"It feels gross that someone could say to a computer, 'I want a portrait of Alex Jones in the style of Frida Kahlo'..."

"... and the computer would do it without moral judgment. These systems roll scenes, territories, cultures—things people thought of as 'theirs,' 'their living,' and 'their craft'—into a 4-gigabyte, open source tarball that you can download onto a Mac in order to make a baseball-playing penguin in the style of Hayao Miyazaki. The people who can use the new tools will have new power. The people who were great at the old tools (paintbrushes, cameras, Adobe Illustrator) will be thanked for their service and rendered into Soylent. It’s as if a guy wearing Allbirds has stumbled into a residential neighborhood where everyone is just barely holding on and says, 'I love this place, it’s so quirky! Siri, play my Quirky playlist. And open a Blue Bottle on the corner!'... Prominent bloggers who experimented with having an AI illustrate their writing have been chastened on Twitter and have promised not to do it again. AI companies are talking a lot about ethics, which always makes me suspicious, and certain words are banned from the image generator’s interface, which is sad because I wanted to ask the bot to paint a 'busty' cottage in the style of Thomas Kinkade...."

 Writes Paul Ford in "Dear Artists: Do Not Fear AI Image Generators /True, new systems devalue craft, shift power, and wreck cultures and scenes. But didn’t the piano do that to the harpsichord?" (Wired).

A Blue Bottle is this type of coffee shop — spookily corporately minimalistic. In their own insanely empty words:

Our cafes are designed to be spaces that pair with your coffee. Just like any food or scent, the aesthetics around you should heighten your experience. Whether you’re gathering with friends or searching for solitude, stepping into a Blue Bottle cafe turns each coffee into a meaningful moment.

I was wondering which blogger used AI to "illustrate their writing" and got "chastened on Twitter" — chastened on Twitter, there's a category of pain for you to contemplate — so I did a Google search. And look. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I had to laugh:

Just when you think huge, prominent eyebrows may be going out of style...

"Unibrowed model Sophia Hadjipanteli takes London Fashion Week by storm" (NY Post). Lots of amazing photographs at the link. Is the model some sort of humorist — a satirist of beauty?

Here's the Instagram page for #unibrowmovement.

And here's "This Model Is Making the 'Unibrow Movement' Happen" (Glamour). It's from September 2017, so maybe it means the unibrow movement is not happening, since it hasn't happened yet. I, for one, am sick of having everyone's eyebrows in my face. Back off! And yet, I've got to say I find this more appealing that the overly made-up, un-unified eyebrows that have been annoying me.

Points for originality — and, yes, I know about Frida Kahlo — and naturalness, nerve, and humor:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sophia ☠️🧿🇨🇾 (@sophiahadjipanteli) on Feb 21, 2020 at 2:16am PST

"How Mattel Found Itself In a Barbie Dispute With Frida Kahlo's Family."

Fortune reports.

The toy firm unveiled its Kahlo Barbie after striking a deal with the Panama-based Frida Kahlo Corporation, which got the rights to Kahlo’s image from one of her nieces, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo, more than a decade ago.... Other members of the family have long been against this commercialization of the distinctive, uni-browed Kahlo image. Last year they accused the Corporation of a breach of contract that AFP now reports (details were held back at the time) was the result of the Corporation “failing to inform Kahlo’s relatives about the uses of her image.” This breach, they say, nullifies the Corporation’s right to continue licensing the image.

I have no opinion about this other than... families, fighting each other over the remains of a loved one. But if money is to be made, people look to see if they can get a cut. But maybe it really is about lofty ideas about the dead artist's image and how it should be used. And yet you signed that power away, didn't you?

Barbie litigation. It's a legal specialty. I was just reading "When Barbie Went to War with Bratz/How a legal battle over intellectual property exposed a cultural battle over sex, gender roles, and the workplace" by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker (January 22, 2018 issue).

"But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another.... I had to say yes...."

"I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears. Since those around me had no knowledge of my history of Harvey, they were very surprised by my struggle that morning. It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then. My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing. At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse. As you can imagine, this was not sexy, but it was the only way I could get through the scene."

From "Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too" by Salma Hayek (NYT).

"Jolen cream bleach turns the mustache on your upper lip to the exact color of Richard Gephardt's hair, which is better than its looking like Frida Kahlo's mustache, but it's still slightly hairier than you mean it to be."

Wrote Nora Ephron, a while back.

I'm finding that this morning, because Dick Gephardt is in the news today, blogged here, where William asked "How did Gephardt spend so many years in public life without being relentlessly mocked for his orange hair. I guess back then people were more tolerant of orange hair...."

Also, Bob Shrum, in "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," describes a Dukakis ad (in 1988) that mocked Gephardt by showing a "gymnast with comically dyed orange hair dressed in a suit... trampolining and tumbling forward and back and forward and back again" with the voice-over describing Gephardt's various flip-flops.

So orange hair got mocked, even in the old days. It's not just something invented recently to attack Trump. I certainly remember Reagan's hair getting mocked, especially since he denied dyeing it. The much-repeated joke attributed to Gerald Ford was: "Ronald Reagan doesn't dye his hair, he's just prematurely orange."

How to trick me into reading another article about Frida Kahlo.

Tease it with the line "Is she the queen of the selfie?"

I refuse to link to that. I'm annoyed at myself for clicking.

And that on a morning when I actually read — more or less — an article written by a philosopher about a book written by a philosopher about — more or less — selfies.

If I were more self-absorbed, I'd hate myself.

60 years ago today, the Rosenbergs were executed.

Here's the NYT article that appeared on the 50th anniversary of the execution.

The available evidence now suggests to historians that Julius Rosenberg did in fact spy for the Soviet Union. The evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, however, is considered flimsy at best. But whatever they may have done, it is far from evident that they had handed Moscow the key to its first atomic bomb, as charged at the time.

The couple remain a special case. The United States has had many spies over the last 50 years, including some believed to have done great harm to American interests. Not one was put to death.

Here's the Wikipedia page:

The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War. In imposing the death penalty, [Judge Irving] Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:

“I consider your crime worse than murder...

"I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth."

"I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love."

What Lola wants...

... is to be a star.

(And that first commenter over there is mean... and also uninformed about the significance of Frida Kahlo in the mind of Madonna.)

Frida Kahlo, whose female fans have the "washed-out, slightly embittered look of British women novelists."

Or so says Anthony Daniels, in The New Criterion (via A&L Daily):

[T]here is something unhealthy, of equal intensity, about the disproportionate adulation that Frida Kahlo has received over the last two or three decades. I think that what has happened is that people with no objective right to do so have equated her suffering with their own, and have appropriated her work as a symbolic representation of their own minor dissatisfactions and frustrations, victimhood being the present equivalent of beatitude.

They say, “I too have known a faithless or a worthless man; I too have suffered from persistent headaches, dymenorrhoea, or sciatica; therefore, Frida Kahlo has understood me, and I have understood Frida Kahlo. After all, I have suffered just like her. Moreover, like me, she was a moral person, which is to say that she had all the right attitudes; she was on the side of the oppressed, at least those who were not in the Gulag; she loved indigenes as a matter of principle; and she took part in the holy work of dissolving boundaries, the boundaries between sexes (or rather, genders) and between cultures.”

The critic likes the artist well enough. He's just repulsed by her fans. But are we not a little repulsed at how invasively he projects himself into the thoughts of the women in the museum whose looks he doesn't like?

And Eddie Izzard will play Mr. Kite.

In a movie called "Across the Universe":

It is a romantic musical, told mainly through Beatles songs, in which a young man from Liverpool comes to America during the Vietnam War to find his father, ending up in Greenwich Village.

I adore Eddie Izzard. Bono's in the movie too. It's directed by Julie Taymor, who did some pretty cool things bringing the story of Frida Kahlo to the screen. So even if you're skeptical of efforts to make productions out of Beatles songs -- based on things like this and this -- you can hold out some hope that this will be worthwhile.