"Your need for approval is like a sickness."

A gem of meaning at 3:14 in this video of the opening of the Oscars show last night.

Not having seen the movies, I experienced this noisy cluttered barrage of vignettes as ugly chaos. It reminded me — with jarring pokes and jabs — why I don't want to see new movies anymore. Why was Conan in overdone makeup that made him look like a very ugly woman? Why did animated Conan develop stars in his eyes for 3 adolescent girls? Why were children screaming and chasing him? He stops for a moment to speak Norwegian and examine whether his need for approval is like a sickness and then the children screaming chase him out of the psychoanalytic dark Norwegian room. It's back to the noisy cluttered barrage that is Hollywood as Conan runs into the theater. I don't know what movie those children were supposed to represent, so I was just thinking generically of Hollywood's exploitation of children. How did the children become the monsters? Or were they running from monsters and Conan running with them, not away from them? At least tell a clear story. But no, I think this years stories were about chaos and raw fear and uncomprehended monsters. 

What are we seeing here? A dying party's last gasps?

Link to the London Times: here.

Excerpt: "As he told Vogue last July, 'I’m a fun, wacky guy. I’m a silly goose.' Take one look at his bizarre Instagram page... or his X account... and you’ll agree with that. Schlossberg often spends his time shirtless, talking about people’s looks. He has pondered Jesus Christ’s body type. He has commented on his own resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. He has wondered out loud whether Usha Vance is 'way hotter' than his grandmother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.And then there’s the video he posted this week. Donning a blonde wig and speaking in a Slavic accent, he pretended to be Melania Trump as he performed a 'dramatic reading' of her recent letter to Vladimir Putin about the welfare of Ukrainian children. On Tuesday he posted again as Melania, saying he would 'be going live, answering all of your questions on my show tonight.'"

And yes, I see what Gavin Newsom is doing. Suddenly, everybody's a comedian. 

"The Defense Department is withdrawing the nomination of Rear Adm. Michael 'Buzz' Donnelly... under whose command drag performances took place on board the USS Ronald Reagan."

The Daily Wire reports.

Donnelly served as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier from April 2016 to September 2018, during which time Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley performed as a drag queen under the name “Harpy Daniels” at a department-sanctioned “Morale, Welfare, and Recreation” event on the aircraft carrier.

Harpy Daniels? Is that like Stormy Daniels? Was it political commentary? Political commentary of the anti-Trump kind?

I don't know but drag in the Navy was right there in "South Pacific," the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein musical based on a James A. Michener's 1947 book "Tales of the South Pacific."

Who can forget "Honey Bun," the sailor with grass-skirt hair and a coconut bra, performing in front of a huge Navy audience?

America, when did you become so repressive?

'Cause we're a having so much fun with Honey Bun... not anymore.

"Trump never attended the Kennedy Center’s annual gala event during his first term, as artists protested his administration and threatened to boycott Kennedy Center events at the White House."

"Now Trump is making clear that he will not be sidelined again from the most celebrated cultural institution in Washington. 'The attitude is different this time. The attitude is Go fuck yourself,' said one of the people familiar with the planning. 'It’s ridiculous for four years for Trump and Melania to say, "We’re not going to the Kennedy Center because Robert De Niro doesn’t like us."' (De Niro was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009 and spoke at the 2024 event.)"

From "Trump Takes Over the Kennedy Center/The president intends to replace members of the institution’s board as he adopts a more aggressive approach toward the arts" (The Atlantic). 

At Truth Social, Trump writes:

"You might recall the epic 2008 Beijing opening ceremony, which showcased the four great Chinese inventions: the compass, gunpowder, paper, and typesetting."

"This one in Paris, put up last Friday, celebrated analogous French contributions like threesomes, the Minions franchise, and dressing like a clown...."

Begins Suzy Weiss, in "Was the Opening Ceremony Demonic, or Just Cringe? Don’t feel bad for Christians—feel bad for the French" (Free Press).

Ha ha. Very well put.

"Boebert famously campaigned against drag story hours, while Noem wrote to South Dakota’s college board asking it to ban campus drag shows...."

"Yet these women express themselves via a dizzying mash-up of gendered conventions: They augment their smiles, bedazzle their pantsuits, and broadcast their bench presses. In their fevered performances of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity, so many of the GOP’s most visible women are themselves engaging in a form of drag. Of course, drag in its queer context offers the chance to slip from and send up the constricting bounds of gender norms, to encourage empathy and celebrate diverse forms of identity. The show these Republican politicians are putting on is its cold opposite: asphyxiated, distended, nasty. Theirs is surely drag’s gothic inverse."

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "How Did Republican Women End Up Like This? The baffling, contradictory demands of being female in the party of Donald Trump" (NY Magazine).

Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

"Leaning back slowly in my chair, I pictured myself as my lover, a cisgender man, talking to a woman dressed to receive him as I always have: pretty dress, light makeup, underwear off as a little surprise."

"It was taxing, this switch of roles, a kind of spiritual gymnastics. But the expansion in my body felt great — the open legs, arms and gestures — suggesting how much I usually compressed myself." 

Writes Maxine Swann in "Why I Dress (and Act) Like a Man/Tired of being deferential to men in my relationships, I decided to create my own drag king persona" (NYT).

“It’s all in good fun. If you’re taking it like that, then that’s a you problem. Not an us problem."

Said Kelly Autorina, "a longtime parade veteran" and "'huge supporter' of drag," quoted in "NYC Pride Parade revelers sound off on controversial Drag March chant: 'Just adding fuel to the fire'" (NY Post).

The chant was "We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!"

Of course, it was satire. The question is whether it's too cruel — or impolitic — to satirize the fear that drag performers are trying to sexualize children. 

The linked article ends with this quote from Jimmie O’Brien, "a 66-year-old gay man from NYC: "I think humor is the truth that breaks everything. When humor comes out, that’s where inspiration comes from. When it doesn’t come out, it’s repressed. And then it comes out as anger." 

And yet we no longer feel free to openly mock gay people (something that was routine in mainstream speech and entertainment a few decades ago). And it's certainly not a generally understood social norm that the person who says something "in good fun" can brush off anyone who takes offense at their fun. 

But laughing at your opponents is a tactic. "We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!" is very funny in the Drag March context. But when you're in a larger social/political battle, you've got to consider how that will look clipped out. 

"I think the biggest misconception is that we are making fun of gender, or somehow romanticizing gendered clichés."

"In my experience, drag is mostly about emotion, story, and beauty. The gendered aspect is simply a stage, a gesture that helps free the performer and the viewer from the supposedly realistic limitations on the world 'as it is,' helping us step into the realm of fantasy. Sometimes, the character we create in drag is more authentic, more personal, more real that what we are allowed to be in our day-to-day.... I first created Sasha Velour as a comic character, and slowly became that illustration in real life, too. Comics and drag share the same idea: you take a good story, clear character design, and put in lots of hard work.... Both comics and drag come from strong independent traditions that enable artists and performers to develop a more unique and recognizable style, and to address a wider range of political and personal topics. All you need to make art is your own self."

Says Sasha Velour, interviewed in "Sasha Velour’s 'The Look of Pride'/The artist discusses gender, self-expression, and how drag can be an antidote to shame" (The New Yorker).

"Our community is concerned with performative allyship, but we believe this is very sincere."

Said Sister Unity, a co-founder of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, quoted in "Dodgers apologize and invite Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Pride Night" (Yahoo).

I'm concerned with performative declarations of sincerity. 

"Drag is a job. Drag is a legitimate artistic expression that brings people together, that entertains, that allows certain individuals to explore who they are..."

"... and allows all of us to have a very nice time. So it makes literally no sense for legislators, for people in government, to try to ban drag."

Said culture and gender studies professor Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, author of "Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance," quoted in  "As Tennessee, others target drag shows, many wonder: Why?" (AP News).

I found that after struggling to read "Tennessee curbs trans treatment and drag for children" (BBC):

They made a Broadway musical out of the movie "Some Like It Hot," and some say they made it too "woke."

Spoiler alert for the movie and the musical. In the movie, when Jack Lemmon takes his wig off and announces he's a guy, the man who fell in love with him says "Well, nobody's perfect." Famous ending for a famous movie. In the new musical, in the same situation, the last line is "You're perfect."

But that's not all, as the Guardian critic, Alexis Soloski writes: 

Are drag queens not dangerous?

I'm reading "I’m a drag queen. Here’s what my art really is" by Sasha Velour.

Drag is about self-expression without shame, and free thinking about others — about showing respect and care for everyone and for all the ways we present ourselves. It’s at once illuminating and not particularly serious; in drag, we playfully reject our assumptions about how a man or a woman “should” act so we can find our own ways of being. And drag, certainly, is nothing dangerous.... 

"The Drag Queen Story Hour website describes the program as 'just what it sounds like - drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores.'"

"'DQSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.'"

From "Proud Boys storm drag queen event for children at Bay Area library, deputies say" (ABC7 News).

"The men made homophobic and transphobic remarks against a member of the LGTBQ+ community who was hosting the event," [Alameda County Sheriff's Dept. Lt. Ray Kelly] wrote in an email. "There was no physical violence. Deputies responded to the disturbance and are conducting follow up to identify the group of men and their affiliation....We will initiate our hate crime protocol and will also address the annoying and harassing of children. More details to follow.... The men were reported to be members of the Proud Boys organization."

"I was raised on Proverbs and pushups... I subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs... I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

"I think if you think about my political ideology, where it really stems from, you know, my ethics and my morals and what I think is right and wrong, you look to ancient Jerusalem, you got ancient Judeo-Christian values. So right and wrong... I also cling to a lot of traditional values and a lot of traditional ideas, because they’ve worked in the past."

"I think that we have bred a generation of soft men and that generation has created a lot of problems in our society and our culture... designed to reclaim and restore masculinity in a society that is ever more dismissive of what it means to be a man."

Those are quotes from Madison Cawthorn, from 2020 and 2021, presented by Politico in an effort to shame him over 2 photographs that show him in what looks like a party setting and wearing women's lingerie, in "Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie in public setting/The embattled congressman has outraged Republican colleagues with accusations of orgies and drug use." 

Cawthorn is running for reelection and has a lot of rivals. After Politico published this exposé, Cawthorn responded the photos are from some game show on a cruise ship: "I guess the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) is going to somehow hurt me? They’re running out of things to throw at me... Share your most embarrassing vacay pics in the replies."

Cawthorn asks to be treated the same as any other politician with an embarrassing old photograph. But if he's made the masculinity of men a core political value, a photo of him in women's clothes is a different problem for him than it would be for a politician who eagerly embraces an ideology of gender fluidity. 

But I would say that within the tradition of distinct gender roles, there has long been playful cross-dressing. It's perceived as comical precisely because you believe in the immutability of the 2 sexes. That's what's going on in the great movie comedy "Some Like It Hot" — with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis trying to pass as female in the presence of Marilyn Monroe. Old-time television with Milton Berle and Flip Wilson in drag isn't  hilarious because they were displaying any inner femininity but because people saw them as obvious men wearing women's clothes.

"Back in 2005, there was a very specific incident that had made Chappelle realise his comedy might be harmful. In a sketch he considered to be ironic..."

"... he was dressed in blackface and dancing, when he heard the loud echo of a white man’s laughter reverberate across the set. To Chappelle, this was evidence that his satire wasn’t working: regardless of his intention, some people felt he was giving them the green light to laugh at an oppressed minority. Over 15 years later, The Closer confirms that Chappelle is no closer to remedying his original problem. After all, he is still drawing out mean-spirited laughs from a crowd – the difference is that the laughs are now at the expense of another marginalised group."

 
From "Meet the new Dave Chappelle – misogynistic, anti-trans and socially irresponsible/Gags about killing women, declaring himself ‘Team Terf’ – the comedian who once poked fun at racists now specialises in mean-spirited, punching-down humour, says Micha Frazer-Carroll, and it’s no joke" (Independent).

ADDED: As we were talking about yesterday, here, Chappelle uses the idea of blackface in his new show, in the context of imagining "TERFs" questioning what transgender women are doing: "They look at transgender women the way we blacks look at blackface. They go 'Oh, this bitch is doing an impression of me!'" That was criticized by a transgender woman who said “He compared my existence to someone doing blackface.” 

Now, in that old Chappelle show incident, Chappelle himself was in blackface, that is, Chappelle was doing a "impression" of his own "existence" and envisioning it in a negative way. That would be comparable to a transgender woman wearing makeup, clothing, and a hairstyle of a type that she herself didn't respect but thought was demeaning! That's more like what a drag performer might do. 

When should women who are not transgender say "Oh, this bitch is doing an impression of me!"? The real answer, I think is, when the getup is an expression of hatred toward women. That's when the blackface comparison is apt. 

ALSO: I said "That's more like what a drag performer might do." Note the "might." A drag performer might admire and respect women and might outright loathe women. There's a whole range in between that's involves satirizing women and clowning in the guise of a woman. But these performances are themselves subject to critique. You can do it, but we get to talk about your doing it.

"The other drag queens hated Divine, because they thought he was making fun of them. And he was!"

"He was making fun of that whole scene of being so serious about it and trying to imitate the worst of women — the most unliberated ones — where Divine was beyond. Divine was not trans. Divine never walked around dressed as a woman. He didn't want to be a woman.... It wasn't like Divine was trapped in the wrong body or anything. Divine was a feminine gay man. But he was proud to say he was a drag queen. He was an actor. And he played a man, woman, he would've played the dog in 'Pink Flamingos' if I'd let him."

Says John Waters, on the new episode of Marc Maron's podcast. Waters is a fantastic guest, one of the best conversationalists I've ever heard on a podcast, so listen to the whole thing. I chose this one piece to transcribe because it says so much... with direct detail and plenty of open-ended implication. Waters is so pro liberated women and pro feminine gay men that there's some hostility to drag and transgenderism. That takes nerve. And vivacity.

(To comment, email me here.)

"Are teens watching Pretend It's a City?" — asks Raphael Bob-Waksberg about the Martin Scorsese series — on Netflix — with Fran Lebowitz.

Are teens watching Pretend It's a City? Have the alternative teens discovered Fran Lebowitz? I feel like for a particular sort of high schooler this show could be It Exactly - a key into a different kind of being: "Oh, I'm That." If you are a teen or know a teen, please report.

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg (@RaphaelBW) January 19, 2021

Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the comic writer associated with the animated Netflix show "Bojack Horseman." I have read and enjoyed his story collection "Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory." I follow him on Twitter, and I loved his question. I've watched the Fran Lebowitz series, and I'm the same age as she is (and lived in the NYC in the 70s and 80s), so I liked it, but what about these kids today?

Bob-Waksberg hasn't gotten too many answers. A couple teens say they've watched it, but give no report on whether they found it to be any kind of "key into a different kind of being." 

But here's the most striking answer:

alternative teens discovered her a'ight pic.twitter.com/cJ7lUd9v3G

— ☹☹⌛⌛⚰⚰♻♻ (@zaws) January 19, 2021

I clicked around and found this: 

I love Fran Lebowitz too... & I would love to be simply excited for this new netflix thing but I have some awfully depressing news... Fran Lebowitz is a TERF! I know this because in this 2010 documentary about Candy Darling, Beautiful Darling, Lebowitz articulates the TERF position just about as explicitly as you can--that Candy isn't a woman, but a man tragically and fetishistically fixated on womanhood.... I suppose I am bringing it up because, as usual, it's that thing where an older cis lesbian has been just about as explicitly hateful towards trans people as you can be, but because she's an elder or whatever we're all pretending that never happened....

TERF = trans-exclusionary radical feminist. 

You can watch the entire documentary "Beautiful Darling" here, but I'll just embed the trailer, which begins with Lebowitz talking about Darling:

 

Lebowitz expresses the opinion that you cannot be a woman if you didn't begin life as "a little girl." The power behind Candy Darling was Andy Warhol, and Lebowitz knew Warhol — she wrote for his magazine — and did not like him, as you can see in this clip from a Scorsese domentary that was HBO in 2011:

 

"This is what happens when an inside joke gets into the water supply."

ADDED: I wrote "Lebowitz expresses the opinion..." but these are not "opinions" in the non-artist sense of the word. I like to quote Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists."

You've got to understand that Lebowitz is a humorist. She's releasing her inside jokes into the water supply. 

"If Dolly Parton were organizing a literary dinner party, which 3 writers — dead or alive — would she invite?"

This answer is amusing because she's so openly declining to answer the question in terms of setting up an excellent conversation:

First would be James Patterson because, since we are both in entertainment, we could write it off as a business expense. (Ha!) Second would be Fannie Flagg — she’s a friend and a very funny author, so I know she would be a guaranteed good time. Third would be Maya Angelou because she would definitely have wonderful stories and spoke and wrote so poetically. As a bonus, I’d ask Charles Dickens to join us — for the street cred. 

That's from a NYT piece with a headline — "Dolly Parton Likes to Read by the Fire in Her Pajamas" — that forces me to crack a Groucho Marx joke — How the fire got in her pajamas, I don't know.

 

Anyway, she names 4, not 3, and Patterson seems only to be there as part of a tax avoidance scheme. Does Dolly Parton ever let her political opinions show? She flaunts her resistance to taxation. That might be conservative. The other thing in that piece that strikes me as conservative is that she expresses — twice — her love of the book "The Little Engine That Could." It's the book she wants all kids to read. I can't imagine a left-leaning person saying that. 

I found this from the Independent: "Dolly Parton’s politics hide in plain sight, whether she admits it or not There’s not much room for ambiguity in our times, as some Hollywood stars have found out, yet Parton’s philanthropy, which includes her funding of a Covid-19 vaccine, means she gets a free pass. But it’s easy to read between the lines." 

I've already read between the lines. A devoted promoter of the "The Little Engine That Could" must be conservative or libertarian. But let's read this: