Does having a large head make you look short?

I'm thinking of this question a propos of Stormy Daniels's discussion of Donald Trump (blogged here). I've never thought about this question before, even though I have a large head, which I've only ever thought of as a problem when shopping for hats...



... which is the main point of that video. But I'm seeing some discussion from body-builders who worry about the distortion of perception from a large head: Your body will be perceived as smaller.

And here's a woman angsting over the opposite problem (in Elle, a fashion magazine):

I'm convinced that [my head is] too small for my body, and only if I'm at an impossible-to-maintain weight (for me that would be 123 pounds for my 5'7" height) do I look balanced....

Hmm. There's a benefit to having a large head. You can weigh more. (Also factor in the added weight of the head itself!)

Actors are known to have large heads, which are thought to translate better to the screen, and the actress as determiner of beauty ideals has never been stronger....

"Hmm," [says casting director Meredith Tucker], "I saw Carey Mulligan in The Seagull on Broadway and thought, Here's this amazing actress, but she'll never make it on screen; her head is too small. Then she did. So I think it's a myth." She pulls away from the receiver to consult her associate. "Yes!" she hollers. "It is true." I hear the words "Philip Seymour Hoffman" in the distance....

Actors are big heads on the screen, and it doesn't seem to matter too much if they are short. Maybe it's preferable for them to be short. And once you get some shortish, big-headed actors in the movies, you don't want to bring in actors who will distract viewers into thinking about head size.

[T]he head, the female head in particular, it turns out, is a locus of much social meaning. Stanford professor Londa Schiebinger... tells me that... [c]apacious skulls were viewed as a sign of greater intelligence and thus the ability to reason. Women, who have smaller skulls than men on average, were said to have limited reasoning capacity, a belief presented during the suffrage era as an argument against our getting to vote. The theory hit an impasse when data grew and it became evident that women have proportionately larger skulls than men. But science in the service of the patriarchy found a way out. "Who else has proportionately larger heads?" Schiebinger asks. "Children! So this became a way of labeling women as more childish than men, rather than smarter."

One could argue that figures such as Betty Boop were a particularly reassuring sex symbol. As unchallenging and loving as babies. Have I not always coveted a bouffant, or at least more hair, because it inflates the head and helps achieve the sexy baby effect?....

The sexy baby effect... That doesn't sound right.

How to photograph a celebrity.

From "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)," the new David Sedaris book, this entry from May 5, 1994:

As part of the publicity I’m doing for the book (Barrel Fever), I was interviewed and photographed for Avenue magazine. The talking part I’m fine with, but I hate having my picture taken. First the photographer had me pose with Dennis (my cat) while wearing a cat mask. Then she had me pretend to hang from the antlers in the living room. Next I was told to close the louvered doors on my neck and then to hold my freeze-dried turkey head up to my nose. Just as she was running out of film, the photographer said, “Can we try something silly?”

That made me remember I wanted to promote this book Chris Buck sent me, "Uneasy: Portraits 1986-2016." It has 338 photographs of celebrities — including one of David Sedaris (that's not from 1994) — often photographed in some odd, quirky way.

For example, there's Billy Joel sitting on the end of a bed holding one of those theater "applause" signs, there are separate photos of Moby and Ike Turner doing that old little boy's trick of positioning a finger to make it look like his naked penis, there's Margaret Atwood pushing the side of her face and outspread hands against a screen door (photographed from the other side of the door), Casey Affleck lying on a table pushed into the corner of a gaudily wallpapered room, Russ Meyer burying his face in cake shaped like 2 breasts, Philip Seymour Hoffman half-hiding behind underpants hung on a clothesline, and George McGovern wearing just a Speedo and (apparently) doing the twist. Much more!

I recommend it highly, having looked at all the pictures and admired the great variety and the gameness of the celebrities. Since they are mostly not actors and models but writers, musicians, and politicians, people who haven't spent their lives figuring out how to look interesting, it takes some ingenuity: Where can you put them, what can you say to them to try to get a photograph that will affect us in a way that has something to do with who this person is?

"Honestly, I don’t think anybody I know romanticized it as much as they liked it. It’s got good qualities."

It = heroin, described by Robert Aaron, the musician accused of selling drugs to Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who died of a drug overdose. Aaron, we're told, paused before proceeding to tout heroin:

"A lot of times you have a deadline and you have to work for 24 hours. This lets you do it with no pain, no tiredness.... If I have to write a book, get me high — I’ll have the book written in two weeks. You’re lucid. And emotions don’t affect you as much — your anger — it bottles up your feelings. It makes you more rational, or you think you are, anyway. You sleep wonderfully. I’m a lifelong insomniac. Everything has its good points and bad points. The bad point is the dependence."

Drake is "disgusted" that Rolling Stone "took my cover from me last minute and ran" with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

He tweets: "RIP to Philip Seymour Hoffman. All respect due. But the press is evil."

"I'm done doing interviews for magazines. I just want to give my music to the people. That's the only way my message gets across accurately."

I feel like siding with Drake here. I mean, he sounds self-absorbed and uncaring.  Philip Seymour Hoffman died! But Philip Seymour Hoffman killed himself with drugs. Why channel all honor to him? The man left 3 young children fatherless. Meanwhile, Drake is staying alive, giving music to the people. Where are our values? Why are we morbidly drawn in to Hoffman's self-waste? Show us somebody who's doing something good, offering new, positive things that make life worth living.

I haven't been keeping track of Drake, however, and perhaps he's awful for some reasons that haven't crossed my path, and I can't remember whether his music is any good, musically or message-wise. That's not my point here. I'm just taking him to be a living artist with new material who got eclipsed by our absorption with the way a dead artist would never give us anything new ever again.

An artsy-fartsy photo project lifts the lid on that "Death" box in your psyche, almost causes me to start another new blog, and gets us back to how John met Yoko.

"Philip Seymour Hoffman looks chillingly vacant in this tintype photo he posed for at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 19, just two weeks before his death Sunday from an apparent heroin overdose."

I had noticed that set of Sundance tintypes — here, at Esquire — but I'd passed on blogging it because it seemed artsy-fartsy. I like the one of Sam Shepard. That takes advantage of the effect nicely. (The movement of the subject causes the hair to resemble a white bird in flight.)

The Philip Seymour Hoffman one is among the best in the group, but how can you separate the old-timey artsy-fartsiness from all of your emotions in that box in your head labeled "Death" that this picture now opens?

But wasn't that the artsy-fartsy idea of doing tintypes in the first place — to take people alive today and position them in a past so long ago that they all look like people who must certainly now be dead and to plunge us into an angsty state of awareness that all of the pictures of ourselves and everyone we now love will some day be pictures of the dead?

"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.

"Broadway theaters dimmed their marquee lights for one minute Wednesday in memory of the acclaimed screen and stage actor Philip Seymour Hoffman..."

"... who died on Sunday, apparently of a drug overdose."

What do you think of this tribute to a man who ended his life with heroin?
	It's beautiful and touching. He played on the Broadway stages. It's an expression of love and loss.
	He was a junkie who threw his life away and should not be celebrated.
	I don't think about Broadway or the private lives of actors. It means nothing to me.
pollcode.com free polls

"Does it really matter that he had 4 shots of espresso? Must we know that he seemed 'out of it?'"

"Perhaps the respectful thing to do is celebrate the life he had..." says a commenter at a CNN article titled "Piecing together Philip Seymour Hoffman's final hours," which includes the information that on the morning before his fatal heroin overdose, "Hoffman stops in at Chocolate Bar on 8th Avenue for his regular order: a four-shot espresso over ice with a splash of milk. He is alone and chats with members of staff," who say that "He seemed perfectly fine... He seemed in good spirits. He was very happy." We also learn of his evening beverage,  "a cranberry and soda."

These positively perky drinks do seem to matter, but why? The reader grabs onto such details, and this grasping for meaning in things that have no meaning explains why we want to read novels. People have their problems, sometimes they use drugs, and sometimes drugs kill their users. Why do we care to know what the man drank, when the drinks were not an element of the toxicity causally related to the death? As a reader, searching for meaning, I felt myself latch on in particular to those 2 drinks. This seemingly useless and pointless knowledge makes us feel more present in this life.

Useless and pointless knowledge, the phrase that came to my mind thinking about the a four-shot espresso over ice with a splash of milk and the cranberry and soda is from Bob Dylan's from "Tombstone Blues" plays in my head:

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

The truth is, we are cooled by the dead man's refreshing beverage. He may have been "out of it," but we are in it, this life.

Accidental overdose or suicide?

A "breaking news" email from CNN says: "Authorities investigating the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman found more than 50 glassine-type bags containing what is believed to be heroin in his apartment, two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation said today. Investigators also found several bottles of prescription drugs and more than 20 used syringes in a plastic cup, the sources said."

ADDED: "I’m a fucking idiot."

"The actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his New York apartment on Sunday morning..."

"... of an apparent drug overdose...." He was 46.

Another great actor died yesterday, Maximilian Schell. He was 83.

UPDATE: Hoffman "was found unconscious in the bathroom of his fourth floor apartment in the Pickwick House around 11:15 a.m. by screenwriter David Katz, who called 911, a law-enforcement official said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. 'He had a needle sticking out of his arm,' the official said."

"I'm a bigot... but for the left."

An old Woody Allen punchline that came up in conversation just now. It's from the movie "Annie Hall." The actress is Carol Kane.

***

Whatever happened to Carol Kane? She had such interesting feminine beauty. I can't think of any actresses today who have the her style of beauty. Is it because they've all been surgically altered? I resist movies these days, in part because the actresses all look alike. Presumably, the look is beautiful, but it doesn't read as beautiful anymore, because they all look alike. This was all predicted in the "Twilight Zone" episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You."



I know. It's not a day for talking about feminine beauty. It's a day for masculine beauty. It's Super Bowl Sunday, and here in Wisconsin "Number 12" is Aaron Rodgers, who is interestingly beautiful in an individualistic way. Which reminds me, despite my (and Meade's) resistance to watching movies, we did watch a movie last night: "Moneyball." It features the masculine beauty of Brad Pitt, who has to hide is splendor a bit in baggy pants, greasy hair, and constant munching of food, so he'll seem as though he belongs in the shabby office space and locker rooms of the Oakland Athletics baseball team (and not in the spiffy digs of the Boston Red Sox). Everyone else in the movie is pretty awful looking. He's bookended throughout by the Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who seem to be in a competition over who most embodies the word "tubby." There's scarcely a woman anywhere in the movie, though there is at least one scene with the Robin Wright, who is beautiful in that boring way and who was once in a movie with Carol Kane.

I answer your questions.

Yesterday, I noted the questions each of which, according to SiteMeter, brought 1 person to this blog. I intended only to mock, but then I actually answered the questions. Why should I mock? I can answer the questions and do some small particle of good in this world.

In that spirit, let's answer today's questions:

who is msm?

A miserable left-wing fool.

what type of jobs will obama create?

According to Rush Limbaugh, today, these will be military jobs, and you won't need to apply for them. You will be drafted.

what to stockpile for an economic crisis?

Bottled water, peanut butter, toilet paper, powdered milk, granola, and V8 Juice — as much as you can fit in your house.

what happened in the movie doubt?

Meryl Streep pursed her lips and Philip Seymour Hoffman got red in the face.

what do men wear to sleep in?

Shorts.

"Harold Pinter's dead... No, wait, he won the Nobel Prize."

That's a line in the movie "Synecdoche, New York," which we saw at the Sundance theater last night:

[In] Schenectady, the working-class city near Albany where Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director, lives with his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their young daughter Olive (Amy Goldstein). Caden, who's had a critical success staging Death of a Salesman with young actors in the middle-age roles, is himself a premature old man; he hears mortality gargling at him everywhere. In the first scene, he wakes to a radio talk-show report about how the coming of autumn is a harbinger of death; from then on, Caden's life is one long fall. Reading the newspaper, Caden sees a headline about a playwright. "Harold Pinter's dead," he muses aloud. "No, wait, he won the Nobel Prize." He glances at the TV and sees his own animated form as part of a cartoon show, accompanied by the sing-song lyrics: "Then he died / Maybe someone cried / But not his ex-bride."

Today, I open the newspaper and see that Harold Pinter has died. He died yesterday, perhaps at the very moment when we heard the death-obsessed character in the movie say "Harold Pinter's dead." The movie is, in fact, all about death -- and life, too.... for contrast -- as Philip Seymour Hoffman shuffles through scene after scene, depressed, headed toward death, but working feverishly on his seemingly never-ending play -- his play and his life -- life being a big play and all the men and women merely players.

Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said on Thursday.

Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in 2002. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.

Here's the video.

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years.

His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

I wrote a post at the time: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them." I don't like that, but I will pass over it on this occasion. Back to art:

Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. “Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We’re not talking about the moon.”

Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.”

Which of course is never ending... which of course is....