I felt lulled and charmed by Lisa Hurwitz‘s The Automat, which I caught at last September’s Telluride Film Festival. It’s just a memory-lane trip, but smartly assembled and a very pleasant watch.

It’s an easy thing, it turns out, to rekindle the lore of those fine, professionally prepared food dishes and exceptionally good cups of coffee (not to mention slices of pie and cake) at popular prices, accessible through those little window slots that you’d drop coins into.

Call it a slightly melancholy saga about a great, enterprising idea that had its day — a franchise business that caught on, thrived, peaked between the ’30s and ’60s, and then started to go away in the ’70s and ’80s.

Managed by the Horn and Hardart company but located only in New York (40 locations!) and Philadelphia, automats were also great hang-outs for office workers, students, book readers, job seekers, workers on the go, poetry writers and the financially pressed.

Remember Dustin Hoffman sharing a fond Automat recollection with Justin Henry in Kramer vs. Kramer? Hollywood’s best Automat recall can be savored in Delbert Mann‘s That Touch of Mink (’62), a bizarre sex comedy about the priggish Doris Day struggling (at age 39!) to avoid having unwed sex with Cary Grant. There’s an Act One scene in which Day’s best friend (Audrey Meadows) slips her free food through the automat windows. There’s also a beautiful evening shot that captures one of the franchise’s midtown facades with that luscious red neon lettering.

The Automat is now playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum, and at three Laemmle theatres locally including West L.A.’s The Royal (which hasn’t been “royal” for quite a few years).

Max Seddon (https://www.ft.com/max-seddon) is the Moscow Bureau Chief of the Financial Times.

As we all know, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling was cancelled a couple of years ago by the trans community. Her sin was having said that biologically-natural women (i.e., women born with female genitalia and raised as a female) have a certain gravity or authority over trans women — “”If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased,” Rowling wrote. “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.”

Trashed as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) who had “attacked” the trans community, Rowling was trans-hated before David Chappelle took her place last year.

Three days ago “T. Greer” tweeted these images from a N.Y. Times video ad being displayed in the Washington, D.C. metro — imagine the deranged chutzpah of the Times advertising team to actually come up with this ad. [HE to readership: This is not a joke — this is a real ad.]

From “Somehow, Trump Is a Tough Act to Follow,” a Gail Colins-Bret Stephens chat (2.21.22) (“The Conversation”):

Gail Collins: “On the domestic front, for all my paranoia about Covid, I’ve been remembering when I was a kid and everybody was terrified of polio. First-graders hearing stories from their parents about all the children who died or were disabled for life. Then the terrible, terrible time when AIDS seemed to be a potential death sentence for so many in the gay community. And when it comes to many less dire illnesses, science also found new cures, or at least effective ways to control them.”

Bret Stephens: “Very true. But here’s what’s depressing: When the Salk vaccine came out, nearly everyone celebrated and got vaccinated, and polio all but disappeared from the developed world. When scientists developed antiretrovirals to manage H.I.V., people living with the virus embraced the new medication as the lifesaver it is. Yet here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.”

Here’s a portion of a hand-written “aerogramme” that I wrote to my parents on 5.3.76. I was living with girlfriend Sophie Black (now a renowned poet and Columbia University prof) in a small studio at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. I was only three and a half years old at the time.

…if a semblance of All In The Family could return as a present-tense social-issues Hulu series, except Archie could be…well, a bit like myself…sensible liberal older guy, perhaps an editor & founder of an online publication or web business of some kind, grappling with the pressures of HR woke terror in the workplace, clashing with Millennial or Zoomer daughter and BIPOC son-in-law who are living with him while they save for a house…basically Hollywood Elsewhere meets Norman Lear…except Archie Wells wouldn’t be as smug or under-educated as Carroll O’Connor was…it could write itself.

While living in the bucolic bedroom community of Westfield, New Jersey, my father led a “Citizens for Kennedy” campaign — basically an appeal to independents and Republicans who had doubts about Richard Milhous Nixon‘s sweaty upper lip.

As it turned out Nixon won Union County (to which Westfield belonged) but JFK won New Jersey, albeit by a nosehair — 49.96% (1,385,415 votes) vs. 49.16% (1,363,324).

I kept the original bumper sticker and eventually duplicated it (peel-off sticker surface and all) at Kinko’s on Westwood Blvd. It was on the rear bumper of my black Nissan 240SX (which I bought in ’93) for many years, and it’s now pasted on the left side of the rumblehog.

I’ve said time and again that my current mode of liberalism is JFK-styled — i.e., sensible left moderate. If the former Massachusetts senator had the heaven-bequeathed ability to survey the cultural-political state of the USA in 2022, he’d be fuming over what the wokesters have done to the Democratic party brand.

The general image quality is obviously far superior in the 1.75:1 Criterion Bluray image, but consider the additional amount of shiny floor, not to mention the reflections within same, at the bottom of the 1.37:1 MPI Home Video image. I own Criterion’s A Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but chopping off the tops and bottoms of perfectly good visual content (otherwise known as “cleavering”) is a terrible practice among home-video distributors.