1. AIRPLANE! (1980) 2. ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) 3. THE BARGAIN (1914) 4. CRY OF JAZZ (1959) 5. ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX 1138 4EB (1967) 6. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) 7. THE EXORCIST (1973) 8. THE FRONT PAGE (1931) 9. GREY GARDENS (1976) 10. I AM JOAQUIN (1969) 11. IT'S A GIFT (1934) 12. LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946) 13. LONESOME (1928) 14. MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937) 15. MALCOLM X (1992) 16. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971) 17. NEWARK ATHLETE (1891) 18. OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1969) 19. THE PINK PANTHER (1964) 20. PRESERVATION OF THE SIGN LANGUAGE (1913) 21. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977) 22. STUDY OF A RIVER (1996) 23. TARANTELLA (1940) 24. A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (1945) 25. A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET (1906)
List the ones you've seen in the order of their what you think is their cultural/historical/aesthetic significance. Here's mine:
1. It's a Gift 2. Grey Gardens 3. McCabe and Mrs. Miller 4. Saturday Night Fever 5. THX 1138 6. All the President's Men
The first 2 on my list have long been high on my personal list of favorite moves. The 3d one is also on my list of favorite movies, but not so high.
... but they are mice. "Inadvertently raked up" — Meade IM's from the garden.
ME: Ouch
MEADE: I didn't hurt them
I even ushered the mother to where I moved them
And then I boiled and ate
All three of them
At first, Meade thought he'd raked up baby moles, but when he found the panic'd mother searching for her lost children, he knew they were mice. But let the topic now be moles. Because, yesterday, we were talking about squirrels, and NotYourTypicalNewYorker said:
Squirrels aren't bothering me.
It's the moles, I can't abide the cursed moles.
I put the trap here, they go over there...
It's the moles I tell ya.
And Meade offered some gardenly wisdom:
The moles are your friends. They aerate the soil and eat pest larvae. It's a misconception that they eat bulbs and other desirable garden plants - they're completely carnivorous.
Set your mower blades higher and/or walk down their feeding runs before firing up the mower. Also, where the female mole pushes up a mound of soil, spread it with a rake or with your boot heel so the mower doesn't hit it. It's the mower that does the damage, not the mole.
Adding tags to this post, I knew I already had the tags "mice" and "rodents." I thought it would be excessive to make a tag "moles." Too narrow! But are moles rodents? No, they are Insectivora. And that underlines Meade's point. Moles don't eat plants. Don't worry about moles. Worry about Meade... eating boiled mice. And me, out there in Meade's grass with the squirrels...
Today, I go there and not only is there no new post on this, the fourth day of the blog, the whole page is blank. The original 2 posts are gone!
I do see some sidebar links to other stuff in Newsweek, like "GOP 'Pledge to America' Looks Unlikely to Inspire." Ha. Well, to me, Newsweek looks unlikely to inspire. What ridiculous writing! How does one look unlikely to inspire? What a phrase. Could they hide their bias a little better? They can't report on something new that the other side does without getting the jump on it and assuring their brain-dead readers that it can't possibly be any good.
Jeez, the Kausfiles blank page looks likely to be the most readable thing over there.
Are we really such an advanced nation that even an extreme "staunch social conservative" has to deny opposing pornography? There's something depressing about that. If not Christine O'Donnell, who?
Not just "staunch," but "extreme 'staunch'"! What's that like?
Also, there's a difference between "opposing pornography" and wanting opposition to pornography enacted into legislation. Her old statement about pornography and adultery was her interpretation of religion. You can have a very high standard as a matter of religion and still leave people alone as a matter of law.
A clip from the excellent documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work":
We saw this movie last night at Sundance in Madison. I have a special love for the documentaries in this niche. Show this new one as a triple feature with "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "Grey Gardens." Here's the trailer for "Joan Rivers." Watch for the insult to Wisconsin, which got a huge laugh here in Wisconsin.
There was a line I tried to memorize, for me, the most interesting line in the movie. It was something like: "I am an actress — an actress playing the role of a comedian." When she was in high school, Joan was in all the plays. We see her in Shakespearean costume. She still sees herself as an actress. She says: You can say anything about her as a comedian, but don't criticize her acting. That's the one thing that hurts. That may seem very odd, because do you think of her as an actress (other than in the sense that when she's doing her comedy she may conceive of herself as playing a character that isn't really her)? She had a dramatic role in the movie "The Swimmer" (with Burt Lancaster)? And in the 90s she starred in (and co-wrote) the Broadway play "Sally Marr ... and Her Escorts" (a play about the woman who is mostly famous for being Lenny Bruce's mother). The NYT said:
Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can't help but applaud her efforts. "Sally Marr" asks her to dig down deep and dredge up some elemental emotions. Ms. Rivers backs off from none of them. In her portrayal of a gutsy woman who has hit the skids more than once in her 80-odd years, there is a childlike sincerity that exerts its own spell in the end. Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.....
[E]arly on, when Sally goes into her theory of comedy. "You don't start with funny and make it funnier," she explains. "Comedy comes from pain."...
It is the play's contention that without Sally Marr... there would have been no Lenny Bruce. Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. She was even there when he made his first tentative steps as an M.C. in strip joints to coach him on the intricacies of comic timing and lend him some of her material. "Lenny Bruce opened the door for every modern American comic, right?" she says, putting her checkered past into perspective for us. "So, in a way, you could say I gave birth to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams and Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and David Letterman."
So is she an actress, and if so, who is the real person? I don't think you get the answer in the "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." There's a scene where she's doing a radio promotion for her new book — "Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery" — and the interviewer goes on about how, whatever a woman does to herself to try to look beautiful, she must, in the end, want to be loved as the person she really is. Joan's response: Who is the real me? Perhaps when the real person is an actor, there is a hollowness that must be filled with a written character.
***
Note to commenters: Please say something more interesting than that you don't like her surgically destroyed face. We can take that as a given. Don't be boring. It's worse than being ugly. Around here.
There was — as far as I could see — exactly one person in town wearing high heels:
Now, what book do you imagine this individual was reading?
Then there were these characters on roller skates:
Note the tail.
And yeah, I know: men in shorts. But this is beyond the normal men in shorts problem (which is, to refresh your recollection, that a grown man is making himself look like a boy). This is skating in hot pants. I have always had a sports exception to the "no shorts" rule. And this is the best costume for today.
