Goodbye to Mike Nichols.

"Mike Nichols, who won an Oscar for directing the 1967 film The Graduate, has died aged 83."

AND: There will be longer obituaries soon. I'm looking at YouTube, all the old Nichols and May comedy routines. Nichols was never married to Elaine May, but he did have 3 other wives before his marriage to Diane Sawyer, whom he remained with for 26 years. The glamorous newswoman is now his widow. I'm looking at Wikipedia and see that he was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931. His original name was Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky.

His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Nichols' father's family had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution, and settling in Germany around 1920. Nichols' mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother.

The relocation to the United States — escaping the Nazis — took place in 1938. What a life!

ADDED: Here's a picture of Gustav Landauer:



"You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!"

AND: Here's the long NYT obituary. Excerpt:

Mr. Nichols said in interviews that though he did not know it at the time, his work with Ms. May was his directorial training. Asked by Ms. Ephron in 1968 if improvisation was good training for an actor, he replied that it was because it accommodates the performer to the idea of taking care of an audience.

“But what I really thought it was useful for was directing,” he said, “because it also teaches you what a scene is made of — you know, what needs to happen. See, I think the audience asks the question, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And improvisation teaches you that you must answer it. There must be a specific answer. It also teaches you when the beginning is over and it’s time for the middle, and when you’ve had enough middle and it’s time already for the end. And those are all very useful things in directing.”

Judge rejects ABC's motion to dismiss, which included the contention that the world "slime" is not defamatory when referring to beef.

The product it called "pink slime" is "much like all ground beef... slimy,” ABC argued.... hilariously.

The commenters at the link (to NRO) mention "Ghostbusters"...



... and "Nickelodeon"...



But when I hear "slime," I go right to my copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness":

The For-Itself is suddenly compromised. I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy, and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me. Its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid nor a dynamism like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me. It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking…. Slime is the revenge of the in-itself. A sickly-sweet, feminine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality “sugary.” … A sugary-sliminess is the ideal of the slimy; it symbolizes the sugary death of the For-itself (like that of the wasp which sinks into the jam and drowns in it)… But at the same time the slimy is myself, by the very fact that I outline an appropriation of the slimy substance. That sucking of the slimy which I feel on my hands outlines a kind of continuity of the slimy substance in myself. These long, soft strings of substance which fall from me to the slimy body (when, for example, I plunge my hand into it and then pull it out again) symbolize a rolling off of myself in the slime… [Slime] transcends all distinctions betwen psychic and physical, between the brute existent and the meanings of the world; it is a possible meaning of being. The first experience which the infant can have with the slimy enriches him psychologically and morally; he will not need to reach adulthood to discover the kind of sticky baseness which we figuratively name “slimy”; it is there near him in the very sliminess of honey or of glue.

He wrote that while eating a cheeseburger.

Gabby Giffords, ever smiling, struggles through an interview with Diane Sawyer.

Giffords can only get a few words out — "so slowly" — and Diane Sawyer has no compunction about supplying words all around Giffords's words, most notably at the end of the interview — you have to watch the video — when she turns Giffords into a puppet who voices the last word to a long sentence yammered out by Sawyer. Sawyer repeatedly assures us that Giffords understands everything and is able to think well, that her only intellectual deficit is in speaking. We're told how effective Giffords will be in pressuring Congress to enact gun control. She will be taken around to the members of Congress so they will be subjected to the ordeal — if they want to say "no" — of saying "no" to her face.

This is how it's done. At what point do you say "no"... enough?

ADDED: The most poignantly telling moment in the interview is when Giffords is invited to say what matters most to her. She says: "family."

"It’s too bad this is such a big deal."

"It’s too bad our society isn’t further along."

The CBS News reporter Diane Sawyer asked [Sally Ride] to demonstrate a newly installed privacy curtain around the shuttle’s toilet. On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes.

ADDED: "The pioneering scientist was, a statement from Sally Ride Science announced, survived by 'Tam O'Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years.' With that simple statement — listed alongside her mother, Joyce; her sister, Bear; her niece, Caitlin and nephew, Whitney — Ride came out." Link.

"The pancreatic cancer community is going to be absolutely thrilled that there's now this advocate that they didn't know about. And, I hope the GLBT community feels the same," Bear Ride, who identifies as gay, said....

Of Sally Ride's sexual orientation, Bear Ride said, "Sally didn't use labels. Sally had a very fundamental sense of privacy, it was just her nature, because we're Norwegians, through and through."

"2 of the 3 broadcasts being anchored by women is nothing to sneeze at..."

Well, I'm sneezing because I think it means that the network news isn't important anymore. That's not progress in feminism. It's what is conventionally a symptom of anti-feminism: That women do something signifies that it isn't considered important.

"There's something about the Olsens that makes them seem like trinkets...."

Robin Givhan on the Olsen twins:

Ashley Olsen... appeared on "Good Morning America" and spoke with Diane Sawyer. The morning host insisted that they stand next to each other so the audience could take note of just how teeny-tiny the millionaire author is compared with the statuesque journalist. We couldn't help but wonder: Would Sawyer have been so inclined to treat the equally diminutive actress Jada Pinkett Smith or former labor secretary Robert Reich like a Travelocity gnome?... Assembling [their new] book took more than a year and was daunting, one of them said. It might have been Mary-Kate. But it could just as easily could have been Ashley. It was impossible to tell them apart.... As individuals, they do not seem fully realized. As adults, they are a blur. When we see Ashley solo in the middle of a cocktail party, we wonder: Where is her other half? What is she doing? And who left this child alone in a room crowded with adults?

Soooo.... wow... twins are freaky.... I mean, I thought Givhan was critical of Diane Sawyer, but then, she just went on infantalizing and dehumanizing them. Hey, big news: Twins are human. Short people are human.

Women as news anchors.

Maureen Dowd comments on the lack of female news anchors.

I know that women have surpassed men, in many respects, by embracing their femininity and frivolity. Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, who mix news with dish, cooking and fashion in the morning, are the real breadwinners of their news divisions, generating more ratings and revenue than the cookie-cutter men of the night.

Yet, as Mr. Ailes says, "network anchoring is still Mount Olympus." I checked around for feminist outrage, but couldn't find any. Women told me the nightly news was an anachronism, so why shouldn't the anchor be? "Caring about having a woman in the showcase or figurehead role seems so 80's," one said.

Ailes's isolated quotes in this column make him sound like a jerk. (But how can a blogger complain about isolated quotes?) But it may be true that not enough people care about the mere gesture of giving the slot to a woman. People have to also want to watch the show, and they need to get the right woman or that won't work.

I can't imagine watching Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer as a nightly news anchor. These women have cultivated an appalling image. I rarely stop by those network morning shows. (If I watch morning news I flip around among the cable news stations. I'd rather have grizzled, old Don Imus on than those horrible network shows.) Both Couric and Sawyer appear insane to me. Couric with her giant Joker smile and Sawyer with her murmuring smarminess. I don't think they are insane. I think they have crafted a demeanor that reflects an opinion of the audience, which is: women are soft in the head. I see nothing feminist in wanting either of them as a nightly news anchor.

Elsewhere in today's Times is this story about Court TV anchor Nancy Grace.

Nancy Grace, the delightfully irascible star of Court TV, is never short on opinions - fiery, unabashedly blunt opinions. Ask her about defense attorneys, and she'll offer the following: "Their job is not to seek the truth; their job is to get clients off."

She's developed a great female style: beautiful, tough, sarcastic, passionate. Has anyone on TV ever sneered so well? You want a fashion tip from Nancy?

"I put everything in my bra - money, pen, paper," Ms. Grace shared in forthright way. "Never carry anything. I learned that from being a prosecutor walking through housing projects to find witnesses."

If blogging is the way your mind looks on the web, then going back and rereading one’s miscellaneous back entries ought to give a person some new insight into their own minds. After ten days of blogging I decided to take account, not of my soul, but of the names I had managed to drop.

Total names dropped (not counting journalists other than Diane Sawyer, but counting fictional characters): 100.

Major categories:

Human movie personalities: 16%
Current political figures: 14%
Human TV personalities: 12%
Artists: 11%
Writers (fiction writers & public intellectual types): 11%
Fictional characters (other than puppets): 9%

5% in each of these categories:

Singers.
Historical figures.
Fashion people/royalty.
Puppets!

I watched the debate last night. I even TiVo'd it and a segment of commentary following it. But I did not watch Howard Dean and his wife being smarmed up to by Diane Sawyer. I resist the Sawyer nuzzle-fest. So I just read about it in the NYT.

"Look, I'm not a perfect person, I've got plenty of warts," Dr. Dean said between coughing spasms and sips from a mug of hot water at the Lebanon forum, where he received numerous ovations. "I say things that get me in trouble. I wear suits that are cheap. But I say what I think, and I believe what I say, and I'm willing to say things that are not popular, but that ordinary people know are right.

"In other words," he added, "I lead with my heart and not my head."

Is that a good explanation? I know he's sick. (He looked pretty ill or very tired at the debate.) But if the concern is that we think he's angry, why would we be reassured to hear that he's going to act from emotion, without thinking it through?

"He just doesn't get that angry," Mrs. Dean, 50, told Ms. Sawyer ... "I mean, he doesn't. You know, he just, he's very kind, very considerate, and, it just doesn't happen."....

And Mrs. Dean, who skipped an afternoon of house calls and paperwork to film the "Primetime" interview Thursday, may come to New Hampshire this weekend — despite Dr. Dean's repeated assurances that he would not use his politically uninterested wife as a prop on the trail.

"Do you feel like a prop, dear?"

I love that question! It's a brainteaser. Is yes more like no or is no more like yes?