Posted 4.16, 10:05 pm: Today’s excursion involved El Matador, La Piedra and Pescador beaches — a couple of miles north of Trancas. Walking from beach to secluded beach, crawling through caves, getting soaked at one point and a bit sunburned overall. Drove up Kanan Dume Road to Mulholland Highway and then east to The Old Place, which was too noisy and crowded and too much of a wait.

Blake Edwards’ Sunset [posted 4.16, 1:13 pm]: Every tourist who’s ever visited Santa Monica has taken this exact same shot. But there I was yesterday on the big bluff. The SRO and I had pedaled out from West Hollywood (Santa Monica Blvd. all the way) and then down to the beach bike path, all through S.M. and Venice and back again.  I hadn’t meditated upon a Pacific sunset in several years, and so we did. (It was Tatyana’s first time.) An hour later we put the bikes on the front rack of an eastbound #4 bus, and were back home by 8:30 pm.

I haven’t bothered to watch Sandy Wexler, the new Adam Sandler movie for Netflix. Mainly because I was afraid. I don’t want to sit through a softer, more congenial Broadway Danny Rose or All That Jazz. At all. If I catch it tonight I’ll write something…maybe.

Soon after the 4.2 finale of HBO’s Big Little Lies it was clear that Nicole Kidman‘s performance would be getting the big Emmy push. The pushing will last several weeks as Emmy nomination voting runs from 6.12 to 6.26. The articles and tweets have mostly advanced the career-tribute narrative — it’s not just Kidman’s turn as Celeste-the-abused-wife but her whole 28-year career. If you count Dead Calm as the beginning, I mean.

That’s a pretty good trick considering that over the last six or seven years Kidman has made herself into a kind of Queen of the Indie Bs, giving her all in one eye-rollingly bad, mezzo-mezzo or not-good-enough film after another — Trespass, The Paperboy, Stoker (which I hated), The Railway Man, Grace of Monaco (grotesque), Before I Go to Sleep, Paddington, Strangerland, Queen of the Desert, The Family Fang (a decent film that quickly disappeared), Secret in Their Eyes and Genius. Yes, Kidman was reasonably okay in Lion but don’t get carried away.

Kidman will soon be seen in the Geraldine Page role in Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled (Focus, 6.23). She’ll have three films in Cannes — The Beguiled, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Killing of a Sacred Deer and John Cameron Mitchell‘s How To Pick Up Girls At Parties.

What Kidman performances have really and truly earned the gold medal? 13 in all. I’ve listed them not in order of preference but sequence: Dead Calm (’89 — I knew when I first saw this that Kidman had “it”), My Life (’93 — Michael Keaton‘s taller wife standing by as he dies of cancer), To Die For (’95 — probably her pinnacle performance — certainly the cleanest and most confident), Moulin Rouge! (’01), The Others (’01), Birthday Girl (’01), The Hours (’02 — “by a nose”), Dogville (her second best ever, just a notch behind To Die For), The Human Stain (’03), Birth (’04), The Interpreter (’05 — I have a soft spot for this Sydney Pollack film), Margot at the Wedding (’07) and Rabbit Hole (’10)

I’m glad that Kidman has achieved a kind of bounce-back effect with Big Little Lies. But there’s no disputing she’d been in a long, slow downswirl cycle for seven years prior. On the plus side she had a vivid, luminous career for 21 years before that (i.e., starting with Rabbit Hole and working backwards).

Real-estate developer, publisher and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, apparently the President’s most trusted and influential adviser, is only seven and a half years older than Jett. On last night’s SNL Alec Baldwin mentioned that Kushner “doesn’t like to talk.” Indeed. Until this morning I’d never heard his voice or listened to him speak about anything.

The below excerpt is from June 2014. Kushner is obviously an amiable blueblood hustler (the onetime Democratic liberal apparently converted to conservatism for purely opportunistic reasons) and for all I know he’s literally Damien Thorne, but listen to his remarks here. He sounds like a comme ci comme ca frat boy, but he’s not stupid. He talks the talk.

If by clapping my hands three times I could eject Trump from the Oval Office and install Kushner in his place, I would do so. Because that would at least mean the death of Steve Bannon and perhaps even Stephen Miller. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Kushner is clearly smarter and more conversant with the cultural-technological particulars of our time than his father-in-law. Scratch Kushner and you’d find a guy who understands that climate change is 110% real.

Here‘s a nicely composed inside-the-West-Wing piece by Vanity Fair‘s Sarah Ellison, not just about the Jared Kushner-Steve Bannon clash but the constantly shifting ground benath everyone’s feet. Everyone, that is, except for Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

“[Steve] Bannon’s real undoing in the eyes of his boss, according to three people familiar with the situation, involves his perceived attacks through the media against Kushner and Ivanka as liberal Democrats seeking to undermine a more conservative agenda. Bannon’s other big mistake has been taking credit for Trump’s own popularity, such as it is.

Vanity Fair illustration by Darrow.

“Referring to [Bannon’s] Time cover, a senior administration official told me, ‘He is very talented at making himself seem the hero of the conservatives who elected Donald Trump’ — the implication being that if you lose Bannon, you lose them. ‘It’s a very smart thing to do on his part,’ this official added, ‘but ultimately it’s not a sustainable strategy for him. The president sees through that kind of thing, and he’s aware of what’s happening.”

“The official went on: ‘The reality is, if he keeps this up he’s not going to be here.’

“Another strike against Bannon is that, when speaking of the Freedom Caucus ahead of the planned vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act, he assured the rest of the senior team, ‘I’ve got these guys taken care of,’ according to someone close to the West Wing. ‘We don’t have to worry about them.'”