Just back from "The Naked Gun," which I kind of liked. (It's the summer of the "kind of liked it" movie.) Liam Neeson can be funny, but he has hurt stitched into his face; he can't do the oblivious deadpan, so the movie has an odd undercurrent of poignancy.

As a child, I thought absolutely everything about the "Sound of Music" movie was wonderful. Well, possibly excepting Julie Andrews' walking down the aisle to a choir of nuns singing, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" It took me years to get the implicit joke of it - for the adults.

It's the birthday of Myrna Loy who, opposite William Powell in the "Thin Man" movies, demonstrated that marriage could be fun, witty and enduringly sexy. Who glided through bust-ups, shoot-ups and bottomless martinis with an amused composure that has never been matched.

Farewell to Robert Wilson, a truly international theater artist who created a startling new vocabulary of images, which seemed to materialize from a Jungian unconscious. He expanded our ideas of what an actor does and how time passes on a stage. I know I'll see him in my dreams.

I inhaled the entire first season of Jack Rooke's "Big Boys," in which scarred, decent, questioning people are mutually empathetic at university. When it's this hot, and the world is this nasty, there is great release in sobbing over people being kind to each other.

It's the birthday of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the last of NYC's great sphinxes. She sustained an intellectual distance from the imponderable celebrity that saturated her life, and she kept her aura bright by staying silent. There is no equivalent in this age of compulsive confession.

Because I have seen "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," there's a part of me that keeps hoping that someone on the floor of the House or Senate - ideally, Mike Johnson - will suddenly realize he's sunk so deep into the mire he can no longer breathe. Sob-wracked confession follows.

Happy birthday, Mick Jagger. Whose voice tore into my childhood, thrilling in its abrasiveness to someone weaned on sweet and smooth. Who made big lips and lissome androgyny cool. Which made me think that maybe I could grow up to be cool, too. (Anyway, it was nice to think so.)

If you need a dash of hope (I know you do) watch Sacha Jenkins' wonderful doc "Sunday Best," about Black performers on the Ed Sullivan Show in the Civil Rights era, from Bo Diddley to the Jackson 5. An unexpected high point: Toni Harper, at 11, gently taking "Swing Low" straight to heaven in 1949.

Please, my name is Papageno.

Every evening, this time of year, we have our own chamber orchestra of wood thrushes performing. They are Mozartian -- and essential reminders of the beauty in the world.

Actually, that last shot of Bertha Russell finally, finally cracking, at the end of Episode 5, is kind of a wow moment. And it finally justifies Carrie Coon's gamble of having played Bertha with such rigid self-containment. It reveals the fine actor who's been there all along.

I have come to identify myself as an emotional support human for an easily triggered cat.

He adheres religiously to the teachings of his early and most influential mentor, Roy Cohn: "Admit nothing and deny everything." In this, if in nothing else, he is consistent.

Yeah, he has to be, though I love Tommy Rail -- and Fosse, though his appearances at scant

It's the birthday of my favorite male dancer in movies, after Fred Astaire. Of course he's also a pretty fine rat-a-tat talker too, and the enactor of one of the wildest, fiercest nervous breakdowns in movies (in "White Heat"). Celebrate by walking like a rooster.

Even her ankles spoke volumes. (See: "The Lady Eve," "Double Indemnity.") As the years pass, I become more and more enamored of Barbara Stanwyck, whose unmannered, direct and unerringly truthful acting, visible in every line of her body, simply doesn't date. It's her birthday.

There are, at least, those moments in "The Gilded Age" that are so plushly, romantically camp, you temporarily forgive the prevailing woodenness. E.g. Gladys the bride poised on the staircase as the servants cheer her onto a loveless marriage. Costumes and context do the work.

Happy Bastille Day. France is a punctilious nation, and when I lived in Paris I found myself being admonished by strangers for mysterious violations of protocol. A woman once yelled at me, as I strolled on the Blvd St. Germain, that I walked too fast (for a Parisian flaneur?).

The graciousness of Sinner and Alcaraz in victory and defeat at Wimbledon. I know some of it's pro forma. But to see these days a civilized, and mutually admiring, exchange between a winner and a loser...Much to be emulated.

Richard Nelson and Ricky Ian Gordon created a "Recherche"-based musical called "My Life with Albertine."

It is the birthday of Marcel Proust. Try to remember.

Local tennis spectator

Things I've discovered about the era known as "The Gilded Age": In those days, people talked as if they had learned what they would be saying phonetically. They held themselves rigidly. And they could never escape the sense that they were trapped in the wrong time, place and role.

Tonight: fireflies in the rain, sheet lightning and murmuring thunder. Upstate in July.

t's the birthday of director of George Cukor, celebrated for eliciting the churning emotional depths beneath the sparkling surfaces of his female stars. And who gave us two unimpeachable classics with his friend Katharine Hepburn: "Little Women" and "The Philadelphia Story."

Farewell to the playwright Richard Greenberg, of "Take Me Out," "The Assembled Parties" and "Three Days of Rain." A lyrical chronicler of the mysteries that are human beings, he understood that the past, far from being another country, is forever a pulsing part of our present.

YouTube video by Dana Spiardi Yankee Doodle Dandy - Jimmy Cagney

This is the time to celebrate the dancing feet of James Cagney, playing a real-live nephew of his Uncle Sam, born on this very day. No one else can move like Cagney as Cohan. Better than fireworks.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8wx...

A humongous ego is a prerequisite for a concert performer, says a flaming 22-year-old Mick Jagger in "Charlie Is My Darling." He embodies the theory in Peter Whitehead's backstage doc on the Stones in Ireland in 1965. Just found it on Criterion and savored every restless second.

Unexpected animals are rife -- and possibly in revolt -- in our little corner of this hot planet. A black bear returns to chase away workmen in our back yard. A bobcat climbs our apple tree. A fox saunters brazenly by. And ants are so aggressively everywhere I find myself thinking of "Them!"