In [an Instagram] post, which drew widespread attention, [Jennifer Aniston], who has been open about her fertility struggles, wrote, “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”...
“Hollywood celebrities say, ‘Oh, well, JD Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’” Mr. Vance said [on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM]. “Well, first of all, that’s disgusting because my daughter is 2 years old. And second of all, if she had fertility problems, as I said in that speech, I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
Why did he say "that's disgusting"? Was it some kind of notion that Aniston was sexualizing the toddler?! Aniston was being very tactful and delicate, and he's saying it's disgusting? That's very strange. I'm getting a gynophobia vibe.
Here's the Vance quote that provoked Aniston: "We are effectively run in this country… by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made."
By the way, I've seen Aniston's cat, and it is disgusting:
Someone in Slovakia says "If you can't express sarcasm or a euphemism by you voice and tone, you shouldn't be allowed to do it. (I haven't seen it here, but maybe somebody does it.)"
An American says: "I did it in Italy once, and my little Italian cousins absolutely lost it laughing so hard, bc they didn't know why I was wiggling my fingers around (which I understand would look very, very strange if you don't know the meaning)."
Someone in Italy answers: "We don't do it in Italy. Some people may know what it means because of American movies and TV series."
"... a relic of a brief burst of liberal reform in the middle of Mr. Putin’s 24-year rule. Through a website, people could write to him for 40 cents a page and receive scans of his responses.... In a letter... Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and 'switch between them.'... Describing prison life... he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko.
Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'.... the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag.... 'Everyone usually thinks that I really need pathetic and heartbreaking words,' he wrote... 'But I really miss the daily grind — news about life, food, salaries, gossip'.... 'I really like your letters,' Mr. Navalny wrote in the last message that [his friend, the Russian photographer Evgeny Feldman, received. 'They’ve got everything I like to discuss: food, politics, elections, scandalous topics and ethnicity issues.'"
Why is Matthew Perry in the headline? We're told that Navalny had never watched "Friends" — a show with plenty of food, gossip, and scandalous topics — but he'd read the actor's obituary in The Economist, "Matthew Perry changed the way America spoke" ("[I]n the audition it was he who had nailed it, reading the words in that unexpected way, 'hitting emphases that no one else had hit'; making everyone laugh. It was less that he, Matthew Perry, could play Chandler than that he was Chandler. He changed the part—and then the part changed him").
The NYT piece tells us that that Navalny's prison library had the classics — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov — and “Who could’ve told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer?”
There's also some material here about Trump, but it's a little hard to understand. Perhaps it was enigmatic in the original. There's "Mr. Navalny confided that the electoral agenda of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump looked 'really scary.'" Not the man, the "electoral agenda"? And then he went on to say "Please name one current politician you admire."
"'It helps me to feel better,' she said.
Her husband is a soldier, and she worries about him often.... There were many times when Ms. Nigmatulina 'felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,' she said. 'And particularly Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,' she added. 'I feel like I lost a close friend.' 'Friends' also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as it has aided people around the world in learning English. 'I talk and hear how I am using the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,' said Yulia Po, 38, a Crimea native who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she had learned Ukrainian thanks to 'Friends.' As a 13-year-old coming home after school, she recalled, she would have just enough time to fry herself potatoes and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired.
She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle, and has not been home or seen her parents since leaving, she said.... 'This is just a humane emotion to feel sad — there is always a space for it,' Ms. Po said. '[Matthew Perry] was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.'"
"In a way, this was no anomaly. 'Friends' has been a weekly fixture among the 10 most-watched series or movies on the streaming service.... [A] show that was born in the 1990s and seemed completely of-its-time (no cellphones, a coffee shop with cushy couches as a main setting) seemed to have new appeal among teenagers and 20-somethings. 'The one-sentence pitch is: It’s about that time in your life when your friends are your family,' David Crane, one of the show’s creators, once said...."
"... when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills. By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get 55 Vicodin a day — I had to have 55 every day, otherwise I’d get so sick... [Notice] how I look between the final episode of season 6 and the first of season 7 — the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes. I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of Friends."
And here's an interview from last year, when he was promoting his memoir. He says he couldn't watch the show, because he'd be looking at himself and seeing what substance he was struggling with....
"... that when he first read the script for Friends Like Us (later renamed Friends) in 1994, he said it was as if somebody had followed him around for a year, stolen his jokes and aped his 'world-weary yet witty view of life.' 'It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler, I was Chandler,' he said of the character known for such one-liners as: 'Hi, I’m Chandler, I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable' and 'I’m not great at advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?' The likeness was so uncanny that Perry’s actor friends, who were auditioning for the series in 1994 and had also spotted the similarities, flocked to his apartment to seek his advice. Perry suggested techniques and claimed that most of his friends copied him, but when it came to his own audition he 'broke all the rules,' ditching the script and landing jokes on odd emphases, a trick which would come to define his role and influence a generation of comedy actors. (Could he be any more funny, for example.)
Much of Chandler’s humour, though already eerily matched with Perry’s own, was shaped by an interview the producers arranged with the cast before filming. Perry told them that he always filled silences with witticisms and that he 'didn’t do well with women.'"
"(He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: 'Yes, all of them.')... He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, 'in a kind of weird but loving way,' that the group knew he was drinking again. 'We can smell it,' she said — and, he writes, 'the plural "we" hits me like a sledgehammer.' Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room. Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: 'I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in "Friends," the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician."'"
"I was like, ‘That should tell me something.'... I didn't know how to stop.... If the police came over to my house and said, 'If you drink tonight, we're going to take you to jail,' I'd start packing. I couldn't stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older."
The other "Friends" actors were, he says, "like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That's kind of what the cast did for me." That sounds like something a character on the show would say.
"... than any of his books. In Baker’s novel 'The Anthologist' (2009), the poet-narrator comments, tongue only partially in cheek, that 'any random episode of "Friends" is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than 99 percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.'"
"... that I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of. That was really the moment that I began to examine the ways I had participated. I knew then I needed to course-correct.... What makes this truly emotional for me is that I want this connection I didn’t have.... I deeply, deeply want this connection with the Black community that I didn’t have. Because of 'Friends,' I never attained that.... In this case, I’m finally, literally putting my money where my mouth is.... I want to make sure from now on in every production I do that I am conscious in hiring people of color and actively pursue young writers of color. I want to know I will act differently from now on. And then I will feel unburdened."
Kauffman — who gets this fawning publicity — endowed a professorship in the African and African American Studies department at Brandeis. The amount of her donation is 1% of her $400 million net worth. I'd say she ought to contribute something more like $40 million before she claims to have literally put her my money where my mouth is. It's still the wrong use of "literally," but it wouldn't be so bad.
"People look at me like I’m a lunatic. On planes, I’ll order a Virgin Mary — not because I’m a teetotaler, just because I’m in it for the tomato juice — followed by an orange juice, followed by a glass of milk.... Late in the afternoon, I ate 'sous vide egg bites' from Starbucks, which are these sad low-carb food-like egg disks that say 'I’m not eating bread, but in every other way I have given up.'... On this morning, I was scheduled to appear on Good Morning America to discuss my foreign-policy book, so it was up at 4 a.m. local time to make a Nespresso and Zoom with George Stephanopoulos, who looked perkier than I did, as is his wont. So did the phalanx of six-packed hotties next to whom I lumbered through leg day at the gym shortly thereafter. Time for another ham sandwich and green juice."
Before now, no one in the history of the world had ever said "phalanx of six-packed hotties next to whom I lumbered." I didn't even know you were allowed to call random strangers "hotties" anymore. But "phalanx of six-packed hotties next to whom I lumbered" — that's mad. And there it is with "sous vide egg bites," "sincerely a juice person," and George Stephanopoulos!
It's all so alien. I never get anywhere near George Stephanopoulos!
Why would you show a politician you support as having no face? One horrible answer would be: Oh, but it does show her face. It shows the facial trait that matters: The color of the skin of her face.
In action, Kamala Harris uses her face. She's not a blank face. She's a smiling face. Like Obama, she deploys a big smile and laughs as much as possible. Like Hillary Clinton, she seems to laugh too much and not because she's genuinely delighted.
Perhaps her supporters default to a blank face because efforts to replicate the smile in a drawing or in cookie icing don't work. And how could they? To look like her, the smile would need to look off. So you just can't do it right.
Another idea is that people are uneasy about any sort of a caricature of a black person. Anything you do might be criticized as racist. Facelessness is the graphic design equivalent of if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all... in a world where the standards of what counts as "nice" are so high and so confusing that you feel anything you say may be used against you. So let me revise: The choice of facelessness is the graphic design equivalent of taking the 5th.
IN THE EMAIL: Omaha 1 writes: "I know it's awful but someone on FB said it looks like she has a turkey on her face. I can't un-see it now! You can see the drumsticks sticking out on both sides."
That's got to be a reference to "Friends":
AND: Tubal writes: "The shadow of the metal stakes makes Biden and, more so Harris, resemble Mr. and Mrs. Thompson from South Park":
"'Other shows do work,' [said someone who teaches how to speak like an American]. 'Friends’ just seems to have the magic something that is even more attractive.'
Fans and educators on three continents echo the sentiment, saying that 'Friends' is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from Manhattan’s West Village.
Kim Sook-han, 45, known in South Korea for her YouTube videos about teaching herself English, said that the show helped her understand the basics of American culture, including which holidays are celebrated in the United States, as well as how people there deal with conflicts between friends and family members."
Here's something linked in the article: speech instructor Rachel Smith using Rachel Green to demonstrate how to sound American (or, for us Americans, how much we know instinctively about how to sound like ourselves):
Smith has many videos, but that one concentrates on a few lines spoken by Jennifer Aniston. You learn how letters are dropped and stress and pitch are used. Very interesting! It's easy to figure out on your own why Aniston is used as a model. She sounds like a real American speaking normally. Imagine teaching non-English speakers how to talk like an American by using Jerry Seinfeld. That would be hilarious. And very wrong. Similarly, however, you could get in trouble talking like the Friends — especially if you handled stress and cadence like Chandler. Actually, all the men talk in a comically strange way.
As for learning the culture of America by watching "Friends," that's pretty tricky too! The Friends actually do a lot of things that are socially unacceptable — notably, sexual harassment in the workplace — and because they are all nice looking and mutually supportive — and because it's 20+ years in the past — you could get the wrong idea about how to act like an American.
And yet "Friends" models a very mainstream American view of how life should be lived. You struggle with your job and your love life when you're in your 20s, but then you find a good career that you like and that establishes you firmly in the middle class, and you find someone to marry who becomes the center of your life — a life with children. "Seinfeld" did not have that. It had outsiders who actively repelled conventional love, and the only one who had job satisfaction was the one whose job was to stand apart as an outsider and make comic observations about all those normal people whose lives he did not envy or admire in the slightest.
FROM THE EMAIL: Justin points me to this old Conan O’Brien clip that seems to embody the exact point I was making in my last paragraph:
I watched it, and in fact, I have watched every episode of "Friends" — all, save one, in the last few years. I came to the show familiar with only one of the performers, and that was Lisa Kudrow. I considered "The Comeback" the best TV comedy ever, and I'd always been a big fan of the movie "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."
But I didn't really like hearing Lady Gaga say that Kudrow's character was "the one that was really herself." The others were... what? Really somebody other than themselves? Maybe Gaga doesn't have facility with language, but I think she deliberately said something challenging, because she prefaced the remark with "I don’t know if this is the right way to say it." Well, the rest of us don't know what "it" is. My interpretation was that she meant to characterize Phoebe (Kudrow's character) as the outsider. In that light, perhaps it's comforting and exciting for many viewers to see that character gets to be with the other 5. The idea seems to be that the popular kids include one oddball in their group, as if that must be every oddball's dream.
Gaga's theory — as I understand it — is a putdown of the rest of the characters — and of the entire show — who are all outsiders in their own way.
Another issue with the Gaga appearance: Was it at the expense of Chrissie Hynde? The Gaga bit used material from the episode — "The One with the Baby on the Bus" — that had Chrissie Hynde playing "Smelly Cat" with Phoebe. If I had to look at pop stars to find the different one, or the one that was really herself, I'd pick Hynde before Gaga. The disinclusion troubles me. The show is all about keeping the original group together (even though — spoiler alert — the series refrained from ending with each of the characters married to one of the others (4 ended up in Friend-on-Friend couples, but they brought in an outsider to marry Phoebe, and they left Joey without a love of his life)).
"... moan to myself, Oh, I can’t go on tour. That’s a real positive thing to do, clearly. So I decided that I wasn’t going to do that anymore and get up and do stuff. I decided I wanted to make an EP. Not an album, just an EP with a few songs. I have a huge EP collection of my own. I love it because you can really get into a small amount of tracks, and that’s what the kids love now. They love EPs! And not only that, they love cassettes."
I've thrown out everything cassette-related. Cassettes are back?! I'm getting my information from an 80-year-old man who hasn't left the house more than 8 times in the past year.
But while, say, the New York Times decided that Hilaria's cosplaying as a Latina stereotype was off-limits — even as they wrote growing profiles of her as well, including uncritically her "slight Spanish accent" — the paper of record has celebrated children having their college admissions revoked for a video of them singing the N-word along to a song when they were 15 as a "reckoning."
I found that because it has Rachel Dolezal in the headline ("Alec Baldwin's wife became Hollywood's Rachel Dolezal because of our sniveling, bootlicking press").
But come on — "they wrote growing profiles." Presumably, that should be "glowing profiles," Hilaria Baldwin has posted many selfies where she's standing sideways to display her pregnant belly. But no, that's not something the NYT can write. Here's the glowing profile in the Times, from back in 2014: "Hilaria Baldwin Holds Her Center" ("Her voice betrays a slight Spanish accent, remains of a childhood split between Boston and Spain").
I wonder how many people are faking accents... and why (and when) we feel a person acquires a pleasing air about them because of that. Oh! Just by chance, last night I watched an episode of "Friends" where the Friends were extremely irritated by a woman who'd acquired a fake English accent:
Well, clearly, blackface is a very specific problem that has been isolated, and everyone has been warned about it, so violations are harshly judged. The same is true of the "n-word," though the presence of lots of recorded music with the word creates confusion for young people who might not understand that this is the ONE thing you don't sing along with.
But accents... accents are different. You can do fake accents... can't you? I've seen people pick up a New York accent or a Southern accent... to try to fit in or to be thought well of. Many actors do accents and get special acclaim. Meryl Streep, etc. etc.
So must Hilaria Baldwin be denounced because she's doing what she's doing while being a highly privileged person? Or are accents different from skin darkening?
"You know there's no sound to represent it — any more than there is for a question. Suppose you have said to your friend 'You are better to-day,' and that you want him to understand that you are asking him a question, what can be simpler than just to make a '?' in the air with your finger? He would understand you in a moment!"
Wrote Lewis Carroll in "Sylvie and Bruno," describing the gesture made while singing the words "this was their wish" in this stanza of a song:
“The Badgers did not care to talk to Fish:
They did not dote on Herrings' songs:
They never had experienced the dish
To which that name belongs:
And oh, to pinch their tails,' (this was their wish,)
'With tongs, yea, tongs, and tongs!'”
I print the entire stanza because of the badgers, of course, this being Wisconsin. But why — you might ask, marking the air with a "?" — am I fooling around inside "Sylvie and Bruno" this evening? I have an answer!
I was reading the Wikipedia article "Air quotes," which naturally traces the origin of air quotes. It gives Lewis Carroll credit for arriving at the basic idea — albeit only with parentheses and question marks — all the way back in 1889.
The oldest definite use of air quotes seems to be Glenda Farrell the 1937 screwball comedy, "Breakfast for Two":
Isn't that wonderful! But air quotes got too popular in the 1990s and became subject to derision, notably by Steve Martin, Chris Farley, and Dr. Evil. And here's George Carlin in 1996:
People got the message and restrained themselves, but air quotes were still around enough to make their appearance in the fall of 2002, in the thing I just watched that got me started on this little research project, Episode 3 of Season 9 of "Friends" — where Joey (ostensibly the dumbest person in the group) does not understand how air quotes work:
"They have been invisible only in the way that Black people who service the margins of white world-making must be. In a genre whose conventions (and hilarity) thrive on white ridiculousness, Black people, relegated to the smallest of parts, exist to rein in the free play of whites, reminding viewers how safely deviant the main cast can be.... Black people on Seinfeld play a very particular role, defining the social edges of 'very,' or too much.... All the bombast, wackiness, and camp belong in the domain of the four protagonists — Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, plus a rotating circle of co-conspirators.... [T]he group is selfish and deranged, delicious micromenaces to normalcy and etiquette who nonetheless enter and leave each episode with their worlds intact. When white characters run wild on Seinfeld, Black people are cops. They exist as agents of public decency next to whom our main characters appear all the more indecent.... Friends, the sitcom most frequently judged for its lack of black characters, stations its black actors on the mundane edges of urban life.... [B]lack characters play a significant role precisely because they are true strangers — estranged by city planning and the color line — for these main casts to bump up against...."
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