"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"

"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).

You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:

"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you." 

— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.

BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.

Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."

So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."

"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Allen Ginsberg. I'm sorry I let it slip past unnoted, but I'm noting it now. Marilyn Monroe had her 100th on Monday. That got way more attention in the media, so I could have observed it, on the right day, but I avoided that. She's had too much attention already. I imagine she's tired of it, tired of the form it takes. 

Here's the whole poem, "A Supermarket in California."

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?... We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier....

"In an upstairs room in Capitol Hill, a dozen people settled into a circle of folding chairs — sketch pads in one hand, cocktails in the other..."

"... and watched a model in cheetah print lingerie and bunny-eared kink mask spread across a stretch of red satin. Then they got to work. They came to practice life drawing, but this wasn’t a traditional class held at an arts center or university. This was Kink N' Draw, held, for this session, at a bar called As You Are. The event is part of a proliferating practice around D.C. where people can shell out a few bucks to draw live, naked models at a bar.... 'This is a space for creativity, self-expression and appreciation of the human form in a way that is respectful, open and completely judgment-free,' announced 27-year-old showrunner and Kink N’ Draw founder Dominique Landinez...."

From "Sorry, pub trivia. Nude drawing might be the hippest new event at D.C. bars/The scantily clad events popping up across the city’s nightlife scene are more wholesome than you think" (WaPo).

1. I've spent hundreds of hours in life-drawing classes, so this seems quite normal to me, "but this wasn’t a traditional class." Oh, it sounds traditional enough. So you've got a few props — lingerie, masks. 

2. There are lots of photos at the link, but absolutely no nudity on view, not even in a drawing. We don't get to see any of the drawings. Perhaps that's because the drawings are bad — and not in a kooky amusing way. But I think it's because WaPo is protecting us readers from nudity... even as it sniffs at "a traditional class" and titillates us with the mere idea of "kink" — manifested in the form of a bunny. 

3. Titillation from a bunny?

"He never discusses the way he wants me to play things"/"He hired you for the job. He wants what you have."

A conversation between Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart about Alfred Hitchcock.

Quoted in "Kim Novak: 'Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time. She could never play me'/The 93-year-old star of Vertigo talks about Alfred Hitchcock, the trouble with being pretty and why a biopic about her love affair with Sammy Davis Jr won’t happen" (London Times).

Also: "[Tippi] Hedren has said [Hitchcock] made a pass at her and told her he 'expected me to make myself sexually available to him,' although she never did. Novak says she and Hedren didn’t talk about him. 'I’m not denying that if she’s saying it, but I never saw him pay any attention to women other than his wife, who was often on the set, and he was certainly never interested in me in that way. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to discuss it with Tippi — I have a hard time believing it because to me you have to see it to believe it. If he was like that with Tippi that was an odd exception.'"

The article has photos of Novak and Sweeney that inspired me to jot down this AI prompt: "I'm noticing that actresses of today will pose for photos with their mouth hanging open, slack jawed. I believe that in the past, the lips would be kept together (unless the actress was smiling/laughing/talking). Is my observation accurate?"

Answer, from Grok:

"She does not feel self-conscious when she is on stage. It is only when she returns to the wings that she feels a little shy."

I'm reading "Why I’m performing Wagner naked at the Royal Opera aged 81/Illona Linthwaite won’t let being nude in front of 2,200 people stop her from defying the ‘bad press’ given to older women" (London Times).

“The curtain goes up and there’s nothing happening, it’s just me. I thought that was really frightening and then when it happened, I thought, actually, this is brilliant,” she said.

The role is Erda, in "Siegfried."

Erda is usually “frocked her up to the nines” in gossamer gowns, Linthwaite said, but Barrie Kosky, the director, wanted the octogenarian’s body to symbolise nature and remind the audience of their mortality.... 

That's the director's view — an old woman reminds you of death — not the old woman's. She thinks she's there to remind you of life: 

She thinks her performance is something of a political act in a country she views as “spiritually arid” for its lack of empathy towards older people. Ultimately, she wants the audience to look at her and see the future not as a tragedy, but an adventure. She wants people to feel: “Hey, I’m looking forward to 80.”

I asked Grok: "If you saw Erda in 'Siegfried' portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?" [ADDED: The actual full question was "What views are attributed to the character Erda in 'Siegfried' and if you saw her portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?"

Answer:

"Why assume that our minds, in their sober 'default state,' are naturally designed to grasp reality as it really is? Smith-Ruiu asks."

"Why not 'explore all the modes of consciousness available to us'? What might they tell us about 'the relationship between mind and world?'... A specialist in the history and philosophy of science whose next book is a scholarly study of Leibniz, he stressed that he wrote 'On Drugs' stone sober and broke no laws to obtain the substances he ingested for his research.... On a dose 'far more than is recommended,' he experienced an intense 'interpersonal exchange' with Marilyn Monroe, who loomed from a poster on his hotel room wall, and, via YouTube clips... 'Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as "Mama" in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.' On yet another trip, he understood that he was no longer any kind of being at all."

From "Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs. An intense exchange with Marilyn Monroe sounds silly. But in a new book, Justin Smith-Ruiu is dead serious about what we might learn from altered states" (NYT).

Here's the book: "On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality" (commission earned).

It was all I hoped it would be....

"It was kind of sad because she was lonesome. Judy would come out wearing her one little black cocktail dress and a pair of little earrings with pearls..."

"... and she would make shepherd’s pie because she liked it. It was comforting. We would have dinner and then we would watch 'The Ed Sullivan Show,' which was on before her show. And if she didn’t like the way someone performed, she didn’t mind telling you!"

Said Bob Mackie about Judy Garland, quoted in "Bob Mackie notoriously created Cher’s look— but he didn’t always like it: 'Don’t tell anyone'" (NY Post).

Mackie also designed for Tina Turner "She was just amazing and funny and if she hated something she told you immediately."

Is this typical of great singers, that they blurt it right out what they don't like? Judy "didn’t mind telling you" and Tina "told you immediately."

"Just found out i’m not hot. Please give me and my family space to grieve privately and uglily at this time."

Said Sarah Sherman, quoted in "'SNL' star Sarah Sherman has hilarious response to TikToker who said the show has never hired a ‘hot woman'" (CNN).

The quote became quotable by Althouse blog standards with the use of the word "uglily." I note that it is difficult to say, it draws attention to itself — if you ever happen to say it — and it contains — in defiance of ugliness — a word that expresses loveliness, "lily."

Here's the TikTok Sherman is responding to. It's a lot meatier than the headline makes it sound:

I've curated 5 TikToks for you this evening. Some people love them.

1. "Alexa! Play Rosemary Clooney!"

2. "Don't cry if you don't want me to laugh."

3. A tribute to the "Apparently" kid.

4. Random kid drama becomes a song.

5. The amazing human capacity to run — explained, while running.

"Cotton Mather called them 'The Hidden Ones.' They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard."

"Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all."

That's from "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735," a 1976 article by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of Early American history at Harvard. I'm reading that at Professor Buzzkill because I wanted to know the source of the line I put in boldface, which is a pretty common feminist slogan.

Some people think that quote originated with Marilyn Monroe (or one of many others), but no, it was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Anyway, the old saying popped into my head when I saw that title of a new NYT op-ed, "The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin" by Rosie Gray. Let's read:

"With a libretto written by... first-time opera makers, the show has Rousselle largely mumbling, rather than singing. Her mumbles are then translated..."

"... for the audience using supertitles.... Despite the opera’s central character being named Blake, 'the only reason people are going to see this is because of Kurt Cobain’s celebrity,' [said a Cobain biographer].... The idea for making 'Last Days' also had little to do with Cobain as a person, said [Oliver] Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence.... [Agathe Rousselle, who plays the Cobain character] best known for starring in the horror movie 'Titane' as a woman sexually attracted to cars, said... [s]he was bullied at school and one day one of the school’s popular girls threw a CD of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind' at her, sneering, 'That’s the kind of thing you weirdo would listen to,' Rousselle recalled. When she got home, she immediately played it. 'I lost my mind to it,' she said.... [Rousselle] said the opera was not about Cobain, but bigger issues like how 'becoming a myth will kill you' and 'the absurdity of being famous and wanting to disappear when you’re recognizable to pretty much everyone.' The opera could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points, she added."

From "A Kurt Cobain Opera Examines the Myth, Not the Man/The creators of 'Last Days,' an eagerly anticipated opera about a grunge star’s final days, insist it’s really about how society treats its icons" (NYT).

"On the one hand we have the blandest pap imaginable — superhero movies and Adele — and on the other we have Netflix and its mindless death porn...."

"It feels, actually, as if we’re going backwards. The playful cheesecake Marilyn of the 1950s — a confected blonde bimbo that this film clearly despises — seems infinitely preferable to the Marilyn of 70 years later: a haggard, weeping cipher and shivering perma-victim who is obsessed with the contents of her womb. In an attempt to 'explain' Marilyn, the makers have simply created another pathetic object: a woman who spends the entire film either naked or in tears, or both.... She can barely touch a drink without getting wasted; barely get in a car without crashing it.... Is this where victim culture has led us.... Schoolgirls are told that they ought to be crippled by their periods. Female celebrities scramble to be defined by menopause, the horrors of pregnancy or, even better, miscarriage. On podcasts, in interviews and in articles otherwise intelligent, capable women moan about their lives collapsing, or being unable to cope with even the tiniest sliver of adversity: they are all like Marilyn on a date with DiMaggio at a perfectly nice restaurant: 'I’m afraid of some of the people here.' Marilyn had more power when she was a plain sex object, giggling on the cover of Playboy." 

Writes Camilla Long, in "Every generation has its own Marilyn. Our one gets drugged and raped. Thanks, Netflix" (London Times).

"I think that since it’s told in this first-person perspective, it works somehow for the film to be a traumatic experience."

"Because you’re inside of her – her journey and her longings and her isolation – amidst all of this adulation... [W]hether it’s an extreme depiction or not – it’s honoring the extreme chasm between the public’s perception of the fame and the glory of Hollywood’s most famous, iconic actor, and the reality of that individual – the loneliness and emptiness and mental turmoil and abuse of that individual."

Said Adrien Brody, who plays Arthur Miller in the new Netflix movie about Marilyn Monroe.

Quoted in "Adrien Brody says ‘Blonde’ is ‘fearless filmmaking,’ meant to be a ‘traumatic experience’" (NY Post).

I wonder how Arthur Miller is depicted. 

"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:

"I was surprised. Yeah. I thought we’d colored inside the lines. But I think if you’ve got a bunch of men and women in a boardroom talking about sexual behavior..."

"... maybe the men are going to be worried about what the women think. It’s just a weird time. It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality. It’s depictions of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They make more porn than anyone else in the world."

Said Andrew Dominik, the director of a new movie based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel that is based on the story of Marilyn Monroe. He's quoted in "Ana de Armas Confused by ‘Blonde’ NC-17 Rating: Other Films Are ‘More Explicit’ and ‘Have More Sexual Content’" (Variety).

The dress was dangerous then and it's dangerous — in a newly fussy way — now.

Kim Kardashian's decision to wear Marilyn Monroe's iconic "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" gown to the #MetGala has conservators, curators and fashion historians baffled and worried that the incident sets a dangerous precedent.

Here's why. https://t.co/kVIjfJZqI0

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 4, 2022

From the L.A. Times article:

"I don't have a bunch of shit about what happened, so if you came to hear that, I had like a whole show I wrote before this weekend."

"And I'm still kind of processing what happened, so at some point I'll talk about that shit. And it'll be serious and it'll be funny, but right now I'm going to tell some jokes."

Said Chris Rock last night, as he took the stage for his show at Boston's Wilbur Theater, CNN reports.

He said absolutely nothing more than the bare minimum. It was just on with the show. That's what he did on the Oscars stage too: On with the show.

"On with the show" is an old show business slogan. It's old-timey, so maybe you don't remember it. If you try to Google it, you'll get a first page full of Mottley Crue links. I know there's a way to exclude a term from the search, but I've forgotten how to do it and I've got the distracting prior question whether I need to use those fake umlauts. I see it's a Rolling Stones title too.

Ah, but there is another version of the slogan that gets me to a nice TV Tropes article: "The Show Must Go On":

[I]n live entertainment, the show must go on at all costs... This forces the characters into crazy improvisations, costume changes, awkward stealth to avoid further disrupting the show and any number of disparate things to keep the show going. It must also be remembered that for live entertainers, not only is it about making sure people get their money's worth or ensuring a production continues, performing is something they've dedicated their lives to. It's not something they do, it's who they are, and it's a point of professional pride that no matter what, the show must go on....

Ethel said it best (words by Irving Berlin): 

 

And here's the crazy, over-the-top finale, with Marilyn: 

"[T]he movie version of 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s,' while certainly beloved, isn’t nearly as interesting to any Capote fan as the novel..."

"... in which the author’s voice comes through (and where the character was imagined as more of an 'unfinished' type, à la Marilyn Monroe, whom he wanted for the role). Capote was disappointed by the casting of Audrey Hepburn; ergo, clips from the movie actually misrepresent his vision."

From "'Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation' Review: An Imagined Tête-à-Tête Between Capote and Williams/Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland uses the friendship between two icons as a leaping-off point for an affectionate if somewhat forced dual portrait" (Variety).

I watched 2/3 of that documentary last night and stopped only because of streaming problems (which I attribute to my internet service, AT&T, not to the streaming service, Criterion Channel).

 

In that trailer, Capote, at 1:12, says "Here is a man who has devoted his whole life to art and is a genius" and then, at 1:28, "Most people think because somebody is a creative individual, they must be intelligent. It is not so. Like Tennessee Williams."

"Omit," "skip."

Annotations by Marilyn Monroe, in the margins of a Jewish prayer book, described in the saddest religion story of the day, "Jewish prayer book annotated by Marilyn Monroe, who converted in 1956, could fetch thousands in auction" (WaPo).

The high school official told the 17-year-girl to "stand up and move around" so she could see if her nipples were still showing...

... and then offered her 4 adhesive bandages to X out her nipples. The girl, Lizzy Martinez, had left off wearing her bra that day because a sunburn (we're told) made the bra unusually uncomfortable.

From the NYT, "Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?":

“She told me, ‘I’m thinking of ways I could fix this for you. She said, ‘I was a heavier girl and I have all the tricks up my sleeve,’” Ms. Martinez said....

The incident happened two weeks ago — Ms. Martinez’s initial tweet about the incident went viral — but the backlash is still going strong. On Monday, Ms. Martinez and some of her classmates held a silent protest in support of “the destigmitization of natural bodies.” Despite threats of disciplinary action, about 30 female students opted not to wear bras, and a number of students decorated their backpacks with Band-Aids in the shape of an X. One student wore a shirt that read, “Do my ni**ples offend you?” (The asterisks were hers.)...

In the case of Ms. Martinez, for example, the school is “foisting this notion that unrestrained breasts are sexual and likely to cause disruption and distract other students,” [said lawprof Meredith Harbach]. But this kind of messaging that targets young women — your skirt is too short, you look too sexy, you’re distracting the boys — “deflects any and all conversation about appropriate mutually respectful behavior in schools between boys and girls... Who is disrupted actually? It’s Lizzy. Whose learning experience is impacted?.... It doesn’t sound like other kids had a major disruption, but she sure did.”...

Meanwhile, women whose nipples don't show are getting injections to produce those "Kendall Jenner" bumps because they love the look. This amusing video was in the NY Post recently: