"The left wanted to make comedy illegal.... like, you can't make fun of anything.... Legalize comedy!"

Legalize comedy
pic.twitter.com/uKr6fiRI3K

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

And then, do you think this is funny, wielding a chainsaw? I mean, he's cutting thousands of jobs. Those are real people.

 

Must Watch Video: Elon Musk Has Been Knighted At CPAC After Receiving The Chainsaw For Bureaucracy

» WATCH/SHARE THE LIVE X STREAM HERE:https://t.co/7NYWKPuERO pic.twitter.com/mFe0unDA7u

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 20, 2025

That's Argentina's President Javier Milei, handing Musk the chainsaw, so I went to Milei's feed to try to get the video to embed from Milei's feed, where I got a bit distracted. For example, he reposted this:

 

On this day, February 21 1964, the Rolling Stones released the single Not Fade Away in the UK. Originally a Buddy Holly track, the Stones recorded their version at London’s Olympic Studios and it became the band’s first Top 10 hit in the United Kingdom! 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/kkM69cBxUz

— The Rolling Stones (@RollingStones) February 21, 2025

So much masculinity: 1. Comedy, 2. Power tools, 3. The Stones.

ADDED: What is the evidence that Javier Milei loves The Rolling Stones?

"You can go to your camper and do whatever you want. I even get television in there.... The camper taught me how to watch TV.... I go to YouTube."

"Anything. And everything. There’s so many things on YouTube. You’ve got Ibsen, you got Chekhov, you got Strindberg. All on the internet. I even like TikTok when I see it from time to time.... TikTok. Yeah. I saw, like, a 14-year-old girl who was deaf, her whole life, and they do something with her, and she actually starts to hear for the first time! How 'bout that? And sometimes the dogs, they rescue them. You watch the guy go in there and bring this beautiful, sad dog back to, uh, being somewhat — aware of things.... Well, I love that stuff!"

Said Al Pacino, quoted in "The Interview/Al Pacino Is Still Going Big" (NYT).

I'm quoting from the recording. The transcript is edited down a bit and it misses some of the feeling. I thought the interviewer, David Marchese, rushed by some of the best material Pacino seemed to want to hand him. For example, when Pacino spoke of the beautiful, sad dog becoming aware, Marchese intruded with "You're such a softy," categorizing Pacino's feeling as shallow sentimentality as opposed to some more subtle existentialism.

And one of the topics was Pacino's nearly dying of of Covid.

"Too much choice is not a good thing. The anxious person is the one who doesn’t know what to do because..."

"... she can do so many things. The neurotic individual is paralysed by the sense that he can’t make the right decision because another one is always available to him. The apparently limitless options afforded to us by dating apps and social media has not made us more content; it has merely intensified our longing."

From "Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness/Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days is on to something with its depiction of main character Hirayama’s calm, habitual life" (The Guardian).

From The Guardian review of the movie:

"There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. We just churned out songs, that’s all. They would say, 'Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,' then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two..."

"... and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. While I was doing that, I was doing my own stuff and trying to get by, but the material I was doing, people wouldn’t go near me with it at the time. I mean, we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let the Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’ I didn’t see it as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give me a subject, and we’d write."

Said Lou Reed, quoted in Episode 164 of the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" — "'White Light/White Heat' by the Velvet Underground.'"

This episode is very long and full of so many varied things — lots about John Cage before we get to John Cale and Lou Reed arrives much later. The stories merge brilliantly. I'm just pointing you at this wonderful episode, not quoting something representative of the whole.

I chose that quote, because that's the point that cued up a snippet of "Cycle Annie," which I found in full here.

"On a shelf behind Reed’s desk, amid Velvet Underground-­related books and music... was a notarized, self-addressed package, to and from Lewis Reed at his parents’ address on Long Island."

"It appeared to contain a tape, and was postmarked May, 1965, when Reed was twenty-three, working as a songwriter at Pickwick Records, living with his parents, and busking on street corners with his new friend John Cale. 'The Velvet Underground & Nico' would come out two years later. Should they open it? They spent years deciding. 'We were treating it like a relic,' Anderson said. They finally did, and the results, an album called 'Words & Music: May 1965,' came out [last] month."

From "Unboxing Lou Reed’s Posthumous Parcel to Himself/After the death of the Velvet Underground front man, two archivists and his widow, Laurie Anderson, discovered a mysterious sealed package from 1965. Inside was treasure: never-before-heard, folky versions of 'Heroin' and other classics" (The New Yorker). 

"A writer friend shared with me the bound galley of his latest book-to-be, and I pointed out to him that his passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs at a picnic..."

"... was surely meant to be barbecued chicken wings. Not (entirely) displeased with my catch, he introduced me to his production editor — the person in a publishing house in charge of hiring copy editors and proofreaders.... In my early days, I would sulk in my office with the door closed if I found out that one of my books included a typo. A sentence referring to 'geneology' once sent me into a blue funk for hours.... I’m occasionally asked whether I can make my way through the world without shivering under the constant bombardment of typos.... [O]nce, watching the movie 'My Week With Marilyn,' I elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs over a prescription bottle, visible on a night table for approximately a second and a half, whose label read 'Tunial' instead of 'Tuinal.' 'I think it must hurt sometimes to live in your brain,' my husband has said on occasion, not unkindly. But, as he also notes, in a kind of nursery rhyme mantra, 'Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.'"

From "My Life in Error/A copy editor recounts his obsession with perfection" by Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief of Random House (NYT).

I don't want to send Dreyer into a blue funk, but if I were writing an essay that had the line "passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs," I would not also have "elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs." It's a repetition of a distinctive image — ribs — for no recognizable reason. That's a language mistake. Make it your husband's arm. You're in a movie theater. It was more likely his arm that you elbowed anyway, wasn't it? You just liked "ribs," but your feeling of liking it came, I'll bet, from having seen it so recently.

And here's the Wikipedia entry for Tuinal, a Eli Lilly sleeping pill introduced in the late 1940s and now discontinued:

Racial harmony, circa 1986: Everybody, especially Lou Reed, sings "Soul Man."

I ran across that this morning because the Jessica Krug story (see previous post) got me thinking about the old movie "Soul Man," which I've never seen, but remember very well, because it was about affirmative action in law school, in which a white guy misidentifies himself as black so he can qualify for a black-only scholarship at Harvard Law School. The movie is named after the old Sam and Dave song, and Sam participated in that remake with Lou Reed — known for, among other things, the song "I Wanna Be Black"* — of the already-old song.

The use of blackface in the movie was criticized at the time, most notably by Spike Lee. The actress Rae Dawn Chong, who played the main character's love interest, said: "It was only controversial because Spike Lee made a thing of it. He'd never seen the movie and he just jumped all over it... If you watch the movie, it's really making white people look stupid… I always tried to be an actor who was doing a part that was a character versus what I call 'blackting,' or playing my race, because I knew that I would fail because I was mixed. I was the black actor for sure, but I didn't lead with my epidermis, and that offended people like Spike Lee, I think."

Anyway, it has always been a terrible idea for a white person to adopt a black identity to get ahead within higher education. That was a subject of a Hollywood movie in 1986. It's amazing that real people so recently have attempted this sort of fraud. Jessica Krug has outed herself (perhaps because she would have been outed by others), but it makes you wonder how many other people are out there who've furthered their careers by pretending to be black.

I'm writing this post mostly because I was struck by the racial healing acted out in that music video — as if getting white people to sing "I'm a soul man" could bring us all together. To quote another Lou Reed song: You know, those were different times.
__________________
* Listen to the song "I Wanna Be Black" here. Read the lyrics, here. They're quite shockingly racist, but the key line, for comprehension purposes is, "Oh, I don't wanna be a fucked up/Middle class college student no more." The annotation at the lyrics link says:

"This song [is] described by Ann Powers as 'a proto-rap unspooling of racist stereotypes that makes fun of white hipsters by forcing a deep wallow in ignorance.' Though racist, this song attempts to be a satire of bored young white men in America and their attitudes and beliefs around black men. Whether it passes Poe’s Law or not, is up for debate."

What's Poe's Law? Wikipedia says:

"Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied." 

I guess you "pass" Poe's Law when you're clear enough that you are not the thing you are parodying. So, Lou Reed was singing all these racist things but then he let us know that he's really making fun of the "fucked-up, middle class [white] college student" who fantasizes about acquiring a black identity.

"I Wanna Be Black" is from the album "Street Hassle," released in 1978.

"They said Torres continued to call out to Boone saying he couldn't breathe, to which she is heard saying, 'That's on you. Oh, that's what I feel like when you choke me.'"

From "Florida man dies inside suitcase, girlfriend charged after claiming they were playing hide and seek: report" (Fox News).

Boone allegedly told police that they thought it would be funny if he got inside the suitcase, Fox 35 Orlando reported. She allegedly said they were drinking at the time and she passed out on her bed. When she woke up-- hours later-- she allegedly said she found him unresponsive and not breathing....

But she made videos, which police retrieved from her phone.

Deputies said Boone is heard laughing and saying, "For everything you've done to me, [expletive] you! Stupid!"

ADDED: Not exactly on point, but I thought about The Velvet Underground's "The Gift":



Spoken-word lyrics here. Excerpt:

Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit. It was now mid-August, which meant he had been separated from Marsha for more than two months.... He didn't have enough money to go to Wisconsin in the accepted fashion, true, but why not mail himself?... He bought masking tape, a staple gun and a medium sized cardboard box just right for a person of his build. He judged that with a minimum of jostling he could ride quite comfortably. A few air holes, some water, perhaps some midnight snacks, and it would probably be as good as going tourist!...

What do Lou Reed, Bill O'Reilly, and Adam Driver have in common?

Answer: They all walked out on Terry Gross — the magnificent interviewer of NPR's "Fresh Air."

Info gleaned from "Adam Driver skips out on his NPR interview after host Terry Gross tries to make him listen to a clip from his new Netflix film Marriage Story" (Daily Mail). Gross was on notice that Driver was sensitive about listening to himself. In previous interview with her, he refused to listen to a clip, and this dialogue ensued:

'I don’t want to hear the bad acting that probably was happening during that clip,' he joked.

'Does it throw you off to hear yourself?' she inquired.

'Yeah, no, I’ve watched myself or listened to myself before, then always hate it,' he replied. 'And then wish I could change it, but you can’t. And I think I have, like, a tendency to try to make things better or drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I wanted to change or I wish I could change.'

Each of us only knows our own inner life. Some of us more than others have a sense of what Driver is attempting to explain there. I do think there's a great range in how minutely people examine and reexamine their failings and imagined failings. I'm going to guess that Driver's acting is great because he's so uncomfortable with himself all the time that it produces a fascinating on-screen spectacle. In an interview, he doesn't have a script, he's supposed to be producing his own words, and the weird uncomfortableness is not part of a movie, but really him. I can believe that experience, inside his head, is intolerable. Those who feel confident, who roll along unconcerned with imperfections, and who love the sound of their own voice probably don't realize how much they are enjoying freedom from the condition Driver describes.

Why did Lou Reed walk out? According to Terry Gross:

For years I had wanted to interview Lou Reed. When people would ask, “who’s the person you most want to interview?” My answer would be “Lou Reed.”

I finally got to interview him (this was a few years ago) and he ended the interview, in about six minutes or so, or less, because everything I was asking him, he didn’t want to talk about. He said, “I’m sorry this isn’t working” and he walked out.

Why did Bill O'Reilly walk out?

"'Nobody even told me about it,' Trump says in the recording of a phone call that Newman says is from the day after she was fired from her White House communications post in December."

"'I didn’t know it. I didn’t know that. Goddammit. I don’t love you leaving at all.'... Newman, in a combative interview on Today, dodged questions about whether Trump was lying on the phone call, saying that she was 'not certain.' She added that Trump, in general, is 'absolutely' a serial liar, but said she 'never expected him to lie to the country.' She said she was locked in a room before Kelly told her she was fired, and characterized the meeting as 'false imprisonment.' 'It’s not acceptable for four men to take a woman into a room, lock the door and tell her wait, and tell her that she cannot leave,' she said. 'It also is unacceptable to not allow her to have her lawyer or her counsel, and the moment I said I would like to leave and they said I can’t go, it became false imprisonment."

CNN reports.

Newman!



ADDED: Trump reacts to his antagonist in 2 tweets this morning:

Wacky Omarosa, who got fired 3 times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time. She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said Ok. People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard....

...really bad things. Nasty to people & would constantly miss meetings & work. When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems. I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said GREAT things about me - until she got fired!

ALSO: I'm amused by the phrase "She was vicious, but not smart." It implies (inadvertently) that it might be good to be vicious if you are smart... or okay to be dumb if you're not vicious. Song cue:



That song is actually about Andy Warhol — Andy Warhol as seen by Andy Warhol:

[Warhol] said, ‘Why don’t you write a song called 'Vicious, and I said, 'What kind of vicious?’ ‘Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower.’ And I wrote it down literally.

ALSO: Speaking of "vicious, but not smart"... there's a popular notion that Andy Warhol had an IQ of 86, and Gore Vidal once quipped, "Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60." I may have already connected that to Trump. I should search my archive, but I'll just say there's a style of using language that looks stupid to people who don't see why it's brilliant, and these uncomprehending people often puzzle aloud — perhaps using big words and long sentences — about how that idiot could be so successful.

AND: One more Trump tweet:

While I know it’s “not presidential” to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!

And:

Wacky Omarosa already has a fully signed Non-Disclosure Agreement!

"Egypt's musicians' union has banned a leading singer from performing in the country for 'mocking' the River Nile."

"It came after video emerged showing Sherine Abdel Wahab being asked at a concert to sing Mashrebtesh Men Nilha (Have You Ever Drunk From The Nile). She responded by saying 'drinking from the Nile will get me schistosomiasis' - a disease caused by parasitic worms that is commonly known as bilharzia. Abdel Wahab then advised the fan to 'drink Evian water' instead. On Tuesday, the Egyptian Musicians Syndicate announced that it had reviewed the video and decided to suspend the 37 year old over her apparent 'unjustified mockery of our dear Egypt.'"

BBC reports.

I tried unsuccessfully to find the lyrics to the song. (Does it profess some deep, quasi-religious love for Egypt?) But I found this video, which went up in 2007 and which has comments about "Sherine" — "Queen Sherine," "I love Sherine and Egypt"...



... so I'm assuming the singer is the same woman who's now being punished, apparently punished for making fun of the lyrics of her own song or perhaps expressing some genuine concern that the song's metaphor is taken literally by some people and causing a very serious disease.

ADDED: This story made me think about "The Velvet Underground — Live at Max's Kansas City," a record I've listened to enough to have engraved on my brain the reaction to the crowd's clamoring to hear a particular song that the singer rejected as encouraging a bad health problem. The concertgoers want to hear what was one of the Velvet Underground's greatest songs, and Lou Reed said: “We don’t play ‘Heroin’ anymore.” From a longer report of the incident:

Lou Reed is on the stage at Max's listening to the audience shout their requests. "Heroin . . . Heroin . . . Yeah, Heroin." Lou answers in a real flat, magnificent "fuck you" tone, "We don't play Heroin anymore." Big deal. So what if Lou Reed refuses a request? But listen to his voice on Live at Max's, his tone. He's not only saying that he doesn't want to play the tune. He's dissing the guy who requested the song. Why would Reed do this? Granted, the Underground stopped playing "Heroin" when people came up to them saying things like "My brother died because he took heroin when listening to your album."...  It's almost as if Reed's answer shares the complex, obscure attitude of the "I-wear-black-and-thus-must-be-hipper-than-thou" syndrome. He's got his eyes shut and his mind made up: if the guy in the audience doesn't know about Heroin, then he's not up to my level. Reed has changed so much, while always maintaining his title as the infamous "engaging character."

Don't do heroin and don't drink river water. Health alerts from pop stars. They are not perfectly well received. We look to the artists for metaphor and mystery.



I don't know just where I'm going/But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can/Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man....

Goodbye to Holly Woodlawn, the star of Andy Warhol's "Trash," "Heat," and "Women in Revolt"...

... the Holly in Lou Reed's "Holly came from Miami, FLA/Hitchhiked her way across the USA/Plucked her eyebrows on the way/Shaved her legs and then he was a she...."

The early New York years were rough. “At the age of 16, when most kids were cramming for trigonometry exams, I was turning tricks, living off the streets and wondering when my next meal was coming,” Ms. Woodlawn recalled in her 1991 memoir, “A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story,” written with Jeff Copeland....

“They wanted me for one or two scenes [in 'Trash'] at first,” she said in her 1970 interview in The Village Voice. “Paul Morrissey said, ‘Do this, do that, fabulous,’ and so they kept adding to my part. I worked six days at $25 a day. Except for the last scene, everything was done in one take. The clothes, the dialogue, like, everything was mine because the character I play is me. I’ve been in those situations.”...

“I felt like Elizabeth Taylor,” Ms. Woodlawn told The Guardian in 2007, recalling her heyday. “Little did I realize that not only would there be no money, but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that was it. But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties; it was fabulous.”

Here's a taste of that last scene in "Trash" (NSFW):



Here's that Lou Reed song.

Here's the theatrical trailer for the movie "Women in Revolt" (NSFW):



"I don't suppose you've heard about Women's Liberation?"/"Women's Liberation has shown me just who I am and just what I can be." (You can find that whole movie on YouTube, but it's challenging just to get through the trailer, even though it will probably make you laugh a few times.)

I saw all those movies — "Trash," "Heat," and "Women in Revolt" — back when they came out in the 1970s. They were considered important at the time in a way that's hard to understand now.

"And sister, she got married on the island/and her husband takes the train/He's big and he's fat/and he doesn't even have a brain."

Sang Lou Reed in "Kill Your Sons."

Backstory:

Lou called his sister, who was living on Long Island with her husband, Harold, to warn her about the [new] album. “Bunny, I have to tell you something.”

“What did you do now?”

“This song’s coming out.” Lou recited the lyrics of “Kill Your Sons”...

“Are you serious?” asked Bunny. “You wipe out my lifestyle and my husband in four phrases?”

“Ah, I needed something to rhyme with train. So I had to take poetic license.”

From "Lou Reed Described Bob Dylan as a ‘Pretentious Kike’/The legendary musician is accused in a new book of racial slurs and abusing women."

"For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying."

"You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence."

I was wondering about that, this morning, because I was struggling to complete the phrase "the path of my wanderings 7 years ago during my exile in Brooklyn" as Meade was searching YouTube for songs with the phrase "walk on" and I could feel how those songs — by Neil Young and Lou Reed — were shutting all the pathways in my head that led to words.

"What was the ambition and the goal?"/"Oh! To elevate the rock and roll song!"

"What I mean by stupid, I mean, like, The Doors.... I never liked The Beatles. I thought they were garbage."

"In these times of compassion when conformity’s in fashion...."

A Bob Dylan line arrived at this morning as a consequence of researching the word "fashion." That's the only time Bob Dylan ever used the word "fashion," in a song about Jesus. Meade recommends Lou Reed's version of the song:



Now, the reason I'm researching the word "fashion" is that yesterday — a propos of the rocket scientist's pinup-festooned shirt — I said: "In the broad span of human culture, fashion is more important than space travel." I didn't elaborate at the time, because it would have been a detour, and also because I thought it would be much more interesting and entertaining to see how much scorn I could incur for saying something that I knew was a cinch to defend.

Click on this blog's "fashion" tag and see all that is encompassed in this topic. I've found 618 occasions to discuss something that fits my conception of "fashion" over the past 10 years. Few subjects rival fashion. Law has 5000+ posts, but other than that. Dylan? 337. It's bigger than Dylan. The Beatles? Only 173. Are The Beatles bigger than Jesus?



Are The Beatles bigger than Jesus on this blog? No! The Jesus tag is used 301 times. So Jesus is bigger than The Beatles, but not bigger than Bob Dylan, according to the metric of blog tags.

Fashion is more important than space travel drew the predictable scorn — much of it in the this-is-why-women-can't-do-science mode — but there were some comments that took things in the direction I'd intended. Dustbunny said:

I like this site because it is smart, funny and littered with Dylan references.

Yes, it is!

Unlike a number of left wing or right wing sites Althouse plays with the stereotypes with which those sites proudly and quite stupidly adhere. I am going to think deeply about the influence of fashion throughout history, but I'm not convinced there is a great deal there except on an esoteric level. Fashion leads to variations on a theme, science lead to space exploration. I am a woman, I grew up reading Seventeen and Vogue, I studied art history and I concede that Coco Chanel was a badass who changed a small but recent block of history..Also I studied art because math was way too hard — l'stereotype c'est moi. Is this about the court at Versailles? sans-culottes vs the aristocrats?

And furious_a had already said:

Hmmm, maybe fashion precedes space travel. Since fashion is intrinsically foreign and requires travel to acquire. Demand for silk and spices drove the merchant adventurers of the Middle Ages to open trade routes to the Far East, after which Columbus and Magellan followed. Demand for furs drew trappers to the Trans-Mississippi West, after which Lewis & Clark followed.

And chickelit said:

Cave people and aboriginals have fashion and very little science (that we know of). So fashion is more basic somehow to human nature. Insofar as fashion is related to mating behavior, fashion is more important than science. You can't advance culture if you can't even reproduce.

Eventually, some people noticed that a lot depends on the scope of the term "fashion." Rusty said:

I suppose, Althouse, it would depend on how you define fashion, but in the grand sweep of human history nobody cares what pants Lee Harvey Oswald wore.

And yet, if Lee Harvey Oswald had not been wearing pants, he would never have assassinated John F. Kennedy. As Mark Twain said: "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." He also said: "Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy." And: "A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it."

Glad that someone had finally focused on the scope of the term, I banged out an answer late at night on my iPad, typing with one finger and therefore stating it bluntly:

By fashion, I mean to include all of the clothing that everyone wears. It's important for basic survival, comfort, and protection, and it's a powerful mode of expression for the wearer and the designer. It's intimately tied to the body and thus to our personal presentation. We see others almost always only with their clothes as part of their image, and it affects how we feel and think about them. Clothing is a big part of nearly everyone's life, a huge part of our visual world.

Having missed the issue of defining the term, Joe spoke words of anger:

Way to backtrack, Althouse. Fashion ≠ clothing except in the minds of elitist snobs. If you meant clothing, why the hell didn't you say "clothing"? And you wonder why most people think lawyers are arrogant dicks.

Oh? So now do I get to be a boy? Suddenly, I'm not one of those women who can't do science, nor am I one of those females who outperform males in language-based enterprises. My verbal achievement gets categorized as male, and suddenly, I am a dick. Well, at least I get to be an arrogant dick.

And arrogance brings me back to where this post started, because that Bob Dylan song quoted in the post title is "Foot of Pride." That song begins: "Like the lion tears the flesh off of a man/So can a woman who passes herself off as a male." I can only speculate what that might mean, even as I've only speculated about what Matt Taylor meant to say as he arrayed himself in a shirt patterned with bosom-y ladies. But I wasn't trying to pass myself off as male.

To the extent I applied lawyer-mind to the task of understanding Matt Taylor's fashion statement, I was sticking to the evidence I had: He wore a very loud, attention-getting shirt, and that implies that he intended a message and thus invited us to think and talk about it. I'm still wondering what he meant, why he took it back, and why taking it back made him cry. I wanted to understand. A commenter criticized me for knowing "very little about geek culture," but I never claimed to know. I was the one who didn't want to talk about Matt Taylor's shirt until I noticed the question: What was he thinking?

Anyway, fashion is a broad term in my book, which is this blog of 10 years. And I am not guilty of making it overbroad: As a word in the English language, it is far broader. The original meaning is "The action or process of making." The meaning related to clothing is: "A prevailing custom, a current usage; esp. one characteristic of a particular place or period of time...  with regard to apparel or personal adornment." That's from the OED, which has as one of it's oldest quotes for the clothing-related meaning, Shakespeare's 1616 line: "'Tis some odd humor pricks him to this fashion/Yet oftentimes he goes but mean-appareled."

Pricks? Are we to think of pricks in the sense of dicks? With Shakespeare, it's a good bet anything that could be a pun is an intentional pun. And I like to think that even with lesser beings, the expressions that could have deeper meaning really do.

I'm not talking through my hat when I say: You're talking through your shirt.



You can't wear that and claim you didn't mean to say anything.

So be more subtle if you want deniability.

Subtlety is my bag....

Do you notice what's extraordinary...

... about this, from 1968?



I was just poking around in the Christmas Eve 1976 edition of The New York Times, looking for something else, and I ran across:



And this pair of ads on the facing page caught my eye:



Two competing images of sexiness from late 1976. Who knew then that the Rocky image would be the much more enduring one. The man, alone with his armpits. Not the man and the woman, with hands thoroughly entangled in curly hair. Rocky even has the more enduring font. And they tried so hard with all those futuristic serifs stabbing their way through the adjoining letters in "A Star Is Born."

Anyway, after finding what I'd actually been looking for — news of the concerts Lou Reed played in NYC in the 70s — I went in search of The Wind in the Willows. I hope you enjoyed that hippie, trippy sojourn into the land of the gentle people, that canyon of if-not-your-then-my mind that was the 1960s, before the mean old 70s came along and made everything so harsh and cruel.

"To get that ultra look, that Tilda Swinton thing, you have to go in there and strip all the melanin away."

"It’s practically like introducing albinism."

Quote from a character in a novel about race-reassignment treatments, reviewed in the NYT here.

One day Kelly meets a familiar-looking black man. This turns out to be his old friend and bandmate Martin Lipkin, a Jewish guy who has undergone what he calls “racial reassignment surgery.” Inside, Martin always felt black.

Alternatives to reading that novel:

1. Read "Black Like Me," the bestseller that seared America's conscience in the early 1960s.



2. Or — from the same era — read this short piece in Jet magazine:



3. Select something from Wikipedia's incredibly long "List of entertainers who performed in blackface." I picked Doris Day:



4. Listen to Lou Reed sing "I Wanna Be Black" one more time.

"Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!"

"Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature."

He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air. Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life.

Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.

For reference: This isn't Lou, but is the 21 form:

"Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today."

"The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May."

He was 71.

I'm so sad to hear this. He has meant a lot to me for more than 40 years.