"As time went on I made movies for an audience of one, Diane Keaton. I never read a single review of my work..."

"... and cared only what Keaton had to say about it. If she liked it, I counted the film as an artistic success. If she was less than enthusiastic, I tried to use her criticism to reedit and come away with something she felt better about. By then we were living together and I was seeing the world through her eyes.... For all her shyness and self-effacing personality, she was totally secure in her own aesthetic judgment. Whether she was criticizing a movie of mine or a play of Shakespeare’s, she held both to the same standard. If she felt Shakespeare had gone wrong—it didn’t matter who or how many sang his praises, it was her own feeling that she went with, and she didn’t hesitate to put the knock on the Bard...."

Writes Woody Allen, remembering Diane Keaton (Free Press).

There's also this, about bulimia:

Spot the error in the People magazine headline: "Woody Allen's Ex-Wife, Mia Farrow, Shares Tribute to Diane Keaton Despite Complicated Past."

 Link to article.

"It’s a family history. I remember my Auntie Martha had skin cancer so bad they removed her nose."

"My father had basal skin cancer and my brother had it. It’s tricky with this skin cancer. That’s why you’ve got to put the sunblock on."

Said Diane Keaton, in 2015, quoted in "What Diane Keaton Shared About Her Health Before Her Death/Diane Keaton—whose cause of death has not been shared—was open about her health battles with skin cancer and bulimia that affected her growing up" (E! News).

ADDED: "We're here to see The Nose. I heard it was running..."

Goodbye to Diane Keaton.

Diane Keaton, 1946-2025.

ADDED: I was just thinking of her this morning. On the sunrise walk, we passed a man with a dog and I said to him, "Your dog is neat." And then I wondered why on earth I'd said "neat" and I thought it's like I'm channeling Annie Hall. See: "Lines from 'Annie Hall' Containing the Word 'Neat'" (Grok)(#6 is "We're not having an affair. He's married. He just happens to think I'm neat").

Now I'm looking back over all my old posts with the "Diane Keaton" tag. I see that she came up on the second day of this blog:

"Because homes, offices and warehouses are already built for humans... humanoids are better equipped to navigate the world than any other robot...."

"I first visited 1X’s offices in Silicon Valley nearly a year ago. When a robot named Eve entered the room, opening and closing the door, I could not shake the feeling that this wide-eyed robot was really a person in costume. Eve... felt human. I thought of 'Sleeper,' the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy filled with robotic butlers.... Mr. Jang was entranced by the way that Eve moved.... 'I saw a level of hardware that I did not think was possible,' Mr. Jang said.... And because of growing shortage of workers who handle both house cleaning and care of elders and children, organizations that represent these workers welcome the rise of new technologies that do work in the home — provided that companies like 1X build robots that work well alongside human workers."

From "Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots/Dozens of companies are building robots that look like humans. One of them is training a machine to be a butler and will soon test them in homes" (NYT)(free-access link so you can see the photos and video).

ADDED: Still waiting for The Orb.

"Just a heads-up."

Liberal woman informs everyone that she won't be dating white men anymore.

Groundbreaking information.pic.twitter.com/2lC5Kqm0Qb

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) March 29, 2025

Ridiculous on so many levels, but I'm just going to highlight the exaggerated enunciation — "as a WHiTTTTe woman."

It made me think of this TikTok video criticizing Rachel Zegler ("Snow White") for over-enunciating:

"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).

"The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality..."

"... which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. [Ernest Becker, the author of this Pulitzer Prize-winning 1973 book] argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally-based self esteem, which Becker calls 'heroism': a 'defiant creation of meaning' expressing 'the myth of the significance of human life' as compared to other animals.... Humanity's traditional 'hero-systems,' such as religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason. Becker argues that the loss of religion leaves humanity with impoverished resources for necessary illusions. Science attempts to serve as an immortality project, something that Becker believes it can never do because it is unable to provide agreeable, absolute meanings to human life. The book states that we need new convincing 'illusions' that enable us to feel heroic in ways that are agreeable...."

From the Wikipedia article, "The Denial of Death," a book title that sprang to mind when I saw the news that the U.S. government is going to stop requiring daily reports of the number of Covid deaths.

This is the book Alvy Singer wanted Annie Hall to read:

Dialogue about rape in the 1972 Woody Allen comedy, "Play It Again, Sam."

As I mentioned yesterday, I rewatched this movie, which I'd absolutely loved when it came out. The script is by Woody Allen, who plays an extremely nervous and clumsy man whose wife has left him, and he's desperately looking for love with the help of his married friend, played by Diane Keaton. As the title suggests, there are references to the love triangle in "Casablanca."

Much of this movie worked quite well for me today. I even got waves of full-body chills at one point — to my surprise. I thought, what the hell? How did they make that happen? Movie magic! But not long before that climactic moment, there was an awkward love scene that included some dialogue that I can't remember accepting at the time but must have been considered hilarious and that is totally beyond the pale today:

KEATON: Did you read that another Oakland woman was raped?

ALLEN:  I was nowhere near Oakland! Do they know who did it?

KEATON: No, they haven't a clue. He must be very clever.

ALLEN: Yeah,  you gotta have something on the ball to rape so many women and get away with it. 

He's smiling mischievously at that point.

KEATON: You know, I think if anybody ever tried to rape me, I'd just pretend to go along with it until the middle and then just grab a heavy object and let him have it... that is, unless, of course, I was enjoying it.

ALLEN: They say it's the secret desire of every woman. 

KEATON: I guess it depends on who's doing the raping.

"For All We Know"... there are 2 songs with this title.

The 1934 song:



And the 1970 song:



I'm listening to both this morning after getting way too involved in the use of the word "for" as a conjunction as opposed to a preposition — after a doctor had said "for my wife and I," which is grammatically wrong if "for" is a preposition there. In the song title — in 1934 or 1970 — "for" is a conjunction... or, no... it's a preposition... right??

The Carpenters' song was in the 1970 film "Lovers and Other Strangers," which I've never seen. It won the best song Oscar that year. The older song is something I've heard many times, by so many different singers. It's much more familiar to me. It seems like the better song: "For all we know/We may never meet again/Before you go/Make this moment sweet again." The kindliest love-'em-and-leave-'em song. It's about living in the present. "So love me, love me tonight/Tomorrow was made for some/Tomorrow may never come/For all we know."

The phrase "for all we know" is an acknowledgment of the unknowability of the future. The older song tells us to be here now, because there may be no future at all. The newer song — I'm calling it newer though it's much older than the 1934 song was in 1970 — imagines a very long future and stresses the love that goes on an on forever: "Let's take a lifetime to say/I knew you well/For only time will tell us so/And love may grow/For all we know." Or does that final "for all we know" reveal the singer's doubt?

ADDED: "Lovers and Other Strangers" was the occasion for the first film appearance of Diane Keaton:

After that last course in the White Woman Restaurant — the overstuffed platter from Ms. Palmieri — here's the palate-cleanser you need.

How far away are Diane Keaton’s forks pic.twitter.com/7HFRtrBK1Y

— caitie delaney (@caitiedelaney) July 17, 2020

"Robots Ruin Robot Hotel."

Gizmodo reports.

First, there was the robot in the room that gets activated when it hears you snore and says “Sorry, I couldn’t catch that. Could you repeat your request?” and wakes you up. And: "The robot in our room is irritating. It speaks when we are in a conversation, but it could not help us when when we needed it.

Then there was the "puppy robot dancers in the lobby," the "humanoid concierge robots," and the "dinosaur robots at check-in," and the robot bellhops...

... but they apparently only work for a small percentage of the total rooms, can only move along flat surfaces, and are prone to wonking out if they get wet on trips outside. “They were really slow and noisy, and would get stuck trying to go past each other”....

Oh, no. Is this the best they could offer?



ADDED: In other robot news, "These Googly-Eyed Robots Could Be Coming to a Grocery Aisle Near You. Here's What They Do" (Fortune):

Marty himself won’t do any of the cleaning—that job will still be handled by human employees. Instead, he’ll page employees when he detects an issue. While he’s rolling through the aisles, he’ll also be on the lookout for out-of-stock items.

"Well, now, there’s Buster Keaton. I thought he was visually thrilling, and very sophisticated: more about women than about men. He lets you read a lot into things."

"You’re left with so much to decide. And then there was a woman in Santa Ana, an incredible woman, an artist. She was mysterious. She loved a lot of things that weren’t yet open to me. And then, gosh, a woman I met once when I was looking for an apartment who claimed that her husband had invented the tea bag. . . Well. And then my family. We’re very close to each other. My sister Dorrie looks like an Eskimo. And then Woody, of course."

So said Diane Keaton, in 1978, when The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt asked her to name 3 people who have influenced her the most in life.

Why am I reading that this morning? I was having a conversation about an old episode of "Friends" ("The One Where Monica and Richard Are Friends") and — because there's a scene in a video store — I got to thinking about a scene in a bookstore in "Annie Hall":



A scene in a bookstore (or a video store, if the show is set in the fleeting video-store era) can take advantage of the books (or movies) at hand to develop the characters. Looking for that bookstore scene, I was googling for "Annie Hall" and "cats" (because I remembered that Allen's character disapproves of her interest in a book about cats and insists on buying her the first of many books he would buy her with the word "death" in the title).

The old New Yorker article happened to contain the word "cats" (because Gilliatt describes Keaton's NYC apartment, replete with cats). Not what I was looking for, but I got interested in reading Gilliatt, whose articles I loved reading in the 70s. Imagine encountering a paragraph like this today:

"It's kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer."

"It" = a Hermes 3000 typewriter, "surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius."

The quote is from Larry McMurtry, on the occasion of winning the Golden Globe award for the screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain." I'm reading that, from 2006, because I just got around, after all these years to making a Larry McMurtry tag for this blog. I dislike tag proliferation, and I avoid making a tag for individuals unless I think they'll be used a few times. It turned out there were 4 old posts with Larry McMurtry's name in them.

The other 3 are:

1. Larry McMurtry effusing over Diane Keaton: "She told me she hoped to be complicated, someday."

2. Larry McMurtry answering questions from a NYT interviewer, including ""What, exactly, do you think cowboys represent, other than the triumph of alpha males?" Answer:

Cowboys are a symbol of a freer time, when people could go all the way from Canada to Mexico without seeing a fence. They stand for good ol' American values, like self-reliance.

Maybe some American values, but you can't say that cowboys were ever interested in spreading democracy.

No, they were interested in spreading fascism.

3. Here's the good, timelessly timely one: "Larry McMurtry raves (literally) about Clinton's book." Clinton is Bill Clinton, and the book is "My Life." Let's go back and read what McMurtry banged out on his juicy Hermes 3000 back in 2004:

Undoubtedly he has occasionally made time for bedroom sports, but not much time. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky may be three of the nicest ladies in America, but their "conquest," however we are to understand that term, does not make Clinton the world's No. 1 ladies' man, or even the No. 1 ladies' man of northwest Washington....

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president....

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved.

"I'm free and I love to be free/To live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please..."

Consider the use of the old Lesley Gore song — "You Don't Own Me" — for political, pro-Obama purposes:



Now, I love old Lesley and her classic song. And it's fine with me if the Democratic Party is her party — and she'll cry if Obama loses, cry if Obama loses, you would cry too if it happened to you. "You Don't Own Me" dates back to 1963 — pre-Women's Liberation, pre-Beatles. But let's consider the lyrics and the extent to which they express the values of the present-day Democratic Party.

By the way, Ms. Gore did not write "You Don't Own Me." It was written by 2 men, John Madara (who also wrote "At the Hop") and David White (who co-wrote "At the Hop" and was a member of the doo-wop group Danny & the Juniors who recorded "At the Hop"). Madera and White also co-wrote "The Fly," which was a dance that you could do at the hop, and here's Chubby Checker showing you how:



That was 1961, 2 years before Lesley sang Madera and White's declaration to female autonomy, which is no kind of dance song at all, though Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn manage to turn it into a dance for the purpose of bringing a close to the execrable 1996 movie "First Wives Club":



That movie is best described by David Rakoff in "Half Empty": "A gynocentric comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores."

Anyway, look at the lyrics to "You Don't Own Me," words which a couple youngish guys put in the female singer's mouth, as repurposed for the 2012 election "war on women" theme:

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please

Sounds libertarian to me. But it's the Obama side using this, so presumably we're supposed to hear something like:

I'm free and I want my birth control to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please and have the government pay for it

Woody Allen's 2 super-powers.

Over the last couple days, we watched the lengthy PBS documentary about Woody Allen. I know a lot of my readers haven't been watching his movies and think of him only in terms of his sexual misdeeds. Exclude that topic for the comments on this new post. All that has been said. Noted. If you must say that again, go to the link above and put it in that comments thread. I want to say something new, based on the documentary, which is overwhelmingly about Allen's work. If you don't know his movies or don't want to talk about the ideas about writing that I'm going to raise, please don't comment in this new thread.

Woody Allen has directed a movie a year — almost precisely — every year since 1969. He's an astounding movie-making machine. It's really quite bizarre. He's a monument not so much to hard work, but to consistently cranking out work, much of it quite excellent. As a writer, he's a lot like a blogger. He just keeps going. It's what he does, quite aligned with living itself. I love that.

Now, it suddenly occurred to me that his achievement is propelled by 2 super-powers — one which he knew he had from his teenage years and another that he discovered through Diane Keaton. (I'll try to finds the specific lines in the documentary that support my theory and transcribe them for you, but I don't have time for that now).

Super-power #1: Automatically thinking of one-line jokes. It's harder for him to stop his thoughts from taking the form of jokes than to think of them (he says). As a teenager, he got a job making $20,000 a year writing jokes. He had to write 50 jokes a day. It wasn't difficult for him.

Super-power #2: As a man, taking the woman's perspective. We see this power burst forth in his fabulous movie "Annie Hall." Allen gives credit to Diane Keaton, whom he worked with in the earlier films "Sleeper" and "Love and Death," for getting him interested in taking on the feeling of being inside the woman's head and writing from there. In this position, he experienced a flow of ideas, that let him write wonderful scenes for actresses, like this one, from "Hannah and Her Sisters," which is used in the documentary as an illustration of his style of writing from the woman's perspective:



You can say that he doesn't really achieve the female perspective or that women aren't really quite like that, but that isn't the point. The point is that his sense of being inside a woman's head empowers him to produce writing that often works for the viewer, including many, many women who love and identify with scenes like that. He's a man, with male thoughts, projecting those thoughts into women's minds. What a powerful force that is, the male with something of his own that he wants to put inside the woman. It makes the urge to write like the sexual urge. That's creative flow. If you can put that force behind your writing... it's a super-power.

Diane Keaton...

... as Nikki Finke.

"She told me she hoped to be complicated, someday."

"Someday? I was reminded of those credit cards which come preapproved. I was pretty sure that Diane Keaton was preapproved for complicated, and still is. On a too-brief visit last weekend I had, for a glimmering moment, a sense that I was about to grasp what she was up to. But when she left, she took the glimmer with her, leaving me no closer to comprehending her agenda than I have been for the past twenty-eight years."

Larry McMurtry effuses over his friend Diane Keaton... and her book "Clown Paintings":

There's nothing the fondest friend can do about the pain of clowns—pain, after all, is where their job starts. In working up to the book called Clown Paintings—it's filled with paintings of clowns—Diane called various of her friends who work in comedy to get their thoughts on clowns—and what she got was their permission to shove off. Woody Allen and Steve Martin and the others she lists "work in comedy," and comedy arises from pain, not from happiness. Perhaps the pain of clowns is a little more primal, which is one good reason for people who work in comedy to give clowns a pass.

Clown Paintings—it's filled with paintings of clowns....

Picasso looks way more photographic on line than in the print edition. The print edition has a bit more to do with the real thing. When I see a painting I'm used to seeing reproduced I'm always impressed, once again, by what paint looks like. The images on line are fascinating--I've got some of my own to post some day--but they are only things that resemble paintings. The texture (metrotexture) is different, and the size often seems absurd.

But I really want to quibble about grammar. The New York Times writes: "The collection includes works by Manet, Degas, Monet and Sargent as well as a rare Rose Period Picasso, 'Boy With a Pipe.'"

Isn't every painting rare? There's one. That's the height of rarity. Rose Period Picassos may be rare, but "Boy With a Pipe" is no more rare than any given Clown Painting From the Collection of Diane Keaton.

I know they mean "The collection includes works by Manet, Degas, Monet and Sargent as well as a rare Rose Period Picasso. The Picasso is 'Boy With a Pipe.'"

Why stick to logic if you might have to write two sentences? Just go ahead and cram more information into one sentence.