George Stephanopoulos moderates the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

LINCOLN: In my opinion, slavery will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?

LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?

LINCOLN: Sounds right — his ex-wife was from Kentucky.

By the way, I’ve been getting very good at spelling “Stephanopoulos.”

This is a must-read about the travesty of a presidential debate Wednesday night. George Stephanopolous defended the vacuous questions he and Charles Gibson asked, saying that voters were concerned about electability. Ed Kilgore rips apart this argument.

I’m still mad about that debate.

I love this picture.

We got approved to rent the apartment. We’re happy.

One of the great things about blogging is that you can ask people for recommendations, which I’ve done several times on this blog.

So my next request for recommendations is: can anyone recommend a mover in NYC?

Alan Keyes officially leaves GOP and hardly anyone notices. Heheh.

We’ve put in an application and refundable deposit on an apartment. My tension has just melted away.

We saw a very nice place on Friday evening in a building we had looked in before. I thought it was great but Matt was hesitant. So we didn’t act on it. Then over the weekend Matt started to warm to it. But I thought it would be gone by now. I emailed the management company agent last night and she got back to me today and said it was still available. So we acted FAST. She emailed me the application and I put together all our paperwork (since we’d already put most of it together in anticipation of finding a place).

It has pros and cons but mostly pros. I feel very happy. It’s in the area south of Columbia University.

I was tense and frantic all morning. The agent said that someone else over the weekend had expressed interest in it (true? not true? who knows, who cares) so I wanted to get all our papers together and get the necessary money orders and hightail it back into the city (Matt couldn’t get away from work today).

So that’s all done and we just have to wait for approval. There’s no reason we wouldn’t be approved, but I like to worry. Well, my body likes to worry. My body is all keyed up and tensed up from a weekend of stress and a morning of worry and it hasn’t quite realized it can relax now.

At any rate, I AM SO RELIEVED.

I think this was the most dejecting weekend of our apartment search so far. We’ve expanded our search from no-fee apartments to broker apartments, but even using brokers we’re not finding places in our price range that we’re comfortable with. There’s something wrong with every place that we’ve seen. Yesterday we saw three places on the Upper West Side; today we looked at a place in the West Village and two places in Chelsea; on Friday evening we saw three places in a building near us, south of Columbia.

I spent much of the weekend depressed and/or anxious. Matt felt some anxiety at a few points, but not as much as I did, and he subsumes his anxiety in activity, while I just… express it.

Last night we went to bed around midnight. I somehow woke up at about 3:40 in the morning and spent the next three hours awake, trying not to think about apartments. It was awful.

At times, I’ve been ready to take a particular place but Matt has wanted to keep looking. There was this one place Matt liked but I didn’t like at all. A couple times, he’s been able to convince me why a particular place was problematic. There was a very nice little place on West End Avenue, but it was essentially a first floor apartment (really second floor, but the first floor was sunken a little below street level, so the second floor was more like the first-and-a-half floor), and it had no bars on the windows even though it faced the street.

Late this afternoon we went for a long walk, starting from our apartment on 109th Street and ending at Fort Tryon Park in Inwood, to see what different neighborhoods were like. Most areas north of Columbia are crap, until you get to maybe the 170s, where it seems to get nicer but un-Manhattan-like. Using this, I calculated that we walked just over 5 miles.

I’ll tell you something – this whole search has been very healthy for our relationship. We’re learning how to communicate better with each other about what we want and don’t want, and Matt’s getting better at giving me the affection and TLC I need when I’m feeling ragged. As I’ve said before, I am a dog and Matt is a cat, but lately he’s been trying to be more attentive to my canine-ish need for affection.

Maybe in 10 or 15 years we’ll get a nice little place out in the country with a stream in the backyard and a real dog…

[Update: Matt didn’t even tell me he blogged this morning. Some similar thoughts there.]

I’m reading a terrific new book right now: Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris. It’s about the five movies that were nominated for the 1967 Oscar for Best Picture and how they illustrate the enormous changes Hollywood was undergoing in the late sixties.

The five films included three revolutionary pictures — Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night — and two throwbacks, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle. Starting in late 1963 and culminating in the Oscars ceremony in the spring of 1968, the book deftly interweaves the stories of the five films as they go from conception to casting to filming to release to awards. You learn about the old guard, such as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was Tracy’s last film and he died soon after filming ended), Rex Harrison, director Stanley Kramer, and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; the new guard, such as Warren Beatty, director Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman; and in the middle, Sidney Poitier, fed up with old Hollywood and the racial box it had put him in, but somewhat reluctant to give up his safe, heroic image.

One of the many treats of the book is reading about the fiasco that was Doctor Dolittle. Movie musicals were big in the early sixties — My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins were all big hits within the course of a year — and some people figured, hey, since those worked, let’s make the Doctor Dolittle novels into a movie musical too! Sure, it requires a huge menagerie of animals, but that’s no problem, right? Of course, it became a huge problem.

Here’s one passage, during filming in a picturesque English village where nobody realized it typically rained throughout the summer:

The fields where many of the animals were kept became so saturated with rain that they turned into swamps. The rhinoceros got pneumonia… Even a shot as simple as one in which Dolittle addresses a few lines to an attentive parrot and squirrel who are standing on a railing became a nightmare when the recalcitrant squirrel wouldn’t stay still. When crew members tried to wrap tiny wires around its paws and then attach the wires to the rail with tacks, the squirrel became understandably agitated. The production broke for lunch, and [director] Fleischer, furious, went off to find a local veterinarian to find out how the squirrel could be sedated. In the afternoon, trainers filled a fountain pen with gin and fed it to the squirrel drop by drop. Finally… they got “a few seconds of film showing the squirrel… nodding and swaying” before it passed out cold.

This was compounded by the fact that Rex Harrison was apparently an asshole throughout the shoot and was accompanied by his drunken basket case of a wife who would act out in restaurants.

If you have any interest in film, you’ll love the book.

Mark Harris, incidentally, is playwright Tony Kushner’s husband. (They had a commitment ceremony a few years ago.)

How did we wind up with George W. Bush in the White House?

That’s not just a rhetorical question. I’ve occasionally asked it over the last 7+ years, because I genuinely wonder how we managed to get ourselves such an awful president. Was it just dumb rotten luck, or was it due to inherent problems in the system? And by “the system” I mean everything that surrounds us – the political system, the media, the American people.

I guess it’s a little bit of everything. For us to get into the horrible situation we’re in, where the next president is going to have a devil of a time trying to correct what went wrong, required a convergence of factors.

First, George W. Bush got nominated. And he got nominated because (a) he decided to run, and (b) he locked up most of the Republican establishment as early as 1998, the year he was re-elected Texas governor. There are times when an upstart can upset the establishment candidate (example: Democrats, 2008), but most of the time, if you’ve got the establishment behind you, you’ve got the nomination.

Second, he had a vulnerable opponent. Al Gore ran at the tail end of almost eight years of prosperity – and yet he only barely won the popular vote (by a mere half a percentage point), because he wasn’t a very good politician.

Third, we had a horrible press corps that had no idea what’s important in electing a president. That could be because…

…Fourth, we were in a period of apparent peace and prosperity, where many people thought it didn’t matter who got elected. (And yet we’re now in a time of fear and recession, and the press still doesn’t do a good job.)

Fifth, just plain horrible luck. Theresa LePore and her butterfly ballot cost Gore more votes than hanging chads ever did. And that led to the Florida debacle. People might have expected some states to have close votes, but who could have predicted the freakish closeness of the Florida vote? And who could have predicted that the national electoral vote would be so close that neither candidate could get 270 electoral votes without winning that freakishly close state? After all, it’s not just that Florida was freakishly close but that Florida mattered. The country went down the rabbit hole that night.

All of this helps explain how W got the presidency. But it doesn’t explain why W managed to be so awful.

Historians are always looking for the causes of events. Sometimes the causes are inherent in the system, but sometimes events are just random. Bush’s ascension to the presidency required a little of both.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand how we got here. It’s almost literary, really. If only it weren’t fiction.

Stephen Colbert was apparently on the Today show this morning. You can watch the video.

A question to my readers: can any of you recommend a real estate broker for rental apartments in Manhattan? Matt and I have been considering using one.

Apartment-hunting is stressful. I think I’m more stressed out about it than Matt. The stressful part is trying to make a snap decision about whether you want a particular apartment or not. Everything we’ve seen so far has been flawed in some way. Small living room without windows, or too dark, or whatever. But perhaps decent enough to live in. We still have a couple more weeks in which we can look, so if we keep seeing similar things, we might take one and might not need a broker.

Thing is, we’d really like to find a building that has laundry facilities in it, and either an elevator or no higher than a 2nd-floor walkup. Our top budget is $2400/month. We’re looking on the Upper West Side, up to anywhere south of Columbia. We might not need a broker after all, but if a broker can widen the opportunities, we might be willing to use one.

(Feel free to email me with recommendations.)

We watched Enchanted on Saturday night. What an adorable, sweet movie.

I cannot get enough of this number. I had to watch it three times before putting the DVD back in the Netflix envelope and irrevocably sealing it shut. And then it dawned on me to check YouTube. How long must it have taken to film this?

I had never actually seen this; I was overseas at the time. But I’d always heard about it. Who hasn’t?

Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here’s the speech Robert F. Kennedy made on the night of King’s assassination. I get chills whenever I listen to the crowd react to the news.

RFK, of course, would himself be assassinated two months later.

Marc Acito’s new novel, Attack of the Theater People, comes out later this month. Anyone who loves theater should read his first novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater; a funny, heartwarming and sexy story about New Jersey theater geeks.

Anyway, Marc has posted a short video promoting the book. I love it.

Who hasn’t thought about making out with a poster of Cheyenne Jackson?

TV Squad presents a list of 15 great New York TV shows.

I’m so happy to see that How I Met Your Mother is on that list, and that it won out over Friends. Even though it’s not filmed there, HIMYM just *gets* New York in a way that Friends never did. Friends would never come up with something like Dowisetrepla.

The apartments are still way too big for Manhattan, though.