"Newsom was profoundly dyslexic.... By the third grade, he had worked himself into a panic over his trouble with reading and math."

"'I’m faking being sick, because I hate school and I’m stressed, and they’re always having to pick me up early,' he recalled.... He was a scrawny, shy boy with a bowl cut. 'He always called himself stupid,' his sister said, and other kids apparently agreed. 'The guys kept saying, "If you’re looking for your brother, he’s hanging from his underwear on a lamppost."'  In middle school, Newsom took steps to reinvent himself as an athlete. 'Rocky' had recently come out, and he emulated the main character—running up and down hills, drinking raw eggs, learning to box. His sister remembers falling asleep night after night listening to the sound of him relentlessly practicing basketball: shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. Learning to read was a similar feat."

Writes Nathan Heller, in "Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Long Game/California’s governor has been touted as the Democrats’ best shot in 2028. But first he’ll need to convince voters that he’s not just a slick establishment politician" (The New Yorker).

"When I asked Newsom about his dyslexia in his office one afternoon, he showed me an overstuffed folder of printed material, his reading from the previous evening. Almost every word of text was underlined. He flipped through a galley proof of his memoir, in which the underlining covered whole pages—the only way, he said, that he could read any book, even his own. He produced another folder filled with lined paper and covered with his handwriting: he copies all the text he underlines onto writing pads...."

"And Sly is a pillar of the really American pop culture and a Hollywood superstar like few others and one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame."

"In fact, the only one that's a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, too, if you can believe that one."

Said Donald Trump, announcing the 2025 Kennedy Center honorees...

The full list, in case you lack the patience to watch the whole announcement, is, according to the NYT: "the country music artist George Strait, the disco queen Gloria Gaynor... the glam rock band Kiss... Michael Crawford, a British actor decorated for his stage performances in musicals like 'Phantom of the Opera,' and Sylvester Stallone, the American film actor best known for portraying the boxer Rocky Balboa in a series of eponymous films and the mercenary warrior John Rambo is a second franchise." LOL. I love that the NYT needs to dump on Rambo. A mercenary!

Rocky says Trump is George Washington.

BREAKING: Sylvester Stallone just made a surprise appearance with President Donald Trump here at Mar-a-Lago! @A1Policy

“No one could have done what this man has done. He’s the 2nd George Washington” pic.twitter.com/j8F53EVhvL

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 15, 2024

"An award given in the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been abruptly canceled after the family of the late Supreme Court justice and others objected..."

"... that this year’s slate of recipients do not reflect her values. The Dwight D. Opperman Foundation last week announced that it would award the prize to Elon Musk, Martha Stewart, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken and Sylvester Stallone. Critics couldn’t help but observe that these 'five iconic individuals' — as the awards news release described them — included among them convicted felons and conservative billionaires who own right-wing media enterprises...."

WaPo reports.

What a mess! How does something like that happen?

Galas built around impressively named awards are a stalwart of the Washington elite social scene — and a way to entice celebrity honorees to rub elbows with politicians and business leaders over $1,000-a-head plates of prime rib....

Ugh. Let them stew in their own au juices.  

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 1: New York Magazine.

It's hard to keep up with the sexual harassment news, as women (and men!) suddenly speak up about things that have happened over the years, but yesterday's bombshell on Franken blew up this week's narrative, which was all about killing Roy Moore and getting Trump to trip over his dead body. The politically defunct Bill Clinton was strategically deployed to ensure Trump's downfall. It was easy to see that the liberal media had a narrative they were pretty excited about. And then comes Al, too big to ignore, too photographically real to deny, too off-message to allow the week's dramatic narrative to grind forward as anticipated.

So what I want to do is go to my usual places — my most-clicked bookmarks — and see how they've absorbed/processed the Al Franken news. My first stop is New York Magazine, where the relevant segment of the front page looks like this (click to enlarge):



There's one Franken story, set amid the stories that carry on the early week theme, and it's already flipped it into another problem with Trump: "Trump Condemns Al Franken, Still Has Nothing to Say About Roy Moore" ("President Trump’s hypocrisy reached new heights on Thursday night..."

But if you go further down the page, in a much less conspicuous spot, there's also "With Franken, the Reckoning Over Sexual Misconduct Comes to the Democrats," which went up at 1:07 yesterday afternoon. I guess it's old and drooping. In it, Ed Kilgore acknowledges the narrative problem:

With the country warmed up by a debate about whether Roy Moore’s alleged sexual misconduct toward underaged women should disqualify him for Senate candidacy, or even serve as grounds for his expulsion if he is elected on December 12, calls for Al Franken’s resignation will come quickly....

Franken needs to leave — it was immediately apparent — because he interferes with the game we're playing right now, making the GOP candidate lose an Alabama Senate seat. (They don't have to worry about Franken's seat, because if he gives up and gets out, a Democratic governor will appoint his replacement, good until the next election for that seat, which isn't until 2020.)

Kilgore crushes Franken into the week's narrative:

But no matter what happens in Alabama, the Franken revelations shows once again that while conservative Republican men may be more prone to justifying piggish and predatory behavior toward women...

may be!

... just as they have a cavalier if not hostile attitude toward women’s rights, sexual harassment and assault occur all over the partisan and ideological spectrum.

I do not for one minute believe that political identification with women's rights issues makes a man less likely to be a sexual harasser in private. It's at least as likely to be used as a cover. Look at Bill Clinton. Look at Harvey Weinstein. It worked!

As New York’s Rebecca Traister puts it, there’s a national “reckoning” under way that will head in unpredictable directions for many individuals and institutions alike. Democrats were already being drawn into a painful reassessment of Bill Clinton’s alleged crimes and admitted misconduct. But Al Franken and Roy Moore are presently the odd couple showing the potential consequences of the “reckoning” in politics.

That's how Kilgore ends it, almost but not quite committing to principle: We must treat like cases alike in the fight against the subordination of women.

New York Magazine readers don't seem too interested in sex and politics though. The top-ranked article on its "Most Popular" list is "Everything I Learned From Dressing Like a Kardashian for a Week." Second is a story about a bumper sticker that says, "FUCK TRUMP AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM." Third is another sexual harrassment story, the one I haven't got around to talking about "Sylvester Stallone and His Former Bodyguard Accused of Sexually Assaulting a 16-Year-Old Girl in 1986."

Maybe New York Magazine readers are going elsewhere for their Al Franken news, but maybe they don't want to see the bashing of a politician they've been loving. I search the archive to see the treatment New York Magazine has given Al Franken. I'm seeing a lot of fawning, like, from last May, a video, "Watch Al Franken Talk You Through His Sumptuous Book Cover."* And this:



All right, enough penetration into the mind of New York Magazine. I'm just making a mental note to watch Bill Maher's show tonight and see if he takes any revenge on Franken for his I'm-too-virtuous-for-you posturing last spring. Or do comedians empathize with each other? I hope not! Empathy is the death of comedy, but then, you know I've been saying we are entering the era of That's Not Funny and maybe nothing will ever be funny anymore. But that reminds me of the second stop I want to make in this morning's review of liberal websites processing the Al Franken news. [ADDED: It wasn't the second stop. Or the third. I hope to get to it!]

___________________________

* Remember when the globe he had his hand on wasn't a woman's breast?

"I agree that Sylvester Stallone gave a hearty, worldly-wise performance as the aged Rocky Balboa..."

"... and thought that he’d be one of the few intersections between my own year-end picks and the nominations. But the Academy’s choice of no one but Stallone to represent 'Creed' at the awards—no [Michael B.] Jordan and no Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed it, and, for that matter, no Maryse Alberti, whose distinctively agile cinematography is integral to the movie’s emotional impact—is a grotesque distortion of the viewing experience. It’s a distortion that, in effect, filters out the blackness from Coogler’s remarkable drama about the modes and ironies of black American experience and reduces the film to 'Rocky 7.' That distortion says much about the Academy—much that the Academy wouldn’t like to acknowledge about itself."

Writes Richard Brody at The New Yorker in "The Baffling 2016 Oscar Nominees."

Do you notice what's extraordinary...

... about this, from 1968?



I was just poking around in the Christmas Eve 1976 edition of The New York Times, looking for something else, and I ran across:



And this pair of ads on the facing page caught my eye:



Two competing images of sexiness from late 1976. Who knew then that the Rocky image would be the much more enduring one. The man, alone with his armpits. Not the man and the woman, with hands thoroughly entangled in curly hair. Rocky even has the more enduring font. And they tried so hard with all those futuristic serifs stabbing their way through the adjoining letters in "A Star Is Born."

Anyway, after finding what I'd actually been looking for — news of the concerts Lou Reed played in NYC in the 70s — I went in search of The Wind in the Willows. I hope you enjoyed that hippie, trippy sojourn into the land of the gentle people, that canyon of if-not-your-then-my mind that was the 1960s, before the mean old 70s came along and made everything so harsh and cruel.

Sylvester Stallone's union troubles.

Just another anecdote from "The Andy Warhol Diaries." This is from the entry for February 22, 1980:

Stallone is so cute, so adorable. I guess he’s lost sixty pounds. He’s sexy. All the stars usually think they should have their portraits done free, though. He’s intelligent, he’s taken over directorship of the movie and now he’s in trouble because the union has a film of him saying, “Lights, action!” It’s going before a board. Stallone was telling stories about how much trouble he’s had with the union, how there’s this little Irish guy that he just wants to beat up so badly. He said he had this one shot all set up, everybody was in costume and makeup with blood and everything for a fight scene and it was snowing, just perfectly and they said, “Okay, stop, everybody break for dinner,” and he said he practically got down on his knees pleading, “Please, just let’s get this one shot, please, I’m a fellow worker, please, I’m Rocky!” and they wouldn’t let him. They broke for dinner and then he had to start all over again.

Please, I’m Rocky! I love that. The workers should view the director as a proletarian because he played one in a movie. And meanwhile, he imagines he's so elite that the artist should provide him with portraiture gratis. But what kind of elite is that? Royalty patronizes the arts.

It wasn't a Rocky movie they were filming. Don't be confused. It was "Nighthawks."

''Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older."

''Everyone over 40 years old would be wise to investigate it because it increases the quality of your life. Mark my words. In 10 years it will be over the counter.''

Sylvester Stallone recommends human growth hormone. "HGH is nothing."

Our "script"... our "reality is pretty brutal and pretty hard-edged like a rough action film," so we need a President "who's been in that."

Sylvester Stallone makes the pitch for John McCain.

So Huckabee's got Chuck Norris. And now, McCain has Stallone. Somebody needs a Schwarzenegger! Wait! Who's that on the phone?!

Meanwhile, our oldest friend France has a new President.

Does he remind you of anyone?

[Nicolas] Sarkozy is unabashedly pro-American, a man who openly proclaims his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone and his admiration for America’s strong work ethic and its belief in upward mobility.

The last film that made Mr. Sarkozy cry was Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” He once said he wanted Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as his victory song. He calls himself “proud” to wear the label “Sarkozy the American.”

America! We've got Stallone, Garrison Keillor, and disco.

What if you had to choose between saving the rain forest and escaping from a fascist prison?

It happened to Germaine Greer! The "fascist prison" was the reality show "Big Brother," which she decided to participate in -- not to get attention but to raise money to save the rain forest -- and can you believe the experience of filming the show turned out to be quite a bit more annoying that she'd thought it would be? I hate fascism, too. You know like when Sylvester Stallone's mother, aka Brigitte Nielsen's ex-mother-in-law, shows up unexpectedly.

Greer said that in contrast to her housemates, who entered the program to raise their profile and further their careers, she had nothing to gain.

"I was a little naive. I didn't realize agendas.

"I had no idea who would be in here, and it's wrong for me to present myself in the same context as they are," she said.

Yeah, who are these people?