A Monday morning juxtaposition. .

I see this at the top of the NYT right now:

Sterile wealth, romanticized poverty, and mindlessness about sleevelessness.

1. The family of 5: "'Money right now, there’s not enough. Literalmente,' said Ms. Torres, speaking Spanglish. 'Sometimes I feel bad, like I can’t do enough for my kids.'"

2. The Biebers: "The 2,792-square-foot apartment has two kitchens — an open-plan kitchen for entertaining, with marble counters and Scandinavian larch wood cabinetry, and a secondary chef’s kitchen with stainless steel and matte aluminum cabinetry. The primary suite looks out to the Hudson River..." The living room, I see, looks out onto a big TV screen and turns its back on the uninspiring skyline of New Jersey.

3. The presumed dearth of sleeves: "In all of the discussions about body positivity and loving the different parts of you, including the parts of you that decades of social conditioning have deemed potentially problematic, arms, especially the upper arms, are often overlooked...." The letter writer is urged to "rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."

"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

"What is Ramsay Hunt syndrome, the condition affecting Justin Bieber?"

WaPo explains:

Ramsay Hunt syndrome is a rare neurological disorder that can occur in people who were previously infected with chickenpox. If the dormant varicella-zoster virus is reactivated, leading to shingles, it can affect the facial nerve and may lead to facial paralysis and hearing loss.... [P]rompt treatment can make a significant difference to a patient’s outcome, with about 70 percent of those who receive antiviral medication within three days of developing symptoms making a full recovery... Mild cases can resolve within a few weeks... but more severe damage to the nerve leads to a longer recovery time and lower chances of a complete return to health. 

Justin calmly explains his condition:

"Harvey thinks Michael is a soulless, tasteless, lying prick."

From "How Harvey Weinstein Survived His Midlife Crisis (For Now)," a 2004 article in New York Magazine. The "Michael" in question is Michael Eisner. If you care. 

I'm seeing that quote because it is in the Oxford English Dictionary, the most recent example of the use of the word I looked up, "soulless." That is, most recent for meaning 2a: "Of a person: lacking spirit, sensitivity, or other qualities regarded as elevated or human; (now esp.) lacking in human warmth, feeling, or sympathy; cold, heartless." 

I'm actually more interested in meaning 1, "Having no soul," because I was having a real-life conversation about the notion that some people don't have a soul, and whether, if that could be true, the soulless person could acquire a soul, and whether a person who regards another person as soulless has a moral or intellectual obligation to look inside himself and seriously examine whether he himself has got a soul.

I read the news today....

"Legendary Drummer Nick Barker Thinks Modern Death Metal Has Become Soulless "There's very little artistic merit these days'" (Metal Injection).

"Millionaire Sandbanks residents are at war with developers over £250m plan to build 'soulless' block of 119 flats on site of Victorian hotel where radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi set up wireless station in 1898" (The Daily Mail).

"Internet slams ‘idiot’ senator who tweeted graphics attacking infrastructure bill" (Raw Story)("Each of you Republican Senators is just a soulless husk void of a heart, morals, or any ideas of value-- mere grifters and racists willing to say and do anything for money, the future be damned. What a legacy"). 

"Justin Bieber Continues to Gush on the Soulless ‘Justice’" (The Emory Wheel).

 "Godzilla vs Kong Review – Soulless CGI MonsterFest" (NerdFest).

"Safaree Samuels Explains How Social Media Creates Culture of Soulless Materialism and Vanity: ‘The Reality Is Nobody Shows the Struggle’" (Atlanta Black Star)("Social media got 22-year-olds wanting to off they selves cause they don’t make 6 figures and drive a 7 series. S–t is terrible. Got Women thinking if you can’t afford a Chanel bag, you doing bad in life and offer them nothing. Got dudes thinking a good 9-5 is slavery. Nobody likes their body, nobody like their home. Just a mass group of people wanting what others have. Or pretend to have"). 

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"Last year 2.3 million tourists visited Iceland, compared with just 600,000 eight years ago. The 20% annual uptick in visitors..."

"... has been out of proportion with infrastructure that is needed to protect Iceland's volcanic landscape, where soil forms slowly and erodes quickly. Environment Minister Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson said it is 'a bit too simplistic to blame the entire situation on Justin Bieber' but urged famous, influential visitors to consider the consequences of their actions. 'Rash behavior by one famous person can dramatically impact an entire area if the mass follows'.... In the viral video — watched over 440 million times on YouTube since 2015 — Bieber stomped on mossy vegetation, dangled his feet over a cliff and bathed in the freezing river underneath the sheer walls of the canyon. 'In Justin Bieber's defense, the canyon did not, at the time he visited, have rope fences and designated paths to show what was allowed and what not,' Gudbrandsson said.... The latest season of the popular HBO drama "Game of Thrones" features scenes filmed at the canyon.... Inga Palsdottir, director of the national tourism agency Visit Iceland, said a single film shot or a viral photograph has often put overlooked places on the map. The most extreme example, she said, is the Douglas DC-3 U.S. Navy plane that crashed on the black sand beach at Sólheimasandur in 1973. The seven Americans on board all survived but the plane wreck was never removed. 'Then someone decided to dance on it and now it's one of the most popular places in the country,' said Palsdottir."

From "Once-Pristine Canyon in Iceland Closed After Bieber Video" (Bloomberg).

"Is Acne Cool Now?/How celebrities and influencers are changing the stigma of having acne."

My favorite headline of the last few weeks... at the NYT. The column is by Andrea Cheng.

“I was ashamed of my acne because of the shame people would place on it,” [said Hailey Wait, an 18-year-old student]. Her acne affected her self-esteem, prompting her to raid the Walgreens makeup aisle for cover-ups, even if they did little but aggravate her skin condition.

Seven months ago, she had had enough, and instead of hiding behind cheap foundation or highly edited selfies, she did the opposite: She revealed her blemishes to her 15,000 followers on Instagram for the first time.

Here is the lovely, acne-proud Hailey Wait, in what I'm thinking of calling the best social-media influencing I have every seen — best and most beneficial:

Post Malone on repeat all week 🙌🏼

A post shared by Hailey Wait 🌙 (@pigss) on May 19, 2018 at 5:17pm PDT

So much of Instagram is women using way too much makeup. I love this leaning so far in the other direction.

And now, in the latest wrinkle, celebrities have joined the skin-positivity cause, with Justin Bieber (who recently posted on his Instagram Story that “pimples are in”), Kendall Jenner, Lili Reinhart, Lucy Hale and SZA openly embracing their acne.

It gets real and then it gets really funny. A sweet teenager does something cool and she's real and then the fake people jump on board. I'm real too!

"Sexually assaulted in full view of millions, the 18-year-old boy really has no option but to treat it as a joke."

I just happened to land on this post from a mere 5 years ago:

Look at the photograph of the hulking Jenny McCarthy grabbing Justin Bieber by the throat and suctioning the back of his neck:

"Wow. I feel violated right now," he said, laughing.

"I did grab his butt," McCarthy said backstage. "I couldn't help it. He was just so delicious. So little. I wanted to tear his head off and eat it."

Imagine the sexes reversed. If you can. McCarthy is more than twice Bieber's age. She's 40. But, oh, she's trying so hard to project sexuality....

I said "stop molesting teenagers. That's not funny, even if circumstances require Bieber to pretend that it is." Here's the photograph:

[PHOTO REMOVED]

 
How did I happen upon that? I was searching my archive for "men's project," after seeing a link at at Instapundit to the Campus Reform piece "The University of Wisconsin-Madison has confirmed that it has disbanded its 'Men’s Project,' a program designed to teach 'men-identified students' about the harms caused by traditional notions of masculinity."

The McCarthy molestation post had the word "men's" ("She first posed for the men’s mag at 21, which helped launch her career as a sexy doofus") and "project" ("She's 40. But, oh, she's trying so hard to project sexuality").

Anyway, the UW "Men's Project." I must have paid attention to that, since it involves my school and topics I care about, but I can't find an old post. My question is whether the Men's Project was as heavy-handed and demeaning as Campus Reform makes it sound.

IN THE COMMENTS: CJ said points to this "SNL" routine with Tina Fey as a teacher fantasizing about sex with her student, played by Justin Bieber. This is from April 2010:

[VIDEO REMOVED]

 
CJ's comment is "I remember watching this when it aired and saying to my fiancee at the time - 'God this skit could've been so much funnier but they're obviously scared of sexualizing Bieber too much - but that's the whole point of the sketch!'"

I think that sketch is great. Pitch perfect, right down to the "I'm going to go call Gloria Allred." It's prescient... about a future that still isn't quite here, the point when #MeToo extends to men accusing women.

Ah, wait, CJ comes back:

Not to spam the comment thread, but I wanted to explain the sketch more - the premise is that Bieber is super cute and even adult women are attracted to him so Tina Fey starts sexualizing him and imagining her life with him as her boyfriend (and lover, it's heavily implied). It's something you could never do with an underage girl, even in jest, and I think SNL knows that. But they wanted to seize on how cute Bieber is and make a sketch about it, but they stopped before it got actually sexual and therefore it's not that funny, just kind of weird.

I don't know if SNL expected the audience to "get it" and take what Tina Fey is doing a step further on our own, and thus it'd be funny because we know what the writers *wanted* to say even though they couldn't say such things on TV about an underage boy, or if they legitimately wanted to stop the joke before it got actually sexual, in which case it's really not all that funny.

Man hands.

A Drudge theme right now:

A topic that came up in the Dali thread, where I'd said "What path did your eye take and how many points of interest did you take in before you saw... the snake around her wrist?" and holdfast said: "before you saw...the creepy man-hands?" Closeup:



Classic "Seinfeld" bit:

"Justin Bieber is a gifted singer, but he is also a controversial young foreign singer. In order to maintain order in the Chinese market and purify the Chinese performance environment..."

"... it is not suitable to bring in badly behaved entertainers. We hope that as Justin Bieber matures, he can continue to improve his own words and actions, and truly become a singer beloved by the public."

Said the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture (responding to an inquiry from a Chinese Bieber fan).

"This is why Harry Connick Jr. is one of my favorite musicians..."

"... instead of addressing the crowd about it, he deals with it in a transparent* way keeps the show going like nothing happened. Amazing, and classy!"

"it" = the audience is clapping on the 1 and 3.

I think there's a lesson here that goes beyond music. I'm thinking of analogies in social, political, and business relationships. You're performing within a group that is getting it wrong, and you could stop and point it out and try to show them how to behave better, but instead you do something that they don't even notice that makes them start doing it right. Of course, if you had this power — Connick power — you could use it for evil.

Maybe Donald Trump has Connick power!

_________________

* This use of the word "transparent" may be confusing. We tend to say "transparent" when we mean that a person is making his intentions and motivations perfectly clear. That's exactly what Connick is not doing. But "transparent" makes sense if what you mean is that the technique used was invisible to the audience and they continued to experience the music as if nothing had happened.

ADDED: Here's an ordinary human dealing with the same situation, sans Connick power:

"Lots of men messed around with masculinity..."

"And for reasons that make no cosmic sense, a few of those men — Prince, David Bowie, Prince Be of P.M. Dawn, and now Mr. Michael — died in 2016, a year in which dismaying ambivalence about aggressive, invasive male behavior was matched by the reinstatement of duller performances of masculinity in both our pop music and our politics. The Princes and the George Michaels seem as radical as ever."

Writes Wesley Morris in "George Michael Mattered Beyond the Music."

The Princes and the George Michaels — sorry, there is only one of each — let's put them to the side now. I give Prince and George Michael all the love the deserve — which is a lot — but I want to focus on what Wesley Morris said about the "performance of masculinity" in the music and politics of 2016. I almost had to diagram that one sentence to understand it. But clear out the stuff about artists who died this year, and you have a statement about the keeping-on-living men of 2016.

These  unnamed men of 2016 showed us 2 different masculine presentations: 1. "aggressive, invasive" and 2. "duller."

And we were ambivalent. Dismayingly so.

Presumably, Morris thinks the dead radicals — Prince, George Michaels — marked the path away from the unappealing choice between the 2 styles of masculinity — ugly or boring — that prevail among us the living. I say "presumably," because the sentence I want to talk about is a sign for an exit ramp Morris zooms past.

Who are the Masculinity Style #1 men and the Masculinity Style #2 men of 2016 that Morris didn't bother to name? It seems as though he had 1s and 2s for both politics and pop music. I don't follow pop music enough to know who the men of 2016 are and whether they are "aggressive, invasive" or "duller." There's Justin Bieber, I know. Which is he?

Politics, I follow. I'm sure Donald Trump was the whole reason for the words "aggressive, invasive." And yet... "In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, 'I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.' I took her out furniture...."

Trump's "performance of masculinity" is just as complicated as Prince's.

"I think that people, as soon as they start hearing me saying I’m a Christian, they’re like, 'Whoa Justin, back up, take a step back.'"

"Also, I do not want to shove this down anyone’s throat. I just wanna honestly live like Jesus. Not be Jesus—I could never—I don’t want that to come across weird. He created a pretty awesome template of how to love people and how to be gracious and kind. If you believe it, he died for our sins. Sometimes when I don’t feel like doing something, but I know it’s right, I remember, I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t feel like going to the cross and dying so that we don’t have to feel what we should have to feel. What Jesus did when he came to the cross was basically say, ‘You don’t have to feel any of that stuff.’ We could take out all of our insecurities, we could take away all of the hurt, all the pain, all the fear, all the trauma. That doesn’t need to be there. So all this healing that you’re trying to do, it’s unnecessary. We have the greatest healer of all and his name is Jesus Christ. And he really heals. This is it. It’s time that we all share our voice. Whatever you believe. Share it. I’m at a point where I’m not going to hold this in."

Said Justin Bieber.

"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.

If only one thing could break through the popularity of Justin Bieber, it would be... Lou Ferrigno.

From the sidebar, just now, at The New York Daily News:



Lou says: "Young people today are looking for shortcuts... They always think there is a supplement out there to make them grow faster."

"Bieber's entourage blocked off local streets to create a drag strip for him...."

"A police report described at least four black Cadillac SUV's blocking roads in front and behind two sports cars, causing backed up traffic."

"He basically didn’t want to comply with none of the officers on the scene, questioning every order that they gave him. He wouldn’t take his hands out of his pockets. He was very uncooperative with the officers at the scene, using profanity."

Justin Bieber is 19 and a Canadian citizen. The linked article quotes a defense lawyer (not his lawyer) saying that with the combination of DUI, resisting arrest, and speed exhibition there is "avery real possibility of jail time":

"The message prosecutors will want to send is that he can’t go barnstorming around the country, renting exotic cars and drag racing in the streets, putting other lives at risk. That’s not conduct the courts are going to just allow to happen... As far as immigration, there’s very little chance he’d be deported over this. These aren’t considered crimes of moral turpitude. This isn’t burglary, murder or grand theft. Typically, this isn’t something that would get you deported."

Wait! It says he caused backed up traffic. That's Chris Christie level moral turpitude!

Why we should leave Justin Bieber alone about what he wrote in the guestbook at the Anne Frank Museum.

He wrote: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

Writing about this causes him to be the main/first thing millions of young people think of when they hear her name. There are, I'm sure, many kids who are hearing about her for the first time in connection with their pop idol, and it's the only thing they know about her. These 2 characters shouldn't have this bond in the mental space of those who don't know much about history. Don't lock in that link!

ADDED: How outrageous is it for Bieber to imagine her as a fan? Have you been to the Anne Frank house? I have. Preserved behind plexiglas on her bedroom wall are pictures of movie stars. (I remember Greta Garbo and Ray Milland.) Based on seeing her room, it was entirely rational for Bieber to think, if we had been contemporaries, she'd love me. Teenage girls do love their pop idols, and remembering the living, not-yet-captured girl does honor her.

A quick wrap-up of today's incipient "mask" theme.

Sometimes the blog acquires a theme, like today, when the first post of the day was about masks that the Hopis don't like to call "masks" — you call them masks, we call them friends — and the second was a metaphorical use of the word "mask," to refer to Ben Carson's current persona. But I would be bullshitting if I said that the third and fourth posts were on theme. Oh, I could do that bullshitting. But I'm not going to waste your time. As the title of this, the fifth post, says, quick wrap-up. So here's the news about masks:

1. "Vogue models 'ate tissues' to mask hunger: Revelations follow similar claims by fashion industry insiders."

2. "Hamas militants’ menacing mask of defiance: Hooded gangs patrol Gaza as Israel fires first attack in months breaking fragile truce."

3. "A man wearing an 'old man' mask robbed a Cleveland Chase Bank Wednesday morning, the FBI said." (Hints for bank robbers: Use sunglasses to keep the rubber mask in place and to provide additional masking.)

4. "Do North Korea’s threats mask power struggle behind the scenes?" ("Those who study the Hermit Kingdom have very serious doubts that any attack on the U.S. or allies South Korea and Japan is even being seriously considered. 'It could be there’s a whole other game going on,' said Stephen Long, a North Korea expert at the University of Richmond.")

5. The General Zod mask from "Man of Steel" has been identified as the Halloween costume item for 2013, but the images that were at this link — purportedly terrifying — have been "removed at the request of the studio." Here's a 2010-era General Zod action figure, decidedly unscary.

6. "Police are looking for a man who went into a Turkey Hill [store] in Palmyra early Sunday morning wearing nothing but a ski mask." ("The man is described as a white male, approximately 50 years old, standing 6 feet tall with a 'heavyset' build. He had no visible scars, marks, tattoos or body piercings, police said." An amusing twist on the old phrase "no visible scars." Usually it refers to scars other than on the face. Here, the face is where the scars could be.)

7. The gas mask Justin Bieber wore around town in London last month was just "a joke." (And he "know[s] who [he is]" and is "not gonna let negativity towards [him] bring [him] down.")

So put down the tissues and eat some real food. Don't let the negativity bring you down, baby. Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy. It's not your style.

"The moment that hamster was handed off to a screaming girl in a harsh, frenzied environment was likely the moment it gazed at the short path to its doom."

Predicted doom met.

"A paparazzo hoping to get a picture of Justin Bieber in his Ferrari after the vehicle was pulled over by police in Los Angeles got struck and killed by an SUV instead."

"And as it turned out, the 18-year-old singer wasn't even in the sports car."

This seems to be an occasion for wheeling out that horrible old saying: He died doing what he loved. He thought he had Justin Bieber set up for a shot. The photographer was swelling with delight and then — blam — not from a Ferrari but an SUV. Let's hope he never knew what hit him — to coin a phrase — and never knew that Bieber wasn't even in that car. He died doing what he loved! He had his peak of paparazzi ecstasy and then... annihilation. A consummation. It's over.

But wait! Justin Bieber wants to speak:

"While I was not present nor directly involved with this tragic accident, my thoughts and prayers are with the family of the victim... Hopefully this tragedy will finally inspire meaningful legislation and whatever other necessary steps to protect the lives and safety of celebrities, police officers, innocent public bystanders, and the photographers themselves."

Oh, Justin. Not every screw-up is an argument for legislation. Putting "meaningful" in front of "legislation" is itself meaningful, but what does it mean? 1. It means meaninglessness, an empty existential cry in the face of helplessness. 2. It means I would like to soothe myself with the fantasy that if the right laws had been in place, the bad thing that just happened would not have happened. 3. It means that we can express meaning through laws, that laws work as expression, quite aside from whether they have any effect on the bad things we would like to call bad.

Now, should we also get on Bieber's case for calling what happened a "tragedy"?

Tragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song") is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing....

Pedants love to say that the word "tragedy" is misused, but I think we may have encountered a correct use of the word. That correct usage seems out of place with the rest of the statement, with its angst about prayer, inspiration, and meaning. One suspects Bieber bumbled into saying something he wouldn't have meant to say. It's meaning without a mind that meant it. We witness human suffering and feel... good!

ADDED: The more apt term is poetic justice — "a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct." The key is the self-contained logic of the story. It makes sense. There should be no call for legislation to find meaning. The meaning is already there. What happened is exactly right: poetic justice. The Wikipedia page I just linked has some examples, and since we were just talking about Wile E. Coyote, I enjoyed seeing him first on the list of poetic justice in TV and film: "Wile E. Coyote always sets traps for Road Runner, only to end up in the traps themselves." The phrase "hoist with his own petard" expresses the concept. Did you know it's from "Hamlet":

"For 'tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard." (Shakespeare, Hamlet (III.iv.226).)

And did you know (again, from Wikipedia):

During the late 17th century, critics pursuing a neo-classical standard would criticize William Shakespeare in favor of Ben Jonson precisely on the grounds that Shakespeare's characters change during the course of the play.... When Restoration comedy, in particular, flouted poetic justice by rewarding libertines and punishing dull-witted moralists, there was a backlash in favor of drama, in particular, of more strict moral correspondence.

"Inmate hatched castration plot after Justin Bieber didn't return his love letters..."

We're told Dana Martin, 45, felt like a "nobody" in prison, and now, we're all talking about him. Pretty impressive: A prisoner — in for life after killing a girl — is able to seize the headlines. He should be a nobody, but now, he's been allowed to become a big old celebrity and to tie his name to that of a mega-celebrity:

Martin — who has a large tattoo of Bieber on his leg — offered $2,500 for each of Bieber’s testicles, which were to be snipped off with a pair of Fiskars Durasharp pruning shears last month, records show.

I think we should have prevented this: Martin's leap into fame.  And we should not be talking about "Bieber's testicles." Talk about Anne Hathaway's vulva if you want: She flashed photographers. But Bieber has kept his pants on and has nothing to do with the despicable nobody Martin.

Sorry to be part of the machine that is making Martin famous, but I want to call out everyone who's getting off on this story.

I know that it's possible for prisoners to commit crimes from prison by hiring others and that it's not automatically a big joke. But specifying the brand of the pruning shears and the pattern of the tie to be used for strangling (paisley) smells like dark comedy. It should not be this easy for a prisoner to amuse himself and aggrandize himself this way. Martin killed a 15-year-old girl and is a life prisoner: turn the spotlight elsewhere.