Why is "Paint It Black" the most-played Rolling Stones song on Spotify?

Look, it has over 1.7 billion streams. The next most played Stones song — "Satisfaction" — has only 940 million.

I think it's the non-Boomers, discovering it through movies and TV and video games and TikTok. Here's a link to see the 180,000+ TikTok videos that use the recording. It seems quite popular with aviation (for males) and the wearing of black clothing (for females). And then there are tattoos:

8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trump. Even if Trump had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

What did Elon Musk mean by "I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA!"

I saw this in real time in the live feed from Saturday's Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and I thought he might just be referring to his black clothing and his black-on-black Make-America-Great-Again cap.

And then I thought it might be a slang use of "dark" as in "Dark Brandon." Remember that? Wikipedia says:

The phrase "Dark Brandon" was initially a meme created by online progressives to parody supporters of "Dark MAGA", a belief promoted by former U.S. representative Madison Cawthorn that former president Trump would return to power "with a vengeance."  It copies the "fashwave" aesthetic used initially by online supporters of figures like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis....

So Dark MAGA preceded Dark Brandon. 

Remember Madison Cawthorn?

Railing against "the cowardly and weak members of our own party," Cawthorn wrote [in May 2022]: "It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." "Dark MAGA" references a fringe movement advocating a vengeful return of Trumpism.

With that background, why would Elon Musk choose to horse around with the phrase "Dark MAGA"? Could he be seriously connecting to the Cawthorn meaning?

In discussions of Elon Musk's recent declaration, I'm seeing various sources that discuss the 2022 use of the phrase, so let me just select one to quote: "Dark MAGA: Will It All End Here?" by David Levi Strauss (in The Brooklyn Rail, which seems like an interesting publication, around since 2000, but only just noticed by me today).

"[U]nlike everyone else, [Melania] was not wearing black...."

"[She wore a] gray tweed coat with a voluminous skirt, structured and tightly belted. It was reminiscent of the protective clothing, as well as the luxury labels, that became her signature during the Trump administration. The color and the style made her stand out, made her look a part of the pageantry but not of it. And they made the choice seem like a symbol — a sign, perhaps, of Mrs. Trump’s historic ambivalence toward the role of first lady and her reluctance to play to the expectations that surround it, as well as her husband’s norm-trampling tendencies...."

Writes Vanessa Friedman, in "Rare Gathering of Former First Ladies Shows Style, and Subtle/Differences United (mostly) in black, their differences were in the details" (NYT).

Notice that Friedman's description is not a criticism of Melania. It's respectful.

"Many of the changes to Dahl’s books seem minor: 'I’d knock her flat' becomes the much more diplomatic 'I’d give her a right talking to,' for instance."

"'You saucy beast!' becomes 'You trickster!' Other changes are just patronising. The Witches once imagined a woman 'working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.' Now she might be 'working as a top scientist or running a business.' Are there no women cashiers now? Rather than going  white as a shee,' the Queen’s maid in The BFG now goes 'still as a statue.' Dahl can’t even poke fun at a tortoise any more. In Esio Trot, tortoises can only read backwards because they are 'very backwards creatures.' How rude! Now they can only read backwards ... just because. And when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set out on their tractors to destroy the foxes’ home once and for all in Fantastic Mr Fox, the animals once noted in terror that 'The machines were black. They were murderous, brutal-looking monsters.' The tractors are no longer black, just in case a fox was being racist."

Writes Laura Hackett, in "Censoring Roald Dahl? I’ll be keeping my original copies/The author’s books have been edited for fear of offending. Kids should be allowed to read them in their full, nasty, colourful glory" (London Times).

I already blogged about this travesty yesterday. I'm blogging again because this has new examples of the awful wreckage.

"I saw that it wasn’t the black that made the picture come alive but the light reflected on the black surfaces... The light was... coming from the color that is the greatest absence of light."

Said Pierre Soulages, quoted in "Pierre Soulages, Leading French Abstract Painter, Dies at 102 Once called 'the world’s greatest living artist,' Mr. Soulages was best known for exploring the possibilities of the color black" (NYT).

 For more than four decades, Mr. Soulages worked every possible variation on black in an evolving series of paintings he called “outrenoir,” or “beyond black,” sometimes using spoons or small rakes to create new textures in his thick slabs of paint and evoke subtle effects of color and light.

"She was wearing a head piece made of Vantablack, the blackest black that anything could be."

"There was only one person who noticed and that was Stephen Colbert. On the back of my tuxedo jacket — which was sort of like an inverted priest jacket with the jacket being white and the collar being black — I had in big, black, gothic script, 'Novus ordo seclorum.'"

Said Elon Musk, describing how he met Grimes, the mother of his newest baby. He's quoted in "Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss/The billionaire space oddity on life with Grimes and Baby X, Trump, Tesla, tunnels, short shorts, stock surges, Facebook fumbles and everything else under the sun" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"Old Sacred Feather building covered in black paint in violation of city rules."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

Steve Manley, who owns B-Side Records across the street from the building, said workers on Tuesday had the painting “all done in a couple hours, and I just could not believe my eyes. It was a beautiful and natural stone and brick facade... A lot of people are upset about it.”...

A man doing work inside the building on Wednesday afternoon declined to provide his name but said there had been a “miscommunication” with painters, who thought they were supposed to paint the outside as well as the inside of the building. The inside was also painted mostly black.

It's hard to understand how such a miscommunication could happen. Go to the link to see the shocking before/during/after pictures of this classic old building.

It's bad enough that the great old hat store is gone. In happier times:



The new tenant is, we're told, a coffee shop.

Life in black.

Burger King promotes a "scary black" product.

Amazingly tone deaf, BK. The full name of the product is "Scary Black Cherry." I would never have used "scary black" in a product name. I don't know if anyone is criticizing the product on the racial insensitivity. I am seeing:

The “scary black cherry” slushy at Burger King might just give you two Halloween thrills for the price of one. Of course, that depends on how you feel about drinking something that might turn your poop bright blue or neon green.

TheReportOfTheWeek actually drinks the stuff. He tests whether it does what it says it will do: "If this doesn't turn my tongue black and make it look like it's just dead and, you know, full-on necrosis has set in, I'm going to be quite upset":



If I google the phrase "scary black" right now, the whole front page of hits is about the Burger King beverage. So I added "race" to my search and — that guy is everywhere — the top 3 hits are about Trump:

A pigment that "we think is the blackest material in the universe, after a black hole."

Writing about Anish Kapoor — in that post about "The Bean" and "The Clenched Fist of Truth" — got me to an article that reminded me that I need to write about the death of Stephen Hawking. I'm going to write about Hawking in the next post, but first I want to read this 2016 Guardian article "'You could disappear into it': Anish Kapoor on his exclusive rights to the 'blackest black'/Artist defends controversial deal with developers of Vantablack, the blackest material ‘after a black hole.'"

The pigment is comprised of microscopic stems of colour that are 300 times as tall as they are wide, so that about 99.6% of all light “just gets trapped in the network of standing segments”, he explains. “It’s literally as if you could disappear into it.” The pigment was being developed for scientific and military use due to its “masking ability”....

But when Kapoor won exclusive rights to the material in February, it came with backlash from the artistic community. “I’ve never heard of an artist monopolising a material,” the artist Christian Furr told the Daily Mail. “All the best artists have had a thing for pure black – Turner, Manet, Goya … This black is like dynamite in the art world. We should be able to use it. It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.”

Kapoor defended his exclusive use of the material: “Why exclusive? Because it’s a collaboration, because I am wanting to push them to a certain use for it. I’ve collaborated with people who make things out of stainless steel for years and that’s exclusive.” He believes much of the debate comes down to emotion. “The problem is that colour is so emotive – especially black ... I don’t think the same response would occur if it was white.”

Kapoor, who has had two decades of psychotherapy, said it’s the “psycho side” of black that makes us want to possess it. “Perhaps the darkest black is the black we carry within ourselves,” he says. “It’s not the night where you switch the lights off – it’s the night where you close your eyes. There’s a psycho side to blackness that we don’t associate with other colours readily. I suspect red does the same. I’ve worked with red a great deal, for not dissimilar reasons.”

A psycho side to blackness.... That sounds wrong, but he's an artist; what does he have to do with politics? Read in that post about "The Bean" and "The Clenched Fist of Truth" and find out.

Can you own a color? You can have a color as a trademark (like UPS has brown), but obviously Kapoor can't own "the blackest black." But what he got was a particular substance, a pigment, that allows black to be seen in way that reflects no light at all. There's a distinction between pigment and color. Color is what is perceived in your brain when light enters your eye. Pigment is stuff that light can hit before bouncing into your eye.

ADDED: Also missed by me back in 2016, the maker of the "pinkest pink" retaliated against Kapoor for hogging the Vantablack:

To keep Kapoor away from PINK, buyers of the paint were asked to sign a legal declaration at checkout to ensure that the artist and his associates would not be able to buy it for him.

And here's Kapoor's response:

“I will never be finished. It will take me the rest of my life to finish my studies but I am dedicating the rest of my life to body modification and perfecting my work."

Says Eli Ink, 27, who to my eye seems damned close to finished:

Work do tonight 😀

A post shared by Eli (@eliinkpiercer) on Jan 5, 2018 at 10:59am PST

Running out of space, it seems.

But isn't there a "blackface" problem he failed to take account of? [ADDED: He is white. See: here.]

“In my opinion, the only person who will only ever understand my transition properly is me. I don’t attempt to describe it to anyone... I’ve always been blown away by art itself. Picasso is a huge childhood inspiration to me, especially abstract art, but I do like all forms of art. Body art was just the next local step for me growing up. I wanted to look like an abstract character in one of Picasso’s paintings. I love the abstract look, no thought, just pure expression.”

Picasso? Doesn't he mean Ad Reinhardt?

In the last ten years of his life, Reinhardt focused solely on square, black paintings....In 1961, Reinhardt described them.... "A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man's outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no–contrasting (colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free–hand, painted surface (glossless, textureless, non–linear, no hard-edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings—a pure, abstract, non–objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self–conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti–art)."

Big and small: compare all those glamorous actresses in black at the Golden Globes to this one woman.

Another woman without her headscarf waves a shawl in Tehran as part of #WhiteWednesday’s protest against compulsory hijab. #IranProtest
تهران به ياد دختر روي سكوي انقلاب. همراهيم با #تظاهرات_سراسرى#چهارشنبه_های_سفید #نه_به_حجاب_اجباری pic.twitter.com/7MPgHUUbfM

— My Stealthy Freedom (@masihpooyan) January 10, 2018

"We actresses are not just modeling clothing when we walk a red carpet on award show night. We are modeling a kind of behavior."

"We are speaking in a coded language to other women — even young girls — that says: The way I look and what I wear and how I wear it is the standard for women. What is being worn is not an exception. It is the rule. You must dress a certain way and look a certain way if you want to be valued as a woman, no matter what you do for a living or who you are. We never intend for this to be the message we are sending with what we wear, but often it is the perceived one, whether we like it or not."

If is not the message you intend to convey, then you are not speaking.

The writing is by the actress Amber Tamblyn, published in the NYT as the Golden Globes are about to happen this evening. The plan tonight, which Tamblyn supports, is for all the women to wear black. I'm going to watch to see how that works out. I'm not sure that everyone wearing the same color is the best way to send whatever the message is supposed to be, but Tamblyn says:

What we are wearing is not a statement of fashion. It is a statement of action. It is a direct message of resistance. Black because we are powerful when we stand together with all women across industry lines. Black because we’re starting over, resetting the standard. Black because we’re done being silenced and we’re done with the silencers. Tonight is not a mourning. Tonight is an awakening.

So that is the message that Tamblyn intends to convey, but is it the message every woman who feels disciplined into wearing black wants to send? Is it the message that will be received? Tamblyn tries to preempt one meaning of black clothing: mourning. But she just got done saying that unintended messages are "often... perceived... whether we like it or not."

She doesn't want to be controlled, but she aims to control us, the audience, but she knows she can't. Moviemakers show us images, and there is complexity to the meaning. You can't force us to see the images in a particular, controlled way, even in the most carefully made film. So it is clearly impossible to dictate the impact that will be made by giant crowd of actresses in black and by individual actresses within that crowd.

I'll watch with an open mind.

How can anyone know? Who is enforcing this? Will no woman take advantage of the redly ripe opportunity to be different?

"'All female actresses attending the Globes are protesting by just wearing black gowns,' a source tells PEOPLE."

Remember what the greatest actress of all time did when she was under pressure to wear the right color:

"Zeus and Achilles were 'almost a religion' to him; how could the 'insipid blackness of the Episcopalian Church'—the faith of fashionable Boston—compete with the 'whoring of Zeus and the savagery of the heroes?'"

Wrote 19-year-old Robert Lowell to 51-year-old Ezra Pound in 1936, according to this New Yorker review of a book about Lowell. Lowell was trying to ingratiate himself to Pound, trying to convince the old poet to let him "come to Italy and work under you and forge my way into reality." What on earth would you say to try to seem like a poet worthy of an internship with another poet? Lowell also said:

I had violent passions for various pursuits usually taking the form of collecting: tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc; buying books on Napoleon... I caught over thirty turtles and put them in a well where they died of insufficient feeding....

I was looking for that passage — having heard it yesterday on the audio version of The New Yorker — and I happened to run into this other article which has some similar material: "The Sage of Yale Law School." The "sage" is Anthony Kronman, who's got a new book, "an eleven-hundred-page exploration of his personal theology, called 'Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan'":

Kronman’s book... explains the Greek view of life, as it was expressed by Aristotle; then he describes the Judeo-Christian view, as espoused by Augustine and Aquinas; finally, he explores atheism. In each case, he shows why the best possible version of each world view is unsatisfying. He concludes that “born-again paganism”—a theology of his own invention, holding that God and the world are the same—is the only truly convincing way to understand our place in the universe....

Kronman sees born-again paganism as inherently democratic. It “divinizes the distinctiveness of every individual,” he writes.... His ideas about divinity seem, at times, more poetic than religious; toward the end of the book, he devotes many pages to Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens....

Poets... but what about Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound? Neither are mentioned in "Confessions," and though I haven't scanned the 1100 pages — I've only used the "search inside this book" function at Amazon — I take it that Kronman's "paganism" has nothing to do with the whoring of Zeus and the savagery of the heroes. He also doesn't mention Episcopalians and their — as Lowell would have it — "insipid blackness."

"Sorry to offend the black-stretch-pants women of America with a little color."

Said Kellyanne Conway, responding to all the snark about her Inauguration Day getup.

Her response doesn't at all deal with what weirded people out about the costume. And she took an unnecessary swipe at all the ordinary women who resort to black stretch pants to ease and simplify their lives.

ADDED: For completely the opposite of black stretch pants and Kellyanne's regalia, look at the Guo Pei Spring 2017 Couture Collection. Scroll all the way through before fixing on an opinion. I began completely dubious but ended as a true believer.

AND: When she picked out her clothes, Kellyanne had to know that she was giving everyone — haters and lovers and all in between — a big opportunity for some great snarky fun. She's in on the fun, even with quoted insult above (which doesn't work too well because it's not aimed squarely at the pop culture elite, since black stretch pants are a go-to choice for all sorts of women).

"Yeah, I don't think we're in New Testament or Old Testament, we're like in Dante's Inferno, we're in the seventh circle of Hell..."

Raved David Brooks on "Meet the Press" today. He looked weirdly wild-eyed. What set him off that badly?

The moderator Chuck Todd had brought up Trump's response to Khizr Khan — "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention, am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq War, not me." — and Doris Kearns Goodwin had recycled her idea that the question is "temperament" and Alex Castellanos seemed to think he was improving on that by saying "it's a choice between temperament and character." Castellanos honed his utterly dull distinction by redoing it as New Testament/Old Testament:

You know, is it a New Testament election where things are going swimmingly and we turn the other cheek? Or is this an Old Testament election where we could lose it all and an eye for an eye?

I keep hearing all these Trump antagonists portraying Trump as "dark," but calling someone dark is dark, and Brooks looked way too psyched about Hell. Meanwhile, Khizr Khan was on CNN declaring that Trump is "a black soul":

"He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country," Khan said. "The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief -- that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul."

The artist Chuck Close "used to love all-white minimalist spaces," which were "perfect for my black-and-white Sol LeWitt paintings and other contemporary pieces."

"Then I started collecting portraits by old masters from the 1300s to the 1600s."

It didn’t take long to realize I couldn’t hang those paintings on white walls. They looked stupid. Visually, white was too harsh a backdrop.

Based on the colors on the walls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he picked a "totally dead" — no sheen — red that his girlfriend-now-wife Sienna compared to "dried blood." She agreed to it on the condition that she could paint the bedroom black — a "greenish black."

When the two rooms were done, I actually loved the bedroom and she loved the living room. In the green-black bedroom, the wall-mounted flat-screen TV seems to disappear and our tall green mother-in-law-tongue plants look lifelike. Sienna put up one of her green paintings and it looks so vivid, almost fluorescent. The room even seems larger now, and the dark color puts me to sleep instantly at night.

In the living room, the seven old masters on the walls look at home. The red doesn’t make the space seem like a European drawing room. There’s no crown molding and our furniture is modern... We also have a minimalist gas fireplace made of polished gray cement. So the room’s design is still pretty severe....

Before I painted the living room red, we never went in there. I used to roll through it traveling from the kitchen to the den or the bedroom. Now we eat only in there.... Now I notice the reds in the portraits that I hadn't seen before, as though they had been hiding until the red walls brought them out.

First the art, then the wall color, then the effect of the wall color on the color in the art and on the way you sleep and eat.

"In such situations, it is not ever an animal’s 'fault' — it is the dog-owner’s fault, of course."

"Seeing a dog-owner with a massive dog, we are likely to think that the dog-owner is enjoying his spurious power: he can cause extreme suffering, if he wishes to, and so we must be grateful that he is reining in his animal, which would love to bark and rush at us. A dog is an expression of its owner’s fantasy-self—perhaps?"

Says Joyce Carol Oates, explaining her story "Mastiff," which begins:

Earlier, on the trail, they’d seen it. The massive dog. Tugging at its master’s leash, so that the young man’s calves bulged with muscle as he fought to hold the dog back. Grunting what sounded like “Damn, Rob-roy! Damn dog!” in a tone of exasperated affection.

Mastiff... massive... master...

Rob-Roy?

Robert Roy MacGregor (Scottish Gaelic: Raibeart Ruadh MacGriogair; baptised 7 March 1671 – 28 December 1734), usually known simply as Rob Roy or alternately Red MacGregor, was a famous Scottish folk hero and outlaw of the early 18th century, who is sometimes known as the Scottish Robin Hood. Rob Roy is anglicised from the Gaelic Raibeart Ruadh, or Red Robert. (He had red hair, Ruadh being Gaelic for red-haired, though it darkened to auburn in later life.)

Names. What does it mean to name the dog Rob-Roy? Oates's scary mastiff isn't even red. He's black.

We were out on the north shore of Lake Mendota the other day with our borrowed black dog named Zeus. Along came another black Lab. "What's his name?" we ask, and the man says, "Thor."

Seeing a dog-owner with a massive dog, we are likely to think that the dog-owner is enjoying his spurious power....

I google for an image of the god Thor, and Google autocompletes to Thoreau...