43 years ago Conrad Dunn burned himself a hole in the screen legend fabric with this brief, extremely funny “Francis” bit in Stripes. This was his screen debut. Dunn was…what, in his mid to late 20s at the time? Most likely in his early 70s today. His acting credits stopped around 2012.

My pulse accelerated when my eyes feasted upon “Your Feet Are Killing Me,” an 8.2 N.Y. Times story by Guy Trebay.

Finally, I excitedly presumed, a Times writer might actually be standing up and saying publicly what I’ve been saying for decades and have known in my soul and bones since I was ten, which is that most human feet, visually, are somewhere between vaguely unsightly and flat-out repulsive.

97% of man-feet should be hidden from view (we all know this) and the same regretfully applies to roughly 85% of female peds. And no one ever admits this.

Alas, Trebay pulls his punches and and opts for a delicate, circumspect tone…wimps out.

From “Unspoken Taboo,” posted on 8.12.18 but originally written 16 years earlier:

“90% if not 95% of human feet are strange and alienating. But it goes farther than that. For me, bare feet are a contemporary pestilence that no culture since the sandal-wearing Greeks and Romans has had to deal with. Once upon a time sandled feet were a subject for light mockery, something that only eccentric beatniks went for. Exposed digits have been ubiquitous, of course, in warm weather months since the mid ’60s. I for one regret it.

“Is it allowable to acknowledge how unfortunate it is these days that virtually every American woman walks around these days in open-toed shoes or sandals, and that a good 70% should probably consider alternatives? I’ve seen some women’s feet that are drop-dead beautiful, but these are the exception. Most of the female feet I see are so-so or okay, at best. Some are dreadful. Most men over the age of 35 or 40 should just forget about going barefoot or wearing sandals, period.

“Every time I see a friend or acquaintance approach on a street or in a mall and I notice they’re wearing sandals, a little part of me dies inside. Or at the very least grims up and prepares.”

Excerpt from Trebay piece: “What is it about a display of digits in the city that people find unfortunate, if not quite egregious? Is it the feet themselves? (And here we are not speaking of those who wear sandals for cultural reasons or for ease of religious observance.) Or is it a creeping sensation that the line between what constitutes public and private spaces has become indistinguishable?

“I have never, ever worn slippers or sandals outside my house,” said Prasan Shah, a co-founder of the cult men’s wear label Original Madras Trading Company. He meant since coming to live in the United States. “I feel childish using this word, but it’s icky,” he said.

“Until Mr. Shah came to this country at 16, he lived mainly in the steamy tropical South Indian city of Chennai, where sandals are worn in almost every setting. He said: “When my father sees me now in sneakers and socks, he’s like: ‘What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you hot?’”

Worse yet, the nattily suited designer said last week, wearing sandals in the city is like giving up your urban cred.

“If I was living in New Jersey, I’d be happy wearing my flip-flops to Target,” Mr. Shah says. “But when I see flip-flops on the streets of New York City, am I rolling my eyes a little bit?”

Hollywood Elsewhere is underwhelmed and frankly depressed by Kamala Harris’s choice of Vice-presidential running mate — the four-eyed, verbally vigorous but staunchly unglammy Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who looks like a dull middle-management guy, a bit overfed and a cross between a hardware store clerk and an owner of an upstate New York diner.

He could be played in a forthcoming Walz biopic by Will Patton with black hornrims and white hair dye.

He doesn’t even have that Paul Schrader glint-of-madness, soul-of-a-poet thing going on…Walz’s squinty eyes have nothing behind them, and his teeth appear small and worn down, and perhaps his soul is too…in his own quiet way he’s almost horrifying. Look at that homely face! His bland, greenish-gray suits and ties! Jesus, I’m freaking out here!

I would have been much, much happier with Sen. Mark Kelly (i.e., “Gollum).

I was looking for a little excitement and youthful urban pizazz from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, but Harris wimped…apparently afraid of pissing off the pro-Gaza progressives (Josh is too pro-Israel?) and with femme militants irate over his having stood by a colleague who was accused of sexual harassment.

Harris, in short, has failed to stand up to pressure from hardcore purist lefties. She needed to lean away from those loons and at least pretend to think and act like a sensible left-moderate, and now she’s blown her first test in that regard. Not cool!

Walz is apparently a good, reliable, highly regarded dude on his own terms but my God, why does his selection make me feel so badly?

He looks like a fringe character actor in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche — your vaguely schlumpy, retirement-age uncle from Hartford or Richmond or Tampa, nothing close to a leading man type, a guy who exudes the very opposite of that Gavin Newsom-y quality, that vibe that seems to fit or fulfill that old JFK notion of an ace-level vote-getter…

He’s another Tim Kaine, whose selection as Hillary’s vp in ‘16 lit no fires and quickened no one’s pulse. In short Walz is an unthreatening No. 2 type, strictly backup, and right now I feel very flat and de-energized.

Walz’s two kids are named Hope and Gus — what does that tell you?

Nate Silver:

…she’s probably going to win in November. Because I can feel it, and because I’ve twice heard that teenage girls of comfort who’ve routinely made faces or rolled their eyes when political topics were raised at the family dinner table…these girls, I’ve heard from unscientific sources, are totally into the Harris campaign.

Discount this if you want, but I think it means something.

It means that Harris’s campaign isn’t political as much as cultural and historical, and people all over want to be a part of what appears to be a major tectonic shift.

SurveyUSA’s 8.5.24 nationwide polling shows Democrat Kamala Harris leading Republican Donald Trump by 3 points in an election held today, August 5 2004.

Today it’s Harris 48%, Trump 45%; 3% of likely voters say they will vote for another candidate; 4% say they are undecided.

Trump leads by 12 points among men; Harris leads by 18 among women — a 30-point gender gap. When we break out men and women by their ethnicity, the enthusiasm for Harris seen among women of color, and especially among Black women, is clear:
Among Black women, Harris leads Trump by 74 points; among Black men, Harris leads Trump by 29.
Among Latino women, Harris leads Trump by 46 points; among Latino men, Trump leads Harris by 5.
Among women of Asian and other descent, Harris leads Trump by 30 points; among men of Asian and other descent, Harris leads Trump by 8.
Among white women, Trump leads Harris by 2; among white men, Trump leads Harris by 25 points.

Suburban women also, as some Democrats might say, seem to understand the assignment, voting for Harris by an 18-point margin, while suburban men vote for Trump by 15 points — a 33-point gender gap.

Elsewhere, Trump leads by 4 points among the youngest voters, those 18 to 34…mind-blowing! Harris leads by 10 points among those 35 to 49, by a nominal single point among those 50 to 64, and by 4 points among the oldest and typically most reliable voters. White voters taken as a whole prefer Trump by 13 points; Black voters prefer Harris by 53; Latino, Asian, and other voters prefer Harris by 19. Trump leads by 9 points among voters with high school educations, by a nominal single point among those who have attended some college; Harris leads by 15 points among those with 4-year college degrees.

Regionally, Trump leads by 5 points in the South; Harris leads by 3 in the Midwest, by 5 in the Northeast, and by 10 points in the West.

Any Fairfield County resident who would place a pair of iron lions on stone pedestals at the entrance to his driveway…I’m sorry but this person (who exists and lives in the Weston-Georgetown area) really doesn’t get the Fairfield County aesthetic. This is the kind of thing you might expect to find in the downmarket regions of New Jersey. You can’t bully people into showing a little taste in the way of landscaping and driveway design. Either you were raised by parents who lived with restraint and displayed a modicum of class in this regard, or you weren’t.

If I’m driving on a mostly-level but older blacktop highway just after a fairly heavy rainstorm, and I’m going 40 or 45 or 50 mph along with everyone else and I happen to notice a large shallow puddle (i.e., the kind that’s almost a small pond, and is possibly more than an inch deep) near the side shoulder, I will probably swerve over to the right so I can hit that pond straight and true and send tens of thousands of water droplets flying.

It goes without saying I wouldn’t do this if any people were standing nearby (especially nuns, schoolkids, old folks, people in wheelchairs, safe-space wokesters), but if the coast is free and clear I would go for the big splash. I’m sorry but it’s fun, and anyone who denies this is lying.

This is Kamala Harris‘s first big, tough, high-profile decision — will she stand up to the progressive left? Not just about picking Josh Shapiro for vp, but about anything. This is not just Marc Halperin‘s view, but also my own. She has to govern sensibly and moderately, and that means occasionally telling the woke wackos to modify their demands, and if they can’t do that to go fuck themselves.

In the thread for yesterday’s Angelina Jolie hit piece, HE’s own Bobby Peru wrote the following:

“Quit sucking Brad Pitt’s small dick long enough to be objective. You obviously know nothing about [Jolie’s] parenting style or who she is as a person. You’re just obsessed with Mr. Movie Star. That’s your entire game here. From what I know, she runs rings around him both as an actress, filmmaker and as a parent.”

HE response #1:

“It’s not about sucking Brad’s wang. It’s about sharing a deep-down regard for and understanding of the many burdens and joys of fatherhood. Serving as a father and showing the necessary devotion at all turns is an absolutely holy and primal thing, and no woman of any decency would actively try to poison the vibes between a dad (unless he’s a child molester or mass murderer or political terrorist or fentanyl dealer) and his children.

“Boiled down, Angie is giving an excellent performance as Lucreatia McEvil.”

HE response #2:

“As a director who chooses or sculpts her own preferred material, Jolie has repeatedly demonstrated a preference for stories about innocents suffering horribly under the yoke of evil forces.

“Does that, like, uhhm, tell you anything about her basic emotional state? Or, you know, her basic psychology? Maybe a little something?

”In The Land of Blood and Honey (’11) focused on a Bosnian muslim woman (Zana Marjanovic) coping with the Serbian genocide.

“Unbroken (’14) was largely about an American soldier being sadistically brutalized in a Japanese prison camp.

“In ’15 Jolie was talking about directing a film about the poaching of elephants with Brad Pitt intending to play poacher-fighter Richard Leakey.

”Then came First They Came For My Father, which deals with the Khymer Rouge’s genocide of Cambodia in the mid ’70s.

”Her latest is Without Blood, which I haven’t seen but is said to be cut from the same torture-porn cloth.

“Four movies about innocents suffering the pains of hell under the yoke of evil forces, directed by the same person within the last 13 years. That doesn’t tell you anything?”

Not to mention the funniest Scorsese film since After Hours, and the best Scorsese short film since The Big Shave.

And it’s called Bleu de Chanel. I love the paradox…an ad spot for Bleu de Chanel that has absolutely nothing to do with Bleu de Chanel…not even a wee bit.

What’s it about then? The hotshit angst and sputtering spigot of super-famous and super-wealthy Timothee Chalamet.

It’s basically Chalamet and Scorsese riffing on the kind of rapid-fire life that Leonardo DiCaprio‘s superstar brat was coping with in Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (‘98).

Best bit: Chalamet being rejected by that hot chick in the dressing room…the one who slams the door in his face.

Tom Shone, posted a day ago: “The 28-year-old Chalamet was reportedly paid $35 million to promote Bleu de Chanel — more than the salary for every film of his up to this point in his career combined, including Wonka ($8 million), Dune ($2 million) and Dune: Part Two ($3 million).

“And the ad [itself is] different. Witty, self-conscious and meta…more like [a] mini-movie.”

I am in friendly but fervent opposition to anyone on ANY campus who picks up a microphone and says they feel “actively victimized” by ANYthing except by real, actual, legitimate threats (i.e., possibly being raped, harmed in some physical way or killed).

Sensible, real-world, non-woke opinions are not threats. They simply represent an aspect of the normal rough and tumble of political dispute, which is par for the course if you (ahem) live off-campus.

The phrase “actively victimized” is a woke cliche used by people who fetishize the threat of victimization in order to display their woke bonafides.

Life IS hard and sometimes even scary. It’s not a walk in the park, certainly in the case of woke wimps and candy-asses. It IS a good idea to toughen your hide and maybe wear a helmet. I despise campus wussies and their litany of complaints about everything that doesn’t look, sound or feel “right” or “safe” to them.

Imagine the settlers in a John Ford western going up to Scar, the hostile Comanche chief in The Searchers, and saying “your war paint is not cool…you guys are making us feel actively victimized, and we really don’t feel safe…waaah.”

The eight-year war between the still not-yet-fully-divorced Brad Pitt and Angelica Jolie has devolved into something truly sick and diseased.

And the proof in the pudding are those smug-ass, Village of the Damned Jolie-Pitt kids…their Val Lewton-ish, zombie-like submission to Angie’s “Brad is truly evil and therefore must be shunned” belief system.

What kind of deranged mom indoctrinates her kids (natural and adopted) into this kind of hate theology? This is fucking cult behavior. This is Manson family stuff.

Who in the world believes that Brad is as “bad” as she seems to believe, or that he’s even “bad” at all? As in unredeemable, deserving of damnation, etc.

Has anyone in the history of Western Civilization ever waged a Mexican standoff war over divorce terms and child custody that lasted eight feckin’ years?

Did Pitt do something ghastly and demonic? Answer: Not by normal people standards. Not if you’re coming from a place of mental health.

Whatever happened to “we’re sorry you let alcohol turn you into a different person eight years ago, dad, but we‘re also glad you embraced sobriety so let’s construct something new…let’s open our hearts, move forward and take it one day at a time”?

I believe that Jolie is definitely the bad guy here.

Pitt’s David Mills character in Se7en: “She’s a nutbag.”

Can kids “catch” emotional dysfunction from their mother? Like mumps or the measles?

Try to flush this out of your mind as you watch Pablo Larrain’s Maria in Telluride.

Page Six’s Sara Nathan:

I’m looking very much forward to seeing Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (Netflix, late ‘24). Because the writing will be excellent —- that I know. An adaptation of August Wilson‘s revered 1987 play, pic stars John David Washington (who also starred in a 2022 Broadway revival of same) and was directed and co-adapted by Malcolm, his brother. Denzel Washington and Todd Black have produced.

I’m presuming The Piano Lesson will screen at Telluride before playing Toronto.

John David Washington needs a leg up as performance-wise he hasn’t really connected thus far. If you ask me he was fairly blah or so-so in Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (’18). Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (’20), which wasn’t an acting platform for anyone, offered no acceleration. Then JDW suffered a one-two punch with his mac-and-cheese wolfing scene in Malcolm & Marie (Netflix, 1.19.21), followed by another flat performance in David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam (’22), which caused me great anguish.