AI slop flag

[Click for a larger view.]

Fifteen stripes, at least sixty-one stars: it’s AI slop. Or as my son said, it’s USAI. And the prose is sloppy too: “issued a called on.” I’d expect better from a department of education led by a former professional-wrestling executive. Note the hyphen.

And yes, it’s a real post.

Thanks, kiddos.

*

I missed the most glaring problem with the picture, but a reader caught it: the students aren’t facing the flag. Thanks, Kevin.

[In most United States schools, the Pledge of Allegiance is already recited every day, though a student’s participation cannot be required.]

Twelve movies

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

Blondie Johnson (dir. Ray Enright, 1933). Talk about a grim beginning: Blondie (Joan Blondell) and her ailing mother are evicted from their apartment; social services are naught; and after her mother dies, Blondie resolves to make some dough for herself. A simple scam gets her into cahoots with accomplished criminal Danny (Chester Morris), and she soon becomes a crime boss with a posse of her own (Mae Busch and Toshia Mori). Blondell is delightful, mixing comedy and toughness. I think the ending must be tongue in cheek: perhaps the studios could already hear the Code coming for them. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). “Oh my God, if anyone had ever told me that I’d be praying for the death of one of my own patients”: that line gives an idea of the high camp melodrama of this movie, which mixes Double Indemnity , a touch of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, red-flocked wallpaper, and garish furnishings and ornaments. Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn star as lovers conspiring to murder; Richard Basehart, Sandra Dee, Lloyd Nolan, John Saxon, Ray Walston, and Anna May Wong are the supporting players. My other favorite line, as Turner’s character leaves the mansion to go “shopping” (i.e., to see her lover): “Enjoy yourself, Sheila.” ★★/★★★★ (CC)

[As a movie, two stars. As high camp, four.]

*

Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941). Elaine, who likes this movie more than I do, calls it a mix of the lightest lights and the darkest darks: it’s a musical with noir, and for me the elements do not meld, as we shift from silly antics to moments of fierce hatred and point-blank gunfire. With Michael Whorf (Benjamin Lee Whorf’s brother), Jack Oakie, Elia Kazan, Peter Whitney, and Billy Halop as members of a die-hard blues band that (nevertheless) plays pop tunes and adds a girl singer (Priscilla Lane), Lloyd Nolan as a gangster, Wallace Ford as an outcast from life’s feast, and Betty Field as a woman who will not be wronged. One redeeming element in this film: a jailhouse version of “Blues in the Night,” with Black cellmates singing a tune that the movie’s white musicians blithely take as their own. Another: montage sequences of Black agriculture, life on the road, and Field struggling to learn a song and falling through the keys of a dream piano. ★★ (A)

*

Night World (dir. Hobart Henley, 1932). A night at Happy’s Club, with proprietor Happy MacDonald (Boris Karloff), chorus girl Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke), son of familial tragedy Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), and too many more characters to name, all of whom figure in interlocking stories of fidelity, infidelity, and predation. Karloff is a surprise here: his Happy is brutal, but also strangely charming (after all, he runs a nightclub). Unexpected: Clarence Muse as a philosophizing doorman of extraordinary dignity. Two Busby Berkeley numbers are a bonus. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Rabbit Trap (dir. Philip Leacock, 1959). Ernest Borgnine as Ever Ready, Steady Eddie Colt, underpaid (no college degree) and overworked, a draftsman and family man whose boss sees human resources as endlessly exploitable. Like The Apartment , this film is about standing up to executive power, or not. My favorite line: “The company doesn’t own you.” With Bethel Leslie as Abby Colt, David Brian as the boss, and June Blair as a secretary who has eyes for the boss (and should see a good optometrist). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Sullivan’s Travels (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941). Social realism and its discontents. Joel McCrea is John L. Sullivan, a director who leaves dopey comedies behind and sets out to explore Depression America and make a movie of Sinclair Beckstein’s novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? But comedy will out, though the movie’s idea of the joys of comedy — maniacal laughter over a Mickey Mouse short — is too over the top for my taste. Much better: the snappy patter between Sullivan and “The Girl” (Veronica Lake). ★★★★ (CC)

*

What’s the Story, Wishbone? (dir. Joey Stewart, 2026). This affectionate documentary traces the PBS children’s series Wishbone’s improbable success — first a trailer, then a contract for five episodes, then a contract for thirty-five, and, finally, a fifty-episode run. One problem with the documentary: the interviews with countless people who worked on the show are repetitive, with the main points — we didn’t know what we were doing; we loved working on the show — repeated again and again. A second problem: though the actors who played Ellen Talbot (Mary Chris Wall) and Wanda Gilmore (Angee Hughes) appear here as themselves, the actors who played the kids — Jordan Wall (Joe Talbot), Christie Abbott (Sam Kepler), and Adam Springfield (David Barnes) — are nowhere to be found, and there’s no explanation why (as Ghostwriter once asked, “Where are the children?”). A third problem: there’s very little of the show itself onscreen, which might have something to do with the fine print that identifies the character of Wishbone (played by the late Jack Russell terrier Soccer) as the property of Mattel. ★★★ (A)

[Only three stars, though ours is a Wishbone-friendly household. I still remember my children, then six and eight, screaming to me from the living room, “Dad! The Odyssey !” And now we have grandchildren as old as our kids were then.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Limited funds only allowed for a two-day shoot to bank all the interviews. “If some people couldn’t make the day, we couldn’t include them. But we feel like we covered pretty much every aspect,” says [director Joey] Stewart. Notably absent from the doc are the child actors who were a part of the main cast.]

*

A Private Life (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025). Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster), an American psychoanalyst in Paris, is determined to uncover the truth about a patient’s unexpected death: suicide, or murder? The doctor enlists her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil) as a second amateur investigator (yes, a Hitchcock trope) in a search for answers that endangers them both, with Lilian becoming increasingly lost in delusions and dreams (recall Spellbound ) about past lives. The truth, when it’s finally discovered, is not especially interesting or satisfying. The movie is stylish but without much substance. ★★★ (N)

*

I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982). James Baldwin revisits the American south, with a sidetrip to Newark, New Jersey, for conversations with veterans of the fight for human rights. Some extraordinary scenes here: Baldwin with the poet Sterling Brown, Baldwin with David Dennis, the former CORE member who hired Michael Schwerner. And some chilling archival footage of Bull Connor and Jim Clark and anonymous white people brutalizing protestors. The sad refrain that runs through the movie: everything has changed, and nothing has changed. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (dir. Terence Dixon, 1970). A white Brit sets out to make a short film about James Baldwin as a writer in Paris, and nothing goes according to plan. Baldwin resists the premise: “You know, I’m not so much a writer as I’m a citizen, and I’ve got to bear witness to something which I know.” Things become more relaxed when we see Baldwin talking with his mentor and friend Beauford Delaney and a group of Black students who have left the States. But when Baldwin addresses the filmmaker — well, if looks could kill. ★★★ (CC)

*

A Toxic Love Story (dir. Alexandra Lacey, 2026). Another Netflix documentary about a dysfunctional relationship? I’m there! The premise: a man meets the woman of his dreams, and she soon begins to receive threatening e-mails, but nothing here is what it appears to be, and the plot twists keep coming. There’s a bit of trickery early on as some careful editing gives the viewer a false impression — thus I’m dropping a star. ★★★ (N)

*

Nowhere Boy (dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2009). The childhood (in flashbacks) and adolescence of John Lennon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), based on his half-sister Julia Baird’s memoir. It’s a story of deep trauma: family separation, the absence of one parent, the death of another. Taylor-Johnson is an eerily evocative Lennon; as Lennon’s mother Julia, Anne-Marie Duff is a vivacious (or manic) figure who seems to regard her son as something of a boyfriend; as Aunt Mimi, Kristin Scott Thomas is alternately severe and generous, trying to preserve some element of order and safety in her nephew’s life: “Don’t forget your glasses.” The (great) soundtrack includes Jackie Brenston, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, Big Mama Thornton, a note-perfect cover of the Quarrymen’s “In Spite of All the Danger,” and a bit of Lennon’s “Mother,” from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the 1970 album in which Lennon revisited childhood trauma. ★★★★ (CC)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“I’m gonna wear shoes.”

“Wow.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[I usually choose my Merrell Moab 3s.]

Letters from an American turns seven

The most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American marks seven years of daily letter writing:

Seven years later, we are approaching the midpoint of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw seven years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.

Attacking Aaron Rupar

“‘The White House has a taxpayer-funded team that tries to incite harassment and threats against their political foes,’ Rupar told Salon. ‘They seem to be especially triggered about my posts about Natalie Harp and how she accompanies the president everywhere’”: “White House doesn’t want voters to see the real Trump” (Salon ).

Note the expression on the current occupant’s face in the photograph that accompanies the article. I think it’s the face of dementia.

Another arch

“When I told him that to celebrate the day, I had set up a thirteen-foot model of the triumphal arch in one of the salons, he immediately left the party and hurried to the room”: from Read, Seen, Heard.

Him: who?

A new stationery store

“Nyack’s new spot for fine stationery”: Busman’s Holiday. It’s the work of Sam Potts, who many years ago made a spectacular poster mapping character connections in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest .

The store offers a pencil exchange, a cloud registry, and other surprises. And a fun Instagram account.

Moleskine print fail

The paper in my 2026 Moleskine datebook is an improvement over that of years past: ink does not bleed through. A problem that I didn’t notice until I wrote with a thicker nib and found the ink slightly ghosting: the print on the recto and verso doesn’t always line up. It happens only on a few pages, but it shouldn’t happen at all, should it? (No, Michael, you’re absolutely right. It shouldn’t.)

[A crude photograph, taken with a flashlight shining through the page, and with the white point adjusted to make the paper look more like paper.]

I have issues with Moleskine quality control. In 2024 I wrote three posts telling the story of getting a defective Moleskine planner (sixteen days missing!) and attempting to get a refund: 1, 2, 3. I wondered then and wonder now if my e-mail correspondence with “Donne” at Moleskine Customer Care was really just correspondence with a bot. I wrote a letter too to Moleskine’s New York headquarters. No reply. Moleskine, sono pazzi.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts (Pinboard)

[I am a prisoner of Moleskine. I prefer the design of their daily planner to that of Leuchtturm.]

Revenge of analog

Sales of pens, puzzle books, Moleskines, and Fujifilm Instax cameras are all up: “The anti-AI portfolio” (Financial Times ).

The indefatigable Aaron Rupar

The story has now made it to Newsweek : the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account has called the indefatigable Aaron Rupar “a sick, deluded freak” for calling attention to the current occupant’s travels with Natalie Harp.

Aaron Rupar’s Bluesky posts are a great public service. They show again and again what “the news” doesn’t: a president declining in real time. If you value the time and effort Rupar puts into collecting video clips, you can buy him a coffee or subscribe to Public Notice.