"Among the early regulars was a group from the Second City comic troupe, including Don Novello, John Belushi and Bill Murray. They downed beer and coffee..."

"... and marveled at Mr. Sianis’s kind but firm handling of first-timers who expected his tiny grill to turn out anything other than cheeseburgers...."

I'm reading "Sam Sianis, ‘Cheezborger’-Flipping Owner of Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern, Dies at 91/His dive bar became famous thanks to Mike Royko’s columns, a baseball curse and a 'Saturday Night Live' skit" (NYT).

"The phrase 'cheezborger cheezborger' entered the pop-culture lexicon and made the Billy Goat and Mr. Sianis a tourist attraction. During the summer of 1978, at the inaugural ChicagoFest festival on Navy Pier, Mr. Sianis set up a booth where he and Mr. Belushi recreated his quirky grill for thousands of fans."

"Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was too young to know [Elizabeth] Taylor as the violet-eyed phenom who first dazzled in 'National Velvet' and went on..."

"... to be perhaps the most famous, the most glamorous movie star in the world. I was, however, just the right age to experience her as a pop culture mainstay and occasional punchline. This was Ms. Taylor’s frosted-tips-and-caftans era, when she appeared in front of a camera only to make soft-focus perfume ads, parodied by 'Saturday Night Live.' It was the time of her union with Mr. Fortensky, a construction worker she’d met in rehab, and whom she married at her friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch."

Writes Jennifer Weiner in "Jennifer Lopez Is Becoming an Elizabeth Taylor for a New Generation" (NYT)(free-access link).

I'm not interested enough in Jennifer Lopez to care about her multiple marriages and divorces, and Elizabeth Taylor began a bit before my time, but I remember the Elizabeth Taylor of the 1960s, and that sets me apart from Weiner, who arrived after Taylor's prime. I'm still quite interested in Taylor, even more so after watching this new HBO documentary:

Taylor critiques fame. I thought this review from Chris Cassingham was apt: "At a time when the public’s access to celebrities’ personal lives is simultaneously at its greatest and most calculated, the raw vulnerability of Taylor’s recollections is necessarily tempered when transposed onto something so pedestrian as Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes often is. If the material at [director Nanette] Burstein’s disposal holds within it deep insights about the toxic nature of hypervisible celebrity, about an industry’s exploitations, her film deploys them hesitantly...."

Trying to come to terms with my switching off of the movie "Days of Heaven" when Richard Gere throws soup at a guy....

 

... I start a conversation with ChatGPT:

Me: 

What are some movies where someone throws food at somebody?

 ChatGPT:

Here are some movies where someone throws food at somebody:

"Running Rolling Stone required special skills. Mr. Wenner had to mold the copy into something readable after drug-fueled interviews..."

"... like the one he did with Jimi Hendrix. And he had to edit the work of [Hunter S.] Thompson, who loved his cocaine and whose office supplies included Wild Turkey and beer on tap, and an air horn. Mr. Thompson’s first dispatch from D.C., when he covered George McGovern’s 1972 campaign, began like this: 'I feel the fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball.'... Mr. Wenner recounts one day early in the magazine when Mick Jagger stopped by for blow and a long visit. On another, [Annie] Leibovitz dropped three large rocks of coke on his desk as 'a gift from Keith for you.' 'Cocaine had a stranglehold on the music business,' Mr. Wenner writes in the memoir. 'Drugs were the coin of the realm, enabling bad behavior, bad relationships, and lapses of judgment all around.' Dinner parties might have silver trays of neatly arranged lines of coke passed around every half-hour. When John Belushi fell off a stage doing his samurai skit and ended up in the hospital, with his leg in a cast suspended by wires, he mischievously pulled out a vial of coke hidden in the cast to show his friend Jann."

A snippet of the long article "Jann Wenner Wants to Reveal It All/The Rolling Stone founder talks about LSD, not reading the magazine anymore and how the Stones now look like 'Lord of the Rings' characters onstage" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

The size of young meatball. Now, that was some choice writing. I suppose it was a young meatball the size of an old meatball. But who really cares about these old meatballs these days? They took a lot of drugs. It doesn't look glamorous from this old-meatball distance. The headline highlights the LSD, but I excerpted cocaine.

"One of the reasons 'Secret Honor' is so affecting is that, with the distance of time, we feel sympathy for the man, especially because we are aware of how Nixon-hating..."

"... had a lot to do with a very personal reaction to the man. There was a sort of loathing that wasn't about politics, but about the way he looked and spoke and certain personality qualities of the sort that would have made him unpopular even as a child. And the truly challenging thing to think about is how he could have been politically effective if he repelled people on a deep psychic level. Bush-haters of today might try imagining themselves thirty years in the future, looking back at him as a mere man."

That's something I wrote on February 14, 2005, in a post called "Small and large falls." 

I'm reading that this morning after seeing this new piece at New York Magazine, "In Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall Plays Nixon As a Wounded Animal." New York Magazine is writing that now because the actor who played Nixon, Philip Baker Hall, recently died. He was 90.

I was writing about "Secret Honor" in 2005 — 17 years ago — because I was teaching the Watergate Tapes case and I had a nice, new Criterion Collection CD of the Robert Altman film. 

"Cathy was a great lady. Men were drawn to her, and she used to make me jealous. But I don’t have a bad thing to say about her."

Said Gordon Lightfoot, quoted in a NY Post item teased on the front page as "Back-up singer best known for killing John Belushi dead at 73." The more dignified headline at the link is "Cathy Smith, who injected John Belushi with fatal overdose, dies at 73."

Until Belushi’s death, Smith was known in rock music circles for singing back-up for Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, later founding members of The Band, and in the early 1970s becoming Lightfoot’s girlfriend and muse. Lightfoot wrote the #1 1974 hit “Sundown” about his tumultuous, extramarital and occasionally violent relationship with Smith, the dark lyrics masked by a lilting, bluesy melody: “[I can see her lyin' back in her satin dress/In a room where ya do what ya don't confess/]Sundown you better take care/If I find you been creepin’ ’round my back stairs.”

Smith claimed the Band song "The Weight" was about her.

"Was SNL’s Take on Sarah Huckabee Sanders Sexist?"

"Critics are arguing that Saturday Night Live’s spoof of White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took low blows at her weight," reports The Daily Beast.

“I will say this: you guys were mean about Huckabee Sanders,” CNN’s New Day co-host Chris Cuomo said on the morning program. “You were fat-shaming her. You were talking about how she looks and what she wears. I thought it was mean, not funny.”...

Regardless of where you fall on the matter of offense, it is certainly lazy to go after a woman’s appearance as the sole source of comedy. Surely there are other punchlines—Sanders’ brusque, exasperated demeanor, her poor grasp of the meaning of “atrocities”—that don’t mock her body image.

ADDED: Ricky Gervais — an actual gifted (and fat) comedian — has strongly and on many occasions defending making fun of fatness. Example:

I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight. They said something like "you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing."

It's not the same thing though, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat. For gayness to be the same as fatness, gay people would have to start off straight but then ween themselves onto cock. Soon they're noshing all day getting gayer and gayer. They've had more than enough cock... they're full... they're just sucking for the sake of it. Now they're overgay, and frowned upon by people who can have the occasional cock but not over indulge.

When a doctor tells me that that's how you become gay, I'll stop making jokes about fat people.

I think what that mostly proves is that if you are funny enough, you can joke about anything. Here's George Carlin's classic defense of that concept.

Now, I haven't watched the SNL about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but I think it might be that they just show her eating. Is that funny enough? I don't know. Depends on how they do it! I remember years ago on SNL, John Belushi playing the role of Elizabeth Taylor — at a time when Liz was pretty fat — and just having her eat, but it was funny eating.

Beyond Obama's blue pill: folksingers!

What medical treatments will the government approve, in the future, for the aging population of America? Two years ago, President Obama let it slip that cheap painkillers would supervene more expensive cures. And here's a new, low-price palliative for the oldies:

Every week, three music therapists from MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care crisscross the city and suburbs to sing songs to the dying. With guitars strapped to their backs, a flute or tambourine and a songbook jammed in their backpacks, they play music for more than 100 patients, in housing projects, in nursing homes and even in a lavish waterfront home. The time for chemotherapy and radiation is over.

The music begins: a song to hold death at bay, a song to embrace death, or to praise God. A Vietnam veteran asks for a song in Vietnamese. One man asked only for songs with death in the lyrics, to force his family to talk to him about the future. He was ready to talk about it. They weren’t. So the therapist sang Queen’s version of “Another One Bites the Dust.” “Amazing Grace” and other spiritual songs are most often requested just before death.

It's a jobs program for sensitive young women who might feel uncomfortable busking on the city streets, waiting for cold-hearted businessmen to drop a dollar in their guitar cases. The government will drop the dollar in, and the elderly patients will be too polite (and also physically unable) to walk away.

Welcome to the hospice, where the strumming of Joan Baez wannabes will prepare you for death. They will ease your "final transition." You'll be ready to die before they're ready to leave.  If you hang out too long at the hospice, be forewarned: When you've heard "Amazing Grace" 10,000 times, you've only just begun.

Can't we please pick our own music? Recorded music played by virtuouso musicians? Maybe Beethoven's 6th Symphony.... or "The Man in the Box"....



IN THE COMMENTS: Jim said:

I was on the faculty in a music department with a music therapy program for ~25 years, and taught a couple of courses to students majoring in MT during that time.

The MT professors/practitioners have been relentlessly pursuing their dream of obtaining funding from medical insurance and the public schools. They point to a growing body of MT research - all of it advocacy, most of it incompetent, much of it just silly - to support their lobbying for the loot.

ALSO: When you get to that hospice and the folksinger arrives, remember John Belushi. (Suggestion via RLC in the email and Sixty Grit in the comments.)