Keaton’s Batman appearing along with Affleck’s.
But harsh reviews for Batman v Superman demolished Warner Bros.’ confidence in Snyder. Even the director’s champions, like production head Greg Silverman, were worried. “When Batman v Superman came out and we did get a negative reaction from the fans, it was disheartening for all of us,” says Silverman, now the founder and head of independent content company Stampede Ventures. “Zack had made these movies, like 300, that were such crowd-pleasers. And that was our job—to make crowd-pleasers. And here, we have made a movie together, and it didn’t really please the audience.”
When Snyder quit, he took his unfinished Justice League on a laptop as a memento. He figured he’d show it to friends.
Marvel Studios movies, whose success exerted so much pressure on the DC team, hit on a formula that mirrored their comic book roots—telling stories about relatable, everyday people grappling with sudden phenomenal powers. Snyder’s DC universe approached its superheroes from the opposite direction, depicting gods and immortals who are at ease wielding cosmic strengths but strain to be human and connect to the ordinary world. The director envisioned this as operatic, tragic, and perhaps a more challenging type of comic book storytelling, but Warner Bros. feared it made his heroes gloomy, their abilities a curse.
Diane Nelson, who was president of DC Entertainment at the time, says she appreciated that Snyder was more into deconstructing the familiar than just recapitulating it. “Zack is a masterful visual storyteller who goes deep on individual characters,” she says. “For some people, that is amazing, and for other people that becomes the problem because they have fixed opinions about who these DC characters are and are not.”
In 2016, as principal photography got under way on Justice League in the United Kingdom, rumors percolated that Snyder had been fired from the film. That didn’t happen, but Warner Bros.’ then chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, did assign watchdogs in the form of DC Entertainment creative chief Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. co-production head Jon Berg. The edict was clear: At least one of them had to be on the set every day.
Berg, who’s now production president at Stampede, recalls that duty as a low point. “It was really tricky and not a position that I loved, to be honest,” he says. “I tried to be forthright about what I thought creatively. My job was to try to mediate between a creator whose vision is instinctually dark and a studio that perceived, rightly or wrong, that the fans wanted something lighter. I was respectful of the director and didn’t pursue things that were coming at me from the corporate side that I thought weren’t in line with what would make the best movie.”
Snyder knew why Johns and Berg were on the set. “You could say babysit,” he says. Many filmmakers would have bristled at the intrusion, but he was gracious. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”
But Warner Bros. did nix some of his more sweeping notions for Justice League, like adding a romance between Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Amy Adams’s Lois Lane, who was mourning Superman’s death in the previous film. “The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life,” says Snyder. “So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course that doesn’t work out for him.”
It didn’t work out for Snyder either. The studio said no.
The downside of making epics is the studios’ financial expectations. For Justice League, Warner Bros. wanted a big, round billion dollars in global box office, which Snyder’s movies had never reached. In January 2017, the director showed his first cut to Tsujihara. It did not go well, according to Snyder and others. (Tsujihara, who resigned from Warner Bros. in 2019 amid a sexual misconduct scandal involving the aspiring actress Charlotte Kirk, declined an interview request.)
Among the issues was the length of the film. “There was a mandate from Tsujihara that the movie be two hours long,” says Snyder. That order had a paradoxical impact, because it meant eliminating much of the heart and humor the studio also wanted, like a comical romantic subplot between Ezra Miller’s Flash and Kiersey Clemons’s Iris, the latter of whom was absent entirely from the Whedon film. (On the day Vanity Fair visited his office, Snyder was working on finalizing the music for the restored scene in which The Flash rescues her from a car crash.)
Snyder also saw a bigger structural problem with the “make it shorter” order: “How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours? I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done,” he says, referring to Whedon’s version. “But I didn’t see it.”
..
Reports that Snyder himself asked Whedon for help were false. Johns, one of the studio-appointed babysitters, had been planning a Batgirl movie with Whedon, and Snyder and others say Johns recruited him to do rewrites for Justice League. (Johns’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Once again, Snyder was gracious and even hopeful: “I thought maybe he could write some cool scenes. I thought that would be fun.”
Soon, it became clear that Warner Bros. was giving Whedon more and more power. He would not just advise during reshoots, but also do some directing himself. Snyder says he only had one conversation with Whedon, about the studio’s notes. Reeling from Autumn’s death—and finding anguish in their work rather than relief—Zack and Deborah quit. “We just lost the will to fight that fight in a lot of ways,” says Zack. “All of us, the whole family, we’re just so broken by [losing Autumn] that having those conversations in the middle of it really became…I was like, ‘Really?’ Frankly I think we did the right thing because I think it would’ve been either incredibly belligerent or we just rolled over.”
One by one, he called members of his cast and crew. “I remember I was in a movie theater, coincidentally enough,” Ray Fisher said on the set of Snyder’s reshoots last fall. “I was walking into the AMC right in Times Square. And I got the call from Zack and he was saying that he had to deal with stuff with the fam and he was having to step away. I had a trillion questions. My heart sank.”
Whedon rewrote and reshot about three quarters of Justice League, from what Snyder can gather. When fans ask him about details of the movie that bears his name, he usually has no idea what they are talking about. Worst of all, for Warner Bros., Whedon didn’t exactly save the movie. “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” says a studio executive, who requested anonymity. “The robber on the rooftop—so goofy and awful. The Russian family—so useless and pointless. Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”
Justice League opened on November 17, 2017, and cratered. Because Cavill had been making Mission: Impossible Fallout during the reshoots, Whedon’s team had to digitally erase his mustache in Justice League, which led to a bizarre warping of his face. The jokes fell flat. And behind the scenes, some of the cast had revolted.
Fisher has publicly claimed Whedon was abusive on set, and that Warner Bros. executives “enabled” his actions. Gadot told the Los Angeles Times that she also had a negative experience with Whedon, which she reported to higher-ups. After concluding its investigation, Warner Bros. announced that “remedial action” had been taken, though the studio didn’t offer specifics. Days before that announcement, HBO, a division of WarnerMedia, parted ways with Whedon on the sci-fi series The Nevers. Fisher continues to clash with the studio and has expressed dismay at the outcome of its investigation.
“[The cast] were very loyal to Zack, and they were hurting for him,” says Nelson, the former DC president. “It would have been a difficult environment for any new director to walk into—I have no doubt about that. But then how Joss chose to handle that is Joss’s to live with.”
[The Justice League film blew up in Whedon's face. He'd have been better off staying away from WB and taking some time off after the Avengers, as planned.]
A noxious contingent of followers, though, didn’t just advocate for the movie, but also used social media to attack people who were critical of Snyder or their cause. Maybe they hoped to silence dissenters, or maybe they were just trolls being trolls. In any case, film journalists with negative takes reported getting swarmed with insults and even threats. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of online fandom and fandom culture is headed in this very toxic direction,” says Kayleigh Donaldson, who writes for Pajiba.com. It is especially strong from Snyder cut acolytes, she adds, perhaps because they respond misguidedly to the director’s tales of loner heroes in a hostile world. “I don’t get this from the Birds of Prey fans or the Shazam fans,” says Donaldson. “I got a little bit from Joker fans but nowhere near the same level.” Nonetheless, she’s looking forward to Snyder’s movie: “I think 300 is great fun. I think the first 10 minutes of Watchmen are some of the best things any superhero movie has ever done.” Even if she doesn’t end up liking the Snyder cut, she says, “I would rather watch one person’s chaos than a committee’s snooze-fest.”
Drea Letamendi, a clinical psychologist who explores superhero archetypes on the Arkham Sessions podcast, notes that fans get especially aggressive on social media when they feel they’ve been denied something. “What I have observed is an enduring false sense of ownership, which can manifest as abuse, threats, and strong, intense reactions when a story doesn’t go their way,” she says. Fighting for the unseen cut of the film became a cause. In some quarters, the worst behavior metastasized. “They’re shouting, and people are listening to them. Even if it’s negative comments, they’re getting positive reinforcement to continue down that path.”
The trolls may have actually held back the movement, like looters at an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Snyder cringes at descriptions of the abusive tactics. “I 100 percent think it’s wrong,” he says. “I don’t think that anyone should be calling anyone anything. I’ve always tried to give people in the fandom attention who do good things.”
[As an aside? The comics and daytime soap opera fandoms are notoriously crazy. Actually all fandoms have crazy people. But the superhero comic fandom and sci-fantasy fandom are notorious. There's a reason I've stayed away from them.]
Initially, says Snyder, Warner Bros. just wanted to release the raw footage on his laptop. “I was like, ‘That’s a no, that’s a hard no,’” he says. “And they’re like, ‘But why? You can just put up the rough cut.’” Snyder didn’t trust their motivations. “I go, ‘Here’s why. Three reasons: One, you get the internet off your back, which is probably your main reason for wanting to do this. Two, you get to feel vindicated for making things right, I guess, on some level. And then three, you get a shitty version of the movie that you can point at and go, ‘See? It’s not that good anyway. So maybe I was right.’ I was like, No chance. I would rather just have the Snyder cut be a mythical unicorn for all time.”
Snyder estimates that it cost around $70 million to undo Whedon’s redo. For that, HBO Max gets four hours of hotly anticipated programming—and the Hollywood comeback story of a lifetime. Snyder himself gets nothing. “I’m not getting paid,” he says. He was paid the first time, of course. This time, he wants creative control, and forgoing a fee helped. “I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.”
Fisher, for one, was eager to return. “There’s not a day that’s gone by over the last three years, I haven’t thought about this movie, that I have not sat up at night thinking, What if there was a world wherein this thing actually does get released?” says the actor, sitting on set in his gray scale motion capture suit. “I probably should have let it go. But there was so much that we left behind in this version of the film. It’s a completely different movie.”
As for the fan base, the Snyder movement has contributed half a million dollars to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention through donations, sales of merchandise, and auctions of props. “People have been saying, ‘Oh, they attack people,’” says Deborah Snyder, her eyes tearing. “But this fan base has saved lives. As much as they wanted something for themselves, they’ve come together for this amazing cause. You feel so helpless trying to help someone, and you don’t know what to do. It’s literally life or death. And I felt like we didn’t really know where to turn.”
Rebuilding the story he had always envisioned is what invigorates Snyder most. He can go as deep and dark as he likes. He can say to hell with DC’s official time line for the characters and let this alt version of the Justice League story wind up wherever he pleases. He has put Superman in a sleek black suit instead of the iconic blue and red. He’s added the Joker (Jared Leto). He has reshot the ending with a hero cameo that will blow hard-core fans’ minds. In what may be a divisive move, he’s also presenting the movie in the boxy 4:3 format rather than wide-screen so that one day it can be watched on IMAX screens. Some may be irritated by seeing Justice League on HBO Max with black bars on either side. Snyder isn’t troubled by that.
The director is also layering in some deeply personal elements. The movie closes with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” performed by Allison Crowe, a friend who also sang it at Autumn’s funeral. It was Autumn’s favorite song. Now it’s an elegy to her. Justice League, however anyone else feels about it, is made of the things—and people—Snyder loves, too. “When you think about the catharsis of it, if I was a potter, I would’ve made some pottery to look for some way through this,” he says. “But I’m a filmmaker, so you get this giant movie.” He wants people to love it. If some don’t? He’s all right with that, with all of it. Whatever comes, he’s okay.
Interesting take on how art was gutted, then the original artist gets to fix it and show his vision without any studio edits or input.
Although, I am suspicious of how much of Fisher's allegations against Whedon were true - due to the fact that Fisher was heavily invested in Snyder's version. As was Gail Gadot and others. They loved Snyder apparently.
Also the article feels a bit like a love letter to Synder, and I'm always skeptical of that. (I've seen a lot Synder's films...almost all of them, so can personally attest to the violence. And I've seen Whedon's Justice League - which I found jarring but not quite as horrible as the article indicates. I'm skeptical of the article here and there. I see marketing hands behind it.)
That's actually my difficulty with a lot of celebrity gossip and back-stage gossip - it's hard to know what is true. So much of the entertainment industry is carefully packaged. With marketing hands in every pot. Spin-doctoring things.
3. [I'm annoyed with the neighbor who lives across the hall from me. He never wears a mask, no one visiting him does. And he slams his door, shaking the entire building. I think he's divorced with a kid - since I only see him and occasionally his kid. It's a tiny apartment, I can't imagine more than two in it, if that. I can't wait for him to move - no one stays in that apartment for very long.]
4. Boredom Economy.
And some groups of people are more likely to experience boredom than others. People who live alone, for instance, are more likely to be bored, said Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at Barnard College who has studied loneliness during the pandemic lockdowns.
“The real burden’s going to be on people who are single, who are by themselves,” he said. “The boredom-loneliness nexus has got to be pretty close, I would think.”
I danced to Fiona Apple's Relay again today, which I find insanely comforting.
Read recently that a lot of the celebrity gossip and interest in the gossip is falling by the wayside. It'd mostly due to the pandemic. People don't want to watch wealthy folks be bored on the internet. Or do podcasts from their luxurious homes. I can't find the article though - but it detailed how the sing-a-long lead by Gail Gadot completely backfired (I never saw it) but it was apparently a bunch of celebrities who can't sing - singing Imagine.
And how the divorce/separation of Kim Kardashian and Kayne West sparked no interest whatsoever. (My twitter page was more interested in Woody Allen and Texas.)
5. Per the Governor's email tonight on the Corona Virus..
Thanks to the hard work of all New Yorkers, our infection rate is now the lowest we've seen in three months, and accordingly, we are now in a position to reopen more recreational activities across the state. Movie theaters in New York City, along with any other areas of the state where they have been closed, are permitted to reopen March 5 at 25 percent capacity, with no more than 50 people per screen at a time. Other safety protocols, including assigned seating and social distancing, will be in place. We must continue to collectively work hard to ensure our numbers keep going in the right direction, which will allow us to safely reopen as much as possible as safely as possible.
Well that is interesting, considering the last time I saw a movie in a movie theater was Emma on March 7. It's also the weekend before my birthday. I don't know if I could sit through a movie in a movie theater right now without fidgeting. I'm having issues re-entering my workplace.
*. COVID hospitalizations rose slightly to 5,804. Of the 142,019 tests reported yesterday, 6,146, or 4.33 percent, were positive. There were 1,148 patients in ICU yesterday, down 14 from the previous day. Of them, 780 are intubated. Sadly, we lost 89 New Yorkers to the virus.
* As of 11am this morning, 93 percent of first doses allocated to the state have been administered. This represents 2,228,283 first doses administered of the 2,406,535 first dose allocations received from the federal government. So far, 1,155,870 second doses have been administered out of the 1,337,275 second doses received. See data by region and county on the State's Vaccine Tracker: ny.gov/vaccinetracker.
* There are still hundreds of appointments available at the Medgar Evers College and York College vaccination centers for eligible New Yorkers. Both these sites, established in partnership with FEMA, open Wednesday and will vaccinate 3,000 New Yorkers a day, seven days a week. For the Medgar Evers College vaccination center, eligible New Yorkers who live in the following ZIP codes can book an appointment today: 11207, 11212, 11208, 11206, 11233, 11213, 11221, 11226, 11236, 11225, 11210, 11203, 11238. For the York College vaccination center, eligible residents in these ZIP codes can book today: 11436, 11434, 11433, 11419, 11413, 11412, 11422, 11429, 11420, 11411, 11418, 11435, 11428, 11423, 11432, 11427, 11439, 11691, 11692, 11693. Next week, scheduling opens to any eligible resident of Queens or Brooklyn. If you're eligible, schedule your appointment HERE or by calling 1-833-967-4829.
* New regulations on nursing home visitations will go into effect Friday, February 26. These full guidelines depend on a county's COVID risk level, and continue to depend on the nursing home facility being free of COVID-19 cases for 14 days. For counties with COVID-19 positivity rates between 5-10 percent (on a 7-day rolling average), visitor testing is required and visitors must have a negative test before entry. For counties with COVID-19 positivity rates below 5 percent, visitor testing is strongly encouraged and rapid tests maybe be utilized. Alternatively, visitors may provide proof of a completed COVID-19 vaccination no less than 14 days from the date of the visit. Visitation was not be permitted if the county's COVID-19 positivity rate is greater than 10 percent. Compassionate care visits are always permitted.
*Beginning March 15, weddings and catered events can resume statewide. Venues are restricted to 50 percent capacity, with no more than 150 people per event. All attendees and patrons must be tested prior to the event. Mask wearing and other safety protocols will be required.
How humanity has decided to handle this pandemic is fascinating and at times mind-boggling.
6.Not to be outdone by New York, England has chosen to lift its lock down restrictions slowly..
England is relaxing lockdown restrictions, slowly.
“We’re setting out on what I hope is a one-way journey to freedom,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said, as he announced the plan to start lifting the nationwide measures prompted by a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus.
Schools in England are set to reopen on March 8 and people will be allowed to socialize outdoors starting on March 29. Pubs, restaurants, retail shops and gyms will stay closed for at least another month. International travel remains banned. Britain rolled out a remarkably successful vaccination program, injecting 17 million people with their first doses.
Worldwide, the pandemic is receding. New cases have declined to half the level seen at the global peak at the end of 2020, which experts credit to improved social distancing and mask wearing, the seasonality of the virus and a buildup of natural immunity among groups with high rates of infection.
7.
As frustration swelled among Texans trapped in their homes without power or water over the past week, some started to remark, half-jokingly, that H-E-B should just take over. The grocery store chain has long been known for its logistical prowess responding to the coronavirus pandemic and to hurricanes, with stockpiles of water and emergency supplies ready to be deployed. Above, an H-E-B grocery store worker handing out flowers last week.
Meanwhile, authorities in Texas who refused to join interstate electrical grids and railed against regulation now have to answer to millions of residents who were left without power in last week’s snowstorm.
8.
NASA released a new video taken from Mars, the first sent back to Earth from the planet.
The images are from the Perseverance spacecraft as it dropped through the Martian atmosphere last week, ending with the rover’s successful arrival on the planet’s surface.
It took a while for the visual files and data to make their way to Earth. There is no high-speed internet connection between Earth and Mars. Instead, the data had to be relayed through orbiting spacecraft passing overhead.
In other space news, Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a cancer survivor and physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, will be one of four people on a SpaceX rocket that will circle Earth later this year. Ms. Arceneaux would be the youngest American to travel to orbit, and also the first person with a prosthetic body part.
We're definitely stuck in a Philip K Dick novel. Albeit possibly not as grim?
9.
Nyan Cat is a ubiquitous piece of web art that has been viewed and shared hundreds of millions of times. A unique version of it was just auctioned off to an anonymous buyer for about $580,000.
The sale was a new high point in a fast-growing market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media called NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens.” The buyers are usually not acquiring copyrights or even ownership. They’re buying bragging rights and the knowledge that their copy is the “authentic” one.
10.
Former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen are liberal icons and rhapsodists about the dreams and travails of everyday Americans. Now, the two friends are also podcast hosts.
Spotify today released the first two episodes of “Renegades: Born in the USA,” in which the men discuss race, fatherhood and the painful divisions that persist in American society.
Although the show is positioned as an attempt to understand these divisions, Mr. Obama and Mr. Springsteen largely avoid politics and stick to personal stories. The show is a searching, high-minded discussion of life in the United States from two masters of the form.
Remember when everyone hated Springsteen in the late 80s/90s for alleged domestic violence against his then-wife, and for appearing to support Regan?
Just me then. See? Some people can revitalize their image.
[Edited multiple times - because I suck at coding and my eyes are starting to blur - had to switch reading glasses.]
Nor does it erase the quality of work he's accomplished. As I told one friend, sure Woody did something horrible - but I wouldn't throw his entire body of work on the dumpster fire.
"Woody Allen is bad and so are his movies!"
Some of them are actually pretty good and interesting. Say what you will about Allen's actions, he was an brilliant play write/screenwriter, and director. The man knew how to write good comedic dialogue. I know I read all of his plays in High School and seen most of films. I've skipped over the ones that...I felt were unsettling and skeevy such as Manhattan. But I'm not going to feel bad for loving Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Take the Money and Run, Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway. And I enjoyed them before all this came out.
Just because somebody did something horrible doesn't make all their films and work horrible by association. The ability to look at a work of art outside of its creator - is important. Particularly in regards to collaborative works.
Nor should you be judgemental of those who love them. Nor does it make them horrible. Stop demonizing people and art - demonize the act.
Honestly, I wonder about people sometimes. Self-righteousness annoys me in myself and everyone else.
As an aside?
Ricky Gervais recently nailed twitter -
Gervais on Twitter
2. This article is an interesting read - The True Story Behind the Zack Snyder Cut - its interesting from a pure film-making perspective. Depicting how something can go blatantly wrong - when the distributors and financiers lose faith in the artist's vision at the last possible minute.
Zack Snyder, the director of Justice League, has never seen Justice League. His name is in the credits as the filmmaker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to.
In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just…it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: a team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left the Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded.
On November 17, 2017, the team-up between Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aquaman, and The Flash didn’t so much debut in theaters as crash into them. It was sneered at by critics, shrugged at by baffled moviegoers, and all but disowned by those who created it. Whedon has since been accused of unprofessional and abusive behavior on set. (The director declined repeated requests for a comment.) He left his name off the movie except to claim a shared writing credit with Chris Terrio, who had written Snyder’s previous installment, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice..
ublicly, everyone close to the movie practiced their smiles and rehearsed their talking points in the hopes of doing no further damage to the project, not that it helped much. The movie earned $657 million globally, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider the nearly $300 million budget, including the reported $25 million for Whedon’s reworking, plus a conservative estimate of $100 million to $150 million in marketing costs. Factor in the sizable cut theaters take from the box office, and a return of only $657 million is a clear money loser. Six months later, Justice League’s box office was dwarfed by Marvel’s own all-star showcase Avengers: Infinity War, which flexed its muscles at $2 billion.
Professionally at least, things have vastly improved. For years, DC fans and Snyder enthusiasts—who worshipped his high-octane brawn-fests like his Dawn of the Dead remake, his ancient Greek battle saga 300, and his twisted Watchmen adaptation—beat a drum on social media demanding, demanding, demanding that Warner Bros. return Justice League to its original filmmaker and allow him to share his version of the movie. They dubbed it the #SnyderCut. The fans could be clever, but many were horrifically toxic. All of them were relentless, and they grew more numerous over time. Last May, they finally got their wish when Warner saw the potential to leverage all the free publicity and do something unprecedented on its upstart streaming service, HBO Max.
It’s not uncommon for directors to lose creative control of big-budget studio spectacles, or for other filmmakers to step in. But it’s unheard of for a studio to return to an exiled filmmaker and offer back the power and creative freedom it has yanked away, especially when some of the most beloved and lucrative characters in pop culture history are involved.
Another excerpt..
Autumn had been in therapy and on medications, but the depression remained brutal. “She was always wondering about her worth. ‘What is my worth? What am I supposed to do? What am I about?’” Snyder stumbles on his words, his eyes glassy. “The conversation was like, ‘Of course you’re amazing! What do you mean your worth? You’re worth more than anything in the world!’ And she would just be like, ‘…yeah.’”
Snyder says Autumn used writing to vent her pain, to channel it into words that might contain it, or explain it. She adored sci-fi. “Her main characters are always in this battle with things from another dimension that no one can see,” says Snyder. “But it’s a serious war. And that war was happening to her every day. I think so many people are in that battle, and they smile and nod at you.”
The fact that a studio had lost faith in Snyder’s ability to make Justice League seemed mundane and pointless after Autumn’s death. “It’s such a lightning strike in the center of this whole saga,” says Snyder. “And in a lot of ways it has informed everything we’ve done since.”
The Snyders tried to keep going for two months after Autumn’s death, finding solace in finishing Justice League. But by then the situation with Warner Bros. had imploded. The official story was that the Snyders were voluntarily leaving the movie due to their family tragedy, and that Zack had handpicked Whedon to complete the movie he had planned. Only half of that was true.
And..
The studio gave Snyder the power to go anywhere he chose with its most valuable characters, and he always went somewhere other than… “than what they wanted,” the director says. Still, to his credit, all the recent DC films have used Snyder’s universe as a foundation, even Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, which take place in his version of Gotham City. The upcoming Flash film will connect all the disparate DC films by ricocheting through multiple universes, with Michael Keaton’s Batman appearing along with Affleck’s.
But harsh reviews for Batman v Superman demolished Warner Bros.’ confidence in Snyder. Even the director’s champions, like production head Greg Silverman, were worried. “When Batman v Superman came out and we did get a negative reaction from the fans, it was disheartening for all of us,” says Silverman, now the founder and head of independent content company Stampede Ventures. “Zack had made these movies, like 300, that were such crowd-pleasers. And that was our job—to make crowd-pleasers. And here, we have made a movie together, and it didn’t really please the audience.”
When Snyder quit, he took his unfinished Justice League on a laptop as a memento. He figured he’d show it to friends.
Marvel Studios movies, whose success exerted so much pressure on the DC team, hit on a formula that mirrored their comic book roots—telling stories about relatable, everyday people grappling with sudden phenomenal powers. Snyder’s DC universe approached its superheroes from the opposite direction, depicting gods and immortals who are at ease wielding cosmic strengths but strain to be human and connect to the ordinary world. The director envisioned this as operatic, tragic, and perhaps a more challenging type of comic book storytelling, but Warner Bros. feared it made his heroes gloomy, their abilities a curse.
Diane Nelson, who was president of DC Entertainment at the time, says she appreciated that Snyder was more into deconstructing the familiar than just recapitulating it. “Zack is a masterful visual storyteller who goes deep on individual characters,” she says. “For some people, that is amazing, and for other people that becomes the problem because they have fixed opinions about who these DC characters are and are not.”
In 2016, as principal photography got under way on Justice League in the United Kingdom, rumors percolated that Snyder had been fired from the film. That didn’t happen, but Warner Bros.’ then chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, did assign watchdogs in the form of DC Entertainment creative chief Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. co-production head Jon Berg. The edict was clear: At least one of them had to be on the set every day.
Berg, who’s now production president at Stampede, recalls that duty as a low point. “It was really tricky and not a position that I loved, to be honest,” he says. “I tried to be forthright about what I thought creatively. My job was to try to mediate between a creator whose vision is instinctually dark and a studio that perceived, rightly or wrong, that the fans wanted something lighter. I was respectful of the director and didn’t pursue things that were coming at me from the corporate side that I thought weren’t in line with what would make the best movie.”
Snyder knew why Johns and Berg were on the set. “You could say babysit,” he says. Many filmmakers would have bristled at the intrusion, but he was gracious. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”
But Warner Bros. did nix some of his more sweeping notions for Justice League, like adding a romance between Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Amy Adams’s Lois Lane, who was mourning Superman’s death in the previous film. “The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life,” says Snyder. “So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course that doesn’t work out for him.”
It didn’t work out for Snyder either. The studio said no.
The downside of making epics is the studios’ financial expectations. For Justice League, Warner Bros. wanted a big, round billion dollars in global box office, which Snyder’s movies had never reached. In January 2017, the director showed his first cut to Tsujihara. It did not go well, according to Snyder and others. (Tsujihara, who resigned from Warner Bros. in 2019 amid a sexual misconduct scandal involving the aspiring actress Charlotte Kirk, declined an interview request.)
Among the issues was the length of the film. “There was a mandate from Tsujihara that the movie be two hours long,” says Snyder. That order had a paradoxical impact, because it meant eliminating much of the heart and humor the studio also wanted, like a comical romantic subplot between Ezra Miller’s Flash and Kiersey Clemons’s Iris, the latter of whom was absent entirely from the Whedon film. (On the day Vanity Fair visited his office, Snyder was working on finalizing the music for the restored scene in which The Flash rescues her from a car crash.)
Snyder also saw a bigger structural problem with the “make it shorter” order: “How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours? I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done,” he says, referring to Whedon’s version. “But I didn’t see it.”
..
Reports that Snyder himself asked Whedon for help were false. Johns, one of the studio-appointed babysitters, had been planning a Batgirl movie with Whedon, and Snyder and others say Johns recruited him to do rewrites for Justice League. (Johns’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Once again, Snyder was gracious and even hopeful: “I thought maybe he could write some cool scenes. I thought that would be fun.”
Soon, it became clear that Warner Bros. was giving Whedon more and more power. He would not just advise during reshoots, but also do some directing himself. Snyder says he only had one conversation with Whedon, about the studio’s notes. Reeling from Autumn’s death—and finding anguish in their work rather than relief—Zack and Deborah quit. “We just lost the will to fight that fight in a lot of ways,” says Zack. “All of us, the whole family, we’re just so broken by [losing Autumn] that having those conversations in the middle of it really became…I was like, ‘Really?’ Frankly I think we did the right thing because I think it would’ve been either incredibly belligerent or we just rolled over.”
One by one, he called members of his cast and crew. “I remember I was in a movie theater, coincidentally enough,” Ray Fisher said on the set of Snyder’s reshoots last fall. “I was walking into the AMC right in Times Square. And I got the call from Zack and he was saying that he had to deal with stuff with the fam and he was having to step away. I had a trillion questions. My heart sank.”
Whedon rewrote and reshot about three quarters of Justice League, from what Snyder can gather. When fans ask him about details of the movie that bears his name, he usually has no idea what they are talking about. Worst of all, for Warner Bros., Whedon didn’t exactly save the movie. “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” says a studio executive, who requested anonymity. “The robber on the rooftop—so goofy and awful. The Russian family—so useless and pointless. Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”
Justice League opened on November 17, 2017, and cratered. Because Cavill had been making Mission: Impossible Fallout during the reshoots, Whedon’s team had to digitally erase his mustache in Justice League, which led to a bizarre warping of his face. The jokes fell flat. And behind the scenes, some of the cast had revolted.
Fisher has publicly claimed Whedon was abusive on set, and that Warner Bros. executives “enabled” his actions. Gadot told the Los Angeles Times that she also had a negative experience with Whedon, which she reported to higher-ups. After concluding its investigation, Warner Bros. announced that “remedial action” had been taken, though the studio didn’t offer specifics. Days before that announcement, HBO, a division of WarnerMedia, parted ways with Whedon on the sci-fi series The Nevers. Fisher continues to clash with the studio and has expressed dismay at the outcome of its investigation.
“[The cast] were very loyal to Zack, and they were hurting for him,” says Nelson, the former DC president. “It would have been a difficult environment for any new director to walk into—I have no doubt about that. But then how Joss chose to handle that is Joss’s to live with.”
[The Justice League film blew up in Whedon's face. He'd have been better off staying away from WB and taking some time off after the Avengers, as planned.]
A noxious contingent of followers, though, didn’t just advocate for the movie, but also used social media to attack people who were critical of Snyder or their cause. Maybe they hoped to silence dissenters, or maybe they were just trolls being trolls. In any case, film journalists with negative takes reported getting swarmed with insults and even threats. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of online fandom and fandom culture is headed in this very toxic direction,” says Kayleigh Donaldson, who writes for Pajiba.com. It is especially strong from Snyder cut acolytes, she adds, perhaps because they respond misguidedly to the director’s tales of loner heroes in a hostile world. “I don’t get this from the Birds of Prey fans or the Shazam fans,” says Donaldson. “I got a little bit from Joker fans but nowhere near the same level.” Nonetheless, she’s looking forward to Snyder’s movie: “I think 300 is great fun. I think the first 10 minutes of Watchmen are some of the best things any superhero movie has ever done.” Even if she doesn’t end up liking the Snyder cut, she says, “I would rather watch one person’s chaos than a committee’s snooze-fest.”
Drea Letamendi, a clinical psychologist who explores superhero archetypes on the Arkham Sessions podcast, notes that fans get especially aggressive on social media when they feel they’ve been denied something. “What I have observed is an enduring false sense of ownership, which can manifest as abuse, threats, and strong, intense reactions when a story doesn’t go their way,” she says. Fighting for the unseen cut of the film became a cause. In some quarters, the worst behavior metastasized. “They’re shouting, and people are listening to them. Even if it’s negative comments, they’re getting positive reinforcement to continue down that path.”
The trolls may have actually held back the movement, like looters at an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Snyder cringes at descriptions of the abusive tactics. “I 100 percent think it’s wrong,” he says. “I don’t think that anyone should be calling anyone anything. I’ve always tried to give people in the fandom attention who do good things.”
[As an aside? The comics and daytime soap opera fandoms are notoriously crazy. Actually all fandoms have crazy people. But the superhero comic fandom and sci-fantasy fandom are notorious. There's a reason I've stayed away from them.]
Initially, says Snyder, Warner Bros. just wanted to release the raw footage on his laptop. “I was like, ‘That’s a no, that’s a hard no,’” he says. “And they’re like, ‘But why? You can just put up the rough cut.’” Snyder didn’t trust their motivations. “I go, ‘Here’s why. Three reasons: One, you get the internet off your back, which is probably your main reason for wanting to do this. Two, you get to feel vindicated for making things right, I guess, on some level. And then three, you get a shitty version of the movie that you can point at and go, ‘See? It’s not that good anyway. So maybe I was right.’ I was like, No chance. I would rather just have the Snyder cut be a mythical unicorn for all time.”
Snyder estimates that it cost around $70 million to undo Whedon’s redo. For that, HBO Max gets four hours of hotly anticipated programming—and the Hollywood comeback story of a lifetime. Snyder himself gets nothing. “I’m not getting paid,” he says. He was paid the first time, of course. This time, he wants creative control, and forgoing a fee helped. “I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.”
Fisher, for one, was eager to return. “There’s not a day that’s gone by over the last three years, I haven’t thought about this movie, that I have not sat up at night thinking, What if there was a world wherein this thing actually does get released?” says the actor, sitting on set in his gray scale motion capture suit. “I probably should have let it go. But there was so much that we left behind in this version of the film. It’s a completely different movie.”
As for the fan base, the Snyder movement has contributed half a million dollars to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention through donations, sales of merchandise, and auctions of props. “People have been saying, ‘Oh, they attack people,’” says Deborah Snyder, her eyes tearing. “But this fan base has saved lives. As much as they wanted something for themselves, they’ve come together for this amazing cause. You feel so helpless trying to help someone, and you don’t know what to do. It’s literally life or death. And I felt like we didn’t really know where to turn.”
Rebuilding the story he had always envisioned is what invigorates Snyder most. He can go as deep and dark as he likes. He can say to hell with DC’s official time line for the characters and let this alt version of the Justice League story wind up wherever he pleases. He has put Superman in a sleek black suit instead of the iconic blue and red. He’s added the Joker (Jared Leto). He has reshot the ending with a hero cameo that will blow hard-core fans’ minds. In what may be a divisive move, he’s also presenting the movie in the boxy 4:3 format rather than wide-screen so that one day it can be watched on IMAX screens. Some may be irritated by seeing Justice League on HBO Max with black bars on either side. Snyder isn’t troubled by that.
The director is also layering in some deeply personal elements. The movie closes with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” performed by Allison Crowe, a friend who also sang it at Autumn’s funeral. It was Autumn’s favorite song. Now it’s an elegy to her. Justice League, however anyone else feels about it, is made of the things—and people—Snyder loves, too. “When you think about the catharsis of it, if I was a potter, I would’ve made some pottery to look for some way through this,” he says. “But I’m a filmmaker, so you get this giant movie.” He wants people to love it. If some don’t? He’s all right with that, with all of it. Whatever comes, he’s okay.
Interesting take on how art was gutted, then the original artist gets to fix it and show his vision without any studio edits or input.
Although, I am suspicious of how much of Fisher's allegations against Whedon were true - due to the fact that Fisher was heavily invested in Snyder's version. As was Gail Gadot and others. They loved Snyder apparently.
Also the article feels a bit like a love letter to Synder, and I'm always skeptical of that. (I've seen a lot Synder's films...almost all of them, so can personally attest to the violence. And I've seen Whedon's Justice League - which I found jarring but not quite as horrible as the article indicates. I'm skeptical of the article here and there. I see marketing hands behind it.)
That's actually my difficulty with a lot of celebrity gossip and back-stage gossip - it's hard to know what is true. So much of the entertainment industry is carefully packaged. With marketing hands in every pot. Spin-doctoring things.
3. [I'm annoyed with the neighbor who lives across the hall from me. He never wears a mask, no one visiting him does. And he slams his door, shaking the entire building. I think he's divorced with a kid - since I only see him and occasionally his kid. It's a tiny apartment, I can't imagine more than two in it, if that. I can't wait for him to move - no one stays in that apartment for very long.]
4. Boredom Economy.
And some groups of people are more likely to experience boredom than others. People who live alone, for instance, are more likely to be bored, said Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at Barnard College who has studied loneliness during the pandemic lockdowns.
“The real burden’s going to be on people who are single, who are by themselves,” he said. “The boredom-loneliness nexus has got to be pretty close, I would think.”
I danced to Fiona Apple's Relay again today, which I find insanely comforting.
Read recently that a lot of the celebrity gossip and interest in the gossip is falling by the wayside. It'd mostly due to the pandemic. People don't want to watch wealthy folks be bored on the internet. Or do podcasts from their luxurious homes. I can't find the article though - but it detailed how the sing-a-long lead by Gail Gadot completely backfired (I never saw it) but it was apparently a bunch of celebrities who can't sing - singing Imagine.
And how the divorce/separation of Kim Kardashian and Kayne West sparked no interest whatsoever. (My twitter page was more interested in Woody Allen and Texas.)
5. Per the Governor's email tonight on the Corona Virus..
Thanks to the hard work of all New Yorkers, our infection rate is now the lowest we've seen in three months, and accordingly, we are now in a position to reopen more recreational activities across the state. Movie theaters in New York City, along with any other areas of the state where they have been closed, are permitted to reopen March 5 at 25 percent capacity, with no more than 50 people per screen at a time. Other safety protocols, including assigned seating and social distancing, will be in place. We must continue to collectively work hard to ensure our numbers keep going in the right direction, which will allow us to safely reopen as much as possible as safely as possible.
Well that is interesting, considering the last time I saw a movie in a movie theater was Emma on March 7. It's also the weekend before my birthday. I don't know if I could sit through a movie in a movie theater right now without fidgeting. I'm having issues re-entering my workplace.
*. COVID hospitalizations rose slightly to 5,804. Of the 142,019 tests reported yesterday, 6,146, or 4.33 percent, were positive. There were 1,148 patients in ICU yesterday, down 14 from the previous day. Of them, 780 are intubated. Sadly, we lost 89 New Yorkers to the virus.
* As of 11am this morning, 93 percent of first doses allocated to the state have been administered. This represents 2,228,283 first doses administered of the 2,406,535 first dose allocations received from the federal government. So far, 1,155,870 second doses have been administered out of the 1,337,275 second doses received. See data by region and county on the State's Vaccine Tracker: ny.gov/vaccinetracker.
* There are still hundreds of appointments available at the Medgar Evers College and York College vaccination centers for eligible New Yorkers. Both these sites, established in partnership with FEMA, open Wednesday and will vaccinate 3,000 New Yorkers a day, seven days a week. For the Medgar Evers College vaccination center, eligible New Yorkers who live in the following ZIP codes can book an appointment today: 11207, 11212, 11208, 11206, 11233, 11213, 11221, 11226, 11236, 11225, 11210, 11203, 11238. For the York College vaccination center, eligible residents in these ZIP codes can book today: 11436, 11434, 11433, 11419, 11413, 11412, 11422, 11429, 11420, 11411, 11418, 11435, 11428, 11423, 11432, 11427, 11439, 11691, 11692, 11693. Next week, scheduling opens to any eligible resident of Queens or Brooklyn. If you're eligible, schedule your appointment HERE or by calling 1-833-967-4829.
* New regulations on nursing home visitations will go into effect Friday, February 26. These full guidelines depend on a county's COVID risk level, and continue to depend on the nursing home facility being free of COVID-19 cases for 14 days. For counties with COVID-19 positivity rates between 5-10 percent (on a 7-day rolling average), visitor testing is required and visitors must have a negative test before entry. For counties with COVID-19 positivity rates below 5 percent, visitor testing is strongly encouraged and rapid tests maybe be utilized. Alternatively, visitors may provide proof of a completed COVID-19 vaccination no less than 14 days from the date of the visit. Visitation was not be permitted if the county's COVID-19 positivity rate is greater than 10 percent. Compassionate care visits are always permitted.
*Beginning March 15, weddings and catered events can resume statewide. Venues are restricted to 50 percent capacity, with no more than 150 people per event. All attendees and patrons must be tested prior to the event. Mask wearing and other safety protocols will be required.
How humanity has decided to handle this pandemic is fascinating and at times mind-boggling.
6.Not to be outdone by New York, England has chosen to lift its lock down restrictions slowly..
England is relaxing lockdown restrictions, slowly.
“We’re setting out on what I hope is a one-way journey to freedom,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said, as he announced the plan to start lifting the nationwide measures prompted by a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus.
Schools in England are set to reopen on March 8 and people will be allowed to socialize outdoors starting on March 29. Pubs, restaurants, retail shops and gyms will stay closed for at least another month. International travel remains banned. Britain rolled out a remarkably successful vaccination program, injecting 17 million people with their first doses.
Worldwide, the pandemic is receding. New cases have declined to half the level seen at the global peak at the end of 2020, which experts credit to improved social distancing and mask wearing, the seasonality of the virus and a buildup of natural immunity among groups with high rates of infection.
7.
As frustration swelled among Texans trapped in their homes without power or water over the past week, some started to remark, half-jokingly, that H-E-B should just take over. The grocery store chain has long been known for its logistical prowess responding to the coronavirus pandemic and to hurricanes, with stockpiles of water and emergency supplies ready to be deployed. Above, an H-E-B grocery store worker handing out flowers last week.
Meanwhile, authorities in Texas who refused to join interstate electrical grids and railed against regulation now have to answer to millions of residents who were left without power in last week’s snowstorm.
8.
NASA released a new video taken from Mars, the first sent back to Earth from the planet.
The images are from the Perseverance spacecraft as it dropped through the Martian atmosphere last week, ending with the rover’s successful arrival on the planet’s surface.
It took a while for the visual files and data to make their way to Earth. There is no high-speed internet connection between Earth and Mars. Instead, the data had to be relayed through orbiting spacecraft passing overhead.
In other space news, Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a cancer survivor and physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, will be one of four people on a SpaceX rocket that will circle Earth later this year. Ms. Arceneaux would be the youngest American to travel to orbit, and also the first person with a prosthetic body part.
We're definitely stuck in a Philip K Dick novel. Albeit possibly not as grim?
9.
Nyan Cat is a ubiquitous piece of web art that has been viewed and shared hundreds of millions of times. A unique version of it was just auctioned off to an anonymous buyer for about $580,000.
The sale was a new high point in a fast-growing market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media called NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens.” The buyers are usually not acquiring copyrights or even ownership. They’re buying bragging rights and the knowledge that their copy is the “authentic” one.
10.
Former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen are liberal icons and rhapsodists about the dreams and travails of everyday Americans. Now, the two friends are also podcast hosts.
Spotify today released the first two episodes of “Renegades: Born in the USA,” in which the men discuss race, fatherhood and the painful divisions that persist in American society.
Although the show is positioned as an attempt to understand these divisions, Mr. Obama and Mr. Springsteen largely avoid politics and stick to personal stories. The show is a searching, high-minded discussion of life in the United States from two masters of the form.
Remember when everyone hated Springsteen in the late 80s/90s for alleged domestic violence against his then-wife, and for appearing to support Regan?
Just me then. See? Some people can revitalize their image.
[Edited multiple times - because I suck at coding and my eyes are starting to blur - had to switch reading glasses.]
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Date: 2021-02-23 09:46 pm (UTC)Huh, that's the first I've ever heard about that.
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Date: 2021-02-24 02:01 pm (UTC)