"Lately the American president has been spending quite a bit of time redecorating the Oval Office. The results can only be called a gilded rococo hellscape."

I'm reading "All Hail Our Rococo President!" —  "an installment of Visual Studies, a series that explores how images move through and shape culture" — by Emily Keegin, in The New York Times. That's a free-access link.

There is a parade of golden objects that march across the mantel, relegating the traditional Swedish ivy to a greenhouse. Gilded Rococo wall appliqués, nearly identical to the ones at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, are stuck to the fireplace and office walls with the same level of aesthetic consideration a child gives her doll’s face before covering it in nail polish....

Lots of photos, analysis, and historical background, so go to the free link. I'll just quote one more thing:

Right before the 2016 election, Fran Lebowitz called Mr. Trump “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” On the campaign trail, he didn’t look or sound like the rest of the new American billionaires. He wasn’t polished or smooth. His appearance was shoddy, strange, lacking all polish. And all that gold in his house? Well, yes, it looked fake. It was Rococo. He was a normal guy self-consciously performing wealth, something Americans had been doing for the previous 20 years. Not to mention the past 240....

Would America be less of a hellscape if it were polished and smooth? 

Odd that we got that metaphor out of nowhere — the little girl covering her doll's face in nail polish — and then the word "polish" became the essence of the way educated, intelligent people "perform wealth": "He wasn’t polished or smooth." And then the author doubled down about polish: "His appearance was shoddy, strange, lacking all polish."

"I seem to be the only person who recalls that ranked choice was on the ballot at one point, and I voted against it. I am really opposed to this idea."

"I’m going to vote for one person in each office.... Truthfully, in my lifetime, I’ve only liked two mayors: I liked Lindsay, and I liked Dinkins. Even Dinkins was far away. Lindsay, no one even knows — some kid asked me this and then she looked up Lindsay. She said, 'How could you have liked him? He’s a Republican.' Today, he’d practically be a socialist. To me, Andrew Yang is a kind of a Trump figure. I’m not saying he’s bad in that way, morally bad. But it’s ridiculous: The reason he was leading in the polls is because everyone knew who he was. The reason everyone knew who he was is that he ran for president. To me, Andrew Yang — he’s qualified for nothing. He couldn’t be the president of my condo board. I assure you, he could not deal with this. If New York City were a high-school football team, he could be the cheerleader — not a college football team but a high-school football team. In a small town." 

Said Fran Lebowitz, quoted in "A Ranked Choice Cheat Sheet/We asked New Yorkers about their ranked-choice-voting strategies" (NY Magazine).

Notice how she avoided the complicated question of how to use ranked-choice voting strategically. Her plan is to just pretend there is no ranked-choice and vote for one. That might actually be the best strategy, though, and I don't just mean to avoid having to think about it. It might actually be the best strategy if you think it through at a high level of math and psychology. But asking a lot of notable New Yorkers is NOT a way to get good answers about the strategy, because there's strategy to talking about strategy. If you reveal a smart strategy, you'll cause other strategists to devise counter-strategies. Plus, these notable New Yorkers all want to use their space in the magazine to say why they like the candidates they support.

Here, Chelsea Manning offered a little bit about actually ranking strategy:

With ranked-choice voting, you have to think more strategically as a voter than you would with winner-takes-all. You can have an extremely popular candidate such as Andrew Yang — by popular I don’t mean ‘well liked’; I mean ‘has an enormous amount of name recognition’ — and whenever people go down the list, they’ll be like, Oh, okay, I’ll put him at the bottom. But being at the bottom still makes that a vote. So it’s about who you put in and who you keep out. And that’s the logic that I have here.

Yeah, people might not realize that because there are more candidates than ranked positions on the ballot, putting Yang last isn't a way to sort of vote against him. What if he wins by collecting a ridiculous number of 5th-place votes from people who regard him as their least favorite?!

“On menswear, she says she would sooner see a man approach her with a grenade than wearing a pair of shorts.”

From "'Come for the quips but stay for the coats': the enduring style of Fran Lebowitz/Pretend It’s a City, the Netflix series about the writer and socialite, is a love letter to her sartorial triumphs" (The Guardian).

"Are teens watching Pretend It's a City?" — asks Raphael Bob-Waksberg about the Martin Scorsese series — on Netflix — with Fran Lebowitz.

Are teens watching Pretend It's a City? Have the alternative teens discovered Fran Lebowitz? I feel like for a particular sort of high schooler this show could be It Exactly - a key into a different kind of being: "Oh, I'm That." If you are a teen or know a teen, please report.

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg (@RaphaelBW) January 19, 2021

Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the comic writer associated with the animated Netflix show "Bojack Horseman." I have read and enjoyed his story collection "Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory." I follow him on Twitter, and I loved his question. I've watched the Fran Lebowitz series, and I'm the same age as she is (and lived in the NYC in the 70s and 80s), so I liked it, but what about these kids today?

Bob-Waksberg hasn't gotten too many answers. A couple teens say they've watched it, but give no report on whether they found it to be any kind of "key into a different kind of being." 

But here's the most striking answer:

alternative teens discovered her a'ight pic.twitter.com/cJ7lUd9v3G

— ☹☹⌛⌛⚰⚰♻♻ (@zaws) January 19, 2021

I clicked around and found this: 

I love Fran Lebowitz too... & I would love to be simply excited for this new netflix thing but I have some awfully depressing news... Fran Lebowitz is a TERF! I know this because in this 2010 documentary about Candy Darling, Beautiful Darling, Lebowitz articulates the TERF position just about as explicitly as you can--that Candy isn't a woman, but a man tragically and fetishistically fixated on womanhood.... I suppose I am bringing it up because, as usual, it's that thing where an older cis lesbian has been just about as explicitly hateful towards trans people as you can be, but because she's an elder or whatever we're all pretending that never happened....

TERF = trans-exclusionary radical feminist. 

You can watch the entire documentary "Beautiful Darling" here, but I'll just embed the trailer, which begins with Lebowitz talking about Darling:

 

Lebowitz expresses the opinion that you cannot be a woman if you didn't begin life as "a little girl." The power behind Candy Darling was Andy Warhol, and Lebowitz knew Warhol — she wrote for his magazine — and did not like him, as you can see in this clip from a Scorsese domentary that was HBO in 2011:

 

"This is what happens when an inside joke gets into the water supply."

ADDED: I wrote "Lebowitz expresses the opinion..." but these are not "opinions" in the non-artist sense of the word. I like to quote Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists."

You've got to understand that Lebowitz is a humorist. She's releasing her inside jokes into the water supply. 

"I loathe domestic life.... I don’t want anyone in my house that I don’t know when they are leaving, so I don’t want there to be anyone else in the house."

"So you’ve never had a live-in relationship?"/"Never! That’s what I’m saying, never! Never. I never did it. I never would do it. I don’t want to do it. I have no interest in it. I don’t like domestic life like that. I am not that share-y a person; I’m not accommodating in that way, in any real way. I have zero ability or desire — the only monogamous relationship I have had in my life is with my car. That is my monogamous relationship; I still have that car, the same car, yes, and the reason that I still have this car is because, unlike humans, I am not tired of the car."

From "Fran Lebowitz vs. the World Talking (on a landline) with the star of Martin Scorsese’s cranky, necessary love letter to New York, Pretend It’s a City" (New York Magazine). I'm quite sure it's not necessary, but it's on Netflix, so I will check it out.

"If you can’t annoy somebody … there’s little point in writing" —Kingsley Amis/"Whatever they criticize you for, intensify it" —Jean Cocteau.

A couple quotes that jumped out at me from "Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany," a book I'm enjoying immensely. Garner is Dwight Garner, a NYT book critic. It's a very smart sequence of quotations. 

Just a few more:

"I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."—William S. Burroughs 

"Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation" —W. H. Auden 

"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane" —H. P. Lovecraft 

"A monster is a person who has stopped pretending" —Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”

"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split" —Raymond Chandler

"If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal" —Fran Lebowitz, in The New York Times 

"Don’t own anything you wouldn’t leave out in the rain" —Gary Snyder 

"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante"—Samuel Beckett 

I hope that annoyed some of you or what's the point?

“The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone.”

“ A couple of people invited me to their houses in the country, houses much more lavish than mine. Some of them have the thing I would love to have, which is a cook, since I don’t know how to cook. And I thought, You know, Fran, you could go away and you could be in a very beautiful place with a cook, but then you’d have to be a good guest. I would much rather stay here and be a bad guest. And, believe me, I am being a bad guest.”

Says Fran Lebowitz, quoted in The New Yorker.

"Everyone's too... everyone's too too too too..."

Said Bill Maher on his "Overtime" show, receiving a lightweight apology from Fran Lebowitz, who'd just said something on Maher's "Real Time" that the producers told her they were getting "blowback" about on Twitter:

#FranLebowitz clarifies her Trump comments on #RTOvertime: pic.twitter.com/m0nFrsjygZ

— Real Time (@RealTimers) May 18, 2019

Deadline gives the background on what led to that.

Asked whether Trump should be impeached, Lebowitz insisted “Impeachment would be just the beginning of what he deserves.” That’s when she suggested we turn him over to “the Saudis, his buddies – the same Saudis who got rid of” WaPo columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “Maybe they could do the same for him,” she had said....

What's interesting about the apology scene is that it's not even an effort to appear sincere. Lebowitz is mocking the producers for watching Twitter and telling her to apologize and Maher immediately takes over to criticize people in general — "everyone" — for being too sensitive. Good. There are too many bullshit apologies, too much fear of offending, and not enough tough comedy.

I wonder exactly what the producers said. I'm imagining You saw what happened to Kathy Griffin.

"That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires — smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge — are basically solitary pursuits."

"Oh, sure, sometimes a friend or two drops by and we light up together and occasionally I bounce a few vengeance ideas around with a willing companion, but actual meetings are really unnecessary."

One of 25 quotes from famous women about being alone. There are a lot of interesting quotes over there. I just picked the one that jumped out at me and needily insisted on being my friend. It's from Fran Lebowitz.

"He was the only man I’ve ever seen who could wear plaid shorts and pull it off. Men shouldn’t wear shorts in the first place."

"The British lost their empire once they started letting colonial officers wear shorts. Who can take orders from a man in shorts?"

Said Tom Wolfe, quoted in the New York Magazine piece "Our Bodies, Ourselves/Running, Jumping, Dancing, Stretching, Smoking: New Yorkers Cough Up Their Fitness Secrets (And Lapses)." The bit about shorts came in the context of naming his favorite part of his own body:

“The gastrocnemius. It’s one of the larger muscles in your calves. It’s well-proportioned.” Body envy: "The one I’ve admired most was Ken Buchanan. He was the lightweight champion of the world from Scotland, and I watched him at Madison Square Garden."

Buchanan is the "he" in the quote in the post title.

[ADDED: What follows is based on my assumption that an article that New York Magazine promoted in its sidebar to me today was a new article. No date is displayed to ward off this assumption. However, the assumption is wrong.]

Also... note to New York Magazine: Fran Lebowitz is not 52. I don't care how much she exercises or how that ultimately makes her look, she's 64, just like me. I remember reading her books in the 1970s. I remember reading her columns in Mademoiselle before those books came out. If she's trying to "pass" as 12 years younger, it won't work on those of us who've done our time in the preceding decades... or did I miss a cultural leap and — like gender and race — you are what you say you are? Not that I think Lebowitz claims to be 52. I think NY Magazine screwed up. And also "you're as young as you feel" is an old old saying. Speaking of 64, 64 years ago there was a movie called "As Young As Your Feel":



That's Marilyn on the cover, but she only has a small role. Here's the whole movie at YouTube. Scroll to 17:00 to see the forever-young goddess. How did Marilyn Monroe keep in shape? I don't know but in 1952, Pageant magazine published an article titled "How I Stay in Shape, By Marilyn Monroe."
I don't know who wrote this, but I doubt if it was Marilyn Monroe, and hardly a word of it rings true, but the idea that there's a way to "feel blond all over" could key into today's obsession with transracialism:

"I have to say that one of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young."

"There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I'd just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? It's repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously. It's like any other sort of revealing clothing, in that the people you'd most like to see them on aren't wearing them. And if they are, it's probably their job to wear them. My fashion advice, particularly to men wearing shorts: Ask yourself, 'Could I make a living modeling these shorts?' If the answer is no, then change your clothes. Put on a pair of pants.... All these clothes that you see people wearing, the yoga clothes—even men wear them!—it's just another way of being in pajamas. You need more natural beauty to get away with things like that. What's so great thing about clothes is that they're artificial—you can lie, you can choose the way you look, which is not true of natural beauty. So if you're naturally beautiful, wear what you want, but that's .01% of people. Most people just aren't good looking enough to wear what they have on. They should change. They should get some slacks and a nice overcoat."

Said Fran Lebowitz, in an Elle interview that's full of readable stuff, like (about Hillary) "I think her lack of style comes naturally. I do, I really do. She has no style, zero. Of course there's millions of women like this, it's just that not everyone's looking at them constantly." And "Well, what if drag queens just really let themselves go, pretending not to try, like most women?" Like most women... including Hillary.