"There wasn't, like, a moment in the '80s that wasn't super cool to be me. And then dark music."

"Bum, bum, bum, bum... I lost control of my anonymity, and it was devastating. I don't want to come off like a victim in some way...."

You won't have to wait even half a minute to see Kris Kristofferson in this clip of "Big Top Pee-Wee."

You may wonder, what's he doing there, but there he is...

"Hey, look! It's my giant underpants!"

Previously blogged, here, in August 2008.

Funnily, the first commenter is Meade, whom I did not know at the time but would be married to a year later, in a real-life instantiation of the oft-repeated Pee Wee question, "Why don't you marry him?" 

Meade's comment: "Ah. Now I can die."

"Tequila."

"Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced..."

"... and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on 'Saturday Night Live' against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone...."

Writes Jason Zinoman in "In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird/Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character" (NYT).

That awful arrest took place in 1991, O'Connor's tearing of a photograph of the Pope happened in 1992. If you lived though that era — the NYT considers it an entire "age"! — do you remember with any specificity the kind of "moralizing"? I remember the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and the obscenity case against 2 Live Crew. I remember "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." If the "age" that is 1991-1992 is expansive enough to go back to 1985, I remember when 11-year-old Karenna Gore activated her mother by playing Prince's "Darling Nikki."

If only there were blogging back then! The "dopey moralizing scandals" — is that the right phrase? — of the time had to do with fearsome sexuality. I don't think it's wise to explain them as transitory dopiness. We can always predict that 3 decades later we will look back and think we were dumb, but it's also dumb to think that there's no worthy morality, just "dopey moralizing."

By the way, the opposite of "dopey" — which means stupefied by sleep or a drug — is "woke."

"Everyone I know has a big but...."

Goodbye to Pee Wee. Goodbye to Paul Reubens, who died yesterday at age 70.

"And now, jorts—those frumpy jean shorts worn by beer-clutching dads behind the barbecue—have wormed their way into style."

 A Wall Street Journal article calls out to me.

Nostalgia is also what pushed Aaron Levine back to jorts. “They harken back to a simpler time,” said the 44-year-old menswear designer who until recently worked at Abercrombie & Fitch. Jorts are “a bit of a ’70s situation, worn with a Faith No More T-shirt or a big polo,” he said....

“You almost chuckle the minute you hear the word ‘jorts,’” said Albert Imperato, 58, a classical-music publicist in Manhattan... The lightheartedness of jorts might actually be the secret to their surging popularity among younger men....

Will Rebholz, 29, a wine and beer salesperson in Grand Rapids, Mich., wore jorts “ironically” to rowdy tailgates in college. He still breaks them out at parties just “to bring some humor” to the room....

Do you believe you've got what it takes to wear clothes ironically/humorously? Or is that like saying "I meant to do that" after you fall off your bike?

 

And I must object to "They harken back to a simpler time." I've said it before, so let me quote myself, from a January 2016 article with the amusing/foreboding title, "Why there are so many things with titles like 'Why I still believe Donald Trump will never be president'":

"Hearkens back" (or "harkens back") is wrong (though common): “An old sense of the verb hark (which mainly means to listen) was used in hunting with hounds, where the phrase hark back denoted the act of returning along the course taken to recover a lost scent." We're not talking about listening back. Sound, unlike smell, doesn't remain on the trail and can't be traced. So please say hark back or just use normal English like it reminds me of.

"Twenty-nine years after a notorious run-in at a Florida adult movie theater derailed his career — which was heading toward becoming the biggest children's-programming phenom since Mister Rogers..."

"... he's still hoping to pedal his red Schwinn back into America's hearts... [H]e's been pitching studios on The Pee-wee Herman Story, a very un-Pee-wee-sounding screenplay that takes his puckish TV persona into dark and unexpected territory (Pee-wee gets sent to a mental hospital for shock treatment for his alcoholism, no joke).... In today's overstuffed entertainment landscape, it's hard to imagine a lane for a sexagenarian man-child who talks to his furniture.... 'People have argued I've done everything consciously or unconsciously to destroy [the character],' he says. 'But it's the brand that won't die. It's still around.'"

"Pee-wee Herman's "Dark" Reboot: Paul Reubens Is Ready to Stage a Comeback"

On creating the Pee-Wee character:

At first, he was conceived as a super-geeky stand-up comedian who cracked extremely blue jokes. But the character evolved, with Reubens drawing inspiration from the children's entertainment of his youth — Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo and Rocky and Bullwinkle in particular. And then one day Reubens slipped into the now-iconic costume — the suit was a loaner from Groundlings founder Gary Austin, the bow tie he grabbed from a pile of accessories backstage — and something inside him clicked.

"It dawned on me that I could actually become Pee-wee Herman," he says. "I could do something that was conceptual art, and the only person who would really know it was conceptual was me."

"Some smartphone-carrying millennials and Gen Zers are so used to texting upon arrival that the sound of a ringing doorbell freaks them out; ‘it’s terrifying.'"

That's the second half of a headline at the Wall Street Journal (where I got in without a subscription). I thought the millennials-are-weird theme was off, because I, an oldie, have the same opinion of doorbells. Who just comes to the door and rings? I won't know, because I don't answer. I assume it's people selling something, pushing religion, or doing politics.

Some young people say they shun the doorbell simply because they see no need for it. “It’s like antiquated, knocking on doors is so far back that it predates any experience people my age have ever had,” says Drake Rehfeld, a junior at the University of Southern California....

By the way, if doorbells come to mean an outsider — a nonfriend — has arrived in person, and people don't answer the door, it will become impossible to do that kind of politics that we've always heard is so important: going door-to-door. And what will happen to the religions that make a big practice out of going door-to-door? And the schoolkids that drum up cash by selling bad popcorn and candy?

ADDED:

"We don't want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants/We don't want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants..."

A very minimal anti-Trump song by Fiona Apple gets an article of its own in The New York Times.

ADDED: I was glad to have a chance once again to use my underpants tag.  I hadn't used it since March 1st of last year. Oddly enough, the post was about Trump. I was linking to something in the NYT, something tragically titled "Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump":

“They’ll flip their top, and they’ll flip their panties...” read the subject line of a recent news release from Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. The quote came from comments Mr. Trump made about women on “The Howard Stern Show” in the 1990s, unearthed by BuzzFeed last month.

Those types of comments, spoken by Mr. Trump over the years as he served as a tabloid regular and reality TV star, could help Mrs. Clinton excite suburban women and young women who have been ambivalent or antagonistic toward her candidacy....

The excited suburban and young women will need to content themselves with the women's march. Apple's tiny-hands-underpants song is intended to be chanted by the marching women.

Before that, there was a Jeb Bush interview in February 2015:

When Hannity said he had one more question, Jeb said "boxers." (Bill Clinton's answer to the famously inappropriate question, by the way, was "Usually briefs. I can't believe she did that." Obama's answer was:  "I don't answer those humiliating questions. But whichever one it is, I look good in 'em.")

And remember that sculpture of a man stumbling about in his underpants that disturbed the women of Wellesley College?

And all the posts about Anthony Weiner's underpants? And references to the underpants gnomes? There was the underpants bomber.

And there was the time The Gatsby Project — should I bring back The Gatsby Project? — got to a sentence with underpants:

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

And "Hey, look! It's my giant underpants!"



ALSO: I do want to give Fiona Apple credit for inventing a new chant. "We don't want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants" really is chantable. I'd like to see marches with new chants. I'm really tired of the continual repurposing of: 1. "What do we want?/X!/When do we want it?/Now!" and "Hey, hey, ho, ho/X has got to go." (The Wisconsin protests of 2011 were notable for their distinctive chants: "What's Disgusting?/Union busting" and "This is what democracy looks like.")

She's sick, he's sick, we're all sick.

So Donald J. Trump tweeted that Megyn Kelly is "sick," and Fox News issued a statement saying Trump has an "extreme, sick obsession" with Kelly, which I'm reading in New York Magazine under the headline "Fox News Denounces Donald Trump’s ‘Sick Obsession’ With Megyn Kelly After New Diatribe."

Sickness is a metaphor, but it's contagious. The cure is to notice that your thinking has taken an imaginative leap and return to your senses. If you can't, you're not mentally ill, you're just mentally lazy and too easily manipulable by the power-seekers using nothing but words.

Why did Fox throw Trump's word "sick" back at him? Why are those who oppose Trump — often criticizing him for his harsh, crude language — picking up his style of speech? They are throwing away their best argument — that normal, serious candidates don't talk like that.

If he gets other people talking like him, he's no longer an outlier: It's just the way we talk here in America, where we are losers, who don't win anymore.

ADDED: Why doesn't Fox just say "I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you?"

I see Hollywood just brought back Pee Wee Herman.

"Gay Events That I, Marco Rubio, Would Go To."

A comic piece at The New Yorker — #1 on The New Yorker's "most popular" list — that riffs on a WaPo item that reads:

Presidential candidate and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in an interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos on Wednesday that he would attend a gay wedding of someone he was close to — while qualifying that he wouldn’t condone the union itself.

It's a good comic idea, which is why I and, I assume, many others clicked on it, which is all that is needed to be "popular" for the purposes of climbing an internet "most popular" chart. The execution of the comic idea is another matter. But that's subjective, and it's going to depend on whether you feel empathy for politicians who need to adopt a namby-pamby pose on gay marriage.

I stopped to contemplate the quality of my own humor. Should I say "a namby-pamby pose"? To help decide, I did a Google image search on the phrase "a namby-pamby pose." #1:



My question is answered. The god Serendipity has spoken.

UPDATE: Speaking of gods speaking, no sooner do I publish this post than my doorbell rings. Though I don't normally answer the doorbell, I go to the door. It's 2 men in suits and a little boy. They've got copies of The Watchtower. Here's how I reacted:



Ah! It's such a perfect day today! I believe in The Universe!

"So Pee Wee had the least ridiculous suit among the contestants?"

Comment at YouTube on a 1979 episode of "The Dating Game," where Pee Wee Herman was one of the unseen, possibly datable men. And speaking of unseen, I wish I could unsee that Pam-Dawberesque lady's hot pants.

"Colmes is like Pee Wee Herman saying 'If you love it why don't you marry it?' Except Colmes is cruder."

"And yet it was Pee Wee Herman who got arrested for masturbating in a theater. It's so unfair!"

Googling in the theater.

Remember when Pee Wee Herman got arrested for masturbating in a movie theater? That was long ago. It must have been before home video, because why go to a theater to masturbate? Exposure? The thrill of potential discovery? A need for just the right degree of intimacy with others? Because once pornography is subject only to boring disapproval from bland people, one must look for another way to feel that you're doing something titillatingly wrong?

But today, the transgression is Googling in the theater. Googling, long ago, could have been a slang term for masturbating. (Are you googling again?!) But those days are past. Googling is research, and research in the theater is a subversive activity.

From Professor Meltsner's essay about the play "Arguendo," discussed in the previous post:

[The play] is replete with jargon and enough insider's free expression law that even many lawyers in the audience were grabbing smart phones to do some instant Googling.

Obama didn't "fall flat." He went low key on purpose. Here's the reason.

Politico is all "Obama fell flat."

A surprisingly long parade of Democrats and media commentators who didn’t think much of the speech described it less as a failure than a fizzle—an oddly missed opportunity to frame his presidency or the nation’s choice in a fresh or inspirational light.

Blah blah blah. But here's Howard Kurtz with the response Pee-Wee Herman made famous: I meant to do that.

Kurtz says Obama's speech was the result of careful focus-group testing.

Strategists felt they were in a box, unable to meet the twin goals of style and substance at once. To be sure, Obama wanted to excite the party’s liberal base. But his brain trust was convinced that they would have gotten killed by going with a red-meat speech that simply bashed Republicans without detailing what Obama would do in the next four years....

Dial-twisting focus-groupers, strategists-in-a-box, a brain trust. Where is the man himself, the candidate, the President? I don't see the excuse here, Howie. It's like you're saying he is the empty chair.

Overweight human beings are the equivalent of an extra 242 million people on earth.

According to a new study (via Reason.com).

Although the largest increase in population numbers is expected in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, our results suggest that population increases in the USA will carry more weight than would be implied by numbers alone," researchers wrote.

You know, I don't think an extra 242 million people sounds like that much. (Only 17 million tons!) But — and this is a big but — if these oversize people are in the U.S., they're going to move around in cars, and the more weight they move, the more fossil fuel they consume, the bigger the carbon footprint. So extra weight in America has a greater environmental effect than extra weight in places where people don't engage in so much commuting and traveling.

"According to the liberal apparatchiks in the White House, Mr. Obama can bypass Congress simply by redefining 'hostilities.'"

"War is no longer war. It is whatever Mr. Obama says it is — or isn’t. George Orwell warned that the perversion of language is the first step on the dark road to authoritarianism."

Oh, settle down. You're acting like Obama is a Republican.

ADDED: "You only are what you believe, and I believe the war is over," sang Phil Ochs a long time ago. And Barack Obama believes what we're doing in Libya is not the introduction of U.S. armed forces...

(1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances;

(2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces; or

(3) in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation...

No. He can't even believe that. He can only pose as someone who believes that. And he can't believably pose as someone who believes that. The linked article warns us about the first step on the dark road to authoritarianism. I would have pictured the first step on that road as more of a confident stride or bold march, not a crazy bike trick with a spectacular stumble and...



... "I meant to do that."

James Wolcott, a 59-year-old man, purports to empathize with Piper Palin and...

... tries to enfold her in his flabby old arms with the pretense that he is somehow cooler than her parents:

Piper in that shot looks like Grace, the elder daughter played by Ruby Jerins in Nurse Jackie....

My "sources" tell me is that a future stop on Palin's bus tour will at Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, Texas, the site of the Sex Pistols' infamous gig in 1978. Todd Palin intends to stand on the very spot where Sid Vicious staggered. I had no idea Todd was so "into" punk history, and wish I could be there when he explains to Piper what Sid and Johnny Rotten meant to America, and from there they'll all be heading to the Alamo to find the basement where Pee Wee Herman's bike is reputed to be.

Hmm.

Wolcott is...
	Hip and cool.
	Sweetly empathic.
	Squicky.
	Pathetic.
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"But what most of the many folks who visit his sweetie’s blog don’t know is that 'New Media Meade' has expanded his role..."

"...by collecting images at protests she just might not approve of. Undaunted, New Media Meade just cannot help himself, he is drawn to a protest just like the moth to a flame. Here’s one."

Hmmm... Well, I don't approve. So I can't show you that. So I'll show you this: