I’m filing this from the middle of the Long Island Sound — sitting on the Cross Sound Ferry, which travels from Orient Point, Long Island, to New London, Connecticut, a few times daily. You can actually get wifi on this thing if you have an air card…amazing.

6.1.08, 9:05 am

Yesterday I attended a celebration of the life and work of the late poet and artist Siv Cedering, my significant other’s mom who passed last November. The event was hosted by sculptor Hans Van de Bovenkamp, the widowed husband, at the sprawling Twin Oaks Farm and Sculpture Garden in Sagaponack, N.Y.

Front lawn, pond, horse stables at site of yesterday’s event — Saturday, 5.31.08, 6:55 pm

5.31.08, 7:25 pm

5.31.08, 8:05 pm

Ms. Cedering was a poet, novelist, screenwriter, children’s book author, songwriter, illustrator, sculptor, painter, musician, and translator. Born in Sweden, she lived with Van de Bovenkamp at the Twin Oaks Farm and Sculpture Garden for roughly 10 years until her death seven months ago at age 68.

“Asked if Barack Obama would wait to get a concession call from Hillary Clinton before claiming the nomination, Obama campaign adviser Anita Dunn said the onus was on Clinton now that the Democratic Party has firmed up the number of delegates needed to claim the party’s nod.

“‘He’s not going to wait by the phone like a high-school girl waiting for a date,’ said Dunn. ‘That’s not Barack Obama.”
Obama’s campaign is 68 delegates away from clinching the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, according to an ABC News delegate estimate. The campaign “expects to win around 38 delegates in the final three contests of Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana. If he hits that mark, it would leave him 30 superdelegates away from his party’s nod.”
Referring to the final contests of South Dakota and Montana, Dunn said that after Tuesday Clinton “can decide how united she wants this party to be.” — from an ABC News story, filed this evening at 8:57 pm.
The Page‘s Mark Halperin quoted Obama himself saying the following this evening: “Ithink that Senator Clinton and former President Clinton love this country. They love the Democratic Party. I think they deeply believe that Democrats need to win in November. And so I trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”

The five porn scenes excerpted in Daniel Murphy‘s “The Five Most Ridiculous Porn Scenes” (a 5.30 Esquire posting) aren’t funny. All porn is fundamentally dreary and depressing because the people involved on both sides of the camera are (a) obviously not very bright and (b) untalented (to put it mildly). But the idea of the piece — the promise of it — is…well, somewhat funny.

(1) “We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along…the moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable“; (2) “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia”; (3) “I’ve developed a total loathing for [John] McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he’s wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him”; (4) “You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?” — from Vidal’s “What I’ve Learned” page in th new Esquire.

East Hampton marina — Saturday, 5.31, 10:55 am.

Due respect to Variety‘s Anne Thompson and other industry analysts who are seeing yesterday’s Sex and the City numbers as proof that the film, as Thompson put it, is “a big-titted hit,” but SATC is so far only a one-weekend wowser. If it shows legs next weekend and the one after that, great. Well, not so great when you think about it.

Michael Patrick King‘s film is, after all, an insipid thing to sit through — one of the most spiritually appalling successful films of all time — and, as Manohla Dargis and Thelma Adams have written, a capturing (or resuscitation) of a lifestyle attitude that has come and gone.
Right now it’s a huge first-weekend female moviegoer phenomenon — a marketing success extraordinaire based on viewer loyalty for the HBO series plus more inspired marketing. It’s also, arguably, an indication that a certain portion of middle-class American females — pre-teens, teens, 20- and 30-somethings, middle-agers — are, no offense, social dimwits and aesthetically clueless saps with the collective depth of three or four quarters laid on top of each other.
The single biggest negative for the image of African Americans over the last 15 years was their widely reported elation when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. People read those stories and saw the video clips and said to themselves, “What…?” The SATC phenomenon, I submit, is on a par with this — a cultural snapshot showing everyone in the world how utterly shallow and culturally nowhere mainstream American women have become, for the most part. If, that is, they continue to embrace this film over the next few weeks. One weekend’s worth of enthusiasm doesn’t make it a bona fide hit.

I’m obviously not speaking of women who are educated X-factor urbans, academics, journalists, hipsters, poets, creatives, etc. I mean the average American suburban woman with her fucking credit cards who sees herself as being “in the game” regardless of her age.
The Zelda Fitzgerald-Daisy Buchanan neurosis that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived and wrote about — something that was pretty much confined to the upper classes in the 1920s — has, of course, become ubiquitous today. A nation of Daisy Buchanans….good God! And what do the media mavens say about this? They say “great box-office,” “let’s make more of these,” “Michael Patrick King…the new Phil Alden Robinson!”
Thompson’s “big titted hit” line is a lift, of course, from Paddy Chayefsky‘s Network when Robert Duvall proclaims that The Howard Beale Show is “a big fat, big tittied hit!” (That’s tittied, not titted.)

At 6:15 pm last night Variety‘s Pamela McLintock projected a $20 million Friday for Sex and the City. But sometime after 11 pm Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason posted a “shocker” report that SATC earned $28.25 million yesterday and is looking at a $70 million gross by Sunday night.
A Friday figure in the neighborhood of $20 or $25 million easily ranks as the biggest opening-day tally for a romantic comedy. As McLintock pointed out, The Devil Wears Prada — the last sizable chick-flick hit — earned $9.4 million on its opening Friday and $27.5 million for that weekend.

Scallop Avenue in East Hampton — Saturday, 5.31, 8:15 am. A land where high thread counts are never questioned, much less commented upon — a given.

Getting on on Air France 777 now (1:03 pm), having missed the 10:15 am flight. (Don’t ask.) Before every flight, I cross myself and ask God Almighty not to seat me next to a morbidly obese person. There are at least two whales in line right now, and I’m feeling a very slight apprehension about this. There are thousands of people in Paris who look well-fed or stocky or fat, but I’ve seen no Jabbas. You might expect otherwise in a foodie city like Paris, but nope.
Update: No fatties but Doug Liman is on my plane. He’s returning from a trip to three African countries, at least one or two of which (Rwanda or Uganda or both) proved to be fairly dangerous. He told me was arrested once, and possibly twice. I admire the cojones of anyone willing to risk the worst to order to encounter things unique, surprising, challenging. We talked about the red-clay color of Uganda’s dirt. Liman’s boot laces were untiedcand flopping around as we walked and talked. He was wearing a round-brimmed straw hat.

I need to be fair and and admit that the career-spanning video on Tom Cruise‘s website is nicely cut. (The Air France terminal I’m typing this on won’t let me load links, but it’s www.tomcruise.com.) Now and then some of it makes you grin in admiration for the guy…truly. The one scene in the entire reel that brought a genuine smile to my face? When Cruise’s Joel Goodson spots Rebecca DeMornay‘s prostitute character in the lobby of a plush Chicago hotel and does that little two-shakes-of-an-index-finger wag as I way of saying “I see you, you see me, we’re both here…tah-tah!”

Harvey Korman has died; Hedley Lamarr lives.