A Trump defender "could point to a prior president, maybe there was a Nixon thing here, maybe there was a Carter thing here, a Clinton thing here, a couple of Obama things here...."

"And they'll say, aha, here's this is analogous or this is analogous or this is analogous. And then they expand and extend and move way beyond that precedent. But then when challenged on it, they can go back and say, well, Clinton did X or Obama did Y. Now two things are true at once. Number one, Clinton often did X or Obama often did do Y.... That doesn't excuse Donald Trump at all. And it doesn't mean that... what Donald Trump is doing is the same level of wrongness. It can be more wrongness. But what he does tactically and what he tries to do legally, which often doesn't fly, but what often flies tactically, especially with his base, is he's constantly pulling from these prior examples that are scattered all throughout modern American history.... [I]f you're an administration that is pulling all of the wrongdoing from say five previous administrations, putting it under one administration and then amplifying all of it, then you do have an issue.... But guys, political fandom should be over, let's not do this, okay?"

Said David French in the new episode of "Advisory Opinions," "All the Things Wrong with Trump’s Billion-Dollar Fund."

The whole discussion there is very good, examining many legal issues and precedents. I'm just selecting that one thing, which is something I've observed again and again. It's not Trump's way to say it stops with me, I see what's wrong, and I'm going to set us straight and get back to what is soundly legal and in line with the intent of the Framers. That might seem to fit his slogan "Make American Great Again," but that's not what he does. He's in the middle of a big fight, and he's going tit for tat and beyond. He's one of those guys who say "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Of course, that's Obama's line — "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun" — but he was paraphrasing the Sean Connery character in "The Untouchables":

: 

"Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!"

"Saturday Night Live" cold opens with lots of political impersonations — including Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.

Scroll ahead if you must — to 10:23 — but don't miss Dana Carvey:

 Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.

Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well, but the show's urgent need for us to love Kamala makes it too hard to like what Rudolph is able to do. The show presumes we agree politically and will simple-mindedly experience fun as "Kamala" has "fun" (and that's how Harris's campaign feels to me). I resist feeling the candidate's emotions as enacted on the political stage. And, for political satire, I want to laugh at her. Speak to me as someone on the outside. Don't treat me like a willing guest at her party. 

Sample line, spoken by the Trump impersonator: "We had this in the bag, but then they did a switcheroo and they swapped out Biden with Kamala. And now everything is chaos. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're taking your pets, and they're doing freak offs. They're doing freak offs with the dogs, and they're making the geese watch. It's very sad. It's very sad. They're doing a Diddy."

ADDED: Mixing the P. Diddy story with the Haitians-in-Ohio story: Is that racist? It would be considered racist if Trump did it. It's in the black-people-remind-me-of-black-people mode. But in the sketch they have the Trump character combining the 2 topics, so if it's racist, it looks as though the racist is Trump. Clever? That's how you (try to) get away with it.

ALSO: For clarification, I substantially rewrote first 2 sentences of the paragraph that begins "Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well...."

"He writes graphically of his own deflowering; how he passes on the favor to his friend Carrie Fisher; of the almost-hand job he gets..."

"... in the back seat from someone’s wife when hitchhiking, as everyone used to do before the Manson murders; how Tennessee Williams grabs his testicles when he’s waiting tables at a dinner party — for better and worse, people always seem to be making a run at Griffin’s crotch — and Martin Scorsese’s wrath when he violates an order of celibacy during the filming of 'After Hours' (1985).... Much of [this memoir] is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born.... dropping Timothy Leary’s finest acid. Sean Connery, then playing James Bond, saved him from drowning! Bob Denver from 'Gilligan’s Island' had a temper!"

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe/In his memoir 'The Friday Afternoon Club,' the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s 'After Hours,' recounts his privileged upbringing" (NYT).

Here's the book, "The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir" (commission earned).

I've got a bit of a theme going now, so I'm going to have to talk about what Jerry Seinfeld said.

And I'm choosing the A.V. Club article, because it's got an excellent headline, "Jerry Seinfeld still talking, even though Pop-Tarts movie came out like a month ago/Seinfeld was waxing nostalgic for 'cultural hierarchy' and 'dominant masculinity' for some incomprehensible reason."

I like the generosity of crediting Jerry with reason, and I feel challenged to comprehend what the A.V. Club writer, William Hughes, purports not to comprehend. And it better not just be that Jerry Seinfeld, a comedian, was joking. That would be boring. Let's read. Jerry went on Bari Weiss's podcast and...

Seinfeld agreed, in the interview, with Weiss’ assertion that part of the guiding philosophy of the ’60s-set Unfrosted—which contains, among other things, a scene that is literally Mad Men fan fiction, complete with Jon Hamm and John Slattery reprising their parts—was a return to that age of “style.” “I miss a dominant masculinity,” Seinfeld said, being careful, admittedly, to note that he doesn’t consider himself part of the list of “real men” he admires. (Including JFK, Muhammad Ali, Sean Connery, and, apparently, Howard Cosell.) “Yeah, I get the toxic thing,” he said with deliberate dismissiveness. “But I still like a real man.”

"Our nation today mourns one of her best loved sons. Sean was born into a working class Edinburgh family..."

"... and through talent and sheer hard work, became an international film icon and one of the world's most accomplished actors. Sean will be remembered best as James Bond - the classic 007 - but his roles were many and varied. He was a global legend but, first and foremost, a patriotic and proud Scot - his towering presence at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 showed his love for the country of his birth. Sean was a lifelong advocate of an independent Scotland and those of us who share that belief owe him a great debt of gratitude." 

Said Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, quoted in BBC.

Goodbye to Sean Connery.

 

"Too bad you had to go — just as things were getting interesting."

ADDED: There have been 25 James Bond movies. I have seen 5 of them: "Dr. No" (1962), "From Russia with Love" (1963), "Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball" (1965), and "Diamonds Are Forever" (1971). 

There are 2 is one other Bond movies with Sean Connery — "You Only Live Twice" (1967) and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969). The rest don't have Sean Connery. I've never gone to the movies to see a James Bond that was not Sean Connery. I realize there've been a lot of other James Bonds, but they have no meaning at all to me. 

What a big deal "Goldfinger" was in 1964 — the same year that brought us The Beatles. I was 13, and it seemed that the culture was going to serve us up endless amazing delights. Now, I'm nearly 70, and it doesn't feel like that at all. 

Why did I see "Diamonds Are Forever" in 1971 when I'd skipped "You Only Live Twice" and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"? Because we went as a joke. We went to laugh at James Bond as an absurd remnant of the past. 

He was in many other movies, but the only one I saw was "Marnie."

AND: From 1953 (when he competed in bodybuilding contests):

"I don't have a Darrell Hammond tag and I'm not going to make one now, because if I do and he turns up randomly later this morning, I will have to reexamine my conception of reality."

I wrote in the comments to the previous post, in which I contemplated the reoccurrence of Sean Connery the second post of the day after he'd come up in the first post and I'd made a new "Sean Connery" tag.

So I didn't make that "Darrell Hammond" tag (yet!) but the threat to my conception of reality caused me to self-protectively do a Google News search for "Darrell Hammond." Is he lurking in the current news stories, about to pop out and scare me? I'll catch him first.

I find "The decade in Domino’s/Once a joke, in the ’10s the company became the biggest pizza chain in the world":

Domino’s Pizza used to be a joke. Consider the 2005 Saturday Night Live sketch in which Donald Trump (portrayed by Darrell Hammond), wears a giant pizza slice around his neck as he shoots a Domino’s advertisement: “Personally, I think it’s the highest quality pizza of the low-quality pizzas.” Sure, good shitty pizza may be better than some, but the point is that it’s still shitty....

All right then!



The world is bizarre, so much more bizarre than Sean Connery popping up twice in my morning's blogging. I feel safe and calm, knowing that I am not at the center of the vortex of bizarreness. That would be Donald Trump.

"No one encouraged me to be a cartoonist.... I showed my work and they just said, 'I didn’t know you were this unhappy.'..."

"My dream was to be a working cartoonist for the Village Voice... Because that was Jules Feiffer, Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack. There was something very idiosyncratic, very New York, about them, all social comment and not a gag panel. And the New Yorker cartoon was a gag panel. I liked that, but I had no interest in doing that. I didn’t see myself as part of that. I submitted because I thought, Why not? I was working for the Voice and for the Lampoon, and I thought I should try The New Yorker. It’s cartoons—same deal. I think it was a Wednesday—I called up and found their drop-off day, and I left my portfolio. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing ever since. I was absolutely flabbergasted and terrified when I found out I had sold something.... ... I went in to see [Lee Lorenz, the New Yorker’s art editor] and he pulled out a cartoon, and he said, ‘We want to buy this! Are you excited?’ ‘Yeah, I am,’ I said. I thought I might be dreaming. A little bit out of body. I noticed that the lights were very like my elementary school. I liked that it’s not exactly shabby but nothing trying to impress you. Places that are trying to impress me always scare me. They don’t impress me, but they scare me. He told me that Shawn [William Shawn, the magazine’s longtime editor] really liked my work. And I had no idea who Shawn was! I assumed it was a first name, someone named Sean, like Sean Connery, who somehow was allowed to like your work. I nodded. ‘That sounds good.’ I did meet him later, and he doffed his hat and I doffed mine, and I wondered why I was doing this."

From "Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast/In the past four decades, the cartoonist has created a universe of spidery lines and nervous spaces, turning anxious truth-telling into an authoritative art" (in The New Yorker).

Speaking of exciting scenes in the life of an artist, I selected that quote and cut and pasted it here before reading it to the end, and I was flabbergasted to see Sean Connery come up. It's so utterly random. The previous post, which I started writing because I was interested in Dennis Hopper's photography, moved through a sequence of things and ended up on Sean Connery. I'd just created a new tag for "Sean Connery" and added it retrospectively to 3 other posts. Sean Connery had popped up only 3 times in 16 years of writing on this blog, and now, this morning, in the space of a few minutes, he's popped up twice. All 5 of the Sean Connery appearances on this blog have been minimal and random. I'll list them in the order of importance — importance with regard to Sean Connery — with the least trivial thing at #1:

5. Roz Chast heard the last name "Shawn" and thought of the first name "Sean," as in "Sean Connery."

4. Darrell Hammond was identified (in 2011) as the SNL actor who impersonates "Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Sean Connery."

3. Dream-casting a movie based on a new Sandra Day O'Connor biography in 2005, one commenter pictures "a cameo appearance from Sir Sean Connery as Robert Bork, who turns out to have been the arch-villain all along!"

2. This morning's discussion of the 1995 Sean Connery movie "Just Cause."

1. My revelation that I haven't seen a James Bond movie since the last Sean Connery Bond movie, "Diamonds Are Forever" ("It was 1971, and we thought James Bond was absurdly passé").

"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

Goodbye to Roger Moore.

"Mr. Moore was the oldest Bond ever hired, taking on the role when he was 46. (Sean Connery, who originated the film character and with whom Mr. Moore was constantly compared, was 33.) He also had the longest run in the role, beginning in 1973 with 'Live and Let Die”' and winding up in 1985 with 'A View to a Kill.'"

ADDED: I don't know if I've ever blogged the obituary of a movie star whose movies I have never seen. The last James Bond movie I saw was "Diamonds Are Forever," the last Sean Connery Bond movie, which we went to see as basically a joke. It was 1971, and we thought James Bond was absurdly passé. So I never saw Moore as Bond or any of the other later Bonds. And I've looked over the list of Moore's movies, and I haven't seen a single one. I might have seen him in some late 50s/early 60s TV shows. (He appeared in a couple episodes of "77 Sunset Strip," which I watched, and I might have followed the season of "Maverick" with Beauregard Maverick.) I really feel no connection to Moore, but I'm guessing some of you may care a lot and want a place to talk about him, so here it is.

SNL's Darrell Hammond "was a victim of systematic and lengthy brutality."

"My mom did some things which have cost me dearly."

The actor is well known as the funnyman who graced "SNL" to spoof celebrities like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Sean Connery. He said there was a darker side that played out in his life, before he became known for those roles, and then later on, backstage before he went out to perform....

Hammond says he was medicated almost all of the time he performed on "SNL" each week, but that wasn't all that was happening behind the stage doors.

"There was cutting backstage," he said, adding that one time, he was taken from the studio to a psychiatric ward because of his actions. "In fact, the week that I did the Gore debates, I believe I was taken away in a straitjacket."

Here's an older clip of Hammond explaining how he worked out his impersonations of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and how he thought in terms of color, for example, picturing both Ted Koppel and Dick Cheney as — for some inexplicable reason — "plush blue." (Like this?)

The O'Connor biopic.

Yesterday, we were discussing the new biography of Sandra Day O'Connor. In the comments, readers started to cast the movie made from the book:

P. Froward said...

I want to see an O'Connor biopic! Like a "Behind the Music" kind of thing, you know, personal torments and redemption and all that. Loretta Lynn, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash... Justice O'Connor....

Simon said...

Also starring Nick Cage as Stephen Breyer, Catheryn Zeta-Jones as Ruth Ginsburg, Chris Barrie as Dave Souter, and Charles Bronson as Antonin Scalia.

Featuring a cameo appearance from Sir Sean Connery as Robert Bork, who turns out to have been the arch-villain all along!

Please contribute to this casting fantasy!

For the record: I hate the biopics that come out this time of year. Which singer will die next and have his dumb musician's problems reenacted by a hammy actor who wants an Oscar really bad? Oh, this is a two question post now. Name the singer who will die and the actor who will play him/her.