Yesterday, we drove past the new "Occupy Madison" encampment...

... which you can see in the first 10 seconds of this 14-minute video...



... and you can hang out with Meade and me for the rest of the drive if you want. You'll see some more of Madison and the University of Wisconsin and eavesdrop on us. It's not all politics, I assure you, at 2 p.m. on a beautiful Saturday.

ADDED: A couple extra videos for reference. Here's the awesome song "United We Stand" by Brotherhood of Man:



And here's one of the wonderful "I'm a Pepper" commercials from the 1970s:



Of course, you must know the Herman Cain "smoking man" commercial, and here's the take-off by the Huntsman daughters.

AND: 2 more references. Donald Rumsfeld:



And Little Edie:

25 more films enter the National Film Registry — "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Which ones have you seen?

1. AIRPLANE! (1980)
2. ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976)
3. THE BARGAIN (1914)
4. CRY OF JAZZ (1959)
5. ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX 1138 4EB (1967)
6. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)
7. THE EXORCIST (1973)
8. THE FRONT PAGE (1931)
9. GREY GARDENS (1976)
10. I AM JOAQUIN (1969)
11. IT'S A GIFT (1934)
12. LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)
13. LONESOME (1928)
14. MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937)
15. MALCOLM X (1992)
16. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
17. NEWARK ATHLETE (1891)
18. OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1969)
19. THE PINK PANTHER (1964)
20. PRESERVATION OF THE SIGN LANGUAGE (1913)
21. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
22. STUDY OF A RIVER (1996)
23. TARANTELLA (1940)
24. A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (1945)
25. A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET (1906)

List the ones you've seen in the order of their what you think is their cultural/historical/aesthetic significance. Here's mine:

1. It's a Gift
2. Grey Gardens
3. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
4. Saturday Night Fever
5. THX 1138
6. All the President's Men

The first 2 on my list have long been high on my personal list of favorite moves. The 3d one is also on my list of favorite movies, but not so high.

These would be lovable if they were moles...

... but they are mice. "Inadvertently raked up" — Meade IM's from the garden.

ME: Ouch

MEADE: I didn't hurt them

I even ushered the mother to where I moved them

And then I boiled and ate

All three of them

At first, Meade thought he'd raked up baby moles, but when he found the panic'd mother searching for her lost children, he knew they were mice. But let the topic now be moles. Because, yesterday, we were talking about squirrels, and NotYourTypicalNewYorker said:

Squirrels aren't bothering me.

It's the moles, I can't abide the cursed moles.

I put the trap here, they go over there...

It's the moles I tell ya.

And Meade offered some gardenly wisdom:

The moles are your friends. They aerate the soil and eat pest larvae. It's a misconception that they eat bulbs and other desirable garden plants - they're completely carnivorous.

Set your mower blades higher and/or walk down their feeding runs before firing up the mower. Also, where the female mole pushes up a mound of soil, spread it with a rake or with your boot heel so the mower doesn't hit it. It's the mower that does the damage, not the mole.

Adding tags to this post, I knew I already had the tags "mice" and "rodents." I thought it would be excessive to make a tag "moles." Too narrow! But are moles rodents? No, they are Insectivora. And that underlines Meade's point. Moles don't eat plants. Don't worry about moles. Worry about Meade... eating boiled mice. And me, out there in Meade's grass with the squirrels...



... levitating.

(Thanks to Palladian for the TrANNscendentalism.)

Hey, what happened to Kausfiles?

I was complaining yesterday that in 3 days, there were only 2 paragraphs showing on the front page of the blog that got all us bloggers noticing that it went to Newsweek.

Today, I go there and not only is there no new post on this, the fourth day of the blog, the whole page is blank. The original 2 posts are gone!

I do see some sidebar links to other stuff in Newsweek, like "GOP 'Pledge to America' Looks Unlikely to Inspire." Ha. Well, to me, Newsweek looks unlikely to inspire. What ridiculous writing! How does one look unlikely to inspire? What a phrase. Could they hide their bias a little better? They can't report on something new that the other side does without getting the jump on it and assuring their brain-dead readers that it can't possibly be any good.

Jeez, the Kausfiles blank page looks likely to be the most readable thing over there.

UPDATE: Now, the page is back, with the original 2 posts, plus a new post, "Isn't Anybody Against Porn?"

Are we really such an advanced nation that even an extreme "staunch social conservative" has to deny opposing pornography? There's something depressing about that. If not Christine O'Donnell, who?

Not just "staunch," but "extreme 'staunch'"! What's that like?

"I tell you if there's anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman... S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There's nothing worse, I'm telling you. They don't weaken, no matter what."

Also, there's a difference between "opposing pornography" and wanting opposition to pornography enacted into legislation. Her old statement about pornography and adultery was her interpretation of religion. You can have a very high standard as a matter of religion and still leave people alone as a matter of law.

Durango costumery.

There was — as far as I could see — exactly one person in town wearing high heels:



Now, what book do you imagine this individual was reading?

Then there were these characters on roller skates:



Note the tail.

And yeah, I know: men in shorts. But this is beyond the normal men in shorts problem (which is, to refresh your recollection, that a grown man is making himself look like a boy). This is skating in hot pants. I have always had a sports exception to the "no shorts" rule. And this is the best costume for today.

"It is so lush, it’s on the edge of becoming decadent."

"It’s extremely romantic, it’s very fragrant, and it’s extremely sensuous. It’s full of secret garden rooms and mystery."

"The Road Not Taken."

As I was saying, I played the docent at the Fred B. Jones Gatehouse, which was part of a Frank Lloyd Wright tour in Delavan, Wisconsin yesterday. Here are some views of the exterior:

 

(That's the water tower on the left.)

 

But I was posted -- imagine me, a blogger, posted -- in the interior, so let's go in:

 

Yesterday's post has one picture of the interior, showing the fireplace, which has a space above it where the current owners have painted a line from that Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken." Here's a closeup of the inscription:

 

I showed many people through the room, and I always had to say that it was the original fireplace, but the line was not there originally, as, indeed, it could not have been -- unless, as I said once, "Frank Lloyd Wright was unusually prescient" -- because it had yet to be written in 1901 when the gatehouse was built. So I had some interesting conversations with visitors about the line. 

Would Frank Lloyd Wright have approved? He took the road less traveled, but the road that consists of loving that poem is very well traveled. All these people enamored of a line about nonconformity -- it's ironic. Most of the people I talked to wanted to take the road less traveled and reject the poem. 

Let's hear it read by R. Frost:

 

One visitor said that Wright and Frost were contemporaries and that there's a good film clip out there of Wright interviewing Frost. "That should be on the internet," I said. I'm not finding it, but there sure are a lot of student films using "The Road Not Taken." Sample:

 

Now, when I see that line -- "I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference" -- I think of the documentary "Grey Gardens." Little Edie, truly a nonconformist, treasures the old line. Part of what is so poignant about Little Edie is that she feels so deeply about some terribly shallow things, like astrology, scarves, and the VMI fight song. And so, that poem... I'm frustrated that YouTube doesn't seem to have the clip of Little Edie reciting Frost, but I did find this video of Rufus Wainwright singing his song "Grey Gardens":

 

[Speaking of feeling deeply about terribly shallow things, I'm remembering the Rufus Wainwright line: "There's never been such grave a matter/As comparing our new brand name black sunglasses...."] 

And then, if I may bring this meandering post in for a crash landing, I found this clip of Christine Ebersole -- who plays Little Edie (and the young Big Edie) in the Broadway musical made from the documentary. She's struggling to answer the question why gay men love "Grey Gardens." At one point, her answer seems promising, but then it devolves into typical showbiz political talk about Republicans:

 

No, let's not end there. Let's get back to the real feeling of Little Edie:

 

"I always took French, but nothing ever happened there." 

ADDED: I did not know when I wrote this post that there had been a terrible murder in Delavan the night before I was there. 

MORE: Actually, the murder was the night after the tour:

Six people, including twin infants, were shot dead Saturday night inside an apartment house. The shooting also wounded a 2-year-old girl, who was still fighting for her life Sunday.... The wounded girl was flown to the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.

The helicopters to the hospital fly over my house. I heard a helicopter in the middle of the night last night.

"Grey Gardens," the musical.

I've already blogged about my great love for the film "Grey Gardens." Here, I respond to the charge that I've phonied up the list of favorite films in my Blogger profile as a way to make myself appear more sexually attractive. And here I describe an at-home triple feature where I inflict it on friends, including the one who made the aforementioned charge.

Now, there's an Off-Broadway musical based on the film. Here's the NYT piece on it, which includes a photograph that should hearten the film's devotees:



That really captures the mood well, doesn't it? From the article:

"Grey Gardens" also developed a following among people, gay men especially, who responded both to the implicit campiness of the film — two faded old biddies, preening and bickering and singing Cole Porter tunes in lah-dee-dah accents — and to the women's eccentricity, originality and uncompromising independence. The two Edies, a cross between the Collyer brothers and Miss Havisham and Estella, are a bizarre version of the American family but ultimately an affectionate and mutually sustaining one. Their admirers include numbers of men who love to watch the film while dressed in drag and reciting the dialogue from memory.

Dressed in drag? Well, presumaby you are wearing the skirt on you head, right? It's the perfect costume for the day.

Even before seeing the musical, some of the diehards are charging sacrilege. Scott Frankel, who was the prime mover behind this production of "Grey Gardens" and wrote the music for it, has been accosted on the street by outraged fans of the film saying "How could you!" Doug Wright, who wrote the book for the musical, said recently: "It's like adapting the Bible. You do feel a certain responsibility."...

... Mr. Frankel called in Mr. Wright, a Yale classmate and the author of both the movie "Quills" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "I Am My Own Wife." Mr. Wright told him he was nuts. "I said I adored the movie, but what you have in mind can't be done," he recalled. "How can you have a two-act musical where nothing happens? It wasn't until they came to me with the tablecloth that I realized there could be a narrative shape."

The tablecloth — a paper one, from Ernie's restaurant on the Upper West Side — was the handiwork of Mr. Frankel and Mr. Korie, who wrote the libretto for "Harvey Milk," among other operas, and who was starting to think about lyrics for the show. It had two boxes drawn on it, one labeled 1941 and the other 1973, depicting the solution the two men had arrived over dinner in the fall of 2003: to create an entire first act set in the past, when Big Edie was in her prime and Little Edie was known in debutante circles as Body Beautiful Beale, and a second set in the actual period of the film.

"We had been playing with the idea of flashbacks, but that just seemed like 'Follies,' " Mr. Frankel recalled. "But then we began thinking about what really happened. What if we saw what life was like at Grey Gardens before it became this hothouse terrarium?"

It will be interesting to see how that works. One of the great charms of the film is the way you discover the past, at surprising little moments, like when the camera shows a beautiful oil portrait of Big Edie, who is laughing about how the cat is "enjoying" itself by pissing behind it.

Do we understand from the musical any more than from the film what brought these women to this condition?

"I kept trying to get a clinical fix on them," Mr. Frankel said, "and my allegiances kept shifting. At first I thought Big Edie was a narcissist who created a sort of bohemian salon for herself at Grey Gardens, and didn't equip her daughter to live an independent, creative life. But then I began to wonder whether Little Edie was ever equipped to deal with the world. Was she mentally compromised? She knows what she should do, and yet she doesn't seem able to make it happen. So maybe Big Edie was in fact providing a safe haven for a daughter who couldn't manage in the world. We kept looking at it as an 'or' proposition, but through talking to Albert we came to see it as an 'and' proposition."

Have you figured it out?

Here's the piece NPR ran this morning, which gives you a chance to hear some of the music. The photo at the NPR page, unlike the photo above, is worrisome for a "Grey Gardens" devotee.

Oh, and apparently, we're about to get a "Grey Gardens" movie too. With Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange!

The Madison blogger triple feature.

As predicted yesterday, I got everything done but hanging that damned blind. The Bolognese sauce was cooked and consumed. Pasta chosen for the sauce: rombi! I'm guessing that's Italian for rhombus, and who wouldn't want intensely delicious meat sauce served on equilateral parallelograms? The plan was to eat tasty food from bowls while watching movies on TV. I had my DVD player loaded up with some of my official favorites (as noted in my profile).

My fellow bloggers live-blogged the event, but, having gotten up at 3 a.m. and worked hard all day, I was too groggy to blog (and too bloggy to grog!). Nina's account is here, here, and here. The other blogger I cannot link to without pre-clearance. That's her policy, which I follow along with a policy of my own: no!

We played a triple feature, during which I took, oh, maybe, ten short naps. The first film was "Grey Gardens" -- because, really, why not confront your deep fears about decay while eating meat sauce? You can laugh and gasp at the cellulite and cat shit and the raccoons in the attic, but at some point you must feel the pain of your own anxieties and succumb to the intimacy of the humanity of Big Edie and Little Edie. "It's so hard to keep the line between the past and the present."



If I had been more awake, I would have insisted on following up on the decay theme with the other great movie about decay, "Decasia," but the un-spontaneously-linkable blogger had smuggled in "Hair." So bring on the hippies, hopping and jumping around NYC in the Broadway style made famous in "West Side Story." Just as urban gangmembers don't leap about balletically, real hippies had none of the wholesome peppiness displayed by the performers in "Hair."



The un-spontaneously-linkable one sang along with the inspirational songs: "I got my guts (I got my guts)/I got my muscles (muscles)/I got life (life)/Life (life)/Life (life)/LIFE!" So much for my decay theme! Could you be any more life affirming? The film has that candy-colored hippie philosophy that nonhippies are all up-tight straights who have no life at all, but they only need to see the light, let their "shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen" hair down, and become hippies, and then they too could surely live. Life!

"Hair" might be the antithesis to "Grey Gardens," but remember the "Grey Gardens" scene where Little Edie sings and dances? Is there really such a distance between her and dancing, romping hippies?

Are you up for a triple feature? You over there, dozing on the chair arm? You said you weren't kicking us out until midnight! That's quite true, so here is movie three, another one of my favorites, the Errol Morris concoction "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control."



How does this third movie fit with the other three? Well, how do topiary, wild-animal taming, robots, and naked mole rats go together? Errol Morris weaves those things together, and if I wanted to prolong this post, I'm sure I could think of some reasons "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" goes with "Grey Gardens" and "Hair." Naked mole rats have no hair... I'll let you do the official Madison blogger triple feature and find the connections. And feel free to cook up some parallelograms and make some Bolognese sauce. The sauce recipe is in here:



UPDATE: Tonya, the erstwhile un-spontaneously-linkable blogger, has rescinded her pre-clearance policy, thus allowing me to link to her live-blogging of last night's triple feature, which includes a lot of (sort of) transcription of the conversation, including my obsession with the position of Treat Williams's bellybutton, and Nina and Tonya's interest in other Williams body parts.

Gimme Shelter.

Tonight, we watched Gimme Shelter, a movie I saw when it came out in 1970, when I didn't know anything about the Maysles Brothers but loved the Rolling Stones. Today, it was more the Maysles Brothers than the Rolling Stones that led me to choose this film. I love Grey Gardens, and all of us who were making the selection love Salesman.

You might have heard the NPR piece on the Criterion Collection this morning. If not, listen to it here. Gimme Shelter is a nice glossy Criterion DVD. The extra scenes made me a little mad at the movie on behalf of the great Tina Turner, who toured with the Stones during the period of the filming and who is featured in the film doing one song, with extremely lascivious mannerisms, followed by a short clip of Mick Jagger watching her on film, then saying something like "It's nice to have a chick sometime." One of the omitted scenes, however, is a long sequence of Mick sitting with Tina (and Ike) looking at a magazine, hanging out, having a warm relationship. Mick plays guitar for a long time, playing quite well, in the style of Robert Johnson, and seeming almost puppylike in his desire for the approval of Ike and Tina. (Too bad they didn't get Ike Turner to do a commentary track on that scene. I would like to know what was going through his head at the time.)

Actually, I'm mad on behalf of Mick too, then--as if he needs my support!--because the edited film made him seem piggish toward Tina Turner, when, judging from the unused scene, he was very sweet with her. In fact, the whole film was edited to feature the Altamont concert, rather than the whole tour, and to make it seem that the Stones' music and the inherent destructiveness of the hippie movement were responsible for the murder and violence that occurred that night, because, of course, dramatically that makes a much better story than the truth, which seems to be that the Rolling Stones were disserved by the lawyers and others who handled the crowd control and security arrangements.