"Holding space."

 Perhaps you're noticing this today:

Margaret Cho: "I'm holding space for that CEO shooter, the abs, and that body"

The American left's creepy fascination with Luigi Mangione continuespic.twitter.com/CJbFoys6iN

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 15, 2024

That's Margaret Cho: "I'm holding space for... those eyebrows, that body, the abs."

She's being funny... and inappropriate, and I'm not going to say anything more about how bad it is to drool over an alleged murderer. I want to discuss the phrase "holding space," which gained traction a week ago with this promotional interview for the movie "Wicked":

"People are taking the lyrics of 'Defying Gravity' and really holding space with that and feeling power in that."

I see there's a Wikipedia article, "Holding space":

"Holding space" is a psychology concept meaning towards creating a safe space for someone or something by being present for them, physically, emotionally and mentally without judgement.

"Awkwafina: ‘I was just rapping about my genitalia – not making a feminist message.'"

"New Yorker Nora Lum, AKA Awkwafina, has been going places since My Vag went viral on YouTube – now she’s playing a scrappy wingman in the movie Ocean’s 8," reports The Guardian.

... Lum has, since childhood, had an effortless ability to make people laugh. (When asked which characters she would have loved to play, she names My Cousin Vinny, “because we have a similar body type.”)... [But she] has precisely one viral hit, one album, and one high-profile collab under her belt: respectively, 2013’s My Vag, 2014’s Yellow Ranger and 2016’s Green Tea, with the standup comedian Margaret Cho.... My Vag, the viral hit [is] an epic boast battle that – with bonkers rhymes – pits her bits against a rival’s.... The track understandably caught people’s attention – not all gleeful; some feminists took exception – and gave the rapper a greater understanding of the platform she had stumbled on.

The 2 linked videos were new to me and Meade and we laughed a lot.

"Now I am scared I am going to wake up with a decapitated moose head in my bed..."

Says Margaret Cho, possible evincing the guilt she really ought to feel.

"There will be high security tonight when Sarah Palin shows up to watch daughter Bristol perform on 'Dancing with the Stars'..."

Watch with me? It's on in a few minutes.

7:02: Wow! Crazy lights! Crazy cleavage! And now, the stars must walk down stairs! They seem powerfully challenged by the stair walk. Margaret Cho — tee hee, Margaret Cho is on — pretends to trip, probably to be funny, but maybe because she was going to trip anyway and needed to fake it. Bristol is all bundled up in a weird spangled gray blazer. Hasselhoff is here — representing the dissolute. Florence Henderson is here — representing the geezers. Is Bristol a "star"? She's identified as a "teen activist," which I guess she was, as a walking (dancing) anti-sex counterexample.

7:12: Audrina Patridge has sexiness going on here (judge points crotchwards) and beauty going on here (judge points facewards) and they aren't really connected. But she's got just the right body for the show, we're told. So... giant breasts. I think dancers look better with small breasts. Actually, they look more connected.

7:15: The NFL guy (Kurt Warner) says he has big shoes to fill (a past winner was an NFL guy), and I note that Warner has tiny feet.

7:25: Kyle Massey, an actor. So far, I'd never heard of any of these people. Massey shimmies and gets his moobs all jiggly. The lady judge acts like that gets her hot.

7:35: Rick Fox. A basketball guy. Never heard of him. Sorry, I FF'd that.

7:40: Next is Margaret Cho. "You're doing it like you're sitting in the bathroom doing number 2," her partner informs her, helpfully. She's got a gold pleated cape that she suddenly unfurls into a vortex as the music hits the chorus: "We are the champions, my friends." Then, she gets comically tangled in it, and her partner "saves" her. Oh, it's hard to pull off comical dancing. I don't think that's for beginners. But this is the only one I'm watching straight through. Maybe because I like the song. Ugh, she falls on her ass (on purpose) to end it. We see her much-mocked mom, applauding. Oh, no, the judges had to ask if it was supposed to be comic. I think the criticism should be that you have to be really good, first, before you can pull off comedy. The judges just tell her to dance without any comic stuff. Dumb!

7:57: Oh, lord. It's a 2-hour show. Now: Brandy. Heard of her. Wholesome. Boring. I need to let the DVR get out ahead of me so I have room to FF. Haven't live-blogged a reality show in a long time. Oh, Sarah! Look what you've done to me!

8:02: Bristol time! The song is "Mama Told Me Not to Come." Because you know you can only get pregnant if you have an orgasm. The more references to Sarah, the better, they seem to think. She's going to "dress up like her mom." People only know her because of her mom. Her partner tells her: "Just have fun and go balls out." The point of the gray suit is to suddenly rip it off and be wearing a short red dress and demonstrate what is "not the way to have fun," per Mama. See? She's the activist by counterexample. The judges are pretty nice to her. Mama is not there though. But Florence Henderson is next, and she's bringing the Mom.

8:16: Flo, who is 76, is eager to show us she's feisty and talks dirty. She is not Mom, she implicitly screams. She's has pretty legs.

8:25: Michael Bolton demonstrates the principle that being able to sing does not include being able to dance. He's earnest and charming. I can see that the point of this show (which I've never watched before) is for the celebrities to get us to like them. But I don't think it's good to be the guy that made me notice that. On the plus side for Bolton: It seems much easier to be a female novice shown off by a male professional than the other way around. The guy is supposed to lead, so the structure of the competition is inherently unfair. But, as the judges admitted (to FH a moment ago), it's really an entertainment show. So, I guess, watching the big, awkward men get it together amuses folks.

8:43: What are the rules of this competition? Why is Jennifer Grey on? She's most well-known for a dancing role. And the song is a song from that movie. And her co-star in that movie recently died. And we see her burst into tears over it. "It took me back in a time capsule... and I was with Patrick." Too manipulative. Not fair. But it's entertainment. Entertainment is not fair. There's no fair in entertainment.

8:46: We are informed by one of the judges that Patrick Swayze is watching the show from Heaven. Another judge — the one that said the head and crotch of Audrina were not connected — is telling us — through tears — that there is "such a connection." Ugh.

8:53: Hasselhoff is last. He whines. He hams it up. I confess I laughed out loud. Judge Bruno: "It was like a potpourri of insanity disguised as dance."  Okay. It's over. Whew! Time for hamburgers.

ADDED: I forgot to blog The Situation. He forgot to rehearse. We're even.

AND: Hasselhoff reminds me of Lorenzo St. DuBois — Dick Shawn.

Margaret Cho shoulders everyone else aside in the raging competition to say the most offensive thing about Sarah Palin.

Oh, settle down. She's a comedian. You have to imagine her saying it.

"My parents are actually worried about retaliation against Asians."

Said Virginia Tech student Lyu Boaz, a Korean-American. “After 9/11, a lot of Arabs were attacked for that reason.”

Asian-American students at Virginia Tech reacted to news about the gunman’s identity with shock and a measure of anxiety about a possible backlash against them....

Mr. Boaz, a resident adviser at Pritchard Hall, said many Korean-American students had left campus immediately. Parents of other Korean-American students were preparing to pick up their children on Tuesday afternoon and take them home.

Is this a realistic fear? There was notably little retaliation against Arabs (or Muslims) after 9/11, and that incident was not only much larger, it involved a group of people with a particular ethnicity/religion, who acted out of an ideology that they openly tied to their group characteristics. Americans deserve credit for making the important distinctions and not succumbing to bigotry.

Let's see what Margaret Cho -- who shares the murderer's name -- has to say on her blog:

I look at the shooter's expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter." There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone's mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

So much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter, how the Korean community is reacting to it, South Korea's careful condolences and cautiously expressed fear that it will somehow impact the South Korean population at large.

What is lost here is the grief. What is lost is the great, looming sadness that we should all feel over this. We lose our humanity to racism, time and time again.

Do Americans deserve this criticism? Is "so much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter"? If we want to avoid bigotry, let's also think about whether it's right to characterize Americans this way. But, of course, it is important not to look on this madman and imagine that he represents Koreans or -- more absurdly -- Asians. Even when a person is quite ordinary, we should resist thinking of him as being the way he is because of his group.

Meanwhile, I'm not seeing a lot of attention paid to the murderer's Koreanness. On NPR this morning, they called him "the English student"! Get it? He was an English major, and attention is being paid to his writings -- which you can see here. Should we worry about bigotry and retaliation aimed at fiction writers who go in for violent fantasies? Or don't worry. Go to the movies. May I recommend "Grindhouse"?

"She mimicked McGreevey in the act of trying to govern amid a miasma of male genitals."

That's a description of the funniest part of Margaret Cho's act here in Madison last night.

The gag combined the two most prominent motifs of Cho's act: Hilarious, gleefully smutty riffing on gay themes, and political riffing that was pointed but, at moments, altogether less funny. Indeed, the show's least comedically satisfying moments came as Cho served up shrill, humor-free barbs that, in drastically tempered form, could have been delivered by a pandering liberal politician. On President Bush: "I don't know why he hasn't been impeached yet." On Benedict XVI: "The new pope fucking sucks." On right-to-lifers: "Anti-abortion people are fucking idiots, and they're wrong."

Thought you'd like to know. (Note my distinct history of defending Margaret Cho.)

IN THE COMMENTS: In the spirit of "An Exaltation of Larks," readers offer alternative "nouns of multitude" for "a miasma of male genitals."

Taking specific requests from Jonah Goldberg.

See? And I'm tempted to also put up my favorite line from one of the commenters, one "Icepick": "Your worst nightmare: an artist with a law degree!"

UPDATE: Should I keep the new quote? (The old one was "Althouse is cool.") I'm getting cold feet for two reasons: 1. Even though I didn't personally proclaim myself a genius, the act of putting the quote in the title box is mine and is a bit much, and 2. It gives ongoing, weird prominence to Margaret Cho (which she might even object to). As to #1, you might have the same objection to "divine," but that seems more playful, and there's something about the two words in combination that might cross the line from playful to delusional.

Goldberg and Cho.

I like Jonah Goldberg, and I dislike Margaret Cho's politics, but I find Goldberg's insistence that Margaret Cho isn't funny completely obtuse. You can't judge Cho's humor from the written text of her act. Most of the humor is in the voice and the facial expression. If you can set aside your aversion to her politics and watch a DVD or two, you would understand why it doesn't make any sense to read the text of her jokes and pronounce them unfunny. Try watching "I'm the One That I Want." It really is quite hilarious.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jonah for linking -- and for writing "Althouse is cool." (I should put that in my sidebar.) And, as long as I'm updating, let me add another example about comedy that this point about Cho reminded me of. The new Seinfeld DVDs have interviews with some of the supporting actors, including one with the actor who played Uncle Leo, a character I find hilarious. He first appears in "The Pony Remark," and the DVD has a nice interview with the actor, Leo Lesser. Lesser talks about auditioning for the part. Everyone laughed at his reading, and he looked at the script and wondered: "What are they laughing at? There's nothing funny in what I'm saying. I repeated a couple of more lines, and they laughed again. And the entire time I'm thinking what the hell are they laughing at? There's nothing funny here." Then the clip of Lesser delivering those lines in the episode is played and we hear the lines: "You wanna hear something? Your cousin Jeffrey is switching parks. They're transferring him to Riverside. So he'll completely revamp that operation. Do you understand? He'll do in Riverside now what he did in Central Park. More money. So, that's your cousin." On paper, there's no joke, but every time I hear Lesser say those lines it cracks me up. It's comic acting, not joketelling. Much funnier than jokes, really, I think.

Blog conversation instead of in-person conversation. Tonya has remarked on our tendency to converse via blog, but I'm still going to answer the question she raises at the end of this post about comedians: Margaret Cho.