"I feel like a jerk suspecting that they were all actors."

I said, and Will Cate said:

I think they were all actors, and I don't at all feel like a jerk for thinking it. It's television. That means it's almost certainly 100% fake. Look at all the different camera-shots, the lighting. I call bullshit on the whole thing.

It was incredibly didactic and it played straight into the audience's desire to believe that good people are out there with the skill and the energy to lead us forward into racial harmony. Ah, well! It was a nice Sunday-school lesson in how to step up and speak out for what's right... if you believe.

In real life, most people, even good people, think it's best to deploy cold silence as the social pressure against strangers who say things that aren't very nice. But you can't make a TV show out of assorted dirty looks, however sharp and well-aimed.

"Anna Gunn, my wife on 'Breaking Bad,' gave me a beautiful hardcover of 'The Dangerous Book for Boys.'"

"A perfect book to flip through to get back in touch with the little boy within. It inspired me to create a concept for a TV show. . . . Stay tuned," says Bryan Cranston, answering questions about books in the NYT Sunday Book Review.

As Meade and I approach the last few episodes of the series — which we've been catching up on at a rate of about 1 episode a day — I'm glad to see Bryan Cranston has a new show in the works. Here's the whole series on Blu-Ray and here's "The Dangerous Book for Boys." I wonder how the "Dangerous Book for Boys" idea became a new TV show. Is it a show for boys (and girls) or is it for adults finding their inner little boy?

I take it Anna Gunn must have thought that Cranston's "Breaking Bad" character was getting back in touch with the little boy within, that it was an actor giving another actor a resource for understanding the character. How does a woman feel when she finds her husband getting back in touch with the little boy within? It may have been Gunn's way of saying: This is how my character sees you, in pursuit of a boyish need for danger. Perhaps Cranston's new-show idea has something to do with the way this need can be repurposed in a positive and productive way in adult manhood. The Walter White character hurls himself out into a quest for manhood that is horrifically destructive. As Cranston puts it in the interview at the top link: "The depth of this tragic story made it feel like the character reached Shakespearean level."

What if it were not a tragedy but a comedy? That's my guess at what the new TV idea is. By the way, I just discovered yesterday, that Cranston was Tim Whatley, the dentist character on "Seinfeld."

"Singing and acting are actually very similar things."

Says Harry Dean Stanton:

"Anyone can sing and anyone can be a film actor. All you have to do is learn. I learned to sing when I was a child. I had a babysitter named Thelma. She was 18, I was six, and I was in love with her. I used to sing her an old Jimmie Rodgers song, 'T for Thelma'." Closing his eyes, he breaks into song: "T for Texas, T for Tennessee, T for Thelma, that girl made a wreck out of me." He smiles his sad smile. "I was singing the blues when I was six. Kind of sad, eh?"

ADDED: Here's "T for Texas," sung by Joe D. Johnson. I'm not familiar with this singer, but get the feeling he was better known for "Rattlesnake Daddy."

Despite his public support for gay rights, Alec Baldwin is punished for uttering an anti-gay slur.

And he even apologized. ("I did not intend to hurt or offend anyone... Words are important. I understand that, and will choose mine with great care going forward.... Behavior like this undermines hard-fought rights that I vigorously support.")

Is that fair?


Baldwin — like many celebrities and assorted other humans — wants esteem from those whose esteem he's decided he values, those in the entertainment industry and among the American cultural elite, and these days, it's easy to see that this means that he ought to support gay rights. But that doesn't tell us how he really feels at a gut level. What pops out when he's angry and looking to express hatred shows us what he hides when he's doing his mundane PR.

Who knows how much hatred against gay people there really is out there and to what extent it's apportioned among people who support gay rights on the one hand and people who oppose gay rights on the other? I don't find it hard to imagine someone who hates a particular type of person nevertheless believing that those people deserve equal rights — because it makes sense philosophically or it fits a political ideology. I also don't find it hard to understand someone feeling no hostility for gay people and still rejecting same-sex marriage and thinking that all non-procreative sexual behavior should be discouraged.

Eagerness to support gay rights may stem from a desire to compensate for strongly felt aversion to gay people. Baldwin's problem is that this compensation cannot stand up to his intense emotionality, and paparazzi who know this have made a game out of provoking him to the point of explosion. It's actually kind of sad. He's a great actor, and since he tends to play villains — wonderfully — he doesn't even need us to think that he's a good person.

But should he have a political talk show on MSNBC? That's for MSNBC to decide, and obviously they have. MSNBC has chosen to be more genteel and respectful toward the cultural elite. It doesn't seem to know how to foster vibrant discourse about politics, and the gambit of putting on the over-passionate Baldwin was always lame, even before he embarrassed them.

"I certainly have never made anyone suffer... The word 'suffering' is completely inappropriate to use about the process of filming."

"To talk about the suffering of the actor is something I can only laugh at — in such a beautiful profession, where you’re creating through your emotions, your body — to me, there is nothing of suffering. The job of an actor... it’s one of a spoiled child. You wake up, you’re made up, you do a few takes, you’re beautifully lit. Not to get into my social origins, but I’ve seen hard labor, and it is not comparable."

Said Abdellatif Kechiche, the director of "Blue Is the Warmest Color," which stars 2 young actresses who claim to have suffered in the filming.

Normally, we admire actors whose performance looks like real life. But if it's actually real...

... and we're being scammed into thinking it's acting, there's no performance that can impress us, only the illusion of performance.

Once you know it's real, you can't admire the acting. You could admire the nerve of the performers to go through the ordeal, but only if they chose to do it that way. Were they paid enough? Did they willingly submit to whatever surprises the filmmaker had in store for them? Did they know there were limits to what would be imposed on them? What power did they have to draw the line?

What if you knew that the actress in a rape scene had no idea what the scene would be and a willing actor was directed to rape her on the set? Assume that afterwards, she was convinced that it worked to produce what looks like a great acting performance, for which she might receive an Oscar, and she was persuaded to keep the director's methodology secret. But the truth slipped out somehow. Would you refuse to see the movie because of the way it was made? If others chose to see it, would you denounce them as moral cretins?

Related questions:

What did Alfred Hitchcock do to Tippi Hedren to produce the footage that became the movie "The Birds"?

Should an actor get drunk to play drunk?

Do we prefer to watch love scenes with actors who really love each other or actors who have to act like they love someone they hate?

Did Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie fall in love because they got so deeply into the roles they were playing in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and never found their way back to their previous personas?

If an actor stays in character for months — on set and off — is that acting or something like madness?

Are very young children playing movie roles undeserving of acting credit because their performances arise out of their childish inability to distinguish fantasy from reality?

What do they say to little child actors to make them cry and emote?  

Were animals harmed in the making of that movie?

"But you don’t think that the proof is in the pudding at all? It is such a brilliant film."

"Yeah, because you can see that we were really suffering. With the fight scene, it was horrible. She was hitting me so many times, and [the director] was screaming, 'Hit her! Hit her again!'"

"In America, we’d all be in jail.... She was really hitting me. And once she was hitting me, there were people there screaming, 'Hit her!' and she didn’t want to hit me, so she’d say sorry with her eyes and then hit me really hard."

IN THE COMMENTS: Dad said:

It's hard for me to get past "The proof is in the pudding."

No, it isn't.

Yes, I selected that quote for the headline — I had my reasons — despite the presence of a cliché — normally, I filter out clichés — and a particularly bad cliché, since it's a corruption. Like "You can't have your cake and eat it too," it's a cliché that has superseded an earlier cliché that made more sense. Here's a couple of NPR guys talking about it:

STEVE INSKEEP: The proof is in the pudding, he said. Tim Lowe wrote us all the way from Santiago de Cali, Colombia, and he writes the following: Frank, the proof is not in the pudding. It would be a messy, if not completely silly place to keep it. With that in mind, we called Ben Zimmer, language columnist at the Boston Globe.

BEN ZIMMER: Well, the proof is in the pudding is a new twist on a very old proverb. The original version is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what it meant was that you had to try out food in order to know whether it was good.

INSKEEP: Zimmer adds that the word pudding itself has changed. In Britain, dating back centuries, pudding meant more than a sweet dessert.

ZIMMER: Back then, pudding referred to a kind of sausage, filling the intestines of some animal with minced meat and other things - something you probably want to try out carefully since that kind of food could be rather treacherous.

And that gives new insight into the old saying "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!"

ADDED: Cliché or not, the suggestion that test is whether the movie is good must be answered, clearly, NO. If we know that what looks like a great acting performance is, in fact, real human suffering, we should — out of morality — decline to see the film. And we shouldn't enjoy it, or if we do find it pleasurable to observe that suffering, we should recognize that this is either sadism or a creepy capacity to compartmentalize.

Further pursuit of this thought in a new post, here.

Ted Cruz reading "Green Eggs and Ham" in its entirety and "Atlas Shrugged" — just parts — from the Senate floor.

Here he is, reading "Green Eggs and Ham" last night at 8 — to us and to his 2 daughters, whose bedtime it was:



I play it, and we talk about how Obama could use that: Try it, try it, try Obamacare and you may see. You may like it. And then when we try it — if we're like the character in the Dr. Seuss book — when we finally try it, we actually do like it. Ah, but in the book, it's not saying try green eggs and ham and once you do, the only thing that you'll ever be able to eat is green eggs and ham from here on in and whether you like it or not.

No, no, that's not the proper comparison. Yes, Obamacare will go into effect, but it can be changed. It can be tweaked. We can drizzle some food dye over the eggs or take away the eggs altogether and just have ham. The ham's not green. Or is it? The text is ambiguous: green eggs and ham.

Let's see those illustrations again. Cruz did not hold up the book and let us see the pictures. No, no, you can't see whether the ham is green until you've tried it and it becomes the only thing on the menu from here on in. We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it. You have to eat the eggs and ham to find out if they're any good, and yes, you know that the eggs are green, but is the ham green too?

I hope you understand that paragraph. That's me, riffing, after a good night's sleep. I activate the live feed and there's Cruz, fully chipper, structured, and lucid, after more than 17 hours. He's not logy and ranting like Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," which — hello? — was a movie, so the struggle of the filibustering Senator needed to feel expansively dramatic. The actor had to demonstrate his range, show his chops, have an opportunity to go big and even — if he's good enough, and Stewart was — give us a taste of the ham. But the acting required of Cruz is to act like he's exactly the same as he was at the point when he started. There's no narrative arc. This is real life. This is not fiction. This is the truth.

And Cruz is talking about truth, I hear, as I activate the live feed on my iPhone (and I'm still in bed, having slept more than 8 hours). Cruz is talking about Ayn Rand, I figure out after a few lazy moments of assuming his references to "Rand" were about Rand Paul.

Cruz is reading and doing commentary on passages from "Atlas Shrugged." One is this:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. 

It's nearly 8 o'clock, and I need to get going. I resist the rejection of moderation. I myself am a moderate. A moderate with a good night's sleep. I'm aroused by Ayn Rand's condemnation of "the man in the middle." I need to do some blogging. That's my part, and I've been doing it, in an unbroken string of days for nearly 10 years — unbroken in the sense of each and every day, but I haven't been typing nonstop as Ted Cruz has been talking nonstop. "Man in the middle" is a phrase that feels like a call to action, because it's a phrase Meade and I have used when we talk about a man we saw as a hero for sitting down in the middle of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, in a crowd of sign-carrying, noisy partisan protesters, inviting them to speak, one-on-one, with someone who was not in agreement with the crowd. It looked like this:



At the time — it was March 2011 — I said:

I started to imagine Wisconsinites coming back to the building every day, talking about everything, on and on, indefinitely into the future. That man who decided to hold dialogues in the center of the rotunda is a courageous man. But it isn't that hard to be as courageous as he was. In the long run, it's easier to do that than to spend your life intimidated and repressed. That man was showing us how to be free. He was there today, but you — and you and you! — could be there tomorrow, standing your ground, inviting people to talk to you, listening and going back and forth, for the sheer demonstration of the power of human dialogue and the preservation of freedom.

Talking, indefinitely into the future... in the middle of a government building. That's what Ted Cruz is doing, but not in the moderate, surely-we-all-can-get-along mode. He's on one side, and he's reviling anyone in the middle. He's reading from Ayn Rand, saying that the moderate is evil, because the moderate is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

***

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. Oh? But would you like it it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? Would you like it in a house? Would you like it with a mouse?

"I don’t want to go to the cinema. Nothing would give me less pleasure.”

A quote from Peter Ackroyd, from the article we were talking about yesterday, which I saved for this separate post, because there was already too much going on in that other post, which concentrated on incredibly prolific writing and staunch aversion to travel. I'm delighted to read about someone who has such extreme versions of tendencies I have in what I'm forced to see as moderation.

As for movies, I've written about my resistance to going to the movies:

Why don't I see more movies? 1. I don't like the physical constraint of committing to sitting in a chair for 2 hours. 2. I only go to movies I think I'll like and still don't much like the movies I see. 3. Few movies seem like the sort of thing I'll like. 4. I have no shortage of other things to do (which is the case for anyone who loves to read). 5. I don't find myself in social situations where going to the movies is what people do together (and I don't see why people want to spend their precious time together doing something that involves so little interaction with each other).

But to say nothing would give me less pleasure. That's so extreme.

We actually did go to the movies this week. Last Wednesday. They were showing "Some Like It Hot," and I don't think I'd ever seen it in the theater, but I've long regarded it as just about the most enjoyable movie ever. Meade had never seen it. Afterwards, he said it was too long. Too long! This is a movie that tells a great story — 2 men running from mobsters fall into parallel romances — with economy and zest, and still it's too long.

Movie-watching takes control of your time. I see I wrote that in 2010 here:

I can't commit 2 hours to sitting in the dark, in the grip of some director's sense of how much time to take telling me a story. I can't wait while an actor speaks slowly and pauses and grimaces to try to make me feel that the words of a script are actually being manufactured inside his cranium. I have thoughts of my own.

But there's none of that slow talking in "Some Like It Hot." And there's some great facial acting. How can you tire of those faces?



So... movies.... what do you think? Surely, there are things that give less pleasure.

"Naomi Watts says she had to paralyse the right-side of her face to play Princess Diana in a new biopic."

"The 44-year-old actress was so determined to perfect the late Princess of Wales’ mannerisms that she changed the way her mouth moved."

“I didn’t just want to appear like her, it’s also about the tone of her voice and the way she moved her face,” Naomi explains.

“It’s completely the opposite of how I move my face. I move my face on the right-hand side and she moved hers on the left. I had to walk around with a cocktail stick in my mouth to paralyse the right-hand side of my face for weeks.”

Oh, she did it with a stick in her mouth. The headline made me think she used injections.

And isn't it a shame? After all that effort, the movie has putrid reviews. These body modification hijinks get attention from the awards-giving community, but not when the movie is terrible.

Stick in your mouth for weeks, eh? Not quite Christian Bale and "The Machinist," but thanks for playing Win an Oscar.

The quadruple take is in a completely different category from the single, double, and triple takes.

Patrick Stewart explains:



(The feet belong to his girlfriend.)

"She wasn’t pretty, didn’t wear the right clothes, couldn’t find dates; and she had no intention of becoming a debutante..."

"... which was the dream of Mrs. Harris’s life. As a defense, Julie escaped into acting. As an actress she could be anyone she wanted to and her mother couldn’t stop her."

From the long NYT obituary for Julie Harris, who died yesterday at the age of 87. Her mother was a socialite (in Grosse Pointe, Michigan). Her father "was an investment banker who was also an expert on squirrels and a curator of mammals at the museum of zoology of the University of Michigan."

For decades, Ms. Harris worked almost constantly.... Her film credits include “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1962), a boxing melodrama with Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Gleason, in which she played a sympathetic but manipulative social worker; “The Haunting” (1963), as a spinster beset by evil spirits; “Harper,” a detective story starring Paul Newman, in which she played a nightclub entertainer and addict...

 

... “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967), an adaptation of a McCullers novel set on an army base in which she played the sickly wife of an officer, played by Brian Keith, who was cheating on her with another officer’s wife (Elizabeth Taylor); “The Bell Jar” (1979), an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel, in which she played the mother of a suicidal young woman; “Gorillas in the Mist” (1984) in which played Roz Carr, a friend to the murdered zoologist Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver), and “HouseSitter” (1992) a romantic comedy with Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin — she played his mother.

I loved Julie Harris, an actress from back in the days before all the plastic surgery, collagen, and botox, when it was so much more interesting to watch the faces in the movies. Harris was always the one who was not too pretty, though she was pleasant enough to look at. She seemed fragile and wan. I've never seen "Reflections in a Golden Eye," but that's the type-casting they did: She's the sickly wife, and the other woman is Elizabeth Taylor (who was incredibly beautiful, back in the days when great beauty was natural and rare).

By the way, when I was in high school, we did the play version of "The Haunting" — which was called "The Haunting of Hill House" (which was based on the Shirley Jackson novel and should not be confused with the very amusing, campy Vincent Price film "House on Haunted Hill"). I got the role Julie Harris played in that movie. I'd also played Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" the year before, so our theater teacher must have seen me as the fragile, wan type. That's a hell of a self-image to inflict on a young girl, but who notices when it seems so exotic and satisfying to get up on the stage?

"Little Chrissy, say sugar."

Here's a clip from one of my favorite movies, "Pecker"...



... which I was watching this morning, because I saw that I'd been mentioned on Facebook. It was Annie Gottlieb saying "Ann Althouse, do not watch" about a pre-production trailer to a movie called "Squirrels."



I said, " So... that did make me click, but I stopped at 0:43. I don't want to see the squirrel bite off the girl's finger. And isn't that the girl who played Little Chrissy in 'Pecker'?"

I looked it up and saw that "Pecker" was made a long time ago, in 1998. I am getting old! So is the actress that played Little Chrissy, whose name, I see, is Lauren Hulsey. She looks like this now and seems to work not so much as an actress, but in visual effects. Perhaps she got into that through her experience making "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," where they made her look like this.

I guess there's a creepy kid category within child acting. Back when I was a kid, the #1 creepy kid was Billy Mumy. And I mean pre-"Lost in Space," particularly the "Twilight Zone" episode "It's a Good Life."

Recommended Amazon Instant Video: "It's a Good Life" and "Pecker."

"You just didn’t see women taking over and beating up men in those days."

"Russ did something no one else had the imagination to do. And he was smart to use three bodied-up women, so whether the picture’s good or not, you still sort of stare at it."

Said Haji, one of the stars of the 1965 Russ Meyer movie “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.” She died last week at the age of 67.

Bodied up. Bodied out.

"It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds."

"I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag," said the Swiss sales clerk who incurred the wrath of Oprah.

"I wasn't sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday July 20 so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection. I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do. She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag.

"I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.... She looked around the store again but didn't say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor. My colleague saw them to the door. They were not even in the store for five minutes."

Now, I think this relationship got off on the wrong track when the sales clerk read the customer as best suited for the Jennifer Aniston collection. This would annoy me. You're steering me toward the Jennifer Aniston?! Why! But Oprah can't go to the press with that, because it doesn't say I was racially typecast. What does it say? You look like a middle class American. That's annoying, but not a topic for outrage. So Oprah points at the most out-of-reach item, figuring it's super-expensive, which it is.


The sales lady stays on track with her original guess that you look like you'd go for something Jennifer Aniston selected to put her name on. Arguably, that's the opposite of racist — looking at a black woman and thinking she's the Jennifer Aniston type? Oprah's outrage seems like what would rankle a white woman: I look merely middle class.

Oh, but isn't it a burden to be black and thus to need to wonder whether any given failure to genuflect is because of race? Even though Oprah's quite different from virtually every other black person who's troubled by that burden, she may feel the call to represent those burden-bearers... especially since she's starring in the latest medicinal movie about race and she'd like you to look at her character and think of her as stereotypically black and not as the huge celebrity Oprah, which is to say, she'd like you to see her as she claims that shop lady saw her. So could you please show her something in crocodile?

From the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary:

The crocodile was fabulously said to weep, either to allure a man for the purpose of devouring him, or while (or after) devouring him; hence many allusions in literature. (See also crocodile tears...)...

1590   Spenser Faerie Queene i. v. sig. E2,   A cruell craftie Crocodile, Which in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile,..Sheddeth tender teares....
a1616   Shakespeare Othello (1622) iv. i. 246   If that the earth could teeme with womens teares Each drop she falls, would proue a Crocadile....
1677   T. D'Urfey Madam Fickle iii. 36   More false than Crocodills, that mourn the slain, and yet delight to kill 'em.

Trayvon Martin's stepmother Alicia Stanley wants you to know: "I exist... I'm the one... I'm the one...."

You don't see her at the trial where the biological mother sits with the biological father, and she's not the "father's fiancee" whose residence was near where the shooting took place, but she sees herself as Trayvon's real mother.

I don't know who made the decision to keep her in the background. Perhaps the Martin family's lawyers thought there were already too many mother figures in the Trayvon story and decided she should be eclipsed. If so, they should have worked harder to obtain her cooperation, because, as you'll see in the interview — here — she feels aggrieved. She wanted her time in the spotlight, and I'd be interested in knowing the details of the decision of the Anderson Cooper show to put her on. There's a "woman shunned" quality to much of what she says, and I suspect other news shows determined that it's too women's television or too outside the racial justice template.

If you have limited time, begin with Part 2, where Stanley — asked if she thinks Zimmerman "zeroed in" on Martin because of his race — says "I'd be lying if I said yes, so I'm going to say this: no." From there, she goes on to her "I exist... I'm the one... I'm the one..." monologue, which is quite dramatic. I felt like I was watching the Halle Berry performance in the role of Alicia Stanley. I wonder if she had this part scripted in advance and what we see on screen is acting.

I mean, she seems to be saying her lines in the fashion that actresses use when they are bidding for an Oscar, but those actresses are purporting to represent real people. Alicia Stanley may be exactly the kind of real person that actresses will want to study in order to give Oscar-worthy performances. Most real people — like the various witnesses I'd watched in the trial — speak in a rather flat and matter-of-fact style when they're invited to speak on television. You just know that if they made a movie out of this trial, the actors would have to punch up the emotion. Which is why I loathe most courtroom scenes: To avoid blandness, they've got to be phony.

But Alicia Stanley isn't a witness in the courtroom, she's a guest in the comfortable gaze of Anderson Cooper. She's not under oath, but maybe she's utterly genuine. Consider that line: "I'd be lying if I said yes, so I'm going to say this: no." Who answers like that instead of just saying no? A person who consciously and actively decides that not only shouldn't she lie, but she's got to be honest even about considering lying.

"Following allegations that actor Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) conducted a test to determine the sex of his yet-to-be-born surrogate child..."

"... the state government and BMC have decided to crack down on genetic counselling centres. A report is expected in 15 days."

All over the world, it takes a celebrity to bring an issue to the surface of the public mind.

Goodbye to James Gandolfini.

Dead at 51, of an apparent heart attack.

This is very sad. What a great actor! "The Sopranos" was — must I add perhaps? — the greatest television show of all time, largely because of him.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary.

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and cement mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school lunch lady....

He had an impressive list of character-acting credits but he was largely unknown to the general public when David Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

AND: The show's creator, David Chase, said: "He was a genius... Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.' There would be silence at the other end of the phone."

(I just watched the first episode again. So brilliant!)

Goodbye to Jean Stapleton.

The actress — who played the "slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series 'All in the Family'" — was 90.

Her father, Joseph, was an advertising salesman; her mother, Marie Stapleton, was a concert and opera singer, and music was very much a part of her young life. Young Jeanne was a singer as well, which might be surprising to those who knew Ms. Stapleton only from “All in the Family,” which opened every week with Edith and Archie singing the song “Those Were the Days.” Ms. Stapleton’s screechy half of the duet was all Edith; the actress herself had a long history of charming musical performances. She was in the original casts of “Bells are Ringing” and “Damn Yankees” on Broadway in the 1950’s, and “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand, in the 1960’s, in which she sang “If A Girl Isn’t Pretty,” and “Find Yourself a Man.” Off Broadway in 1991, she played Julia Child, singing the recipe for chocolate cake in the mini-musical “Bon Appétit.” On television, she sang with the Muppets.

Here's the audio of Stapleton singing "If A Girl Isn't Pretty."

ADDED: Here's an interview with her from 2000. At about the 6-minute mark, she talks about first meeting Carroll O'Connor when the 2 were cast in an episode of the TV show "The Defenders."

Huma Abedin: "A Wife With Powerful Ties Is an Unexpected Architect of a New York Comeback."

That's a front-page article in the NYT, illustrated by a picture of Huma and Hillary that makes them look like a single 2-headed entity. The Times, citing unnamed sources, calls Abedin "a seasoned operative well versed in the politics of redemption" and "a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback," who is exploiting her status as a "surrogate daughter to Bill and Hillary Clinton."

This is very interesting to me, because when I watched this video, Weiner's first in his mayoral campaign....



... I thought Anthony Weiner did a great job, presenting himself in the context of New York City, seeming to really belong to the city and its people and to care about it and to be ready to serve. And then there's Huma. She appears in a speaking role at the very end, and there's just something off and unnatural about her. Weiner comes across as a regular guy — he's got the actor skills of a politician — but she — in her seeming fakeness — betrays the reality: This is a remorseless machine of a power couple. She's the woman behind the man, and I'm sure they think that bringing her on camera should boost him. She's beautiful — or so we've been told many times — and she stood by her man. If she accepts him after what he did, that should be enough. That should cancel out his sexual misdeeds. If we hold those misdeeds against him, we're punishing her, which would make the opposite of sense, given that the wife is the official victim when the husband sexually sins.

It's like Bill and Hillary all over again, except that — unlike Hillary — Huma doesn't have the actor skills of a politician. She's a behind the scenes person, and though she can look fabulous in stills, in the video, she can't convincingly embody the Warm, Loving Wife character that Americans generally expect to see with a political husband, and that Anthony Weiner in particular needs.

The NYT article reminds us that Abedin "faced scrutiny this month about an arrangement that allowed her to earn money as a private consultant while still working as a top adviser at the State Department." We're told Abedin "fully intends to continue her work with Mrs. Clinton’s transition team" and that  "several political aides have been tempted to sign onto a Weiner mayoral campaign" because they want a connection that might get them in on the Hillary '16 presidential campaign.

The article begins with a description of how Abedin seemingly hoodwinked Chelsea Clinton into appearing in Anthony Weiner's first post-disgrace photo op: "When Chelsea Clinton wanted to make a low-key visit to the hurricane-stricken Rockaways last fall, she arranged to take a trip with her close friend Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton." Huma proceeded to exploit Chelsea's little trip for the re-introduction of Weiner. Now, I'm completely skeptical about whether Chelsea really wanted her visit to be low-key and whether she was surprised or tricked in any way by Anthony's horning in on the Female Empathy Tour of the Stricken. And I'd like to know the real truth of the interactions between the 2 power couples, Bill-and-Hillary and Huma-and-Anthony. I assume the Clintons know everything that's really going on, even as they want to look disconnected. It will be interesting to see what we will be able to figure out about all this, and I think Huma's lack of skill on video camera will be quite helpful in this regard. Bring on the Huma!

By the way, the NYT says "The couple live in a spacious Park Avenue apartment owned by a Clinton donor." But look at the kitchen in the background at the beginning of the video. Come on. That's not their kitchen, is it? I call bullshit.

On everything.

AND:  Rereading that headline... there's that word... that word that is the classic bullshit tell of our time: unexpected.

ALSO: I constantly mistype "Human" for "Huma." I can't tell you how many times I did that in the process of writing this post. But the one that I missed — and left up for 2 hours — was the one in the post title.  To err is human. To err in the post title is... superhuman.