"'One of the things that’s really interesting with Hume’s Treatise is that he introduces the term "sympathy" to explain why we have esteem for the rich and the powerful'..."

"... says Neil Charles Saccamano, associate professor of English at Cornell University. 'Hume talks about how the notion of property enters into why we esteem them – that they own things like houses and gardens.' The beauty of those objects, Saccamano says, is designed to produce pleasure in the owner of the object. 'And we others, who do not own this property, and are not rich and powerful, and who are of a lower class, we simply "sympathise" with the pleasure we anticipate that the owner of the property will receive from the objects,' he says. So, when we watch Meryl Streep and Steve Martin making late-night chocolate croissants at her bakery in It’s Complicated, the sense of pleasure and anticipation we take from the scene is as much about 'sympathising' with the luxuriousness of it all: the softly lit kitchen, the pastry against the cool marble counter, the exquisite indulgence of owning a bakery at all, let alone breaking in after hours for a little erotically charged patisserie-making.... 'And in [Hume]’s analysis, part of the pleasure of the owner is knowing that others envy them – or sympathise with their pleasure,' says Saccamano...."

From "Lights, camera, comfy furnishings: why the ‘beige chic’ of Nancy Meyers is having a revival/In her hit romcoms, the director’s sets were as popular as the films. Now trending on social media more than a decade after her last movie, her coveted look is back" (The Guardian).

"'She was seen as too sexy and too lightweight to be serious,' her longtime agent... said... Ms. Babitz was a precocious child of Hollywood, born on May 13, 1943, stopping traffic at 13."

"(A soon-to-be famous actor, spying her on her front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit, cruised her in his convertible before realizing her age and speeding away, she recalled in 'Eve’s Hollywood.').... She clocked the popular girls.... 'When they reach 15.... and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting — like coming into an inheritance and as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and how they spend it and on what.'  Eve’s inheritance was her appetite, her curiosity and her zaftig beauty, like Brigitte Bardot with a shag haircut and hip huggers. She was a hedonist with a notebook. Eve hung out at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood club that nurtured Jackson Browne, the band Buffalo Springfield, for whom she made album covers, and Steve Martin, whom she made over by showing him a book of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs featuring crisply dressed men in white suits on the beach in France at the turn of the century. In 1963, she wrote to Joseph Heller, the author of 'Catch-22,' angling to find a publisher for a nascent novel that never materialized: 'I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.'... Then in 1997, trying to light a cherry-flavored Tiparillo while driving her Volkswagen Beetle, her clothing caught fire, searing most of her body.... Holed up with her cat in her West Hollywood apartment, Ms. Babitz became a recluse — and a pugnacious conservative, converted by the talk radio that became the backbeat to her new life...."

From "Eve Babitz, a Hedonist With a Notebook, Is Dead at 78/A child of Hollywood, she wrote of the sensuous pleasures of Los Angeles, and sampled them enthusiastically" (NYT).

A strange obituary. And I've elided Frank Zappa, Salvador Dalí, and Marcel Duchamp. 

Creepy, really. You'd think "Me Too" had never happened. She died of Huntington's disease, so maybe this obituary was composed years ago. 

The scene on the front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit seems like the scene in the Kubrick movie where Humbert Humbert first lays eyes on Lolita. The Times sounds Humbertish referring to Babitz as "a precocious child." The editors left in "stopping traffic at 13." Maybe that's the tone of Babitz's writing. She wrote "When they reach 15.... and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting" and "I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard." And all this is added up to the role of "hedonist." It's as though the New York Times has devolved into Harvey Weinstein. Ah, but she turned into a conservative — "a pugnacious conservative" — so no holds barred. 

"This was not a two-week process, I needed to educate myself a lot. I realised I have had a date with destiny with this thing for 31 years."

"I really do apologise. I know you weren’t asking for that, but it’s important. I apologise for my part in creating that and participating in that. Part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologise."

Said Hank Azaria, quoted in "Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria offers apology to ‘every single Indian person’" (London Times). 

Here's the top-rated comment over there: 

As an Indian having watched Simpsons I didn't even know I was supposed to be OFFENDED and needed to be APOLOGISED to. This woke brigade has created issues out of nothing, mountain out of molehills. Hari Kondabolu does not represent us - never heard of him and now don't even want to know him. There are 1.5bn indians and this guy does not represent even 0.0001% of Indians as most are too busy working hard to get involved in wokery. Remember Indians don't play victim (according to the race report published last week) - they don't have the time as studying, jobs, hard work, looking after family, being a good citizen takes up all the time - not enough time to protest, shout, march and scream at the govt for imaginary issues or time to be offended.

Maybe you've never heard of Hari Kondabolu either, so here's the trailer for his documentary movie: 

 

FROM THE EMAIL: Hari writes:

As a Hari (and a Singh) apology accepted. Having lived my entire 62 years in New York, I have been waiting patiently for my turn to be insulted over my ethnicity, and now I finally have gotten my chance. Thank you!

ALSO: WK says:

When Hank Azaria said "Part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologise," I pictured Navin Johnson in "The Jerk" handwriting an individual check to everyone who ended up cross-eyed from using the Optigrab he invented.....

Anxious and unsettled?

I always wear a mask when I go outside. But something about it was leaving me anxious and unsettled. I thought about the problem, addressed it, and here is the solution. pic.twitter.com/aUW4jHI3dX

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) September 12, 2020

"I ought to mention that he marked the parenthesis, in the air, with his finger. It seemed to me a very good plan."

"You know there's no sound to represent it — any more than there is for a question. Suppose you have said to your friend 'You are better to-day,' and that you want him to understand that you are asking him a question, what can be simpler than just to make a '?' in the air with your finger? He would understand you in a moment!"

Wrote Lewis Carroll in "Sylvie and Bruno," describing the gesture made while singing the words "this was their wish" in this stanza of a song:

“The Badgers did not care to talk to Fish:
They did not dote on Herrings' songs:
They never had experienced the dish
To which that name belongs:
And oh, to pinch their tails,' (this was their wish,)
'With tongs, yea, tongs, and tongs!'”

I print the entire stanza because of the badgers, of course, this being Wisconsin. But why — you might ask, marking the air with a "?" — am I fooling around inside "Sylvie and Bruno" this evening? I have an answer!

I was reading the Wikipedia article "Air quotes," which naturally traces the origin of air quotes. It gives Lewis Carroll credit for arriving at the basic idea — albeit only with parentheses and question marks — all the way back in 1889.

The oldest definite use of air quotes seems to be Glenda Farrell the 1937 screwball comedy, "Breakfast for Two":



Isn't that wonderful! But air quotes got too popular in the 1990s and became subject to derision, notably by Steve Martin, Chris Farley, and Dr. Evil. And here's George Carlin in 1996:



People got the message and restrained themselves, but air quotes were still around enough to make their appearance in the fall of 2002, in the thing I just watched that got me started on this little research project, Episode 3 of Season 9 of "Friends" — where Joey (ostensibly the dumbest person in the group) does not understand how air quotes work:

Steve Martin gets it just right — the celebrity response to the coronavirus.

I won't call attention to celebrities who've gotten it wrong — other than to say Gal Gadot — but here's a celebrity doing it as close as I can imagine — and I do mean imagine — to perfect — right down to the natural soft setting and the delicate colors of his clothes and the gentle smile....

Banjo balm. pic.twitter.com/eQ6jUkHSHm

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 21, 2020

Steve Martin as Roger Stone on last night's "SNL" cold open.

Fantastic, hilarious performance.

And though Steve Martin never appears again in the show (except at the curtain call), we felt that he must have contributed to the show in other ways, because the whole thing seemed to be on a better, higher level than has become the norm.

Meade was especially amused by "I Love My Dog":



In other rap-related sweetness, I enjoyed this tribute to Manhattan's Upper East Side:

"Malia Obama's Harvard boyfriend revealed to be British student Rory Farquharson who was head boy at Rugby School."

That's very nice. Good luck to the lovely couple.

ADDED: Jeez, how do you pronounce that name? It's pronounced just how it's spelled, Farquharson.

What the new editor of Vanity Fair — Radhika Jones — wore to her first meeting with staff.

A navy blue dress that Women's Wear Daily described as "strewn with zippers" and tights "covered with illustrated, cartoon foxes."

WWD retreats into quoting Anna Wintour (who is not only the editor of Vogue editor but also the artistic Director of Condé Nast of which Vanity Fair is a part). Wintour only made a gentle gibe, "I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket."

I'm more interested in interpreting the metaphors. What can you say about a navy blue dress strewn with zippers? It says women have the power now. The zipper's strongest association is with the fly on a man's pants. We might say a man with uncontrolled sexual compulsions has a "zipper problem," as in "Jackie Collins Knew Bill Clinton Had A ‘Zipper Problem’" (HuffPo, 2011)("I remember, before Clinton was president, I was sitting at a dinner in Beverly Hills and one of his aides was there and told me that he was definitely going to be president, except for one problem: the zipper problem.... They knew way before he was elected!").

And then a navy blue dress... I think of Monica Lewinsky.



That dress was strewn with Bill Clinton's genetic material.

Therefore I interpret Radhika Jones's dress as wry political commentary: the end of the political subjugation of women, the end of silencing — zip your lip, not mine — and a new era of female domination.

Now, let's consider the item of clothing that was even more attention-getting and metaphor-pushing than a blue dress strewn with zippers: tights covered in foxes.

What do foxes mean? When the political website FiveThirtyEight chose a fox as its corporate logo, Nate Silver quoted the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

So there were many zippers on the dress and many foxes on the tights, which is a message of multiplicity already. But each of the many foxes is also a symbol of knowing many things.

There is, of course, the idea of women as "foxes," which was already laughably sexist when Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin played Festrunk Brothers in 1978 (and Garrett Morris had to explain that you can't talk about American women like that):



I'd say the foxes on Radhika Jones's tights represent a reclaiming of an old diminishment, amplified and multiplied, and complicated by zippers. Foxes run around, finding out about everything, uncovering what is hidden, and zippers enclose while suggesting a sudden, perhaps shocking disclosure. That's all very apt as a message about journalism, and it's an exciting way to say that a woman is now in charge.

ADDED: Also consider that the top-rated meaning for "zipper" at Urban Dictionary is: "A death trap for your dick."

And I created a "zippers" tag and went back and applied it to old posts. I was amused by how many times over the years I've talked about the Brian Regan comedy bit about Zipper, the bad dolphin (in contrast to Flipper) — "Zipper's surly. He is uncaring."

Meade, reading this post, said his first association with zipper was the "zipless fuck" (in Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"). I had to do some additional retroactive tagging, because I'd only searched for "zipper." Searching for "zipless," I found places where I'd talked about Erica Jong's idea, including one in the context Trump's "Access Hollywood" remarks, from October 8, 2016 (the day after the sudden, shocking disclosure of the tape):

[I]f you watch the whole video, you see him winning with another woman, Arianne Zucker, the one who, in Trump's words, is "hot as shit, in the purple." Zucker is the one who inspired him to say "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And in fact, you see the female version of that power trip: The woman plays on the man's sexual interest. Grab them by the crotch. Zucker looks entirely pleased with herself, demands to walk in the center and grabs the arms of both men. If that is what is expected and that is the norm in your workplace, how can you be the cold one who keeps her sexuality to herself?

I invite you to contemplate why this got me thinking about Erica Jong's concept of the "zipless fuck":

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one. 

Why Trump won.

Because a man like Steve Martin won't fight for himself in a situation like this:

On Tuesday, the comic wrote in a since-deleted tweet, "When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well."

Media outlets and fans immediately turned on the comedian saying Martin’s tweet had a sexist undertone.

Does Martin think this one appeasement will end the insane, pointless bullying? How could it? It doesn't even save his ass today. By deleting, he confesses to a nonexistent political crime. Now, it is what we will remember him for. What a sexist! That awful man! He called Carrie Fisher a "beautiful creature" and marveled that she was also smart and funny.

Imagine the first thing you notice about a person being how they look! Unless you're meeting people by telephone or blind, it's always the first thing you notice.

Is SNL's "Black Jeopardy" racist?

It's very funny and has a significant point to make — that lower class black and white people are more alike than different — but that doesn't make it not racist:



This is from last Saturday's show, with Tom Hanks, and — looking for commentary on it — I am reminded that the "Black Jeopardy" idea has been used before, but, in earlier variations, the third contestant — the one who doesn't fit the stereotype of a lower class black person — was unable to understand the questions in the stereotypically lower-class-black-person way that was easy for the other 2 contestants. There was Drake, the Canadian black person, and Louis C.K. as a white African-American studies professor. This past week, the contestant who seemed not to belong (because he was white), was, in fact, able to get all the answers.

Tom Hanks's lower-class white man wore a "Make America Great Again" hat, and this led one commentator, Daniel Barna at Complex to say:

There may not be as big a difference between Trump supporters and the black community after all. That was the clever premise behind Saturday Night Live's "Black Jeopardy" sketch, which saw last night's host Tom Hanks don a red “Make America Great Again” cap as Doug, a pretty docile Trumpeteer who gives all other Trumpeteers a good name.

Docile. Well, I guess the point is that SNL viewers were invited to perceive the disaffected white people who turn to Trump as sympathetic because they remind us of black people — even though the black people he's like — the other "Black Jeopardy" contestants — have clownishly rude and ignorant ideas. I wouldn't call them docile. They are angry, suspicious, and proud of themselves — in a manner similar to the stereotypical Trumpster.

Here's Daniel Politi at Slate:

[T]his episode of “Black Jeopardy” looked to be an easy setup to mercilessly mock Trump supporters at every turn. Instead, it revealed that conspiracy theorist Doug had a lot more in common with the other contestants—Leslie Jones as Shanice and Sasheer Zamata as Keeley—than most people would have likely expected....

Oh! I thought I was going to get some serious analysis here. Actually, this goes nowhere. I had the feeling that people were talking about this sketch, but I'm not finding any depth to the analysis.

To me, the sketch is too racist to just point at and call funny. It relies on a stereotype of black people.

It's also too serious not to want to talk seriously about. The serious point is something I've heard — mostly from left-wing people — for decades: That what really matters is not race but class. This orientation is important going forward out of the 2016 election, because the Trumpsters have peeled away from the establishment Republican Party. Where will they go after Trump loses the election? (I know, I'm assuming, but come on.) Shouldn't the people who coalesced around Bernie Sanders be looking to embrace the disaffected, working-class white people who turned to Trump? I could see the 2 parties flipping and re-composing themselves, with half of each party connecting with half of the other. Maybe nobody wants to talk about this until after the election is over. But no: I do. I want to talk about it.

ADDED: Meade wanted me to address the "punchline" of the sketch. The "final Jeopardy" category is announced: "Lives that matter." The black host and contestants turn and stare at Hanks. This happens after Hanks had won their enthusiastic approval and inclusiveness. The host then laughs and says: "Well, it was good while it lasted." The audience laughs a lot. Hanks's Doug mutters that he has a lot to say about that, and the host (Keenan Thompson) brushes him off.

This could be taken to mean that the idea that had been developed — that working-class people should see what they have in common and get together — was all just a fantasy that everyone entertained for a while and now we're getting back to the reality of hostility and deep-seated suspicion.

But I saw the ending as similar to the ending of the great old "Theodoric of York" SNL sketch from 1978. In that sketch, Steve Martin plays a "medieval barber" who, in the end, gets the idea of using the scientific method to understand disease and discover treatments. Then there's a pause and the sketch ends with him saying: "Nah!"

That doesn't mean that the "nah" was the right answer. It's patently wrong, but Theodoric made progress toward the right answer before he threw it away. Thus, the last line isn't necessarily the insight the writers want you to take with you. That line could be the funny-sad experience of the characters losing an insight that you have received and should not forget. Indeed, the characters' loss of the insight could reinforce its value as you feel the poignancy of their losing it.

"To the American people, first I say thank you for the love they give me. I want the time to give my love to American people."

Says Elian Gonzalez, who once found himself "alone in the middle of the sea."

"For my family it has always been, we always have the desire to say to the American people, to say to each household our gratitude, appreciation and love that we have.... Perhaps one day we could pay a visit to the United States. I could personally thank those people who helped us, who were there by our side. Because we're so grateful for what they did."

ADDED: Back in May 2000, Steve Martin had a humor piece in The New Yorker, written in the voice of Elian Gonzales:

Yes, the photos were doctored. I was taken to a little room, where a photographer held me at gunpoint. Janet Reno came in and started into her irresistible shtick and I burst out laughing. The photo was snapped, and my head was Photoshopped onto another kid’s body. I was then taken to a play yard, where a man masquerading as my father threw a Nerf Ball that I was supposed to chase. My own father is quite fat, certainly not as attractive as the man who was chosen to pose as him... When I finally got back into Cuba, I was placed in a wooden box, which was then suspended from a scaffold in the town square while Castro himself held the ropes. I can still hear him saying, “Zees ees what happeeens to leettle boyz who sail acrozz zee sea.” ... All this just to make Castro look good. I think that this event was what made it possible for him to snag and marry Jennifer Lopez.... I guess blood is thicker than water.

 Maybe in 2000 that was funny. Here's the photograph that was taken on April 22, 2000:



Is it funny now?

What does the crowd say? Watermelon, cantaloupe, watermelon, cantaloupe...?

Or is it walla walla walla?

I saw a movie once, probably twenty years ago, in which one character is a Hollywood old-timer who's known in the biz as the World's Greatest Extra. Another character says, awestruck, "He invented the 'Courtroom Walla'!" It's explained that in courtroom dramas, when the verdict is announced, everyone in the courtroom softly says, "walla walla walla," creating a nice, low-level hum of excitement without anything really discernible in it.

Or are they just saying murmur....



Is the word "murmur" onomonopia? OED says:

Etymology: Partly < Middle French, French murmure indistinct expression of feeling by a number of people (c1170 in Old French), subdued expression of discontent (c1200), muted noise (c1230), sound of a light breeze (1555), respiratory murmur (1819 in passage translated in quot. 1821 at sense 5) < murmurer murmur v.; and partly < its ultimate etymon classical Latin murmur a low, continuous sound, a subdued or indistinct utterance, such an utterance indicative of anger or resentment, a reduplicated imitative formation....

The answer seems to be partly.

"Now that my war on Christmas is over, I can begin my war on New Years."

Steve Martin tweets.

"'I couldn’t be a woman,' Steve Martin once joked, 'because I’d play with my breasts all day.'"

"Now he has written a novel about a young woman, but nearly the only thing he can imagine about her is wanting to play with her breasts. The Object of Beauty is a nasty exercise in narcissism, particularly in the narcissism of the famous."

A nasty review that considers a book nasty because it seems only to say look at my breasts begins with 2 sentences that say look at my breasts.

Steve Martin is in trouble.

For luring people to pay $50 to hear him interviewed and then having the interview be all about the art world and his book about the art world.

It is exactly — exactly — like demanding your money back because Elton John didn't play "Rocket Man." 

No, it's like going to see Elton John and demanding your money back because he played only classical music — and not at the level of a professional classical pianist.

"Tonight, you belong to me."

I got this song stuck in my head the other day after I ran across a clip of the old Patience and Prudence recording via Digital Oddio. Digging up the whole thing in YouTube, I saw this charming Fiona Apple version. The song was written back in 1926, I learned on Wikipedia. There, I was reminded of a scene from "The Jerk" that I had forgotten, in which Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters sing the song together and then try, very hard, to kiss — and fail.

"Elvis the ecstatic/ Elvis the plastic/ Elvis the elastic with a spastic dance that could explain the energy of America.”

Bono's poem about Elvis, aired on British radio:

A warning about the poem’s language preceded the airing, as a series of offensive words including “nigger” and “spastic” were employed.

Here in America — where we have Elvis energy, apparently — those 2 words are on completely different levels of offensiveness, but I guess that's the way they talk in Britain, where, presumably, "spastic" is not a word to be used casually.

***

Bonus: "Saturday Night Live" transcript. ("Oh no, its Chaz 'The Spaz' Knerlman!... Why don't you shut up, Spazalopolis!")

Ah, now it's coming back to me. Remember back in 2006, when Tiger Woods got into trouble for casually saying "spaz" in Britain? Language Log had a great post titled "A Brief History of Spaz":

[T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with Bill Murray as Todd DiLamuca and Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner. On two shows that year (Apr. 22 and Nov. 4), host Steve Martin joined in, playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz" as he was known to Todd and Lisa.... A year after the SNL sketches in 1979, Bill Murray starred in the summer-camp comedy Meatballs, which featured a stereotypically nerdy character played by Jack Blum called "Spaz."

For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s (and who, incidentally, is on record as saying that another Bill Murray movie, Caddyshack, is his all-time favorite), the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....

***

Don't you love the energy of America?

"Excuse me! I was in First Class! Where's the VIP rescue boat?!"

"So I guess that whole 'I forgot' thing works after all! Thank you, Steve Martin!"

LOL.