"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"

That's I question I had, a couple hours ago, as I was gathering my thoughts in preparation, I thought, for blogging this article by the New Yorker's movie critic, Richard Brody, "In Defense of the Traditional Review/Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future."

I got a bunch of great quotes out of Grok with my question, including the one that deserves to stand in for them all: "Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read" (Frank Zappa).

Then there was this, from Pablo Picasso: "The critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." And that got me tumbling down a side path with an issue I'd encountered yesterday, the idea that there are individuals who identify as eunuchs and the notion that castration is, for them, medically necessary. I was told: "The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (Version 8) includes a chapter on 'eunuch' as a gender identity, suggesting that castration may be considered 'medically necessary gender-affirming care' for some who identify as eunuchs and experience distress from their genitals."

I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:

"Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"

That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?"

All of that was more interesting to me than what I would have produced reading Brody's article and blogging it in my usual way. And my "usual way" is to follow whatever interests me, not to feel obligated, but to do what is intrinsically rewarding for me. You see the problem!

"We prefer to have the melody before working on the lyric. We feel that when we have the melody, there are words on the tips of those notes, and we have to find them."

Said Alan Bergman, quoted in "Alan Bergman, Half of a Prolific Lyric-Writing Team, Dies at 99/With his wife, Marilyn, he wrote the words to memorable TV theme songs and the Oscar-winning 'The Way We Were' and 'The Windmills of Your Mind'" (NYT).

I've always been fascinated by the song "The Windmills of Your Mind," and I blogged about it in 2019 when the composer — the man who wrote the notes on the tips of which the Bergmans found the words — Michel Legrand, died.

That post has many versions of the song embedded, but I'll chose just one here, the 1968 Noel Harrison version that I remember as a hit and that I know was heard in — and won an Oscar for — "The Thomas Crown Affair":

My old post ends:

"It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out...."

"'Slop bowl'  is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants.... TikTok feeds, meanwhile, are overtaken by streams of 'fast fashion slop.' Thousands of users have embraced the genre of the 'Shein Haul' reveal.... Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term 'vibecession,' notes that across different kinds of consumption... people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else’s), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday’s) or a little less human.... Some psychiatrists say it makes sense that being confronted with nonstop online slop comes with cognitive downside.... So now some posters and shoppers are trying to edge away from it...."

Writes Emma Goldberg, in "Living the Slop Life/Slop videos. Slop bowls. Slop clothing hauls. When did we get so submerged in the slop-ified muck?" (NYT).

Sometimes a word helps us perceive and understand and react to a problem. A word can shape or change the problem. Is "slop" accurate? Is it propaganda?

What are the words that have worked like that?

"The left wanted to make comedy illegal.... like, you can't make fun of anything.... Legalize comedy!"

Legalize comedy
pic.twitter.com/uKr6fiRI3K

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

And then, do you think this is funny, wielding a chainsaw? I mean, he's cutting thousands of jobs. Those are real people.

 

Must Watch Video: Elon Musk Has Been Knighted At CPAC After Receiving The Chainsaw For Bureaucracy

» WATCH/SHARE THE LIVE X STREAM HERE:https://t.co/7NYWKPuERO pic.twitter.com/mFe0unDA7u

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 20, 2025

That's Argentina's President Javier Milei, handing Musk the chainsaw, so I went to Milei's feed to try to get the video to embed from Milei's feed, where I got a bit distracted. For example, he reposted this:

 

On this day, February 21 1964, the Rolling Stones released the single Not Fade Away in the UK. Originally a Buddy Holly track, the Stones recorded their version at London’s Olympic Studios and it became the band’s first Top 10 hit in the United Kingdom! 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/kkM69cBxUz

— The Rolling Stones (@RollingStones) February 21, 2025

So much masculinity: 1. Comedy, 2. Power tools, 3. The Stones.

ADDED: What is the evidence that Javier Milei loves The Rolling Stones?

People don't want to shout out their own name, but Kamala Harris seems to have thought it would be a cool way to demonstrate that "It's about all of us."

They were loudly chanting her name, and she instructed them to shout out their own name, the idea being, I think, to unleash a hilarious, heartwarming cacophony:

This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3

— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) October 29, 2024

But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."

Apparently, individualism is not in vogue... or not something her people feel good about expressing loud and proud.

If I followed the method of the elite media and the Democratic Party, I would call it fascistic. The crowd showed that it only wanted to be unified behind the identity of the adored leader.

ADDED: I feel the strong need to republish a post I wrote in September 2018:

"Not even 48 hours after word got out a 43-foot-tall nude effigy of Donald Trump hung suspended from a construction crane, the indecent artwork was gone."

"But for most of Saturday and Sunday, a mile or two off Interstate 15, a few hundred yards from the always-bustling Love’s Travel Stop just north of Sin City, the statue had people stopping and staring.... [T]he statue was what some would call 'anatomically correct,' displaying the unknown artist’s concept of the very public billionaire’s private parts.... Alex Lannin, a 53-year-old special-education teacher in Las Vegas, brought Spirit Airlines flight attendant Honey Hunter, 27, of Spokane, Wash., to view the piece. 'I would say [it’s] very creative, like a piece of artwork, you know,' Hunter said.... Real-estate professional Clem Zeroli, 25, brought his girlfriend Tommi Alexander, 24, to pose together for a selfie at the site.... 'It’s not very respectful,” Zeroli said, “but I think it’s kind of funny. Any publicity is good publicity.'"

From "Pop-up exhibit? 43-foot naked Nevada Trump effigy vanishes after roadside ruckus" (NY Post).

We've been through this before.

I blogged naked Donald Trump effigies on August 19, 2016. There were 5, simultaneously, in 5 difference cities. I said: "The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on 'Crossfire' in 1986.... '[Brutality] is already in politics....'"

And on October 18, 2016, I had "Gender equality: Naked statue division": "In August, we saw the naked Trump statue set up in Union Square in NYC, and today we get the naked Hillary statue at the Bowling Green subway entrance in downtown Manhattan."

What goes around comes around as they say, and I'm not encouraging the creation of retaliatory naked statuary. I'll just quote Bob Dylan again: "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."

"And over 26 years of marriage, Gail played housewife. But in the early years it was for a house full of groupies."

"'A diverse array of horny dreamers, oddballs, misfits, and sycophants freeload on heavy rotation,' Moon describes in her memoir. (They included longtime Zappa bassist Roy Estrada, who was later twice convicted on charges of child molestation.) 'I still wear my pacifier around my neck for security, never knowing who’s safe and who isn’t, who my dad is humping and who he isn’t.' In a 1971 documentary, Frank was asked about his affairs on the road. 'I like to get laid,' he said. What about your wife, the interviewer asked? 'She’s become accustomed to it over a period of years,' says Zappa.... In fact, Gail was bitterly unhappy about his extramarital pursuits and could explode into rages. Moon writes about the time her father asked her to find the gun so her mother couldn’t get her hands on it. 'Gail is on a rampage,' he said. 'I didn’t even know we had a gun,' she writes.... Even after the groupies drifted away, nothing much changed. There was no structure, no family vacations, no PTA meetings. None of the four Zappa children graduated from high school.... Ahmet and Moon... each ran away from home only to find that nobody seemed to notice."

From "Frank Zappa’s kids are still grappling with his legacy — and each other/Like their dad’s oddball rock songs, their family defied description. His music, and their pain, has endured" (WaPo)(free access link).

"He returned to Stanford when the war ended, graduating in 1947 with a degree in industrial engineering. But after working for just four days..."

"... as an electrical engineer, he quit engineering forever. He was hired as a messenger at 20th Century Fox for $32.50 a week and eventually rose to story reader. But, he wrote in his memoir, 'I knew I was going to be a writer, producer or director of motion pictures, and I needed more background in the arts of the 20th century.' He enrolled at the University of Oxford on the G.I. Bill to study the work of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. After six months at Oxford and six months in Paris, he came home and sold a chase-across-the-desert script to Allied Artists for $3,500. He was so unhappy with the finished film, 'Highway Dragnet'... that he decided to become his own producer. With the $3,500, a borrowed one-man submarine and $6,500 raised from a dozen friends, he was almost ready to film 'Monster From the Ocean Floor'..."

From "Roger Corman, 98, Dies; Prolific Master of Low-Budget Cinema/He had hundreds of horror, science fiction and crime films to his credit. He also helped start the careers of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and many others" (NYT)(free access link — read the whole amazing story).

I love monster movies, and the cheaper they are, the better they are.... I wanted to embed this but Blogger won't let me, so here: Frank Zappa — Cheepnis (Original Roxy Footage).

"We're all fat," said Trump, last night, in his big — really big — big fat rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.

New Jersey! He came to New Jersey. They capture him in the courtroom 4 days out of the week, and they seem to be hoping he'll barely be able to campaign, but there he was, expanding his scope beyond the battleground states and into one of Biden's supposedly safe states, New Jersey.

I see how the mainstream media has been covering the rally. WaPo has "Trump insults prosecutor at Jersey Shore rally filled with vulgar jabs/The presumptive Republican nominee spoke at a large rally where there were plenty of personal attacks and vulgar expressions from Trump and his supporters." Large? How large? WaPo says "thousands," but Trump was saying 80,000. 

Anyway, I watched the whole thing, and I heard the "vulgar jabs." I just wanted to quote this:

You look at the Afghanistan disaster. You look at the border. You look at the real economy, not the fake economy. Everything they touch turns to what?

The thousands cry out "Shit!" He teasingly chides:

You shouldn't use that kind of language. Look, you can't use the word "shit," okay? 

"Zappa prods at a ludicrous cast of early-’70s hipsters, suggesting that their sense of authenticity is based on thin visions of consumerism."

"'Is that a real poncho?' he asks in a sultry baritone.... During so many of his ad-libs, Zappa sounds like a parody of sleazy TV presenters. Here, we can’t tell whether he’s playing himself or someone trying to gatekeep participation in the counterculture: 'I mean, is that a Mexican poncho, or a Sears poncho?'"

Writes Daniel Felsenthal, in "Hipsters Were Always Hypocrites. Ask Frank Zappa. Of the late musician's many records, Over-Nite Sensation best crystallized his cutting satire of our country’s blank-eyed habits" (The Atlantic).

This seems to follow on yesterday's discussion of the "word of the year" — "authentic."

"I changed the door panels on an old 56 Chevy, and replaced some old floor tiles, made some landscape paintings, wrote a song called 'You Don’t Say.'"

"I listened to Peggy Lee records. Things like that. I reread 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' a few times over. What a story that is. What a poem. If there’d been any opium laying around, I probably would have been down for a while. I listened to The Mothers of Invention record Freak Out!, that I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. What an eloquent record. 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy,' and the other one, 'Who Are the Brain Police,' perfect songs for the pandemic."

That is what Bob Dylan (says he) did during the lockdown.

Let's all read "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for Bob.

And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow. 

As for Zappa, he was alerting us to "The emptiness that's you inside" ("Hungry Freaks, Daddy") and raising the question whether the people we know are melted plastic and soft chrome ("Who Are the Brain Police?").

The perfection for the pandemic of "Brain Police" must have to do with the long middle section repeating "I think I'm gonna die" and "I'm gonna die." It's interesting to picture Bob grooving on that and thinking How eloquent... perhaps while laying floor tiles.

"Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat...."

"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.... Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.... The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"

Writes Annaliese Griffin, in "Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians" (NYT).

Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it! And it's always nice to discover an opinion piece in the New York Times that nudges us to think about it. 

Did you know it could "free" us from having meat in every meal? Did you realize your excess money was enslaving you to eating meat 3 times a day?

Am I missing the tone? Could this be intentional humor? I mean... "exciting vegetables." As we used to say in the 70s... Call and they'll come to you/Covered with dew/Vegetables dream of responding to you...

"Frank Zappa once said 'the world is rudderless.' I like yours SO MUCH better."

Said RideSpaceMountain, about my phrase "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots," in the comments to this post about the outsider artist Lee Godie. 

I'd wanted to embed a trailer for a documentary about the artist, and the Vimeo page gave me the HTML code, but then, on publication, it wouldn't display, and there was a reference to some privacy policy. I said: "That seems so out of keeping with the spirit of the artist, so there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots." 

I was just putting up this new post — because I want to encourage the world to adopt the line, "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots" — when RideSpaceMountain re-commented: "Correction: Alan Moore made that quote, no[t] Zappa." 

"Into this lacuna created by non-naming come degrading, disgusted terms for labia – 'beef curtains,' 'fanny flaps'” – that reinforce the sense that squeamishness is warranted..."

"Second-wave feminists [had] consciousness-raising women’s groups where everyone would examine their vulva with a hand mirror. That fell out of fashion in the 90s and 00s – surfing a post-ironic, anti-earnest wave, feminism was suddenly fine with the hidden, private vulva. Any public notion of what a vulva looked like was created by pornography, starting with complete hairlessness..... [There is a] digital native generation that [looks at pornography and thinks] 'Oh my God, that is not what I look like' [and doesn't want] to talk to anyone about it, because that would be mortifying.'... The artist Jamie McCartney produced The Great Wall of Vagina – 400 plastercast vulvas – in 2011... (He knows that the casts he has made are of vulvas, not vaginas, but the word play doesn’t work so well.)... 'While casting, I discovered that loads of women.... would look at other casts and say: "This one’s so neat," or: "I wish mine looked more like that." I was incredulous – there really wasn’t any sense in my mind that some were good and some were defective. And this ideal was created in my name, apparently, because that’s what men like. I just thought: "Fuck that."'...  On social media, even the most conceptual works of feminist visual representation often have to be taken down due to nudity or 'community' guidelines...."

From "Labia liberation! The movement to end vulva anxiety for good/Women have long been taught to be ashamed of their vulvas, with increasing numbers turning to cosmetic surgery in pursuit of genital ‘perfection.' But a new generation is fighting back" (The Guardian).

ADDED: I'm trying to grasp "post-ironic, anti-earnest." Seems contradictory, but maybe that's what they were. I do remember finding the consciousness-raising era feminism too earnest. But I don't really know when feminists were not earnest. As for irony, if the later feminists were post-ironic, when was the ironic era in feminism? I lived through the whole thing and observed it, through my own varying levels of irony and earnestness.

“What was in you that you just couldn’t do this? They all did — all the other tables. You were literally the only one of 20 other people. So there was something in you that was different from all the other people.”

Said Chuck Modiano, who "identified himself as a citizen journalist who writes for @Deadspin," quoted in "Protesters target D.C. diners, triggering backlash after heckling woman/Lauren Victor refused to go along with raising her fist — although she supports the movement" (WaPo). He was speaking to Lauren B. Victor, the woman in this viral video:

1) In a scene that played out several times Monday, a Black Lives Matter protest that began in Columbia Heights confronted White diners outside D.C. restaurants, chanting “White silence is violence!” and demanding White diners show their solidarity. #DCProtests pic.twitter.com/fJbPM76vb0

— Fredrick Kunkle WaPo (@KunkleFredrick) August 25, 2020

"What was in you?" — he asked, and it feels like an accusation of racism. You just couldn't even give us this. But what was in her — I hope — was humanity and personal integrity:

You could say, the hardest part of everything is other people.

I'm seeing the NYT headline: "The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid Is Other People/A mother recounts the pushback she received from her own family in raising a gender-nonconforming child."

Just remember: You are somebody else's "other people."

I have my problems with other people. Maybe try, if you can, to live in a way where you depend on yourself and draw on energy from within. If you keep demanding that "other people" rearrange their beliefs and behavior to smooth your way in life... 1. They're only going to go so far, 2. You've made yourself dependent on them, and 3. You're the "other people" too.



For the impatient or music-averse, here are the lyrics. (Key phrase:"We are the other people/We are the other people/We are the other people/You're the other people too.")

And what did Jean Paul Sartre mean by "Hell is other people"?

"Even as Trump tries to paint Joe Biden as gaga, he is doing something truly gaga: He is running the government that is responding to the worst pandemic in a century..."

"... at the same time he is the leader of the resistance to his own government, urging people and states to open up whenever they see fit, recommending Clorox injections, stifling Dr. Fauci, refusing to wear the mask. The fact is that Donald Trump has been wearing a mask for a long time, like Eleanor Rigby 'wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.' He studied larger-than-life titans like George Steinbrenner and Lee Iacocca and invented a swaggering character called Donald Trump with a career marked by evasions, deceptions and disguises. The young builder was intent, as T.S. Eliot wrote, to take the time 'to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.'"

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Covid Dreams, Trump Nightmares/Of masks, unmasking and dropping our professional masks for our medical ones" (NYT).

Okay. So... The Beatles...



"Eleanor Rigby" calls on us to feel empathy for "all the lonely people," but Dowd invokes it to sneer at a man.

Who does not wear a mask — a face that we keep in the jar by the door? How sad it is! Where's the love? But to Dowd, because it's Trump, we are called to hate, not love. A man has a persona as he faces the world, but who is he really? Because it's Trump, that isn't a call to empathy, but a basis for shunning and contempt and disgust — the kind of feeling that made Hillary say "basket of deplorables." The basket, the jar... the dehumanizing.

Here's a better "jar" song to suit the Dowdian mood...



The jar is under the bed...

And let's get the rest of the T.S. Eliot quote. It's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Please carefully read the entire poem and contemplate the extent to which Trump is anything like Prufrock, but let me expedite the process by quoting Wikipedia:

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.

Well, that does not sound like Trump at all!  Unattained carnal love? It sounds like a list of things Trump doesn't feel — "weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay." If anything, it's what he makes other people feel. It's one hell of a mask, if what we're seeing is merely a mask and the real Trump is all Prufrocky.

More likely Dowd is just playing around with the nifty bits and pieces that float by in her highly fluid consciousness. Thanks for the quotes, Maureen. They were very bloggy. The Beatles and T.S. Eliot...

...fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them, and fishermen hold flowers.

"They said Torres continued to call out to Boone saying he couldn't breathe, to which she is heard saying, 'That's on you. Oh, that's what I feel like when you choke me.'"

From "Florida man dies inside suitcase, girlfriend charged after claiming they were playing hide and seek: report" (Fox News).

Boone allegedly told police that they thought it would be funny if he got inside the suitcase, Fox 35 Orlando reported. She allegedly said they were drinking at the time and she passed out on her bed. When she woke up-- hours later-- she allegedly said she found him unresponsive and not breathing....

But she made videos, which police retrieved from her phone.

Deputies said Boone is heard laughing and saying, "For everything you've done to me, [expletive] you! Stupid!"

ADDED: Not exactly on point, but I thought about The Velvet Underground's "The Gift":



Spoken-word lyrics here. Excerpt:

Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit. It was now mid-August, which meant he had been separated from Marsha for more than two months.... He didn't have enough money to go to Wisconsin in the accepted fashion, true, but why not mail himself?... He bought masking tape, a staple gun and a medium sized cardboard box just right for a person of his build. He judged that with a minimum of jostling he could ride quite comfortably. A few air holes, some water, perhaps some midnight snacks, and it would probably be as good as going tourist!...

"So far this morning, you’ve mentioned Frank Zappa, Ric Ocasek and the Talking Heads. I’m sure there are lots of musical threads that attach the three. But..."

"... there’s something else, too: Baltimore childhoods. Frank Zappa and Ric Ocasek were both born in Baltimore and David Byrne moved to town when he was in elementary school. I grew up just outside the city and live here now. It’s a challenging and frustrating place on a lot of levels but it’s also a town that celebrates creativity and inspires a lot of loyalty."

A reader writes.

I wrote about Talking Heads in the context of saying goodbye to Ric Ocasek, who always reminded me a bit of David Byrne. Maybe it was the Baltimore connection! I often think of Frank Zappa, but until now, I don't think his connection to Baltimore ever figured in my musings. I wrote about him yesterday as I contemplated the NYT story about Brett Kavanaugh:

And I'd like to know... When can people get naked at parties and waggle their genitalia at each other?... I'm inclined to believe that people at private parties can get naked. We were just talking about Woodstock, that revered historical event where young people got naked. In the words of Frank Zappa:

There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
Will be free to sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we know
Will be an evil that we can rise above
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
To buy a pair of mod-a-go-go stretch elastic pants?
There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance

Another song for this morning: "What's New in Baltimore?"

Hey! What's new in Baltimore?
I don't know!
Hey! What's new in Baltimore?
Better go back and find out

By the way, did you see that the NYT, promoting its Kavanaugh article, tweeted "Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun…"? and then deleted the tweet and apologized because nobody they cared about identified with the notion. I hope you don't think that what I wrote indicates that I am the kind of person the NYT was tweeting about. The Kavanaugh article doesn't say a penis was thrust in anyone's face! It says "thrust his penis at her" — just "her," not "her face." So that's another thing wrong with the deleted tweet. It worsened the allegation — having the penis thrust at the face — which makes the allegation sound much less like dancing and more like an outright sexual assault. In making that aggressive move — that journalistic thrust in the face — the tweet undermined itself. We might think that getting naked and dancing at a party is harmless fun, but we won't think that way about a penis thrust at a face.

"Wait a second. Who did what to whom? Kavanaugh’s 'friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student'?"

"Can someone explain the logistics of the allegation here? Was Kavanaugh allegedly walking around naked when his friends pushed him into the female student? No, if I’m reading [NYT reporters] Pogrebin and Kelly right, the friends didn’t push Kavanaugh in the back. Rather, the 'friends pushed his penis.' What? How does that happen? Who are the friends? Who is the female student? Were there any witnesses besides [the classmate Max] Stier? All that the authors write in the New York Times essay about corroborating the story is this: 'Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)' So they corroborated the fact that Stier made the allegation to the FBI, but the authors give no indication that they have corroborated any details of the alleged incident. The book isn’t released until Tuesday, but Mollie Hemingway got a copy, and she writes on Twitter: 'The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event.' Omitting this fact from the New York Times story is one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory."

From "The New York Times Anti-Kavanaugh Bombshell Is Actually a Dud" by John MacCormack (National Review).

The NYT article — "Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not. Deborah Ramirez’s Yale experience says much about the college’s efforts to diversify its student body in the 1980s"— now has an update:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book's account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

Note that Deborah Ramirez is not the person in the incident alleged by Max Stier. The Max Stier allegation is used to corroborate the Deborah Ramirez allegation — which is that Kavanaugh, drunk at a party, exposed his penis in some sort of "thrust" near her and that she reacted by hitting him in the penis.

The article — as you can see from the headline — is mostly about class difference. Some young people supposedly felt at home with whatever was going on at parties like that, and some were lost and alienated. That is a serious problem with college life, I'm willing to believe, but I'd rather see it reported and analyzed as a free-standing problem, not appropriated for the purpose of taking down a political enemy.

And I'd like to know: When is it okay to hit a naked man in the penis? When can people get naked at parties and waggle their genitalia at each other? I don't fit in with that kind of partying either — and I never did — so I'd like a sober, neutral explanation. I'm inclined to believe that people at private parties can get naked. We were just talking about Woodstock, that revered historical event where young people got naked. In the words of Frank Zappa:

There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
Will be free to sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we know
Will be an evil that we can rise above
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
To buy a pair of mod-a-go-go stretch elastic pants?
There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance

Clearly, Zappa was making fun of the hippies' high hopes for naked dancing. That song is from 1968, a year before Woodstock, and a decade and a half before Kavanaugh's Yale party days. And here we are today — 40 or 50 years after that youthful revelry — judging those people. I'd love to analyze the whole thing, and I'd even like to see a strongly feminist analysis. But this get-Kavanaugh motivation makes it all twisted and tainted with lust for political power.