"I was in my twenties then, and I’d grown up with a certain expectation, watching films, of what my sexual life was going to be like, and then it wasn’t that."

"The world had begun to be so saturated by sexual imagery in porn and the expectations were shifting. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, but it does change the way people are expecting you to behave in a natural sexual situation. And so I was just confounded, and I think Girls expressed a lot of that confusion, anxiety, and frankly, pain."

Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Lena Dunham on Too Much and her long-awaited return to TV: 'I stepped back from acting after my body was dissected'/Eight years on from ‘Girls’, the HBO comedy that made her name – and made her a lightning rod for criticism – Dunham is back with a 10-part romcom, ‘Too Much’. Ellie Harrison hears from the writer, along with her new lead stars Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe, about their London-set love story, which is well worth the wait" (Independent).

Did Lena Dunham have her body "dissected"? When I read that in the headline I thought it was a reference to her health problems (notably, endometriosis). But no: "When Girls was on television, discourse about Dunham’s appearance was rabid. Howard Stern called her 'a little fat girl' on national radio. One newspaper described her as a 'pathological exhibitionist.' 'Having my body dissected was a reason that I chose in general to step back from acting a little bit more and focus on my writing and my directing, and also just make different kinds of choices as an actor,' she says now."

"The TV show 'Girls' is a right-wing show.... [That's] some labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact."

"But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences.... about [what]... society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art..."

I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":

 

The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."

Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").

That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."

"What’s novel about 'Friends,' or what must seem so to a certain subset of New York teenagers of whom so much is expected, is the absence among the six central characters of any quality of corrosive ambition."

"The show refuses to take professional life or creative aspirations too seriously. What does Chandler Bing actually do? I was never entirely sure. In the series’ ninth season he is an advertising intern. On 'Girls' you have writers who are trying to be Mary Karr; on 'Friends' you have actors who want to be on 'Days of Our Lives.' The dreamscape dimension of 'Friends' lies in the way schedules are freed up for fun and shenanigans and talking and rehashing, always. 'In the back of our minds we know it’s unrealistic,' Maggie Parham, a 15-year-old who lives on the Upper West Side, told me. The characters 'have nice apartments and lots of free time but there is something about that perfect lifestyle that is fun to watch,' she said, adding, 'They all work, but they seem to be able to get out of work easily.'... [A 17-year-old girl said] 'All they do is hang out in a coffee shop or a really nice apartment... It’s the ideal situation.'"

From "‘Friends’ Has New BFFs: New York Teenagers" (NYT). That's from 2015, but I'm reading it today because it's linked in a new article in the Times, "Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement," which notes that "the show has found an especially receptive audience on Netflix, where it became available in 2015."

And here's a New York Magazine article rom 2016, “Is ‘Friends’ Still the Most Popular Show on TV?”

The world of Friends is ­notable, to modern eyes, for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt, the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a ­matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism...  Which is why you might expect that Friends, like similar cultural relics of that era, would be safely preserved in the cryogenic chamber of our collective nostalgia. And yet, astonishingly, the show is arguably as popular as it ever was — and it is popular with a cohort of young people who are only now discovering it....

I myself am just watching the show for the first time, going at a rate of about an episode a day, and just getting to the end of Season 3.

"But 'Girls' was a show in which any kind of confident male authority or presence was simply gone, among most of the older characters as well as among the millennial protagonists."

"The show’s four girls had mostly absent fathers (the only involved and caring one came out as gay midway through the show) and few Don Draper-esque bosses to contend with. The toxic bachelors they dated were more pathetic than threatening, and the 'sensitive' guys still more so; even the most intense relationships they formed were semi-pathological. A few men on the show (the oldest of the younger characters, most notably) exhibited moral decency and some sort of idealism, a few were genuinely sinister — but mostly the male sex seemed adrift, permanently boyish, a bundle of hormonal impulses leagues away from any kind of serious and potent manhood.... [T]he male absence felt more like a signifier of masculine failure than feminine empowerment...."

That's Ross Douthat, in his column at the NYT, grinding "Girls" through his NYT-friendly traditionalist conservatism. He even drags in Donald Trump for Times-readers' delectation.

Of course the real-life civilization [the girls] are part of just elected Donald Trump as president, making all those prestige-drama portraits of toxic patriarchy seem quite relevant to our circumstances again, and the travails of life under social liberalism a little less immediately pressing.

There's nothing substantial to read about the series finale episode of "Girls"...

... so I'll just make a list of my thoughts on the subject.

1. I laughed when Hannah (the Lena Dunham character) got mad at Marnie (the Allison Williams character) for letting the song "Fast Car" play on the car radio and singing along. "Fast Car" is that 1988 Tracy Chapman recording that — in my experience — comes on the "Coffeehouse"-type channels of satellite radio far too often. The Wikipedia article on the song suggests why XM programmers think that's what will work on listeners who hang out on that part of the dial:

According to Metro Weekly critic Chris Gerard, "Fast Car" tells a grittily realistic story of a working poor woman trying to escape the cycle of poverty, set to folk rock music. The song's arrangement was described by Orlando Sentinel writer Thom Duffy as "subtle folk-rock," while Billboard magazine's Gary Trust deemed the record a "folk/pop" song. Dave Marsh said it was perhaps an "optimistic folk-rock narrative," whose characters are in a homeless shelter. American culture critic Jim Cullen believed that with songs like "Fast Car", Chapman brought a uniquely Black and feminist perspective to acoustic folk-rock's generally White, middle-class audience.

When I hear the song, which I've heard way too many times over the last 30 years, I think of the well-off white people who love themselves too much for loving it. So I delighted at Hannah's annoyance at Marnie's loving the song. And I was crushed when absolutely the last thing that happened in the series was Hannah — as she got her baby to breastfeed at last — manifesting her long-awaited ascendance into adulthood by softly singing "Fast Car." My favorite thing about the episode — Hannah's irritation at Marnie's lame self-love at loving "Fast Car" — got ruined.

2. Meade — who tends to sit with me when I watch one of my shows — had a different reaction to "Fast Car." He thought it meant that Marnie — who was driving the car — was going to crash and kill them all. I said: "That's how they're going to end the series — just randomly kill everybody?!"

3. The story arc of the last season has been: Hannah got pregnant. In the final episode, the baby has arrived. We were spared having to endure an episode with labor pains, getting-to-the-hospital high jinks, pushing and screaming, umbilical cord twirling — all the theater of childbirth. But perhaps that was only because an earlier season had already given us a childbirth episode. We had many episodes of pregnant Hannah, and now, in the final episode, the baby is suddenly here. The drama/comedy is all about breastfeeding — the mechanics of breastfeeding and breastfeeding to represent everything about mother-and-child bonding. The story is really about the end of Hannah's life as the child to the recognition of herself as the mother. If the breasts repurpose themselves as milk dispensers — voila!

4. The baby appears to be black. Here's a picture of Hannah and Paul-Louis, the father of the baby. The actor playing the role is Riz Ahmed, a British man of Pakistani descent. It's as if the show's producers see race in terms of white and nonwhite. I suspect they thought it was racially enlightened to give the white main character a dark-skinned baby, but I found it distracting. How did the baby come out much darker than either parent? Maybe there's a scientific answer to how that could happen. I'm just saying it's distracting, and not just because I had to drift off into contemplating genetics. It's that I'm trying to imagine what they were thinking and how it related to the perennial criticism of the show that it is too much about the little problems of white people. Now, a little nonwhite baby comes into the world and saves Hannah. There's a lot of racial politics there to analyze, but the show didn't analyze it. My mind ran way off the track they wanted me to pay attention to. It was like the fast car in Meade's ideation.

5. The baby's name is Grover. That was the name Paul-Louis suggested over the telephone, when Hannah told him he was going to be a father and he wished her good luck. Why accept the absent father's weird name suggestion? She doesn't even know if the guy was thinking of President Grover Cleveland or Grover on "Sesame Street." Maybe there's some idea that if you don't get the last name from the father — the baby gets Hannah's last name (Horvath) — you should get the first name from the father. Some kind of feminist compromise. Grover's as good as any other name, isn't it? You can, for short, call him Gro, pronounced "grow."  If you take out the verhorva, you've got gro[w]th. This series has been all about growth... and the lack of it. 6 seasons of lack of growth, and a final episode with a big magical growth spurt. Because: baby!

6. Each of Hannah's friends had made a pitch to be the baby's co-parent. (The show is not realistic.) In the final episode, Marnie is the one living in the charming upstate house with Hannah and the magical baby. She exults that she won — she is the best friend. As for that perfect house: Don't get distracted wondering how do these people get these houses? The show is not realistic.

7. But Marnie's only going to be in that house for a while. The stories of the other girls of "Girls" were wrapped up in the second-to-last episode, and this episode is concentrated on resolving the story of Hannah. But Marnie needs a send off too. We're prompted to understand that she won't stay in that house co-parenting with Hannah throughout Grover's childhood. That's Hannah's story to complete, which we're supposed to believe will happen because in the end the baby latches onto the nipple — the episode is titled "Latching" — and the screen goes black, the credits roll over sucking sounds, and Hannah is heard singing "Fast Car." The prompt for where Marnie's life story will go is her musing that she's always wanted to go to law school.

8. Law school! So this is the end of Marnie, going to law school?! Well, she was into reading those books about breastfeeding and she did swaddle the baby effectively. And then she proclaimed — right after saying law school was her heart's desire — that she loved rules. Ah, is that what drives people to law school, a love for rules? Maybe that's why I had a nightmare last night about being a terrible law professor. The students hate me because I won't stop all the nonsense and just tell them what the damned rules are already.

I'm stopping now. I started this list as my first post at about 6 a.m., but it was taking too long and wrote 4 other posts before coming back to this. And I think now the title of the post may be inapt. Surely, somebody else is opining on line, dealing with some of these themes — feminism, racial politics, names, law school. It's time to release this blog post out into the world — let it live a life of its own. I can't be coddling and swaddling this forever. Yes, there are only 8 points, and I could tweak it up to 10 for a round number. In fact, I could break up a couple points and get it up to 10 — or 3 and get it up to 11 — but I don't care. That would be Marnie-ish of me, and I'm not the Marnie....

"How realistic are New York apartments on TV shows?"

"From 'Girls' to 'I Love Lucy,' we break down the hovels, the dream pads and everything in between."

I hope you can get into The Washington Post, because this is delightful with diagrams and floor plans. But you might not care if you've never struggled to get housing in NYC. (I have: I've lived in 6 different apartments in NYC.) And you might not care if you haven't watched the relevant shows, especially "Girls" — which is of special concern here because the series is about to end (this Sunday).

"I have come to realize how exhausting and narcissistic and ultimately boring this whole dynamic is, and I finally feel brave enough to create some distance for myself."

In the second-to-last episode of "Girls," one of the girls takes her parting shot.

"That’s the mistake we all make, isn’t it? Believing that being a writer means being, you know, totally and utterly uninterrupted—it means silence, it means, you know, a room of one’s own."

"No, no. That’s bullshit. That’s what we perceive a male writer to have. And that can lead to horrible solipsism and disconnection from humanity. I’m not naming names, never naming names... Martin Amis, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow."

Lines delivered by Tracey Ullman (as a writer named Ode Montgomery) in the "Painful Evacuation" episode of "Girls." I wish I had video of this scene — a little vignette that precedes the credits. It's all we see of Ullman, but I kept pausing and rewinding and rewatching it bit by bit. I was exclaiming: "This is the best performance I have ever seen on television." The lines were good and Lena Dunham — interviewing Ullman's character — was doing a fine supporting role, but Ullman was so funny (and dramatic) and doing so much in such a short time that I was in total awe.

I cut and pasted the line from a piece in Tablet by Miranda Cooper "On ‘Girls,’ Narcissism and Jewish Writers/Hannah gets some unexpected news, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow get name dropped, and Ray confronts his own mortality."

Excerpt:

What more could a Jewish-American-literature obsessed recapper ask for? Casting aside Amis, a self-professed philosemite, the fact that Montgomery’s list of self-centered writers is all Jewish is like manna from the HBO heavens.

Interestingly, Allen and Bellow have also been often compared to Philip Roth, who held much of last week’s episode’s attention. Allen even had a not-so-subtle cameo in the form of a photo on the wall in fictional writer Chuck Palmer’s study: a brilliant sight gag in an episode about writers abusing their fame and privilege. As with Roth, these are more than casual name drops. Girls is setting up an old guard of male Jewish American writers with whom Hannah must contend. Is being a writer as a woman really as hard as it seems, Hannah asks? Harder, Montgomery confirms.

By the way, if you don't actually watch this show, don't assume you know what it is like. The first 2 episodes of the new season have been phenomenal, and last season was great. Please don't clutter the comments with things you've been repeating about Lena Dunham for years. To do that is to flaunt that you do not know what you are talking about. Anyone who thinks the show is doctrinaire feminism and female narcissism is making it obvious that he doesn't know what he is talking about. 

Answers I'm sure I didn't get this wrong.

I'm taking "Vulture’s Girls Superfan Quiz."

ADDED: Here I am taking a 50-question quiz and I get this level of effrontery!



That's so unfair to Zac Posen.

"I feel like I’m perfect for the aesthetic of Slag Mag, because my persona is very witty and narcissistic..."

"... and the other thing about me is I give zero fucks about anything, yet I have a strong opinion about everything, even topics I’m not informed on."

Says the Lena Dunham character at the beginning of the first episode of the last season of "Girls."

For those of you who hate "Girls" so much you don't even want this post to exist, hang on. Here's some anti-Paul Krugman dialogue:

Shoshanna: Oh, wow. The American middle class is disappearing. Thanks for the hot tip, Paul Krugman.

Ray: I know, right? You've really got your finger on the pulse there, Krugman.

Marnie: What's happening?

Shoshanna: I know, it's like, if I need a tip about what to talk about at a dinner party in 2005, I'll call you on your flip phone.

Ray: Fuck you, Paul Krugman! Thank you for shedding light on the most obvious, self-evident bullshit that every halfwit in the city already knows.

Shoshanna: It's like, "Oh, hey, Krugman, maybe you should write an article - about, like, women's inequality." Like, let's talk about that.

Ray: Oh, man.

"Hi, sir. Bye, sir. Your kind are not welcome here. Read the sign. Out!"

Says Hermie (Colin Quinn's character) on the "I Love You Baby" episode of "Girls" that aired on HBO this week. The sign — in Ray's Coffeehouse — says no "man buns." And Hermie is blatantly, vocally enforcing the shop's new "hipster hate" theme. Shoshanna (the Zosia Mamet character) has very enthusiastically devised this theme and put up the signage and gotten the NYT interested doing a style-section piece on the place: "They love the hipster-hate angle." Hermie's interpretation of the theme is overt refusal of service. Shoshanna reacts:

"Hermie, Hermie, we cannot actually turn people away. That's discrimination. We just have to, like, you know, glare at them and make them super-uncomfortable and bully them until they leave of their own volition."

Hermie reacts:

"From now on, anybody walks through that door with a bun on top of their head or tattoos that were not acquired on a naval adventure on the South Pacific, we treat 'em like a hippie at Disneyland in '68. This is a haven for normal people — working men and ladies... We're taking back the night. You're either with me or against me."

Shoshanna seems to have come up with the hipster-hate theme as a marketing gimmick to counter the competition from the extremely hip coffeeshop across the street (Helvetica). She's following the "lean in" advice Hermie found in that book by Sheryl Sandberg. Later, Hermie tells her he needs her to "lean out" a bit, because she's too intense. But he likes the money that's been coming in under the hipster-hate branding, which the NYT and some of the customers might think of as ironic, but Hermie is an older guy — the actor who plays him (who I remember from the old MTV quiz show "Remote Control") is 58. Hermie seems to be getting excited by the theme unironically.

The interplay between these 2 characters is wonderful. Is Hermie some kind of stand-in for Zosia Mamet's father David? In the final scene, closing the coffeehouse for the night, Hermie and Shoshanna dance to the evocative old voice of Frankie Valli singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." I had to puzzle over whether that counted as sexual harassment in the workplace, but I backed off — influence by retro-ishness and my idea that Hermie and Shosh were like David and Zosia — into the view that they were like a father and daughter at a wedding. Isn't "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" an iconic wedding song?

As for those hippies in Disneyland in '68... like many of the things we remember from the 60s, it happened in the early 70s:

August 06, 1970. A bizarre occurence takes place at Disneyland when 750 "Hippies" and "Radical Yippies" infiltrate the park, and take over the Wilderness Fort. They raise the Vietcong flag and pass reefers out to passersbys. Later, they march in a Main Street parade, and sing their own lyrics to "Zipadee Doo Dah" ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn is going to win..."). More conservative park guests try to drown them out by singing "America the Beautiful." Before the confrontation can heat up, a platoon of Anaheim Police officers in full riot gear pour into the park from backstage areas! A riot is adverted and Disneyland vice president of Operations Dick Nunis orders the park closed at 7:10 PM. For many years afterward Disneyland will selectively enforced a "dress code" at the park, occasionally refusing admission to "long-haired hippies."

Look at the ads in the NYT next to the story about the great hippie invasion:



What a fabulous moment in movies: You've got the iconic hippie movie, "Easy Rider," the iconic racial comedy "Watermelon Man," the iconic military movie "Patton," and — tucked in there cozily in the corner — "Rosemary's Baby" (7 years before Roman Polanski committed rape) and "Tales for Males" (2 decades before Hollywood began making its movies about gay men).

The Lena Dunham character on "Girls" raped a man.

Maybe you didn't watch, but if you did, I hope you noticed. How conscious are viewers? From the New York Magazine recap:

The moment they exit the city, Fran and Hannah have inverse reactions: While Fran takes deep breaths and glories in his freedom, Hannah begins to feel the walls of the RV closing in on her, and sticks her head out the window to try to find more space.

What follows are some of Hannah's worst decisions, all lined up one right after another. She breaks up with Fran at a desolate rest area, refuses his offer of a ride home, calls each of her friends to try to get them to pick her up, finally deigns to call Ray, forces a blow job on him (?!) while he's driving her home, causes him to crash the enormous coffee van, and then leaves him by the side of the road so she can hitchhike back to the city.

That we are meant to understand this as female-on-male rape is, to me, obvious. Ray protests — while continuing to drive, with Hannah ordering him to keep driving — and (after the rollover crash) Hannah taunts him about his failure to get an erection. He was plainly nonconsenting.

The theme of female-on-male violence repeats as Hannah is riding with the man who picked her up hitchhiking. She becomes fearful of him (when she sees a gun in the backseat) but as they talk, we learn that he is fleeing from a girlfriend who physically abused him — and he never hit back. He fled. He could be lying. We never see those scenes. But my point is: The show is not presenting the female characters as victims. They babyishly think of themselves as victims, but that is not the point of view of the writers.

One of the best lines in that episode, delivered by a male character (Adam) who is holding a baby (Sample), responding to a female character (Jessa) who is upset that the baby spit up down her back and screamed "Why aren't you helping me?!":  "You're an adult. She's a baby. Why do you need more help than a baby?"

ADDED: I'm looking at a couple other recaps, and these are perfectly blind to rape. Here's Entertainment Weekly:

Hannah decides to reward Ray with some oral stimulation as he’s driving. Ray says no at first, but Hannah keeps going because screw boundaries.

Key words: "reward" and "at first." And here's MTV News:

But somehow Hannah manages to make her inelegant break with Fran a high point, as she spends the rest of the episode curled in the fetal position under a sign before Ray shows up, blowing Ray once they’re on the road, and then abandoning him to hitchhike back to New York once her failed attempt at sexual favors has resulted in the crash of Ray’s $50,000 coffee truck. 

Zero attention to Ray's lack of consent.

"On Sunday’s episode of 'Girls,' the show resurrected the story of Kitty Genovese, the 28-year-old bar manager attacked outside her Queens apartment in 1964."

"The next day, news broke that Winston Moseley, the man who stalked, raped and killed her, had died in prison at age 81."

[In the episode,] Hannah, played by [Lena] Dunham, attends a play called “38 Neighbors,” in which audience members are set free to roam through the units of an apartment building, where they encounter actors... who play the neighbors ignoring Genovese’s screams. The attack is rendered with an abstract tableau in the courtyard below: A couple of white dummies posed in a grappling position, lit with blinking red lights and piped with a recording of a woman’s screams. And as the characters of “Girls” move throughout the play and prove more interested in acting out their own minute psychodramas than bearing witness to the crime, Ms. Genovese’s tragedy forms the backdrop for a tragicomic tour through the conflicted state of female empowerment.

“It’s ‘Girls,’ ” [said the writer of the episode, Sarah Heyward]. “Our characters have to be self-involved and focused on their own problems.”

In “Girls” world, the single woman is less at risk of physical threat than a kind of soft social erasure. As Hannah navigates the rooms of the play, she watches as her old friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke) couples up with her ex-boyfriend Adam; her best friend, Marnie (Allison Williams), glibly dismisses Hannah’s relationship problems; and her new boyfriend, Fran (Jake Lacy), is repelled by her odd brand of sexual self-expression....

.... “I was doing some Wikipedia-ing last night, and I had completely forgotten the fact that Kitty was a lesbian,” Hannah says. “Do you think that may have been a factor in what happened to her? Wouldn’t surprise me. Another woman deemed unacceptable by society and left to die for her sins.”

By the way, in case you haven't been watching and you can't tell from that description, the show has leaped to a new level this season. If you've dismissed "Girls" and you have HBO on Demand, go to the beginning of this season and watch. It's very impressive, comically, dramatically, and artistically. The characters are self-involved, but the authorial viewpoint is not that of a self-involved person. The episode was titled "Witnesses," and we, the audience were witnessing the audience at the play, who were witnessing themselves and the actors in the play, who were enacting the witnessing of a murder that took place long ago. At all of those levels of witnessing, there was imperfect attention and understanding. Pay attention! Check it out.

"You're attracted to me. You're intrigued by me. You think I'm a wild horse that needs to be tamed. I understand all of that; it's the new frontier of misogyny."

"Take a woman that's in control of her life, and then silence her. And I'm up for it!" That's a line from an episode of "Girls" that aired last March and I finally got around to watching this week. (I'd been keeping up with the show all these years until an episode last winter when the Lena Dunham character took to her bed in depression and wouldn't get out. I guess I felt that I, at least, had to get out.)

Anyway, I was intrigued by that new frontier of misogyny, and I think there really is a thing properly described as "Take a woman that's in control of her life, and then silence her."

But what got me looking up a recap of that episode — Season 4, Episode 8 — was the line, in response to that old cliché "It's not about you" — "It's not not about me." There's a conversational move you might want to consider.

I felt like there was an old "Seinfeld" episode about the phrase "It's not about you," but it turns out that — "The Lip Reader" — was about the similar but different phrase "It's not you, it's me."

Gwen: It's not you, it's me.

George: You're giving me the "it's not you, it's me" routine? I invented "it's not you, it's me". Nobody tells me it's them not me, if it's anybody it's me.

Gwen: All right, George, it's you.

George: You're damn right it's me.

"Honey, I just think it speaks volumes about you, about what a real creature of the theater you are that the only time that you ever had an orgasm..."

"... was saying the words of a homosexual man. It was as far from a heterosexual orgasm as you could possibly get."

Said Alec Baldwin to Elaine Stritch after she described having "an orgasm for the first time in my life" on stage in a very emotional moment of Edward Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" ("You know, that big scene? ‘Our son,’ he yells in my face, ‘is dead.’ And I went ‘No!’ At the height of my force, I said no to him.")

That's in the transcript of the May 13, 2013 episode of Baldwin's podcast "Here's The Thing." Here's the audio, with Stritch doing a very dramatic yelling of "Nooooo!" She was 88 at the time, suffering from diabetes, and a year and a month away from her death.

"The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s 'Girls,' light-rail, Beyonce, and Hillary Clinton."

"The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is 'catching on' is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating. I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is."

Says Ann Coulter, in my favorite of her 9 objections to soccer.

AND: By "football," she means football.

The University of Iowa is too cool to allow "Girls" to film on campus.

They don't want to be disrupted.

(The Lena Dunham character on the show (Hannah) got into the Iowa writing program, which the real-life Lena Dunham attended.)

The linked article has quotes from Josh Schamberger, director of Iowa City/Coralville Area Conventions & Visitors Bureau:

"Gosh, can you imagine the economic impact of having HBO film crews staying in hotel rooms and bringing a greater awareness of Iowa as the best of the best, especially to a younger audience? You can’t buy that sort of exposure."

“It’s unlike any place in the country... I think it would be cool to see the Iowa City campus and the ped mall” on the show.

The ped mall! Seriously! Iowa! The opportunity you are missing! America could witness the ped mall. I could attain greater awareness of Iowa. Schamberger seems like some guy character on the show — another one of the guys who get dirty looks from Hannah.

ADDED: I think the school made the right decision. They have this high-prestige writing program, and they can't subordinate the students' experience to the interests of the show. They owe it to their students not to succumb to the glamour and mystique of HBO. The students think very highly of themselves and the honor they have attending the Iowa Writer's Program. What would they think — what would they write — if their short time in the program were handed over to a TV show? Maybe some would squee. Others would — and should — feel contempt and hostility. This is not the program that brought me to Iowa. You sold out to pop culture. 

"The Rhode Island School of Design alumna, who calls herself an artist first, actress second, is cautiously aware of the 'specialness' of her situation..."

"... but reasons, 'if someone was willing to show my work now, I don’t really care why. I’m honored to have the platform.'"

The actress-artist is Jemima Kirke (of the HBO show "Girls"). The article is in the NYT.

From the comments (links added):

First Shia Labeouf tries to pass off the work of Dan Clowes as his own. Now Jemima Kirke is ever-so-earnestly describing how the friends she painted deeply inspired her "art" rather than the Alice Neel coffee table books she clearly cherishes and studies. There is something fundamentally wrong with this Napster generation. Just because you can play a passable cover of "Needle in the Hay" does not mean you ARE Elliott Smith or that you actually WROTE the song. Ms. Kirke's attempt to pass off her work as anything other than homage is reminiscent of a classic headline from The Onion: "Judge Awards Heather Mills Writing Credit On Eleanor Rigby."

Many commenters carp about the similarity to the work of Alice Neel and some attack the Times for failing even to mention Neel. For contrast, when the NYT wrote about that painting George Bush did of himself in the bathtub, it did not fail to cite Pierre Bonnard — "Pierre Bonnard’s strangely chaste, luminous paintings of his wife reclining in a bathtub."

How do you feel about celebrity artists getting attention when lesser-known, better artists are ignored? Is it okay as long as any artists they steal from also get the press? Is it okay as long are there's no different treatment based on the politics of the celebrity artists? Or is it just all about the clicks and nothing here really matters?

2 conversations I listened to today (with great pleasure).

1. The Sartorialist, Steve Schuman, talking about photographing fashion on the streets and his devotion — even as many other offers come his way — to blogging and to sincere self-expression.



2. Lena Dunham talks to Bill Simmons about "Girls" (establishing her distance from her character Hannah) and about the pop music and TV and movies that have influenced her.

"American society's aestheticization of hairless female genitalia apparently came at the cost of a veritable epidemic of grooming-related injuries."

The New Republic reports, pointing to data based on the percentage increase in emergency room visits. There's a fivefold increase (between 2002 and 2010), but I'm seeing no reference to the actual numbers (and no discussion of whether the tendency to avail oneself of emergency room services has changed), so I have no idea whether this assertion that there's "a veritable epidemic" of shaving accidents out there is true.

I do suspect that TNR is in the anti-hair-removal propaganda business. The article begins:

The Brazilian wax has been on its way out for a while. But what may be its final death throe comes, according to the Atlantic Wire, in the form of unshaved mannequins on display at American Apparel.

They missed what I would have thought should be the de rigueur reference, last Sunday's new episode of "Girls," where a door was suddenly flung open, and there was the new girl, played by Gaby Hoffmann, naked from the waist down. Hoffman is interviewed: