Ah, the final days of summer. Finisce l’estate, comincia l’opera, Don Giovanni.

Every third post on my feed today, there’s that fucking bloated orange sack of shit’s face again — a malignant jack-o’-lantern marinated in grease, vanity, and human sewage.

dunno why, but this photograph makes me enormously happy

First impression: Twyla Tharp rehearsal. Actual caption: something rather different.

BOTD: Pina Bausch, artist extraordinaire. I can’t think of a theatre or opera director I admire who hasn’t been influenced by—or stolen from—her masterworks, The Rite of Spring and Café Müller. One of the most radical and influential artists of our time.

(2/3) He kept writing. He continued going to his Beverly Hills office every weekday. Years later he said, with characteristic wit, that he “was retired but didn’t know it.”

“I have ten commandments. The first nine are: don’t bore. The tenth is: thou shalt have right of final cut.” —Billy Wilder BOTD 1906

👇 ✍️ 🎂 🎉 🎁 👏

Apparently everyone on my BlueSky feed saw The Odyssey this weekend… except Werner Herzog, Judi Dench, the Pope, and my cousin Gary, who said he’d wait for the director’s cut.

With all due respect, where’s Gena Rowlands?

BOTD: Gena Rowlands. I love Criterion Closet Picks. Again and again, actors and filmmakers reach for A Woman Under the Influence and end up talking about Rowlands and her influence on their own work. One of cinema’s greatest actors.

I’ve never actually read The Odyssey. I read the Classics Illustrated comic, and at seven, considered the matter settled.

In anticipation of what I’m sure will be another dangerous and idiotic Trump speech tonight, I never thought I’d quote Brett Stephens quoting Thomas B. Reed: “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.”

Sitting in a cottage in northern Michigan, I decided this was the week to embrace a healthier diet: lettuce, berries, fresh vegetables. Cyclospora, apparently, had the same week circled on its calendar.

The Rolling Stones have a genuinely inspired new album, and somehow it made me think of Verdi. (Yes, I realize how absurdly pretentious that sounds.) Verdi was 79 when he wrote Falstaff. The best artists never really get old. They just keep surprising us.

I’d been directing for many years before I read Mike Alfreds’ Different Every Night. I thought rehearsal was repetition in search of the appearance of spontaneity. Mike taught me to make room for true spontaneity. He’s 92, still teaching. I’m still learning.