"Alongside his 'hypno-coaching' business, Curtis runs a series of spiritual retreats across America. For years he had dreamt of 'financial freedom' and used to touch wads of cash he kept in a bowl..."

"... in the hope that this would bring him wealth. Now he has an apartment in Tribeca, New York, on the street where he always wanted to live. And spends his summers on a superyacht. He has attained the reach and affluence he’d been trying to manifest for many years.This month he will publish The Book of Possibility, positioned somewhere between self-help, spirituality and what Curtis calls 'science.' 'Your inner vibrational world shapes your external reality,' is its message.... Curtis is a classic hunk, with cut biceps and a swoosh of grey hair. Before he answers a question, he likes to shut his eyes and press two fingers to his temple. "

From "Jim Curtis on life with Jennifer Aniston: 'I feel real partnership'/Hollywood’s favourite new self-help guru — and Jennifer Aniston’s boyfriend — tells Megan Agnew how he manifested his way to abundance" (London Times).

What is "disgusting" to J.D. Vance?

I only found one appearance of "disgusting" in "Hillbilly Elegy": "my urine turned a disgusting brown shade" (page 183).

Here's what motivated me to look, from "JD Vance Hits Back at Jennifer Aniston, Defending ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Remarks/The 'Friends' actress, who has been open about her fertility struggles, recently criticized Mr. Vance’s 2021 comments on social media" (NYT):

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:

A Minion of the Anti-Christ!

"Three years ago... JD Vance... suggested in a TV interview that some Democrats including Vice President Harris are 'a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable.'"

"Those 2021 comments are resurfacing on social media now.... [M]any... are embracing and owning the 'childless cat lady' label as a point of pride.... 'There’s a movement,” declared Nikki Barnes, a previous member of the Democratic National Committee from Florida, accompanied by a 'Childless cat ladies for Harris 2024' image quickly amassing nearly 2 million views. On TikTok, people are snapping up 'Cat ladies for Harris 2024' stickers."

From "‘Childless cat ladies,’ Jennifer Aniston, and Swifties take on JD Vance/Celebrities including Jennifer Aniston and Whoopi Goldberg cite many reasons women don’t have kids. Others are embracing being a childless cat lady like Taylor Swift" (WaPo).

It's clever to take an insult and turn it around like that. I'm trying to think of other examples of that. There's "nasty woman." And "suffragette."

Another reaction to Vance's "childless cat ladies" is that not everyone who is childless is childless by choice:

“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” actress Jennifer Aniston wrote Wednesday.... “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.... I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

"The humor in 'Seinfeld' is a bit too gritty and New York-specific... while 'The Big Bang Theory' could come across as too much of a 'scientific nerd thing.'"

"'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."

From "How ‘Friends’ Helps People Around the World Learn English/Language teachers say the show 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 the West Village" (NYT).

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:

"Staff... have been encouraged to... wear rainbow lanyards on campus to show solidarity with the transgender community."

According to "Edinburgh University lecturers given list of ‘microinsults’ and guidance on transgender issues" (London Times). Rainbow lanyards! 

FROM THE EMAIL: Lloyd points me to this:

"The Real Scare of Jennifer Aniston’s Friends Prank Is How Nobody Loves Rachel."

Writes Devon Ivie at Vulture about this segment of the "Ellen" TV show, which Aniston guest hosted on Friday:



"[S]he squatted behind the famous couch and jumped out to scare those unsuspecting tourists [who were visiting the 'Friends' set]— but by the sixth round of people declaring their love for every Friends character besides Rachel Green, we can’t help but feel Aniston herself is the one being pranked here. (Someone even said Ross is their favorite. Ross!)"

By the way, Ross is my favorite Friend.

ADDED: I watched the Aniston guest-host show, and it gave me a lot of respect for Ellen. It's hard to seem natural in the phony-baloney role of afternoon-talk-show woman. Aniston just won a Screen Actors Guild for playing the role of a TV-talk-show woman in some Apple TV series called "Morning Show" or some generic title like that. And Aniston's "Ellen" appearance was completely scripted, so all Aniston needed to do was to be a TV actress, which she most certainly is, at the highest level. But I could feel the fakeness. I guess fiction shows have an understood fakeness to them. The additional ease and naturalness that Ellen enacts is not something Aniston was able to achieve.

"But in Hollywood, Apple must hone its identity and reputation in an entertainment market crowded with competitors, from Netflix and Hulu to HBO and Disney."

"It’s using its deep pockets to buy itself a name in Hollywood. Apple is paying Witherspoon and Aniston about $1.1 million an episode each, according to a Hollywood executive with knowledge of Apple’s plans.... Apple has been trying to shed the notion that it is different because it hails from Silicon Valley. Hollywood is programmed to be skeptical of outsiders who don’t understand the intricacies of filmmaking.... Still, Apple has no Hollywood track record, and people who have inked deals with the company described the decision as a leap of faith in Apple’s ability to execute on its plans and deliver big audiences.... 'Apple is the only company in the world that can drop a couple million dollars in entertainment and get Reese Witherspoon and M. Night Shyamalan on board without any articulation of a plan in terms of marketing or distribution,' said one well-connected Hollywood executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to upset Apple.... "[Apple CEO Tim Cook] is paranoid about anything that affects his brand,” the Hollywood executive said. Now that Apple is becoming its own film studio, it’s in direct competition with other services."

WaPo reports.

Apple, the TV/film studio. What do you think? I care a lot more about Apple's various devices than I do about whatever TV and film it might be able to throw into the already-huge mix of TV and film. There's a high chance of diluting the brand. The brand for the devices is so clean and neutral. A TV show or film with the same kind of aesthetic would be so incredibly dull that it is, realistically, impossible.

Watching TV naked... is that weird?

A montage I'd like to see on YouTube: TV characters watching TV and talking about how TV is like or not like real life.

For example, in "Friends," the friends are watching TV, and the character Joey — who is an actor (played, of course, by an actor) — says: "It really hit me last night. I'm gonna be on 'Days of our Lives.' And then I started thinkin' about all of you, and how these are the days of our lives.”

That's from "The One With the Lesbian Wedding" in Season 2. As you may know, I've been given the box set of the complete episodes of "Friends" and I am watching them all. Here's the uncut script of that episode.

There must be a hundred examples of characters on TV watching TV and speaking as if they are real people and saying something about the TV/reality distinction, giving us the joke of seeing them on TV while we're here in reality. For all I know, there's a sitcom where the characters are watching that episode of "Friends" and hearing and commenting on that very line "these are the days of our lives."

Could somebody else collect all those examples and make a montage for me?

By the way, back in the 90s, that line would be called "going meta," and it was a very popular comic device. Maybe it got overused and trite and was largely abandoned, and I'm liking it in a kind of retro-throwback-ironic way. Nostalgic for going meta?! What a concept!

There's other going meta just in that episode. For example, Marlo Thomas is playing Jennifer Aniston's character's mother, and Marlo ("Mrs. Green") keeps enthusing about how she wants to live like her daughter ("Rachel") — single, free, in NYC. This involves getting a divorce from Rachel's father. Rachel says, "Couldn't she have just copied my haircut?" That's funny because in real life, the Rachel haircut was the rage. A photograph of Rachel was probably the most-shown-to-a-hairstylist photograph ever.

If you think too much about "going meta" you'll be ready to close the door on it again too. Go ahead, shut that door. It's over there. In the fourth wall.

"The law of closure states that individuals perceive objects such as shapes, letters, pictures, etc., as being whole when they are not complete."

"Specifically, when parts of a whole picture are missing, our perception fills in the visual gap. Research shows that the reason the mind completes a regular figure that is not perceived through sensation is to increase the regularity of surrounding stimuli. For example, the figure that depicts the law of closure portrays what we perceive as a circle on the left side of the image and a rectangle on the right side of the image. However, gaps are present in the shapes. If the law of closure did not exist, the image would depict an assortment of different lines with different lengths, rotations, and curvatures—but with the law of closure, we perceptually combine the lines into whole shapes."



From the Wikipedia entry on Gestalt psychology, which I'm reading because I looked up "closure" in the OED and saw that it was a concept in Gestalt psychology. I looked up "closure" in the OED, because I'd just watched an old episode of "Friends" — "The One Where Ross Finds Out" (Season 2, Episode 7 (1995)) — and the word "closure" — a vogue word at the time, I think — was used to great comic effect.



And that's an answer to the question I asked 2 days ago, "What TV sitcom has ever had a character who has been presented and developed with real depth?" I said, "I'm asking the question because I'm starting to watch an old TV series that someone else has said they think has characters that are explored with real depth." The old series is "Friends," and the "someone else" is my son John.

Jennifer Aniston answers the question "Have you ever been sexually harassed in the workplace?"

"I’ve definitely had some sloppy moves made on me by other actors, and I handled it by walking away. I’ve never had anyone in a position of power make me feel uncomfortable and leverage that over me. In my personal experience I’ve been treated worse verbally and energetically by some women in this industry."

The interview is in In Style magazine, which does absolutely no follow-up. Which women? What exactly did they do? Was it mean talk, delivered "energetically," or were there threats or sexual demands? What do you mean by "worse"?

I'd like to go further into this notion that maybe "sloppy" sexual moves by co-workers are forgivable and next to nothing if you just walk away and that what really hurts is something else, something that might not even be sexual, but some other sort of treatment, something women do to other women more than men do to women, but what are the specifics? I'm ready to hear about how women undercut each other and how painful it is when your dreams of sisterhood are punctured, but you've got to expand on "I’ve been treated worse verbally and energetically by some women."

Actually, how do you expand on it without being part of the problem of women not supporting other women?

Maybe the interview is edited down and follow-up questions were asked and went nowhere, either because Aniston couldn't come up with any specifics or because she didn't want to talk about it or she or the magazine decided it wasn't wise to mess up the #MeToo momentum with a new focus on how the real problem is other women. But, they did leave that tantalizing sentence in: "In my personal experience I’ve been treated worse verbally and energetically by some women in this industry."

The interview as published goes right to a question that seems designed to get the focus back on the badness of men — "Have you experienced sexism in your career?" And, just to make sure: "Do you have hope for change as a result of Time’s Up and #MeToo?"

"I am new to this world of junket interviews, where journalists queue to interview a celebrity."

"I've been called awkward, or bumbling, or rookie in some of the articles about the interview..."

... but I'd rather that and be myself, and find out things I find interesting, than try to stitch up or take advantage of someone I respect.

I want to know what we may have in common, rather than the stuff that makes us different...

Yes, I'm nervous, but the junket environment makes it even harder. Sitting in front of Jennifer Aniston is a once-in-a-lifetime chance: I'm not the right guy to use that one chance to try to catch her out.

Watch the viral interview here.

"It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds."

"I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag," said the Swiss sales clerk who incurred the wrath of Oprah.

"I wasn't sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday July 20 so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection. I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do. She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag.

"I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.... She looked around the store again but didn't say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor. My colleague saw them to the door. They were not even in the store for five minutes."

Now, I think this relationship got off on the wrong track when the sales clerk read the customer as best suited for the Jennifer Aniston collection. This would annoy me. You're steering me toward the Jennifer Aniston?! Why! But Oprah can't go to the press with that, because it doesn't say I was racially typecast. What does it say? You look like a middle class American. That's annoying, but not a topic for outrage. So Oprah points at the most out-of-reach item, figuring it's super-expensive, which it is.

"Is someone deliberately sabotaging the movie careers of beloved TV comedy actors?"

"Or is some inexorable force of Marxian historical overdetermination at work, compelling Steve Carell and Tina Fey to make the kinds of sub-mediocre, machine-produced formula pictures that would once have starred Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston (and may yet!), and so rendering irrelevant all the qualities that made them irresistible on television?"

"While filming 'Friends,' cast members Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow ate the same Cobb salad every day for ten years."

People who eat the same thing every day... what's that all about?

***

What if you had to eat the same thing every day? What would you choose? What do you think would happen?

***

Is it about comfort?

WALLY: I'm looking for more comfort, because the world is very abrasive, I mean, I'm trying to protect myself, because really there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look.

ANDRE: Yeah, but Wally, don't you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable and I like to be comfortable, too. But comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility. I mean, my mother knew a woman, Lady Hatfield, who was one of the richest women in the world, and she died of starvation because all she would eat was chicken. I mean, she just liked chicken, Wally, and that was all she would eat, and actually, her body was starving but she didn't know it 'cause she was quite happy eating her chicken and so, she finally died! See, I honestly believe that we're all like Lady Hatfield now, we're having a lovely, comfortable time with our electric blankets and our chicken, and meanwhile we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality that we're not getting any real sustenance.

Jennifer Aniston takes 3-minute showers in which she not only accomplishes all the usual showerly things...

... she also brushes her teeth!

Why the harsh discipline? "Every two minutes in the shower uses as much water as a person in Africa uses for everything in their life for a whole day!"

How else are celebrities helping?

• Adrian Grenier has lived in an apartment insulated with old pants.
• Vegetarian and planetary crusader Tobey Maguire reportedly has banned all leather products from his house. ... [H]e also "makes everyone take off their leather belts and shoes and leave them by the door!"
• ... Leo DiCaprio "stays green at home, too—with his $3,200 eco-friendly toilet!"

Planetary crusader, eh?