"You can go to your camper and do whatever you want. I even get television in there.... The camper taught me how to watch TV.... I go to YouTube."

"Anything. And everything. There’s so many things on YouTube. You’ve got Ibsen, you got Chekhov, you got Strindberg. All on the internet. I even like TikTok when I see it from time to time.... TikTok. Yeah. I saw, like, a 14-year-old girl who was deaf, her whole life, and they do something with her, and she actually starts to hear for the first time! How 'bout that? And sometimes the dogs, they rescue them. You watch the guy go in there and bring this beautiful, sad dog back to, uh, being somewhat — aware of things.... Well, I love that stuff!"

Said Al Pacino, quoted in "The Interview/Al Pacino Is Still Going Big" (NYT).

I'm quoting from the recording. The transcript is edited down a bit and it misses some of the feeling. I thought the interviewer, David Marchese, rushed by some of the best material Pacino seemed to want to hand him. For example, when Pacino spoke of the beautiful, sad dog becoming aware, Marchese intruded with "You're such a softy," categorizing Pacino's feeling as shallow sentimentality as opposed to some more subtle existentialism.

And one of the topics was Pacino's nearly dying of of Covid.

"August Strindberg once claimed in his profound, deranged seriousness that the stars in the sky were peepholes in a wall."

I'm reading that in "My Struggle: Book 1" by Karl Ove Knausgaard (p. 205).

Knausgaard goes on to other things, but I want the original Strindberg. I find this on the internet...

But that's from a play — "The Butcher's Apron" — by Charles Tidler in which Strindberg is a character.

I can't find the original Strindberg. When I read the sentence in the Knausgaard book, I imagined the stars as peepholes for those watching us from the other side of the sky.

But in that Tidler play, it's the other way around, and we on this side can go up to a peephole and look through to the other side. Maybe I was influenced by "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes":



And here's the post from a few days ago where we were talking about peepholes, including the idea of reversing a peephole.

"I mean, have you ever really looked at a woman naked? Really objectively looked at a woman’s body?"

"What do you see? A fat boy with overdeveloped breasts, that’s what you see. Basically, a badly made youth. A child who’s somehow managed to shoot up to adult height without growing any muscle – a chronic anaemic who haemorrhages regularly thirteen times a year. What do you expect to come out of them? Wit?"/"If what you say is true, then how can it be that I so easily came to think of her as my intellectual equal?"/"Hallucination. The mesmerising power of a skirt. Or perhaps the two of you really have become equals. Perhaps the capillary power of her vacuity has actually sucked your brains out and brought her up and you down to the same moronic level."

That's August Strindberg, as delightfully translated by David Greig, in the play "Creditors," a production of which we saw this afternoon. A snapshot of the set:



The last performance is less than 2 hours from now, so if you're nearby, consider snapping up one of the few tickets left and running out to Spring Green.

"Pretty girl, not as pretty as James Bond, maybe prettier than his co-presenter (who was that?)."

Said Bad Lieutenant in the comments to "Patti Smith : Bob Dylan :: Sacheen Littlefeather : Marlon Brando?"

The "co-presenter" of the 1973 Best Actor Oscar was Liv Ullmann. Do people today really not recognize Liv Ullmann?! She was the greatest actress of that time. "Scenes from a Marriage," "Cries and Whispers," "The Emigrants," and "The New Land." Do people not know these movies?

I googled to find something to link to, and I was intrigued to see a 2014 article in The Guardian: "Liv Ullmann on Miss Julie, Donald Trump and why she hates the modern age/Ingmar Bergman’s muse talks about directing a version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, terrorism and Twitter."

That's 2014, not 2016, so what's up with Donald Trump showing up in a headline alongside Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg? 

Liv Ullmann likes watching The Apprentice. Or, rather, she likes it when Donald Trump goes in and out of rooms. “I find it tremendously interesting, his entrances and exits. I can’t believe someone is doing this and taking it so seriously! If you made a movie about such a man, you would tell them they were overacting.”

Spend some time thinking about "If you made a movie about such a man, you would tell them they were overacting." It almost a conundrum. You have a larger-than-life character, except he is in life. He's real. Then you want to make a movie about him, and the actor playing him is trying to be exactly like him, but you have to tell him, no, you've got to tone it down, because otherwise you seem like a bad actor. You're going to have to underplay him to preserve this biopic's sense of realism.

It is Trump, she thinks, who is a modern-day Miss Julie – the queen bitch in the August Strindberg play she’s just made into a movie. Both are snoots sneering down from a pedestal of their own construction. “Trump says no to refugees trying to get into US from Mexico. He says it’s all Obama’s fault and he’s given them too much freedom. And he blames him for Ebola coming in from Africa.” Ullmann smiles, gentle and appalled and vulnerable. “If you live in a tunnel, hiding, then people don’t like you and in the end they will come back and kill you. It’s not because he’s evil. It’s that it’s easier for him to be apart than to hold the hand of someone homeless and alone.”

Hey, spoiler alert on "Miss Julie"! Oh. All right. Now, I've got to read the plot summary. Don't worry. Okay, I'm satisfied. Nobody other than Miss Julie kills Miss Julie. Miss Liv is not predicting assassination. Liv is very sensitive:

“That is the sadness of being human today. We still don’t realise that there is no 'other.' We still think we are the audience to everything; we don’t understand we are not witnesses, we are participants. You cannot save the world, I cannot, even Donald Trump cannot. But if we do allow beauty, if we don’t kill movies and concerts and ballets and books we still have a chance.”

A Drudge screen-grab.

This jumped off the page at me:



Elements that caught my attention: 1. Cropping the photo to give the impression that the big word over Hillary's head is "universe," as if she's running for Mistress of the Universe, 2. The crushing banality of a daughter defending her mother, 3. The atrocious green "housecoat" Hillary has on and its contrast with Chelsea's studiously youthful get-up, 4. Hillary's grandiose hail-to-the-people wave in contrast with Chelsea's little-girl ooh-I-see-somebody-I-know-in-the-crowd wave, 5. The subtle similarities and differences between Chelsea's big toothy grin and Warren Beatty's famous smile, 6. The sense that Warren Beatty stands in for and represents all of the Lotharios of this world, including the (Bill) Clinton fool, 7. I wrote "the (Bill) Clinton fool" because the words, as cropped, behind Chelsea's head are "the Clinton fou," and fou = fool, 8. And now I'm getting into weird flights of possibly over-educated fancy, but the Swedish playright August Strindberg wrote an autobiographical novel in French that was titled "Le Plaidoyer d'un fou," which translates to "The Defense of a Fool." Wikipedia says (somewhat ineptly):

As his stormy marriage to Siri von Essen was coming to an end, August Strindberg feared there was a secret conspiracy between the women of Europe, and they were planning to silence him by conducting a campaign to make people believe he was insane. Strindberg therefore decided to hurridly write a book revealing the truths about the marriage.

Oh, what fun we would have if Bill Clinton came to believe there was a vast female conspiracy that was planning to silence him by convincing us that he's insane and he had to hurriedly write a book to reveal the truths about his marriage.