"Sam Smith has expressed their disappointment that women have been snubbed from the gender-neutral category at the BRITs this year."

"No women are nominated for Artist of the Year at next month's ceremony, which has sparked fury among music fans. The BRITs changed their format last year to remove the gendered awards, which Adele issued a jibe at as she picked up its first ever non-gendered gong. While Sam welcomed the axing of the gendered awards - which came some years after they came out as non-binary - the Gloria hitmaker has branded the lack of female talent celebrated in the category 'frustrating.'"

The Mirror reports.

If Adele won last year, what's the problem? Why should music be divided into male and female?

Here's Sam Smith singing "Gloria" on "Saturday Night Live" 2 days ago: 

 

Somehow, somebody decided they needed a woman's body sprawled out in the foreground while Smith sang, and somehow that body ended up being Sharon Stone.

The hell? What's progressive? It's totally retrograde.

"Unlike so many Hollywood roles, the sexuality at the core of hers wasn’t cute or passive or submissive."

"It was challenging, confrontational, defiant; she stared into the camera with those remarkable eyes, almost daring us to return her gaze. The parts became increasingly transgressive: in The Night Porter, Rampling has a sadomasochistic relationship with her Nazi torturer; in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore she has an incestuous affair with her brother; and in Max Mon Amour, she cheats on her diplomat husband with a chimpanzee. 'Ah, the ape – I love it,' she says affectionately.... Rampling says she simply wasn’t interested in Hollywood. 'Let’s use a nice old English expression: it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I wanted to go into the auteur and European world of the semi-darkness.'"

 From "Charlotte Rampling: ‘I am prickly. People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more’ She’s best known for her dark, difficult roles, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The actor talks about swinging in the 60s, family tragedy – and why she’s still got It" (The Guardian). 

Rampling is 75, and she's still doing movies. She's been in so many things over the years, beginning with the uncredited role of Girl at Disco in "A Hard Day's Night." I haven't seen many of them at all. Avoided "The Night Porter," which was a big deal in its time (1974). I did see "Stardust Memories" (1980):

I looked up "Max Mon Amour," and I've got to say the poster is very nice:

From the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes (where it has a 22% rating): "Impossible to take seriously or as satire, this film is an embarrassment to humanity and our cousins in the jungle"/"A wry mix of King Kong and My Man Godfrey, it's a potent premise that somehow never catches fire."/"On the whole, it works as a witty, black comedy of manners that judiciously avoids the vulgarity inherent in the subject."

The Guardian says "the sexuality at the core of hers wasn’t cute or passive or submissive," but are we to take these movies — which she did not write or direct — as expressive of Rampling's sexual core? She got the roles she got. This seems like a good place to bring up Sharon Stone's new memoir. Here's an article about it in TNR, "Sharon Stone and the Fantasy of Female Domination/At the peak of her fame, she exuded total control on screen. According to her new memoir, a different story played out behind the scenes." 

"I had a producer bring me to his office, where he had malted milk balls in a little milk-carton-type container under his arm with the spout open."

"He walked back and forth in his office with the balls falling out of the spout and rolling all over the wood floor as he explained to me why I should fuck my co-star so that we could have onscreen chemistry. Why, in his day, he made love to Ava Gardner onscreen and it was so sensational! Now just the creepy thought of him in the same room with Ava Gardner gave me pause. I watched the chocolate balls rolling around, thinking, You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test … Now you think if I fuck him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed. I felt they could have just hired a co-star with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines. I also felt they could fuck him themselves and leave me out of it. It was my job to act, and I said so. This was not a popular response. I was considered difficult."

From "Sharon Stone Says Producer Pressured Her to Sleep With Male Co-Star to Create 'Onscreen Chemistry'" (The Vulture).

The Kiss — a 10-item list.

1. After writing the last post — focusing on 2 magazine covers depicting a kiss — made me want to write a blog devoted to the kiss. It would be easy to keep a Google alert on the word "kiss" and blog every day on whatever miscellany relating to kissing happened to come up. I considered starting a new blog, but kiss.blogspot.com, kissblog.blogspot.com, and thekissblog.blogspot.com were all taken, so this post is a rough draft of what that blog would have been.

2. A Google news search on "kiss" brings up something I should already have blogged: Joe Biden, swearing in a Senator (Chris Coons) and wrangling various family members into good photo-op positions, got a little too cozy with a modest/nervous little girl and guessed wrong when he decided that a little cheek nuzzling would loosen her up. Reactions varied from "Holy Hell Would Be Unleashed On 'Handsy' Joe Biden If He Were Conservative" to "Awesome Little Girl Rejects Biden's Kiss At Senate Swearing-In." Hey, Joe, no means no... Mr. Violence Against Women Act.

3. Remember your first kiss? Kid Rock does — or is able to strain his voice Jack-and-Diane style in various assertions to that effect in this new video "First Kiss":



"And now these days when I drive through a small town/I turn my stereo up and roll my windows down/’Cause it reminds me of my first kiss/And those days that I always miss/Tom Petty on the radio." Tom Petty gets a big shout-out. Seems like John Cougar Mellencamp deserves a nod (or a peck on the cheek).

4. Kiss cam variations... including the deepest deep kiss:



5. "KISS frontman Gene Simmons... is as ubiquitous as ever with a reality-television show and a recent book on his business philosophy called 'Me Inc'" and a new restaurant in Oviedo called Rock and Brews. Quote: "You are alive, and you are supposed to keep moving... I'm 65, and, boy, do I look great."

6. "Tell me about the Root kiss. Was that a big gift for the fans?... Did you think it was a 'Goodbye forever' kiss, or a 'Shut up, I’ll be back' kiss?" Apparently, there's a TV show called "Person of Interest" and there was a kiss that made a big impression — "a much-anticipated kiss between the show’s electrifying women." What was so big about it? It can't just be that 2 women kissed on TV or even that 2 electrifying women kissed on TV. In the first nonplatonic 2-woman kiss the women were electrifying: Sharon Stone Mariel Hemingway and Rosanne Barr. "Television critic Frank Rich of The New York Times called 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' 'a small step forward for the stirring of homosexuals into the American melting pot' and a 'sophisticated half-hour [that] turned homophobia on its ear.'" The year was 1994.

7. The previous post — the post that got me started on this list — discussed a Charlie Hebdo cover showing 2 men kissing which I assumed was an intentional allusion to the famous New Yorker cover showing a Jewish man and a black woman kissing, and Meade said: "You know what else you should have included?" I said: "Brancusi's 'The Kiss'?"



No, he was thinking of the famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse: "V-J Day in Times Square" by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Scanning my Google image search results, I saw Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" and said: "As ubiquitous as Gene Simmons." No, I said: "How many dorm rooms have you seen this in?" And "There's also that Rodin."

8. For a less famous, less over-liked artwork called the kiss, consider Tino Sehgal's "The Kiss": "On the [Guggenheim Museum's] ground floor, a man and woman entwine in a changing, slow-motion amorous embrace.... As choreography it will hold no surprises for anyone familiar with contemporary dance. Taken as living sculpture, it has amusing moments: every so often, the performers strike erotic poses derived from Courbet, Rodin, Brancusi and Jeff Koons." I'd already thought of Rodin and Brancusi, but let's check out the Courbet and the Koons.

9. Hey, Koons (#8) and Coons (#2). It's like the stars are in alignment. Is there a constellation called The Kiss? No, but The Arctic Monkeys sang: "And her lips are like the galaxy's edge/And her kiss the color of a constellation falling into place."

10. "Kiss" is a very old word in English. The OED — giving the first meaning as "A touch or pressure given with the lips... in token of affection, greeting, or reverence; a salute or caress given with the lips" — has the oldest appearance of the word circa 1000:

Ælfric Homilies II. 32   Ic hine to minum cosse arærde.

I don't read English well enough to understand that, but the language becomes more recognizable by the 1380s, when a translated Bible had: "Kisse he me with the cos of his mowth." And here's a great poet: "Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?"

"I've lived in my face."

Says Ali MacGraw, who's 67 and comfortable with a face like "a road map." An excellent road map:



There, now. It's nice to be elegantly, comfortably old, perhaps. Don't you think?

UPDATE: By contrast, consider Sharon Stone, as she appears in "Basic Instinct 2." As Manohla Dargis puts it, "man, does she look weird here." She sure doesn't look like Sharon Stone anymore: