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 outburst of brightness and positivity that took over pop culture upon the election of our first Black president in 2008, and that continued until the wheels fell off eight years later. This was the age of Glee, Taylor Swift’s 1989, and Hamilton, seemingly disparate art born out of the same impulse: the feeling of a new dawn, a generational shift, a national redemption.... ... Obamacore positioned itself as sensitive, non-threatening, and relatable. It was Aziz Ansari writing a book on modern dating alongside a Berkeley-trained sociologist, porn star James Deen talking about bacon, Louis C.K. playing a cop on Parks and Recreation.... The fandom that had sprung up around Obama’s presidential campaign expanded to embrace New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and later, Hillary Clinton. For a moment, bodies as hidebound as the Supreme Court and the papacy looked as if they might be rehabbed into vehicles for social justice.... This summer’s sudden reappearance of hope and positivity has spurred split reactions. Do you embrace your inner cringe, or try to tamp it down?... The optimistic case is that, against all odds, we seem to have heeded the lessons of Obamacore. Generation Z is willingly climbing the coconut tree."
Looking for something else — whether I'd ever blogged a particular video (I had) — I found this discussion, from 2009, of the use of "Obama" as a slang term:
LAST week, if you wanted to use the latest slang to tell a friend he was cool, you could have called him “Obama,” as in: “Dude, you’re rocking the new Pre phone? You are so Obama.”
"But what you realize when you’re sitting behind that desk — and what I want people to remember about Michelle and me — is that presidents and first ladies are human beings like everyone else."
These were the official portraits, not to be confused with the National Portrait Gallery portrait, which we saw unveiled in 2018, the one with the leaves. Instead of a background full of green leaves, this new portrait has a stark white background, like a photographer's paper backdrop or an Interrotron video by Errol Morris.
It seems that Obama portraits always demand that we talk about the background. All those leaves were distracting, and now nothingness — whiteness — is distracting. Obama has a tie on this time, and instead of forefronting the hands — as in the Portrait Gallery portrait — the hands are entirely hidden. The focus is on the face, and it seems very photorealistic. (I say "seems" because I'm not seeing a big enlargement.)
Photorealism heightens the texture and the discontinuities of the skin — the little freckles and moles and wrinkles and shiny spots. I think that's what inspired Obama to say "Presidents so often get airbrushed." You expect a painted portrait to idealize, and the photographic equivalent of that is airbrushing (or, as we say these days, photoshopping). So it seems that Obama is explaining or accepting the portrait: It's good not to airbrush me.
One reason he can find it easy to say don't give me "mythical status" — I'm a "human being like everyone else" — is that people have accorded him mythical status.
And don't tell me people don't give Trump mythical status. Why, he's Satan!
I know President Obama sang "Amazing Grace" into a microphone — and "Let's Stay Together" — so we know he could sing into a microphone. Did any other President sing into a microphone? But what I really want to know is did any American President ever do this? — sing the national anthem into a microphone:
I found that because the Russian national anthem came up — 2 posts down — in the context of learning what lies in store for Brittney Griner if indeed she ends up serving her sentence in a Russian penal colony, where prisoners must sing the anthem, “Glory to Our Free Fatherland,” every morning at 6:05 a.m.
Brittney Griner, when she was a free woman in America, opposed the playing of the American National Anthem at basketball games. In 2020, she said: "I’m not going to be out there for the national anthem. If the league continues to want to play it, that’s fine... I’ll not be out there."
There's grisly irony, and I would not laugh at that harsh turn of fate. I've been thinking about the power of national anthems. Listening to a formal presentation of the Russian anthem, in spite of myself, I get chills. It's in the music. Look at the faces of the people, in that clip with Putin. It's reaching them deeply and merging them in shared resolve.
Resolve to do what?
Would we Americans want a President who would sing our national anthem like that, or do we prefer our Presidents singing "Amazing Grace" and our anthem safely ensconced where it belongs, at basketball, baseball, and football games?
"The party, the uninvited were told, had been scaled back because of growing concerns about the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus.... [Larry David] was uninvited.
So were the majority of former Obama administration officials... The late-night talk show hosts David Letterman and Conan O’Brien were also cut from the guest list.... Celebrity couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwayne Wayde and Gabrielle Union, were photographed arriving on the island ahead of the party, alongside actor Don Cheadle and comedian Steven Colbert. Even a 'Real Housewives of Atlanta' star, Kim Fields, was photographed flying into the island.
It was possible that some of the famous new arrivals decided to come to the Vineyard despite being cut from the party list.... Steven Spielberg was on the guest list.... along with Bruce Springsteen... and George Clooney..... Tom Hanks.... was also still invited....
Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay had pulled out of the party earlier...."
I've seen that proposal a thousand times, and here we are again, this time with Jennifer Weiner in the NYT. But it's quite another matter to figure out who would be the royal family.
I'm not interested in reviewing the pro-royalty argument. You know what it is. I'm only interested in the question of how — if we were to restructure America with a royal family akin to Britain's — we would pick the actual hereditary family.
I can't find the old post, but I believe I once blogged about who would be king/queen of the U.S.A. now if George Washington had become king. Wherever that post is, I'm sure it included this video:
My archive search did turn up this video about George Washington (which I just watched twice)(warning: some questionable factual assertions):
Anyway, here's how Jennifer Weiner addresses the question who'd be king/queen of America:
We could keep it simple and give the gig to Miss America, who’s already been chosen and already has a tiara. Or we could have a televised reality contest (a roy-ality contest — see what I did there?) to elect our king and queen. We could recruit the glittering couples we think would be best suited for the job of representing America on the world stage (Beyoncé and Jay-Z! Jennifer Lopez and A-Rod! George and Amal Clooney! Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman! Ina Garten and Jeffrey!)...
Oh! She's utterly giving up the hereditary angle. No, you have to commit. You have to believe in royal blood. No elections. That would debase. You've got to have magic.
But isn't it funny that Weiner pictures an election, homes in on entertainment couples — all heterosexual, by the way (tsk tsk) — and doesn't think to offer up the most obvious entertainment couple: Donald and Melania Trump? Well, Donald is already President, and the point is to separate the head-of-state functions, but he'll have served his term(s) by the time the election for king/queen happens. And once you recognize that, you ought to see that the final nominees for the position could be Donald and Melania — or should it be Ivanka and Jared? — against Barack and Michelle. I'd watch those debates.
Barack and Michelle would win, of course, if for no other reason that that they're far more successful at getting top-level entertainers to perform in the White House (yes, under, Weiner's plan, the king and queen live in the White House, and the boring President of the United States is relocated "to more modest digs").
"'American history wells up when Aretha sings,' Mr. Obama wrote to The New Yorker in response to an email query about the artist in 2016.... 'That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears,' he said... United States presidents tend not to be celebrated for their groovy record collections. The current officeholder’s favorite Beach Boy is most likely Mike Love, which alone should qualify him for yet another impeachable offense. If this is a bewildering time to be an American, so, too, is it a disconcerting time to be a fan of rock and pop, among the country’s maddest and most characteristic concoctions. Barack Obama, music critic, has become an unlikely balm, his beautifully detailed lists acting as strange flickers of continuity and survival."
"Balm" is aromatic ointment. Is it strange to say that a person is balm? Perhaps it's wrong, more wrong than calling him a nonhuman animal. He's a gooey substance, to be spread on the skin, for comfort. So weird! But "balm" has long been used figuratively. It can be anything softly soothing. No one, even his fans, would call Donald Trump "balm."
Did you know that in Jamaica, "balm" is "A faith-healing ceremony typically involving drumming, dancing, and ritual feasting; a herbal bath or other treatment administered during this" (OED)? There is a sense that Obama had healing powers, and yet where was all the healing? Why did Obama lead to Trump? It's a strange mystery!
The link on "is most likely Mike Love" goes to "Mike Love to Trump: ‘You Tried Your Best to Help Whitney Houston’/You’ve always been a big supporter of some of the best music that America has ever made,' Beach Boys singer told president" (Rolling Stone, October 2018). Love was at the White House for Trump's signing of the Music Modernization Act, which aimed to protect the rights of artists in digital media.
I love the idea that loving Love is "another impeachable offense." It underscores Trump's characterization of impeachment as "Impeachment Lite." Everybody's doing it, defining impeachment downward. It seems peachier than ever. And now, we're adding Love.
I note that Ruttenberg did not say Trump's favorite musical act is The Beach Boys. He only said that Trump's favorite Beach Boy is probably Mike Love. If you pay attention at all to Trump's rallies, you would conclude that Trump's favorite music act is The Rolling Stones. Not only does he always end with "You Can't Always Get What You Want,"* the pre-speech song list of perhaps 22 songs may have 3 Rolling Stones songs — "Time Is on My Side," "Let’s Spend the Night Together," and "Sympathy for the Devil" — while having no repetitions from other artists, with exactly one exception, Elton John.
Hey, it's Christmas, so I feel I should say something Christmas-y... and that got me wondering whether it's true — as my instinct tells me — that The Rolling Stones have a never done a Christmas song. According to Showbiz Cheatsheet, I am right about that, but they did do this “Cosmic Christmas” in "a hidden coda" on "Their Satanic Majesties Request":
And their song "Winter" has this line: "And I wish I been out in California/When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out/But I been burning my bell, book and candle/And the restoration plays have all gone around."
To me, this message, played at the end of a political rally, feels like a critique of all politics. Yes, I've stood here and promised the sky, but you must realize you might not get it, and what you do get may even be preferable. You're feeling your wants, and I'm stoking your wants, but I might have something else in mind, something that I think is good enough for you or actually better than what you want. And you really shouldn't be taking those drugs and drinking that wine or even drinking that soda. What kind of a thinking adult are you anyway, preferring "cherry red" soda? Grow up. You've had your fun at my rousing rally. Now, straighten up and try to see what you're getting as all you really need.
Here are the "Editor's Picks" on the front page of the NYT website this morning. Click to enlarge (not that you need to enlarge Pamela Anderson's breasts, but you can make the small print clearly readable by clicking):
1. "How the ‘Baywatch’ Swimsuit Became a Summer Classic/Athletic. Flattering. Red. Who needs a string bikini?" Yes, ladies, it is okay and maybe even cool to wear a one-piece bathing suit. But don't expect support from Pamela Anderson: "Ms. Anderson said modesty was not an issue for her but confirmed that the suits were pretty fitted. 'Some people bring me bathing suits to sign autographs on and they are these big bathing suits and I say, "Listen, my bathing suit was tiny. It just stretched and pulled onto your body,"' she said." If you want support, get a structured brassiere.
2. "They Met on the Court. They Both Won in Love. Eric Wankerl and Paige Marquardt first connected in 2013 during a Special Olympics event in Minnesota." This article could be #1 on the all-time list of feel-good stories in the New York Times. If you're hoarding your free reads for the NYT and you have any heart at all or you just want to try to have one, click through to this wedding story. Tears are running down my face as I give you this advice. Excerpt from the article: "We were told he’s never going to be the doctor or lawyer or engineer that you might have hoped for, so prepare yourself.... His dad and I had to go through counseling, this sort of grieving stuff where they tell you, 'This is the child you were given.'... I thought, the more people who are seeing him in town, the more people who are going to know him and look out for him. And that turned out to be true." Beautiful wedding photos.
3. "The Week in Books/Téa Obreht’s new novel, Barack Obama’s summer reading list and more." Oh, my lord! It's time for Barack Obama's summer reading list again! Topping the list is the collected works of Toni Morrison, so that's some serious homework for you. Or is that what he's reading? The book on the list I think he's most likely to actually be reading is the one that I've read, "Men Without Women" — the Haruki Murakami one. There's also an Ernest Hemingway collection with the same title, and that's actually the audiobook I've been walking to this week. Excellent performance by Stacy Keach. Recommended!
"Touching on issues of race and class, democracy and civil rights, and much more, we believe each of these productions won’t just entertain, but will educate, connect and inspire us all.”
Said President Obama.
"We love this slate because it spans so many different interests and experiences, yet it’s all woven together with stories that are relevant to our daily lives. We think there’s something here for everyone — moms and dads, curious kids and anyone simply looking for an engaging, uplifting watch at the end of a busy day. We can’t wait to see these projects come to life — and the conversations they’ll generate."
I don't know. I feel like I'm hearing 2 robots talk. Come on. Is that really them? So eerie!
I'm reading about the 7 projects. One is about "remarkable people whose deaths were not reported by" The New York Times. Another, called "Listen to Your Vegetables & Eat Your Parents" is about "the story of our food." Another "will aim to portray the importance of unheralded work done by everyday heroes guiding our government and safeguarding our nation."
I don't have Netflix, but you never know what might push me over the edge and make me subscribe — unheralded work of everyday heroes, people whose deaths were not reported, our food...
Sources say artist Kehinde Wiley — who painted the former president before a background of greenery and flowers — has studios in China and produces most of his work there. "It’s his base of operation," said art critic Charlie Finch, who has known Wiley and appreciated his talent since they were students at Yale. "He has dozens of assistants working for him.... Normally, Wiley sketches out the important parts, and assistants fill out the rest."
This portrait, this artist outsources portions of every painting. I mean, actual brush strokes are made by outsourced painters? And the guy admits it! He admits it! So I’m wondering who paints the sperm in this guy’s pictures. But it’s true. Obama’s picture, his portrait, was outsourced. Kehinde Wiley outsourced it. I’ve never heard of that. Is nothing real anymore? Does nobody actually do their job? Does everybody have somebody behind the scenes actually doing the work while other people are taking credit for it? It boggles my mind how often I run into this. I can’t keep of any other examples here, but it boggles my mind. Well, news anchors on TV. Somebody else is writing every word they say, and probably making one-twenty-fifth (if that much) of the salary they make.
If you don't know what "the sperm" refers to, read this. I want to talk about the practice of artists using assistants. Is it something to get worked up about or perfectly normal? I see that I missed all the discussion of this subject back in 2013 when an assistant to David Hockney died and "Suddenly Hockney's unremarkable seaside house seemed to be an art world Tardis concealing a hitherto ignored workshop of assistants, like Andy Warhol's Factory...." That's from The Guardian, which expanded on the topic:
'It was hard labour by any measure," says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos's apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. "There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking – as we did our daily penance.... We coloured in Gilbert and George's penises for eight hours a day." At least you didn't have to pay, as Rembrandt's assistants did, for the privilege of working in the master's studio. "Oh, we paid," retorts Chapman. "We paid in dignity."
The relationship between artist and artist's assistant is vexed, ripe for oedipal tensions, mutual resentments, or at least spitting in the great master's lapsang souchong. How tired, one suspects, Lucian Freud's assistant (and painter in his own right) David Dawson, got of being called "Dave the Slave" by his late master.*...
Behind every great artist might well be a highly skilled team of assistants, but that truth is suppressed for fear of shattering our illusions: the lone-genius myth helps sales, and is partly what gives an artwork its mystique.... "The idea of the genius struggling in solitude in a cockroached and frozen garret with only a crust of bread and syphilis for company is an historically specific vision no longer, if ever, of relevance," argued Stephen Bayley this week writing about Hockney's studio. "Artists are not solitary. They rely on human support systems, often of a very sophisticated sort."...
What about all those poor saps who paid Rembrandt and then wound up helping him to crank out paintings for which he got the kudos? Chapman is unsentimental: "Does the person who makes the hubcaps or whatever they're called these days – low-profile sports rims – point at a passing Mercedes SLK or whatever it's called, saying, 'I did that?' No. So why should assistants claim possession for their work? It's a job."
The work that you recognize as the work of this artist is work that is done with lots of technical help. He's the face of the operation, and if he did the whole thing himself, it would be very different work. There wouldn't be all those fussy leaves all over the background. It's like the way if the judges didn't have law clerks there wouldn't be all those citations and footnotes and reexplaining of everything over and over again. The badness would be easier to find, but is that what you want? I do, but I think a lot of people prefer slickness and glossy overproduction.
"I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore,**" [said Richard Wentworth, professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, who worked as Henry Moore's assistant in 1967]. "Five reasons. Firstly, the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works."
_____________________
* Take a moment to note the actual slave called Dave the Slave, a much-admired 19th century American potter.
** Henry Moore was huge in the 1960s, when people enthused over things like this:
IN THE COMMENTS: narayanan said:
President (you did not build that) has Portrait "painted" by Artist (I did not paint that)
"At some level, all portraits are propaganda, political or personal. And what makes this one distinctive is the personal part. [The artist Kehinde] Wiley has set Mr. Obama against — really embedded him in — a bower of what looks like ground cover. From the greenery sprout flowers that have symbolic meaning for the sitter. African blue lilies represent Kenya, his father’s birthplace; jasmine stands for Hawaii, where Mr. Obama himself was born; chrysanthemums, the official flower of Chicago, reference the city where his political career began, and where he met his wife."
Writes the art critic Holland Carter at the NYT, where you can see the portrait, which is kind of interesting, especially if you like your President well embedded in foliage.
Now, the portrait of Michelle Obama, on the other hand — by a different artist, Amy Sherald — is a lot worse. And I'm not saying that because I need a lot of leaves and flowers in official portraits or because it's mostly blue background and huge geometrically patterned skirt. It's that the face is such a small part of the thing and it doesn't look like her.
As Holland Carter puts it:
The dress design, by Michelle Smith, is eye-teasingly complicated: mostly white interrupted by black Op Art-ish blips and patches of striped color suggestive of African textiles. The shape of the dress, rising pyramidally upward, mountain-like, feels as if it were the real subject of the portrait. Mrs. Obama’s face forms the composition’s peak, but could be almost anyone’s face, like a model’s face in a fashion spread. To be honest, I was anticipating — hoping for — a bolder, more incisive image of the strong-voiced person I imagine this former first lady to be, one for whom I could easily envision a continuing political future.
I put up a post last night, linking to a New Yorker tribute, with my own photograph from an airplane of the Madison lake where Redding's plane crashed. This morning, I'm clicking on my Otis Redding tag, because there's one thing I know is there and I want to find it. But I'm interested in all the old Otis Redding posts, and I'm going to list them here.
What songs well-known as girl songs would take on intriguing meaning sung by a guy?... The obvious actual example of this is Aretha Franklin singing Otis Redding's "Respect."... The trouble with a man singing that song is that it's a bit ugly: I make the money, so you owe me. It's the conventional arrangement. The lyrics are a bit awkward in the female re-sing. Why was Aretha giving this guy "all my money"? But we ignored that. It was the remnant of the Otis version. She sang through that and pulled out the better, female meaning through sheer force.
... I put in my earphones and fired up Pandora and meant to type in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to get to some more music like that. Mixing in the movie title ["Coffee and Cigarettes"] and influenced by that coffee I was drinking, I typed in "Cigarettes and Coffee." Pandora turned up a song I'd never heard before called "Cigarettes and Coffee" -- by Otis Redding. I wasn't meaning to listen to that kind of music but I liked it well enough.... [T]he theme [of "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan"] this week is "Coffee," and one of the songs on the playlist was "Cigarettes and Coffee" by Otis Redding.... Bob mentions how Otis died, converging by airplane with a lake here in Madison, Wisconsin. And he plays a clip from the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes"...
"Known for lush, larger-than-life portraits that overlay black street culture with European classical motifs, Wiley is an exciting choice for the presidential portrait. Imaginably, the New York-based artist will have a novel spin on the traditionally formal composition. Wiley has painted rapper LL Cool J in the style of John Singer Sargent, Ice T as Emperor Napoleon by David and young African American men in stained glass tableaus, like saints in a cathedral."
Quartz reports (showing examples of Wiley's work to give you an idea of what the Obama portrait might looks like).
"I was so pissed," said Bowie later. "I thought, 'God, I could have done with that money'. And so I wrote Life on Mars, which was sort of a Sinatra-ish parody, but done in a more rock style."
And suddenly, the news comes out that Paul Anka is going to sing the song for Donald Trump:
An insider tells the site, "Paul was asked by the members of the Trump inauguration committee and he was only too happy to do it for his longtime friend. While everyone else was running scared from performing at the inauguration, Paul stood fast. He wasn't about to be intimated [sic] by anyone!"
Anka will be singing special re-written he-did-it-Trump's-Way lyrics. We can only guess what changes he'll make to the lyrics. You can't start with "And now, the end is near...." even though that's a perfect line from the Trump hater's viewpoint — along with "Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew/When I bit off more than I could chew...."
And, whatever you do, wear a shirt — "That’s Just. The Fucking. Way. It Is!"
"The most memorable part may have been at the beginning, when Mr. Fallon’s Teleprompter went out. He vamped for a bit, and after the commercial break he returned with a joke — likening his mishap to Mariah Carey’s singing disaster on New Year’s Eve — that it seemed half of Twitter had already made at that point."
Jimmy's a nice man. I like him. But I find celebrity talk about presidential politics so compulsively avoidable these days. The celebrities all backed Hillary Clinton. They — in their reeking privilege — seemed to have had their hearts set on 8 more years of glamming it up in the White House.
How many of them were at Obama's Last Party — the one that raved on until 4 a.m. and ended with waffles?
8 years ago, Obama demanded the freedom to "just eat my waffle," and last Saturday, the most elite and celebrated people celebrated the last of The Presidency called Obama with waffles in the White House.
And then they jetted back to L.A. to dress in even prettier clothes to celebrate themselves with awards — golden globular awards — and to take shots from their La La Land* at the new celebrity President, the one whose opponent they all backed, and somehow they think we could care what nastiness they lobbed at Trump.
Did it hit? I don't know. I don't care. We were in the heartland — the frozen heartland — watching another channel and hailing Mary.
You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:
I don't know how long that video will be available on YouTube, considering the infamous take-down notice on the YouTube video of the baby dancing to "Let's Go Crazy," which happened 10 years ago but got the attention of the Supreme Court this week:
The high court hasn't yet granted review of the nearly decade-old dispute between Stephanie Lenz and Universal Music, but on Monday in a strong sign that the justices are at least entertaining the possibility, they invited the U.S. Solicitor General to express the government's viewpoint about this case.
Lenz, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, alleges Universal Music made a misrepresentation of its copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and asserts that Universal Music should have considered copyright fair use before telling YouTube that the background music in the cute baby video was a violation of the music giant's rights. After a long build-up at the California district court, the dispute was tackled in 2015 by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Neither side got everything they wanted and both seek Supreme Court review. I think President Obama's spontaneous beautiful outburst helps the fair use side of the argument.
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