“With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall.” So tweeted The Humphrey Bogart Estate today, letting cinephiles everywhere know that Hollywood lost yet another great one this week. She was 89.
Bacall, of course, met Humphrey Bogart on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1943. And they became one of Hollywood’s legendary couples, starring together in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). Above you can watch Bogie and Bacall share some light moments together during a costume test for Melville Goodwin, USA, a film the couple never ultimately made. The footage was shot on February 20, 1956, just after Bogart learned that he had esophageal cancer. He passed away less than a year later, on January 14, 1957. May Bogie & Bacall rest in peace.
Note: The costume test, like many from the period, doesn’t have sound. As you’ll see, you hardly need sound to appreciate the scene that unfolds. Don’t miss the part where the camera zooms in.
When we discover Jorge Luis Borges, we usually discover him through his short stories — or at least through his own highly distinctive uses of the short story form. Those many of us who thereupon decide to read everything the man ever wrote sooner or later find that he ventured into other realms of short text as well. Borges spent time as a poet, an essayist, and even as something of a film critic, a period of his career that will delight the sizable cinephilic segment of his readership. “I’m almost a century late to this party,” writes one such fan, Brendan Kiley at TheStranger, “but I recently stumbled into the movie reviews of Jorge Luis Borges (in his Selected Non-Fictions) and they’re fantastic: gloomy, sometimes bitchy, hilarious.” He first highlights Borges’ 1941 assessment of Citizen Kane, which Interrelevant provides in its incisive, unsparing, referential, and very brief entirety:
AN OVERWHELMING FILM
Citizen Kane (called The Citizen in Argentina) has at least two plots. The first, pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits: a vain millionaire collects statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, cars, libraries, man and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are usually ascribed to the Holy Ghost), he discovers that this cornucopia of miscellany is a vanity of vanities: all is vanity. At the point of death, he yearns for one single thing in the universe, the humble sled he played with as a child!
The second plot is far superior. It links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. A kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined. The same technique was used by Joseph Conrad in Chance (1914) and in that beautiful film The Power and the Glory: a rhapsody of miscellaneous scenes without chronological order. Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him.
Form of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. (A possible corollary, foreseen by David Hume, Ernst Mach, and our own Macedonio Fernandez: no man knows who he is, no man is anyone.) In a story by Chesterton — “The Head of Caesar,” I think — the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.
We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of cordial and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrendous. Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth.
The production is, in general, worthy of its vast subject. The cinematography has a striking depth, and there are shots whose farthest planes (like Pre-Raphaelite paintings) are as precise and detailed as the close-ups. I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as a certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have “endured”—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.
“A kind of metaphysical detective story,” “a labyrinth with no center,” “the work of a genius” — why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Borges here describes his own work. Welles himself didn’t go ignorant of his film’s Borgesian nature, or at least of the tendency of others to point out its Borgesian nature, not always in a positive light. “Some people called it warmed-over Borges,” Welles recalled in a conversation 42 years later with the filmmaker Henry Jaglom. Nor did he forget Borges’ own critique: “He said that it was pedantic, which is a very strange thing to say about it, and that it was a labyrinth. And that the worst thing about a labyrinth is that there’s no way out. And this is a labyrinth of a movie with no way out. Borges is half-blind. Never forget that. But you know, I could take it that he and Sartre” — who thought the film’s image “too much in love with itself” — “simply hated Kane. In their minds, they were seeing— and attacking — something else. It’s them, not my work.” Defensive though this may sound, it identifies the impulse that had the author of Labyrinths seeing all those labyrinths in the movie: to quote Anaïs Nin, a writer contemporary though not often brought into the same context with Borges, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
In a previous post, we brought you the voice of Italian fantasist Italo Calvino, reading from his Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar. Both of those works, as with all of Calvino’s fiction, make oblique references to wide swaths of classical literature, but Calvino is no show-off, dropping in allusions for their own sake, nor is it really necessary to have read as widely as the author to truly appreciate his work, as in the case of certain modernist masters. Instead, Calvino’s fiction tends to cast a spell on readers, inspiring them to seek out far-flung ancient romances and strange folktales, to immerse themselves in other worlds contained within the covers of other books. Not the least bit pedantic, Calvino possesses that rare gift of the best of teachers: the ability to make Literature capital “L”—an intimidating domain for many—become wondrous and approachable all over again, as in our early years when books were magical portals to be entered, not onerous tasks to be checked off a list.
Calvino’s short essay, “Why Read the Classics?” (published in The New York Review of Books in 1986), resounds with this sense of wonder, as well as with the author’s friendly, unpretentious attitude.
He lays out his reasoning in 14 points—slightly abridged below—beginning with the frank admission that all of us feel some sense of shame for the gaps in our reading, and thus often claim to be “re-reading” when in fact we’re reading, for example, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, or King Lear, for the first time. Calvino states plainly the nature of the case;
The reiterative prefix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, we need only observe that, however vast any person’s basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.
Point one, then, goes on to argue for reading—for the first time—classic works of literature we may have only pretended to in the past. The remainder of Calvino’s case follows logically:
1) ….to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth.
2) We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.
3) There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth.
4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.
6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.
Calvino introduces his last 7 points with the observation that any formal literary education we receive often does more to obscure our appreciation of classic works than to enhance it. “Schools and universities,” he writes, “ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite.”
Part of the reason many people come to literary works with trepidation has as much to do with their perceived difficulty as with the scholarly voice of authority that speaks from on high through “critical biographies, commentaries, and interpretations” as well as “the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography.” Though useful tools for scholars, these can serve as means of communicating that certain professional readers will always know more than you do. Calvino recommends leaving such things aside, since they “are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say.” He then concludes:
8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before.
9) The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.
10) We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans.
11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
Finally, Calvino adds two points to explain why he thinks we should read old books, when we are so constantly overwhelmed “by the avalanche of current events.” To this question he says:
13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise […]
14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.
In other words, classic literature can have the salutary effect of tempering our high sensitivity to every breaking piece of news and distracting piece of trivia, giving us the ballast of historical perspective. In our current culture, in which we live perpetually plugged into information machines that amplify every signal and every bit of noise, such a remedy seems indispensable.
If you, as a filmgoer, have anything in common with me — and if you happen to live in Los Angeles as well — you’ve spent the past few weeks excited about the Andrei Tarkovsky double-bill coming up at the Quentin Tarantino-owned New Beverly Cinema. We’ve previously featured the famously (and extremely) cinephilic Tarantino’s listsoffavoritefilms, but what about Tarkovsky? What movies did the man who made The Mirror and Nostalghia — to name only two of his most strikingly personal films, not to mention the same ones coming up at the New Beverly — look to for inspiration? Nostalghia.com has one set of answers in the form of a list Tarkovsky once gave film critic Leonid Kozlov. “I remember that wet, grey day in April 1972 very well,” writes Kozlov in a Sight and Sound article re-posted there. “We were sitting by an open window and talking about various things when the conversation turned to Otar Ioseliani’s film Once Upon a Time There Lived a Singing Blackbird.”
Tarkovsky struggled toward an assessment of that picture, eventually deeming it “a very good film.” Kozlov then asked the filmmaker to draw up a list of his favorites. “He took my proposition very seriously and for a few minutes sat deep in thought with his head bent over a piece of paper,” the critic recalls. “Then he began to write down a list of directors’ names — Buñuel, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Vigo. One more, Dreyer, followed after a pause. Next he made a list of films and put them carefully in a numbered order. The list, it seemed, was ready, but suddenly and unexpectedly Tarkovsky added another title — City Lights.” The fruit of his internal deliberations reads as follows:
Among respected directors’ greatest-films lists, Tarkovsky’s must rank as, while certainly one of the most considered, also one of the least diverse. “With the exception of City Lights,” Kozlov notes, “it does not contain a single silent film or any from the 30s or 40s. The reason for this is simply that Tarkovsky saw the cinema’s first 50 years as a prelude to what he considered to be real film-making.” And the lack of Soviet films “is perhaps indicative of the fact that he saw real film-making as something that went on elsewhere.” Overall, we have here “not only a list of Tarkovsky’s favorite films, but equally one of his favorite directors,” especially Ingmar Bergman, who places no fewer than three times. The esteem went both ways; you may remember how Bergman once described Tarkovsky as “the greatest of them all.” Still, as cinematic mutual appreciation societies go, I suppose you couldn’t ask for two more qualified members.
Haruki Murakami’s 13th novel,Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A Novel, was first published last April in Japan, and, within the first month, it sold one million copies. This week, the novel (translated by Philip Gabriel) finally arrives in bookstores in the U.S. If you’re wondering where this novel will take readers, you can read an excerpt of Murakami’s novel recently published in Slate, and then Patti Smith’s book review in The New York Times. Smith, the “Godmother of Punk,” won the National Book Award for her 2010 memoir Just Kids. She knows something about writing, and she’s clearly no stranger to Murakami’s body of work. While planning to go on tour, Smith once wondered what books to take along, and wrote on her personal web site:
The worse part, besides saying goodbye to my daughter Jesse, is picking out what books to take. I decide this will be essentially a Haruki Murakami tour. So I will take several of his books including the three volume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to daydreaming while you are reading him. thus i always miss stuff.
No Eli Roth gorefest or low-budget video nasty, no Hubert Selby or Thomas Hardy adaptation, no Michael Hanecke gutpunch nor the bleakest noir can compare with the work of Werner Herzog when it comes to existential dread. His documentaries and absurdist tragicomedies reach into the heart of human darkness and doomed obsessive weirdness. Even his turns as an actor and producer take him into shadowy, amoral places where grim, sure death awaits. Do you, dear reader, dare follow him there?
If so, you must first brave the application for Herzog’s Rogue Film School. Lessons include “the art of lock-picking, traveling on foot, the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully, the athletic side of filmmaking, the creation of one’s own shooting permits, the neutralization of bureaucracy, and guerilla filmmaking.” Have technical questions? “For this purpose,” Herzog writes in his 12-point description of Rogue, “please enroll at your local film school.” This is no beginner’s workshop; it is “about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible.” This being Herzog, “excitement” likely involves death-defying danger. Prepare for the worst.
But you who are applying for the Rogue Film School know this already. You are up for the challenge. You also know that Herzog doesn’t put himself bodily and psychologically close to—and over—the edge of civilization just for the sake of a thrill. This is art—raw, confrontational, and utterly uncompromising. And so, Rogue Film School will also “be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.” There is a required, eclectic reading list: J.A. Baker’s document of hawk life, The Peregrine, Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber & Other Stories, Virgil’s Georgics. Suggested readings include The Poetic Edda, The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and—somewhat unexpectedly—The Warren Report.
And of course, there is film, “which could include your submitted films,” but will also include a required viewing list: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (if available, he writes—watch it here)—an Iranian coming-of-age movie on BFI’s “Top fifty films for children up the age of 14” list. You will discover ways to “create illumination and an ecstasy of truth.” But do not for a moment think this will involve some middlebrow New Age brand of self-discovery. “Censorship will be enforced,” Herzog warns, “There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.” You will probably eat meat raw from a predatory beast you’ve killed with your bare hands.
Alternately, you may have canapés and drinks at a secluded bar in the UK while Herzog chats you up about your latest project and his. So began the orientation to Rogue Film School for filmmaker and sound designer Marcelo de Oliveira, who chronicled his experience as a Herzog apprentice in a two-part write up on the Scottish Documentary Institute’s Blog. On day one, Herzog advised his pupils to “be prepared to step across the borders.” De Oliveira quotes the master saying “Film school will not teach you that we have a natural right as filmmakers to steal a camera or steal certain documents.” And though Herzog does not explicitly advocate such activities, he strongly implies they may be justified, referring to his own act of stealing a camera from the Munich Film School—the same camera with which he shot the crazed and visionary Fitzcarraldo. The theft, Herzog has said, was no crime, but “a necessity.”
Herzog is not a guru, transmitting instructions for enlightenment to cross-legged disciples. He is a catalyst, encouraging his students to “go absolutely and completely wild” for the sake of their individual vision. His film school sounds like the kind of opportunity no daring filmmaker should pass up, but should you apply and get rejected, you can still learn a thing or two from the great German director. Just watch the video above, “Werner Herzog’s Masterclass.” Herzog shared his wisdom and experience with a rapt audience at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. Among the many pieces of advice were the following, compiled by Indiewire. See their post for more essential highlights from this fascinating session.
It’s a very dangerous thing to have a video village, a video output. Avoid it. Shut it down. Throw it into the next river. You have an actor, and people that close all staring at the monitor gives a false feeling; that ‘feel good’ feeling of security. It’s always misleading. You have to avoid it.
I always do the slate board; I want to be the last one from the actors on one side and the technical apparatus on the other side. I’m the last one and then things roll. You don’t have to be a dictator.
Never show anyone in a documentary, rushes. They’ll become self-conscious. Never ever do that.
Sometimes it’s good to leave your character alone so no one can predict what is going to happen next. Sometimes these moments are very telling and moving.
Dismiss the culture of complaint you hear everywhere.
You should always try to find a way deep into someone.
If the gender-defying German performer Klaus Nomi (above) was an acquired taste, so is Jägermeister, the hangover-defying (some say inducing) German 70-proof herbal liqueur.
Synergies aside, it’s still surprising that any company big enough to have shareholders would elect to have as bizarre a scenemaker as Nomi to endorse their product.
If you can identify any of Nomi’s fellow Jägermeister fans, please let us know in the comments. Not every wonderful creature gets the documentary he or she deserves, but Andrew Horn’s 2004 The Nomi Song can hip you to the creature who came from outer space to save the human race. Watch it for free here.
What is Film Noir? Ask that question to the Film Noir Foundation and this is what they’ll tell you:
Film noir is one of Hollywood’s only organic artistic movements. Beginning in the early 1940s, numerous screenplays inspired by hardboiled American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European émigré directors who shared a certain storytelling sensibility: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery often drawn from an earlier era of German “expressionist” cinema. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, among others, were among this Hollywood vanguard.
During and immediately following World War II, movie audiences responded to this fresh, vivid, adult-oriented type of film — as did many writers, directors, cameramen and actors eager to bring a more mature world-view to Hollywood product. Largely fueled by the financial and artistic success of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity(1944), the studios began cranking out crime thrillers and murder dramas with a particularly dark and venomous view of existence.
In 1946 a Paris retrospective of American films embargoed during the war clearly revealed this trend toward visibly darker, more cynical crime melodramas. It was noted by several Gallic critics who christened this new type of Hollywood product “film noir,” or black film, in literal translation.
Few, if any of the artists in Hollywood who made these films called them “noir” at the time. But the vivid co-mingling of lost innocence, doomed romanticism, hard-edged cynicism, desperate desire, and shadowy sexuality that was unleashed in those immediate post-war years proved hugely influential, both among industry peers in the original era, and to future generation of storytellers, both literary and cinematic.
If you want to get another angle on the question, you can always take into consideration Roger Ebert’s 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films. But our suggestion, especially on a long Sunday afternoon, is to spend some time watching the classic movies gathered in our collection of 50 Free Noir Films. The collection features public domain films by John Huston, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles and other celebrated directors. Here’s a quick sample of what’s in the archive:
Beat the Devil – Free – Directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, the film is something of a comic and dramatic spoof of the film noir tradition. (1953)
D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s classic noir film. Called “one of the most accomplished, innovative, and downright twisted entrants to the film noir genre.” (1950) Five Minutes to Live — Free — Memorable bank heist movie stars Johnny Cash, Vic Tayback, Ron Howard, and country music great, Merle Travis. (1961)
Quicksand - Free — Peter Lorre and Mickey Rooney star in a story about a garage mechanic’s descent into crime. (1950)
Scarlet Street — Free — Directed by Fritz Lang with Edward G. Robinson. A film noir great. (1945)
The Hitch-Hiker - Free — The first noir film made by a woman noir director, Ida Lupino. (1953)
The Stranger - Free — Directed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robinson. One of Welles’s major commercial successes. (1946)
We recently added another 15 films to the collection of free noir films. So even if you’ve perused the list in the past, there’s now something new to enjoy.
Europeans do weird things with American folk music. Sometimes they do horrible things, like the 1994 techno rendition of traditional country song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” by a Swedish act who called themselves “Rednex” and who dressed up like cartoonish hillbillies in a parody only slightly less offensive than their music. In the video above, we have three continents colliding for another Scandinavian appropriation of Appalachian tropes, by way of a cover of “Thunderstruck” by Aussies AC/DC. The Finnish bluegrass band Steve ‘N’ Seagulls has achieved viral notoriety with their most recent release, which features banjo, mandolin, upright bass, accordion, a drummer who plays the spoons, and an anvil. Oh, and of course a wardrobe of overalls and suspenders without shirts. And the accordion player arrives on the scene on a riding mower.
Offensive? I don’t know—where Rednex was clearly minstrelsy, this has the feel of a fond tribute to a culture whose musical traditions Steve ‘N’ Seagulls clearly adores, though their wearing of Native headdress (below) would not sit well with certain music festival organizers.
As for their take on AC/DC; I almost prefer it to the original, though one Metafilter user pointed out that being able to hear the lyrics with such clarity does confirm one’s suspicion that they’re completely inane. And lest you think Steve ‘N’ Seagulls is some one-cover-hit wonder, check out their covers of Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” above and Dio’s “Holy Diver” below.
If you read the novels and stories of Ursula K. LeGuin and J.G. Ballard, you drop yourself into invented realities both overwhelmingly alien and unsettlingly familiar. And if you heard them on the radio — That Most Intimate of All Media, so they say — wouldn’t those qualities take on a new intensity? Thanks to CBC Radio’s Vanishing Point, a science-fiction anthology series which ran from the mid-1980s to the early 90s, you can do just that and find out for yourself what it feels like to have them piped more or less directly into your mind’s eye. Fans of both LeGuin and Ballard may take exception to the straight labeling of them as “science fiction” authors, and rightly so. The former’s work belongs as much to the tradition of fantasy as to that of sci-fi, and in both modes does a lot of detailed sociological world-building; the latter’s dark psychological dimension and near-nonfictional use of the modern world always prevented easy categorization. Still, I suspect that the makers of Vanishing Point not just knew all this, but understood its appeal.
They must also have realized that neither LeGuin nor Ballard had grown famous for their adaptability. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven got made twice for television, to varying opinions; opinions varied even more when her Earthsea books more recently became a Sci Fi Channel miniseries and a film from Hayao Miyazaki’s animation studio. Ballard’s novel of auto-wreck-eroticism Crash became a cult favorite in the hands of David Cronenberg, but usually his work crosses into other media in a more bizarre fashion (such as the television short of Crash we featured last year). But radio can handle pretty much anything such imaginative writers can throw at it, as you’ll hear in Vanishing Point’s six-part adaptation of LeGuin’s The Dispossessed at the top of the post, or in the Internet Archive playlist of its six adapted Ballard stories just above. History, alas, hasn’t recorded the reaction that LeGuin, always outspoken about others’ treatments of her worlds, had to these CBC dramas. When Rick McGrath of jgballard.ca sent Ballard himself CDs of all the productions in 2004, he received “a great note from him explaining he’d love to listen to them, but he has yet to buy a CD player.” And if I had to make a guess, I’d say that visionary of our alienated, fragmented technological future never got around to picking one up.
Find more sci-fi radio dramatizations in the relateds below.
Rookie’s never less than worthy “Ask a Grown Man” series provides a forum for mature males like actor Jon Hamm and radio personality Ira Glass to offer thoughtful, straightforward advice and explanations, born of personal experience, to teenage girls (and other interested parties).
The most recent edition adds depth, and could just as accurately be titled “Ask a Level-Headed 50-Year-Old Father of Three, Who’s Been Happily Married to His Children’s Mother for Years.”
Lurking just beneath Stephen Colbert’s hawkish Colbert Report persona is a fair-minded, serious fellow, who’s unembarrassed to weigh in in favor of parental authority when a 19-year-old fan complains of her dad’s opposition to sleepovers at her boyfriend’s place while she’s still living at home. Perhaps she should’ve asked a grown man whom experience hadn’t equipped to see things from the other side of the fence, as Colbert foresees that his answer won’t “go over great with everyone.”
Perhaps this segment should be called “Ask a Grown Man Whose Unequivocating Moral Compass Is Inconveniently Close to Your Dad’s, But Whose Position Allows Him to Offer Insights Without Losing His Temper or Going Off Message.”
Colbert’s children’s extremely low profile in the media’s line up of celebrity offspring reflects well on those charged with their upbringing. Were his 18-year-old daughter to take issue with the old man’s musings on Twitter or Snapchat, she’d have the luxury of doing so in the way of the average Rookie reader, rather than some obsessively observed nearly-grown baby bump.
As to how to tell whether a boy—or anyone—likes you, Colbert says “they want to hear your stories.”
As one viewer noted, “ask a grown-up, get grown-up answers.” Word.
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