"I don’t mind getting older. I do mind getting uglier. Come on, there’s only one thing we know of that is definitely going to happen to us."

"That’s all the information we have in this life. You know, a lot of my friends didn’t get old. I’m not a worrier, by nature – and there are so many great things about getting older. For example, I don’t think there’s very many things that I know now that I didn’t know when I was 16 – but there’s a big difference between knowing something and realising it. Realising something takes 50 years. I’m more relaxed now, if you can believe it. This is the real mellow version of me. Ageing is like being a pothead again. Though that’s not to say there are not things that wind me up daily."

 
Said Chrissie Hynde, responding to questions in "Chrissie Hynde: ‘I’m more relaxed now. Ageing is like being a pothead again’/The Pretenders frontwoman and punk pioneer takes questions from Observer readers and famous fans on her relentless creativity spanning half a century, rethinking her hippy youth, and her cruelty-free farm" (The Guardian).

"Thank you so much for being the person for all of us on 'Friends' that was — I don’t know if this is the right way to say it — but the different one, or the one that was really herself."

Said Lady Gaga to Lisa Kudrow on the "Friends" reunion, quoted in "'Friends: The Reunion': 5 Things We Learned/You might think there’s nothing more to know about the show and its cast, but the reunion special, which premiered Thursday on HBO Max, reveals a few things" (NYT).

I watched it, and in fact, I have watched every episode of "Friends" — all, save one, in the last few years.  I came to the show familiar with only one of the performers, and that was Lisa Kudrow. I considered "The Comeback" the best TV comedy ever, and I'd always been a big fan of the movie "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."

But I didn't really like hearing Lady Gaga say that Kudrow's character was "the one that was really herself." The others were... what? Really somebody other than themselves? Maybe Gaga doesn't have facility with language, but I think she deliberately said something challenging, because she prefaced the remark with "I don’t know if this is the right way to say it." Well, the rest of us don't know what "it" is. My interpretation was that she meant to characterize Phoebe (Kudrow's character) as the outsider. In that light, perhaps it's comforting and exciting for many viewers to see that character gets to be with the other 5. The idea seems to be that the popular kids include one oddball in their group, as if that must be every oddball's dream. 

Gaga's theory — as I understand it — is a putdown of the rest of the characters — and of the entire show — who are all outsiders in their own way.

Another issue with the Gaga appearance: Was it at the expense of Chrissie Hynde? The Gaga bit used material from the episode — "The One with the Baby on the Bus" — that had Chrissie Hynde playing "Smelly Cat" with Phoebe. If I had to look at pop stars to find the different one, or the one that was really herself, I'd pick Hynde before Gaga. The disinclusion troubles me. The show is all about keeping the original group together (even though — spoiler alert — the series refrained from ending with each of the characters married to one of the others (4 ended up in Friend-on-Friend couples, but they brought in an outsider to marry Phoebe, and they left Joey without a love of his life)).

ADDED: Here's Chrissie Hynde on the show:

"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."

Why I'm reading about a shooting that took place in 2007 over the question of exactly how tall was James Brown.

1. In the first post of the morning, I asserted: "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." Instead of naming any actual video, I just wrote, in parentheses and italics, as if that helps, "(Yeah? Which ones?!)" 

2. That loose thread nagged at me for 3 hours — from about 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. — and I tried to call to mind a great video that fit the description. I came up with "Brass in Pocket" and watched the delightful video, even though it does not fit the description:

 

3. Who cares? I like it anyway. Primed by a good YouTube experience, I took the websites suggestion to watch "David Bowie imitates Mick Jagger!!"

 

4. Bowie does do a quick, excellent Jagger impression. About 2 seconds of that video, but watch the whole thing. You'll get to a part about how his wife bought him an old suit of Little Richard's and he must not have been so little after all because the suit was way too big for Bowie. 

5. That got me looking up how tall the 2 men were. Have you noticed the internet is ready to tell you the height of various people? Just yesterday I was watching a video of Bob Dylan and David Crosby singing at the same microphone and Dylan seemed to tower over Crosby. The internet says Dylan is 5'9" and Crosby is 5'10". Maybe it's something about the shoes or the camera angle.  

6. In honor of the first post of the day, which got this list started, I pause to see if the internet will give me the answer for the famous philosopher named in that post, and I'm pleased to be informed: René Descartes was 5'1". Anyway, it turns out that David Bowie and Little Richard were the same height: 5'10". Maybe Bowie's wife got conned on that suit deal. 

7. Since I was interested in the height of Little Richard, the internet assumed I would be interested to know that James Brown was 5'6". That is pretty interesting. If you didn't know that fact, I could see how you might get into an argument with somebody who — knowing the fact — would annoyingly stand his ground. And that's what happened in January 2007: "Man shot over argument about James Brown's height" That happened not long after "Brown, who was known to wear lifts, died of heart failure Dec. 25 at age 73."

"What the hell am I doing here?/I don't belong here..."

Ada Vox/Adam Sanders on "American Idol" last night:



"Creep" is kind of an "American Idol" tradition, notably from Jena Irene in Season 13:

"Statues dedicated to Confederate heroes were swiftly removed across Baltimore in the small hours of Wednesday morning..."

"... just days after violence broke out over the removal of a similar monument in neighboring Virginia. Beginning soon after midnight on Wednesday, a crew, which included a large crane and a contingent of police officers, began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, tearing the monuments from their pedestals and carting them out of town." (NYT).

And there they go. Lee and Jackson sailing through air onto flatbed truck in Baltimore at 3:40 AM. An amazing sight. pic.twitter.com/4SzRYRiVOB

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) August 16, 2017

Have you ever woken up in the morning to find your city had changed during the night? There's a dystopian edge that called to mind "Dark City"...



And that old Pretenders song with the overly familiar intro, "My City Was Gone":



IN THE COMMENTS: iowan2 said:

I have seen a tag line of late, something about darkness, just can't put my finger on it,

Oh here it is. Washington Post."Democracy dies in darkness"

Prescient I guess

Matthew Sablan said:

There's a way to go about removing the monuments. Doing it with force of arms and threatening the city with violence is not the way.

And doing it under cover of darkness suggests that it's something shameful that needs to be hidden. If you can't do it proudly, by daylight, you're not ready to do it.

"Okay, I'm not here to embolden anyone," says Chrissie Hynde, encouraged by the NPR interviewer to think of "Brass In Pocket" as "emboldening" women.

"I don't understand why there's — You know what, I don't care what a lot of people want. You know? I'd rather say, just don't buy the f****** book, then, if I've offended someone. Don't listen to my records. Cause I'm only telling you my story, I'm not here trying to advise anyone or tell anyone what to do or tell anyone what to think, and I'm not here as a spokesperson for anyone. I'm just telling my story. So the fact that I've been — you know, it's almost like a lynch mob."

"I don’t think sexual assault is a gender issue as such, I think it’s very much it’s all around us now. It’s provoked by this pornography culture..."

"... it’s provoked by pop stars who call themselves feminists. Maybe they’re feminists on behalf of prostitutes – but they are no feminists on behalf of music, if they are selling their music by bumping and grinding and wearing their underwear in videos. That’s a kind of feminism – but, you know, you’re a sex worker is what you are. I think it’s provocative in a way that has nothing to do with music. I would say those women are responsible for a great deal of damage."

Said Chrissie Hynde.

"Chrissie Hynde slammed for saying some rape victims 'have to take responsibility.'"

She was speaking from experience (she was raped by a biker gang when she was 21):

"You can’t f- -k about with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges — those motorcycle gangs, that’s what they do.... If you play with fire, you get burnt. It’s not any secret, is it? Technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing, and I take full responsibility.... If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk? Who else’s fault can it be?... If you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him."

"Ally’s playing the guitar and I went ‘Who’s that pervert looking in the window?’ I got up, because I’m a bit blind, got to the window, telling him to sling the hook, with a few choice Scottish words..."

"... and at that moment I realised it was Bob Dylan.... I was so embarrassed, because then I had to phone Jake. I was like, ‘I’ve just told your dad to sling his hook.’ Which was really weird."

Later that night, Chrissie Hynde took [Sharleen] Spiteri to meet Dylan. “He’s talking away, never mentioning anything. And then he just turns to me and repeated what I said to him shouting through the window.” And despite what she says on camera, the phrase certainly wasn’t as innocuous as ‘sling your hook’. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my whole life,“ admits Spiteri. Dylan, however, was apparently amused by the incident. “He’s got a dirty sense of humour,” according to Spiteri.

I had to look up "sling your hook" (even though we can see that "sling your hook" is not what was said, but a euphemism for it). More here:

It is a dockers phrase from the industrial revolution in the early 1800s in places like East London, Liverpool and Portsmouth. Much of the trade coming into these ports were in bales, especially bales of cotton and wool.... It was common practice for Dockers to have hooks in which they would impale the bales in order to make them easier to carry. Work was given out daily on an ad hoc basis depending on how many ships were in port and what cargo they were carrying. Queues of dockers would form, and when all the days jobs were allocated, the remaining dockers were told to 'Sling your Hook', or 'Sling yer 'ook', as in 'Throw away your hook or put it over your shoulder and leave, there's no work for you today.'