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"I'm essential to my dream"/"Philip Glass is too primitive" (to enlarge click and then click again):



The slim upper story:

Goodbye to Jeanne Moreau.

"Jeanne Moreau, the sensual, gravel-voiced actress who became the face of the New Wave, France’s iconoclastic mid-20th-century film movement, most notably in François Truffaut’s 'Jules and Jim,' died on Monday at her home in Paris. She was 89."

The NYT reports.

To have Jeanne Moreau as your favorite actress has always seemed to me to be the height of sophistication. My favorite Jeanne Moreau movie is "The Bride Wore Black."



And here's the delightful trailer for "Jules et Jim":

Scaramucci, we hardly knew ye.

"President Trump has decided to remove Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, three people close to the decision said Monday, relieving him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff," the NYT reports.

The decision to remove Mr. Scaramucci, who had boasted about reporting directly to the president not the chief of staff, John F. Kelly, came at Mr. Kelly’s request, the people said. Mr. Kelly made clear to members of the White House staff at a meeting Monday morning that he is in charge.

ADDED: Let's see if Ryan Lizza has anything to say. Oh, yeah, he does:

The sacking of Scaramucci signals that Kelly, a retired marine general, may actually be empowered to be a true chief of staff. There was no bigger test for Kelly than the fate of Scaramucci, who, in his Wednesday phone call, demanded that I reveal my sources for a trivial tweet about who the President had dinner with that night, threatened to fire his entire staff if I didn’t, alleged that he had called the F.B.I. to investigate his White House rivals, attacked Reince Priebus as a “paranoid schizophrenic,” and described Steve Bannon as engaging in auto-fellatio.

After the interview was published, several people asked me if I believed Scaramucci would be fired. My understanding at the time was that Scaramucci was already on thin ice with the President after a series of high-profile appearances.... But Kelly, apparently, as his first move as chief of staff, told Trump that he wanted Scaramucci out of the White House....

Read the whole thing. It also reveals that it seems that Kelly, before taking the new job, convinced Trump that it is unnecessary to build an actual physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and that Kelly may believe he "might be able to tame Trump and get him to back off some of his most cartoonish policy ideas, even the ones that were core campaign promises."

Deliveries.

(A door in Indianapolis.)

Goodbye to Sam Shepard.

"Sam Shepard, the celebrated avant-garde playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, died at his home in Kentucky on Thursday of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a spokesman for the Shepard family announced on Monday. He was 73," the NYT reports.

One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like “Buried Child,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and “Curse of the Starving Class” and “A Lie of the Mind.”

I remember sitting in the front row for “Curse of the Starving Class" at the Public Theater in 1978. I got hit by water and an artichoke. From the Wikipedia article (artichokicle) on the play:

Act I... Weston enters, drunk, with a large bag of groceries. Weston talks to the lamb briefly, and then begins putting the groceries, which turn out to only be desert artichokes, in the refrigerator. Wesley enters and they discuss Weston’s laundry and the best way to help the lamb with the maggots.

Act II... Wesley and Emma then argue over who is going to go add water to the artichokes that are boiling on the stove. Wesley doesn’t want to do it because he is making the door and Emma doesn’t want to do it because she is remaking her posters. Wesley says that Emma doesn’t want to do it just because she’s “on the rag,” so she throws down her markers and gets up to add the water.... Ella returns with groceries that Taylor has bought for the family and throws out the artichokes....

I remember a lot of throwing of artichokes and one rolling off the stage and into my lap.

ADDED: Sam Shepard co-wrote a song with Bob Dylan, "Brownsville Girl":

It’s... an 11-minute narrative... [about] a long-lost love and his standing in line to see Gregory Peck in a classic Western film ["The Gunfighter"]. No one knows who wrote which lines in the zany masterpiece... but the tale fits squarely within Shepard’s canon with its use of Old Western themes, Mexican-border drama, mysterious women, and general disenchantment as an understated rumination on the myth of the American Dream.... At one point during the song, Dylan shifts from nostalgic reverie to directly inserting himself into the very film he’s standing in line to view. “Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head / But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play,” he sings, almost as if to suggest he is unable to separate his own unparalleled fame from that of Peck’s character Ringo, the fastest gunslinger in the West deeply troubled by having become a magnet for every two-bit desperado looking to make a name for himself by besting the top gun....  The song was performed only once by Dylan and is rarely, if ever, mentioned in retrospective analysis of his most essential works.

Here's the text of the lyrics. Excerpt:

Well, I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind
He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about
But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line

I can see why he was vague about Peck's next movie. It was "Captain Horatio Hornblower." Try writing a quatrain about that.

"Warsh Me."

A sticker in the window of our favorite Indianapolis restaurant, Milktooth.

I had to look it up to see what, exactly, it referred to. I came up with this:



Good to know everything's warshed.

"Is that a dog or a statue of a dog?" I said when I first stared at this from across the street.

The sign in the middle of the open door says the policy needs to be no dogs in the store, and I don't know if the dog could read and if the dog used to be allowed in this store, but this was a dog who dearly wanted to go in and absolutely understood that he could not break the plane of the doorway. He stood alert with his nose pressed against the invisible glass.

"Breaking story after story, two great American newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are resurgent, with record readerships."

"One has greater global reach and fifth-generation family ownership; the other has Jeff Bezos as its deep-pocketed proprietor and a technological advantage. Both, however, still face an existential foe."

James Warren (in Vanity Fair).

What's the "existential foe"?

But an existential threat is... many Americans won’t believe a thing either newspaper says, no matter how great the accuracy, attention to detail, or fair-mindedness. The sharp uptick in Times and Post readership may obscure a larger cultural change. The unequivocal evidence* of Russian involvement in the presidential campaign exemplifies the state of play. In June, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that more than half of those surveyed believe that the Russians interfered in the presidential election, with about one-third believing it influenced the outcome, and more Americans buying Comey’s explanation of his dismissal than Trump’s. But half think the press has been overly dramatic and irresponsible in its Russia-related coverage, with two-thirds of Republicans simply not believing that the Russians interfered at all, despite evidence assessed by four different U.S. intelligence services. Dig deeper and you find that, while 89 percent of Democrats believe in the importance of the media’s “watchdog” role, only 42 percent of Republicans do, according to the Pew Research Center. It is the widest gap that Pew has ever seen. What’s astonishing is that in early 2016, according to Pew, Democrats and Republicans essentially agreed on the role of the press, with Republicans (77 percent) actually outpacing Democrats (74 percent) in their support.

No link to that Pew poll. I'm not "astonished" by the degradation in confidence over that short period of time, because you're comparing the idea of "the role of the press" to our response to a particular performance in that role.  If you polled people about whether Hamlet is a great role and got almost everyone to say yes and then, a year later, a movie came out with Adam Sandler as Hamlet and a poll showed very few people considered it a great performance, it wouldn't mean that respect for the role of Hamlet had plummeted in that time period.
__________________

* What "unequivocal evidence"?! Or... oh, well, I guess I'm the existential foe, an American who's not believing what you say. But my skepticism isn't insensitive to accuracy, attention to detail, and fair-mindedness. I'm looking at your words, what they mean, what evidence you proffer, and trying to put it all together and see if it adds up. I notice where you slide along and I stop and ask why you're doing that. Yet I'm the foe. Or a subpart of The Foe which is the agglomeration of suspicious Americans like me.

At the Breakfast Café...

... what should we be talking about?

(That tablescape is from Milktooth.)

"Horrible Phone Calls I Assume I’d Have If It Weren’t for the Internet."

Nicely drawn and written visualization of the social anxiety that binds us to the internet (The New Yorker).

Chris Christie — in Milwaukee, at a Brewers game...

"When he initially was going up the stairs I yelled his name. He was quite a bit passed [sic] me, and 30 feet away I yelled his name and told him that he sucked … I called him a hypocrite because I thought it needed to be said. He turned around back towards me and got in my face for what seemed like a long time, but was probably only about 30 seconds or a minute. (He) was yelling at me. First he told me, 'Why don’t you have another beer?' which I thought was a decent come back, and I thought that was kind of funny. Then he started calling me a tough guy."

Video at the link (to New York Magazine).

"At an emotional level, shunning onion powder feels like a meaningful rejection of the previous generation’s cooking ethos."

"Onion powder hasn’t been treated with quite the disdain of, say MSG or corn syrup, but it is part of the same emotional package. And while plenty of home cooks still use it, within the realm of chefs, food writers, and other tastemakers, it is generally regarded as old school—not in an exciting or authentic way, but in a snickering, 'Can you believe people used to cook with condensed mushroom soup?' way."

(Metafilter.)

"Some of the most conservative Hindus in India believe that a woman whose husband has died should no longer live because she failed to retain his soul."

"Rejected by their communities and abandoned by their loved ones, thousands of destitute women make their way to Vrindavan, a pilgrimage city about 100km south of Delhi that is home to more than 20,000 widows. These women have no choice but to live in a vidhwa ashram (ashrams for widows) run by the government, private enterprises and NGOs. Clad in white, they know they will never return home and that this is where they’ll end their days. According to Hindu tradition, a widow cannot remarry. She has to hide in the house, remove her jewellery and wear the colour of mourning. She becomes a source of shame for her family, loses the right to participate in religious life and becomes socially isolated...."

A BBC photo essay (from last September).

"Ann, I finally found the Department of Homeland Security statement that has given so much wind to the press Russia Collusion business."

"I'm having a hard time understanding the words, and was hoping you could help to elucidate them, as you are so good at doing," asks Dante in last night's "Open-All-Night Restaurant." Here's the full text:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Dante continues:

Some of my concerns is the use of the word "Believe", which I usually associate with what is not in evidence.

Also, it is amazing the FBI would concur with this statement, since the FBI has no access to the hacked server.

Also, I'm not certain about the flow of references, either. Does "These Thefts" refer to "methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts" or is it referring to "alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0"?

If it is referring to "alleged" hacked, doesn't that weaken the entire message?

Finally, what is "these activities"? Does it include "hacking the DNC servers?"

I am having a hard time understanding that message. I know the way the way it is meant to be interpreted, but is that what is in fact stated?

It's simply amazing that an assertion this weak has become a fact that must be taken as true. I'd ask who benefits from shutting that door?

The part that seems the most absurd is the assumption "based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." When was it ever established that private hackers can't do things on a big scope and wouldn't target what is sensitive? And what exactly was so big about what was done here? Why are "senior-most officials" so special when it comes to computer hacking?

We're told what happened in this case is like what happened in other cases because the same "methods and motivations" are present. Even if we assume the "methods and motivations" are so special that they indicate a unique source, did we know in those prior cases who the unique source was? 

This statement has been used to impose an indisputable fact on us, but it's so weak on its face. A lot of people must really want that fact to be true. Why — of all whose reputation was bundled into the creation of this fact — has no one come forward to cast doubt on it or pick it apart? The simplest answer (to my mind) is that those in the know know much more, it's more convincing, and they can't tell us why.

At the Open-All-Night Restaurant...

... you can have your fill of conversation.

The photo is — like the last few on this blog — from The Fountain Square Hotel Building in Indianapolis. The restaurant is called Smokehouse on Shelby. Here's the view from the other side:



And, please, if you're doing any on-line shopping, remember to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.

Duckpin Bowling was a bit of a mystery to me...

... as I photographed these windows and signs yesterday at the Fountain Square Hotel Building in Indianapolis:







Duckpin bowling originated in Baltimore in 1900:

Ten-pin bowling used to strictly be a winter sport and most alleys closed during the summer except for a few that remained open to play odd bowling games using the smaller balls. Summer bowlers suggested that it might be interesting to trim the standard pins down to match the size of the small ball. Because it was much harder to get strikes and spares, the rules were changed to allow three bowls on each turn but only counted as a score of ten if all ten pins were knocked down with the third ball. Duckpins became so popular that during the 1920’s duckpin bowling spread along the east coast, from New England to Georgia.

Today duckpin houses are still found only in the eastern states with the exception of our two locations here in Fountain Square, the only authentic Duckpin Bowling in the Midwest!

Babe Ruth liked to duckpin bowl.