Hotel or AirBnb — you choose.

I made a new tag — "pretzels" — and applied it retroactively.

This was, perhaps, the most satisfying retroactive application of a new tag I have ever done. Check it out: "pretzels."

The trick with tags is to hit the right level of generality. For example, "food" is too general. What's the point? But should there be a tag for every food that happens to play a role in a blog post? Pretzels came up in the first post today. So did crackers. I already had a "crackers" tag — I love crackers — and it felt like the right time to start a "pretzels" tag.

The retroactive application of a tag is a bit of a chore, but it's relatively easy when you have a distinctive word to search for, but it's so rewarding to turn up a lot of varied posts, which is what happened this time. 

There was the story of a disastrous crowd crush in 1896 in which a promise of pretzels played a role.

"Billie Eilish began watching porn aged 11 to be cool, 'one of the guys.' But the brutal, abusive scenes she encountered gave her nightmares and in her first sexual relationships..."

"... she complied with acts she hated 'because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.' Porn, she said this week, 'destroyed my brain.' Yet already Eilish, who only turns 20 this weekend, is being censured for her 'anti-porn tirade.' Her lush voice, dark lyrics and seven Grammys can’t save her from being branded a Swerf (Sex Worker-Excluding Radical Feminist), a slur applied to any woman who dares challenge the global sex trade. For a decade the supposed progressive position on pornography has been that it is liberating and 'sex positive.'... In her recent book 'The Right to Sex', the Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan describes teaching her students the work of 'second wave' feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who argued that porn writes the script for male oppression. Srinivasan assumed undergraduates would find their position as outdated and repressive as she did. Instead they were electrified, agreeing with 1970s feminists that porn objectifies women, ignores female pleasure and, like Eilish, that it groomed them into sex acts they didn’t enjoy. Srinivasan reflects that at 36 she only encountered porn as an adult, while 'sex to my students is what porn says it is.'... A generational shift is under way.... Younger people, whose childhoods were defiled, will agree with Billie Eilish who says with a fearlessness born of pain: 'As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace.'"

Writes Janice Turner in "Porn apologists are running out of excuses/The pop star Billie Eilish will be an inspiration to many young people in rejecting grotesque images of sexual violence" (London Times).

Here's Eilish's song on the subject:

Trump discovers blogging.

Yesterday, I read "Trump launches new communications platform months after Twitter, Facebook ban The space will allow Trump to post comments, images, and videos" (Fox News).

But it's not a "new communications platform" other than in the sense that he's new to communicating in this old way, the way that I love and hold dearest. It's a blog. 

The platform, "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump" appears on www.DonaldJTrump.com/desk.  

Fine. But why didn't he set up a page like this as soon as he got dumped from Twitter and Facebook? By the way, the Facebook Oversight Board is issuing its opinion on Trump this morning, so he might get back onto Facebook. [UPDATE: Trump lost.]

I can think of 2 good reasons why Trump might have delayed putting up a blog. First, he was actively arguing that Twitter and Facebook were oppressing him. If he has an easy work-around, it undercuts his argument. Second, he may have wanted to create something that really would be a new communications platform, something more like Twitter (or Parler), where millions of microbloggers could pour in and react back and forth to each other, creating waves of passionate chitchat and the seeming newsiness of trends. But it just didn't work. It was hard to design and keep running or too expensive or legally problematic. After months of experimenting, they gave up and went utterly minimal, with a blog — a blog that could have been put up the day Twitter banned him.

I see many people are mocking Trump for blogging. It's just a blog! The mockery makes sense aimed at Fox News and anyone else who calls it a "communications platform," but don't mock the blogger. The blog is sublime! I don't mean Trump's blog in particular, but The Blog, in the abstract and in my experience (which is 17 years of daily blogging). 

Will Trump's blog be sublime? We shall see. If he blogs the same way that he tweeted, it might not work. He doesn't even have comments, so where's the dynamic? His style is to attack things and on Twitter, you have more of the sense of hitting someone who's there with you, and then your followers retweet that and get something going, back and forth. It's a game to be played. By contrast, the blog just sits there, more like a book. Want to read it? Where's the sport in that? 

Trump had millions of followers on Twitter, and all they had to do was show up at Twitter and his little nibbles of quips and carps popped instantly into their heads. Do these people have the kind of heads that will go to Trump's blog and maybe copy the text and maybe the link and go back to Twitter to try to propagate the man's latest words? Or did Twitter — with Trump — ruin those heads, make them so dependent on little yummy word snacks that they can't pull it together to read a blog anymore?

Possible solution: Read books! It's retro, like Billie Eilish in a corset. No no, not like Billie Eilish in a corset. Books are not squeezing you smaller in the places convention designates as needing to be as small as possible. That's more like Twitter. Twitter and your brain.

As for blogs... well, it all depends on the blog.

(You can email me here. I don't have comments anymore. I have email! Speaking of retro.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Alex writes: 

I have to wonder if Facebook's decision, and Trump's move to a blogging platform, won't backfire on the anti-Trump establishment. Without the stream of consciousness of Twitter, Trump may be forced to slow down and replace instant, brief, commentary with something that is still relevant, but a bit longer and more nuanced. This risks making him look respectable and even *gasp* dignified and statesman-like. Well... ish. As for comments, I'd think the first step is getting into a rhythm regarding publishing his thoughts on the new platform, as well as deciding how to deal with issues such as the inevitable trolls and nutjobs. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there's a deal to integrate Gab or Parler as a means of commenting.

"Billie Eilish wants you to know she is in charge, brash and self-assured enough to scrap the raffish image that helped garner her a world of fans in favor of something a little more … adult....."

"The singer... swapp[ed] her trademark sweats for a style more domme than deb: pink Gucci corset and skirt over Agent Provocateur skivvies, accessorized with latex gloves and leggings. The choice was her own, Edward Enninful, the magazine’s editor in chief, wrote in the June issue. 'What if, she wondered, she wanted to show more of her body for the first time in a fashion story?' Mr. Enninful recalled. 'What if she wanted to play with corsetry and revel in the aesthetic of the mid-20th century pin-ups she’s always loved? It was time, she said, for something new.' To that end Ms. Eilish embraced the shopworn trimmings of female allure, offering the camera, without apparent irony, a nod to the sirens of golden age Hollywood and some of more recent vintage: Taylor Swift, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion among them." 

Writes Ruth La Ferla in "On That Bombshell Billie Eilish Cover for British Vogue/The pop star known for defying gender stereotypes got a glamour makeover with a corset. Not everyone is happy about it" (NYT). 

First, "garner" — she garners her fans. Doesn't just get them and doesn't quite win them. She garners them, so picture her storing them in silos, like grain. 

If you've already garnered a "world of fans," what do you do next? Maybe offload some of them. Offend. Disappoint. She was the girl who covered up her body with big, heavy tracksuits — which she said she wore so people wouldn't focus on her body — so the opportunity was there, inside the suit, to put the body on show. 

Enninful's quote challenges our credulity. It was all her idea. And it was "play"! Oh, was it? The NYT critic, La Perla, says she went for "the shopworn trimmings of female allure... without apparent irony." If it was play, why does it look so unplayful? Maybe the photographer's attempts to make it seem playful looked staged and creepy, and the glum face — hostage face — seemed at least arguably sophisticated. 

Let's break the Enninful quote in half. The second half is believable:

"At the very end of a Grammys ceremony that did its best to pretend like the Recording Academy has always supported and centered Black artists, women and especially Black women..."

"... Billie Eilish was put in an impossible position... Awarded record of the year for 'Everything I Wanted'... Eilish could only gush over Megan Thee Stallion. 'This is really embarrassing for me,' Eilish, a white teenager who — like many in her generation and beyond — worships Black culture, said. 'You are a queen, I want to cry thinking about how much I love you.' She went on. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of Adele praising Beyoncé when '25' beat 'Lemonade' for album of the year in 2017... . Some online bristled at the performative white guilt on display, while others applauded Eilish’s apparently sincere fandom."

From "The Best and Worst of the 2021 Grammy Awards/Megan Thee Stallion owned the stage, struggling indie venues got a much needed spotlight and the event proved a pandemic awards show doesn’t have to look like a video conference" (NYT).

 

ADDED: I have saved a lot of time in life by never being interested in the Grammys. When I was young, in the 1960s, the Grammys didn't recognize the great music that I liked. They seemed irrelevant and archaic back then. I have spent some of my precious time caring about movie awards, but I guess that's not happening anymore, because the Oscar nominations just came out, and I don't care enough even to consider pushing myself to write something about it.

"Pretzel in pocket."

A very short podcast for reasons explained in the first minute.

Topics: "Pretzels, height, crabs, white-presenting voters, roll-off voters, Wikipedia, Billie Eilish, George Harrison, David Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Emanuel Macron."

"You think that you're the man/I think, therefore, I am/I'm not your friend/Or anything, damn."

So sings Billie Eilish in this new video, which I'm reading about in Vanity Fair — "Jimmy Fallon Parodies Billie Eilish's New Video, Angers 30 Rock Staff" — and watched only so I could understand what Jimmy Fallon had done that pissed people off... and because I like Eilish enough to check out the song, especially since she's highlighting Descartes' famous quip:

 

Here are the lyrics — at Genius — where the annotations include the information: "The video is just the way the song feels to me of just kinda like careless and not really trying.... It’s some random, chaotic, don’t care shit." Some of the best videos have been made like that, with the singer randomly walking along someplace mouthing the lyrics and interacting with this and that. (Yeah? Which ones?!)

Here she's in an empty mall at night, but — as in a dream — the food places are lit up and the fresh food items are ready to be taken and eaten. Notably the pretzels. It's a realistic dream for COVID times. Just to go to a mall again and have a stupid pretzel. Wouldn't it be nice?!

Now, I'm up to speed to watch the Jimmy Fallon parody...

 

Ha ha. COVID dream becomes COVID nightmare. I wish I had a "pretzel" tag, but I won't start one because it would be annoying to add retrospectively, given the metaphorical use of the word. I quoted someone in 2012 saying Mitt Romney "twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously." How boring to sift through such outdated ephemera. Mitt Romney twists himself into a pretzel, therefore he is. 

But there are also tasty crumbs to be found in a search for "pretzel." There's this — "Pretzels and free will" —  from the first half-year of this blog:

"[I]n an attempt to defend [Billie] Eilish — a sincere attempt, often from other young women — a new narrative is being formed around her body."

"Now, it’s about Eilish’s 'bravery' in having a body atypical for celebrities because she’s seemingly not a size 0. It’s a common refrain anytime a woman in the public eye is seen eating in public, having hips in public, or having rolls in public.... The goal of this kind of noxious positivity is to make clear that not being thin — either intentionally or not — is just as worthy of celebration as thinness has been since basically forever. But this is a false equivalence; we praise thinness because we think it tells us something about someone’s worth, their inherent beauty, their value as a person. The issue isn’t so much celebrating one type of body over another, but rather celebrating a body for its bravery, as if there’s something impressive about existing in the world even though your body doesn’t conform to narrow standards of beauty. Refusing beauty norms, or merely falling outside of them, isn’t that brave; it’s just an inevitability since those standards are increasingly harder to attain. Arguably, every woman in the world is brave in that regard because none of us are meeting every characteristic of perfection, whether we want to or not. Eilish has been vocal in the past about why she wears clothes '800 sizes bigger' than she actually is. 'It kind of gives nobody the opportunity to judge what your body looks like. I don’t want to give anyone the excuse of judging,' she told Vogue Australia in 2019. 'Anything you look at, you judge.'... Calling someone brave for merely existing in the body they have doesn’t take power away from thinness, and it doesn’t create any kind of equilibrium in culture.... The truth about Eilish’s body in those paparazzi photos — the truth about most women and their bodies — is really boring: It’s just a body, and you get the one you get."

 From "That Photo Of Billie Eilish Isn’t Brave. It’s Just Typical. In the pursuit of body positivity, we’ve tipped over into an absurd place — where merely existing in a body larger than a size 0 is considered courageous" Scaachi Koul (Buzzfeed).

First, I'd just like to say, the idea that there are beautiful celebrities who wear size zero is absurd. The chest measurement for size zero is 30 inches! Please point me to any adult with a 30 inch chest. This is not any sort of beauty ideal. But people say "size 0" the way people used to say "thin as a reed." Nobody is thin as a reed, and if they were, it would freak you out. 

Second, I'll say that women's bodies are not boring.

"I have never felt desired. My past boyfriends never made me feel desired. None of them."

"And it’s a big thing in my life that I feel I have never been physically desired by somebody. So I dress the way I dress as I don’t like to think of you guys – I mean anyone, everyone – judging it, or the size of it.... And sometimes I feel trapped by this persona that I have created, because sometimes I think people view me not as a woman.... But my body is mine and yours is yours. Our own bodies are kind of the only real things which are truly ours. I get to see it and get to show it when I want to.... All I ever wanted was a boyfriend. Any time when it was rainy or cloudy, all I would wish is I was with some boy. That was my thing. Whenever we were somewhere nice, a beach or a balcony with a sunset, I would never be able to enjoy the experience as I just used to wish I was with some boy....  I have never felt powerful in a relationship. I did once and, guess what, I took advantage of that person’s kindness. I wasn’t used to it. It’s been months and I am not attracted to people any more."

Said the big pop star Billie Ellish, quoted in "Billie Eilish: Confessions of a Teenage Superstar" (GQ). She's 17. CORRECTION: She's 18.

"The enthusiasm of Ms. Eilish’s devotees denotes a striking turnabout, a new generation’s rejection of the flirty babe aesthetic embodied by contemporary idols like Ariana Grande..."

"... in favor of something more crazily improvised and less strenuously sexual. At 18, [Billie] Eilish, who often goes without makeup, favors a pastiche of outsize 1980s and ’90s hip-hop and skater looks. That look speaks assertively to a Gen Z crowd chary of artifice and aggressive displays of sensuality. 'Her look is not about vanity,' said Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster and brand strategist. 'She is flipping the idea of beauty to something surreal, something influenced by gaming and the cyberculture. These are not the filtered images of millennials'....Her style resonates, [Amanda Petrusich wrote in The New Yorker], 'in a cultural moment when we are all trying very hard to sort out real people from the ones who are merely savvy and ambitious enough to know the right way to curate and present an authentic-seeming vibe.'"

From "Billie Eilish: Gen Z’s Outrageous Fashion Role Model/The Grammy-winning artist is reinventing conventional notions of femininity" by Ruth La Ferla (NYT).

I'm glad these kids today are "chary of artifice and aggressive displays of sensuality" (as the NYT puts it).

I like seeing Generation Z rise up and challenge the millennials. Time for millennials to see younger people not enjoying them. It's one thing to feel the older generation's criticism, quite another to have the criticism coming from the new people.

ADDED: "I've never been to school. I grew up homeschooled, stayed homeschooled, never was not homeschooled," said Billie Eilish, quoted in Reason, in "Sibling Grammy Winners Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell Praise Homeschooling."