"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

The movie was "Just Cause,"  from 1995, and I don't remember it, even though I saw a lot of movies back then. Sean Connery played — in the words of Wikipedia — "a liberal Harvard professor." If you imagine that I'd go out of my way to see movies about law professors, you have it exactly backwards. I did read the plot summary though. Don't read this if you don't want spoilers or if you feel bad laughing in the context of rape and the death penalty:

Paul Armstrong (Sean Connery), a liberal Harvard professor and former lawyer opposed to capital punishment, is persuaded by an elderly woman (Ruby Dee) to go to Florida to investigate the conviction of her grandson Bobby Earl Ferguson (Blair Underwood) for murder.... ... Ferguson gets a re-trial and is acquitted and thereafter freed from prison...

Back at the prison, Sullivan gloats that he and Ferguson struck a deal: Ferguson would kill Sullivan's parents in exchange for freedom, while Sullivan would claim responsibility for the girl's murder...

Ferguson's motives for everything turn out to be a desire for revenge on Armstrong's wife Laurie...  the prosecutor against him in a previous rape trial.... At the local regional swamps, Armstrong finds his wife and daughter in a small shack, where Ferguson appears. Ferguson's plans include raping and murdering Armstrong's wife and daughter (Scarlett Johansson)... ... Ferguson... drowns and is subsequently eaten by an alligator....

The alligator is an interesting touch — just what horrible filmmakers assume the debased audience wants after threatening 11-year-old Scarlett Johansson with rape by a black man in the swamp. I'm guessing the line "in the hospital dying of nothing" was cut because it was too funny and the filmmakers knew that they were risking inappropriate laughter all over the place and that they were reducing to nothing the chance that the big eaten-by-an-alligator climax would be taken seriously.

Does this post cohere? Yes. It's about writing and taking things seriously.