"I think if you think about my political ideology, where it really stems
from, you know, my ethics and my morals and what I think is right and
wrong, you look to ancient Jerusalem, you got ancient Judeo-Christian
values. So right and wrong... I also cling to a lot of traditional
values and a lot of traditional ideas, because they’ve worked in the
past."
"I think that we have bred a generation of soft men and that generation
has created a lot of problems in our society and our culture... designed to reclaim and restore masculinity
in a society that is ever more dismissive of what it means to be a man."
Cawthorn is running for reelection and has a lot of rivals. After Politico published this exposé, Cawthorn responded the photos are from some game show on a cruise ship: "I guess the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) is going to somehow hurt me? They’re running out of things to throw at me... Share your most embarrassing vacay pics in the replies."
Cawthorn asks to be treated the same as any other politician with an embarrassing old photograph. But if he's made the masculinity of men a core political value, a photo of him in women's clothes is a different problem for him than it would be for a politician who eagerly embraces an ideology of gender fluidity.
But I would say that within the tradition of distinct gender roles, there has long been playful cross-dressing. It's perceived as comical precisely because you believe in the immutability of the 2 sexes. That's what's going on in the great movie comedy "Some Like It Hot" — with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis trying to pass as female in the presence of Marilyn Monroe. Old-time television with Milton Berle and Flip Wilson in drag isn't hilarious because they were displaying any inner femininity but because people saw them as obvious men wearing women's clothes.
That caught my eye because I was just reading a diary entry from 2017 in David Sedaris's new "Carnival of Snackery" about the decision to get rid of "Ladies and gentlemen" in announcements on the London Underground:
There’s something sad about this to me. It’s like a casual Friday for language, only it’s not just on Friday. I rather liked being thought of as a gentleman. Yes, I’d think whenever I heard it, I believe I’m up for this.
The new announcements, he writes, would begin “Hello, everyone.”
You know, it's funny that "Ladies and gentlemen" lasted as long as it did. Even 60 years ago, it sounded old fashioned. It was corny announcer-talk. It seemed to imagine an audience that was much more dressed up and proper than the people who'd actually shown up. It added some humorous grandeur or an edge of hucksterism. And that was long before any complicated gender critique bubbled up in the culture.
ADDED: Milton Berle used to say "Ladies and germs" as a joke.
Said Spencer Tracy, as the thoroughly disgraced Captain T. G. Culpepper, encased in a body cast, at the end of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," which I watched — all 2 hours and 39 minutes of it — as the 1963 entry in my imaginary movie project. This is a movie I saw in the theater when it came out. I was 12, and I didn't know much about gigantic epic comedy chase movies. In fact, I still don't. It's been more than 50 years since then, and I've found any number of things to laugh at along my way, but I can't say I laughed much rewatching this sprawling, raucous monster. I wasn't in a theater full of people who'd assembled to enjoy the hell out of themselves, as I was back in 1963. I'm sure I laughed a lot back then, but I only half-laughed twice in the present-day rewatch.
Tracy, musing about ever laughing again, in fact gets to laugh almost immediately. Buddy Hackett (also in a full body cast) peels a banana, throws the peel on the floor, and Ethel Merman, who's been yelling at everyone throughout the film, comes strutting in, yelling at everyone, and she slips on the banana peel and falls hard on her ass. Do we really want to see a woman get hurt? Yes, in this case, we've been conditioned to wish harm on her, because she's been the loud-mouth mother-in-law visiting aural pain on all the men (except her beloved son Dick Shawn) for the entirety of the movie.
I get it. And yet, I do not get it. And I did not get it the first time around. Yes, I understand the old comic convention of The Mother-in-Law — specifically the mother-in-law to a man. She's got her daughter's devotion and she's going after the daughter's husband, crushing his masculine pride at every turn. You don't ask why these people are like this. They just are. They're characters. They're assigned these positions. Do not pause to reflect or all is lost. That is, nothing is funny. It's just loud. And — oh! — Ethel Merman is loud. Did you know her original last name is Zimmerman — just like Bob Dylan? She lopped off the "Zim." Why not lop off the "man" — it would be more castrating-y — and be Zimmer?
Lionel Ritchie flips the concept of confusion, when a former contestant, Adam Sanders, returns to audition in drag as Ada Vox. As Gay Times put it: "Vox then slayed the mother-tucking house when he performed a stunning rendition of House Of The Rising Sun by The Animals."
Come on, The Animals didn't write "House of the Rising Sun." There was another contestant (Zach D'Onofrio) who said he was singing "'Cry Me A River' by Michael Buble." This is crazy talk. "House of the Rising Sun" is an old folk song. The Animals recorded a fine and memorable rendition, but unless you're them you're not singing "House of the Rising Sun" by them... or unless you mean to say I intend this to be heard as an Animals impersonation, which was certainly not the case here. Vox intended to be heard as a female and not as the unusually macho Eric Burdon:
And it wasn't The Animals who dug "House of the Rising Sun" out of the old folk archive. It was Bob Dylan, getting the jump on Dave Van Ronk [correction below]:
In late 1961, Bob Dylan recorded the song for his debut album, released in March 1962. That release had no songwriting credit, but the liner notes indicate that Dylan learned this version of the song from Dave Van Ronk. In an interview for the documentary No Direction Home, Van Ronk said that he was intending to record the song and that Dylan copied his version. Van Ronk recorded it soon thereafter for the album Just Dave Van Ronk.
So there's no reason to attribute "House of the Rising Sun" to The Animals. No good reason. The bad reason is, the show tells contestants to introduce the song that way to maximize the chance that its (presumably dumb) audience will have a glimmer of familiarity.
As for "Cry Me a River," it became popular in 1955 because of a recording by Julie London, not that she wrote it. It was written by Arthur Hamilton, who seems to have invented what is now a cliché:
"I had never heard the phrase. I just liked the combination of words... Instead of 'Eat your heart out' or 'I'll get even with you,' it sounded like a good, smart retort to somebody who had hurt your feelings or broken your heart." He was initially concerned that listeners would hear a reference to the Crimea, rather than "..cry me a...", but said that "..sitting down and playing the melody and coming up with lyrics made it a nonissue."
The Michael Buble recording was a minor hit in 2009, and many people have recorded the song over the years, including Shirley Bassey, Dinah Washington, Barbra Streisand, Lesley Gore, Joe Cocker, Crystal Gayle, Diana Krall, and Etta James. That is, it's more of a song for a woman to sing. Which is maybe why Zach D'Onofrio didn't make it through (and I don't give a damn about Michael Buble). Aerosmith also recorded "Cry Me a River."
Hey, that reminds me. We have already seen an "American Idol" performer in drag:
It was Steven Tyler, a former judge on the show, doing a faux audition for comic effect.
All the performers are wearing costumes, even the guy in khakis and a checkered shirt. As RuPaul said — and I quoted here a week ago — "We're all born naked the rest is drag." And speaking of RuPaul, his show is really popular these days, so it's not surprising that the struggling "American Idol" wanted to get in on the action. I think Adam Sanders as Ada Vox seems old-fashioned and depressing compared to the drag queens on "RuPaul's Drag Race," but Ada Vox has a good vox, not to my taste, and who knows what TV pseudo-drama they'll crank out of that story? They already did drag as burlesque comedy with Steven Tyler, which, as I said at the time, was a throwback to Milton Berle, who was the biggest star in the (short) history of television, back when Julie London was thrilling us with "Cry Me a River."
... Julie London was my father's favorite singer. As a child, I had reason to believe that she was the most compellingly beautiful woman in the world. As I heard her singing, she was whispering. That was the gimmick: Whispering. Listening to it now, I hear how sexy it is intended to be to a man. I'm not sure whether it's completely subtle or a sledgehammer of sex. It's trying to be both in a way that would seem ridiculous or naive today, unless you could convince yourself that it's ironic. But it's not ironic.
CORRECTION: I should not give Dave Van Ronk credit for dragging "House of the Rising Sun" out of the archive. He deserves credit for a distinctive arrangement of the song, as a careful reading of the Wikipedia article I've already linked to would make clear. Woody Guthrie recorded the song in 1941, and Lead Belly recorded it in 1944 and 1948. There are also recordings by Glenn Yarbrough, The Weavers, Pete Seeger, and, yes, Andy Griffith in the 1950s. And there's also Miriam Makeba and Joan Baez in 1960. So it was standard for folk singers before Bob Dylan's famous supposed affront to Dave Von Ronk.
He came out as if he were the last contestant and maybe it took half a second to recognize the big rock star (who was on the judge's panel last season). The news reports of the little stunt emphasize the drag and the (miniscule) surprise, but even where the lyric is quoted, the attribution to Bob Dylan is missing. Here's the NY Daily News:
"What the, what?" Randy Jackson said when he got a first glimpse of his former co-star on stage.
"My name is Pepper. I'm going to sing a song called 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa, Our Love Going to Grow, Wah Wah,'" he joked to judging panel. "But before I do I'm going to judge you all (bleeps) first."
I'm not finding any news reports that place the lyric — which I have engraved on my brain — in the old Bob Dylan song. "Talkin' World War III Blues" has 12 verses of Bob talking his way through a dream he had about walking through post-nuclear NYC, with all the people gone from the "lonesome town." Here's the 9th verse:
Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”
Tyler said "Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah," by the way, just like Dylan, not "Wah Wah," as the Daily News would have it.
Now that you get the reference, is there anything to be made of it? Maybe Dylan was making an in joke at the time and Tyler was referring to that joke. Maybe Tyler wanted to alert us to the threat of nuclear war. Maybe Tyler wanted to wink at Dylan fans. But the best clue I found — as I did a Google search to see if anyone had recognized the Dylan quote — was an article from back in November about friction between Tyler and current-season judge Nicki Minaj. Tyler had said in an interview:
“If it was Bob Dylan, Nicki Minaj would have had him sent to the cornfield! Whereas, if it was Bob Dylan with us, we would have brought the best of him out, as we did with Phillip Phillips....”
Manaj thereafter tweeted:
“Steven Tyler said I would have sent Bob Dylan to a cornfield??? Steven, you haven’t seen me judge one single solitary contestant yet!”
And:
“I understand you really wanted to keep your job but take that up with the producers. I haven’t done anything to you. That’s a racist comment.”
Racist because it's against her... or because sending someone "to the cornfield" is a reference to slavery?
“You assume that I wouldn’t have liked Bob Dylan??? why? black? rapper? what? go f— yourself and worry about yourself babe.”
To quote Bob Dylan — especially while dressed in a garish blonde wig and big inflated breasts — is to tweak Nicki. Talking blues is related to rap, somewhere in the ancestry. The quoted line, which is talked, is about singing, singing like a rockabilly guy — "Rock-a-day Johnny" — and Tyler was acting as though he were going to sing the song Bob Dylan heard. Dylan is all alone in his dream, looking for company, and in his desperation, he turns on the radio, and then puts on a record, and it's this pop culture idiot, singing nonsense — ooh-wah, ooh-wah —but it's very poignant, because, after the war, Bob is longing for any kind of a voice. In the 10th verse, he calls the telephone number where a recorded voice says the time, and he listens to that voice, repeating the same time — 3 o'clock, the time the war started — for over an hour.
So Steven Tyler had a lot to say, if anybody wants to notice. He's saying we don't get artists like Bob Dylan anymore. The music industry — like NYC after the bomb — is devoid of real people. We're desperate for a human voice. And Nicki Manaj is the embodiment — for all her voluptuous physicality — of emptiness. He was spoofing her, critiquing everything, crying out for real human art, which — for him — Bob Dylan embodies.
But did anyone hear him? He pranced out as a clown. He was dressed as a woman. It resonated in the hollowness that has always been television. In drag, with that wide smile, he even looked like Milton Berle.
IN THE COMMENTS: In this post where I chide others for missing the Dylan reference, Mumpsimus dings me for missing a reference:
"To the cornfield" refers to the SF/Horror story "It's A Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or, more likely in this context, to the Twilight Zone episode based on that story.
While it may have deeper implications today than it did decades ago, men dressing like women is one of the oldest forms of comedy. It is at the heart of one of the best feature comedies ever made, Some Like It Hot, as well as several other classic comedy films, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Birdcage, and it has had a presence on TV, most notably with the 1980 series Bosom Buddies starring Tom Hanks, and Saturday Night Live where male cast members regularly impersonate female celebrities. And then there is the British school of comedy with Monty Python and Benny Hill. ABC’s president Paul Lee brought up his heritage when explaining his decision to pick up Work It to critics at the summer TCA press tour. “I’m a Brit, it is in my contract that I have to do one cross-dressing show a year,” he said. “I was brought up on Monty Python. What can I do?” As a fellow European who also grew up with Monty Python and Benny Hill, I can actually relate to that...."
I can see the Brit excuse, but it's really awful, if you're going to indulge in argument by listmaking like that, to leave out the most prominent — in more ways than one — cross-dresser in the history of television, the man who was called Mr. Television, Milton Berle.
Here's a great clip of Berle in drag — in a guest spot on Lucille Ball's show. (If you've only got 2 seconds to spare, click here.)
By the way, what a concentration of comic acting in that 5-minute clip, from everybody involved, including Desi Arnaz, who, if he showed up on TV today, would probably elicit criticism from some dignity-protecting group that doesn't care whether or not comedy has room to breathe.
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