Jeffrey Wells Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee, was a moderate rightie — a “constitutional conservative” — but she was no Amy Coney Barrett. Nor was she Ruth Bader Ginsburg. My hazy recollection is that she wasn’t too bad overall. Regrets about O’Connor’s passing, but then again she led a full life and made it to age 93.
HE agrees wholeheartedly with Michael Sherman, but his 12.1 anti-Disney Substack article doesn’t mention their forthcoming Snow White movie, which has been described by Rachel Zegler as being about Snow White becoming a leader in the medieval struggle for feminine fulfillment. New song lyrics: “If I’m lucky a prince will never save me / and I will then shape my own destiny.”
I’m not saying that yesterday’s sudden loss of control of the facial muscles on the right side of my face and my mouth in particular…I’m not saying I look like Charles Laughton in The HHunchback of Notre Dame (‘39) but half of my facial features, which were fairly top-of-the-line when I was younger and at least pleasant in recent years…my looks are pretty much gone now, and if I was scheduled to see Sutton today I would be worried about alarming her. In the space of 24 hours I have suddenly become a mildly grotesque figure…I am now Richard III…dogs bark and howl as I pass by.
Before:
After:
Bonus points for anyone who can identify which film the above monster-in-the-mirror images are from. No, it’s not Martin Scorsese’s The Big Shave.
The exact same cosmic or celestial shift in the cathedral of the soul was experienced by Joseph Goebbels, Moses, Mouse (my Siamese cat who died of pancreatic cancer over 20 years ago), Amelia Earhart and Mother Teresa. Ascended or descended…the soup is hot, the soup is cold.
The legendary, less–than–beloved Henry Kissinger has died at age 100.
He was quite the influential diplomatic maestro during the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his bottom-line reputation has been disdained or at least debated for many decades, particularly by aged and post-traumatic residents of Cambodia and Chile and their descendants.
My own brusque opinion is that Kissinger was a brilliant, audacious, cold-blooded chess player whose initiatives and achievements were generally unaffected by humanitarian concerns.
The Nikki Haley campaign is, at heart, a classic Republican pride campaign — a valiant attempt to keep alive notions of conservative Reagan-esque sanity. Which isn’t my deal, just to be clear — I’m a Gavin Newsom-Pete Buttigieg-Gretchen Whitmer guy by way of sensible, anti-woke centrism.
Alas, Haley is attempting to prevail within the confines of a once semi-normal political party that over the last seven or eight years has been infected with tear–it–all–down, mule–like authoritarianism and dumbfuckism.
Haley can’t defeat The Beast or hope to persuade those millions of rural, anti-Democracy nihilists to vote sensibly, but if Trump were to drop dead she would almost certainly become the Republican nominee for the presidency and, given her age and gender and mental vigor and non-extremist views for the most part, would undoubtedly defeat Joe Biden in the general.
I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s remark about the face of one his aunts looking “like something you’d find in a live bait store.” Woody knew that the funniest jokes are the cruelest and that every joke had to have a point. He was saying that life was grim and suppressive in ethnic, working-class Brooklyn, where they sure didn’t breed them for beauty.
Ditto to a somewhat lesser extent in Westfield, New Jersey, where I suffered through my childhood and mid-teen years.
When I was young almost all of the older people I ran into (suburban parents, teachers, merchants, civil servants) were not, shall we say, abundantly attractive. Certainly compared to the on-screen talent. None of them looked like Kirk Douglas or JFK or Dirk Bogarde or Jean Simmons or Elizabeth Ashley or Tony Curtis or Jeanne Moreau or Burt Lancaster.
I’m not saying our adult-aged neighbors were generally ugly but they certainly seemed homely and stessed and spiritually downcast and hardened by age or drink or cigarettes. Whatever glow or promise they had as youths had certainly been ground out of them. Well past their prime.
The men looked just as morose and imprisoned and regimentally dressed as the women. They were tidily or correctly attired and drove nice cars, but to me they seemed to behave like inmates of some huge, sprawling suburban concentration camp.
I was struck by this Times Square photo because this is what so many mothers, teachers and grandparents dressed like. (The Pat Nixon-like woman in the middle is clearly a Republican.) The idea seemed to be “our faces might look grim and puffy or hardened and resigned to an unwelcome fate, but our frumpy department-store clothing completes the effect.”
it was enough to put you off the idea of growing up and becoming an adult yourself.
From my gloomy, lemme-outta-here, eight-year-old perspective the deal seemed to be “if you study hard and follow the rules and obey your parents and get into a good college you too can grow up to look hemmed-in and compromised and dress frumpy…when you grow up you too can develop homely, chubby faces and adhere to the dreary social order of things…but only if you work hard and get really good grades. You don’t want to be left behind!
Friendo: “Neil Burger’s The Marsh King’s Daughter (Lionsgate/Roadside, 11.3) is ostensibly a thriller, and I love thrillers. Good director, talented stars — but Bezos wants $19.99 to RENT the damn thing.”
HE to Friendo: “The combination of Daisy (‘who’s Cary Grant again?’) Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn plus that awful title (who would want anything to do with a marsh king, much less his daughter?) sounds lethal.”
Supporting player #1: “So this guy rules the marshlands, you’re saying? Residents pay tribute, owe him their lives, work for him, fear him?”
Supporting player #2: “Yeah, pretty much.”
Supporting player #1: “I’m taking a film crew into the marshlands next month. We have permits from the state film commission but…what are you saying, we also need permission to shoot in this guy’s territory? We need to butter him up, pay him off?”
Supporting player #2: “I wouldn’t recommend not doing that. He’s a ruthless, powerful cat. You need to show obeisance.”
