Nancy rewritten

I’m not a fan of Caroline Cash’s Nancy . The art and lettering are not to my taste. And there’s been some wild revisionism: Aunt Fritzi is now bi, and she has a girlfriend named Phyllis. And Phil Fumble, the boyfriend of Ernie Bushmiller’s Fritzi, is living in West Hollywood. Nudge, nudge.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

JB Pritzker on the move

JB Pritzker has released Fighting for Illinois: Day One Agenda , a detailed list of proposals for Congress to undo the work of the current occupant’s regime:

The people of Illinois cannot afford to wait. Our Day One Agenda offers a bold and practical roadmap for governing, including 200 proposals to repair the damage caused by the Trump administration while creating a future where everybody can enjoy the life they’ve worked hard to build.

The PDF is available to download.

HCR on the midterms

In the most recent installment of Letters from an American , Heather Cox Richardson takes stock of Tuesday:

The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule.

I suspect that for many voters, “affordability” — the theme that the current occupant unwittingly turned into a boomerang — was foremost. But it’s difficulty to think about affordability for long without placing it in a context: economic difficulty for many, grotesque wealth for a privileged indifferent few. (“Now envision chandeliers all over your ceiling.”) I hope that Richardson is right, and that more than the price of gasoline (“the price at the pump,” as the cliché goes), drove Tuesday’s results.

More than twelve hours

It’s been more than twelve hours since the current occupant’s last social-media post (10:52 EST last night). Too dispirited to “truth”? Poor guy.

11:57 a.m.: He’s now self-soothing by freestyling in front of what C-SPAN calls “White House Construction Site.” Hair flying, microphone buzzing.

12:15 p.m.: “Now envision chandeliers all over your ceiling. Envision marble floors. This will be the most beautiful ballroom.”

Interesting: this event is not listed on the occupant’s schedule today.

[“Truth Social”: as Orwellian a name as “House Freedom Caucus.”]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, TCM, a theater, YouTube.]

‌Prix de Beauté, aka Miss Europe (dir. Augusto Genina, 1930). Our Miss Brooks (Louise), in a movie that may have helped inspire Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novella The Invention of Morel (no spoilers). Brooks plays Lucienne Garnier, a typist who wins a European beauty contest, thereby making life with her possessive partner André increasingly difficult for her (the title suggests both a prize and a price to be paid). One of the great pleasures of this movie, aside from the chance to see Louise Brooks, is the attention the camera pays to so many details of everyday life — someone removing shoes at the beach, women typing, a waiter carrying plates, a man hawking newspapers — much in the spirit of People on Sunday (dir. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930). And there’s an bizarre ultra-meta ending. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Night Holds Terror (dir. Andrew L. Stone, 1955). It‘s two movies in one. First, a thriller (of sorts), based on a true story, in which three killers on the run hold an aerospace engineer and his family captive in their house, before taking the engineer hostage and demanding an enormous ransom from his grocery-chain father. And then, in the final half hour, what might be called a telephone-company procedural, in which the full forces of Ma Bell are tasked with tracing the killers’ phone call. With Vince Edwards, John Cassavetes, Jack Kruschen (the doctor neighbor in The Apartment ), and some striking mid-century interiors. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). When a boy given to telling tall tales witnesses a murder, no one believes him, save for the killers. Bobby Driscoll is the boy in danger; Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale, his parents; Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman, the killers one flight up. It’s a perfect small-scale noir, played out in a Manhattan tenement and an abandoned building (alas, Driscoll, just thirty-one, would be found dead in such a building).That this movie has made it into a twelve-movies post for the fourth time would suggest that I’m willing to watch it whenever I’m aware of it. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Disputed Passage (dir. Frank Borzage, 1939). A strange, compelling movie that pits the head against the heart. Dr. Foster (Akim Tamiroff), or “Tubby,” as his more derisive students call him, is a surgeon and med school professor, a man of reason, insisting on emotional detachment and undivided devotion to work. John Howard (John Wesley Beaven) is a med student who makes room for emotion in his life. That includes his relationship with a Chinese med student, Audrey Hilton (Dorothy Lamour), a relationship that “Tubby” insists must end. Yes, Lamour is playing an Asian woman, but the movie is blessedly free of orientalism, with its Chinese characters and locales presented with nothing but respect. ★★★★ (YT)

[The title comes from Walt Whitman, “Stronger Lessons”:

Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?

Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?]

*

Mystery Broadcast (dir. George Sherman, 1943). A meta start, as a crime in progress turns out to be a moment in a radio drama, and more moments of sly comedy follow. The premise: a writer of radio mysteries (Ruth Terry) teams up with her sound woman (Mary Treen) and the star of a rival detective show (Frank Albertson) to work on a unsolved real-world crime. The plot is baffling, in a low-budget way. Fun to see Albertson and Treen, probably best known from It’s a Wonderful Life, where they appeared as Sam Wainwright and Tilly, the secretary at the Building and Loan. ★★ (YT)

*

One Crowded Night (dir. Irving Reis, 1940). A movie that honors the Aristotelian unities of time and place and action: everything happens from one morning to the next at a desert oasis (gas, food, and cabins), with various life stories knit into a whole as travelers stop for gas, food, and shelter. But improbable possibilities (which Aristotle frowned on) abound. I recognized just two cast members: Ann Revere (a stoic matriarch) and Gale Storm (a young waitress looking to get out). The most interesting character here: Brother Joseph (J.M. Kerrigan), a Micawber-like patent-medicine hawker who rises to a crucial occasion. ★★★ (YT)

*

Grace of My Heart (dir. Allison Anders, 1996). Loosely based on the life of Carole King, and starring Illeana Douglas (whom I knew only as the art teacher in Ghost World and Kenny’s nameless wife in Frasier ) as Edna Buxton, a singer-songwriter in a world that knows no such category. As Denise Waverly, Edna forsakes singing for writing, cranking out hits from the Brill Building, where she works for Joel Milner (John Turturro), a Phil Spector-like (in appearance, not personality) producer, before coming into her own. Along the way, the story takes a baffling (wrong) turn when Denise moves to Los Angeles and begins a doomed relationship with a Brian Wilson-like savant (Matt Dillon) at work on an album reminsicent of SMiLE. Great music throughout, with songs by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, Gerry Goffin, Joni Mitchell, Carole Bayer Sager, and others. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dark Mountain (dir. William Berke, 1944). YAMBAFNWI: a forest ranger (Robert Lowery) in charge of Dark Mountain reconnects with the woman (Ellen Drew) he thought he was waiting for him, but she’s already married — to a businessman who turns out to be a black marketeer (Regis Toomey), and who’s put her name on the warehouse leases. The movie turns into something of a low-budget High Sierra, complete with a mountain cabin and a little dog (and Toomey, in white shirt and black vest, looking like Humphrey Bogart’s Duke Mantee). It’s cliché after cliché for fifty-six dull minutes. But it’s fun to see Toomey (the mild-mannered soda jerk in Meet John Doe) as a murderous bad guy. ★★ (YT)


[YAMBAFNWI: Yet Another Movie Billed As Film Noir Which Isn’t.]

*

Murder on the Waterfront (dir. B. Reeves Eason, 1943). The IMDb says that it’s the shortest Warner Bros. release, but it’s not short enough. It begins with song and dance, as entertainers put on a show at a Navy camp and add perhaps ten minutes to the proceedings. When the inventor of a new piece of military hardware arrives at the camp and is promptly murdered, suspicion falls in several directions. Nothing about the events that follow is even remotely plausible. ★ (TCM)

*

White Echo (dir. Chloë Sevigny, 2019). A short film about to leave the Criterion Channel, so we watched it. Five young women make a short escape from the city to an old country house, where, one claims, something terrible once happened. The women try a Ouija board, dance and drink, and talk about patriarchy. Some mildly spooky moments, and one grisly spooky moment, but the pieces don’t add up, at least not to a sum I can figure out. ★★ (CC)

*

Appointment with Danger (dir. Lewis Allen, 1950). Al Goddard (Alan Ladd) is one hardass postal inspector. Assigned to investigate the murder of a fellow inspector — a man he promptly announces he didn’t like — he gives the work his all, posing as a corrupt inspector and getting in on a plan to stop a train and seize a large money shipment. With Paul Stewart as the leader of a criminal gang, Phyllis Calvert as a nun who can identify one of the gang, Jan Sterling as a bop-loving moll, and Harry Morgan and Jack Webb as gang members (Webb’s character is particularly vicious). Close calls and tight spots abound, and the movie is well worth the $3.99 Amazon charges to rent it, seventy-six years after the fact. ★★★★ (AP)

*

You Can See Everything (dir. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, 2026). At home with fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their children. I thought of the title of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method as a way to think about this unforgettable documentary: Nathan Fielder sets out to figure out the truth about Holmes’s character and her failed biotech project Theranos, and he uses his usual method of asking awkwardly probing questions to get there. And the project runs up against what seems to be the radical unknowability of an other, whoever that other might be. And just when the story seems to be wrapping up, it begins again, Vertigo-like. ★★★★ (T)

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Blue!

Last night our daughter texted “Is this real life!!!!” Yes, it is.

Here in downstate Illinois, it’s not all blue. In our IL-15, Mary Miller easily won reelection to the House of Representatives. She will now be a member of a diminished minority (the House Freedom Caucus) within a diminished minority (House Republicans). But she’ll continue to be as effective in representing her constituents’ interests as always — which is to say not at all. I expect more of the same from her: fulminations about the “Green New Scam” and invaders inside the gates (yes, really) and boys in girls’ sports and bathrooms. Keep fighting your way to utter irrelevance, Mary.

Revenge of the narcissist

Awaiting the results of today’s elections, I’m thinking about Charles Crumb’s words in the documentary Crumb (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1994): “When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it.”

Or persons. I expect that the current occupant will soothe himself with criticism of Republican candidates: the voters like me, they didn’t like him; I tried to help him, but he choked; I worked so hard for him, but he needed to carry it over the finish line himself, &c.

*

Later in the night, from ABC News:

The White House’s mood is “defiant” as results are coming in, a White House official told ABC News.

After weeks of President Donald Trump urging voters to pretend like he is on the ballot this election, the White House official is now highlighting that Trump wasn't actually on the ballot.

“President Trump was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot,” the official said when asked if they had any response to tonight’s results so far.

The official added: “Also, candidate quality matters, and President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”

Words of the year

And so it begins.

From Dictionary.com, maxxing : “Maxxing is a word that refers to the practice of pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimizing a certain aspect of your life.” As in looksmaxxing , &c.

My suggestion for 2026: affordability .

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive. Please, can we have some grownup words?

Word of the day: chryselephantine

From a New York Times article (gift link) by Shawn McCreesh with a surreal headline: “Trump Delivers a Closing Midterm Message. Mostly About Landscaping”:

And now here he was, using his final in-person address before the election to talk more about his chryselephantine fantasies of ballrooms and arches and Corinthian columns.

Merriam-Webster: “composed of or adorned with gold and ivory.”

And from the Oxford English Dictionary (account needed): “of gold and ivory: applied to statues overlaid with gold and ivory, such as the Olympian Zeus and Athene Parthenos of Phidias.” There’s also a figurative meaning, which might better suit non-ivory structures like military complexes and ballrooms. Though elephantine does seem apt.

[Spoiler alert. Highlight the blanks to see the words below.]

Chryselephantine is now the number-two lookup at Merriam-Webster. Chorister , which appears in today’s Times Strands game, is number nine. Crooner , also in Strands today, dropped out as I typed.

Elaine and I watched half an hour of the current occupant’s pool party on C-SPAN yesterday. It’s worth watching. Don’t hide the madness.

[χρῡσελεϕάντινος: “of gold and ivory.” You can see the elephant in the word.]

How to improve writing (no. 137)

From a Washington Post article:

Then the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” begins to play. Trump pumps his fists and sways his hips, his feet planted in place, as supporters cheer, reach toward the stage and raise their phones to capture one of the most recognizable rituals in American politics.

Much better:

Then the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” begins to play. Trump pumps his fists and sways his hips, his feet planted in place, as supporters cheer, reach toward the stage and raise their phones to capture one of the most bizarre rituals in American politics.

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All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 137 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]