"Cary Grant was an idol of mine and I was in awe watching him in the movies and I wanted to copy him. I love thick suits with structure. I think masculine is feminine."

Said Diane Keaton, quoted in "How Diane Keaton redefined the movie star look/The 78-year-old actress has gathered a voluminous selection of her most celebrated, most treasured and most questionable looks in a new book, 'Fashion First'" (WaPo)(free-access link, so you can see the photos and because it's the last day of the month and I've got 2 more to use).

You're not dressing like Cary Grant.

I disagree that you dress like Cary Grant. In this thread, I will list some of the ways in which your dress differs and why such important details matter. 🧵 https://t.co/6hTiPgpxSX

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) April 28, 2024

Read the whole detailed thread. Quite aside from the fantasy of dressing like men did in 1548, Guy shows it's also a fantasy to believe that men in suits these days are dressing like Cary Grant in 1948.

I was especially interested in Guy's attention to the problem of a collar gap, because I was troubled to see that Biden was allowed to go on close-up camera last night at the Correspondents' Dinner with a giant gap between his shirt and his neck:

  

It's reminiscent of a ventriloquist dummy, notably Charlie McCarthy, who dressed in white tie:

"A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design."

"There weren’t many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirks—on clothes, on faces—went wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories I’d retained and neuroses I’d cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that I’d want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.... The closest 'Flying Over Sunset' gets to true surreality is when Cary [Grant], a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture.... The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that... drugs alone... make for interest."

Writes Vinson Cunningham in "The Bad Trip of 'Flying Over Sunset'/James Lapine’s new musical, at the Vivian Beaumont, sets the LSD hallucinations of three nineteen-fifties celebrities to song" (The New Yorker).

"Never mind the long tradition of lounging on the fabled spot — a scene perhaps best evoked by Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in the 1953 film 'Roman Holiday' — sitting on the Spanish Steps is now subject to a fine of 400 euros..."

"... or about $450, under new municipal rules that ban a variety of activities in the city’s historic center. The regulations are intended to 'guarantee decorum, security and legality' by prohibiting actions that are 'not compatible with the historic and artistic decorum' of Rome’s center, according to the city’s website.... Dozens of startled people, most of them presumably tourists, were reprimanded on a broiling Wednesday afternoon by a small force of municipal police officers — this reporter counted at least eight — who admonished step-sitters by blowing twice on their whistles and gesturing stiffly to stand up.... A tired-looking father with a stroller in his hands and a toddler on his shoulders, was coming down the steps when he was stopped by a cry of 'Hey Mister.' The stroller, an officer said, cannot touch the steps. The father grudgingly complied.... 'You see one stroller — we see millions of them. This is a historic monument that has to be preserved,' [the police officer] said, declining to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. He asked to be identified as 'a municipal police officer who loves Rome.'... The Rome newspaper Il Messaggero said Wednesday that photographs of empty stairs 'were not an image of strength, but of desolation.' The newspaper accused the mayor of trying to apply 'Swiss rigor' to what was a quintessentially Roman spot for relaxation."

From "Rome’s New Rules: No Sitting on the Spanish Steps (and No Wading in the Trevi Fountain)" (NYT).



Famous tourist attractions are too crowded these days. You travel to see something, and it's full of people, and way too many of them are taking pictures of themselves. It affects who travels, and I suspect the city would prefer the travelers who spend a lot money, the people who stay at that hotel at the top of the steps and not the people who'd like to lounge on the steps eating street food.

ADDED: Audrey Hepburn totally littered that ice cream cone!

I've never seen "Roman Holiday," but, boy, does it look bad. Is Gregory Peck a bad actor? I see that the role was originally offered to Cary Grant:

Grant declined, believing he was too old to play Hepburn's love interest (though he played opposite her ten years later in Charade.) Other sources say Grant declined because he knew all of the attention would be centered around the princess. Peck's contract gave him solo star billing, with newcomer Hepburn listed much less prominently in the credits. Halfway through the filming, Peck suggested to [the director William] Wyler that he elevate her to equal billing—an almost unheard-of gesture in Hollywood.

I'm just noticing that Hepburn's character, a princess, is named Ann. Ann, with no "e." Strange! I wonder if I'd noticed that years ago, I might have eventually gotten around to watching this movie. I have seen the other Hepburn-as-Italian-tourist movie, Katharine Hepburn as an aging spinster in "Summertime." Generally, I'm not big on the cliché movie idea of woman traveling and finding herself by getting into a sexual relationship. Oh, I don't know. It could work on me. I love "A Room With a View." The Italian city in this one is Florence:

I will read one and only one of articles on the "Popular in Slate" list, which I think stands on it's own as something worth reading.

I'll update soon with something about the one I want to read.

ADDED: The article I chose — could you guess? — was "It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct" by Riley Black (subheadline: "The New Yorker’s story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear").

Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.

This isn’t a scene from the next Indiana Jones film; it’s the kind of breathless prose novelist Douglas Preston employs in his latest New Yorker feature hyping a controversial fossil site that slammed onto social media last week like the asteroid that closed the Cretaceous. It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay... It’d be one thing if the rogue-heroic-scientist-makes-amazing-discovery storyline was one of many types of tales of how we make progress in this field. But it’s the only one we ever seem to get with paleontology, and in this case, the hype just doesn’t match the published results. The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....

This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works.... 

IN THE COMMENTS: William said:

I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists.....

That's right! The 2 most well-known paleontologists in American popular media are Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and Ross in "Friends." Both are nerdy and inhibited.

"He claimed he was saved by LSD. You have to remember that Cary was a private man. He rarely gave interviews. And yet..."

"... after taking acid, he personally contacted Good Housekeeping magazine and said: ‘I want to tell the world about this. It has changed my life. Everyone’s got to take it.’ I’ve also heard that Timothy Leary read this interview, or was told about it, and that his own interest in acid was essentially sparked by Cary Grant.... I’m part of the 60s generation. I’ve taken acid myself. Not a lot, but enough to think, ‘Wow, someone who’s taken it 100 times would have had really felt the effects.’ He would have had a lot going on."

Said Mark Kidel, director of the new documentary "Becoming Cary Grant."

Grant used LSD in the early 60s, before the government made it illegal.

"Whenever I'm in the shorts, I feel a real onus to be as deadly serious as I can possibly be, because you can't put those on and act silly."

"If you put those on and act silly, it's a joke on a joke on a joke. It's just an over-decorated cake. So, for better or for worse, whenever you see my performance on the show, that's me doing my most serious acting. In my mind, I'm like Cary Grant in that thing."

From "10 Things Thomas Lennon Wants You to Know About Lt. Dangle's Reno 911! Shorts."

Lennon is speaking of his state of mind, not opining on how he thought he looked, but it does make me wonder if Cary Grant wore shorts. Yes:



But that's consistent with my long-term exception for sports where the traditional attire is shorts.

"New York's narrowest house, which measures just 9.5 feet wide and 30 feet deep..."

"Located at 75 1/2 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, the three-story townhouse is legendary for both its size and its famous past inhabitants, which include Cary Grant, John Barrymore, Edna St Vincent Millay and Margaret Mead." Mead live there with her sister and her sister's wife, the cartoonist William Steig.

I love this place, which I've noticed in person many times. The linked article includes the floor plans and photos of most of the the interior spaces.

ADDED: I mean husband. What is happening to my mind in this world today!

George Clooney doesn't care if you think he's gay.

He says:

"I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down saying 'These are lies!' That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community.

"I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing. My private life is private, and I’m very happy in it. Who does it hurt if someone thinks I’m gay? I’ll be long dead and there will still be people who say I was gay. I don’t give a s---."...

Making a comparison with Cary Grant, who some people still claim was gay, Clooney said he thought the late star "would have laughed at that and not cared what people thought."...

Rumours about Clooney's sexuality were fuelled when his friend Brad Pitt, also a campaigner in favour of same-sex marriage, joked that he would not marry his partner Angelina Jolie until Clooney could legally marry his partner.

Nice attitude. Good points.

Beauty... love... kisses...

One reason I enjoy blogging so much is that there's something about my brain that visualizes everyone as beautiful.

If I don't see your photograph or hear some description that stops me, I picture the men looking like Cary Grant and the women looking like... No, not Myrna Loy!



Myrna Loy today would look frumpy. That hairstyle! I picture the women looking more like Jennifer Connelly.

What's wrong with me?! I like to think I'm an optimist. But it's a problem when I try to step out of this life of the mind — oh, come on, humor me, blogging is the life of the mind — and interact with real people. I believe I'm swanning around at a posh cocktail party in a 1930s Hollywood movie, and it's quite a shock to see that things don't look like that at all.

This is a topic upgraded from my Twitter feed, where I've also been talking about my other cognitive quirk: I visualize things outside of my immediate physical sphere as much smaller than they are. For example, I "small-visualize" government, industry, geography, historical time, and outer space. My theory is that this is a natural consequence of evolution: We're hard-wired to understand a world that has the scope it had when we lived in a small, walkable place, when the things we knew about had a human scale.

The smack in the face.

A teaser for a forthcoming diavlog.

What do you think we're talking about?

ADDED: Glenn Kenny guesses "Chinatown," meaning this:



Is there more famous slapping in the movies? Well, there's Cher slapping Nick Cage in "Moonstruck":



This isn't really slapping:



Nor is this:



Now, this is slapping, but it's not movies, just TV:



But then, I said a "smack in the face." Is that different from a "slap"? Isn't it odd that a "smack" can be a slap or a kiss?

***

There's also this.

AND: Commenter Peano notices something disconcerting:

"Write me a letter!"

Said Cary Grant fending off Katharine Hepburn in the last scene of "Bringing Up Baby," which John quotes when I remark that it's pretty funny that we keep emailing each other when we're sitting three feet away at side-by-side tables, here at Espresso Royale.

Let's try shaming first.

John Fund has a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing for term limits for Supreme Court Justices:

A seat on the high court is now so powerful and so heady that many justices stay long past their prime. Legal scholars have concluded that half of the last 10 retirees have been too feeble or inattentive to fully participate in the work of the court.

The secrecy that shrouds the high court can also allow someone to turn his chamber into a nursing home, as William O. Douglas did in the 1970s. He was so determined to hang on until a new president could appoint someone philosophically compatible with him that he refused to leave after an incapacitating stroke. This is not only irresponsible, but for, say, a liberal justice hanging on through a series of Republican presidents, it is directly at odds with the preferences of the electorate. In Douglas's case, his colleagues were so concerned that they informally agreed that during the last year of his service none of the court's decisions would be valid if his was the deciding vote. They finally pressured him to resign in 1975. A weakened Thurgood Marshall often looked to his fellow octogenarian William Brennan on how to vote because he no longer could hear well enough to understand the arguments other justices made during their conferences.

Fund makes a strong argument. (Read the whole thing.) But he does not address how term limits would affect presidential campaigns. We'd know which Justices were slated to leave in the upcoming presidential term. As it is now, we just engage in a guessing game, saying things that are often ridiculously off-base. (In the 2000 campaign we were told the next President would probably get three appointments, but in fact, he got zero.) Maybe the people voting for President should know which Justices are coming up for replacement. And there is something unseemly about the Justices -- supposedly aloof from politics -- timing their retirements to try to control the ideology of the next occupant of their seat.

But I still resist changing the Constitution, and even if I didn't, I'm realistic enough to know how incredibly difficult it is to amend. A more moderate approach, which I want to recommend, is shaming.

While we do criticize Justices for their opinions, we hold back from criticizing them for clinging to their seats too long. I think we may be observing the general social norm that frowns on age discrimination and accommodates disability. But maybe we ought to set aside that generality and get specific about Supreme Court Justices: they wield immense power and they cling to it. Why don't we talk about that? Why don't we shame them for staying too long?

We don't spare the criticism for other persons who tighten their grip on power. Before we try to amend the Constitution, let's try shaming. I think the Justices are vulnerable to our criticism. Much as they may love their power, they must also love our good opinion. They must want to be remembered as great Justices. But insulated on the Court, surrounded by respectful admirers -- should I say sycophants? -- they may need to hear stronger voices from the rest of us. Why don't we put aside our stock politeness and say more clearly and more often that it is wrong to hold your seats too long and wrong to let too many years pass without giving the President a chance to appoint someone new.

I'll leave you with this passage from Bill Maher's book "New Rules":

New Rule

Just because you have a job for life doesn't mean you have to do it for life. It's well and proper that we venerate our elders -- but give it a freakin' rest....

Now, I know it must be hard to give up your job when your job is literally sitting on a throne, or being on a "supreme" court, or keeping women out of the priesthood to make room for the gays -- but at some point it starts to look like you think of yourself as indispensible, and no one is indispensible, including you, the late Mr. Infallible...

[T]here's a reason that names like Cary Grant, Joe DiMaggio, and Johnny Carson inspire a special kind of awe: They all did something that made them more beloved than anyone else -- they left before we got sick of them.

"What do actresses see in their scruffy men?"

The International Herald Tribune inquires:

The once glamorous Hollywood of Cary Grant and Steve McQueen has been taken over by greasy-haired, scruffy-bearded, baggy-pants-wearing men who could be mistaken for vagrants if their $30,000 watch didn't give them away.

The obvious example of this frog mentality is Mr. Britney Spears, Kevin Federline, whose arrival in the city of angels set the stage for this latest Hollywood trend. Granted, Spears was never a leading lady in film or fashion. But even classic beauties with fashion know-how like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Garner, and Kate Hudson are all being squired about town by men (Chris Martin, Ben Affleck, and Chris Robinson respectively) who wouldn't make the dress code if they showed up alone.

Here's my theory. Only someone genuinely young and good-looking can get away with with the look. So it's very daring and exciting to be one of the few people who can do it. Let ordinary men attempt to get in on the super-elite trend and they will humiliate themselves.

That cross-dressing reality show.

Stephen Bainbridge wants to know what Tung Yin and I think of the new reality show "She's a Lady," a cross-dressing competition for men. Prof. Yin characterizes it as a dumb makeover show. It looks as though they are trying to get some (lame) excitement out of fooling the men:

They thought they were competing for the title of "All-American Man." They couldn't have been more wrong.

This fall, eleven manly men will compete to become...the ultimate lady. And the winner will take home a quarter of a million dollars!

Thanks for informing us that the men are "manly." That reminded me of this Virginia Heffernan critique (in the NYT) of Bravo's "Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Male Model":

When the guys, who have manly names like Tate and Blake, talk, their conversation is about how definitely not gay they are. When induced to strip to their underwear and skydive, each with a male instructor strapped to his back, they get very serious in their complaining that everyone would rather be skydiving with a girl. Got it?

So let's have a reality show about cross-dressing, but let's structure a competition to assure the home viewer that no one is gay. Having a very masculine man dress as a woman is an old comedy theme, though. The oldest example that springs to mind is Cary Grant in "I Was a Male War Bride." It was Milton Berle's game. And everyone remembers Gene Hackman in "The Birdcage." Cross-dressing actually is a field of endeavor that lends itself to humorous competition, and by using contestants who (we are assured) aren't otherwise interested in cross-dressing, the audience can stay in its comfort zone.

Another harmless TV confection. I'm not offended, really. But I certainly won't watch.

Insight into the mind of Amazon.

Amazon emailed me this:

Greetings from Amazon.com Alerts.

As you requested, we're notifying you of new releases matching the
following criteria:

DVD and Video with "Cary Grant" in the Actor's name. ...

Dracula

Publication date: July 20, 2004 ...

We hope you enjoyed receiving this message.

Well, first, I did enjoy receiving this message. It was quite amusing, in fact. Cary Grant was in Dracula? I click on the "more info" link and see it's that 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula — the one with Gary Oldman as Dracula. Winona Ryder is in it. I saw that movie, and even if I hadn't, I'd be damn skeptical that Cary Grant was in it. I click on the link to see the full cast of the movie. I search the page for "Grant" and then "Cary" and find the actors Richard E. Grant and actor Cary Elwes. Amazon isn't quite as smart as we might think.