"My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not women as opposed to men."

"But, in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency."

Wrote Barack Obama, in a letter to a girlfriend, in 1982, when he was 21, quoted in "Obama’s love letters from 1982 resurface: ‘I make love to men daily, but in the imagination’/Former president’s love letters to his ex-girlfriend reveal his 'androgynous mind'" (Independent).

"In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination."

Strange to call that a "love letter." It seems more the opposite of a love letter, writing this to a woman. And yet... see note 2, below.

Why is this "resurfacing now"?

"Imagine losing your job, at a hospital of all places - or absolutely any argument - over astrology. ..."

"I lost a debate with my friends over whether or not my wife can walk through walls. This was all long before Greta Thunberg got a mural in San Francisco, but Tom Foremsky - an English friend I admired - gave me a book, called 'Ishmael,' featuring a gorilla who talked about 'saving the planet,' to explain what I was getting wrong...."

Writes The Crack Emcee in "First Man Canceled™️" (The Macho Response).

"The Crack Emcee, once San Francisco's blackest man, with an original collection of (actual) 'Rock' songs - exclusively about females..."

"... and all recorded throughout the San Francisco Bay Area over a 20-year period, as he served time with SF's The Beatnigs (Alternative Tentacles) Consolidated (Nettwerk) Broun Fellinis (Moonshine) and Little White Radio (Crack House). Shouts out to Detonator Kemrexx, Toph One, Chris Cotton, Nosia, Ann Althouse, Daren and Doug, for the undying inspiration. All songs written and produced by The Crack Emcee, except 'She’s A Woman' by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. 'Britney Houston' was compiled from excellent-to-extremely sketchy source material, and was mixed to make the divergence 'work'. Cover photo 'Shelia' by The Crack Emcee. Enjoy."

Listen to Crack Emcee's "Britney Houston (Bay Area Black Rock Girl Songs: 1995 - 2015)" by at SoundCloud, here.

Loneliness — "A problem that almost anyone can relate to."

The quoted phrase is mine, from a post this morning about a NYT op-ed by a college sophomore titled "Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student."

The Crack Emcee responded, "Almost" and linked to Greta Garbo's iconic "I want to be alone":



That made me think about something in a novel I just read, "Convenience Store Woman." The title character takes in a young man who proceeds to live in her bathtub. She wants him not as a lover or a companion but just so her friends and family won't be troubled by thinking of her as pathetic because she is a woman without a career or a man. He's not interested in her as a lover or a companion. Here's his explanation of all he wants:

“I want you to keep me hidden from society. I don’t mind you using my existence here for your own ends, and you can talk about me all you want. I myself want to spend all my time hiding here. I’ve had enough of complete strangers poking their noses into my business.... When you’re a man, it’s all ‘go to work’ and ‘get married.’ And once you’re married, then it’s ‘earn more’ and ‘have children’! You’re a slave to the village. Society orders you to work your whole life. Even my testicles are the property of the village! Just by having no sexual experience they treat you as though you’re wasting your semen... Your uterus belongs to the village too, you know. The only reason the villagers aren’t paying it any attention is because it’s useless. I want to spend my whole life doing nothing. For my whole life, until I die, I want to just breathe without anyone interfering in my life. That’s all I wish for,” he finished, holding his palms together as if in supplication.

I don't have a "loneliness" tag. I've always had "solitude." That is, I keep open the question whether being alone is a more negative experience than being with others. It's in that context that I made up my aphorism, "Better than nothing is a high standard."

Obviously, Garbo is unhappy. She wants to be alone not because it's sublime and rewarding, but because the alternative is sadder. The man in the bathtub is in even worse shape. And it's a cliché to say You can be lonely in a crowd. One might seek solitude because the loneliness is more painful when you are surrounded by people who are engaged with each other. You may do damaging, dangerous, regrettable things when feeling the pain of loneliness in a crowd.

The Crack Emcee moves on to "The Republican Record."

Listen to the new song here (along with the earlier "A Message to Kanye"). "The Republican Record" includes the voices of Nixon, George W., Reagan, and Trump (and begins with Rachel Maddow).

You know The Crack Emcee from our comments section, but please listen to his recordings (or at least one of them) before commenting on this post. Don't just continue the back-and-forth from recent comments threads. Talk about the music.

For those of you who miss The Crack Emcee...

... here's "UNMASTERED/A New Political Series By The Crack Emcee."

"William O’Reilly Debated Jon Stewart On One Topic — White Privilege. Guess who won?"

Asked The Crack Emcee in the comments to yesterday's race-consciousness post, pointing to a "Daily Show" interview from a couple days ago, which I happened to have already watched. (I watched the show version. He links to the extended version, which I haven't seen.)

I answered (in the comments just now):

Yeah, I watched that yesterday. Thanks for reminding me about that. I thought Stewart acted like a jackass bully and O'Reilly kept his cool. Stewart had his whole audience braying their pleasure at the bullying of O'Reilly. To this home-viewer, O'Reilly won. He won by keeping his dignity, acknowledging all the factual and fair points about race in history, but rejecting the ideological term "white privilege."

As I just said, I did not watch the extended version. I'm going on what the show's people decided would be most amusing to their viewers, which I assume is what presents Jon Stewart as the winner and Bill O'Reilly as the bully who gets his comeuppance, overcome by the sheer force of superior intelligence, information, and virtue.

It's interesting to hear that the entire extended interview stays with the white-privilege topic, because that means:

1. They had a lot of raw footage from which to select the clips that fit the narrative they thought would be so gratifying to their audience of people who believe in their own superior intelligence, information, and virtue.

2. They never got around to the subject of the book O'Reilly had come on the show to pitch — "Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General" — another form of disrespect, which I suspect was deployed to antagonize O'Reilly and increase the likelihood that he'd say something stupid about race.

So, again: O'Reilly won. But what is this candy-ass bullshit about who won and lost a television interview? The name Patton has been invoked. Let's get some proportion and perspective about what winning means.

The Drowned World.

That's "The bridge shadow," posted yesterday, turned upside down, as recommended, in the comments, by The Crack Emcee.

"The Drowned World" floated into my head as a good title for this picture, and I had to look it up to remember what it was.

The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by J. G. Ballard. In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, the novel features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it....

[A] natural catastrophe causes the real world to transform itself into a dream landscape, causing the central characters to regress mentally.

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.

The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard... p. 41.

I'd like to read that. Perhaps there's an insight into how we might adapt to the future of rising sea levels. Maybe I have that book in the house, in amongst the old SF paperbacks that my first husband left behind when he moved out:



I was reading this New Yorker article about the book genre of books about books, where the author undertakes some reading project, like "The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading," where writer reads through a set novels that just happened to be shelved together because of the authors' names and alphabetical order.  Also: "The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" (2004), "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages" (2008),  and "The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else" (2010).

I got the idea of reading all the sci-fi books in that box. They're from an era in the past. They are the selections of my ex-husband, and he left them in the house. Who knows what all I could bullshit about reading all that and riffing however the mood strikes me?

.... plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory....

Radio alert: The Crack Emcee is on Uncle Ray's Psychedelic Soul again.

Listen here. Or listen later on the podcast.

Scroll down here for the Top 100 Albums they've been counting down over the last few weeks, so you can see which artists they're getting to (but not which album cut).

UPDATE: "If I can't hear a rap about a woman's heavy period in the morning I'm not up yet," says Crack, highlighting the line in the song that jumped out at me: "My attitude is bitchy, cuz my period is heavy." That's Missy Elliot (in "Funky Fresh Dressed").

Then they were talking about this blog and the commenters here, specifically what's going on in the comments on yesterday's Hurricane Carter post. The verb "to spew" is deployed.

Now, they are making fun of people who like Bruce Springsteen, who's next up on the countdown. "The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle” is #51, and Ray said he picked the cut he picked because it's the shortest.

UPDATE 2: They spend a lot of time talking about the extreme ugliness of Joe Jackson, who Crack said, elicits gasps from the live audience who have seen photographs but are still stunned at the real thing.



UPDATE 3: The topic is The Rolling Stones and Crack says "Brown Sugar" is "one of the most racist songs ever." Why does that get "a pass"? Ray asks if they have "a ghetto pass," and Crack's answer is "Jagger got big lips." They proceed to discuss whether other big-lipped stars have "a ghetto pass" and they are emphatic that the answer is no for Carly Simon and yes for Steven Tyler.

UPDATE 4: Crack sort of tries to read this comment from me (in the comments on this post):

Crack, a sometime commenter, goes on the radio, I blog about that, people comment, then Crack on the radio talks about the comments, and I comment in the comments about Crack the commenter on the radio commenting on the comments. Now, if they talk about that on the radio it's the ultimate new media moment.

So that must have been it, the ultimate new media moment. Have you achieved transcendence?

I'm still waiting for Crack to pronounce my name right. He seems to enjoy saying "Outhouse," even as Ray spells my name and questions the pronunciation. But Crack proceeds to mention Meade's blog, so that's nice.



That's "Bandit the Border Collie." And I've got to walk back "ultimate new media moment," because for me the ultimate and endless new media moment is Meade.

UPDATE 5: Crack announces that he's got a job in case you are "emotionally invested in that." And he says that the picture of the dog that I put embedded in Update 4 is the very same one he'd just shown to Uncle Ray. The races are in alignment, says the Ebony-and-Ivory dog, Bandit.

UPDATE 6: Kisses:

The Crack Emcee is on the radio again.

Listen here. [UPDATE: The live broadcast is over now. But you can stream or download it here.]

With Uncle Ray. And here's the link to Ray's top 100 albums of all time, which they are counting down. Ray asks Crack what would be on Crack's top 100 albums of all time, and Crack says "Zappa, Zappa, and more Zappa."

ADDED: "What do you have in South Central for breakfast?" asks Ray, and Crack says: "Toast." Later: "How about bread, oatmeal, and hot dogs for breakfast?"

AND: Crack and Ray are debating the age-old music question: "Tusk" or "Rumours"?

UPDATE: Crack says "Meade, Ann, this is for you," as the Aretha Franklin track (from "Lady Soul," #59) begins, and I get the joke, which is that one time I used the word "bellyaching" to describe soul music, and he's never let me forget it. I think the context of my remark was that when I was a teenager in the 1960s, I preferred music that felt more like it was about teenagers in love than the heavy, troubled relationships of adults. Ah, here it is. It all started when Meade was playing the the Garnet Mimms version of "Cry Baby," and I said:

I remember when that song... was on the radio. It was 1963. I was 12. I listened to top 40 AM radio, and I liked the songs that felt like they were about teenagers. There was a brightness and a happiness to the songs that dominated the top 40. Even the songs about crying. The biggest song about crying in 1963 was "It's My Party." Lesley Gore is gloriously triumphant in her claim of the right to cry.

"Cry Baby" seemed to come from a dreary 1950s world of old people and their problems. Meade says he loved music like that. Maybe that look into the weighty, complicated lives of adults was enticing to some really young radio listeners, but I wanted it on a different station. Here, I said, here's my answer to that "Cry Baby":

[Embedded video: The Pretenders, "Stop Your Sobbing."]

I love the original Kinks version too, and you'd better believe I had all the early Kinks albums. Kinks, Kinda Kinks, and Kinks Kontroversy. I still love that kind of [kinda] thing. It still appeals to me more than the anguished bellyaching of soul music.

Boldface added.

The Crack Emcee is on the radio...

... right now. Listen here. [UPDATE: The live broadcast is over now. But you can stream or download it here.]

NOTE: He's there to talk. There's also music that's not his. Don't let me confuse you into mistaking Elvis for Crack.

AT 10:20 CT: The music part is over and Crack is talking now.

AT 10:43: They are going through some kind of countdown of greatest recordings of all time (from the "psychedelic soul" view point), and I like that the Little Richard song is "Rip It Up." That's my favorite Little Richard song. AND: Trying to retrospectively add a Little Richard tag to this blog, I discover a hidden reference to Little Richard in the dialogue from the Beatles' movie "Hard Day's Night": "Have you no natural resources of your own?... You could learn more by gettin' out there and living!"/"Out where?"/"Any old where! But not our little Richard. Oh, no. When you're not thumpin' them pagan skins you're tormenting your eyes with that rubbish."

AT 10:50: Crack gives a shout-out to "Meade and Ann."

AND: Actually the countdown is of Uncle Ray’s Top 100 Albums. You can see the whole list here. Little Richard's "Little Richard, “Here’s Little Richard," is #78, and I don't know the criteria for picking the track from the album.

11:10: After Uncle Ray says he loves on-line trolls, Crack disagrees and says: "It can get very dark." And the next subject is Nirvana, because Nirvana's "Unplugged" is next on the list (at #74). Crack expresses great appreciation for Kurt Cobain, "including the way he took himself out. He was very definitive about that." The album cut playing is "All Apologies."

11:25: Discussion of the n-word. (NSFW on the music that follows.)

11:42: After Ray played Meatloaf (which I had to turn way down), Crack said: "Meatloaf is the perfect example of why The Ramones were so necessary."

11:45: Crack finds more misogyny in Led Zeppelin than in rap.

11:55: Ray says Crack will be back next week "unless you get a job," and Crack says: "You're as bad as people on line."

The Crack Emcee doesn't buy Romney's "claim to humility, and that condescending-as-hell 'sad eyes' routine..."

"... with the slightly tilted head and wan grin, is as grating today as ever - four years of that is going to be excruciating - as are the cutaways to his wife, who has the eyes of a bald eagle deciding what chunk of flesh to tear next."

I'm extracting a description that made me laugh from what is more or less a positive review of Romney's speech.

"According to my Facebook profile, I'm doing about as well as their stock price..."

"... my "outreach" is -80%, whatever that, and 'outreach,' means."

"Some of the stuff in [Sarah Jessica Parker's] house was shabby chic, and let’s just say, Anna [Wintour] wanted less shabby, and more chic."

This is completely mundane to me. Of course, a house that a real family lives in is different from the norm for a glamorous lunch party. Whether Anna Wintour or some less divine stylist is doing the redoing, it must be redone.

But it became hilarious when Rush Limbaugh — who had never even heard the term "shabby chic" — tried to get his mind around it.

Have you ever heard of the term "shabby chic"?  That is how the New York Post describes Sarah Jessica Parker's house. The decor is shabby chic.  I've never heard it, either.  I don't know what it is.  But they had... It's in the Post. Apparently, people were over there Windexing doorknobs.  This place is made out to be an absolute pigsty that Anna Wintour had to go into and clean. No, I'm telling you that's how it's written.  There are people cleaning the doorknobs, washing the windows, taking a piano upstairs, moving furniture out, moving furniture in. 

Etc. etc. After the break, he's got a definition of the term — it's from Wikipedia, though he doesn't say so — and he's quoting and riffing:

"Shabby chic is a form of interior design where furniture and furnishings are either chosen" because they look old and worn out, with "signs of wear and tear." Or if they're new items, they're made to look that way. Flaking paint, dents, little chunks taken out of the wood table in the kitchen. I have pictures of some of this stuff.  It looks like you'd run into it in one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins.  At least to me. "At the same time, a soft, opulent, yet cottage-style decor, often with a feminine feel is emphasized to differentiate it from genuine period decor."

Anyway, Anna Wintour didn't like it. She got it out of there.  It's not even her house.  It's Sarah Jessica Parker's place.  Anna Wintour shows up, and she probably said, "I'm not going in there.  I am not setting foot in this place! I'm not having my picture taken in a place like this."  So the story goes on. She moved the piano upstairs. They were spray painting stuff, washing doorknobs inside and out.  They're making the place sound like a pigsty. 

Limbaugh obviously wants it to be that Parker is a big old slob, but "shabby chic" is a decorating term that has nothing to do with things being filthy or even messy. And "one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins"... that's a way to say "hillbillies" without saying "hillbillies." Limbaugh wants to say: this is the case of the biggest fashionista in the room calling another fashionista a hillbilly. The material is not there, because "shabby chic" is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.) But Limbaugh nevertheless follows his original impulse, that Wintour and her people insulted Parker by calling her home "shabby."

IN THE COMMENTS: I say: "Note to commenters: References to Parker's resemblance to a horse have been done, done, and overdone. Come up with something new." And Crack Emcee says: "Glad to oblige," and — quoting me "The material is not there, because 'shabby chic' is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.)" — says "Oh, that shit is HEAVY alright." Indeed!

ADDED: An antidote to the heavy at Crack's link. By the way, we're repainting our house, and we're repainting black and white. What we need to survive... together alive...

"Crack's Top Ten Suggestions For What Meadhouse Can Do To Keep Me Entertained."

The Crack Emcee was really inspired by my comment "Remember, Meade and I need to do some road trips for your entertainment, and it's a big deal to do that customized Sprinter to suit the sensitivities of an old lady professor-blogger."

Note: The "Clarence Thomas" tag is not a mistake.

Judge Posner includes a photograph of Bob Marley in an opinion and sloughs off worries about copyright.

The case was about dreadlocks (and the prison officials who cut them off), and Posner said his use of the photo fit the "fair use" doctrine:

"It's not as if we're selling our opinions in competition with a photographer... Using the photo in a judicial opinion couldn't conceivably be hurting the copyright holder."

Posner did not give the photographer credit, though it's a commercial photographer who uses Getty Images to collect fees. But Posner just grabbed the photo from the internet. He says "With the Internet, it's extraordinarily easy to find photographs of anything," so there's a good chance he encountered the photograph on a website that didn't name the photographer.

Posner seems to think it's quite fun to toss photographs into judicial opinions. It reminds me of the way some judges like to quote song lyrics or lines from movies. Blogging, I always feel that it's more questionable to use an image that someone else created than it is to cut and paste a block of text, but why should that be? I quote blocks of text all the time, but I remember, when I started blogging, worrying quite a bit about whether it was acceptable to copy that much text, so I'm relieved to hear a judge take a broad view of fair use and set an example.

Here's an opinion where Posner includes a picture of an ostrich with its head in the sand and a picture of (presumably) a lawyer with his head in the sand as he criticizes a lawyer who failed to cite a case that should have been cited. The lawyer filed a grievance against Posner for funning with him like that. The grievance was dismissed, and Posner offers the classic nonapology "I'm sorry he was upset by it."

There's more going on here than copyright. There's also the idea that judges are supposed to be neutral and sober. They wield power against real individuals, and it's a power that's supposed to come solely from law, not from any will of the judge's own. In that light, when the judge displays that he's enjoying the experience or playing to the crowd, entertaining the audience, we may fear that he's doing something wrong. This is why most judicial opinions are so godawful tedious, as the judges all sound alike and phrase everything in the dullest possible way. And there are no pictures!

This reminds me. We lawprofs have to make students read these texts, and we use casebooks that have edited the tediously verbose writings down, but the casebooks are still ponderous — in more ways that one. I'd like to take iBooks Author — an amusing new app — throw all the cases I assign into it. (All the judicial opinions are in the public domain, so there's no copyright issue at all.) Edit the cases down, summarize some things, and embed some pictures in a Posneresque way.

For example, take Griswold v. Connecticut (the old birth control case that flummoxed Mitt Romney in the debate the other day). There's a point in Justice Harlan's concurring opinion where he writes:

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment stands, in my opinion, on its own bottom.

That's just begging for a photograph grabbed from the internet.

Should Althouse use iBooks Author to write a Posneresquely amusing Constitutional Law casebook?
	No. It would be undignified and unserious and thus not usable in a real law school class.
	Yes. Students (and other readers) will love it.
	No. It won't be that good. It might be annoying. And Althouse has better things to spend time on.
	Yes. I'd like to see Althouse's creative energy drained away in this idiotic project.
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IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Posner is The Crack Emcee of judicial opinions?

"No political correctness, no caring about anyone's feelings... or any of that - these are just ideas, finally free..."

"... and they must (and will) be dealt with. Fortunately, people do laugh at what he says," says Crack Emcee about Patrice O'Neal:

[H]is mind is one of the best examples of why the black male experience can be so difficult to integrate into the American WASP experience. His comedy is almost an x-ray of why black guys must be contained** by the wider society - there's no barriers on his brain.

Patrice O'Neal, who died yesterday, at the age of 41.

"You're Gonna Pay."

Everyone's talking about the anthem of the ages.

ADDED: The Crack Emcee is talking about it. And not in a nice way.

"But a marriage is between two people and – this is going to come as a shock to some women..."

" ... you’re not in it."

Should people who don't know Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin talk about their marriage?
	No. A marriage exists within a sacred closed circle of 2.
	No. We don't know enough to have an intelligent opinion.
	No. Leaving them alone will help them avoid divorce and divorce is bad for society.
	Yes. It's an interesting subject to speculate about even without full information.
	Yes. A spouse needs to hear from others in order to make good decisions.
	Yes. A marriage is intermeshed with society and that makes a high-profile marriage a public issue.
pollcode.com free polls

Crack plays Instapundit...

... with Instapundit. There's a funny but NSFW image at the link. BTW, I think Crack is wrong about why Glenn doesn't link to him. I think Glenn's mind and Crack's mind are just far enough out of sync that... well, maybe one day, one of them, all of a sudden will realize he's on the wrong page or on the right page but the wrong note, and he's got to get in sync with the other one to understand what’s happening in this country. And it will be blogged.

ADDED: Crack, could you take a look at this?

AND: The link in the "ADDED" section was wrong for many hours yesterday, I apologize. Corrected.

ALSO: Instapundit acknowledges that his site was sending out malware vibes yesterday. Sorry I passed that along. I kept noticing a nasty window popping up when I tried to go to his site, but it took me a long time to notice that I'd entered it here.