Here’s Rod Dreher’s account of yesterday’s totally lunatic ‘Jericho March’. Hate Hillary as I might, she had something with ‘Deplorables’. These fucking ‘Christian’ assholes are all totally and truly lower than deplorable. So stupid also they even thanked her by using her nomenclature.https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-i-saw-at-the-jericho-march/

Dreher is even a very religious man, so it’s best to read his account of this horrifying spectacle. He’s a good writer; I had no idea yesterday in D.C. was this bad.

That will be my Evangelical literature for a lifetime. Although this is documentation, Dreher is Catholic and not some freak like Alex Jones, who was a surprise Performer.

Trump hates them too, and would never associate with them. Couldn’t get into high society no matter what, so pretends he’s above Park Avenue. I’d love to hear some of that ‘Contemporary Christian Music’ at Carnegie Hall–some nuclear blast that would be.

The world is watching, and EVERYONE knows that this election was a FRAUD, and if Biden swears in, the world will know that America is a HUGE JOKE.

Unbelievable to hear this said over and over, because so blatantly untrue. Why did all the important world leaders congratulate Biden on his victory except Putin (that I know of.)

The world is always watching America. That’s all it does. Bloggers living in China don’t talk about China, Australians don’t have any local news that interests anybody–and they know all minutiae of U.S. politics, and did so during the Dem primaries. I know who the President of China is, but not the one of Australia. Of of Austria for that matter. I know France and Britain, but can’t right off remember Ireland, Italy or Greece (and those are even places I’m interested in.) All other countries are given short shrift. I can’t think of a one that gets 5% the publicity the U.S. does.

All the people screaming that it’s FRAUD are just doing it because Trump says it, and you want Trump. That doesn’t make it true (even if it is.) In fact, it is logical to assume that most do NOT think it is fraud.

Of course, the extreme rightist blogs are insisting Trump *SEIZE POWER TOMORROW OR IT WILL BE TOO LATE*, so that would be an interesting diversion to wake up to.

I’m in the West Village, just one block below Chelsea. Lots of celebs live a few blocks inland from the Hudson near me (Harrison Ford and Callista Flockhart, for example, and I forgot I did see her a few years ago, but alone), Lauren Hutton, Gere, both of whom I saw many years ago. Most of the others I mentioned now live in the Richard Meier glass houses right on the river or in the streets closest to it. They’ve made my area the trendiest in Manhattan, although the top is obviously still the Upper East Side and Park–but they usually won’t let actors into their co-ops, are the Old Money and lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, etc., is what they want (Barbra Streisand has been screaming about it for years that they wouldn’t let her live on Park Avenue, ‘because I’m Jewish’, and it’s indeed true that that’s the last stronghold of WASPdom here.) As I said, I’m not an ‘extreme fan’ of anybody in any field–despite my adoration of Deneuve, who could have easily been one of the ones I saw when she came to the NY opening of Potiche in about 2012 or so; I should have done that, because she was speaking too. In fact, that’s the only regret I have of not seeing a film star, I’ve more often regretted not going to see onstage Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean-Louis Barrault (Children of Paradise with Barrault and Arletty is probably my single favourite film if I had to choose, but, as I said I’m nuts for Chinatown.) I agree totally with what you said about they’re just like other people, but since we’re so familiar with them in film or television, it’s just fun when you see them by accident, and how they react (or don’t react to you). It often makes you want to say “Hi” because it feels like you know them, but I restrain that. Julianne Moore was really charming with her young daughter about 10 years ago, smiled sweetly and sincerely, and I think she’s a wonderful actress. Flockhart smiled too, and Lauren Hutton even cruised a bit. If I cared to see celebs in LA, I know it would be easy, and I knew what restaurants they went to, but I usually stayed only a week just before Xmas (when it’s so beautiful, cool and clear there), and just wasn’t interested since I’d seen so many here. No, it ‘doesn’t matter’, but it’s a little like sightseeing. These Hollywood people are not nearly so idolized here as in LA; I once saw Rod Stewart on a very cold Xmas Day, and he kept looking around for fans, which was hilarious–nobody was paying any attention to him.

Well, yes, I did see Garbo on the Middle Upper East Side, dressed all scruffily in a man’s coat, but not Cary Grant. Lots of New Yorkers saw her regularly, because she was almost always here, and loved to get out and roam around. Now that you mention back in the day, I also saw Julie Christie breeze by very fast near me in the winter (she was as beautiful off-screen as on), and the one all dressed up was Lana Turner, who was like this hallucination of Technicolor wickedness. Also saw Ann-Margret, who was as charming and pretty as ever. Saw Dustin Hoffman twice, once talking very loudly to somebody just outside my post office. Knew Ruby Keeler way back, when she did a Broadway show I was the pianist for–way, way back. She was very sweet, I introduced my parents to her. She’s the only one I count for those I saw onstage, which is different from just passing by. There are a lot of those, which I’m sure you have too. Sean Connery and Michael Caine were at the Sherry-Netherland Bar when I played there, and Jeremy Irons when I played at the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. Once when I was really hard up, I did temp work at the Park Ave. Armory (Valentino show), and Teresa Wright came in and got all sexy with me–but I couldn’t place who she was although I told her I thought she was familiar, and she got very annoyed when I asked her and refused to answer. My co-workers said “Who was the dame? It took me years to figure out (from some movies she happened to be in that I saw) that that’s who it was. I saw Jackie O on the street and enter Sotheby’s, and her sister Lee 3 times, at the same Valentino in 1993 (somebody said Streep came too, but I didn’t see her), and then twice at two lectures at the Met Museum in the 00s. Lee was a knockout in 1993, but later the nosejob showed a bit too much.

My god, I’d totally forgotten, I saw Jack Nicholson at the old Balducci’s in the 70s, was surprised he was so short, and I think he even had makeup on. I thought he seemed unpleasant. Also James Gandolfini with his little daughter as they got into his car. I’ve probably seen the very young ones down here near me, but don’t know who they are.

You live in a bubble. Trump is the most unpopular President in American history, he has never had a favorability rating over 50 peecent his entire term. Out my college graduating class of 1200 people maybe 10 percent voted for him. My New Hampshire high school traditionally was very Republican but all the women I am still in touch with loathe Trump, and these are women who have voted Republican for 30 years. The men from my class who are outspoken Trump supporters were certainly not the brightest kids.

The real question in my mind is how did Trump get 74 million votes. That’s where the fraud probably is. Outside the hardcore fanbase who goes to rallies and bitter middle aged failures I never meet Trump supporters in real life.

I meant “‘Grady told Jack that someone was trying to interfere with ‘this situation’”, not Scatman (he was one of the ones who picked up on it, although I don’t recall his saying he saw these ghosts.

Never have gone celeb-searching anywhere, but esp. not in L.A., but did want to see some of their houses. You can walk a good way up Benedict Canyon, although I had to take a cab from the Beverly Hills Hotel to get further, and once I did see the Malibu Colony, which does gleam, but it’s too tacky for tourists to walk on it and pretend they’re not impressed, as is known to happen. I knew restaurants movie people went to, but I am not much of an ‘extreme fan’ type, so any I saw here were by accident, and I never saw one in L.A.

This one will be very shorter, but is just to clear up a few things.

You have misunderstood my comment on The Shining the movie, changing the resolution of the story. They got away in the film same as in the book so your wished for ending of them never escaping and/or dying was not going to happen anyway.

I may not have been clear enough about this, but I never wanted the mother and child to not escape or to die. That they got out so miraculously was what was so mysterious, and we were left with their helplessness, because Danny’s ‘shining’ had made him ‘see’ the ‘crazy woman’ in room 237, the ghosts were sometimes made to seem alive more than just Jack’s alcoholism, he was freed from the pantry by ‘Grady’, who is one of the ghosts, and at the end there is the picture of Jack on the wall from 1921 as ‘Midnight, the Stars and You’. So there is this ambiguity (not just in Jack’s mind) about whether some of this is real or not (especially if Grady could let him out of the pantry where Wendy has locked him. Yes, I’ve had to look at a summary to remember some of these details, others I do remember.) Toward the end, Wendy ‘sees ghosts’, and since both Jack and Danny had as well, they seemed to have something of an evil life in the hotel, although that probably had to be stimulated from without. Scatman said to Jack at some point that “someone was trying to interfere with this ‘situation’”. Earlier, Danny had asked Scatman “Is there something bad in this hotel?” (these I remember on my own, although it’s been 25 years since I saw it, probably a second time.) And although Jack does freeze to death without quite being like Mr. Grady and his slaughtered children, there was this sense of a real haunting insofar as both Danny and Wendy also picked it up.

So that Wendy and Danny would go away without ever being able to convince anyone that any of those ghosts and telepathic things that Danny and Scatman had meant a thing. Wendy could only report Scatman’s death to the police, and they’ll find Jack frozen to death. Otherwise, the whole nightmare will remain between them alone–which makes it so the phantoms still seem somewhat alive. Although he communicates with Danny telepathically, it doesn’t seem that he also ‘saw’ these ghosts. In the book, the hotel is burned down or is blown up, which means that everybody is free of the curse of this evil, which, as I said, I would want in real life, if such a similar thing occurred, but the escape of Danny and Wendy was more chilling since they barely made it on their own, with Danny tricking Jack to go in another direction in the maze, and the two of them, at wit’s end, just making it out on Halloran’s (Scatman) snowcat. Of course, Scatman was a ‘good guy’, but he would not be able to corroborate Wendy’s story, Danny could be explained away with almost anything, being a child, but the hotel blown up would then seem to be primarily about Jack’s alcoholic dementia, rather than the horror characters seeming real, esp. with that photo of Jack at the end credits. In the book, “Hallorann, who has taken a chef’s job at a resort in Maine, comforts Danny over the loss of his father as Wendy recuperates from the injuries Jack inflicted on her.” That’s too mundane for horror fiction, although it would be what one would hope for in real life.

I live in an area which a lot of celebs moved to beginning in the late 80s and continuing (mostly by the Hudson), and I’ve run passed a good number (and elsewhere in the city over the years). No, I didn’t expect any of them to be dressed up, but she wore dirty sneakers and looked like a slob. I think in the last 20 years, I’ve also passed (in this area), Julianne Moore, Richard Gere, Jude Law, Tom Cruise, Leonard DiCaprio, Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer (gorgeous and slightly dressed-up but not flashily), and Robbins, as mentioned. Cruise was right across the street from me, looked insane, almost murderous, but is very good-looking, I have to admit. The other actors looked a lot plainer than I thought actors would, Kidman needed makeup because looks plain otherwise, but none looked somewhat ratty except Sarandon. Before that, I saw quite a number of the old really glamorous legends from the 30s, 40s onward, but that’s another story–one was really dressed-up, in one of those black lace dresses, but she was the only one.

No Steve, try not to be stuck in the 1980s. Any sane, sober appreciation of the system points toward violent civil war and nothing else. Nothing else is literally possible.

Biden’s team stole the election. The stealing would not matter as much if it were Kennedy-Nixon, other than personalities and which gang of thieves steals more, and patronage, but here the stakes are much, much higher. Kennedy’s people did not talk of putting Nixon’s people in forced labor camps after public humiliation. They did not talk of seizing everything from White people to give to blacks. They did not talk of open borders and instant citizenship for any illegal with a third of the workforce now permanently unemployed and likely half after the next spate of lockdowns, nor packing the court, nor sending the last few jobs to China or Indian H1 B workers while instituting lockdowns that never ever end. With massive unemployment and nothing in the pipeline for good paying jobs. Oh and abolishing the police and opening prisons, but just for blacks. Who are now legally entitled to prey upon Whites for any reason at all.

Worse, as illegitimate as he is, Biden was a public and known quantity who was Obama’s VP. Kamasutra is an incompetent whore who could not even manage simple competence as AG. She won not a single primary, and is seen rightly as:

A. A Whore pure and simple.
B. Incompetent with the charm of a rattlesnake and the disposition of a black widow spider.
C. Militantly anti-White in her aims and disposition.
D. Illegitimate in that no one voted for her and she’s the heir to the thief who stole the election.

Moreover, there are now predictably rumblings from Kamasutra’s camp that Generals, Admirals, and Sepcial Forces will be extradited to Iran for “war crimes” related to blowing up various Iranian generals etc. And that a great mass of soldiers will be extradited to the International Criminal Court. That’s competent meritocracy for you. Add in that there are series of new lockdowns in sight: the Kazakhstan plague whatever it is, more Beer Flu lockdowns, etc. and people are angry. Most Dem Governors just canceled Christmas. Meanwhile Kamasutra is proposing race-based health care rationing and lots of goodies for blacks, abolishing the police, and nothing for Whites. Or Latinos. Obviously Team Walking Dead is being elbowed aside for Team Whore of Babylon. Weekend at Biden’s is over, its now rule by grating Diversity HR manager.

Restrictions on evictions and mortgage payment holidays will end this month. For Christmas Queen Harris has ordinary people moved from their house to a tent under a bridge. What do they have to lose now?

And states like Texas, and Florida, and all the others that joined in can simply ignore Queen Harris and her decrees, take Trump as the legitimate President, and refuse to accept any order or edict they don’t like from Queen Harris. The pressure on them to do this will be irresistable by their voters and supporters, as will use of Federal Troops to remove Governors, Sheriffs, and other people and rule directly from DC. Remember oil, gas, retail that is not Amazon or Wal-Mart, agriculture, mining, and defense spending are all going to be made extinct by Queen Harris and her group. There are lot of people in boring non-Hollywood places making money that will be made poor forever by Queen Harris and the Silicon Valley oligarchs. She’s promised the Green New Deal, abolishing the internal combustion engine, flying for ordinary people, vacations, pets, eating meat, and lockdowns that never end. Meanwhile Kamasutra is likely to render a whole bunch of military people to Iran or the ICC to reopen the Iran Money Laundering machine for her backers, and rely on said military to repress states and officials and run things directly. She will likely have to use Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam, the NFAC people, Anti-Fa, and the like to run things and those clowns are guaranteed to spark off the hot phase of a civil war via guaranteed atrocities. Since much of the military is likely to do a sitzkreig response to her orders after extraditing various Generals and Admirals (who are all connected) as well as Special Forces groups. Harris is too stupid to understand that. She’s a less competent black-adjacent Hillary without the charm.

The Silicon Valley Oligarchs want the “Great Reset” and to use the media and Harris who is their tool to force the average American into drinking recycled sewage and eating bugs. Since your average person would happily commit genocide of every African on the planet to avoid a lifetime of eating bugs Civil War is inevitable. Particularly since Harris has zero legitimacy. None.

Already in California of all places, the Orange County and LA County and Riverside County Sheriffs have said they will not enforce Gov. Newsom’s orders. Not the curfew, not the ban on outdoor dining, or indoor dining, or limits on congregating, or church worship. None of it.

Ask yourself: is Kamala Harris a person who is viewed as legitimate? As even half-way liked? As someone who can even remotely make people’s lives better than they are now? And what of her backers? Are Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg people who inspire confidence? What about Susan Wojicki or Sundar Pinchai or that greasy Indian guy at Microsoft?

Trump? He will die in prison like Jeffrey Epstein. Who did not kill himself. Along with his family. The Bidens will be pardoned by Harris. But while Harris can take office with insider moves, she can’t move people from being in their own homes, celebrating Christmas, with their own cars and trucks to being homeless under a bridge eating bugs and not have a violent response.

Meritocracy? That’s boomer short bus talk. The US has not been a meritocracy since the first Bush Admin. Or arguably since the Civil Rights movement. The Lockheed Skunkworks did not employ empowered black women who screamed at White men all day and talked about their hair to create the SR-71. Almost all talented White, Asian males, and Latinos are locked out anything under crushing globalization and black black black black black blackety black black black.

This isn’t over. According to the Q Anon people, there’s lots of stuff going on behind the scenes:

https://twitter.com/lebronsonroids/status/1337488077095366657

Steve doesn’t even believe the election was seriously rigged (enough to change the outcome). He’s stated that.

It’s shocking because he has had plenty of opportunity to study the “anomalies” and to see what others with a numbers background and an open mind are saying, e.g., https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/11/12/i-asked-one-simple-question-to-people-who-work-with-fraud/ (previous two posts on that site also lay out specific “anomalies” that, taken together, are essentially statistically impossible).

Even the videos and 1000+ eye witnesses to fraud seem not to have changed his mind. I think there are some people who just can’t bear to believe that the US has already become a banana republic–that includes a lot of his “respectable” readers/commenters here no doubt.

I’ll just say this. I have on occasion donated to Steve in the past, and I appreciate his courageous research on many subjects, but I’d like to focus my future contributions on those who are on the same page on really important issues. Not getting that this election was fraudulent is big. Hopefully he and others can continue to keep an open mind and review the data. I believe more and more people, when they really get a chance to look at the data, will come to understand that there was massive fraud at play.

you favor a snoozer like The Hunger.

I made a typo, ‘now’ should have been ‘not’. The Hunger was not a good movie, the book was in this case what was so effective. I liked it because of Deneuve’s long guilty stillnesses, which conveyed her acceptance at being the ‘major vampire’, as opposed to Bowie’s ‘minor, more short-lived vampire’–but he didn’t know it early on, and she didn’t tell him that she got a few thousand more years than he did. She just stood there looking helpless in her hilarious guilt. But the gross mistake was to finally kill the Deneuve character and let her new favourite, Susan Sarandon, whom she corrupted into vampirism, be the final shot at the top of some Croyden-looking high-rise apartment building. I’ve always thought Sarandon was overrated hugely, including on the street, on which she dressed down to an absurd degree. Lived a few blocks from me (maybe still does, but she was with Tim Robbins then and I saw him once, he was nice.) Anyway, in the book, the final paragraph has the Deneuve character triumphant and having been threatened by her ‘smart protege’ Susan Sarandon character, ‘visits her frequently’, but, in the last line, Strieber has her vow that “she knew that she would never ever take the chance of letting her out of her coffin again”. Of course, that could make you ’emotionally depressed’ just like Scatman getting the ax and the mother and son having a ‘less famous’, maybe more feral, sort of getaway, but I just don’t think horror is supposed to make you feel all elevated and enlightened–it’s a kind of fiction, supposed to make you a bit queasy if not a lot… and I’m not attracted to it generally. Also, the way certain stars were always supposed to survive–like Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno, that sort of thing. But Susan Sarandon atop Deneuve? Unthinkable. However, it was 1984 by then, and unhappy endings had also finally come to America in the 60s (although there are the notable few even as far back as D.W. Griffith’s beautiful Broken Blossoms.) I had read Strieber’s book after seeing the film and it was from the library, so you might have agreed with someone who had pencilled in after the last paragraph “The writer is insane!” I thought that hilarious, but Strieber knew how to portray a *Serious Vampire*, none of that Anne Rice bullshit. Otherwise, in the movie, it was sort of an ‘overdone chic’ atmosphere, with Deneuve and Bowie smoking and posturing all the time. Sometimes she played ‘Gibet’ from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, on the piano, which was also very funny. Here’s one NYT featured a few weeks ago and is recent. I haven’t even read the article yet, but I think it’s been online for awhile: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/movies/the-truth-review.html

Movies not made in LA? But that reminds me one of my favourite things is movies ‘made in L.A.’, including Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A., a sort of sequel to Nashville. Loved it, especially Keith Carradine and Geraldine Chaplin, who was gorgeous, and it inspired me (along with all of Joan Didion’s and Raymond Chandler’s books) to go to L.A. 13 times from 2001-2011. Also, the old noirs made there, like Kiss Me Deadly, Criss Cross, Double Indemnity and, above all, Chinatown, for which I searched out all the locales: Lake Hollywood, Pt. Fermin, the Casino on Catalina, Alameida Street, went to them.

But they divorced almost immediately after this film came out. But the few film clips I have seen of their interactions in Eyes Wide Shut seemed to be more revealing of their off-screen relationship than any acting–it was distant and at heart, false.

Could be. But it was revealed as false, which is why I now think the movie was good. They all were as ambitious as possible, as are all Hollywood ‘tuffies’ who are really making it there, and the divorce seemed like an immediate continuation of the movie. There are all kinds of these relationships in movies which are interesting to me: The extreme artifice of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad is made even more so by all that serialized Robbe-Grillet writing, but the two lovers gradually come together in this weird sort of happy ending, despite all the stylized movement in the hotel throughout, so that a kind of ‘true love’ came out of all that artifice.

Impressive you could tolerate this so long. I didn’t even understand why it was published since McCullough’s order had already been thrown out before putting the article here.

The most extreme right blogs are stark in their insistence on the same ‘loss of rule of law’, and although this brings great relief from the senseless sputterings of this fat pig, who doesn’t care how much harm he causes, they immediately started talking about Trump invoking the Insurrection Act that Flynn advised. I stayed away from even glancing at that particularly horrible blog since May, but now that they are basically defeated I was not going to hear such as ‘time to cross the Rubicon’ with much difficulty.

Nothing would surprise me about even the most extreme things from Trump, not even the Insurrection Act. He doesn’t have anything else to do–he is all that and only that. That’s why he called this ‘the big one’, although whether he really thought so or was just running interference till the next vaudeville number came into his thick skull, we’ll just have to see.

Your whole argumentation can be summed up within one paragraph:

You have no problems with a lecherous old pervert occupying the white house who has a penchant for pawing and upsetting young girls and sniffing older married women against their wishes.

AJM “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz artist.

By your responding that “Filing lawsuits is not insurrection” you have demonstrated you suffer from a serious comprehension deficit disorder.

My exact statement instead was “Interfering in how a state conducts its election under its own laws is and thereby “stirring up discontent, resistance or rebellion against the government in power” is sedition which is precisely what Texas is doing with its law suit.” Notice the conditional that preceded the conclusion?

Reread it and try harder. Maybe it will come to you. If you need help, read the 2nd Amendment.

The similarity to the Dred Scott decision is that no matter what the Supreme Court does, the breakup of the Union is now inevitable.

That was the precise point I was making. Glad you caught it.

The “Union” has already been nullified by massive vote fraud–there is no way to put that toothpaste back in the tube.

That is a claim for which no proof has been except fake evidence such as the claim that the probability if the late vote shift toward Biden was one in a quadrillion that statistically proves fraud occurred.

Of course, the numb nuts who p[resent that as evidence do not acknowledge it is based on the complete false premise that the distribution of votes counted early matched the distribution of votes counted later was false because in was the same day vote that was counted early that was heavily weighted toward Trump because it was Republican voters who predominated in the same day vote while it was he mail in vote that was counted late and Democrats voting for Biden vastly predominated among the early voters . The vote count would then necessarily be skewed in different direction depending on when the votes were cast and counted. The difference was magnified by the fact that early voting also predominated in the heavily Democratic areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And then on top of it, the Republican dominated legislature prohibited the processing and counting of he mail in votes until election day that further delayed the count of those votes.

Thus the claim the skewing of votes depending on when they were counted being evidence of fraud is just more fake Trumpista news. and the complete lack of honor among Republicans that they would even make such outlandish claims when they have to know the truth that falsifies it.

The union is not disintegrating because of the fraudulent election because of the phony fraud claims the Trumpistas are using to incite their side to reject the election that is sedition.

That is how the Dred Scott decision divided the country because the court rendered a decision that could not hold because it would be entirely unacceptable and completely undermine a principle underlying the formation of the Constitution that states would accept the full faith and credit of the laws of other states.

Do be sure to always decimate everything in a commenter’s post. Wonderful etiquette.

All obscure and/or mediocre films. Not a great CV.

They are all known to people who know anything (or maybe a lot about movies.) I included The Glittering Prizes and After the War, which are BBC TV series, not theatrical films, which you obviously didn’t know. Still, fine examples of Raphael’s writing. Two for the Road is probably Audrey Hepburn’s best film (although not her most iconic), and she and Finney are beautiful in it. Petulia is marvelous, and was one of the first that showed us Julie Christie’s fabulous acting talent, but…I had meant Darling, just previous to that, for which she won Best Actress. (Lawrence Marcus wrote Petulia.)

None of those were mediocre, and even if something is obscure, that is not a valid criticism of it. John Korty’s Silence is a beautiful film, and that’s very obscure.

I don’t see why she is your favourite. Try watching that thing she was in with Jack Lemmon. Are you really sure she is still acting in 3 movies a year? Haven’t heard a thing about her in ages except for her honorable public stand against MeToo.

I can’t even believe someone would write such an appalling sentence–it’s none of your business ‘why she is my favourite actress’. If you don’t like it, then just bugger off. Even if someone told me that Jennifer Lopez was their favourite actress, I would just respond with bewildered silence, not tell them “I don’t see why she’s your favourite”; however stupid I might think the reasons were; they have their reasons. What am I going to do, try to talk them out of it?

But since you phrased it so crudely, I will follow with the one thing (besides Barry Lyndon, I guess) we agree on: The April Fools is definitely her worst film, and I’ve seen all of them that I’ve been able to find. Hustle with Burt Reynolds was none too great either, now was the movie of The Hunger, also with David Bowie. She’s a great actress and a great beauty, cool and magnificent. That’s hardly obscure, now is it? Lots of people love her. Yes, she makes 2 or 3 movies every year, explaining it by saying she and some of the finest French directors aged at the same time. She’s still in great demand. If you haven’t followed her, then you just haven’t. Even European films aren’t shown here with much publicity any more, and usually only in NY or LA, even then only about a week. In the last 5 years, I’ve seen the few that were made in theaters like IFC in NY, but there were at least 3. The others I’ve streamed. Yes, her response to MeToo was brilliant, and very Deneuve to do it. She is very fond of men, always has been. And god knows they’ve been wild about her. How couldn’t we be? She’s older now, but still one of the great beauties.

As for her best movies, there are Repulsion, Peau d’Ane (with the equally beautiful Delphine Seyrig as the Lilac Fairy), Tristana, Indochine, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Mississippi Mermaid, The Last Metro, My Favourite Season (one of the best, I think–Andre Techine is one of the greatest directors, and he later directed her and Depardieu in Les Temps Qui Changent, which is wonderful–the first had Daniel Auteuil, one of the great French film actors of the last 30 years), Place Vendome, Pola X, East-West, a miniseries of Les Liaisons Dangereuses which I thought better than the Close/Pfeiffer/Malkovich movie)…the best from the 00’s on that I was able to get hold of or see in theaters were A Christmas Tale (fantastically good), Potiche, The Girl on the Train (also Techine), On My Way, In the Name of My Daughter (in theater), and All That Divides Us, from 2017, a year in which she made 5 pictures.

As for the evil, the two examples are different. If it’s going to be HORROR, it should really scare you as much as it can. When I said ‘they are still there’, I just meant that that’s the fictional intention in the movie of The Shining and the success of the vampires in the book of The Hunger . That does not mean I think ‘evil should triumph in real life’, which brings us to Eyes Wide Shut: That was just a thought of mine, but I thought Kubrick was clever using real-life husband and wife even if I don’t really like either of them much (he’s good for action, she’s always pretty flat-footed, and another stupid Oscar for The Hours). He had to be thinking of this fact by using them to portray another couple besides themselves. So there had to be some sort of psychological manipulation–although both actors would have been aware of the contrasts and similarities of the fictional couple they played. Probably ‘evil’ was therefore too strong a word for Kubrick’s choice of a famous couple to do his film about a couple. In that way, the film makes some sense to me even if I don’t like it.

I’m sticking to my story: The Killing and Barry Lyndon–the only 2 films that are any good.

And that’s your business. Think what you please.

And some say nothing even with few words. I thought you were wrong when you alleged the case in Merchant of Venice was decided based on the contract provision that barred the lender from getting a drop of blood. You’re plain wrong. The contract called for him to get a pound of flesh, period. Nothing in it for or against any blood. Moreover, there was nothing in the contract about how many times the cut could be made to obtain just a pound.

Now a law professor in a civil procedure class at Columbia indeed pointed to this case to show how courts resolved issues of law and equity that are bound up in this play. Under contract law as specified in their contract, the lender was entitled to a pound of flesh. Nothing at all about blood or how many cuts he could use to get exactly one pound. Since the law of contract entitled him to a pound, no more nor less, it didn’t matter pursuant to the contract whether it resulted in bleeding or how often he cut to get pound.

So here is where law and equity clash when the merchant offered to make the lender more than whole so he wouldn’t insist on his pound of flesh. The lender spurned it not because he waned merely to vindicate his legal rights, but to get revenge on the merchant for among other things the merchant having attacked him for his lending practices and his daughter having run off with someone close to the merchant so he wanted to use his legal (statutory) right under contract law to punish the merchant using the contract breach as the weapon.

Now as the law professor explained it, courts were loath to invalidate clearly agreed to contract terms; they were, however, equally loath to enable anyone to use pure contract or statute law to inflict harm. So how to solve the dilemma.

Simple. Vindicate the contract right but impose conditions based on equitable principles that made it impossible to realize them that were beyond the contract terms but which are those impossible conditions of trying to get a pound of flesh with a single cut without shedding a drop of blood, that, contrary to your false claim about it, was not specified as a condition in the contract.

You are even wrong about your notion that the old equitable principles under English law have gone by the way side.

The “law” of torts is nothing but based entirely on principles of equity imposing duties on individuals based on what is just and right in contrast to statutory rights that specify precisely what shall or shall not be done that need to be clearly defined to be understood to be effectuated. Whereas in the old English system, these were vindicated in different courts, in America courts have combined jurisdiction over both that allows both to be vindicated in the same court as part of a single action.

Your feeble effort to respond with mere disparagement without even directly addressing my comments exposes you as a true who relies entirely on using lies, deception, misrepresentation and fraud to advance his claims.

The hallmark of lies is they can be made up with few words that can be unraveled and exposed only by providing the all facts and details that expose the truth about them discredits them.

I get it. You can’t refute the truth, so you ignore it. The sure mark of a charlatan and con man. A real Trumpista.

You also seem to be conflating Jews living in Germany in the 30’s and 40’s with Jews living in NY. When I wrote “they had few interactions or thoughts on Jews until the Jews began propagandizing the so called “Holocaust” and escalating the hatred of Germans anew in the early 1970’s” I referred to 2 different periods,

I’m conflating them in that they are both swarms or populations of Jews. Of course the experience is not going to be the same.

This seems so unimportant but it seems you wanted a response.

Therefore I’ll kindly ignore some of the seeming condescension. I didn’t care whether you responded or not. You suggested something that was of interest to me, and if you think it’s unimportant, I certainly am unconcerned. It’s not unimportant, and neither was what you wrote.

I’ve noticed that people here seem to talk about *Holocaustics* beginning in the early 70s, when it most certainly began much earlier. I’ve been aware of it all my life, including when I grew up in KKK country. You’re a bit younger than I am, but not by much. It was taught. In fact, I knew a lot about Jews all through the 60s from Leonard Bernstein and Barbra Streisand alone, and all Hollywood is Jewish-produced (even if I didn’t know that at the time.) I just didn’t know the bodies of thousands of Jews till I got here.

This was interesting. I have been surrounded by Jews since I was 16, they are everywhere in NYC of course. And HOLOCAUSTICS (Joseph Heller) screamed everywhere. I just accepted it for years just like almost everybody else.

I met some Germans over the years and I noticed they felt no guilt about it either.

But what is most interesting about what you wrote is that you knew so few.

This sounds quite fantastic to me, an Anglo-American from the South, where there was one Jewish family in town, so basically none: many Germans had few interactions with Jews. Personally, I thought Jews were a people from the Bible and never had a thought about them until I was 13 or 14 and I befriended a few at school and the mainstream media began talking incessantly about them.

Over the years here, I’ve thought I’ve ‘befriended a number of them’, even thought they were rather exotic and at conservatory, much of the faculty and student body were Jewish (and I didn’t think they usually played well either, and didn’t like much of the music of the Jewish composers either.)

Not so many years later, I did temp work in all sorts of offices to support myself, and was often in offices where I was the only Gentile. I guess it’s like growing up in KKK country (I think some of the townspeople were KKK, although they didn’t say so, and the KKK once did parade through town–in any case they were all around) and, without modulation, moving straight to one of the American-Israeli cities–this one, and Los Angeles seems to be the other. I’m pretty much a New York Native by now, and it’s worked out for me here somehow, but I did notice as I became more aware and less intimidated (the numbers of Jews here!), that I gradually ended up with no more Jewish friends, and took a look–most were Catholic.

Not that this means anything in particular, but it’s odd that, even though Jews weren’t prevalent in KKK country (I didn’t even know KKK was anti-Jew, only anti-black), I’m the one from a place not associated with this Holocaust phenomenon and you and other Germans I’ve met have sometimes not even met a single Jew–unless they stayed here for at least a day or two! An Australian I used to chat with had never met one, and I stayed with a Swiss friend in Lausanne in 1997, who had met no Jews in Switzerland, only during his year or two in New York. I am saying that to come here from the Deep South was to be constantly in swarms of Jews and still is, but just that I am friendly acquaintances with one or two, while having no close Jewish friends anymore. I had never been able to cooperate with the ‘system’ here, which is well-entrenched in the Arts, of course. I think there is a ‘Jewish look’ (and some Jews have agreed with me), and it has never been attractive to me, although I shouldn’t say that.

These are just stray thoughts you’ve stimulated, another being that several WASP types from the South married Jewish men, in most cases having to convert and raise Jewish children.

My brother is a professor/dean at a major Southern university, and talks about his one or two encounters with Jews as being enough to know something of them. They are not. I must have done the time well enough to be able to live here (it does have its advantages, as is well-known even to those who claim to hate it), but I’ve liked more Italians, Greeks, English, Irish and other Europeans by a long shot, now that I’m not so intimidated by *Jewish Quantity*.

I’m the other end on The Shining. I thought the changes Kubrick made were brilliant. Then I read the King book, the only one I’ve ever read of his–thought it was awful, not scary, and the ending Kubrick substituted instead gave ‘the devils’ still some of their power left, even if the mother and child got out–that makes for much scarier sensations than that ridiculously cornball Stephen King ending. In fact, the evil people are ‘still’ in the Overlook Hotel. Shelley Duvall and the little boy didn’t stop the spell. The Hunger (the movie) was equally bad for not letting the evil and horror triumph at the end. If it doesn’t win, it’s not really evil. Whitley Streiber’s book was chilling and the last page incredible. So those two swap, one better as a book (most often), one better as a movie (rare that it’s better than the book.)

Good to read this, though, I had never known Frederick Raphael co-wrote this. He’s one of the best screenwriters, from Petulia, Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes, After the War, more…although I definitely find Eyes Wide Shut an extreme mediocrity. Cruise has his one moment to show his stardom, and takes it. Kidman is no star as far as I’m concerned, dreadfully overrated.

List of Kubrick films is very good to see, how many of them are masterpieces. I’d forgotten some were his. Loved Barry Lyndon, a total ‘biological sport’ of a film, and 2001 is one of the greatest.

I never liked Belle De Jour much, but Deneuve is my favourite of all film actresses, so of course anything she does is worth watching for me. She’s still making good pictures, 2 or 3 a year.

The only thing I like about Eyes Wide Shut is that Kubrick seems to be using the couple real-life marriage without their permission. This is very sinister and evil in itself.

They were both in Scientology, but she got out.

I think Biden’s approval rating is decent enough right now.

Looking at these two reminds me that NO ONE in America likes them. Biden and Harris aren’t liked by other democratic leaders, not liked by the voters who voted for them, and they are hated by everyone else.
I can’t remember another time when a newly elected President had so close to zero genuine support.
Now that they are on TV posing as our leaders they look so incompetent.

Left out name of the 1993 miniseries: It was called Wild Palms and set in 2007, which itself is long gone, as we all know.

I never had thought of movies in these kinds of categories, they seem sort of odd. ‘Agreeableness’? Well, I guess that’s The Sound of Music because it was the freak sales phenomenon. I watched it again a few years ago to see if I hated it less, and that it might be better than I had originally meanly judged. It wasn’t. Even the score is thoroughly inferior.

Love both of The Godfather movies, which are, I think, usually now strung together. Godfather III was awful, and Pacino and others are in WaPo or NYT today talking about it, but I didn’t read it yet. They weren’t perfect, though, with Diane Keaton always going “MIIIIIII-chael”–or maybe she was properly drear. I love Pacino, though, throughout his career. Much less de Niro.

I’m at the other end of the world with There Will Be Blood, which I despised, especially Day-Lewis, whom I find insufferable–he always publicizes his ‘research’ and in this case came up with John Huston, and everybody could hear it. So I won’t say much, except I guess, if I cared about the Oscars, I’d be glad No Country for Old Men won, because I thought it was very good, and I’ve liked a number of Cormac McCarthy’s novels a great deal. The trilogy is beautiful.

Pulp Fiction, when it came out, was one of the trendiest moments in world history, and I found it sickening like all of Tarantino’s other work–including all the silly articles about it, making this little runt seem like he was Fellini or Orson Welles or something. There’s one for neuroticism, I guess. Someone said they thought Vertigo was Hitchcock’s worst, but I thought it was one of his best, but the Shower Scene in Psycho is peerless. Not generally ever a fan of horror, and agree it’s perfectly paired with neuroticism–but Hitchcock and Janet Leigh were a genius combination.

Best films are, for me, Chinatown, Dressed to Kill, Les Enfants du Paradis, Last Year at Marienbad, Touch of Evil, La Dolce Vita, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, The Birth of a Nation, Romance of Happy Valley, others.

I haven’t seen most of those giant things by Spielberg, nothing since Close Encounters.

Interesting what you say about Oliver Stone. He’s definitely prime Disagreeable material, but I remember how brilliant that 1993 miniseries was he and Bruce Wagner did with Angie Dickinson and the others. It’s the only thing I ever saw that made me so paranoid I couldn’t watch most of it. Later got it on vhs and thought it was masterful.

So let’s see what the PA AG says in his brief that reflects directly on your claims about the meaning of the decision you refer to regarding a state legislature’s alleged plenary powers to designate electors (REPUBLICAN PARTY OF PENNSYLVANIA, v. KATHY BOOCKVAR, IN HER OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS SECRETARY OF PENNSYLVANIA, ET AL., No. 20-542, USSC

Start with:
“Petitioner [Republicans] suggests that under the Elections and Electors Clauses, state legislatures have absolute authority over the states’ conduct of federal elections, unencumbered by state constitutions. The fundamental principles of our Constitution, the Framers’ intent, and this Court’s own long-standing and recently reaf firmed precedent confirm that Petitioner is wrong [That’s Ken R.]”

To go on:

“Nothing in the Elections Clause “attempts to endow the Legislature of the state with power to enact laws in any manner other than that in which the Constitution of the state has provided
that laws shall be enacted”. Smiley, 285 U.S. at 368; see McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1, 25 (1892) (‘The legislative power is the supreme authority, except as limited by the constitution of the state.’”) So even the case Ken cites refutes his claims.

And then:
“The same is true for substantive provisions of a state constitution. This Court has specifically (and recently) held that a state legislature is bound by substantive provisions of a state constitution when enacting regulations governing federal elections, and that such substantive limitations do not violate the Elections Clause. See AIRC, 576 U.S. at 817” (emphasis added).

To sum it up, as these points make clear, a state legislature can direct the manner of choosing electors, but can do so only in according with its own constitution that in Pennsylvania provides it do so by enacting laws that are subject to vetoes and that it can only alter by enacting other laws that revise them. It entirely lacks any authority to willy nilly disregard its own laws and simply decide to designate electors by resolution or other manner by suddenly seizing its authority to designate electors that ignore the votes the public cast which you claim the US Constitution delegates to legislature as an absolute power that overrides the state’s own Constitution.

That’s nonsense, as I made crystal clear about the power the Constitutional provision grants legislatures that is self-evidence from a simple reading of the text. .

I didn’t need to read briefs to figure it out from the plain text of the clause. That I refer to the case you cite and the brief of the PA attorney general is merely to show the truth has only one version, and that their reading coincides with mine proves only that what all of us said was the truth that anyone can ascertain from what it is rather than it is true because someone said it that we must depend on it for its truthfulness as you and those adhering to precedents seek to make it.

Think about that, and when you do it long enough maybe it will seep through your ossified brain.

Truth stands on its own independent of anyone’s perception of it. Just as the material world stands by itself independent of how any human perceives it. It is only when humans necessarily perceive it as it actually is that they can realize themselves with it by acting in accordance with it.

The slavish reliance on precedents and decisions turns this truth on its head and leads only to chaos and the multitudes being subjugated by the misrepresentations, lies, deceptions and frauds practiced by Trump, his Trumpistas and their ilk.

And you would indeed be well advised to adhere to your declaration you will not respond or engage me on any comments on any subjects to avoid exposed your limitations.

It’s Trump who has been committing treason and sedition for years by soliciting foreign help for being elected; by engaging obstruction of justice in violation of his duties to take care that he faithfully execute the laws, by disregarding the emoluments clause and the Republicans for violating their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution by ignoring all the criminal acts Trump has committed.

It is, instead, Trump who has from the beginning gone with the power is everything concept of governing. You just don’t like it when you can see how the tables can be turned.

Yes, the Republican has reduced it to the game of power and to hell with the Constitution and rules.

We’re close to the point where you should listen to Mao about how power comes from the barrel of a gun.

You really think that all the millions more who voted for Biden than voted for the gangster Trump will simply sit back and let him go on for a single day after Jan. 20?

And you seem to forget the military may have something to say about tings if it gets as far as Trump wants to push it. You rally think the military will fully stand behind an ass…. who calls them suckers and losers? Sure they will.

It says something when Manny and the French are to the right of American intellectuals and media. The latter groups really are to the left of Che Guevara.

The French and their Gallo-Roman culture elites need to never forget the Franks when considering the foundations of France. It was the Franks, led by Charles Martel, who defeated the Moors at the Battle of Tours and began the process of driving Islam out of Western Europe. They could use another Charles Martel right now. So could we.

Mostly these are films that appeal to fans of the director but not as much to outsiders, although Mulholland Drive is probably peak David Lynch.

Definitely agree that it is. After that, Inland Empire is endless and full of all the noir cliches. He can’t even seem to resist ‘prostitutes in Pomona’, and still trying to ‘demystify’ Los Angeles, when that helicopter in bright, cold air hovering above the HOLLYWOOD sign seems to already do that, as well as explain and declaim that that’s why and where noir came to be, and is the only great location for that genre. But I think it was the apotheosis of noir and that it now is basically non-existent. The Black Dahlia proved that (for me, at least; I thought it was awful, but then I think all the adaptations of Ellroy’s novels are bad. He’s one of the few novelists who don’t seem to care if their work is twisted and torn apart.)

The earlier ones were often good, as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, but MD is surely his best. He’s sort of a cult, though, I’m not in it. But not as bad as Tarantino, all of whose movies I despise–but that’s just me.

I’m kind of shocked. Macron, of course, is a punk and a bullshitter. But I’m tempted to say that the fact that this is happening is a good sign.

New York is an overwhelmingly ugly city. Sure some public insides spaces are upscale, like the Opera or the Saks store on 5th. Expensive restaurants have great decor, but food is often over hyped, with subpar service. Uncollected trash and 10 Warhols on a restaurant’s wall. Only in NY.

Lived there 30 mis-spent years. NYCers love the filth and ugliness. It’s part of their “we can take anything” mentality. In their fucked up heads, the more filth and ugliness, the more it proves how tough they are. That’s why nothing ever gets permanently fixed up; after Giuliani/Bloomie comes De Blasio, as winter follows summer.

The tough/ugly thing must be some miscegenation of Jew/Italian. The Jew in his chutzpah says, “Look at my ugly painting, it’s better than Leonardo.” The Italian in his bravado says, “You think I’m ugly? Go ahead, punch me, just try it.”

“They say if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere. But if you can make it anywhere, why would you live in New York?” Ed. Abbey.

The tough/ugly thing must be some miscegenation of Jew/Italian.

I wouldn’t give any landscaping prizes to NYC’s Asians and Latinxos, either. True there are precious few neighborhoods or commercial streets you would stroll down for an aesthetic treat, but one thing the city does have is quite a few lovely parks and greenways of various sizes, often in surprising locations. I used these a lot, often planned my walking routes around them. But the question, as with the subways, is safety, and no longer would I push my luck there.

those whites virtue signaling their superiority to deplorable–i.e. in touch with reality

It’s so unfortunate that Hillary’s nasty words are immortalized by white people. The fact is is that “deplorable” is never good, even if you mean by now a certain group of white people. Maybe it was an easy way to describe what used to be called ‘the lightly possessed’, and the ‘well-possessed’ have always condescended to the ‘lightly possessed’. Although I know that by ‘deplorable’ you also mean some whites who are very well-possessed.

I hate the BLM signs on my block too, but I wouldn’t eat the Jews that put them there–no matter what they did or posed as doing–I am WHITE GENTILE KOSHER, but I am NOT a DEPLORABLE . I don’t identify with this term ‘deplorable’ even if many of you find it the thing to do. In a subtle way, it actually makes Hillary look as if she’d said something accurate. Maybe it’s just easier, but I think it makes the group you’re talking about look a bit stupid (and some of them are.) Seems to me you’re letting those very virtue-signalling whites determine some of the narrative that should not be their prerogative.

Interest in the welfare of blacks is destroying the modern world…

Oh man, am I sorry about that, and you in Chicago have lots of reasons for feeling uncool–at least the mayor wouldn’t condone the theft and looting. Graffiti is garbage anywhere, and you’re arrested for it in NYC, so we don’t have nearly as much as we did way back in the 70s. Blacks are always going to like ‘the squalid look’, at least the ordinary ones (I admit to liking quite a number of black musicians, and Ella Fitzgerald sounds white because she was influenced mostly by the white singer Connie Boswell), plus you get arrest for graffiti since Ed Koch, who was good at things like that. Does Chicago arrest for graffiti? I’ve never seen the appeal of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat–a saw a whole show of his works, and they all look like big canvasses of graffiti. The very worst here was spraying the windows of the subway black so you couldn’t see where you were, and that’s thankfully gone, although I don’t take the subway anymore. If I have to get somewhere, a bus.

And, of course, at the peak of the early St. George riots, NYT would put a photo of ‘young girl painting a mural’–it was someone’s fucking house, it was private property! They acted as if it were an important creative act! Disgusting!

I was thinking of the heritage going back so far with France, Italy and Greece, I still think it’s part of what makes them cool, although I think Steve wanted current trends to be the criterion for ‘coolness’. I did watch all the recent movies of my long-time favourite Catherine Deneuve last year, and I didn’t notice any graffiti, but it was probably there and I just didn’t see it.

I’d put Portland and Seattle as *Most Uncool U.S. cities* right now.

The U.S. is the center of the world, according to all those who say it’s collapsing. Bloggers and Tweeters from Australia and China talk mostly about American politics and mores.

I don’t think it was ever the coolest as a whole nation, but New York and Los Angeles both definitely used to be.

France, Italy, Greece–because of what they were, and they’re all still very sensual people despite the Muslims.

Tahiti is super-cool, and that’s not just because of billionaires with overwater bungalows: The French are much better at that sort of colonial possession than the British were: you get great French restaurants and the interior of Tahiti and also the lagoon of Bora Bora are as beautiful as anything in Europe or America.

In terms of charisma, the U.S., not because of ‘charming cool’, but because even with collapses and upheavals every few minutes, everybody else in the world knows all the latest U.S. news. An Australian I used to chat with knew all about the candidates for Democratic nominee, and I still can’t remember their president or prime minister.

Maybe the U.S. really is the coolest–and more than ever–because it is so dangerous and yet every event here is watched by the entire world. I know I already said that, but it’s a big deal, even if I personally don’t find American culture ‘cool’ at this juncture.

Also, it doesn’t have to be new things. France, Italy and Greece are still way cooler in aesthetic ways than the U.S. for things that happened and were made and still exist up to several thousand years ago. Iraq is the same, but somehow was isolated in modern times and never had a cool period till the Iraq War.

The IRA and the Black Panthers are both gangsters dressed up as revolutionaries.

Only three Biden cabinet members (of 15) have been announced. All are Jewish:

1) Treasury – Janet Yellen
2) State – Anthony Blinken
3) Homeland Security – Alejandro Mayorkas

The Big Four cabinet positions are State, Treasury, Defense and Justice.

Merrick Garland, also Jewish, is rumored to be under consideration for Attorney General. That would make three out of four top cabinet positions filled by Jews.

Biden’s Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, is also Jewish.

I don’t ever want to hear another goddamned thing about “diversity” from the Democrats in my entire life. Nor do I ever want to hear about how badly Jews are oppressed in this country.

I don’t think they look gay at all. They’re just handsome, look like aristocrats. I don’t much like the look of kilts, including on Prince Charles, but the lederhosen this guy has on look really good. But the other guy’s jacket and vest are better. I don’t think of lederhosen as ‘dressing up’, but then I don’t know much about it. Some kind of embroidered but outdoorsy shirt without buttons would look better. Could be very Wagnerian, with those great tough-looking boots on the right –but I bet Louis XIV would have worn those too-frilly boots on the left–they look like something somebody from Lichtgenstein or Luxembourg would wear, maybe Vienna, but I don’t think a kilt is for Viennese balls-the men have to be magnificently formal, and the women in long white dresses and long gloves, all of them blonde and discreetly busty.

No they don’t. You should see NYC’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, all these red-faced guys half out of breath from having to march and blow tubas with a Guinness hangover…they do NOT look gay in their green kilts.

I wouldn’t ever wear a kilt myself though, I don’t think they look gay but it would feel like wearing a skirt and I wouldn’t like that. I definitely would wear lederhosen and they look German-butch, not gay. What’s the matter with you? Hitler looks like absolute shit in his unclean lederhosen, and I bet his stupid moustache would always be full of…mucus membrane….

I thought it was chocolate mousse too, but that too is plenty faggy.

I had a patron on Park Avenue when in my 20s who lived across from to two rich gays. One of them was Peruvian, started Dean & DeLuca and came over and made this wonderful cheese souffle, speaking of mousses. Mrs. De Rahm was real “Old New York”, and told me privately that she didn’t believe what she’d heard about Felipe and ‘Timmy’, that she found that offensive. Like many of those bored loaded socialites, she also had, at age 75, a gay lover who was 35. I don’t know whether he ‘put out’ or not, but he wrote godawful music. Looking back, I’m embarassed at my hickish ‘oohs and ahhs’ at the couple’s shoe room–at least 400 pair between the two of them. ‘Timmy’ looked at me condescendingly.

But main thing is they had two Schnauzers named Artichoke and Anchovy.

I think I don’t like any fictional treatments of presidents, monarchs, etc., while they’re still living and functioning. And even if dead, I usually would rather see something on Louis XIV or Marcus Aurelius–somebody dead a long time

Agreed.

Re: Deaf Great Beethoven. Of course. But these people seem a bit airhead not knowing that Beethoven was already great, accomplished and celebrated both as composer and pianist long before he became deaf. And that affected the music–maybe making it more powerful, that struggle, agony. But there’s a huge lot of work before he became deaf. He could still hear music up until about 1812, but he was never totally deaf. Also, it’s important that while it is very admirable that his composition continued and grew into magnificence, the deafness did stop his performing as a pianist, from which he got major income. And he became very withdrawn. Also, although his ‘totally deaf period’ is considered his greatest music, it is not a huge amount, and the 9th Symphony is the only one of the symphonies he composed while totally deaf.

Mr. Stix is right, and they were highly publicized. The ones I’m thinking of right now occurred about 10-15-20 years ago, although surely some before that. There was one that made me always stand at the back of the platform till the train gets there. I read that article from NYT to my sister in Georgia the other day. Union Square is near me, and also got the beginnings or tail ends of some recent protests on either side. Mainly, I was marvelling at the woman who got under the tracks and survived. I think I could pull myself up the platform, it’s not too high–and if I dropped something really important onto the tracks, I wouldn’t hesitate to jump down, even though you’re never supposed to.

I haven’t taken the subways since pandemic started, but they were already getting horrible well before that. Threats of beheading me once, single mothers taking up 5 seats for 3 people getting furious at somebody who wanted to sit in a crowded car, and throwing their junk food at them. Those were black, but I ran into a young super-butch lesbian a year or so ago, who started a fight with me, and we screamed at each other till I had to get off–she was Asian, surprisingly.

I don’t believe the Upper East Siders who left for their beach and country homes won’t be back. That’s just part of the way it works–the city part is the most important, with all the galas, openings, etc., although that social level does ‘require’ enough money to have something in the Hamptons at least.

Once the vaccines start really working, I think the city will totally come back. There’s just much more of all things cultural here. All right, I know about the NY vs. LA thing, going back to shit talk by Woody Allen and the rest, but I have made 13 trips to LA since 2001, and explored everything: The quality is as good at the Music Center, Disney Hall, and many great museums (not just both Gettys), and I’d stay a week usually just before Xmas. It was like a horizontal and wonderfully relaxing version of New York in some ways, and fabulous restaurants, to be sure, and all those much more beautiful beaches than we have. But the quantity is still not as great as it is in NYC by a long shot. There’s a good, but small and young ballet company which I’ve seen once, and the LA Opera was very good–saw Robert Wilson’s Parsifal there–it was fabulous, as good as the Met, and TeKanawa’s last opera role Vanessa, plus some orchestra concerts under David Zinman, and The School for Scandal at Mark Taper Forum. All first-rate quality. LA gets Broadway shows, but doesn’t have a big theater tradition like Broadway. Of course we don’t have Hollywood, but that’s pretty over-woke by now. LA Ballet is very minor compared to NYCB and ABT.

Obviously NYC is taking a colossal hit, but how many suburbs and exurbs have anything to compete with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, countless world-class museums, Broadway extravaganzas, gallery openings and other A-list parties, and not least: Michelin-starred restaurants?

And as people come trickling back, the nexus of super-achievers again forms and builds on itself. Talent likes to be around talent.

New York can (and probably will) fall a fair distance, but unlike most places it has a long way to fall.

Wow. That’s mind-boggling.

The IRA protesters standing next to me had jumped up and down with excitement.

You mean the IRA protesters were enthusiastic and excited about the British queen, top representative of their mortal enemy? Some one of them held a gun at her while horseback riding in a parade (I think in the 70s), but there were no bullets. So she didn’t do any more public appearances of that sort. And there was another attempt on her life when she visited Northern Ireland once.

Off-topic–the best true story of the Queen is that harmless but crazy *goblin* as I call him–I think maybe a junkie–who got into her bedroom after first stealing a bottle of wine through some Buckingham Palace tunnel. And she fooled him by saying that she’d go get him a cigarette. He said she was, lying asleep in bed, “a young girl in curlers”, which is hilarious. Especially since Diana was winning all the Beauty Contests by then (1982, I’m pretty sure.) He wasn’t prosecuted because trespassing is (or was) not against the law in the UK. I didn’t know till then how little security they thought they needed. The Queen herself was always driving a car, even in London, up till the early 70s. Then they put up the razor wire.

I remember a big nail bomb attack by the IRA in the late 70s or early 80s. Fair amount of footage of Thatcher visiting the children seriously injured by this.

I would have thought they’d be throwing a whole host of epithets at her. In the 1994 film London, a wonderful film narrated by Paul Scofield, you see her doing one of those ceremonial duties–turning on the electricity at some new shopping mall or something, and one of the bystanders yells “Pay your taxes, you scum!” Although I don’t think he was IRA. But I never thought of IRA as exactly timid.

Good point about ‘the rankers’, and now I know the word for this low habit I despise. It’s often the province of *Extreme Fans* who have to have all their ‘The Greatest’, and it’s so fucking retarded. The less the ‘ranker’ does himself, the more Extreme Fan he is.

Except there is no evidence of fraud and the so-called “after hours vote dumps” are just the result of mail and drop off ballots being counted later, which is exactly what everyone expected to happen who was paying the slightest bit of attention. The whole fraud nonsense story was carefully orchestrated by Trump beforehand because he knew he was in serious danger of losing. There was no reason other than Republican obstruction not to count those Pennsylvania votes beforehand, in which case it would have been obvious election night Trump was losing.

After watching Tucker Carlson trying to explain the facts to the Trumpists and then getting wildly attacked, my new conspiracy theory is that Trump is playing up the whole fraud story partly to undermine Tucker, the number one contender for the populist throne. If Trump fights the fraud story he’s an “enemy of the right”. If he goes along with it, he looks like a toady. Tough position for him, and clears the way for Ivanka in 2024.

Maybe not so recently, but there were big Irish immigrations to Britain, where there was more opportunity. You can see it very obviously in Liverpool, where I went in 1987, and is considered the ‘most Irish of British cities’. It’s also a fantastic, unique and beautiful city, by the way.

Even if this is true, so what? She was one of the greatest figures of the 20th century.

Never have cared for Gillian Anderson and am surprised she’s still working in important projects. She was all wrong, I thought, for Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth, because her previous courtesan persona doesn’t come across as being within her abilities–hardly like Marguerite Gautier even several steps down, a roles which was done by innumerable actresses onstage and film, and in th opera La Traviata. But many of these could really carry across the intensity of the character, and there were already so many legends and myths around her–but Garbo, Bernhardt, Duse.

Mainly, there was a TV miniseries from the late 70s with Geraldine Chaplin in the part, and she also had that otherworldly charisma. She was a thousand times better, but she’s also so beautiful and Anderson is attractive, but not that outstanding IMO. Anderson should just be in commoner roles (and maybe she has been, I haven’t kept up with her.)

I thought the movie about the queen with Helen Mirren playing the lead was a well-done movie in the sense that the plot and Mirren’s acting represented a plausible sensibility that the queen might possess. Whether the represented sensibility is true to life to that of the real queen doesn’t matter. It’s a movie after all.

Most thought it was good, and I know Mirren is a fine actress, not one that has ever interested me that much, but liked the miniseries Prime Inspector. I think I don’t like any fictional treatments of presidents, monarchs, etc., while they’re still living and functioning. And even if dead, I usually would rather see something on Louis XIV or Marcus Aurelius–somebody dead a long time–and I won’t care if there’s all sorts of ‘creative pageantry’, as in Cleopatra. And I want it to be as close to 100% factual, insofar as is possible. I prefer documentaries and real footage of people like the royals or still-living U.S. presidents, and don’t read historical fiction. I got much more turned on by Gibbon than I do any fiction about Roman emperors, etc. If it’s, say, about Queen Elizabeth I, that can interest me as with the old one with Glenda Jackson. Even movies about movie stars, like Frances I don’t like if they don’t stick to the facts strictly, although Jessica Lange was good, as always. I have to admit I did like Mommie Dearest, but that’s probably because I could never stand Joan Crawford and thought Faye Dunaway was brilliant.

I did see one of the TV mniniseries about Diana when she was still alive, based on the Morton book, but that was pretty pathetic for enough other reasons.

I remember back in the day, there was a piece on Mrs Thatcher in Vanity Fair or some such. One thing mentioned was some weekend something at one of the Queen’s residences (I can’t remember which and was surprised such a ‘pleasure moment’ was even devised.) She had quite a reaction to what the writer called “the luxury of the Queen”, couldn’t bear servants waiting on her down to fine details. Then there’s segue to 10 Downing Street, where she is still somewhat ‘angry’ about this (telling, it seems, I would have thought she’d take that in stride–after all, her ‘great love of Britain’ that she proclaimed to Barbara Walters was going to have to include all that royal luxury too, and she should have been able to see that–but it had to have had something to do with being unable to identify with that class…but still, since it was so briefly…) and is said to have in something of a rage gone to the fridge and ‘defrosted Shepherd’s Pie’.

Over the years of her reign, I thought she herself suddenly started to become very luxury-loving and wore lots of jewels and sometimes even looked glamorous, but she probably saw that a thousand years descended from William the Conqueror was still sort of hard to fit into comfortably, and certainly not compete with.

It also didn’t really make sense because the PM meets with the Queen once a week at Buckingham Palace, such meetings which make the Queen know more state secrets than any living human due to longevity and that whole line of prime ministers. The person told me that the Queen did not particularly enjoy these meetings with Mrs. T., and that it reminded her of ‘going to the dentist’. Just before Major took over, there was much talk about comparing the two, and Thatcher did take on a much glossier look. So she got used to a lot of it.

In any case, her funeral at St. Paul’s was among the most elaborate ever given a prime minister, and only the second one the Queen attended (Churchill being the other.) I’m sure they respected her, at least the Queen did, and she often seems the only one with much sense; she certainly didn’t have to go to the funeral. I always thought she was very charismatic, and she always stood out in photos of world leaders at summits.

Glad you’re enjoying the series. I am not a royal-watcher, and never cared about the Charles-Di scandals, although that Royal Wedding was spectacular with Kiri Tekanawa singing Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim” stealing the show. But I also just never have wanted to see these living monarchs in fictionalized form. It would seem bizarre to me, for example, to see Helen Mirren do the original movie The Queen and a few months later seeing the real queen meeting with George W. Bush. I do like her Christmas Message and watch it every year. I saw her and Philip at Lincoln Center at the 1976 anniversary of the bicentennial. Quite beautiful when in her 40s–I was surprised, because she’s weirdly not photogenic. I think there was a B’way thing with Mirren continuing her role as the Queen, and maybe it was called that as well. Didn’t interest me at all. But neither did Meryl Streep mimicking Mrs. T. , but I’m in a minority who find Streep boring. I know she has a fine ear, but so did Joanne Woodward, and Streep is so un-sexy.

He is certainly an obnoxious blowhard but that doesn’t mean the smart thing to do is hand the presidency over to someone who referred to Kim Jong as “that Korean guy”.

That is certainly not worse–no matter the clinical condition–than some asshole saying he’s “in love” with the Korean pig. There were even jokes about “the couple’s first date” having gone so well, but then… In fact, I think saying he’s “in love with him” is much more pathological, but Trump has no class by the usual standards, even the true standards. He was never accepted in the ‘best social circles of Manhattan’, no Brooke Astor wanted him, no Gloria Vanderbilt (and now her son Anderson Cooper) wanted this type.

The same was true of Jared, who was always envious of the even richer Jews of Short Hills, New Jersey, one of the most affluent communities in the U.S. Neither of them unlike Leona Helmsley, vulgar and Jewish from Brooklyn.

The problem I see is that Republicans from the beginning had planned to win by electoral vote and only barely. That is a poor strategy. They never cared about independents and planned on picking up an electoral win from the base.

Polls were showing early on that independents did not approve of how Trump was handling the virus.

I am one of those independents.

He never really acted like a leader and I think that made it harder on everyone. He needed to drop the petty tweeting and turn off Fox news.

I warned about him not taking it seriously back when it was overloading hospitals and the Trump Train here accused me of being on the side of the media. No I was on the side of the hospitals and the public.

Well Trump Train I hope you are happy with the outcome. Downplaying videos of patients in hallways really worked out. My favorite part was accusing health care workers of lying for deep state. Anyone can go dig through my comments to see how I was shouted down here for being concerned about the hospitals. Totally insane.

but like…….what is the fraud?

everything brought in court gets laughed out immediately, Dominion+the voting machines was a joke, the “”mathematical”” efforts…..

AKarlin is right. MAGA Cope is understandable, but pretty obviously just reduces to “i know that our institutions are rotten, i know they don’t want Trump, so it must have been fraud”

Yes, to hear TNC interviewed (Charlie Rose, before the fall) is to utterly loathe him.

Given such admirable choices, it would seem impossible to find anybody worse, but Miss D’Angelo is the worst of ALL Americans. My disgust at this bitch is unfathomable even to me.

The other one I just hear quoted (also disgusting) but I don’t pay much attention to him.

I am not sure why I watched d’Angelo preaching once, but it seemed somehow carnal when she said ‘every pore of my body is exuding white privilege’. She’s not really fat, but has ‘factory-town’ arms and gives the impression of weighing 11 stone. I don’t know if her audience knew what ‘exuded’ mean, but I don’t think the word ‘ask’ was in it. She’d never have pronounced it properly, even though it’s a lot harder to say than ‘ax’.

Why Euro-Africa?

Why link these two continents – which have *ABSOLUTELY NOTHING* in common, not even a land bridge, – together?
Apart from the French, no other European nation gives a shit about Africa, or pretends that it’s destiny is entwined with Africa.

A reality check for the French:

Your involvement with Africa – which is part of your national inferiority complex regarding England, which humiliated you many many times, and stripped you of the colonies actually *worth* having, dates only from year *1830*.
A mere pin prick in history.
It is/was a pure mistake and folly of epochal proportions.
Just drop it as a dead loss, cut off all ties, forget about it, and move on.

Emanuel Macron?

Emanuel Micro-Phallus, more like.

I and the other creative individuals whom I know are happiest when riding the waves of agony and fulfillment that precede attaining Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow State. What made Europeans great is enjoyment of struggle. The Flow State is useful for any difficult activity, e.g. music, trading intra-day, performing surgery, but happiest is he who lives in a state of creative struggle, not to be confused with a hopeless struggle imposed from without.

A Jew pathologicizing European creativity by deriving it from “unhappiness.” That is the expected gambit.

Next gambit: sell them Buddhist spaced-out contentment, so they won’t wake up and do something about Jewish control of their society. And Mr. “No Gods. No Masters.” falls for it. ….LOL.

Yes, but I cannot stand Coates even if he has somewhat better Negro I.Q. and isn’t so formally mediocre. Otherwise, Blow gets worse every column.

So, white people voted for Trump because they’re racist.

Hispanics voted for Trump because white people are racist.

Blacks voted for Trump because white people are racist.

LGBTQ people voted for Trump because white people are racist.

Got it?

Seriously, the amount of anti-white racial animus in this article is unusual even by Charles Blow’s standards. Also, he writes like a grandiose middle schooler with mild dyslexia. I mean, “the coattail it has of those who depend on it,” what the fuck? That’s not just ungainly, it’s plain bad English.

I think part of Blow’s venomous racial hatred of whites stems from his awareness, on some level, that he is an obvious affirmative action hire and hopeless mediocrity. Reading his turgid prose actually makes me wish I were reading Tallahassee Coates, who is at least a somewhat livelier prose stylist and can occasionally make me laugh with the nerdy sci-fi / fantasy influences he wears on his sleeve (“Trump cracked open the glowing amulet of whiteness and released its eldritch energies” — ohhhh, somebody just re-read The Elfstones of Shanarra!).

Good grief, NYTimes. One small bright spot — look at the reader comments to this article. Many of the most highly rated ones are quite critical of the article and are encouraging Democrats to dial back the identity politics.

‘Insufferable’ is definitely the word for Blow. His column just before this one was about how we were just about to ‘descend into bedlam’, which he’d never say meant just that if Trump won, the boarded-up stores would serve their purpose for the mob. So now he says it was ‘obscene’ that Biden didn’t take the lead right when he said it should, because people didn’t do what he wanted done.

Someone wrote in the NYT comments on that one that he was making an ‘invitation for such violence’, and I added that that was true and that why on earth can NYT (no matter what any UR people think of the paper as a whole, and it’s awful, but still somewhat useful) can allow such yellow journalism to be published. I saw him on Charlie Rose talking about being sexually abused as a child. Rose, in his usual passive way with this sort (he wasn’t that way when talking with terrorist leaders or tyrants, he was extremely good and fought them), let him talk about that and also his post-family-man gayness, but didn’t ask him “Do you think you are gay now because you enjoyed the abuse so much after all?” i mean, who can ask Charles Blow to say yeah, “well, I can’t forget how good it felt after all.” Someone called him a ‘bitchy gay’ and he has gotten worse and worse, he is on the level of that extreme man-hater Lindy West, who’s mother taught her about ‘how disgusting big cocks’ are, and the Times publishes this shit.

Well, they didn’t publish my comment as they usually do. Although I guess I think that’s better than at WaPo, where it’s anything goes and the lesbians usually seize the day. But after cancelling them a month ago, they quit offering me a mere $29 a month to resuscribe, but offered 3 months for $1 about 1 a.m. Nov. 3rd, so I realized “yes, very good for watching election results”, and cancel after 3 months, hating the paper. Kathleen Parker does sometimes have something to say (and has a wicked sly wit), but that’s all I’ll enjoy having back for awhile. I can’t even believe such as Greg Sargent, who more or less writes the same column every day, and so does Jennifer Rubin.

But Blow is indefensible. They just let him act out his self-righteous BLACK RAGE every few days. Loathsome.

Yes, I wasn’t looking closely enough, and have never known her as anything other than the old Queen Mother, but with my reading glasses and holding it closer, I can see the features are hers. Amused I confused her with Wallis Simpson, though–not to mention not very bright, because what would Edward and Wallis in front of bombed-out area. I’ve also forgotten both how King George and Edward looked, and the current Queen has been the only one of the royals who has ever interested me–totally unflappable, and was beautiful in her 40s–she and Philip came to NYSTheater at Lincoln Center for 1976 Bicentennial; I was about 20 ft. from them, but I also had much better vision then. Otherwise, I haven’t been one of those royal-watchers, never paid any attention to the scandalous youngsters, although Andrew certainly has done a star turn as persona non grata. Thanks.

I bet the pair pretending to be King and Queen are two of the many body doubles paraded about during the war.

What are you talking about? I looked at the connected posts and saw Edward VIII and Simpson. Are you talking about Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip?

Yes, you are wrong. Americans are by no means as well-educated as British or any Western Europeans. OF COURSE they belong here. It’s not going to be a monarchy, even a constitutional monarchy, because we hardly go back very far, not even 3 centuries. And that’s not just Paris and London either, just to take 2 examples. You meet people in the English or French countryside and there is no comparison with what you find in rural places here. I know, because I grew up in SE Alabama and, not even considering what I just said about Europe, New York City has scum living in it, but that is not the same as knowing next to nothing as most in my former hometown do. If you are lucky enough to live in a Whitopia like I do, there’s almost nobody without at least reasonable education.

PLUS all the entertainment that you consume in your mountain area or small-town area is made in the media cities, NYC and LA, rightly hated for some things, but I have noticed that country people are just fine consuming TV made in NYC and LA. When I’ve visited my family in Alabama, I’ve noticed they never see the credits and ask themselves anything about who made the shows they’re totally addicted to.

Cosmopolitan America is very much a major part of America. It’s not like Ireland which, due to years of oppression by Britain, never became urban (those who have been to Dublin say it still has a rural feel.) The super-powerful cities of America are definitely the equal or beyond of any in Europe. New York is usually called the Cultural Capital of the World, even more than London.

America is *both kinds*.

Good then. Your remark had been a little minimal for me to know whether I had any way of interpreting it.

That ‘chap’ sent me that just a few hours ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, should be a good guide to the book itself. I noticed he mentioned you there.

Cheers!

Wonderful review you did. It was excellent and is also to some degree going to be a guide if I order the book (which I likely will.) Thanks for sending! I read all of it. Yeah, there has been nobody like Mitchum, and also one more note to make of the stupidity of the Oscars–one nomination for supporting role for him. It’s not just that they’re dumb now, with all emphasis on their own ‘special picture-people wokeness’, they’ve been dumb almost since the beginning. I’d give them a few first few years at most…after that, all that cheap Hollywood sentimental self-congratulatory business, although that has certainly been consistent to this day.

I was pretty sure he hadn’t made a film with Marlene Dietrich, and he hadn’t, but that wouldn’t have stopped that nympho–so they probably…did…but again, Mitchum would have thought her outrageous appetite very funny, and wouldn’t have cared what she thought–and god knows she wouldn’t have even noticed. His self-confidence and self-possession were greater than Brando’s–and he had a lot more humour. I mentioned in another post in one of these Connery threads that he would laugh onscreen at some of his co-stars: It wasn’t an actual laugh, of course, but rather a certain kind of sexually knowing smile which proved his effortlessness of always being in charge–not really cruelly, but rather a merciless teasing enjoyment of the other. Some qualities like Connery in the ‘toughness department’.

I think it was his aging that made him the best Marlowe–weary from no sleep and too many fights and waking up in some terrible and unfamiliar place. And Charlotte Rampling was a gorgeous and perfect Velma. Really a great voice too. You’d hear it without having known beforehand and know that’s who it was. There are voices like that you couldn’t miss–Rosemary Clooney you’d know anywhere, and on that Thunderball discussion about Bassey and Warwick, that seemed the most extraordinary idea of Bassey imitating Warwick. Warwick is my favourite female singer, and that’s a voice I’d know anywhere too.

Man, I love C.C & Company. haha. I love the beginning where Broadway Joe enters the grocery store and goes down the aisle and makes himself a ham sammich, drinks a carton of milk, opens up a package of napkins, all without paying. He then goes up to the cashier and purchases a pack of gum IF I remember right and asks for saving stamps.

William Smith is a fascinating character. The guy could speak a few different languages IF I remember right, was a Korean war vet as well I think, been awhile since I looked him up, but I remember his Wiki entry said he was very fluent in Russian. I loved him as Falconetti in Rich Man, Poor Man, and of course, as the character, “Moon,” in the cheesy but very watchable, C. C. & Company.

William Smith was perfectly cast as Conan’s father in Milius’ Conan The Barbarian

Video Link

Carole Bouquet was indeed Too Beautiful for You in 1989, in which she starred with Gerard Depardieu, and then was married to him from 1997 to 2005. Good in Lucie Aubric in the 90s, and most famous early on for Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. Interesting that one of Deneuve’s and Depardieu’s best movies, Techine’s Les Temps Qui Changent, was made while he was still married to Bouquet. Just saw she’s 63 now, and has ‘partnered’ with Philippe Sereys de Rothschild. Now more into wineries and vineyards in Sicily.

Delphine Seyrig is the only French actress I find more beautiful: https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk034gAeCYH0-XY3vh9li7JQkSdMPGg:1604362550578&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=delphine+seyrig+images&client=firefox-b-1-d&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiM1aufjOXsAhULTt8KHb-TCosQjJkEegQIChAB&biw=1366&bih=591#imgrc=wdQelA_KaTO4uM

That’s in Last Year at Marienbad, in which she was extraordinary. She’s no longer with us, but made several fantastic movies, including Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, with Jean-Pierre Leaud.

Seyrig and Deneuve are greater actresses than Bouquet, I’d say, but they are all three stunningly gorgeous women, which I couldn’t say for Isabelle Huppert (and also cannot stand her anymore.) Deneuve still makes 2 or 3 movies a year, and they are always of fine quality.

Glad to hear somebody mention William Smith. Sort of an early bodybuilder actor, and had a brief mainstream few years, including Any Which Way You Can with Eastwood, who naturally had to win the fight–more famous. He was good in the Laredo television western, and did all those fabulous Hell’s Angels movies in the early 70s, including Angels Die Hard, which I’ve got an old vhs of; I think that was the best one. He was even a child actor, whom you can see in The Song of Bernadette (as a little boy already looks like the Muscle Beach character he’d become) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. All the biker movies were the best though–did C.C. and Company with Joe Namath and Ann-Margret–very hot when Smith puts his hand under Ann-Margret’s chin. Even Namath calls him ‘Your Majesty’, nevermind it was joking–Smith was a kind of ultimate of that sort. But was stuck for decades in totally B-things. These were good when he was young and the biker movies, but after Falconetti and the Eastwood movie, he didn’t get any more parts in mainstream movies. Had a great voice too, I never understood why he didn’t become A-list.

The murder rate increased 57% in Chicago in 2016. I don’t think it had anything to do with wearing masks at the time. That is what I call Black Lives Matter version 1.0. On Memorial Day of this year we saw the release of Black Lives Matter version 2.0. The upgraded BLM is far more deadly than the prior version.

And we were wearing masks AT LEAST a month before Memorial Day. The Chinese always wore them and many probably still do. Nick Land wrote a lot of Tweets about how ‘even the worst ones are better than nothing’, and he lives in Shanghai–just reading his tweets made me go get several KN95’s while I still could. Wasn’t being touted here yet, due to shortage or whatever. Finally Ross Douthat said something, but we do know that the Chinese have been successful, although we also know they don’t have a Negro ass-suck problem either.

Over the years I’ve heard many people say this generation needs a good long war! I would tell them that that I was in Vietnam and that I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Until 2020. Until coronavirus. Now, I think we need six Vietnams. On my ballot, I didn’t vote for Trump, I didn’t vote for Biden, I wrote in “someone who fought in Vietnam.” I fought in Vietnam. Steve was a kid during Vietnam, and that’s a damn shame. Because if he fought, he might have the GUTS to say that the people who won’t wear masks deserve to sent to another Vietnam. I’m the only one with any guts around here.