"She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim."

"She was 16 when she met the 11-years-older, mid-divorce Salvatore Phillip 'Sonny' Bono, who lied to her about being a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, and she moved into his apartment in exchange for cooking and cleaning — not sex, at first."

From "Becoming Cher Didn’t Come Easy/The first volume of her frank autobiography is a testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and the brazen path to stardom, with and without Sonny" (NYT).

"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

It's hard for me to listen to new music. I have to force myself to put time into listening to anything new.

It's interesting to be old — I'm almost 69 years old — and to experience my mind as new things happen now and with all my memories of what I did and what I felt in the past. One of the biggest differences I see in myself is openness to new music.

In the 1960s, I had endless openness to new music and was always tuning into the radio to find things. Hearing them once — I remember the first time I heard "I Got You, Babe" (it was on a station that only came in late at night from Fort Wayne, Indiana) — I could instantly bond and know this was good, this matters to me. I would read about music that hadn't been released in America yet and long to get a chance to hear it. I had a photograph of Cat Stevens from a magazine pinned to my bedroom wall at a time when it was not yet possible for me to hear his music.

These days, I still listen to Cat Stevens. In fact, I have one song ("Morning Has Broken") that I play every day. That's how grounded I am in the old things. What I love most is what is repeated.

So I had a hard time trying to be interested in the list my son John made of his "Top 100" songs from the past decade. It's a very carefully and individualistically curated list and the best of an entire decade, and it's my son and I ought to care that a decade is about to end (in 17 days!). But it's so hard for me to begin to listen to something new and to continue. The only way I can open up to it is to listen multiple times. Maybe on the 5th or 6th time, I could bond and feel that this is good and this matters to me. I need the repetition, but how to get to the stage where it is repetition?

One thing is TikTok! When I want physical and mental rest and recreation, I love to sit back and scroll through whatever the TikTok app decides to serve up as "For You." Often, the very short videos have a musical soundtrack, and some audio clips are used repeatedly. So a snippet of music can make it into my head and become liked by my ancient brain.

Here's a good example. I'll just give you 2 videos using the same song clip (which has been used in many other videos, collected here, with embedded video at the top giving you the entire song). The audio clip has been used over 1.5 million times, and I'm giving you 2 from the same person, which says something more about me and repetition:

Whatever happened to the sweet comedians?

I ask the internet, a propos of a conversation in last night's "Deep Purple Café," which had a photograph of some lush purple flowers. Xmas said:

I'm surprised they are still selling purple lupines. I thought you were far enough East that they'd be considered invasive.

And I said:

These are not lupines. I am certain they are salvia because I have another picture of the same set of plants where the label, a sticker on the pot, is clearly readable. These are May Night Salvia. The 2 plants are completely different, not even the same order. Salvia are Lamiales, which include 23,810 species, including (Wikipedia says) "lavender, lilac, olive, jasmine, the ash tree, teak, snapdragon, sesame, psyllium, garden sage, and a number of table herbs such as mint, basil, and rosemary." Lupines are Fabales, which include "the families Fabaceae or legumes (including the subfamilies Caesalpinioideae, Mimosoideae, and Faboideae), Quillajaceae, Polygalaceae or milkworts (including the families Diclidantheraceae, Moutabeaceae, and Xanthophyllaceae), and Surianaceae."

Lupines are in the family Fabaceae or Leguminosae — "commonly known as the legume, pea, or bean family..."

Blah blah blah... I had to reverse that line of Wikipedia-powered blather:

I'm just cutting and pasting from Wikipedia and not showing off my own knowledge. I had to look it all up. If you'd have told me, 10 minutes ago, that salvia and lupine were 2 words for the same plant, you could have fooled me.

rhhardin reacted aptly:

Furze and gorse are the only two exact synonyms in English.

And I said:

I'd like a comedy team named Furze and Gorse.

And then I started thinking of all the comedy teams that were around in the 1960s. There was a sweetness to them. Who was I thinking of? Allen & Rossi?



That's a random men-in-shorts occurrence. Anyway, back then, the audience laughed easily at Marty simply saying "Hello dere."

The second sweet comedy team I think of is Shields & Yarnell:



That was back when we loved mime. Mimes were so sweet. And Sonny and Cher were a pretty sweet comedy team too. But where is the sweetness now?

The internet returned this 2017 NYT article, "Sick of Angry Comics? Try Some Sweet-Tempered Stand-Up":

Comedy clubs have long been packed with head-shakers airing grievances and heatedly picking apart nonsense. But [Josie] Long is part of a new breed of young performers more likely to begin a joke with affection than annoyance and to end with ridiculousness, not ridicule. This sunnier stand-up is in part a function of the times, when social media keeps count of likes and favorites, and late-night television is a chummy safe space for celebrities. But the hopefulness is also a refreshing artistic change of pace, a backlash against generations of smug finger-pointing and knowing raised eyebrows. When irritation becomes so common, good cheer can be novel, if not downright irreverent....

Is there a nascent sweetness trend in comedy? If so, can we also get a sweetness trend in politics? I'm sick of all the anger there too.

Question: Does Cher still go on television and sing "I Got You Babe"?

Answer: Yes.



That's painful. Or so I thought for most of the performance... which has her singing with the Late Late Show's James Corden, who's sort of in the Sonny role, but also looking and acting like Cher. The joke is that the song is modernized to refer to swiping on an iPhone and "Netflix and chill" and sexting and deleting porn history and calling your relationship "offish" (which is better than the word it's treated as rhyming with — "marriage"). I was cringing in the pain but as it went on — with both Cher and Corden totally committed to making a joke out of the song — I stopped feeling bad for Cher and I finally realized that this actually is exactly the kind of comedy Cher did with Sonny on her old TV show. She's a great comedienne and not just a movie actress comedienne, but a TV comedienne, which means selling some half-assed sketches. It's not easy. It takes real skill and nerve.

"It’s a song about flirting, about going out and partying, about having fantastic, adventuresome, totally enthralling sex–with your spouse."

"This may not be the vision of marriage conservatives intended to try to promote. And it’s absolutely a more aspirational, exciting good than the idea that marriage will discipline wayward men or provide support for women who can’t manage economically on their own."

So... believing the sentiments expressed in pop lyrics and the staged enactment of passion... that's the fresh approach? Well, sex sells better than advice about careful household budgeting, but why would it sell marriage? And assuming you can bamboozle the young folk into marrying with a hyped promise of fantastic, adventuresome, totally enthralling sex, isn't that laying the groundwork for divorce? But who believes the hype? Is anyone excited by excitement? Exciting people about excitement is a short term game.

That said, I remember being 14 and sold on the thrill of marital love by Sonny and Cher.



But I was young and I didn't know.

"Chaz couldn't be happier."

"This is an important step in his transition and will allow him to change a variety of his identity documents to show who he truly is."

"Every time someone tries to hold Norm Coleman accountable, he runs to court to try to weasel his way out of it."

Al Franken does not like being sued for defamation. Who does? I hate to see political mud-slinging turned into lawsuits, even if there are plenty of people who will make the argument that if something were really a lie -- e.g., the "Swift Boat" attacks on John Kerry -- the candidate would have sued.

I thought conservatives loathed tort suits... not to suggest that it's fine for liberals to drag political battles into the courtroom.

***

By the way, "Senator Franken"... won't that be weird? If it happens. Not really weirder than Sonny Bono in Congress. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California. Ah, I guess nothing about blurring the showbiz/politics line can be weird anymore. It's utterly banal.

***

Did you know Sonny Bono's epitaph is "And The Beat Goes On"?