"Punks had earned a reputation for evil and expressed it in their outfits and in their music. But back then, within certain circles, evil was used colloquially as good."

"I was intrigued by the bad guys and wanted to see what happened when a woman photographed a man, as the opposite was the norm in those days."

Said Marcia Resnick, quoted in "Marcia Resnick, photographer of punk’s heyday, dies at 74/She also took photos of actor John Belushi before his fatal drug overdose" (WaP)(free-access link, so you can see the photographs).

There was also this 1978 book "Re-visions" — "an autobiographical book of photography exploring female adolescence... One image showed a loaf of bread held against a woman’s groin, with the accompanying text: 'She first learned the facts of life from a friend while on a class trip to the bread factory.'

"I would cry real tears of joy if I was drunk and a boy showed up [at a party] with homemade cinnamon bread."

Writes Nell — commenting on  a TikTok video — and it's "extremely validating" to the man who was treated as though he'd done something hopelessly weird.

"Still, the baguette is under threat..."

"... with the country losing 400 artisanal bakeries a year since 1970 — a decline that is especially significant in France’s rural areas, where supermarkets and chains have overtaken traditional mom-and-pop bakeries. To make matters worse — and in a sting to French pride — sales of hamburgers since 2017 have exceeded those of jambon-beurre, sandwiches made with ham on a buttered baguette."

 From "A Slice of France, the Baguette Is Granted World Heritage Status/More than six billion baguettes are sold every year in France. But the bread is under threat, with bakeries vanishing in rural areas" (NYT).

The article links to this 2007 discussion of the deep cultural meaning of bread: 

For Saturday, take a journey through 12 TikToks, arranged meaningfully... or so some people think.

1. Maybe you'll say "I remember the old pole."

2. London women who don't like American women are not too likable themselves.

3. How you would love it if your candidate were this loved.

4. A vertiginous ride.

5. A vertiginous walk.

6. The workhouse museum.

7. The meaning of life in eating your toast.

8. The butter board?!

9. Oh, Wisconsin!

10. When Anne Bancroft met Mel Brooks.

11. Saving a seal.

12. A dog carps about the stuck traffic.

"Despite the camp absurdity of her scenes, she is not a clown, and despite her nakedness, her work doesn’t straightforwardly concern..."

"... either masochism or self-love. Instead, fat stigma is toyed with, embodied, and satirized, sometimes through sexualized caricatures of gluttony. 'Good Morning' shows her—with her underpants pulled down and stuffed with a loaf (or more) of sliced white bread—holding a knife and a jar of Nutella.... A fat woman is by cultural default already an object of ridicule; inviting laughter by clenching a baguette between her legs, or ironing a pizza to her chest, could easily spin out of her control. Perhaps Susiraja’s blank affect is the key to her peculiar power to retain the upper hand. Indifference is one of the purest forms of defiance, but her disciplined impassivity, her refusal to cue the viewers’ reaction, is more than that. Her unwillingness to feed us meaning is more provocative, and disquieting, than an obvious dare, and it leaves a more lasting impression."

Writes Johanna Fateman, in "Iiu Susiraja’s Self-Portraits Are More Than a Dare/The photographer uses her own body without straightforward interest in either masochism or self-love" (The New Yorker). Lots of stunning/hilarious photos there. Perhaps a paywall will stop you, but here's her webpage. You can see the same photos there — and even more.

Wait. How do we know "she is not a clown"? It can't be the "blank affect." One of the prime ways of clowning is to do ridiculous things while maintaining a flat facial expression. There's a special and well-known word for it: deadpan.

The OED tips me off that "pan" was once American slang for "face" or "mouth." To quote "Great Comics" (1924): "Open yer pan afterwards about this and you'll be in stir for the next thousand years."

And I see that Nathanael West used "dead pan" in "Miss Lonelyhearts":

"The colors of our flag are intended to stand for unity, valor and justice. The gray, monochrome flag represents America surrendering..."

"... to its fall from power and loss of the ideals it once stood for. The American dream is being washed away."

Writes Na Kim at "REDESIGNING AMERICA’S FLAG/Six New Takes on Old Glory" (NYT). 

Here's her redesign:

Here's a webpage showing more work from Na Kim. She's mainly a book cover designer, but she's also been prominent in social media, including in this Instagram account Panolo Blahnik, which is photographs of shoes made of bread (or... should I say bread made into shoes?):

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Panolo Blahnik (@panolo_blahnik)

Take that into account as you decide how to understand the proffered flag.

"The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy."

"It is nature's joke.... Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask whence it is. It takes the laws of the world, whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws, that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth, and death. There revolve to give bound and period to his being, on all sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which impose new restraints on the young inhabitant. We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which blows around us, and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word, — these eat up the hours."

From "Prudence" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, stumbled across this morning after Emerson and comedy happened to pop up in one post, the previous post. It was just a haphazard sequence, not any connection between Emerson and comedy. So I went looking, on the theory that there was none. 

Hot from the oven at 5 a.m.

 

Meade made bread... for the second day in a row. He even milled the grains and seeds — wheat, oats, teff, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, sesame seeds. 

Teff?! I had never heard of it.

Eragrostis tef, also known as teff, Williams lovegrass or annual bunch grass, is an annual grass, a species of lovegrass native to the Horn of Africa, notably to modern-day Ethiopia. It is cultivated for its edible seeds, also known as teff.... The name teff is thought to originate from the Amharic word teffa, which means “lost”. This probably refers to its tiny seeds, which have a diameter smaller than 1 mm....

So teff was one of the seeds, not one of the grains? What is the difference between a grain and a seed? I realize I don't know. From the Wikipedia article "Grain": 

A grain is a small, hard, dry seed, with or without an attached hull or fruit layer, harvested for human or animal consumption.... Grains and cereal are synonymous with caryopses, the fruits of the grass family. In agronomy and commerce, seeds or fruits from other plant families are called grains if they resemble caryopses.

So teff is a grain (and a seed) and wheat is a seed (and a grain). It's good to know these terms and facts. Also good: Fresh Meade-made bread in the house!

"Thousands of videos quickly popped up using the audio, with people carrying, caring for and kissing loaves of bread. But they picked the wrong carbohydrate."

From "Mi pan, su su su: how a dancing llama and a nonsensical song captivated TikTok/Acoustic remix of Miel Pops Russian cereal jingle becomes a strange anthem for a stranger time" (The Guardian).

By the way, I knew all about this days ago — from sitting around gazing at TikTok! If you don't understand what's so lovable about TikTok, that article might help.

Frenchface again?!!

(If you missed yesterday's discussion of Frenchface, it's here.)

"They'll rue the day they made fun of these bad boys. Woe to those who make fun of the cargo shorts and then suddenly need some snacks, a multitool, a first-aid kit, or a Johnny Cash CD. Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more."

Said Brent Barden, quoted in "Family Gonna Be Sorry When They Want Some Trail Mix From Dad's Cargo Shorts They Just Made Fun Of" (in The Babylon Bee, which apparently has heard of my disparagement of it and decided to try to appeal to me by using my well-known "men in shorts" issue).

ADDED: "Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more." Care to rewrite that, Babylon Bee? It's a father, humorously addressing children, and you've unwittingly got him sort of threatening them with his genitalia! And that's right after he's talking about them getting into his pants to find something to eat. So ham-handed!

OH? You've got ham hands? Can I have a ham-hand sandwich, Dad?

HEY: A guy once did make a ham-hand sandwich of sorts...



WELL: That video sure made me laugh a lot. I'm ready to watch all videos by I Did a Thing. You know, there's no arguing with taste, especially in humor... and in bread gloves.

ALSO: "Mad respect for a man willing to strap a laundry basket to his back, put flippers on his hands, and get in a bathtub just to reenact a sea turtle getting a straw stuck in his nose and then slowly dying."

"I get a coffee, egg whites and a bowl of grits. I’m trying to cut out bread. Oh, I have one slice of buttered, whole-wheat bread with grape jelly."

"I go to a place across the street. It’s called Academy. Coffee, cream and three natural brown sugars. No more sugar for me."

From "How Spike Lee Spends His Sundays" (NYT).

There must be a Greek term for the rhetorical device he uses twice in that quote. I really enjoyed that. The Times has a regular feature on how somebody or other spends their Sunday. I enjoy the feature, but I especially like this Spike Lee one, because he doesn't fit their pattern, doesn't treat Sunday as special. The usual celebrity has some fussy Sunday particularity to it, and he so delightfully unspecial about Sunday: "I wake up, brush my teeth, take a shower, put my clothes on, and I go to work. It’s not like for me Sunday is the Sabbath. I got work to do."

How to eat like a medieval peasant.

It's pretty great:



And I learned that "potage" originally meant whatever you're cooking in a pot.

Throwed rolls.

I learned about the throwed rolls at Lambert's Cafe...



... from the Oxford English Dictionary, which has this in the sidebar today:

"Throwed" — unless you're talking about "throwed silk" — is "colloq. or nonstandard," the past tense of "throw," and one of the quotations selected by the OED is:

1995 Midwest Living Apr. 185/1 Fun family restaurant and home of ‘throwed rolls’ (for laughs, owner Norm Lambert tosses warm dinner rolls around the cafe to customers).

The oldest published use of the word the OED found is:

1861 H. M. G. Smythies Daily Governess I. xiii. 113 He was a selfish brute, and she a throwed-away angel.

"The internet has always been lawless, but the chaos of the Trump era has worsened online nastiness to the point where even I, a verifiably snarky internet writer..."

"... have grown sick of it all. Desperate for an antidote, I started dabbling in wholesome activities: bicycling, crossword puzzles, baking and writing in my journal. 'Oh no! You’re becoming a hippie,' my mother said after I informed her of my new hobbies. In these efforts to self-soothe, I made a life-changing discovery: Making sourdough bread is the opposite of using the internet...."

From a NYT essay by Eve Peyser, "I Wanted a Dog. I Bake Bread Instead." The headline highlights the dog/bread alternatives as opposed to the escape-from-the-internet theme. I'm guessing that's because dog gets hits... on the internet.

Anyway, I'm blogging this because of the mother's concept of "hippie" and the idea that it could include crossword puzzles. But I like the idea of the younger generation rediscovering the hippie lifestyle, especially if it's envisioned in positive ways — with "wholesome activities."

Also, this article fit with something else I was just reading, "In a divided U.S., therapists treating anxiety are hearing the same name over and over: Donald Trump/'Trump Anxiety Disorder' may not be an official diagnosis, but therapists know the symptoms" (Politico), which chimed with something I'd already blogged this morning, Trump himself using the term Trump derangement syndrome.

Isn't it interesting that therapists are seeing the reaction to Trump as a disorder?! And that Politico framed it that way.

Maybe mainstream media is noticing a lot of people who feel the way I do, that the antagonism to Trump is so over-the-top that it's weirder than Trump. We turn away... and toward the man we originally resisted because he was too weird.

I tried to find a picture of a hippie doing a crossword puzzle, but my search had the serendipitous effect of turning up this New Yorker humor piece from last February: "Former Hippies Put in Horrible Position of Rooting for F.B.I." ("'I always dreamed I’d spend my retirement surrounded by my grandchildren, telling them that the F.B.I. were fascist pigs,' Carol Foyler, a former hippie who lives in Santa Cruz, said. 'That dream has been shot to hell.'").

Trump, hitting back at Jeff Flake, calls him "Flake(y)."

Here's the tweet, which is funny for a few reasons:

Sen. Jeff Flake(y), who is unelectable in the Great State of Arizona (quit race, anemic polls) was caught (purposely) on “mike” saying bad things about your favorite President. He’ll be a NO on tax cuts because his political career anyway is “toast.”

The funniest thing about it to me is Trump calling himself "your favorite President." It's absolutely accurate, because he is our only President. I mean, you might try to write a screwball comedy — in the manner of "My Favorite Wife" — where some strange occurrence causes there to be 2 Presidents, but even if you think Hillary was cheated out of the presidency, there's no way she is the President. And if you try to say, but my favorite President is Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, I'm going to say it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

There's also some rock solid content. Flake has decided not to expose himself to an actual election process in Arizona, where a GOP incumbent should be able to win, and instead — with no judgment of the electorate to worry about — he's just speaking out against Trump. Flake's speaking has struck me as vain and attention-seeking, and the love he's getting from liberals would never translate into support in an actual political contest.

The "(purposely)" is funny, because who doesn't believe that Flake meant for his remark to be heard? Making it seem secret was a way to amplify it. That was my opinion and my favorite President agreed. Good. I also like that he used the "mike" spelling and not "mic." (Maybe Laurence Tribe will apply his massive brain to the question whether "mike" is a "distinctly Jewish" spelling.)

"Toast" is funny because "toast" popped up in Flake's open mike remark "If we become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast." So Trump is just flipping the insult back. Reminds me of "Puppet? No Puppet. You’re the Puppet" at that debate with Hillary:



It is childish, but Trump doesn't have time for longer statements.

And on a deeper, emotional level, "toast" is a warm, delicious word. Toast! We're toast! I love toast! Mmmm, toast! A toast to toast!

But what I really came here to opine about is the name-calling: Flake(y). Should a President be sticking names on everyone? I don't know but Trump doesn't do it to everyone. Only to those who hit him with a low blow. It is undignified, and I prefer the idea of going high when they go low, but that's not Trump. That's not what our favorite President does. (That's the name he's gotten me to start using for him. It's sticky.)

So let's move on to the question whether Flake(y) is a good name for Jeff Flake. "Flake" was already a funny name — already connoting flakiness — and Flake has lived and achieved with it. How can you make it more of an insult by adding "y"? Is it worse to be "flaky" than to be a "flake"? I think it's worse to be a flake, since it suggests it's the entirety of what you are as opposed to merely one of your attributes. (Reading the definition of "flaky/flakey" in the OED, I see that President Reagan called Qaddafi "flaky.")

But when I think about "Flakey," my first association is Flakey Foont!

Do you know what I'm talking about? Are you not up on Mr. Natural comics?

Mr. Natural has strange, magical powers and possesses cosmic insight; but he is also moody, cynical, self-pitying, and suffers from various strange sexual obsessions. He is endlessly being accosted by would-be disciples seeking the truth (among them such long-running Crumb characters as Flakey Foont and Shuman the Human). He typically regards them with amused condescension and a certain grudging affection, although his patience often wears thin and he takes sadistic pleasure in making them feel like idiots. While he is typically very cool and in control, he sometimes ends up in humiliating predicaments like languishing for years in a mental institution.

The really weird thing is thinking of Trump as Mr. Natural!

I really just wanted to know if Whole Foods has ciabatta today. They don't always have it.

I'm not confusing it with art, but I am a little confused about finding the answer to my question on the internet. I mean, my search found me this:

That's from "All The Houses: A Novel," by Karen Olsson.

"Though of course bread and butter are eaten all over, the buttered roll (or roll with butter, as it is known in parts of New Jersey) is a distinctly local phenomenon."

"Mention its name outside the New York metropolitan area and you would very likely be met with blank incomprehension."

From "Ode to the Buttered Roll, That New York Lifeline," by Sadie Stein (in the NYT).

I know this article is getting mocked — as if it's typical New York cluelessness about the people who don't live in New York, but I think the mockers are not really getting the way New Yorkers experience the buttered roll. My understanding is premised mostly on my experience working in midtown Manhattan offices in the 1970s, where a bell from the coffee wagon broke up the morning's work. Something about the small array of items got me tracked into eating the completely nondescript buttered Kaiser roll that came in a waxed paper sandwich bag. (Stein calls it "wax paper." I'm not that much of New Yorker. I say "waxed paper," since it's real paper with wax on it, not paper somehow composed of wax, but I'm not going to fight about it, because I'm not a native New Yorker. I don't like to fight for the sake of fighting. I'm just saying it's not "wax paper." I also don't say "piece fruit," for "piece of fruit," but I've lived around New Yorkers who did.) Anyway, in my experience, the buttered roll in New York is a specific thing and a weird thing, precisely because it is too ordinary to be considered a specific rather than a generic thing, but it really is. I think elsewhere people would look at this as an empty sandwich, a failure to add baloney or cheese or something. What is this?

And why is a Kaiser roll called a Kaiser roll?

"As much as university administrators lament student-led intolerance and narrow ideas about free speech, they played a roll in their creation."

The editors at USA Today — which I got to via Instapundit — make a good point, while protecting their credibility within mainstream media with staunch anti-Trumpism, e.g., "Campus protesters are right that President Trump's America-first nationalism is a grave threat to many Americans. But unfettered First Amendment rights are the answer to the threat, not its cause."

But come on... "they played a roll..." If the editors of a newspaper are going to purport to instruct the plebes on what they ought to believe, they ought to take care at every moment that they are — in the most fundamental sense — editors.

Played a roll... I remember when Johnny Depp played a roll in "Benny and Joon"... played 2 rolls, actually, just got them out of the breadbasket, stuck forks in them, and made them do a little dance:



I've also seen actors play 2 roles, e.g., Patty Duke playing Patty and her cousin Cathy on the old "Patty Duke Show." I've even seen actors play 3 roles. Indeed, I've seen Peter Sellers play 3 roles twice. He was Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in "Dr. Strangelove," and Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, and Tully Bascombe in "The Mouse That Roared." He also played 3 roles in "The Prisoner of Zenda" — Rudolf IV, Rudolf V, and Syd Frewin — but I haven't seen that. And I've also not seen "Soft Beds, Hard Battles" (AKA "Undercovers Heroes"), which takes the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen. In that one, he played 6 roles — Général Latour, Major Robinson, Herr Schroeder, Prince Kyoto, The President, and Adolf Hitler.



Speaking of cake and free speech, what about cake makers who won't write what customers want on their cake? I'm seeing this story — about ShopRite's refusal to put a 3-year-old child's name on a birthday cake. The father said: "There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change. They need to accept a name. A name's a name." The year was 2008, the new President was Barack Obama, and the 3-year old was Adolf Hitler Campbell.

UPDATE: USA Today has corrected the roll/role mixup, and Instapundit has corrected it on his post as well. 

IN THE COMMENTS: I get very involved in the question whether Chaplin — in the scene Depp paid homage to — used rolls or potatoes. I would have used the Chaplin clip if I'd thought Chaplin used rolls, but I'd always seen them as potatoes. This is me in the comments:

1. "'Depp's "roll" playing is a rip from (or homage to) Chaplin's doing the same thing in THE GOLD RUSH' [wrote Robert Cook]"/Yes, I know, but I couldn't use Chaplin here, because Chaplin used potatoes."

2. "Here's Chaplin with the potatoes. Of course, it's better than what Depp did, but Depp was good as a guy who tried to be like Chaplin. Or am I wrong? Is Chaplin using dinner rolls? Now, I have to look it up. I think Depp's use of rolls has caused people to see Chaplin as using rolls. I think it was potatoes!"

3. "Watch Curly do it at 15:48 in 'Pardon My Scotch.'"

4. "In the Chaplin scene, the woman on the right clearly has a potato on her plate. Is that causing me to perceive Chaplin as spearing potatoes on his forks when in fact he's got dinner rolls? But why would they pose the potato on the woman's plate like that if not to orient the viewer to understand what the relevant items are?"

5. "Or am I wrong about that being a potato on the woman's plate. It looks like a split-open baked potato, but on further viewing, I'm willing to believe it's one of those dinner rolls that are baked after cutting a slit across the top."

6. "Okay, this convinces me that those were rolls, not potatoes. Also, Chaplin wasn't first. He got it from Fatty Arbuckle. (Video at the link.)"

Translating the Lord's prayer into a language with no word for bread: "Give us this day our daily seal."

From an article that's not at all mostly about language or bread or prayer, "GREENLAND IS MELTING/The shrinking of the country’s ice sheet is triggering feedback loops that accelerate the global crisis. The floodgates may already be open" by Elizabeth Kolbert:

Nuuk sits on the southwest coast. It was founded in the early eighteenth century by a Danish-Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede, and for most of its existence was known as Godthåb. When Egede arrived, he discovered that the native people had neither bread nor a word for it, so he translated the line from the Lord’s Prayer as “Give us this day our daily seal.” Today, a giant statue of Egede presides over Nuuk much the way Christ the Redeemer presides over Rio.

I recommend the article for its main topic too, but I wanted to break out that translation question that interested me so much. I'd like to see other examples of translating the Bible for people with no word for bread. Bread is important in the Bible, as a food and as a metaphor. Jesus calls himself "the bread of life." Did that become "the seal of life" in Greenland? That hints at another question: Does comfort with metaphor vary from one language to another?