A Facebook gush about Paul McCartney duet-ing with Neil Young, a testament about how wonderful this musical moment was…

The other day Sasha Stone asked for names of the all-time dishiest actresses. The ones who’ve inspired the most tumescent sexual fantasies, etc.

I’ve always had a thing for sleek blondes. The two most painfully unfulfilled relationships of my life, an achey-breaky high-school flirtation and an anguished sexual affair with a married People magazine co-worker, were with blondes. There was another hurting affair with a blonde filmmaker in ’12. So I didn’t hesitate in saying that Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, Dead Heat on a Merry Go-round, Mackenna’s Gold, The Greek Tycoon) was at the top of my list.

Sparv and the young Grace Kelly share the top slot, pretty much. Along with the young Ingrid Berman, Kim Novak in Vertigo and I-don’t-know-who-else. Elke Sommer in The Prize?

Still with us at age 81, Sparv landed only one truly interesting role — the delectable but elusive Carole (Robert Redford‘s Dave Chappellet falls for her but she eventually dumps him) in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69).

In my humble opinion the young Sparv (26 when she made the Ritchie film) had the sparkliest eyes and most beautiful mouth…slightly upturned, tempting, exquisite.

I guess I’ve alays felt a vague kinship with Sparv because she was married in the mid ’60s to Robert Evans, whom I was on friendly terms with in ’94, ’95 and ’96.

Evans’ description in “The Kid Stays in the Picture“: “Her name was Camilla Sparv. The moment she arrived in New York, she was a star model. A tall, leggy blonde, she had a natural patrician quality money can’t buy.”

A recently restored 4K version of Charlie Chaplin‘s The Gold Rush — not the 1942 re-released version (72 minutes w/Chaplin’s narration + occasional sound) but the original 95-minute silent classic — will open the Cannes Classics section in the early evening of Tuesday, 5.13.

I’ll be arriving in Cannes roughly four hours before the screening, but I’m not especially enthused about attending the screening, to be honest. I’ve just re-watched the ’42 version and had seen it once before somewhere. That’ll suffice.

The Gold Rush was shot in late ’24 and early ’25, and premiered on June 26, 1925. Portions were shot in the snow-covered terrain of Truckee, California; the rest was shot on sound stages in Chaplin’s studio on La Brea Ave.

The New Year’s Eve “auld lang syne” scene is my favorite segment.

A kind of Roman Polanski-ish figure in his day, Chaplin had a thing for much younger women. Lita Grey, whom Chaplin began a sexual relationship with when she was 15 (are you reading this, Polanski pitchforkers?), had originally been cast as Georgia. But Grey was was replaced by the 24-year-old Georgia Hale after Grey got pregnant. Chaplin’s marriage to Grey “collapsed” during production of the film, largely because he’d taken up with Hale.

Hale didn’t marry Chaplin, but was on romantic terms with him (bip-bip-bip) in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She became wealthy through real estate investments, and died on 6.17.85.

“[Because] white people don’t have anything to say.”

Imagine if some inane TikToker was to say the same thing about POCs…imagine.

This is one more reason why I’m not on the Sinners train. It’s also a reason why some people voted for Trump. I voted for Harris, of course, but I loathe people like Daisy Dream.

@daisydreamlife Sinners is a movie with SOUL. It was made with intention and heart. It is a story of pain, love, grief, generational trauma, and friendship told through visual art (the costume design, the editing, the cinematography, etc…), music, and writing. I miss leaving a movie theater and feeling like my soul and my humanity merged and like the collective conciusouness expanded. Our world REALLY needs art right now — art with a purpose that opens doors and brings dreams to life. Art is the revolution and the stories that have been ignored need to be pushed into mainstream media now more than ever. #sinners ♬ original sound – Daisy Dream

I’ve been an Allman Brothers guy since the Nixon administration**, but until last night I’d somehow never listened to this one.

The actual sung lyric is “nobody left to run with any more”,

“Everybody wants to know where Jimmy has gone
He left town, I doubt if he’s coming back home
Well, Tony got a job, three kids and a lovely wife
Working in the Commerce Bank for the rest of his life”

…everything fades, weakens, falls away.

** To think that Richard Nixon was once regarded as Beelzebub incarnate. By today’s standards he’s a center-right moderate. Okay, with a paranoid streak.

“Best Allman Brothers Story,” posted on 8.21.19: