"Even if the family occasionally finds evidence that mountain goats have been in the kitchen, being so connected to the land is worth it."

"'The intensity of the light, the smells of the plants, the noise of the cicadas — it’s like everything is turned up to 11,' he said. 'There’s something completely cathartic about being there.'"

From "He Built a House With No Doors and Windows You Can’t Close/Inspired by homes open to their natural settings, an architect designed a house on the Greek island of Corfu with minimal barriers from the 'wild landscape'" (NYT)(free-access link).

Makes me think of that Paul Mazursky movie "Tempest," with John Cassavetes as an architect who's fed up with New York City and relocates — with adolescent daughter Molly Ringwald in tow — to a Greek island....

"This phrasing was a terrible mistake, as it implies that until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution...."

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I've selected 7 TikToks for you tonight. Some people love them.

1. What do the French mean when they talk about King Charles's "marottes"?

2. When you tell Grandma you would love a skein of yarn.

3. Photographing the sun.

4. Three levels of grilled cheese.

5. Mr. Doodle finished drawing his house. (Boy, does he have a marotte!)

6. Susan Sarandon talks about filming "Rocky Horror Picture Show."

7. A Halloween breakfast.

"I wasn’t sleeping so I took a pretty strong sleep aid. And I had this dream that David had called me and that we’d had this conversation."

"Then later I thought, 'Did he actually call me?' And I went to my phone and he had. But I have no recollection of what that conversation was. He died a week later. It’s all so frustrating."

Said Susan Sarandon, quoted in "Susan Sarandon reveals she had a final phone call with ex-lover David Bowie a week before he died and they shared 'things that needed to be said'" (The Daily Mail).

No recollection... but things that needed to be said. 

Did that need to be said?

"As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality, I was a firm supporter of the middlebrow legal thriller."

"I eschewed bike riding, kissing girls (uh, see above), and learning how to smoke cigarettes for the clearcut satisfaction of a well-executed courtroom monologue, or Julia Roberts cryptically intoning that everybody she’s told about the brief is dead. The characteristics of the middlebrow legal thriller dovetailed so well with the tastes of a teen who imagined himself to be quite smart and sophisticated — they didn’t so much require a familiarity with the law but with the three or four legal concepts that particular film decided were important. In The Firm, the concept was 'billable hours.' In A Time to Kill, it’s 'change of venue.' Once you’ve got the concept down, the movies tend to be about chase scenes and tense cross-examinations. With Grisham, the Mob is very often involved, or else the government acting like the Mob. By the end, the two characters we care most about arrive at an understanding about each other. It ain’t Tolstoy, but it is deeply enjoyable."

From "The Death of the Middlebrow Legal Thriller" by Joe Reid (The Vulture), written on the crushingly boring occasion of the 25th anniversary of the movie "The Client."

I saw part of that movie. I was on a plane and I watched enough to decide this is a type of movie I hate and will never watch again: a plot based on putting a child in danger with many shots of the mother maternal woman worrying and anguishing.

[T]he real gem at the heart of this movie is Susan Sarandon, who milks her star turn for all its worth. Her scenes opposite Tommy Lee Jones as they face off over the fate of this young boy are the kind of crackling movie-star showdowns that rarely appear outside the action drama.... 

Could they please go crackle somewhere else and not inside the aluminum tube I'm trapped in? For me, that was most certainly not — to use Reid's phrase — "deeply enjoyable." I'm irritated by the notion that we're expected to enjoy children put in danger. In real life, it would be horrible, but having our emotions artificially leveraged because of our primal love of children, that's pleasure.

ADDED: I've corrected this post. Originally, I'd written "The Firm" for "The Client." The one I saw and the one marking its 25th anniversary is "The Client." "The Firm," also discussed in the linked article, came a year earlier. ALSO: I don't think Sarandon was the mother, just the lawyer and a woman (and therefore, conventionally, experiencing maternal pangs).

"The joke wasn’t funny to me anymore..."

From "Julia Louis-Dreyfus Acts Out/The actress on challenging comedy’s sexism, fighting cancer, and becoming the star of her own show" (The New Yorker)

Louis-Dreyfus, who is fifty-seven, had a memorable part in the 2015 sketch “Last Fuckable Day,” on the Comedy Central series “Inside Amy Schumer.” In it, Schumer is hiking through the woods when she happens upon Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey, feasting and drinking toasts to Louis-Dreyfus. “In every actress’s life, the media decides when you finally reach the point where you’re not believably fuckable anymore,” Louis-Dreyfus explains. “I’m thrilled. Ecstatic!” Then she guzzles a quart of melted ice cream, burps, and farts. “Who tells men when it’s their last fuckable day?” Schumer asks. The other women crack up.

“I don’t know why, exactly, but there was a moment while I was doing it in which I lost my sense of humor about it,” Louis-Dreyfus told me. “The joke wasn’t funny to me anymore, and I had this complete crisis of confidence.”

Here's the sketch. I could only get through the first minute and five seconds of what goes on for almost 5 minutes.  I get that the criticism is of "the media," and I don’t know why, exactly, but there was a moment while I was watching it in which I lost my sense of humor about it. It was 1:06.

ADDED: Who wrote that sketch? Amy Schumer? If so, this is Julia Louis-Dreyfus trashing Schumer. I looked it up and found "An Oral History of Amy Schumer’s 'Last Fuckable Day' Sketch/The inspiration, the improvised lines from Tina Fey, and the 'total dream day' when it all came together" (a Vanity Fair article by Bruce Handy from 2016):

Amy Schumer, executive producer, writer, star, Inside Amy Schumer: “Last Fuckable Day”—that was like Jessi’s and my baby....

Jessi Klein, executive producer, head writer, Inside Amy Schumer: This sketch had kind of been my white whale for a long time. It came out of a conversation we were all having one morning [in the writers’ room]. I think we were just talking about magazines, like Us Weekly. I don’t remember what the exact conversation was. Probably we were talking about Susan Sarandon, just because she’s had to carry the mantle of being the fuckable older actress for so long. Like is there that moment where it just stops? And someone—I don’t remember who—said, “Oh, what’s her last fuckable day?” And everyone was like, that’s such a funny idea. Like one day Halle Berry, I guess, will have a last fuckable day?...

Kent Alterman, president of original programming, Comedy Central: “Last Fuckable Day” was originally written for, I think, Sigourney Weaver and Susan Sarandon and, I can’t remember, one other actor. It was just always a scheduling problem. I think there was interest. It went through a couple seasons as a possibility.

Amy Schumer: Everyone said no—the actresses. They didn’t want to be in a scene called “Last Fuckable Day.” Jessi had to do a million rewrites, because we kept switching the actresses we were sending it to. Like, “O.K., we’re sending it to Julianne Moore. Change it so that it makes sense for her.” But we wound up getting the best cast. Like it was thank God that the first batch said no....

ALSO: "Fuckable" is such an ugly word, but it's in the Oxford English Dictionary, which shows it's been around a long time. The oldest example found in print:

?1889 ‘C. Deveureux’ Vénus in India II. 113 The poor man had at last outwitted his careful wife and obtained a much longed for, fuckable cunt.

"Guys, this is Thelma and Louise reunited after twenty-five years."

"I think they are both beyond judgment for this occasion. *bows at their feet*"

Susan Sarandon trashes Hillary Clinton.

"I think that she's isolated. I don't think she's... a victim — playing this female part — I don't think she is. She's been connected to power for a very long time, and when she was on the board of Walmart for 9 years, she did nothing to raise that wage or stand by women and all the things she could have done. And I think that her name recognition is helping her quite a bit in the South, but I don't think that she's been there, like Sanders has, getting arrested, all through his life standing up for rights...."

Kate Winslet, who did not win a SAG award last night, touches...

... Susan Sarandon's breast.

Back up to the previous photo to get some idea of what inspired Kate, the I'll-just-wear-a-black-bra-with-my-white-tuxedo look Susan chose from the SAG Awards.

Don't stoop to the obvious "sag" joke. You're better than that. And Susan is better than that. Feel free to marvel at Susan's amazing daughter, Eva Amurri.

"For his senior thesis, he turned the Bill of Rights into a play. 'I made each amendment into a character...'"

"'The First Amendment is a loudmouth guy who won't shut up. The Second Amendment guy, all he wanted to talk about was his gun collection. Then the 10th Amendment, the one where they say leave the rest for the states to decide, he was a guy with no self-esteem.'"

From the Wikipedia article on David E. Kelley, the TV writer and producer (who made "Ally McBeal," "Boston Legal," and a lot of other shows). The play in question was written while he was an undergrad at Princeton. He later attended Boston University School of Law and was a lawyer before he branched out into TV writing.

How did I end up on that article, of all articles? I got there from the page on Michelle Pfeiffer (who happens to be his wife), and I was reading about her because we were talking about the movie (which I love) "The Witches of Eastwick," which we were talking about because the Susan Sarandon character in that movie is an elementary school music teacher who has some scenes with the band that are reminiscent of the school band scenes in "The Music Man." (Sarandon is inspired by the Devil, and the Music Man is a bit of a devil, a trickster palming off a fake system for kids playing musical instruments.)

And we were talking about "The Music Man" because Meade was singing "'Til There Was You" as a consequence of my asking for more examples of songs about nature seeming to express the feelings of the singer, such as "Close to You," which begins "Why do birds suddenly appear every time you walk near." I rejected "'Til There Was You" as an example of what I was looking for, since it's not a fantasy about nature, but a true statement of the singer's increased awareness of the beauty of nature. "There were birds in the sky/But I never saw them winging/No, I never saw them at all/'Til there was you."

The "Close to You" fantasy is really the same idea, expressed subjectively. The birds seem to appear because love has heightened the singer's awareness of the existence of birds, but she doesn't seem to understand, as does Marian the Librarian (the lovely Shirley Jones, whom you can cause to suddenly appear if you click on that last link, above). The "Close to You" singer (let's pick Karen Carpenter) presents herself as baffled by the phenomenon. She asks "why?" Marian/Shirley is the fully/overly rational woman, the librarian with book-learning of the existence of birds, and she too has some fantasy — the notion of never having seen birds at all before the arrival of love. She means: I never really saw them. Or perhaps: Seeing without the emotional lift of believing that the birds are about this love of mine is not really seeing.

So continue this long train of thought with me as we circle back to the Bill of Rights and talk about the infusion of human emotion into that which is not human. Do you picture the rights as human entities with feelings and motivations, and if you do — or force yourself to do it — is the 10th Amendment a guy with no self-esteem?

I am outraged at the disparagement of the character of the 10th Amendment!

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The man who knows the scope of the job he's been hired to do and doesn't spread himself thin taking over things that other workers have been doing for a long time — and know how to do better — isn't a sad sack. It's the guy with the inferiority complex who feels he's got to take over everything. Mr. 10th Amendment is smart and competent. He knows he's got plenty of important work that needs to be done well, he sticks to that, he has the integrity to resist seeking brownie points for doing extra work, he's not a jerk who can't trust the other workers to do things well enough, and he's not an egomaniac who thinks he's got the one right answer that must be applied to everyone regardless of the different ideas they might have and good experiments they might like to try.

I know you need a villain to pump some drama into your play, but I think in a theater piece about the Bill of Rights, the villain should be the federal government. The rights are all heroes. In my play.

"I won’t marry because I am too afraid of taking him for granted or him taking me for granted..."

"... maybe it will be a good excuse for a party when I am 80."

Said Susan Sarandon a while back. Sarandon is nowhere near 80. She's 63. The man she pictured herself growing old with, Tim Robbins, is 51. They'd been together for 23 years. No more.

Does it make it any easier not being married? Yes, I always knew this was temporary? You know the old hippie poster:

You do your thing, I'll do mine.
You go your way, I'll go mine.
And if we end up together...
It's beautiful.

"Real Time."

I hope you got the chance to see this week's "Real Time," the Bill Maher show on HBO. Not only did Andrew Sullivan passionately revile Noam Chomsky, but former Senator Alan Simpson went all Zell Miller on Bill Maher. And why didn't the "Real Time" producers edit out Sullivan very conspicuously and embarrassingly scratching himself? (It happens during the closing credits sequence.) I can only conclude that they deliberately decided to humiliate him!

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has an extended recount of the show. He makes fun of Susan Sarandon, who really was awful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Slate's Dana Stevens can't say enough about Sullivan's scratching himself. Sullivan is duly irked. Stevens manages to completely miss what Simpson and Sullivan were arguing with Maher about.