... you can talk about whatever you want.
Monday, January 24, 2022
At the Backyard Fox Café...
"The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear challenges to the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina..."
"... presenting the most serious threat in decades to the use of affirmative action by the nation's public and private colleges and universities.... In the latest case, groups backed by a longtime opponent of affirmative action, Edward Blum of Maine, sued Harvard and UNC in federal court, claiming that Harvard's undergraduate admissions system discriminated against Asian American students and that UNC's discriminated against both Asian American and white students.... The challengers in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, urged the justices to overrule the court’s 2003 decision on affirmative action, which upheld the University of Michigan's use of race as a plus factor and served as a model for similar admissions programs nationwide...."
"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
I'm reading that this morning because it popped up in the end of a New Yorker article about — of all things — Led Zeppelin:
If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don’t have to do it themselves—which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract—then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony.... [S]urely all kinds of demonic and powerful art, including many varieties of music, both classical and popular, have been created by people who didn’t live demonically. What about Flaubert’s mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art? In Led Zeppelin’s case, the great music, the stuff that is still violently radical, was made early in the band’s career, when its members were most sober. The closer the band got to actual violence, the tamer the music became.
Yes but who is the "famous fictional atheist" and how can I reverse the paraphrase "atrocious human deeds are... the manure for our future harmony"? Oh, I managed to do that.
It's from "The Brothers Karamazov," spoken by Ivan, who's famously atheist:“Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. I have believed, and I want to see for myself, and if I am dead by that time, let them resurrect me, because it will be too unfair if it all takes place without me. Is it possible that I've suffered so that I, together with my evil deeds and sufferings, should be manure for someone's future harmony? I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for.”
The NYT tries hard to get Temple Grandin to talk about vaccines and the fear of autism, but she won't go there.
They get an interesting interview out of her anyway — "Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently" — but it starts off incredibly awkwardly:
During the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about who’s vaccinated and who’s not, and historically, a fear of autism is one of the things that antivaxxers — I will make only one comment: I have two Pfizers and a booster and a flu shot. That’s all I’m going to say.
Well, if it’s OK, I have another couple of questions about vaccines and autism, and you can choose if you’ll answer or not. That’s a subject where that’s pretty much all I’m going to say. I am glad that I have my vaccinations. I don’t have to worry about going to the hospital. I’ll leave it at that.
In the past, you’ve expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines because of — No comment.
Is it your understanding that the concern that certain parents have with vaccines is — No comment.
OK, I’ll move on for now...
There's a footnote at "In the past, you’ve expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines":
In a 2013 interview with The Times, when Grandin was asked about mothers of autistic children who suspect links between vaccines and autism, she replied, “I have talked to maybe five or six of those mothers, and that’s the reason I don’t pooh-pooh it.”
The interviewer David Marchese moves on to some other things, but comes back to what I assume is the whole reason for choosing to interview this well-known public figure now:
There are specific studies debunking the idea that vaccines have a causal relation to autism, A 2011 analysis of more than 1,000 research articles concluded that there are no links between immunization and autism, right? No comment. No comment. No comment.
You don’t think it could be useful for people to hear your opinion? No comment. No comment.
I got it. You better get it. Because I’m not discussing it.
Have you gotten in trouble for talking about this subject before? No comment. I’ve had my two Pfizer shots and my booster. If they require a fourth shot, I’ll be first in line, thank you.
Again Marchese retreats into other material, and after a while — showing amazing doggedness — he tries again:
I realize that maybe earlier I should have just asked this question bluntly: Do you believe vaccines can cause autism? I’m not discussing that. I will give you one thing about vaccinations: I listened to the news, and a doctor was complaining about having heart-attack patients die because they could not get into the emergency room because the hospital was so full of unvaccinated Covid people. And then I talked to this person that was not vaccinated about, you know, maybe all these people filling up this hospital killed some heart-attack patients. He said, I never thought about that. That I will talk about.
But why not vaccines and autism? I don’t want to talk about that.
I’m curious about your reluctance. I’m not discussing it. OK. There are certain things I don’t talk about because it interferes with stuff I care about. It’s that simple.
He really wanted her to get into that. I am going to guess that he had an idea for an article that it might be possible to write: Maybe Grandin would give people reason not to dread autism and perhaps to advise us that it ought to be understood in a positive light, as part of the rainbow of human diversity.
But, good lord, how many times should a reporter pressure the interviewee to talk about a subject she's put off limits? It's interesting to print the entire sequence, so that we, the readers, live through the experience of a reporter not taking no for an answer.
I've been interviewed a few times by a reporter who kept coming back to something he seemed to already believe and wanted me to say, so I like the transparency! And Marchese never comes out and states what — if anything — he's trying to get her to say, so this interview is much better than what I've gone through.
"When the snow melts in the spring, fields can get so muddy in the plains of Eastern Europe that Russians have a word for it: Rasputitsa, or 'the season of bad roads.'..."
"If Russian President Vladimir Putin orders his forces to invade, analysts believe it would come before the spring thaw. 'The best time to do it is winter because it's going to be a mechanized advance and the mechanized divisions need hard frozen ground'... At a news conference Wednesday marking his first year in office, President Joe Biden warned Putin against an invasion, threatening a strong response by the US and NATO, but waffled over what would happen if Russia made a 'minor incursion,' in an awkward statement he sought to clarify afterward. 'The Russian dictator has not been subtle or secretive about what he wants. He might as well make the national anthem the Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R.,"' wrote Max Boot, in the Washington Post. 'He definitely wants to resurrect the Soviet empire, thereby undoing what he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. And that requires bringing back into the fold the second-largest former Soviet republic (by population) — the independent state of Ukraine.'"
From "Putin confronts the mud of Ukraine" (CNN).
***
From a 2011 post of mine, collecting mud quotes:
"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev
"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau
"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf
Russian, French, American, British.
Sunday, January 23, 2022
"What's Up With The Ignorant Tattoo Style?"
I learned a lot from this fascinating video:
I became aware of this phenomenon yesterday, when I saw this and this at the subreddit r/shittytattoos.
Here's video of the "[c]reator of the famed Ignorant Style tattoo style, Fuzi... a street art legend."
And here's an Instagram collection of Ignorant Style tattoos.
I'm pretty amused by the concept and, especially, the name — though I think most examples of this sort of thing are a mistake. Many years ago, probably in the 1990s, I saw a young woman on campus that had a tattoo of a bathtub on her neck. Just a dark line drawing of an old-time claw-footed bathtub with the pipe extending upward for the shower head. I felt so bad about it. And I love bathtubs. But now I can see that it was an early example of the Ignorant Style!
ADDED: Back in 2009, I blogged about a tattoo artist that did things that he might characterize as Ignorant Style. It's at least adjacent to Ignorant Style. I said "I love these scribbly tattoos!" You can see a lot of his things at Instagram, here.
"Could we have had a more unsuitable man in charge? Sloppy, lusty, blind to details..."
"... just look at the piteous footage of Boris Johnson as he apologised to the Queen last week, nearly weeping, entirely out of self-pity. Nobody, he moaned, told him the massive party he had personally attended was 'against the rules.' If it wasn’t a 'work event,' he said, he couldn’t 'imagine why on earth it would have gone ahead.' I can tell him why: it went ahead because no one at Downing Street ever gave a toss about the rules. Not a single one of the scores of entitled, cashmere-hoodie-toting Tinder-swiping gin-in-a-tin-chugging junior staffers who flocked to the basement disco gimpfest the night before Prince Philip’s funeral gave a second thought about what was happening in the rest of the country. It says everything that even when Johnson came out of hospital, one of the earliest things he did wasn’t to tell Carrie to tone down the fire-pit heart-to-hearts; he went to what one MP described as a 'welcome back' party in his garden. He ignored Covid and nearly died from it but came back and still ignored it and licked everything. Who does that?"
From "Keeping up with the Johnsons is exhausting — life is lived at 10,000 miles a minute" by Camilla Long (London Times).
I do enjoy reading The London Times. The writing is different from what we get here in America. Apparently, in the U.K., a classy paper will print the word "gimpfest." And every other sentence makes me want to diagram.
"To celebrate his birthday, he had also brought along his mandolin, foie gras and champagne...."
From "French adventurer, 75, dies in attempt to row across the Atlantic/Jean-Jacques Savin, a former paratrooper, wanted ‘to laugh at old age’ but got into difficulties off the Azores" (The Guardian).
I don't much celebrate birthdays — do you? — but I don't think I'd even consider celebrating my birthday while alone, and if I did, I might come up with the idea of champagne and some special food, but not of picking up a musical instrument and serenading myself.
It's so charming — don't you think? — that mandolin, foie gras, and champagne. I look to see — when was his birthday? Did he get to that birthday before the deathday popped up in the timeline of fate? Yes, he did. His birthday was January 14th. He died on the 21st.
"Some senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it."
"Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming. Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological. Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy."
Writes Robert Reich in "Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts" (The Guardian).
Is it "whacky" or "wacky"? The author of "Common Errors in English Usage" says:
Although the original spelling of this word meaning “crazy” was “whacky,” the current dominant spelling is “wacky.” If you use the older form, some readers will think you’ve made a spelling error.
But the OED has the oldest example as "wacky," in 1935, though "whacky" also appears early on, in 1938. "Wacky" looks predominant, but "whacky" is also good. Still, a "whack" is a hard hit, so you might think about whether you want that image infecting the meaning which is just "Crazy, mad; odd, peculiar."
The OED tips me off that "wackier" appears in John Irving's "World According to Garp." I'm printing it here because to me it's much more interesting than Reich's going on about the mental aberrations of Sinema and Manchin:
There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed [spoiler deleted] by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King, and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader. And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.
I like the phrase "drive [them] even wackier or simply away." There must be a Greek word for that structure, the intentional and surprising lack of parallelism ("wackier" being an adjective and "away" an adverb).
"Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools."
The ACLU tweets, quoted in "The ACLU Suddenly Reverses Its Support For Transparency/The long-time civil liberties organization continues its partisan transformation" (Inquire).
The ACLU tweet links to this NBC News article, "They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.' Conservative activists want schools to post lesson plans online, but free speech advocates warn such policies could lead to more censorship in K-12 schools." From that article:
[T]eachers, their unions and free speech advocates say the proposals would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and would lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism....
“It’s important we call this out,” said Jon Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America, a nonprofit group that promotes free speech. “It’s a shift toward more neutral-sounding language, but it’s something that is potentially just as censorious.”
"But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion..."
"... the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."
From "Does 'Mein Kampf' Remain a Dangerous Book?" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).
In this short article, Gopnik uses variations on the word "creepy" 5 times: "not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy.... The creepiness extends toward his fanatical fear of impurity.... Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now.... Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone.... it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."
That suggests that, if we readi the book, we will feel an instinctive revulsion against the writer, even as the writer was endeavoring to inspire revulsion against designated others. Is it good to rely on this instinct to deliver us from evil?
"The indictment [for seditious conspiracy] describes some Oath Keepers’ belief that 'the federal government has been coopted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights.'"
"That [Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers], the leading defendant, graduated from one of the country’s most élite law schools, Yale, is more than just a fun fact. He developed his views on the Constitution as a law student eighteen years ago, and won a school prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. His paper argued that the Bush Administration’s treatment of 'enemy-combatants' in the war on terror was unconstitutional. Rhodes wrote that 'terrorism is a vague concept,' and that 'we need to follow our Constitution’s narrow definition of war and the enemy.' The argument would have found much support in liberal legal-élite and civil-liberties circles.... [I]n order to convict the defendants of seditious conspiracy, the government will have to prove that they planned their storming of the Capitol with the purpose of opposing the lawful transfer of Presidential power.... Rhodes’s seeming belief that his plan for January 6th was resistance to an unconstitutional process may seem wholly unreasonable.... But, if the case goes to trial... [s]ome jurors may find it difficult to convict Rhodes and others of seditious conspiracy if they find that sincere views about reality informed the defendants’ purpose.... Such an outcome might have the effect of adding legal legitimacy to the big lie.... Now that talk of potential 'civil war' occurs not only among extremist groups but in the mainstream press, a public trial of alleged seditionists will showcase the central fissure that could lead us there."
Writes Jeannie Suk Gersen in "The Case Against the Oath Keepers/Members of the group face seditious-conspiracy charges for their roles in the January 6th insurrection. Can a sincere belief that the election was stolen protect them?" (The New Yorker).
Gersen highlights the risk the government is taking, forcing public attention onto the seditious conspiracy charge: Americans will put effort into understanding the defendants' arguments, some unknown segment of us will agree with them, and many more will think the government has overreached because it cannot prove that they were insincere.
Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading "Sports."
I thought this was odd:
But I clicked through and saw that it was no mistake:
Yes, I blogged Aaron's bookshelf gesturing — back on January 4th... in happier days....
Aaron Rodgers points out his copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand to Eli and Peyton Manning during Monday Night Football. pic.twitter.com/2qSOcSSb3m
— The Recount (@therecount) January 4, 2022
Saturday, January 22, 2022
"[S]ince around 1980, English speakers have been more given to writing about feelings than writing from a more scientific perspective."
"From around 1850 on, [researchers] found, the frequency of words such as 'technology,' 'result,' 'assuming,' 'pressure,' 'math,' 'medicine,' 'percent,' 'unit' and 'fact' has gone down while the frequency of words such as 'spirit,' 'imagine,' 'hunch,' 'smell,' 'soul,' 'believe,' 'feel,' 'fear' and 'sense' has gone up. The authors associate their observations with what Daniel Kahneman has labeled the intuition-reliant 'thinking fast' as opposed to the more deliberative 'thinking slow.' In a parallel development, the authors show that the use of plural pronouns such as 'we' and 'they' has dropped somewhat since 1980 while the use of singular pronouns has gone up. They see this as evidence that more of us are about ourselves and how we feel as individuals — the subjective — than having the more collective orientation that earlier English seemed to reflect."
Writes John McWhorter, in "Don’t, Like, Overanalyze Language" (NYT), discussing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purported to detect a "surge of post-truth political argumentation" and a "historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and — inextricably linked — between the rational and the emotional.”
McWhorter thinks the authors of the study are overdoing it, because, he says, often "the process by which language changes is that something starts out being about objective observation and drifts into being, as it were, all about me." He focuses on the question: "Why would this have happened to such an unusual extent since 1980?"
And he guesses that it's a matter of increasing informality, which naturally entails being "more open about the self, less withholding about the personal, more inclined to the intimate." In that light, it's hard to believe the researchers think they've shown a move from individualism to collectivism.
Something McWhorter doesn't talk about is that some people adopt a rationalistic tone for rhetorical purposes. They're not actually more rational, just trying persuade other people by posing as reasonable and unemotional. Ironically, that's an emotional move, and it can work if we respect the speaker's sincerity and good will, but it can stimulate wariness and irritation if we mistrust the speaker. And it's entirely rational to mistrust all speakers in the American political discourse that's developed in the last 40 years. In that light, it's not surprising that speakers have been abandoning the less effective rhetorical strategy.
"One of the first killer jokes in the stand-up act of Louie Anderson was about the meanness of older brothers."
"Imitating one of his own in an intimidating voice, he warned that there was a monster in a swamp nearby. With childlike fear in his eyes, Anderson reported that he avoided that area 'until I got a little older and a little smarter and a little brother.' Pivoting to the future in an instant, he adopted the older brother voice, pointing to the swamp and telling his sibling: 'That’s where your real parents live.'"
From "Louie Anderson and the Compassion of America’s Eternal Kid/He displayed an empathetic humanity that he shared offstage with his friend Bob Saget. The loss of both comics represents the end of an era" by Jason Zinoman (NYT).
When you think of the 1980s comedy boom, the first artist that comes to mind for many is Jerry Seinfeld and his clinically observational brand of humor. For others, it might be the rock-star flamboyance of Eddie Murphy or Andrew Dice Clay. But in the days of three major networks, the culture incentivized a warmly inclusive, rigorously relatable comedy that could appeal to a broad mainstream and, at its best and most resonant, had an empathetic humanity.
The outpouring of love for Bob Saget... was in part... because of a vast audience that saw him as the friendly paternal face on “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”... Anderson fit seamlessly into an equally idealized role as our culture’s eternal kid. There was a boyish innocence and sweetness to Anderson that never left him, even when he was playing a mother on “Baskets,” a remarkable and sincere performance....
I haven't kept up with network sitcoms, so "Baskets" was news to me. I enjoyed this, showing clips from the show, him getting made up as Christine Baskets, and his very sweet account of how he's bringing his own mother back to life:
And here are Saget and Anderson in a podcast conversation (recorded last May).
ADDED:
What is the controversy about this magazine cover at British Vogue?
Consider the question for yourself before reading the criticisms. 
At Instagram, British Vogue says: "The nine models gracing the cover are representative of an ongoing seismic shift that became more pronounced on the SS22 runways; awash with dark-skinned models whose African heritage stretched from Senegal to Rwanda to South Sudan to Nigeria to Ethiopia. For an industry long criticized for its lack of diversity, as well as for perpetuating beauty standards seen through a Eurocentric lens, this change is momentous."
At CNN, a writer based in Nigeria says:
Why are the models depicted in a dark and ominous tableau, the lighting so obscure to the point they are almost indistinguishable on a cover meant to celebrate their individuality? Why were they dressed all in black, giving a funereal air, and an almost ghoulish, otherworldly appearance?
Why were they sporting strangely-coiffed wigs? Many of these women wear their natural hair normally and it would have been great to see that reflected on a cover celebrating African beauty. Additionally, on the cover, the models' skin color appeared to be several shades darker than their normal skin tone.
The photographs were taken by Afro-Brazilian photographer Rafael Pavarotti, and the images -- published in numerous glossy magazines over the years -- are consistent with his visual style of presenting Black skin in an ultra-dark manner....
But the lighting, styling, and makeup, which purposefully exaggerated the models' already dark skin tones, reduced their distinguishing features and presented a homogenized look. Was this the best way to celebrate Black beauty?...
Should we ask what's the best way to celebrate black beauty or what's the vision of the artist/photographer? Pavarotti is black, so to push him back and say he's doing it wrong is to reject a black vision, to put him in a lower position than all the photographers whose vision is respected. And yet, the artist and model relationship has long been a matter of critique, and Pavorotti shouldn't get special immunity from criticism.
Many online critics felt the images were fetishized and pandering to a White gaze, ironic, considering the editorial team behind them consisted almost entirely of people of African descent.
Ghanaian writer Natasha Akua wrote in a private message on Instagram: "When I saw it I immediately was shocked ... I feel like I know what statement he was trying to make visually but turning these black models into this strange tableau straight out of a horror movie just felt instinctively wrong."
"Why darken their skin beyond recognition?" she asked. "To make some statement about being unapologetically black? Unapologetically black means being who you are and does not require this manner of hyperbole."
"I find the lighting and tones beautiful," Daniel Emuna wrote. "But my personal complaint is that publications and brands are constantly communicating that the deepest darkest hue in complexion represents the truest essence of Blackness or even Africanness. This is clearly a mark of the white gaze."
"[State voting] laws — like that recently passed in Georgia — are far from the nightmares that Dems have described, and contain some expansion of access to voting."
"Georgians, and Americans in general, overwhelmingly support voter ID laws, for example. Such laws poll strongly even among allegedly disenfranchised African-Americans — whose turnout in 2012, following a wave of ID laws, actually exceeded whites’ in the re-election of a black president. In fact, the normalization of ID in everyday life has only increased during the past year of vax-card requirements — a policy pushed by Democrats. And Biden did something truly dumb this week: he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in November now that his proposal for a federal overhaul has failed: 'I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit.' No sitting president should do this, ever. But when one party is still insisting that the entire election system was rigged last time in a massive conspiracy to overturn a landslide victory for Trump, the other party absolutely needs to draw a sharp line. Biden fatefully blurred that distinction, and took the public focus off the real danger: not voter suppression but election subversion, of the kind we are now discovering Trump, Giuliani and many others plotted during the transition period.... And why have they wildly inflated the threat to election security and engaged in the disgusting demagoguery of calling this 'Jim Crow 2.0'? The WSJ this week tracked down various unsavory GOP bills to suppress or subvert voting in three states — three states Obama singled out for criticism — and found that they had already died in committee. To argue as Biden did last week in Georgia that the goal of Republicans is 'to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion — something states can respect or ignore,' is to add hyperbole to distortion...."
Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "How Biden Lost The Plot/Listening to interest groups and activists is no way to get re-elected" (Substack).
Friday, January 21, 2022
"I’m an African-American man, so I speak plainly. It was a Black theater. You yelled at the screen, and folks would talk."
"A major component of Black existence is forced comportment in white spaces. There is a comfort derived from taking off the disguise, if just for a few minutes in the cinema."
Said Cyrus McQueen, a stand-up comedian, quoted in "The ‘Shouting Back’ Theater Abruptly Closes, and Brooklyn Mourns/A rowdy movie house suddenly goes dark, inspiring an outpouring of dismay and reminiscences" (NYT).
The theater closed last Sunday, taking regulars by surprise.... Dean Fleischer-Camp, a filmmaker, said that his favorite movie experience ever involved people “screaming, laughing, singing” and “throwing popcorn” during a 6 p.m. screening of “Drag Me to Hell.” Lincoln Restler, the newly elected councilman whose district includes Downtown Brooklyn, shared a picture of a moving van parked outside. “For the shouting-back-at-action-movie experience,” he wrote, “there was no place better!”
"How can the Washington Post say the court decisions on his vaccine or testing mandates were 'out of his control'?"
"Biden and his legal team are supposed to figure out a way to implement his policies that *won’t* get blocked by courts! Those court decisions didn’t happen at random; they happened because judges looked at what the administration did and decided that it didn’t comply with the law."
Writes my son John, at Facebook, commenting on "A year ago, Biden unveiled a 200-page plan to defeat covid. He has struggled to deliver on some key promises" (WaPo).
"Biden and his legal team are supposed to figure out a way to implement his policies that *won’t* get blocked by courts!" — We are all expected to pursue our goals and desires within the limits of the law. But we still can complain about the law that stands in our way and excuse our failure to achieve by pointing at this pesky law.
Sometimes you push the limits of the law and hope to convince judges. With a slightly different configuration of the Supreme Court, the vaccine mandate would have succeeded. Blaming the Court is worth doing to set up judicial appointments as a campaign issue.
And would the implementation of the vaccine mandate have served Biden's interests? Isn't he better off with it failing? He can point to it and say that he tried so hard and not be burdened with the realities of driving so many people out of employment, leaving businesses inadequately staffed, and imposing on the intimate personal bodily autonomy that his Party ordinarily celebrates.
By the way: "Activists look ahead to what could be the 'last anniversary' for Roe" (NPR).
Speaking of the pending abortion case... did the Texas legislators "figure out a way to implement [their] policies that won’t get blocked by courts"? I'd say they deliberately overreached well-known law because they wanted to convince the Court to change it and, failing that, they wanted political credit for trying.
"Hello, I’m Tom Hanks. The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine."
Said Tom Hanks in "The Simpsons Movie" (in 2007), quoted in "‘The Simpsons did it first’: Tom Hanks’s video for Biden likened to cameo" (London Times).
From the London Times article:
In a two-minute video released by the Biden Inaugural Committee yesterday, the Oscar-winning actor narrates the accomplishments of the Biden administration in its inaugural year — pointing to the distribution of vaccines and that “shops and businesses are buzzing again all over the country.”
Here's the new video, which I clicked off — muttering "Oh, jeez" — at the 3-second mark:
I'm going to try again to watch it, for the sake of this post, but I'm going to publish first, because I don't know how many on-and-off clickings it will take for me to reach the end.
ADDED: Okay. I've finished. It was long, but it mainly said we're dealing with Covid and the economy is coming back. It would have worked just as well as a Trump ad. Maybe the Democrats realize they need to squirrel away the divisive issues.
"'Bat Out of Hell' was rejected by dozens of record companies before the album was finally released by Cleveland International, a small label.... It received tepid, even hostile reviews at first."
"But through relentless touring and a 1978 appearance on NBC’s 'Saturday Night Live,' Meat Loaf found an audience, making 'Bat Out of Hell' an enormous, if unexpected hit.... Its signature tune, 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light'... was an ornate melodrama about a teenage make-out session... more than eight minutes long and [it] even contained a long segment narrated by Hall of Fame baseball player and broadcaster Phil Rizzuto, describing a batter rounding the bases and sliding into home. (Rizzuto said he didn’t realize his description was meant to be an elaborate sexual metaphor.) His musical secret, Meat Loaf said, was that he approached every song like an actor preparing for a role. 'I can’t sing unless there’s a character... Because I don’t sing. It’s almost like being schizophrenic — I don’t sing, the character sings.' Early in his career, the long-haired, 300-pound Meat Loaf was openly mocked by critics — and even by [his collaborator Jim] Steinman, who once called him 'a grotesque, bloated creature, who stalked the stage like an animal but acted as if he were a prince.'"
From WaPo's very lengthy obituary, "Meat Loaf, whose operatic rock anthems made him an unlikely pop star, dies at 74."
This wasn't my kind of music, but I can admire his work from afar. People loved him in "The Rocky Horror Show,” and he had a very interesting role in "Fight Club."
And he's got a great Donald Trump connection — "Meat Loaf, should I run for President?"
Later, "You look in my eyes: I am the last person in the fucking world you EVER want to fuck with":
"In his first press conference for 78 days, the President was perhaps seeking to demonstrate his command of detail, ultimately speaking for almost two hours."
"But the moment he finished White House officials desperately scrambled to 'clean up' the remarks on Ukraine. They said what Mr Biden had been talking about was the divisions in Nato over how to respond to Russian aggression. It was also suggested that by 'minor incursion' he had meant Russian cyber attacks, rather than a small military invasion.... For Mr Biden it was the latest gaffe on foreign policy. In October, his officials had to calm the waters after he suggested the US would come to Taiwan's defence in the event of an attack by China, appearing to shift Washington’s delicate longtime policy of 'strategic ambiguity.' On Wednesday... Mr Biden then embarked on a lengthy analysis of what he thinks is going on inside Mr Putin's head - a notoriously difficult thing to predict. He went into great depth speculating on what Mr Putin might believe about a variety of subjects, including fires on the Russian tundra and nuclear war. If he was watching - it was the middle of the night in Moscow - Mr Putin must have been rather puzzled by it all."
It's "notoriously difficult" to know what's going on in Putin's head, the article-writer says... before asserting that "Mr Putin must have been rather puzzled." Must have? I'd imagine Putin to be something other than puzzled. Isn't he an evil genius playing 3D chess?
"The green M&M, previously seen in ads posing seductively and strutting her stuff in white go-go boots, will now sport a pair of sneakers."
"A description for the green candy on the M&M’s website says she enjoys 'being a hypewoman for my friends.' 'I think we all win when we see more women in leading roles, so I’m happy to take on the part of supportive friend when they succeed,' the green M&M said on the promotional site."
From "M&Ms characters to become more inclusive" (The Hill).
I didn't know that M&Ms had become color-based characters. If you're green, you're one thing, red, another...? Is that a good lesson for the kids?
I feel so old, only able to remember an M&Ms advertisement that's half a century old — you know, the one where the peanut M&M and the regular M&M are sunning by a pool. The emphasis back then was that kids made a mess out of chocolate that's not "candy-coated." They did add arms, legs, and faces to the M&M, so they were, essentially, characters, but I don't think we expected them to have individualized personalities. Or was the peanut M&M a bit "nutty"?
What is the history of adding arms and legs to food items for advertising? Was the Kool-Aid Man first — in 1954? Oh, no, wait! Mr. Peanut has him beaten. 1916. And Mr. Peanut always had a lot of personality: He was high-class and cheerful. And what about the California raisins? You don't see them around anymore. Their time came and went — 1986 to 1994.
But back to the green M&M, which I've never seen in action. It's hard to believe the ad makers styled it as some sort of "seductive" go-go dancer, but if that happened, improvement was needed. It's funny that they went for the most flat-footed feminist concept. If you're such an achiever, Green, why are you eating candy?!
Finally, let me say that I have never before seen the word "hypewoman." I read that as "hyperwoman" first, and that sounded candy-appropriate. But "hypewoman" — that looks like it should mean huckster or con artist. Urban Dictionary tells me it's the female version of "hypeman" — someone who comes out on stage to hype up the audience before a performer comes out and may "work the side of the stage... yelling classic lines like 'Throw ya hands in the air!' 'All the ugly people be quiet!' 'When I say_________, y’all say _________!'"
And that undoes my impression that they just made Green a feminist cliché. She's actually a bit of a sexist stereotype, taking the role of supporting others. Re-experience that Françoise Gilot quote that begins the previous post:
"As young women... were taught early that taking second place is easier than first. You tell yourself that’s all right, but it’s not all right. It is important that we learn to express ourselves, to say what it is that we like, that we want."
The new green M&M is not all right. Whenever they change something that's wrong, they just change it to something else that's wrong. Wrong in a new way.
"As young women, we were taught to keep silent. We were taught early that taking second place is easier than first."
"You tell yourself that’s all right, but it’s not all right. It is important that we learn to express ourselves, to say what it is that we like, that we want."
Said Françoise Gilot, quoted in "Françoise Gilot: ‘It Girl’ at 100 The painter, writer and the only woman with the spunk and self-determination to leave Picasso has a few things to say about success, personal style and the nature of intimacy" (NYT).
She has not always been above using her looks to further her aims. Soon after they met, she writes, she took up Picasso’s invitation to teach her engraving. “I arrived on time wearing a black velvet dress with a high white lace collar, my dark red hair done up in a coiffure I had taken from a painting of the Infanta by Velázquez.”
When he remarked that her turnout was ill-suited for engraving, she informed him that she knew he had no intention of teaching that day. “I was simply trying to look beautiful,” she told him.
"She has not always been above using her looks to further her aims" — Is that sarcastic understatement?
Speaking of herself now, at the age of 100, she says: “Maybe I rather like the way I look... A sense of style is important... It’s like a pane of glass that makes you seem transparent but at the same time is a barrier.... You should not make yourself known that much to other people and keep your most intimate thoughts to yourself... People tell you to be natural. But what is natural, I would like to know?"
I read her book "Life with Picasso" half a century ago. Highly recommended.
How are you picturing that Infanta hairdo? This seems rather implausible:
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Another Coldness Café.
No photos of this too-cold day. I only took a half step outside the door to pick up a package — that toaster I ordered yesterday. It's the third day in a row that I have not left the house, I'm sorry to say. It's cold! I have my indoor things — eating toast, etc. — so I'm quite all right. Only one more day of this intense cold, I think.
Meanwhile, please use the comments section to talk about whatever you like.
"Trump gives Biden the best advice."
ADDED: It looks much nicer as a TikTok embed, so I've replaced the YouTube version. I'll put it below the fold if people say this doesn't work on their browser. By the way, the last line is so clipped you could miss it, but it's excellent.@austinnasso Trump has advice #donaldtrump #trump #impression #fyp #usa #america #biden #bidenimpression ♬ original sound - Austin Nasso
"Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims [of executive privilege] would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision."
Said the Supreme Court, disposing of Trump v. Thompson with sublime efficiency.
Justice Thomas would have granted what was an application for stay of mandate and injunction pending review.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote a statement that began:
The Court of Appeals suggested that a former President may not successfully invoke the Presidential communications privilege for communications that occurred during his Presidency, at least if the current President does not support the privilege claim. As this Court’s order today makes clear, those portions of the Court of Appeals’ opinion were dicta and should not be considered binding precedent going forward....It's clear... but he chooses to write about it anyway:
Without sufficient assurances of continuing confidentiality, Presidents and their advisers would be chilled from engaging in the full and frank deliberations upon which effective discharge of the President’s duties depends.
ADDED: Now that this decision has come out, I find myself very interested in finding out the specifics of what Trump said and did while the siege of the Capitol was under way. I could have accepted executive privilege for the reason Kavanaugh stated, but that isn't what's happening and I like the opportunity to find out this important information — after all we've been through, including the second impeachment. I hope it's a big letdown for Trump haters, but if it's not, it will be good to know.
"Number one: Anybody who listened to the speech — I did not say that they were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor."
"I said we’re going to have a decision in history that is going to be marked just like it was then. You either voted on the side — that didn’t make you a George Wallace or didn’t make you a Bull Connor. But if you did not vote for the Voting Rights Act back then, you were voting with those who agreed with Connor, those who agreed with — with — And so — and I think Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like I was attacking them. If you’ve noticed, I haven’t attacked anybody publicly — any senator, any — any congressman publicly. And my disagreements with them have been made to them — communicated to them privately or in person with them. My desire still is — look, I underestimated one very important thing: I never thought that the Republicans — like, for example, I said — they got very upset — I said there are 16 members of the present United States Senate who voted to extend the Voting Rights Act. Now, they got very offended by that. That wasn’t an accusation; I was just stating a fact. What has changed? What happened? What happened? Why is there not a single Republican — not one? That’s not the Republican Party. ... So, that’s not an attack.... Look, I still contend — and I know you’ll have a right to judge me by this — I still contend that unless you can reach consensus in a democracy, you cannot sustain the democracy.... I believe we’re going through one of those inflection points in history that occurs every several generations...."
From the transcript of Biden's press conference. Biden was responding to a question about his campaign promise that his “whole soul” was dedicated to “bringing America together, uniting our people.” Instead of reaffirming that dedication, he found a new basis for dividing people — the misinterpretation of his Georgia speech. "Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like" he was attacking his opponents. He was attacking his opponents, and really harshly — yelling at people who don't support the current voting rights legislation.
By the way, I've been noticing that the supporters of the Voting Rights Act rarely if ever mention any specific provisions of the text. They say "voting rights" but not which rights. I'll bet very few Americans have any idea what is in the bill, what rules states will actually need to follow if it is passed. The political discourse is woefully impoverished, abstractions and accusations of nefariousness.
"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause... but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism."
"The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.... Incidentally... I think this should remind you of something that is happening. And we see what is happening in the Western countries. It is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind."
Said Vladimir Putin, making the news last October (in the Boston Herald), but I'm thinking about them this morning because yesterday — prompted by YouTube's algorithm — we watched this new Jordan Peterson video:
He gets so emotional that you might feel that he's raving, losing control, but he is reading something that was already published — here — so the emotion is some combination of performance and a real-time reaction to his own words. The words are locked in by the pre-existing text. Excerpt:
[T]his is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretence and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs:...Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE [Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity] upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it? Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought. Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.
The top story in the Wisconsin State Journal: "Wisconsin athletic department condemns fan’s actions at Tuesday’s men’s basketball game."
I wondered what racist gesture? The article does not say, but there was a link to the video, and it wasn't what I'd pictured. The fan got ejected from the game, so I'm not sure why this is front-page news. Is it to decry racism or to stimulate the belief that racism is raging in America today?
Just saw this video on TikTok of this incredibly racist Wisconsin fan going at the Northwestern student fans.
— Xavier Sanchez (@Xavier_Sanchez4) January 19, 2022
Glad to see a Northwestern employee and a police office force him to leave. Do better people. Don’t be like this guy. pic.twitter.com/5noQ7XPqh9
"I am hoping that Vladimir Putin understands that he is — short of a full-blown nuclear war, he’s not in a very good position to dominate the world."
Did Biden inadvertently — obliquely — advise Putin to use nuclear weapons?
From the transcript:
I’m very concerned that this could end up being — look, the only war that’s worse than one that’s intended is one that’s unintended. And what I’m concerned about is this could get out of hand — very easily get out of hand because of what you said: the borders of the — of Ukraine and what Russia may or may not do. I am hoping that Vladimir Putin understands that he is — short of a full-blown nuclear war, he’s not in a very good position to dominate the world. And so, I don’t think he thinks that, but it is a concern. And that’s why we have to be very careful about how we move forward and make it clear to him that there are prices to pay that could, in fact, cost his country an awful lot. But I — of course, you have to be concerned when you have, you know, a nuclear power invade — this has — if he invades — it hasn’t happened since World War Two. This will be the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world, in terms of war and peace, since World War Two.
What hasn't happened since World War II? That a nuclear power has invaded? (Is that true, and, if it's true, how did you have to interpret "invade" to get it to be true?) Or was he saying the thing that hasn't happened since WWII is the use of nuclear weapons?
Notice that he said "when you have... a nuclear power invade" and then changed it to "if he invades."
"The only war that’s worse than one that’s intended is one that’s unintended" — what is the unintended war? Nuclear war?! He's "concerned" that "this could... very easily get out of hand." Is he not talking about nuclear war? This seems less careful about nuclear war than what we've seen from past Presidents. It could "very easily get out of hand because... the borders of the — of Ukraine." He stops, but I believe the point is that right next to Ukraine, there are NATO nations:
And, you know, we’re going to fortify our NATO Allies, I told him, on the eastern flank....
The point seems to be go ahead and take Ukraine, but don't go any further:
The cost of going into Ukraine, in terms of physical loss of life, for the Russians, they’ll — they’ll be able to prevail over time, but it’s going to be heavy, it’s going to be real, and it’s going to be consequential.
He directly tells Putin he will win Ukraine and is concentrating on warning Putin against going any further. Biden's ambiguous mutterings about nuclear war seem to relate to invasions beyond Ukraine.
Is this to be another day with no sunrise pictures?
Well, yeah:
I don't even need to refer to the "feels like" number to see that I'm not going out. In fact, I'm trying avert my eyes. Once you decide you're not going out, the cold means nothing. In fact, it gives ease to a day of indoorsiness. You never have to think I should go out... I need to throw myself out of the house.... You just stay in. It's nice. In the old days, when I had to go to work, it didn't matter how cold it was, I had to step up to the challenge, and I did, often walking the 25-minute walk from my house to the law school. It's not really that hard. The main thing is to wrap a scarf around your lower face so the air you breathe doesn't ice up inside your nose.
"When Polka Dots Signal Both Optimism and Disquiet/The motif has long been associated with a certain brand of American cheeriness but, as its recent ubiquity attests, is most visible during times of turbulence."
A headline in T, the NYT Style Magazine, for an article by Nick Haramis.
The history of polka dots. This is the article I want to read. I feel some pressure to write about Biden's 2-hour news conference yesterday, which I watched, but I'm loath to blog it without a complete transcript. I have seen the "5 takeaways" pieces and the "utter disaster!!!" stuff, and it's propaganda on top of propaganda. Until I find a transcript, I'm holding off, I'm in the ellipsis... and therefore: polka dots!
Haramis writes delightfully:
Though a staple of Central European folk art, and named for a dance popularized in mid-19th-century Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), polka dots have played an outsize role in defining America’s national identity over the past century. For a country constitutionally preoccupied with happiness, the print has proved a useful and recurring signifier of optimism, especially when it seems furthest from reach. Polka dots are the uniform of the ever-perky Minnie Mouse, and of a relentlessly high-spirited Shirley Temple in 1934’s “Stand Up and Cheer!,” released in the midst of the Great Depression. During World War II, when Westinghouse Electric produced a poster to boost the morale of female workers, it depicted a factory employee with her hair wrapped in a red polka-dot scarf, ready to get the job done. (The refined New Look — rounded shoulders, cinched waist, billowing skirt — that Christian Dior developed in the postwar years was in many ways an expression of European distaste for Rosie the Riveter’s earnest vigor.) By the 1950s, polka dots had come to symbolize, for better or worse, the dogged cheer of midcentury America. Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball wore the print with such frequency that it became the visual equivalent of apple pie — comforting but predictable — and in Billy Wilder’s 1961 political satire, “One, Two, Three,” East German Stasi officers torment a suspected spy by playing, on repeat, a caterwauling version of the 1960 Brian Hyland song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” Too much of a good thing can be wonderful; it can also be torture.
Ha ha. I remember when that song came out. There were so many novelty songs at the time, and they were wonderful to me when I was 9. As for bikinis, though they were very controversial until the 1970s, they'd been around since 1946, when the designer named them after the atomic bomb test that had just taken place on the Bikini Atoll. And that drags me back into contemplating Biden's new conference, in which I believe he advised Putin that the only way for him to succeed in Ukraine would be to use nuclear weapons. I need the transcript....
Here's the Wikipedia article on polka dots, where, among other things, I learned about Polka Dot Man and the fact that because the dots on his costume are different sizes and colors, they are not actual polka dots:
Apparently, Polka Dot Man can peel off those dots and turn them into useful weaponry. He looks a little like Biden, don't you think? That smile! Those eyes... speaking of dots....
But the ultimate use of polka dots to keep us giddy in times of turbulence has got to be "The Polka-Dot Polka" — the "surreal finale" of the 1943 Busby Berkeley musical "The Gang's All Here":
ADDED: 2 years before "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini," there was that other novelty song about skimpy clothing for women, "Short Shorts." On the piano, that's Bob Gaudio, who co-wrote the song and went on to co-write all the most famous Four Seasons songs:
And as long as I'm extending this post with extra video of songs about wild things women are wearing, here's the most famous number from "The Gang's All Here," "The Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat":
That moved the classy critic James Agee to write: "There is one routine with giant papier-mache bananas, cutting to thighs, then feet, then rows of toes, which deserves to survive in every casebook of blatant film surreptition for the next century." And here we are in the next century, talking about it.
AND: From the OED entry for "polka dot":
1966 Mrs. L. B. Johnson White House Diary 3 Apr. (1970) 382 A young newspaper-woman in a black-and-white polka-dot bikini, with a figure to suit it....
1957 V. Nabokov Pnin vi. 138 Amber-brown Monarch butterflies flapped.., their incompletely retracted black legs hanging rather low beneath their polka-dotted bodies.1996 Esquire June 38 A model whose nom de spume was Big Ginger bobbed her lush mangoes perkily against her polka-dotted bikini top.
"Given to drama in his personal style (he favored capes, gloves and regal headpieces), his pronouncements ('My eyes are starving for beauty') and the work he adored, he cultivated an air of hauteur...."
"Mr. Talley was a fixture at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where, according to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III.... Mr. Talley, who was openly gay, lived alone and had little semblance of a romantic life... It was through [Vogue editor Diana] Vreeland... that he entered the magazine world, and... met [Andy] Warhol. 'He was constantly trying to grab my crotch,' Mr. Talley later told The New York Times. 'It was not a Harvey Weinstein moment. Andy was a charming person because he saw the world through the kaleidoscope of a child. Everything was 'gee golly wow."'... For [Talley], fashion was both inspiration and disguise, camouflage against the racist barbs he experienced, such as being referred to as 'Queen Kong.'... There were 'many in that industry who really did love André for his talent,' Mr. Butts said. It was also the case, he added, that 'there were others who exploited his talent and used it to their advantage,' who 'never really gave him respect as a man and were condescending.'"
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
"I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers."
"According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.... The new music market is actually shrinking.... [T]he 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago.... [T]he current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police. I saw it myself last week at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on 'Message in a Bottle' (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under thirty but every song more than forty years old. I asked my server: 'Why are you playing this old music?'
She looked at me in surprise before answering: 'Oh, I like these songs.'... The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it publicly.... The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music—how sad is that?... [And yet m]usic company execs in 1955 had no idea that rock ‘n’ roll would soon sweep away everything in its wake. When Elvis took over the culture—coming from the poorest state in the US, lowly Mississippi—they were more shocked than anybody. And it happened again the following decade, with the arrival of the British Invasion from lowly Liverpool (again a working class city, unnoticed by the entertainment industry). And it took place again when hip-hop emerged from the Bronx and South Central and other impoverished neighborhoods, a true grass roots movement...."From "Is Old Music Killing New Music?/All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs—how did we get here, and is there a way back?" by Ted Gioia (Substack).
I was listening to Bob Dylan's old radio show — "Theme Time" — the other day, and he read what was supposedly a letter from a listener, asking why did he play so much old music when there's new music too. His answer was: He plays old music because there's so much more of it.
The old should dominate. There's a century and more of old recordings to play on the streaming services. Why should the music of the last few months predominate? Anything new has to compete with everything old.
I'm old, so I don't expect to like anything new, and I'm delighted to have access to the entire history of recorded music with Spotify. I discover things that are new to me. Some of them are many decades old, sometimes even older than I am, and, as I said, I am old. These are recordings, not live concerts. They're like books. We pick what's best, not what's new.
But I remember how exciting it was, back in the 1950s and 60s, to hear what was new on the radio, to feel that the culture was alive and inventive and a cool, unfolding surprise. Maybe none of that would have happened if we'd had something like Spotify/Apple Music to allow us to root around endlessly in the past.
"Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends."
A statement from Sotomayor and Gorsuch, tweeted by the NYT reporter Adam Liptak.
Also tweeted by Liptak, a statement from Chief Justice Roberts: “I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench.”
Here's Liptak's article at the NYT, giving the background:
The justices’ statements seemed to be primarily directed at a report by Nina Totenberg of NPR on Tuesday attributed to “court sources.” In it, Ms. Totenberg said that Justice Sotomayor “did not feel safe in close proximity to people who were unmasked.” “Chief Justice John Roberts, understanding that, in some form asked the other justices to mask up,” the report said.
I blogged Totenberg's article (yesterday, here), but not the part about the masks, even though Gorsuch's mask is forefronted. The headline is "Gorsuch didn't mask despite Sotomayor's COVID worries, leading her to telework." There's no correction there, and Liptak says NPR said it stands behind Totenberg's reporting. Liptak doesn't — and can't — say Totenberg (or her sources) were wrong. Roberts, Sotomayor, and Gorsuch could all be lying or stretching the truth.
And what counts as asking Gorsuch to wear a mask? Maybe Roberts/Sotomayor said something more general and respectful, such as expressing the opinion that it's a good idea to wear masks to protect others and that they'll be wearing a mask or just saying that they'll be wearing a mask because they believe it's best. That's not directly asking, but could be construed by the sources as a way of obliquely asking.
Anyway, I love the statement "we are warm colleagues and friends." I hope they are, and at least they show that they know they should be, that the legal disputes are not personal. It's not just a matter of displaying civility. It's foundational to their legitimacy.
UPDATE: "NPR reporting on Supreme Court mask controversy merits clarification/An inaccurate verb choice made the reporting unclear" (NPR).
Totenberg and her editors should have chosen a word other than "asked." And she could have been clear about how she knew there was subtle pressure to wear masks (the nature or even exact number of her anonymous sources) and what she didn't know (exactly how Roberts was communicating)....
The way NPR's story was originally worded, news consumers must choose between believing the chief justice or believing Totenberg. A clarification improving on the verb choice that describes the inner workings of the court would solve that dilemma.
Comparing 3 states based on how they billed us for skipping the toll booths on a recent trip to NYC.
Pennsylvania — charged $0 and advised that we'll have to pay next time.
New York — required to pay the toll amount ($16).
New Jersey — must pay the toll amount — $3.95 and $9.85 — plus a $50 administrative fee — with the amounts billed separately and the administrative fee charged twice. That's $100 extra on top of $13.80 in tolls.
NOTE: There was no option to stop and pay the toll. There was no one in the booth, presumably because of Covid.
What's the last thing you woke up from a dream yelling?
For me — and this happened last night — it was: "There's a reason there's a rule against jumping on the furniture."
I even said it twice. It was, apparently, an important revelation in the world of a dream of which I have no memory.
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