"It’s very easy to get caught up in fruitarianism because when you start out, you feel euphoric. You’re eating a lot, but you’re not gaining weight."

"Your digestion is perfect, you feel light, you have more energy than ever. You can’t understand why other people wouldn’t want to feel like that all the time."

Said Emilia, a former fruitarian, quoted in "Why Karolina Went to Bali/She struggled with an eating disorder for years. When she discovered raw veganism, she thought she’d found the answer" (The Cut).

The raw vegans I spoke to didn’t see any connection between fruitarianism and disordered eating. Karolina didn’t die from solely eating fruit for the last seven years of her life — she died, they argue, because she had essentially lost her will to live. Karolina could have recovered from her eating disorder while still on a purely fruitarian diet, they say, if only she had adopted a more positive mind-set. “It’s sad a lot of people would blame the diet,” says Zaia. “They’d say, ‘Oh, all she ate was fruit.’ But this was someone who ate one fruit a day and was really hating herself and just barely getting by. It really has nothing to do with the fact that she was fruitarian.”

And I had to look at this crazy ad juxtaposition — a sickly looking skeletal Tilda Swinton presumably smelling like something you'd want to buy:

"A perfumier designed the aroma to contain hints of 'pus, blood, faecal matter and sweat' so [Jude] Law could imagine himself as [Henry VIII]...."

"At the start of filming Law said he made sure 'very subtly' to use a dab or two of the stomach-turning scent. However, when he found that the smell aided his performance, 'it became a spray-fest.' "When Jude walked in on set,” the director, Karim Aïnouz, said, 'it was just horrible.' [Alicia] Vikander, who performed sex scenes with Law, gave a look of disgust as the actor [said] 'Even the camera operators were gagging. My memory is that we were laughing a lot.... [I'd] read several interesting accounts that you could smell Henry three rooms away. His leg was rotting so badly. He hid it with rose oil. I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful.'"

From "Jude Law has more than a whiff of Henry VIII in Firebrand/The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Cannes film festival on Sunday" (London Times).

Watch Ms. Vikander approach the putrid actor:

I asked ChatGPT, "Can you tell me about other actors who have used smelliness to enhance their performance?" In classic ChatGPT form, I got a list of 5 items:

"No one else could make this work, and there will be plenty of people who say she should be listed among those who tried and failed..."

"... but this, to us, is the essence of Tildaism."

Top-rated comment: "David Bowie may be gone but hopefully we'll always have St. Tilda."

"Tilda Swinton: The Surreal World."

Photographs by Tim Walker.

"To get that ultra look, that Tilda Swinton thing, you have to go in there and strip all the melanin away."

"It’s practically like introducing albinism."

Quote from a character in a novel about race-reassignment treatments, reviewed in the NYT here.

One day Kelly meets a familiar-looking black man. This turns out to be his old friend and bandmate Martin Lipkin, a Jewish guy who has undergone what he calls “racial reassignment surgery.” Inside, Martin always felt black.

Alternatives to reading that novel:

1. Read "Black Like Me," the bestseller that seared America's conscience in the early 1960s.



2. Or — from the same era — read this short piece in Jet magazine:



3. Select something from Wikipedia's incredibly long "List of entertainers who performed in blackface." I picked Doris Day:



4. Listen to Lou Reed sing "I Wanna Be Black" one more time.

"Honestly, to whatever extent this is working, it’s working because it’s on Cate Blanchett."

"Except for maybe Tilda, we doubt anyone else could wear this without looking batshit insane or like they just walked away from some horrible, flaming industrial accident."

Tilda Swinton takes a nap — the artwork.

At NYC's Museum of Modern Art — if you go at the right time — you can look at Tilda Swinton in a glass box, purportedly sleeping. It's called "The Maybe." If you've ever wanted to go right up to a celebrity and gape and her, this is your chance.

An integral part of The Maybe's incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist's statement released, no no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real—shared—time: now we see it, now we don't.

Presumably, "no no" is a typo. I love the way the celebrity's need to control her own time/sanity is — by the usual museum-bullshit text — deployed to give depth and mystery to the art.

I think it's a great opportunity to observe everyone other than her, as they relate to a celebrity and to a work of art in a museum.

Will they get right up close? Will they display the attitudes of politeness/deference that are ordinarily used around a stranger/sleeping person or will they get that ponderous studiousness that people summon up when they are looking at art?

If I were Tilda, I'd have some confederates in the crowd to get right up to the glass and point at my body parts and say provocative things. Press your nose against the glass right by my face. Huff some breath on the glass and write words in it. Have someone dressed as a guard come over and enter into a dialogue that begins as a simple don't-touch admonishment and spirals slowly into a My-Dinner-With-Andre-type inquiry about what is art.

"Call me Ishmael."

Or Tilda Swinton.

Are Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton "even allowed to be in the same movie?"

"Doesn't this... mess with the talented, very pale actress space-time continuum?"

***

You know, I have a big problem with actresses these days looking too much alike. In an age of plastic surgery, there's a standardized insipid beauty that wrecks a lot of movies and can be downright confusing. But Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton don't represent that problem at all. They carry on the old tradition of highly distinctive beauty. Yet, even within that tradition, there can be too close a resemblance.

And then there's that wonderful "Coffee and Cigarettes" scene where Cate Blanchett plays 2 different women who look and act entirely different. Snippet: