"In 2019, Criterion started a streaming service called the Criterion Channel, which a few months ago added Criterion24/7, a nonstop live-stream feed..."

"... from its wide-ranging library of releases.... I watched the Criterion live stream (free to the channel’s subscribers) for 24 hours straight, recording the highlights and lowlights and whatever else seemed notable as my brain numbed and my eyes struggled to stay open...."

Writes Lucas Trevor, in "Criterion is streaming movies 24/7. I stayed up all night to see them. The films were from Hollywood and abroad, scripted and unscripted, good, great or unwatchable — and I watched them anyway" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I can't imagine watching movies for 24 hours straight (or even staying up that long), but it's an interesting experiment, because you're accepting what's on — like in the days of TV before Betamax and VHS — instead of selecting what you want. It's a way to push yourself out of your limitations, and Criterion is especially trustworthy. I've made it a free-access link so you can see what the movies were and read Trevor's description of them.

It's a really exciting sequence. He begins at 6 a.m., and by late morning, he's watching 2 of my favorite movies:

"We may imagine specific unlived lives for ourselves, as artists, or teachers, or tech bros; I have a lawyer friend whose alternate self owns a bar in Red Hook."

"Or we may just be drawn to possibility itself, as in the poem 'The Road Not Taken': when Robert Frost tells us that choosing one path over the other made 'all the difference,' it doesn’t matter what the difference is... In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between two clearly defined fates, designed by the gods and foretold in advance: he can either fight and die at Troy or live a long, boring life.... But the world in which we live isn’t so neatly organized. Achilles didn’t have to wonder if he should have been pre-med or pre-law; we make such decisions knowing that they might shape our lives.... As Sartre says, we are who we are. But isn’t the negative space in a portrait part of that portrait? In the sense that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately. " 

From "What If You Could Do It All Over?/The uncanny allure of our unlived lives" by Joshua Rothman (in The New Yorker).

This is a subject I raised a few days back, on the blog here. Do you have a "road not taken" point in your past — a particular moment? Do you question your fixation on that moment or do you find present-day meaning in the way that is preserved in your mind? It's not that there was a fork in the road, but that your life in its entirety is a fork, and you still have that fork.

ADDED: I have a post from 2007 called "The Road Not Taken." It's about a day I spent as a docent in a Frank Lloyd Wright gatehouse that has the inscription over the fireplace: "Taken the road less traveled by/That has made all the difference." (The precise Frost line is "I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.")

Katy Perry "looks like she’s modeling the Little Edie Beale Haute Couture line."

Say Tom and Lorenzo, and the top-rated comment says: "This is what I want to wear when I scatter cat food out for the raccoons in the attic of my dilapidated Hamptons estate."

Whether you get the "Grey Gardens" references or not, you've got to click through to see one of the craziest outfits ever.

MEANWHILE: "Shaming all the normcores."

"I put my hand over the phone and talked to my brother and said 'Who are The Beatles? Are they any good?'"

"Fortunately, he was the one that knew about that kind of music... He said, 'Yeah, they're great," so we both got on the phone and made a deal and rushed out to the airport," said Albert Maysles.



"These guys, The Beatles, they were almost like from another planet."

"Albert Maysles, the pioneering documentary filmmaker who frequently collaborated with his brother, David, died Thursday at 88. His influential career spanned nearly 60 years."

Clips at that link. Full obituary here.

For more than 10 years, my blogger profile has had the same 12 movies list as my favorites. The Maysles brothers' "Grey Gardens" is one of them.

About that scientist's sexy-lady shirt.

You know this story. The Rosetta project scientist, Matt Taylor, on the day of the landing on the comet, wears a ridiculous shirt, gets criticized, and makes a tearful apology. I wasn't going to talk about it because I didn't know what to say. Then I read this from WaPo's Rachel Feltman:

Of course, I personally hope that one day (when he's a little less busy) Taylor will say a bit more on the subject, and show that he understands why the shirt wasn't okay. Science is not a welcoming place for women, even today, and the only people who can truly make it more welcoming are the men who run the show. If a stellar scientist walks into work -- and then says hello to the whole world -- wearing a sexist shirt, what kind of message are we sending to future scientists?

She wants him to say why the shirt wasn't okay. That's just dragging out the apology, making it into more of an abject ritual. She already knows the reason why it's not okay, but just wants to hear him recite the reason that he's already had his face rubbed in to the point where he's sniveling. What I want him to talk about is what we don't know: Why did he think it was okay... not just okay, but a good idea? I don't know what else Mr. Taylor has in his closet, but what was that like — knowing it was the day of the landing, when eyes would be on you — to look at your array of clothing and to have it dawn on your big brain that this is the best costume for the day. I'd like a verbal depiction of that mental process, perhaps in the style of Little Edie:



That's from one of my favorite movies, "Grey Gardens." Another favorite movie of mine is "The Fly," the 1986 one with Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle. Brundle's a brilliant scientist — a tad odd, but brilliant. And in one of the lesser scenes — lesser, but memorable — he has to explain his clothes to his girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis):

Ronnie: Do you ever change your clothes?
Seth Brundle: What?
Ronnie: Your clothes. You're always wearing the same clothes.
Seth Brundle: No, these are clean. I change my clothes every day.
Ronnie: [looking in his closet] Five sets of exactly the same clothes?
Seth Brundle: Learned it from Einstein. This way I don't have to expend my thought on what I have to wear next, I just grab the next set on the rack.

So, now, I'm picturing Matt Taylor's closet — his Einstein-informed closet — packed end to end with shirts garishly patterned with cartoonishly bosom-y women. Come on, Matt, stop your sobbing and say something interesting.

The best song for the day:



"Do you have a shirt that you really love, one that you feel so groovy in?"

What's happening these days at Grey Gardens?

For many of us, Grey Gardens means Big Edie and Little Edie in a movie engraved on our hearts. Rufus Wainwright sang about that.

But here it is mentioned by Howie Kurtz, who's at Fox News these days, taking a shot at Pari Bradlee, the daughter-in-law of Ben Bradlee, who once ran WaPo, the newspaper Kurtz abandoned:

Her new [Facebook[ profile picture, in a Swiss-cheese bra that leaves little to the imagination and long black leather sleeves and briefs, is so revealing that it drew a torrent of breathless comments....

"I have worked so hard all my life and always wanted to feel and be beautiful inside and out," Bradlee writes on Facebook. "I own my sensuality and teach others not to repress it. Femininity for me is a very powerful and beautiful force."...

The photo shoot took place at Grey Gardens, the fabled, 14-room East Hampton mansion, once featured in a movie, that the former Washington Post editor bought with his wife a quarter-century ago.

A movie. A Swiss-cheese bra.

I got to Kurtz's place via WaPo, where Erik Wemple is casting aspersions on Kurtz, calling his reporting a "nothing-sandwich posting." Is that a nothing sandwich with Swiss cheese?

Everyone knows at Grey Gardens, you eat liver paté.

"Everywhere you look there are jokes... I mean, my life is just... jokes."

A clip from the excellent documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work":



We saw this movie last night at Sundance in Madison. I have a special love for the documentaries in this niche. Show this new one as a triple feature with "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "Grey Gardens." Here's the trailer for "Joan Rivers." Watch for the insult to Wisconsin, which got a huge laugh here in Wisconsin.

There was a line I tried to memorize, for me, the most interesting line in the movie. It was something like: "I am an actress — an actress playing the role of a comedian." When she was in high school, Joan was in all the plays. We see her in Shakespearean costume. She still sees herself as an actress. She says: You can say anything about her as a comedian, but don't criticize her acting. That's the one thing that hurts. That may seem very odd, because do you think of her as an actress (other than in the sense that when she's doing her comedy she may conceive of herself as playing a character that isn't really her)? She had a dramatic role in the movie "The Swimmer" (with Burt Lancaster)? And in the 90s she starred in (and co-wrote) the Broadway play "Sally Marr ... and Her Escorts" (a play about the woman who is mostly famous for being Lenny Bruce's mother). The NYT said:

Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can't help but applaud her efforts. "Sally Marr" asks her to dig down deep and dredge up some elemental emotions. Ms. Rivers backs off from none of them. In her portrayal of a gutsy woman who has hit the skids more than once in her 80-odd years, there is a childlike sincerity that exerts its own spell in the end. Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.....

[E]arly on, when Sally goes into her theory of comedy. "You don't start with funny and make it funnier," she explains. "Comedy comes from pain."...

It is the play's contention that without Sally Marr... there would have been no Lenny Bruce. Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. She was even there when he made his first tentative steps as an M.C. in strip joints to coach him on the intricacies of comic timing and lend him some of her material. "Lenny Bruce opened the door for every modern American comic, right?" she says, putting her checkered past into perspective for us. "So, in a way, you could say I gave birth to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams and Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and David Letterman."

So is she an actress, and if so, who is the real person? I don't think you get the answer in the "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." There's a scene where she's doing a radio promotion for her new book — "Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery" — and the interviewer goes on about how, whatever a woman does to herself to try to look beautiful, she must, in the end, want to be loved as the person she really is. Joan's response: Who is the real me? Perhaps when the real person is an actor, there is a hollowness that must be filled with a written character.

***

Note to commenters: Please say something more interesting than that you don't like her surgically destroyed face. We can take that as a given. Don't be boring. It's worse than being ugly. Around here.

Pick a movie to design a meal around.

That was the challenge last night on "Top Chef," which this post won't spoil, but there are spoilers at here, where I read about it. (I haven't watched this season of "Top Chef." Maybe I'll catch up with it later. Is it good this time around?) Anyway, Jim Hu, at the link, thinks the contestants made pretty lame movie choices. They should have been less literal, more creative, and more cleverly knowing about the content of a good movie. His choices:

Wizard of Oz: Rainbow trout with artichoke hearts and a poppy seed crackers.
Spartacus. Escargot... and oysters.
Duck Soup. Perhaps an exception to the obviousness rule, but how can you not do this?
The Godfather: Fish baked in parchment.
The main entree could be Dances with Wolves Buffalo steaks. Or you could do Silence of the Lambs, but only if you serve the lamb with fava beans
Citizen Kane Rose sorbet

Commenters, surely you have some ideas! Me? Well, my favorite movie already is about dinner: "My Dinner With Andre." To be creative and knowing, we'd have to get past the potato soup and squab and come up with something from inside the stories Andre tells. Maybe something covered in coarse salt to represent sand — Andre eats sand in the Sahara Desert (and laughs). [ADDED: Actually, he doesn't laugh: "We weren't trying to be funny. I started, and then he started, and we just ate sand, and threw up. That was — that was how desperate we were."]

Let me go on to the rest of the favorite movies I list in my Blogger profile:

"Aguirre the Wrath of God." This should not be an opportunity to serve Spanish or Brazilian food. I'd be all about the seaweed. (When they're really hungry they pull algae out from between the logs of the raft.)

"Crumb." The first thing I think of here is a drawing of a can labeled "[unwritable word] Hearts." Next, I think of Maxon Crumb ingesting a long strip of cloth dipped in water (to clean out his innards). Let's skip this movie.

"Grey Gardens." Paté on crackers! [ADDED December 20, 2014, after watching this movie again: ice cream right out of the container, Wonder Bread, cat chow, and corn on the cob.]

"32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." Pills!

"Limelight." Hmmm. Limes? No, the lime in limelight is not the fruit.

"It's a Gift." Kumquats!



"Dr. Strangelove." To drink: nothing but distilled water. [AND: Pure grain alcohol!] Food: a big buffet table. And every night: a food fight. That's our restaurant gimmick: We encourage the patrons to throw food. "The Grave of the Fireflies." In this movie, a Japanese animation, children starve. Must skip. "The Nights of Cabiria." Too easy of an excuse to make Italian food. Nothing specific comes to mind. "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control." Well, we can't serve lions or mole rats. Robots are not edible. We'd have to come up with some way to make topiary shapes out of things. "Slacker." Sorting through my memories of this movie, I'm just seeing a lot of coffee.

IN THE COMMENTS: The name Ted Turner comes up, and there's a suggestion that his movie would be "Soylent Green."

Comfort movies.

Do you have a comfort movie? This would be a movie you rewatch in times of stress, when you want to create a comfortable environment for yourself. My son John says he uses the "Back to the Future" movies to mellow out at exam time. He says a lot of people his age -- mid-20s -- have "The Princess Bride" as their comfort movie? So, what's yours?

When I was in college -- in the days before home video -- one campus cinema always showed Marx Brothers movies at exam time. It was understood that this was what you watched to escape the stress. I was trying to think of what I would have now that fits in this category. I was going to say "My Dinner with Andre," "Slacker," "Fast ,Cheap and Out of Control," and "Grey Gardens." But John is disqualifying these choices on the ground that these are actually movies that I consider great, not the sort of junk food that we're trying to talk about here. It's true that I don't have any not-actually-great movies that I like to rewatch for comfort's sake. He says that I use TV reality shows for this. He's right. You know, the other day I watched three episodes of an old season of "Survivor."

(Song that John is playing that is amusing me while I write this post: "Nuages"... by Django Reinhardt. I'm looking for a YouTube clip of that for you, but what I'm seeing is that everyone tries to play that song.)

HEY: This post has a vlog:



And John never found the clip.

OH: I thought of one -- look, we watched it the day I wrecked my car -- "Serial Mom."

About those movies....

Tonya's talking about my profile: she hasn't read any of my favorite books and she hasn't seen any of my movies. She thinks I may even have made up a fake title in "Grave of the Fireflies." And she thinks the profile function would be a good way to find a boyfriend ... except that clicking on my movie links either gets you only me or gets a bunch of 18 to 21 year old guys. Guys younger than my sons. Guys who like geocaching, which actually sounds like fun but about which Tonya says "What the hell is that? Is Mark into some freaky stuff?" I think we can safely say Googling is not one of Tonya's interests.

If I wanted to use my profile to search for boyfriends, would I come up with this as a list of favorite movies? Note that it looks like I have a taste for madmen (My Dinner With Andre, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Crumb, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Dr. Strangelove) or maybe just geeks (Fast Cheap & Out of Control), or lovable old clowns (Limelight, It's a Gift), and I am a feisty outcast (Grey Gardens, The Nights of Cabiria) who enjoys immersing myself in the saddest movie ever made (The Grave of the Fireflies).

Several of those movies make it part of the way into my heart with music: My Dinner With Andre, Crumb, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, Limelight, The Nights of Cabiria. To a lesser extent: Aguirre the Wrath of God, Dr. Strangelove.

Several of them affect me because they are about a person profoundly dedicated to art: My Dinner With Andre, Crumb, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Limelight.

Three of them are about war, but very different aspects of war, all very moving in different ways: Aguirre the Wrath of God (delusional conquest in the jungle, looking for an unknown city, attacked by an unseen enemy), Dr. Strangelove (horrible, hilarious mistakes and nuclear weapons), The Grave of the Fireflies (the struggle to survive in the aftermath of firebombing and defeat).

Anyway, those really are my movies. (If I wanted to seem more serious than I really am, I wouldn't blog about American Idol all the time.) Of Tonya's recent favorite movies, I also love Election and Memento. (A couple other movies I love that are Memento-like are Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, and The Matrix.)

Tonya mentions Wonder Boys, but I have to steer clear of that because I loathe Michael Douglas. Why don't you like Michael Douglas, you might ask, but the question really should be: What is it about everything else you don't like that reminds you of Michael Douglas?