"The White House has explained the East Wing’s demolition as 'renovation,' and the necessary prelude to a multimillion-dollar ballroom."

"This is the architectural equivalent of a celebrity-style makeover: a redo to admire as a luxury commodity, an old building rejuvenated, history erased.... Of course, when celebrities go under the knife, we never see the surgery. Nor do we see the blood, bruising or scars. These aspects just get disappeared, before the eventual 'reveal' of the transformation. This is why the honesty discourse around surgery is complicated: Think of it as a film with some segments edited out, making the transition seem magical, and free of any gruesome in-between stages.... The Treasury Department has reportedly prohibited any further photos of the East Wing’s demolition site — we must not see the patient on the operating table...."

I'm reading Rhonda Garelick's "Americans Love a Makeover, as Long as It’s Invisible/The gutting of the East Wing of the White House and our national preoccupation with 'renovation'" (NYT).

AFTERTHOUGHT: Taking Garelick's analogy very seriously, I could believe that Trump's buildings are, for him, the equivalent of a woman's body and face.

There has alway been a womanly aspect to Trump, and I think that is one of the (many) things that trouble those of us who have focused on his weirdness over the years. A transwoman is easier to fathom. Rather that to be focused on his own body and face, he has pushed this awareness out to the buildings that surround him. He's deeply invested in extreme achievement in the field of aesthetics — he's said "I'm a very aesthetic person" — and he may be too much like those actresses who overindulge in plastic surgery as they experience their time running low.

If I am right, it's not just a matter of the "gruesome in-between stages" of the reconstruction work. It's also the final result. Why does the NYT include that photo of Kristen Chenowith?

"Yet dandyism is all about refusal — of fixed identities, of mediocrity, of gender conventions, of the boundary between life and art. "

"Dandyism blends literary and artistic creation with the art of personality, the careful cultivation of image and behavior.... Many tend to associate dandyism with white, European aesthetes of earlier centuries — men like Beau Brummell, Lord Byron, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde — who often produced art or literature, but also produced themselves: making social waves not by dint of noble birth, but through their carefully constructed personas, ironic wit and impeccable dress. Although less recognized, Black dandyism also dates to the 18th century.... At his Chelsea apartment and studio, Mr. Udé greeted me in one of his signature looks: pale khaki Bermuda shorts; vintage white oxfords; a fitted beige cotton blazer, discreetly striped in black and red; a crisp white shirt; and a silk neckerchief in chartreuse, black and red. As ever, Mr. Udé’s hair rose in two hemispheres of springy curls, parted in the middle, giving the effect of a bifurcated crown...."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "America’s Premier Living Dandy Doesn’t Want the Title/The artist Iké Udé understands the power of rejecting labels" (NYT).

Did you know dandyism was a current issue (and a matter of serious historical study)?

My reference point:

BONUS: As long as we're in the mid-60s and the name Beau Brummel has been invoked:

"You might think such a scene — lines of strangers ogling an exposed female body lying in the middle of the street — would feel unsettling or prurient...."

"Instead, the atmosphere felt mildly jovial, as people exchanged amused glances, shrugged, and snapped photos. Nothing untoward was happening here, because Balloon Kim seemed protected from any personal transgression. Naturally, being 60 feet long helped.... But Balloon Kim seemed impervious to transgression [because] Balloon Kim did not so much depict a person as it did a commodity, an abandoned outer shell.... By covering her famous face, Balloon Kim refused to return the onlookers’ gaze. She depicted no personal expression, and blocked even the depiction of any access to her interiority. This structure was not a portrait or a sculpture of Ms. Kardashian, but rather a very faithful recreation of the workings of Ms. Kardashian’s empire, which is built on the meticulously crafted project she has made of her body — a collection of highly public, highly exposed curves and spheres, sculpted and polished to perfection, displayed according to Ms. Kardashian’s diktats, and offered up as a series of ideals to be aspired to and emulated via the purchase of products."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "About That Giant Kim Kardashian in Times Square/The seamless, poreless, sanitized effigy of a capitalist titan was a startling piece of marketing for Skims" (NYT).

1. That last sentence — "This structure was not... " — is a doozy. Have I ever written "doozy" on this blog? Yes! And I've written it in the context of a long sentence that needed diagramming. So now, here's another item for the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Diagram this sentence...."

2. "Interiority" — You might remember just last month I was asking "What kind of people use the word 'interiority'?" Encountering the word in a NYT article (about Dylan Mulvaney), I searched my blog archive and extracted the history of the word "interiority" on this blog. There were 5 earlier appearances, all of them in quotes, never used by me. One day I'll use it!

3. This post gets my "big and small" tag — which is, regular readers may know, my favorite tag. I  am amused by absurd and radical size variations. 

4. The NYT writer is doing something I've seen a lot of over the years — crediting a woman for doing something other than what you might think she's doing: selling her sexuality. 

"Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were both born in 1964, the very last year of the Baby Boom."

"Yet many in that cohort feel no identification with baby boomers. But neither are they Gen Xers. They are people in-between. Perhaps in 2024, this status now enables public figures to be 'in between' in new ways, to wear their gender more lightly."

Those are the last few sentences of "Paying More Attention to His Appearance Than Hers/They’re the same age, but pundits and voters can’t stop talking about how much older Tim Walz looks than Kamala Harris. It’s not the only way her running mate seems to be absorbing some of the scrutiny usually heaped on female candidates" by Rhonda Garelick in the NYT.

That's from August 12th. I was looking for something else when I ran into that, and I got engrossed.

The idea of wearing one's gender lightly intrigues me.

What was I actually looking for? I was thinking about the time President Bill Clinton, running for reelection, wanted to use federal spending to incentivize public schools to require their students to wear uniforms.

My search terms — Clinton, school, and uniform — all came up in that Harris/Walz article:

... Hillary Clinton... came to prominence as first lady, as a “wife,” and was assailed for her hair and style, her presumed disrespect for “cookie baking” and for tolerating her husband’s transgressions.

... Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor, was called “a hectoring schoolmarm” for offering expert policy explanations, and advised to change her glasses and hair.

... Ms. Harris hews generally toward a sleek uniform of pantsuit, silk blouse, pearls and heels, which “suggest fashion without being too fashionable”...

"What explains the disjunction between the remote figure in the photos and the loving grandmother who once harvested onions?"

"Was it just the Trump family attempt at privacy? Or was it too hard for the media to make sense of a grandmother who seemed to prefer Manolos to fuzzy slippers?... Now, with her passing, we are learning more about Mrs. Knavs, and can connect the dots from her hardscrabble beginnings in a former Soviet bloc country to her recent life in Palm Beach. Acknowledging Mrs. Knavs’s origins during her lifetime might have gone a long way toward softening Mrs. Trump’s image during her time as first lady. Instead, Mrs. Knavs was presented to us as a near clone of her daughter, a retinal after-image of Mrs. Trump’s own inscrutable glamour."

So ends "The Inscrutable Glamour of Melania Trump’s Mother In public, Amalija Knavs did not adhere to the stereotypes of an American grandmother" by Rhonda Garelick, in The New York Times.

I was surprised to see this very positive-looking presentation on the front page:

Is the article positive? We're told in the end that Amalija Knavs could have been exploited to greater political effect, and we don't even know exactly why she wasn't. There was all this great material that could have been deployed to soften Melania Trump. Maybe when Melania dies, the NYT will discover material that could have been used to soften her.

The unexamined premise is that women are supposed to be soft. And that human beings are supposed to be used.

"The suit turns a man into a compact, easily readable visual unit over which the eye skims quickly, uninterrupted by embellishments or intricacies of silhouette."

"Suits, therefore, homogenize men’s bodies, making variations of weight, even height, less noticeable, focusing attention on the face. Men’s suits say 'we are heads, not bodies.'... Women are still the adorned, visible, bodily sex whose physicality gets staged by clothes. Accordingly, women’s fashion — including even business attire — requires a near-infinity of daily micro-decisions from head to toe.... Leisure wear for women risks depriving them of gravitas, making them look 'off duty,' and hence outside the space of authority.... [W]omen’s dignity and authority remain, alas, more socially precarious than men’s — harder to construct sartorially and far easier to lose. Taking away the dress code might exacerbate this inequity. What’s more, formal business attire offers some of the most gender-neutral fashion options, thereby enhancing sartorial equity for nonbinary individuals...."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "What We Lose When We Loosen Dress Codes/Allowing senators to wear what they please on the Senate floor may seem like liberation, but abandoning the dress code could wind up symbolizing the failure to achieve consensus" (NYT).

I understand that to mean that John Fetterman's dressing in a sweatshirt and shorts is an exercise of male privilege.

"You are invisible as an old person. It helps to accept that. I like to be invisible."

"I was in India with my son and some friends, about seven years ago. And I was often alone in the dining room, since my son and the others would go off. And there was a loneliness that was interesting to me. People didn’t strike up conversations with you. Or they try to flee. Maybe they think you’ll latch on to them and bore them. I think the old woman sitting alone at the restaurant or the cafe table is in some sort of strange bubble of her own. Invisibility is a form of freedom that I do cherish most of the time."

Said Judith Thuman, quoted in "Fluent in the Language of Style/For over three decades, Judith Thurman has captured the often ineffable pull of fashion and beauty like few others" by Rhonda Garelick (NYT).

"You describe growing up under Soviet occupation, being trained to revere the Soviets, rat out your neighbors, to obey."

"It was indoctrinated into you to obey and revere an occupier. And this, you say in the essay’s conclusion, familiarized you with being controlled, with being with someone controlling. 'My marriage was a sort of occupation,' you write. Looking at what’s happening in our country and around the world, do you think about the connection between shame and defensiveness and occupation and politics?"

That's a question the NYT interviewer, Rhonda Garelick, asks Paulina Porizkova in "Paulina Porizkova Doesn’t Call Her Book a Memoir/The model and author spoke about writing 'No Filter: The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful.'"

Porizkova's husband was the rock star Ric Ocasek.

That question was absurdly difficult! And Porizkova doesn't really try to answer it. 

Garelick persists: "But you made that political connection in your essay — between the occupying army and Ric."

Fair enough. Porizkova blows it all off. She was jet lagged and under time pressure when she wrote that — "My marriage was a sort of occupation."

Either say it and defend it or don't speak. The dead Ocasek cannot speak. Or do beautiful women have a special privilege to make aggressive analogies?

"Everything — hair, makeup, jewelry, wardrobe and nail care — seemed to communicate calm, control and, especially, neutrality...."

"[Cassidy Hutchinson] wore minimally visible makeup — what appeared to be light bronzer, but no discernible colors of lipstick or eye shadow.... Social media teems with thousands of tutorials on 'reshaping one’s face' with contouring makeup, how to make eyes look bigger, noses smaller, skin smoother. The overall messages are clear but contradictory: 'become an artist of the self,' 'make yourself beautiful' and 'do it imperceptibly.' It’s a tall order — time-consuming, hard to ignore and subject to wide interpretation. And it’s especially hard for women in politics.... Many of the (often young and attractive) women of the Trump administration favored an overt, high-glam style, and we saw a lot of very long hair, dramatic false eyelashes, sheath dresses and stiletto pumps — a 'beauty pageant' vibe said to be favored by the former president.... At the hearing, Ms. Hutchinson’s image was distinctly different from that aesthetic. She dressed as if ready to blend into the corridors of power, to do her job, to convey depth over surface (although she was noticeably telegenic)..... And the nation is unlikely to forget the day Cassidy Hutchinson, with her precise, low-key style, told her disturbing story."

From "Muted Tones Spoke Loud and Clear/At a surprise session of the Jan. 6 hearings, Cassidy Hutchinson calibrated her appearance to keep us listening" by Rhonda Garelick (NYT).

I'm laughing at the happenstance of seeing "surprise" again so soon after going on about the tedium of surprise. But I'm blogging this piece because I'd blogged, just yesterday, about Cassidy Hutchinson's makeup: She seems to be wearing dark foundation on her face that doesn't match her skin tone. I'm saying that based on the light pink color of her hand, which we keep seeing held up next to her face, because that's the appropriately evocative taking-the-oath position.

"According to Ms. Evangelista’s lawsuit... those stubborn fat deposits that balloon beneath their skin do not look like normal flesh."

"Instead, they resemble longish, solid rectangular bars — which in fact, reproduce perfectly the shape of the hand-held CoolSculpting wand, the device that is passed over the flesh to 'freeze' the fat. In other words, in cases of [paradoxical adipose hyperplasia], the body permanently takes on the precise contours of the tool used to reshape it. The body has literally, visually, internalized the weapon that deformed it and conformed to that weapon. In Ms. Evangelista’s case, she says her body created a permanent, visible record of what it — and she — were supposed to conceal."

From "The Cruel Paradox of Linda Evangelista’s Fate/A world obsessed with women’s hyper-visibility can dispatch them so swiftly to invisibility" (NYT).

The NYT writer, Rhonda Garelick, works hard at portraying Evangelista's medical problem as a Greek tragedy. Evangelista, I would say, was the most beautiful model of her time. She could have been satisfied with her glory and resisted all treatments, not deigned to allow anything as gross as a CoolSculpting wand to come anywhere near her perfect — or erstwhile perfect — self. 

I don't think Garelick pulls off the Greek tragedy comparison, because look how she's blaming the world — a world obsessed with women’s hyper-visibility has dispatched her so swiftly to invisibility. 

No, no, if this is to be a Greek tragedy, it's Linda's fault! 

But this is to be a NYT article, so the woman can't be to blame. She's a victim of the culture. Ordinariness.

"Melania’s lengthy disappearance was more a matter of degree than of kind. She has always been missing, in an existential way...."

"What’s more, the fact that the mystery was medical only amplified the usual effect: To wonder what was wrong with the First Lady’s health is to think about her internal body, her interiority. Medical matters force us to think about people’s inner human functioning. By denying us even the most minimally plausible account of the First Lady’s illness and treatment, the Trump administration denied us her physical reality, confirming instead her status as pure surface, a two-dimensional being, devoid of flesh and blood — not unlike the projected shadows and light of which film heroines are made. In her immateriality, Melania well represents the status of women under Trump — absent, frozen out, erased from the picture. This applies of course not only to those women within the administration, but to the way women in general are perceived: As inessential blank spaces, their humanity and concerns easily erased."

From "Melania’s Recent Behavior Is Right Out of Hitchcock The lady vanishes" by Rhonda Garelick (The Cut). Garelick is an English professor, and she is representing the status of women within English departments — present, heated up, inscribed.