"I had a producer bring me to his office, where he had malted milk balls in a little milk-carton-type container under his arm with the spout open."

"He walked back and forth in his office with the balls falling out of the spout and rolling all over the wood floor as he explained to me why I should fuck my co-star so that we could have onscreen chemistry. Why, in his day, he made love to Ava Gardner onscreen and it was so sensational! Now just the creepy thought of him in the same room with Ava Gardner gave me pause. I watched the chocolate balls rolling around, thinking, You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test … Now you think if I fuck him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed. I felt they could have just hired a co-star with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines. I also felt they could fuck him themselves and leave me out of it. It was my job to act, and I said so. This was not a popular response. I was considered difficult."

From "Sharon Stone Says Producer Pressured Her to Sleep With Male Co-Star to Create 'Onscreen Chemistry'" (The Vulture).

A lesson in how to keep activists from winning: Don't let acceding to their demands be the path of least resistance.

There are 2 murals at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District:

There's this one, by Beau Stanton, which is attacked because the rays emanating from the head remind some people of the Japanese imperial battle flag, and which the L.A. school district plans to paint over.

And this one, by Shepard Fairey (who's famous for those Obama "Hope" posters) which depicts Robert F. Kennedy.

Now, Shepard Fairey is using "the only leverage I have" and saying that if Stanton's mural is painted over, he demands that his own RFK mural be painted over.

The Stanton mural is not on the theme of Japan or Korea. It's a painting of Ava Gardner!

Fairey said it’s important for the school district to understand that it made a poor decision in succumbing to what it apparently considered to be the path of least resistance. The artist said he wants to create and encourage some counter-resistance.

His Kennedy mural is arguably one of the school’s defining visual elements. It is on an outside wall of the entrance to the library, which is built on the footprint of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom where Kennedy gave his last speech, in 1968. Moments later, an assassin fatally shot the presidential candidate in a pantry area next to the kitchen....

“I have talked to a teacher from RFK about where the students stand, and they overwhelmingly want the mural to stay,” Fairey wrote to [school board President Monica Garcia, who represents Koreatown]. “If Beau’s mural is removed I will reach out to students to have them take part in my mural being painted over as a symbol of the sacrifices that are sometimes necessary to stand up for important principles."... 

“What [Stanton] has in his mural is nothing close to the battle flag. It’s not the same color scheme. It’s not the same focal element. It’s stupid to me. I thought that cooler heads would prevail because this is absurd.”

The school district's senior regional administrator, Roberto Martinez, has compared the Stanton mural to Confederate statues and argued that, in both cases, the value of the art doesn't outweigh the offense to people. Fairey says:

“I’m from the South,” Fairey said. “I know that loving the Confederacy is at best a nostalgia for some sort of rebellious identity that probably never existed except as fantasy, or at worst it’s coded racism. The comparison of the mural to Confederate statues is asinine.”...

Confederate statues do display respect for the Confederacy, but I don't think anyone believes that the sun rays in the Ava Gardner mural were intended to display respect for the WWII Japanese.

Sun rays are a common element in Stanton’s work, and Fairey has used them, too. Critics of the decision have pointed out that it could be an aesthetic, ethical and logistical quagmire to begin purging representations of sun rays from all or parts of Los Angeles.

They want to get rid of the sun!

What Melania did was "like showing up to a meeting of African-American cotton farmers in a Confederate uniform."

What did she do? She wore a white pith helmet in Africa. The quote is from Matthew Carotenuto, a coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University, who added "Historical context matters." That is, some people associate pith helmets with the colonial era in Africa. The quote appears in "Melania Trump Raises Eyebrows in Africa With Another White Hat" (NYT). The NYT says a few nice things, deep in the article:

Mrs. Trump has seemed at ease... She has posed for photos with babies and children, often murmuring the same things at each stop — “Beautiful!” and “Hi, guys!” — while holding their hands or waving at the cameras.... On Friday, she looked happy as she visited a red clay feeding pen for orphaned elephants at the Nairobi National Park. She administered them formula in oversized baby bottles, patted the animals on their heads and inspected their floppy ears.

We're told she wore a white shirt and that the shirt did not get dirty as she fed the baby elephants.

Why does the headline say "Another White Hat"? I think it's because there was a lot of talk last April about a white hat she wore in France. See "Melania Trump, White Hat/The first lady’s choice of headgear made quite a statement on the second day of the French state visit" (NYT). The NYT fashion critic struggled to find meaning:

In the iconography of the Western, the good guys wore white hats... It’s possible Mrs. Trump is not aware of this.... Except she has something of a history of using white suits to send what seem like fairly pointed messages; see her decision to wear white — associated with women’s rights in the form of the suffragist movement, as well as Hillary Clinton — to her husband’s first State of the Union address, which happened to be her first high-profile appearance with him after the Stormy Daniels scandal broke.... 

Whatever. We know Melania's most famous fashion message: "I really don’t care. Do U?"



AND: In getting pushed around by a baby elephant, compare Ava Gardner (in "Mogambo," suggested by commenter rcocean):

CNN has served Trump well.

That's the click-bait headline on the front-page, written presumably by people who realize what they have done, hate it, and can't stop.



The linked to article is a column by Stephen Collinson with the headline, "Trump divines his own truth without consequences."

Let me rewrite that one too: CNN divines its own truth — with consequences.

Sarah Silverman as Joan Rivers on "Saturday Night Live."

From last night's show:

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

And, yes, all the tags for this post are correct.

AND: Even better is the trailer for "The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything."

"A remarkably beautiful woman who was surprisingly shy, yet spoke her mind fearlessly... who thought little of herself as an actress..."

Peter Bogdonovich on Ava Gardner.

I must confess that I've never understood why people -- is it just men? -- are enthralled by Ava Gardner. Was she ever good in a movie? Is she really so especially beautiful? I don't see it in the stills, and maybe I've never seen one of her movies. She made a hell of a lot of them, but look at the list. What a shocking lot of crap!

Anyway, I like that she was good with the snappy remark. Bogdonovich quotes this crack about Clark Gable: "Clark is the sort of guy that if you say, 'Hiya, Clark, how are you?' he's stuck for an answer."

Black soap.

Kausfiles writes:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that? Why doesn't Bush make that argument--talking about Saddam's actions in the years before the U.S. invasion instead of Saddam's "intent" to have WMDs at some point in the future?

I wouldn't be surprised to hear Bush pick up this neat form for an argument he is already making. And in case you're thinking the image is inelegant--because who has a black bar of soap?--there is a legendary black soap. It's Erno Laszlo's Sea Mud Soap. Remember Woody Allen/Alvy Singer obsessing over Annie Hall's black soap in "Annie Hall"?

OLD WOMAN
Don't tell me you're jealous?

ALVY
Yeah, jealous. A little bit like Medea.
Lemme, lemme-can I show you something,
lady?

(He takes a small item from his
pocket to show the woman)

What I have here ... I found this in the
apartment. Black soap. She used to wash
her face eight hundred times a day with
black soap. Don't ask me why.

OLD WOMAN
Well, why don't you go out with other
women?

ALVY
Well, I-I tried, but it's, uh, you know,
it's very depressing.

That was Erno Laszlo soap. And by the way, you ought to be grateful you're even allowed to buy this soap:

Among his clients were the Duchess of Windsor, Gloria Vanderbilt, Doris Duke, Greta Garbo, Lilian Gish and Paulette Goddard. As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the Erno Laszlo Institute had over 3,000 clients. Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Stavros Niarchos, Mrs. Gianni Agnelli, Mr. Truman Capote, The Begum Aga Khan and, in 1954, the Duke of Windsor, were numbered among its members. In the 1960s, the list was enlarged by Audrey Hepburn, Yul Brynner, Hubert de Givenchy, Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and many more. In the pictures of Marilyn Monroe's death bed in August 1962, her Laszlo preparations could be seen on her bedside table.

The Erno Laszlo Institute was a closed society of the rich, famous and powerful. One needed to be recommended to gain admittance, and a single reference alone was often not good enough. In 1954 (?), each consultation visit cost $75, an unheard-of sum at the time. The Doctor's time was limited. He could only see a limited circle of persons.

In the 1970s, Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Woody Allen, Sting, Val Kilmer and James Spader joined. Later, Erno Laszlo products could be seen in films like Bonfire of the Vanities, Working Girl, Annie Hall and Final Analysis.

Erno Laszlo remained severe even with his most famous clients. In June 1963, the doctor cautioned the President's wife, Mrs. Kennedy not to put more oil or cream on her face. As she admitted having made changes to his instructions, he firmly replied: "You cannot make changes!" He also refused to remove Katherine Hepburn's freckles, when she asked him to remove them. He declined, saying they were an integral part of the Hepburn beauty.

When Ava Gardner insisted that she had followed his instructions, he told her: "Excuse me, but you are lying". - "How would you know?" - "Your skin tells me. You have not been doing your ritual. When you do, then you may come back, but not before." As the fiery brunette refused to leave, he came as close as he ever had to actually throwing a patient out the door. When she finally realized that she could not get away with any ruse, she calmed down and agreed to follow the Doctor's instructions.

But if you don't have $32 black soap to carve into a gun, you can use white soap and use black shoe polish to make it look like a gun, as Woody Allen--him again--did in "Take the Money and Run."