If I had not seen it with my own eyes this past week at MoMA, I probably would not have believed it possible that one movie could contain this and this.

Those legs.

More than all the slinking Cyd Charisse did with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, it’s the manic heights she scales with Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli’s careening Two Weeks in Another Town that I’m thinking of. I wish there were a clip of her first scene in the film floating around youtube.

I’m pretty sure the camera starts on her legs, and then pulls back so we can watch her sidle through the stopped traffic in Rome to drape herself into a convertible where her ex-husband, the washed-up actor played by Douglas, stares. She drips jewels and desire and contempt, and it’s only the beginning.

Cyd Charisse, 86; dancer starred in movie musicals with Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Los Angeles Times

The New York Observer reports that the “puckered smile that makes the Olsen twins’ seem engaged (”We’re happy to be here!”) yet reserved (”Teeth are so crass!”) has a name. It’s called “the Prune.”"

And I am reminded of my friend Frostine’s wonderful (but alas, silent) blog Prunes and Prism. The title of Frostine’s blog refers to a passage she came across on Merrycoz.org, a website devoted to “early 19th-century American works for children,” and it follows:

RULES FOR YOUNG LADIES: Some arch advice on snagging a husband. Exercising the mouth into a pretty shape through repetition of certain words seems to have been an indoor sport for young nineteenth-century girls; in Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens’ overly bred girl repeats, “papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism.”

From Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964).

“I like what you’re doing with the car. Just stick with that.” Ronald Reagan delivers that line like he’s taking direction from David Lynch.

From “Swann Song,” Judith Thurman’s account of Yves Saint Laurent’s final haute-couture show in 2002:

There was plenty of cerebral whimsy to offset the noirish sex play: feather minis suitable for a showgirl’s wedding to a peer; a minuscule suède tunic from the sixties worn with high-heeled waders; swanky cocktail dresses that exposed a nipple; a transparent black baby-doll disco nightie trimmed with fur; quite a bit of immaculately white-collared “Belle de Jour” respectability begging to be corrupted; a strong dose of double-breasted androgyny; and a backless evening gown cut to the cleft of the buttocks, then scored with lace. But while Saint Laurent can sometimes be pedantically outré, he’s never trashy. And he displayed such encyclopedic formal invention and technical virtuosity that the occasional bomb—like a series of umbrella-shaped flowered tea frocks in what looked like shower-curtain fabric, or a shapeless wool shift worn with a dowager’s turban—were like a sorbet between courses rather than a disappointment.

More on Yves Saint Laurent, Catherine Deneuve, and the fashions of Belle de Jour at Kimberly Lindbergs’s Cinebeats.

Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Is Dead at 73, New York Times
From Tootsie to Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Sragow, Salon
Sydney Pollack, 73; Oscar-winning director and producer, Los Angeles Times
“God forbid you should lose your standing as a cult failure.” YouTube

The current issue of the Massachusetts Review is especially queer and especially fetching, with contributions from Laylah Ali, Shelley Jackson, Eileen Myles, Frank Bidart, Lee Gordon, Marilyn Hacker, and many others.

From “Moments of Shared Glamour: A Conversation” by Gregg Bordowitz and Liza Johnson:

This constitutes amity. We confer and on this we agree:
All depends on who’s watching.
What’s spoken is what you see when I hear.
That’s how we feel the meaning of our words.
A rain storm where you smell it first
And the wind changes then it plinks and soon you’re covered in it.
Like sitting down to find the chair
Still warm from someone’s ass.

The entire poem is here.

Here’s a link to my write-up in the Los Angeles Times of the Norman Mailer memorial last week at Carnegie Hall. I got to run on a bit about D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Town Bloody Hall, a documentary of a 1971 debate about Women’s Liberation, which features a slew of literary celebrities as well as Cynthia Ozick’s unprintable query to Mailer about his writing practice.

And, as I have little sense of propriety, I include the exchange below:

Cynthia Ozick confessed to the room, “This is my moment to live out a fantasy.” And then to Mailer, her voice sweet and curious, she spoke: “You said quote ‘a good novelist can do without everything but the remnants of his balls.’ For years, I’ve been wondering, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?”

Mailer, laughing, responded: “I don’t pretend I’ve never written an idiotical or stupid sentence in my life and that is one of them.”