No stopsign

A while back, “Back in Black” turned thirty years old. I loved AC/DC. To me, they were the perfect blend of big chords, hard beats and sex-crazed lyrics: basically, a teen age boy reduced to his core biological components plus electric guitar equals a three minute AC/DC tune.

In 1979 they released Highway to Hell, and it was exhilrating and terrifying. To hear Bon Scott scream “Hey Mama, Look at Me/ I’m on my way to the Promised Land” always gave me chills. The record was an instant classsic, and radio loved it. Finally, after struggling in bars for years, AC/DC were getting huge recognition, monster arena tours and tons of monetary success.

Then Bon Died. I can’t fathom how the band members felt. Bon was the heart and soul of the band, the rock and roll Master of Ceremonies. He literally carried guitarist Angus Young on his shoulders ever night to the delight of whatever sweaty bolloxed crowd came to see them. And now he’s gone, after having come so far, just as his band was beginning what would be spectacular commercial success.

And that’s why I hate Back in Black. Brian Johnson squeezes his laranyx in a cheap imitation of Bon Scott. The lyrics say things like “cut loose/from the noose/that’s kept me hanging around” as if Bon’s dead and the new singer is his (improved) reincarnation. It’s not just shoddy and lazy songwriting, it’s disrespectful to the memory of the dead band leader.

People give me crap about it. They point to the great production and killer riffs. None of it matters because Bon was an honest-to-God small town hardware store and Brian Johnson is WalMart. That record should have been called “Bon Scott was the Heart of this Band and Could Never be Replaced”.

I don’t care if Bon and Brian were friends. I dismiss the argument that Bon would have wanted the band to go on- of course he would, but in a lite version?

I’ve imagined a late night meeting between an eternally young Bon Scott and the Devil. We had a deal, the prince of darkness coos- I brought you the fame, the fortune, the sales, the girls. Now I’ve come for your soul. Bon stares into his beer. I really don’t remember you saying it would be this soon. Beelzebub laughs, everybody says that, you know. Bon shifts uncomfortably, let me just tell my mates goodbye. Sorry, Bon, that ain’t how it works….

Of course the band had to go on. Maybe retire the name, maybe hire a different guy, maybe just write better lyrics. I just can bear Brian Johnson’s thin falsetto saying things like “I hit the sack, I’m glad to be back”

I’m going to go listen to Dirty Deeds and pretend it didn’t happen.

Rest in Peace Bon.

At this moment, much less than a second, the person in this picture is still alive. He’ll be dead before the camera finishes making its clicking sound. What happened then? Who were his family, his friends- where were they at this critical moment in this troubled man’s life? What were the factors that could drive a person to jump from a tall building to end his life?

I’ve been using Google Maps to explore the area near my grandfather’s death. The Hotel Belmont is gone, the whole neighborhood is basically wiped away, but there are a few architectural hold-outs, dinosaurs from this period most of us know as LA noir. Using Streetview, I “walked” from the old hotel Belmont down Hill Street to 6th, and took a left. At first I couldn’t find anything familiar, then I peeked down an alley, where I found this:

There’s a fairly well documented history of the Hotel Belmont, but it’s gone now. I even found a student film made nearby that caught demolition trucks busy tearing away at the facade of the building. I would have liked to sit in the lobby, go upstairs and look out the windows to the street below, and imagine what that day in September so many years ago might have been like.

What happened after that day isn’t completely clear: My Grandmother Lottie put her three children into some form of protected care (family rumor is that it was the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home:
and then either walked or hitchhiked back to her family home in Oklahoma.

I try to imagine this newly widowed woman, always thin and slight, walking along the desert highway asking strangers for help getting back to a safer time and place. I see her as a dark silhouette, haunting and severe, emotionally shattered and mentally unstable, unable to deal with the enormity of having three kids, and a now dead but formerly abusive and intoxicated dentist as a husband, as she trudged through the late summer heat dressed in black.

And the kids, what could they have thought? How much did they know? My father, the eldest, was only six. He has basically no recollection of any father figure in his life. His younger sister Jeanne was four, and the little brother Bill was 2 years old. Unfortunately, the artifacts I’ve found include no pictures of the late Dr. Hunsaker.

American Novelist Raymond Chandler wrote about the Bunker Hill neighborhood, cementing it into American psyche with characters that lived,worked, drank and connived there. Here’s how he describes it: This is from his book, The High Window

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.

Bunker Hill capsulizes the period zeitgeist of LA in the forties. The depression has stripped the elegance and grace from a lot of America, no where more so than Los Angeles. A once proud and desirable address, Bunker Hill had become the desperate part of town. Addicts, hustlers and thieves lived in the boarding houses that were once mansions and formerly luxurious hotels, like the Belmont.

On September 28, 1942, a dentist named Robert Hunsaker checked into the Hotel Belmont, and got a room on the top floor. Despondent that his third marriage was collapsing, and with a history of intoxication and abusive behavior, Dr. Hunsaker chose this place and time to end his life. Belmont Hotel desk clerk Bernardo Sargil noticed Hunsaker on the window ledge and called the police. When they arrived, they found dancer Ruth Rex in his room, pleading with him not to jump. The cops tried to grab him but Hunsaker ordered them back; finally he said “So long boys, this is getting tiresome,” and loosened his grip, falling the length of the building to meet Hill Street below.

He was my grandfather, my father’s father. He’d reached the end of his rope. I’ve found a series of postcards, letters and court orders that lead up his last day, but there’s no clear narrative. There’s a 1933 newspaper article that mentions police searching for him “on charges of driving on a highway while drunk and disturbing the peace”. It also states that he “threatened to do his wife harm”. The last line refers to his wife and three children in Huntington Park- a previous family to my father’s- my Dad was born in 1936, and is the first of three.

It’s hard to draw a straight line through this guy’s cluttered history. Here he’s a family man in LA in 1933, a death notice about his mother refers to him as a dentist in St Louis; we know my Dad was born in 1936 in Union County, Illinois. The post cards I found portray a cross-country trip, many are from hotels. They all have a wistful, wish-you-were-here tone, the voice of my Grandmother, Lottie. She refers to her husband as “Doctor” as in “Doctor got a piece of metal in his eye and can’t work” (an actual line). The line of their travel drops south into Mexico at one point, and a later postcard mentions “Had a second boy”.

There’s one addressed to her, written in a scribbled hand, with multiple strikethroughs. It’s from “Doctor” and is brief. It says “The Packard and your things are where you left them when you left me. Diplomas are in the trunk, keep them for me if you will.” Then there’s a sheaf of paper with a blue outer lining. it’s a court order of restraint, dated august 1942, prohibiting the defendant (Doctor) from ” threatening, striking, or molesting” the plaintiff (Lottie). Lastly, there’s a check from the coroner’s office for 13 cents, presumably a refund for what he had in his pockets when he died.

Time had worked it’s Hollywood magic on the dude since then. We kept getting script changes, and a new sub-plot was developing. The movie’s about a guy who lives with his parents, and dates girls until they start to “get serious about him’, then he brings them home to Mama and they run screaming- pretty funny bit, right?

Evidently, the actor felt that his character was too much of an asshole, and helped develop the storyline about a fiance who had died, and the emotional pain that made him act this way- he doesn’t want to get close again, you see? From a comedy perspective, nothing’s funnier than a dead girlfriend.

This happens a lot, actor help shape scripts, and that’s a natural part of the process. It seemed like a inelegantly executed play: let’s build in some pathos for my character. It just rang cheezy to me- maybe I don’t get the big picture.

I was doing what I love- Art Department, specifically set dressing. Dressing sets on a movie about boats is about as good as it gets, and we spent lots of nice time out on the water, and kept finding reasons to take the ferry from Oxford to St. Michaels. It was a great gig, but all great gigs have their dirty underbelly.

Mine was that the guy who hired me was a drug-addled lunatic whose highest priority was getting drunk every night and banging a fat bartender who was, by any stretch of aesthetic imagination, not attractive in the least. One of my main tasks was to cover for him when he didn’t show up at call time and to creatively weave new tales out of sparce narrative fabric (where the hell else could he be afterall?), I was running out of places to say that he was.

One night I went to dinner with him and the Production Designer, Set Decorator and a couple set dressers. The evening’s dynamic was one of overlords and underlings, the set dec explained how things work in the industry (I’m in my 16th year of it at this point) how the designer and decorator work in tandem (thanks, I’ve done both jobs) and other tales of regalia skewed to remind me how lucky I was to be in this present company.

And the wine flowed, as it should at a good meal. But having returned to my straight edge roots, I was chafing- when people get drunk, they lose their subtlety. Whatever grace they use to cloak their barbs falls away. I started feeling the need to leave, but there wasn’t a polite way to do so. It became a chore to not let my discomfort show, and to stay witty, charming, fun, all the things that we like think ourselves to be.

Finally, the meal wound its way down and we were leaving through the old colonial architecture of the restaurant when a huge thunderclap shook the place. It was raining violently, suddenly. I took the chance to bolt, just kinda yelled thanks bye and sprinted into the storm towards my car.

Sitting dripping in the driver’s seat, I turned the key and music filled the inside of the car: it was Frodus’ last record, and the drums and bass shook the windshield as I cranked it up.

The words were like a balm to me, I started feeling calm, soothed. Something about those sounds was bringing me down from my near-anxiety attack. Nothing matters. I could hear tubes in the amps rattle as the singer screamed his words: “Move on down move on down/ The road goes on for miles…”

I started driving through the rain. It’s all cool, I can handle whatever comes my way.

http://www.frodus.com/mp3s/frodus-red_bull_of_juarez.mp3

English majors at Emory & Henry are introduced to literary criticism early in their curriculum: it’s a way to practice expression within a fairly structured format, forcing the writer to present cogent information and opinion and shore it up with research. Arguably a boring exercise, it’s a skill-building framework that writers sorely need: structure, annotation and editing.

I quietly despised it: I only had room for my own creative expression, not being a commentator on someone else’s work. I viewed it as a parasite industry, best practiced by those who can’t do (my motto ” those who can’t write, criticise”).

As I eventually admitted to myself that film was the medium I loved and wanted to practice, I discovered Siskel and Ebert. I found that my tastes were usually aligned with Gene Siskel. His mistrust of sappy sweet stories and obvious endings paralleled my tastes. I didn’t like Ebert- he was too soft on sucker-bait Hollywood event movies- at one point I was certain that Paramount must pay him to give good reviews, because that blurb in their ads could make or break a weekend gross. Anyone who doesn’t despise Michael Bay can’t know anything.

That was a long time ago. Now, strictly because of Twitter, I’ve discovered that Ebert is a thoughtful and prolific observer and reporter on a world of topics beyond movies. He’s faced immeasurable pain, and it’s shaped his world view, shaving off the sweet edges. The medium he massages to craft his message is the 140 character bite, usually a link to an article he’s written, a picture he’s found or something that makes him happy, provokes his ire, or is just odd enough to interest him. And us.

Ebert has had surgery to remove cancer which left him without the ability to speak. As a result, he’s found his voice, and the device to deliver it, which is twitter. I don’t even want to mention one of his most moving essays is about the fact that he can no longer eat or drink. He talks about the memory of taste more than taste itself. If his words don’t move you, you have no heart.

The grace with which he has faced adversity, and his ability to see and articulate clearly that which seems important is beautiful and entertaining as well as inspiring and redemptive. Finding Ebert on twitter has been one of the things that reminds me why technology is a tool, and artists use tools to make the world better.

(I love when people say Twitter is stupid. Great, stay off it. It’s a poet’s medium, finding 140 letters numbers and symbols that can communicate something clearly that might be interesting to other people takes thought, grace and wit)

Don’t follow me: @filmcore

it's the real thing

Look, everybody does it. There’s only a crime committed if you claim to be “inspired by” another person’s work. Have you ever watched Bugs Bunny? All the (insanely fantastic) music in those cartoons has sections that are wholly lifted from classical composers, and I don’t read their names in the credits. One of the most popular recordings of the last decade is the completely illegal Gray Album.

What happens is that the finished product becomes the next generation of the original, just as I am my father’s son. It’s natural. It’s what artists do, observe the world around them, then express it. So what if they observed a cool snare sound from an old Motown record. To quote Joy Behar, so what, who cares? It becomes a support mechanism for a new piece of work, like a beam from a old barn used inside a living room.

Oh, everybody cares. There’s a legal field devoted to stopping cut and paste/mashup/remixes wherever they occur. There’s a “live by the sword..” aspect as well. The Beastie Boys, who clearly revel in using samples from previous works, actually got a huge boost from a settlement in their favor from Nike when the shoe manufacturer used their music without permission. They’ve since defeated claims against their own music, actually setting precedent in Federal Court.

My first music video is my attempt to do what I saw on the set of Enemy of the State, creating a chase sequence wherein shadowy forces pursue our heroes while the attempt to elude on bike, through a restaurant back door, onto a roof…sound familiar? Let’s watch:
I feel like it honors Tony Scott that I’d want to do this. Hey, Tony has called me on my cell phone all right? Next time he does, I’ll be sure to mention how I honored him with my video.

Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film is a rip-off, but in his hands it’s completely original. In his case, John Woo went on to steal a scene from Tarantino’s film as an “homage” back. Kinda like when Prince played the Foo Fighter’s song at the Super Bowl after the Foos had released a cover of Darling Nikki in europe. Don’t believe me? Watch how Prince says “count it” at the end: (also a helpful clinic on how to work a telecaster)

It’s like an old-school dance off. That’s the way to settle it, let the art battle it out. Information wants to be free. The only crime is to deny it.

This year it’s short:

IN:

I-Phone

OUT:

Crackberry

The blackberry is a device that lets you get email when you’re away from your computer. The I-Phone is a tool that helps you communicate and organize your data in logical and convenient ways.

It’s a parenting tool: from about the end of August until the New Year, when my kids act bad, I remind them that Santa (as they know from their diabolical song) is stalking them, much like Sting describes in “Every Breath You Take”. Nothing quiets them as quickly as this video, which plays on the I-Phone:

The Easter Bunny works the rest of the year. I’m not a palavering fanboy, nor do I have a gizmodo tattoo. I simply recognize that this tool will soon filter down to the suburban moms of America, and that future apps will do things like manage the power consumption of our homes, track our children and pets’ movements and simulate fart noises.

There’s an online class for developing your own app that Stanford University has put up (as an app) for free. Abilene Christian University is experimenting with using I-Phones as an interactive classroom tool for testing, homework and lectures. Smart small business models include not only developing an I-Phone app, but incorporating tweeting into keeping a 2-way dialogue with customers (or fans or clients, depending on the product or service) open and current.

Current business plan for wife: The Cookie Lady: a curbside service that features a modified vehicle with a service window which sells fresh cookies and is staffed by cute and fun women wearing shirts that say cOOkies with the Os strategically placed, a la’ “Hooters” logo. They’ll park in busy disctricts downtown, then tweet their location until all the peanut m&M/mexican chocolate chip cookies are gone.

thievery is the sincerest form of flattery

I’m not a hard core purist for the king’s English; I recognize that language is an organic, evolving organism and that all languages die. That doesn’t mean we should participate in killing them. Even irreverent cartoon characters on Adult Swim make references to Strunk & White. Here’s my list of things people say in English that are killing our native tongue, and which must be stopped:

Bitches as second-person plural noun of address as in: Here’s Fugazi, bitches. It’s something Britney Spears says on a record, so you should stop doing it immediately. If it was ever cool, it’s not now, just like when you see people at the Mall of America wearing nu-designer jeans- it means it’s over.

Nuke-You-Ler- in the 1950′s it was a novel addition to the language, and LBJ could be forgiven (or at least defended) for pronouncing it nuke-you-ler. Not so today. Just because a former President from Texas says it incorrectly does not mean it’s now re-entered into the popular lexicon this way. Even Dennis Miller called someone out on it in a brilliant exchange-

Official: ” What scares you most about the threat of nuke-you-ler weapons?”
Miller: ” People with access to them who can’t pronounce ‘nuclear’”

Clever media linguist Geoff Nunberg says it’s a choice, not a mistake, that makes it sound more “folksy”, more like the way bubba in Missoula probably pronounces it. I personally don’t want munitions that are capable of annihilating a civilization made more folksy. I want their horrible reality to remain evident as long as they exist.

Forward. It’s “4word”, right? When I listen to the radio and watch the news on TV, I hear it pronounced ” foe-ward”. Foe-ward is the side of a boat that pirates attack from- windward, leeward, foeward. Maybe it’s a dialectical difference, occurring regionally. If it’s a mid-west thing (the generally recognized dialectical leaning of broadcast announcers, a.k.a. ” un-accented”) then why does Diane Rehm, born and bred in Washington DC, do it? (Why is she on the radio anyway? If I was going blind and a photographer, I would stop and find another avocation instead of exhibiting out-of-focus pictures.)

Apostrophe errors. A friend recently wrote on Facebook: “when world’s collide”. I think it’s because he recently moved to Baltimore and is experiencing the first symptoms of mental retardation. I know a girl in the adult film industry who laid it out to her numerous posters: Plural doesn’t mean add an apostrophe. Thanks, Dana. Take that bitch’s.

Literally People who say this almost never mean literally. I’ve heard, my head literally exploded. People feel it’s a modifier that means I need a word here to make this sound more crucial. Figure out what you mean and say it- do you mean actually, figuratively, spiritually, virtually? Whatever it is, it’s probably not literally.

Retire the following: nounification of non-nouns, especially Disconnect. It’s lazy and stupid, just because everyone else is saying it doesn’t make you sound current. Thinking out of the box only a kidnappee should be doing this- Return to normalcy I know it’s since been vindicated as appearing in dictionaries dating to 1857, but Warren G. Harding sounded stupid when he said it, and so will you. Utilize You mean use, say use. At this point in time a.k.a., now, alternate: currently. You’re not on Quantum Leap, and therefore unqualified to define this point in time, so knock it off.

Incorporate these: Flogging to overuse/ push beyond the bounds of good taste, as in: they’re really flogging that bi-partisanship thing. Current new, fresh, dope, happening now. Applied science all purpose noun/placeholder, common usage: the applied science of getting your ass to work on time.

Try them, you’ll like ‘em.

n

nice set

Don’t get me wrong- If I don’t have a project this week, I’ll gladly art direct and prop your shoot. A DP asked me last week, what falls within your purview? The answer is-everything that’s not an actor.

Even though Locations is usually a different job from art direction/props, I spend a lot of effort and energy helping some clients find the exact right location. What location we choose greatly effects the amount of propping and/or modification that will be needed on a particular shoot. Besides, most ad houses/PR firms have their hands full, and would love to be able to call a guy they know and whose aesthetic sensibilities they trust and say: we need an all-American street scene, we need a field of wheat, we need a gas station… or whatever.

Jim Kriedler over at GMMB loves to tell the story of when he called around 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon. I was playing golf way out near Front Royal with Kevin Quick and wouldn’t have even picked up the phone except for those magic 4 letters that have spelled gainful opportunity on so many occasions. He said they needed a complete surgical scene, and were shooting in a green screen room (but were not compositing) so we’d need all the stuff of hospital-land: bed, tray of instruments, IV stands, machines that go beep. I said, yeah, I’d like to see a wall of back-lit X-rays, and I could curtain off the perimeters to make it look medical…

No problem, I ended my paragraph about how I thought it could look, when do you need it? That’s the hard part, Jim said, we’re shooting tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. Without recounting the arduous evening, we got it done, it looked like this:

Last week a friend called- she needed an “classic 60′s Porsche” for a still photo shoot. I have fond memories of finding this one for the movie Spy Game: and said, sure, I think I can find one.

Here’s the difference between me and a lot of people who do this for a living: I know you can’t Google everything. If you could, the job wouldn’t be a job, and for the record, when I started doing this, there was no Google. You’re going to have to get out of that chair, do what I like to call ground-level-intelligence. I figured out right away the expert I used last time was no longer in business, in fact, he’s since gone on to his great reward.

So I got in my car and went to the last place I saw a classic Porsche, in this case a ’76 white 911 Targa with a for sale sign on it: Curry’s. They were busy, I waited until a helpful manager had a second. He heard my pitch, thought about it for a second and gave me the name of another place, one that specializes in Porsches. There, the owner was extremely helpful, and referred my to IMA motorsports, where I met Ivan.

This place is Porsche heaven. His garage is cleaner than my kitchen, and the floor-to-ceiling windows into it make it seem like it’s a giant aquarium filled with exotic Porsche fish. Now might be a good time to mention that I’ve been in love with this particular brand of car since encountering one as a kid in 6th grade. It was a treat just to be here.

I waited. Patience is a key to ground-level intelligence, Ivan is on the phone in his office, and I can hear him cussing. I picture a large, gruff russian mobster. When he comes out, he’s the opposite- he’s friendly, jovial, and, most importantly to my primary task, helpful. He knows a guy who just might have what I’m looking for..

I’ve already decided that my target vehicle would be a mid-sixties 356. The client has specified a convertible, so that’s the goal. Til now, the closest I’d come was a couple targa-top 911s. Remarkable, he dials a number, puts it on speaker-phone to include me, and closes a deal on this masterpiece of automotive design:

I like doing this, it’s a challenge, a puzzle. I live in an area that’s rich in resources and diverse people and things where the film business is still interesting and unusual enough that people are often interested in participating (once they’re sure it’s not a scam). But you can’t do it from your desk, you have to actually go out into the world and talk to people. Maybe that’s why I like it.

Basically

this is America

So my personal healthcare saga continues: a while back, my union, which provides my healthcare, told me that employer contributions were short by $15 dollars over a two-year period, and I would lose my healthcare coverage. Which is odd, because it seemed like I’d done enough union-sanctioned work (film/TV created by signatories of the union) to qualify. In fact, I’d been working on a lot of Healthcare for America ads.

It turns out, one of my biggest employers wasn’t contributing (but I’m not getting into that right now). The point is, my family and I were being ejected into the American wilderness of no insurance, which, if you’ve ever been to the doctor, is a potentially unpleasant/ cripplingly expensive condition.

But I had a coping plan. The medications I take can actually be purchased for *less* without insurance, thanks to retailers competing with one another. Winner: Giant Pharmacy (yay!). And my pediatrician was not able to get doses of THE healthcare holy grail in the suburbs right now, the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) vaccine. Which is how I wound up before dawn outside a public health clinic in Reston with 250 other fretful parents who think immunizing is a good idea.

Simply getting the shot wasn’t easy: it’s not like I could open the paper and read where daily clinics were being offered ( I don’t even get the paper anymore-recession). Besides, online resources should be more current, right? The Virginia Health Department has a page of “vaccination locations” which includes every retailer that ordered
the vaccine. Only trouble with using that as a user-searchable database? It’s totally useless, not one of 30 locations I called had the actual vaccine. OOPs.

Frustrated, I sent them a note saying- jeez you guys, pretty sloppy. Then my phone rang: it was a friendly sounding intern from the VDH who said she understood I was having trouble finding vaccination locations. I said, look, you’ve got a huge pile of misinformation on your site during what’s now been declared a national emergency, and it’s unconscionable. She told me it’s a “fluid situation”. That’s the first time I heard that phrase within the context of this discussion.

Really, it’s not, I said, your site is static, and it’s wrong- I’ve been researching for a week and everyday your site remains unchanged, while other sites, for example CVS Minute Clinic is updating their site daily (and has a small apology that information could be as old as 24 hours) She said she appreciates my patience during this fluid situation. I’m not the least bit patient, I let her know, which is why I’ve bypassed your website and am telling others to do the same. She told me that she was sorry, and it’s a fluid situation.

I just clicked on Prince William County’s health department site, which contains a long disclaimer that previously announced vaccination clinics may or may not occur because, yes, the situation is fluid.

Drink it in.