"The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women..."

"...  by the cosmeceutical industrial complex who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”

Said Jamie Lee Curtis, posing in wax lips and quoted in "'Generations of women have been disfigured': Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery, power, and Hollywood’s age problem" (Guardian).

Obviously, the word “genocide” is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. “I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances...."

And yet: 

Curtis’s daughter Ruby, 29, is trans.... “I’m an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they are.... I’m a John Steinbeck student... and there’s a beautiful piece of writing from East of Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion, institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.””

I guess those Hollywood actresses with their chemicals and surgical procedures are not trying to "be who they are" but to be what they feel others want them to be. How "against plastic surgery" is Curtis? When is it "disfigurement"? When does she feel motivated to use the word "genocide"? One might feel inclined to say that each person is free to make their own decision, but when do onlookers judge them harshly? How do we know who is truly finding their real self in these medical cuttings and who is straining to conform to real or imagined societal expectations?

ADDED: Here's the question I was motivated to ask Grok: "Are trans women mostly attempting to look like beautiful women or is the goal simply to look like an ordinary woman (and to 'read' as a woman)? Or is it enough merely to feel, from their own perspective, that they are expressing their own personal idea of womanliness (or femininity) and not focused on what other people think of what they are seeing?" 

"By dint of his down-home edginess and comfort with slick filth, Von somewhat overlaps with the rest of the manosphere."

"What sets him apart is that he is not particularly cowed by fame or wisdom or authority or aggression. He blends curiosity with humility, and treats his guests as conveyors of mystical information.... His naïveté is both honest and strategic, a carefully laid roadblock protecting Von and forcing everyone else to move at his unlikely rhythm.... In almost every episode, there comes a moment when Von’s guest stumps him. It’s never a gotcha, and the topic is rarely something terribly obscure.... Some recent examples: Mitchell-Lama housing, the Kurds, who wrote the song 'This Land Is Your Land,' misandry.... He can sometimes free-fall into inventive left-field phrasing that achieves a sort of bliss. He said he once saw the boxer Evander Holyfield eating, putting French fries in his 'Panamouth Canal.' Kissing someone with lip filler is 'like trying to eat two shrimps that won’t give up.' Nudity is 'the Lord’s matte finish.'"

From "Theo Von Dismantles the Interview Show/The comedian and podcaster is one of the defining conversationalists of media’s new MAGA-friendly mainstream. But he can be harder to pin down, politically and culturally, than his bro-cast peers" (NYT).

Something I learned: Theo Von's full name is Theodor Capitani von Kurnatowski III.

"Yesterday I posted a tweet in response to a post that dealt with the issue of racism. While not intending the post to be interpreted as racist, the post was itself insensitive and so I shut my account down and removed the comment."

So says Wisconsin superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr, quoted in "State superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr apologizes for racially insensitive tweet" (Wisconsin State Journal). 

This woman apologized and deleted herself from Twitter just because she was criticized for an inept contribution to a discussion about race. I think the state school superintendent needs a lot more gumption than that. 

Her tweet was dumb. Someone on Twitter had put up the question "When was the first time someone called you the n-word. I was 18." And Kerr, who is white, wrote: "I was 16 in high school and white — my lips were bigger than most and that was the reference given to me."

The person who had asked the question said: "When I read [Kerr's] statement, I was livid. There are communities where we are the only person of color in that community, so Twitter and social media have become spaces of healing. [Kerr’s statement)] is insensitive. She was not able to read the room, or understand the technology and how people understand these spaces as sacred, even though it is a public medium." 

And somebody else tweeted: "As someone who has been bullied relentlessly and called a monkey and a (N-word) for having big lips — this is just not the level of Karen I wanted to see the day after your primary win." 

A Madison School Board member tweeted: "This makes me profoundly sad and angry tho. Perfect example of white educators profound failures to understand the isolation, alienation, and disenfranchisement our Black & Brown students experience in our education system — public & private. Microaggressions from staff and peers."

Fine. Kerr was right to take down the tweet and apologize. But to delete herself from Twitter? How is that consistent with leadership? The big issue in the campaign for superintendent has been the school choice program, and Kerr advanced in the primary because she supports it. Her opponent does not. It takes courage in the face of accusations of racism to support school choice.

"[James] Charles and [Tati] Westbrook, two stars of the YouTube beauty and makeup community, had long been friends, with Charles referring to her as 'like a mother.'"

"Then, in May 2019, Westbrook released a 43-minute video in which she accused him of using his fame to 'manipulate someone’s sexuality,' referring to straight men. Charles vehemently denied this charge in a video of his own, and for a while, the two continued releasing videos about each other, centered on their fraying friendship."

I'm trying to read a damned near incomprehensible WaPo article about YouTube withdrawing advertising from some popular vloggers. You might not know the name Tati Westbrook, but her video that came out yesterday already has nearly 6 million views. Here, try to watch it — I tried but clicked it off at the 3-second mark because that stare and series of mouth noises utterly grossed me out:



I know I wrote about this controversy — whatever the hell it is — back when it was in the news last year. Ah, here it is, May 17, 2019: "I'm reading 'James Charles, Tati Westbrook, and the feud that’s ripping apart YouTube’s beauty community...' and I cannot understand it...."

Yeah, I still can't — and won't — understand it. The reason I'm blogging it today is because I was interested in the phrase "manipulate someone’s sexuality" — in "she accused him of using his fame to 'manipulate someone’s sexuality,' referring to straight men." Is it wrong to "manipulate someone’s sexuality"? Isn't that what people do when they have sex with another person — manipulate each other's sexuality?

If it's wrong to "manipulate someone’s sexuality," then it would seem that the only ethical form of sex is masturbation. A good theory to propound on the internet!

But I don't know what Tati Westbrook is really talking about. Something special against gay men? I don't know, and I'm not going to put up with Westbrook's grotesque mouth smacking to find out. Presumably, she fascinates other people with that strange, slow-talky facial action... manipulating their sexuality.

"In a new graphic-nonfiction book, 'Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration'..."

"... Bryan Caplan, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, makes the radical pro-immigration argument that others don’t. In his view, immigration should be essentially unlimited.... Opening the world’s borders wouldn’t mean abolishing them, Caplan explains.... Governments would relinquish their exclusionary authority, so that anyone, regardless of citizenship, could 'accept a job offer from a willing employer or rent an apartment from a willing landlord.' In one illustration, a cartoon Caplan serves a trillion-dollar blueberry pie; its slices are distributed to landlords with apartments to rent, retirees with newly affordable elder care, and mothers reëntering the workforce thanks to lower child-care costs... Presumably, an open-border policy would lead to a mass exodus [from poorer countries]. And yet an illustrated version of Caplan, working as a Western Union teller, reassures these countries that they would be rewarded with compensatory, monumental remittances. Brain drain wouldn’t be an issue, since the total liberalization of movement would allow everyone—not just the highly skilled—to emigrate.... The illustrations in 'Open Borders' are playful, bright, and irreverent.... [but] they tend to reduce their subjects to caricature. 'Poor countries' are depicted using images of generic slums and anonymous, emaciated brown people; a person who smuggles migrants in the desert is represented as an actual coyote, wearing sunglasses.... "

From "THE CASE FOR OPEN BORDERS/In a new graphic-nonfiction book, a libertarian economist conjures an alternative reality in which immigration is unlimited all over the world" (in The New Yorker).

Here's the book:



I love the way, amidst all that diversity, everyone, including the Statue of Liberty, has the same lipless smile. And every face is saying I'm an optimistic person with simple, practical hopes and all I want is a fair chance to help and contribute. Is it even possible for human eyebrows not to point upward? Everybody means well.

By the way, comic books are a great format for presenting political and policy arguments. I think it's silly, though, to call them "graphic-nonfiction books."

"27 Gendered Products That Prove Masculinity Is Incredibly Fragile."

Beginning with Q-tips with a label that actually says "Men's Ultimate Multi-Tool/Detailing/Cleaning/Building." That's at Buzzfeed, where I arrived via a Metafilter thread about a Details article titled "Make Way for Brosé: Why More Men Are Drinking Pink/Forget craft beer. These days, guys are toasting summer over bottles of blush, turning rosé into the drink of the moment." A Metafilter commenter says: "Don't Bro at me, yo. Rosè is for picnics where people will wander off to have sex against a tree with their half cousin from Switzerland. Sometimes there are peacocks."

Some one else says: "Part your lips for the Dude Stick. Drag your lush yet masculine mouth up the Dude Stick’s smooth, blood-warm side, coating your lips with a pearly trail of tactical moisturizer." Which gets the immediate response:  "Dude stick is mostly infuriating because the pre-existing major brand is already CHAP STICK. CHAP. As in FELLOW, DUDE, BRO."

Putting the hard in Harding: "The Letters That Warren G. Harding’s Family Didn’t Want You to See."

"Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief untilI take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts."

Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied. . . . Wouldn’t you like to hear me ask if we only dared and answer, 'We dare,' while souls rejoicing sang the sweetest of choruses in the music room? Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake — for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond?

ADDED: What do you make of "sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake"? I was entertaining the theory that "Superior" was his name for his penis (like John Thomas in "Lady Chatterley's Lover").

"The man whose lips Rihanna ruthlessly mocked on the Internet — in front of nearly 12 million people — doesn't think it's racist..."

"... in fact, he's HAPPY she compared his mouth to a leather couch."

"From a narrative perspective the most perplexing problem with these sex scenes is that they mute and obscure the actresses..."

"... who otherwise, in many other parts of the film, offer their intelligent faces and voices to the screen in subtle and moving ways. In visual media the body is often deeply inexpressive compared to the heart’s great canvas—the face. The sex between these characters, as is true of most carnality, causes the interesting parts of these women’s personalities to recede. The actresses for long stretches of time become action heroes, and the portrait of them that the film has ostensibly been working on grinds, so to speak, to a halt."

The novelist Lorrie Moore, writing about that new movie with the very long lesbian sex scene, "Blue Is the Warmest Color." Let me also excerpt what Moore says about the main actress's mouth:

In general Adèle’s soft wide mouth hangs open throughout the film, revealing an attractive overbite long associated with French actresses. She pulls her hair up, lets it fall again, ties it back up—continually. Between the slack mouth and the unstable hair, we see quickly that Adèle does not quite know who she is. But she is a creature of appetites, and much time is spent watching her pliable mouth chew—pasta, candy, oysters.

I so much prefer watching those words to watching whatever that looked like in the darned movie.

Presumably, the mouth, being part of "heart’s great canvas—the face," has more to say to us moviegoers than those nether lips that are so dull in the tedious sex scenes, and yet Moore makes all that mouth action sound boring too (even as Moore's prose is not boring). Which is why we read. And that's a message that one must assume that a novelist writing about movies would like to convey.

ADDED: Moore says that "most long sex scenes" are "emotionally uninformative, almost comedically ungainly and dull to watch" and adds the parenthetical: "Did we learn nothing from Vivien Leigh’s little morning-after smile in Gone With the Wind?" How could genitalia compete with that mouth? Vaginal lips have nothing to say.

"'Sparrow Face' Is The New Duck Face."

Please work on the new facial expression. It's from Japan. It's newer and subtler, but be prepared for cranks to say it's still duck face. No, it is not Duck Face. It's Sparrow Face.

To achieve the coveted “sparrow” look, open your eyes wide and part your mouth slightly, “like you’re a baby bird waiting” for a tasty worm.

Bob Dylan looks like Rick Santorum.

In his painterly mind:



The trouble with painting/drawing portraits is everyone gravitates to the question whether it looks like the person it's supposed to be. That's a good reason — if you like doing portraits — to choose subjects who aren't well-known. Alternatively, use a camera. You might get credit for making one person look like someone else.

Here's Bob Dylan's new "Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10." And here's Dylan's long-ago release titled "Self Portrait"...



... the one about which Greil Marcus asked in Rolling Stone: "What is this shit?" (Here, please credit me for resisting making a Santorum joke.)

Comparing the 2 selfies, we see a consistent approach to the upper lip/lower lip proportion, the the Scarecrow-from-the-Wizard-of-Oz nose, the hair part deeply denting the forehead (making it look like a lopsided heart), the cut off jawline with jowls, and the un-level ears (though the down ear is now up and the up is down*). The biggest difference, other than skin tone, is in the eyebrows. Gone is the amazement of youth. The old man has seen it all, but he's still looking.
_________________________

*Old lyric that resonated (after a search for "up" and "down"):

Oh, the only decent thing I did when I worked as a postal clerk
Was to haul your picture down off the wall near the cage where I used to work
Was I a fool or not to try to protect your identity?
You looked a little burned out, my friend, I thought it might be up to me

"She approached in a knit white top and navy-blue business skirt, her dark, almost black hair down to her shoulders."

"She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race."

#1 on a list of "The Four Silliest/Creepiest Huma Abedin Descriptions in 'New York' Magazine's Weiner Piece," compiled by Isaac Chotiner, at The New Republic, who says "Abedin always gets good press, but this piece takes it to a new level." But it's not true that "Abedin always gets good press." Chotiner's wrong about that. And the selected lines from the New York piece (which is written by Mark Jacobson) are so gloriously absurd, that they must be intentional satire and not a new level of good press, so Chotiner must also be wrong about that. I'm giving the win to Jacobson, and I haven't even read his article yet. It's a tad early on a Monday for that. Here's one pull quote:

If it was a mystery why Huma Abedin decided Anthony Weiner was the man for her, there were clear practical reasons to stay with him. It was far more than the fact that she worked for Hillary, learned the haute Tammy Wynette drill from the best. Weiner was, after all, the father of her child. If the candidate didn’t want Jordan to grow up hearing how the naughty pictures had ended his father’s political career, why should his mother feel any differently? Then again, they could just love each other.

I suspect that by the time Jordan is grown up, he and all the young people he knows will be sending photos of themselves in their underpants as the normal friendly way to say "hello." What will be hard — hard — to explain is why his father had to resign from elected office for such a thing. Why didn't Huma leave him? Maybe it was to say to the people of the future — including her grown-up child — that she knew, even back in the old days, that sexting is trifling, and the only real infraction was the husband idly flirted with other women. Who resigns from Congress or gets divorced over that?

"I got the idea spontaneously.... I'm a man of science, I have a very high IQ."

"I thought, I'll get rid of it.... I have the ability to solve problems in a second."

Said the professor, explaining his thinking after he cut off his wife's lip, when he realized doctors might be able to sew it back on. She'd told him she wanted a divorce. He ate the lip.

Mick Jagger in the role of a loser watching other guys do karaoke versions of Mick Jagger.

The SNL guys doing the imitations are very funny, and I just loved Mick submitting to the role, particularly accepting closeups on his fascinatingly ugly face (without the familiar hairstyle/wig that keeps us seeing him as the rock star and not a regular human being).

Oddly, to me, in this clip, he look like Joe E. Brown, a comic actor with a very distinctive mouth characterized by — of all things not associated with Mick Jagger — liplessness:

Saw the movie "Changeling" last night but I don't like to write movie reviews...

... so let me do what I did for the last Clint Eastwood movie I saw and challenge myself to write a list of 10 things. Here goes:

1. There were several points in this movie where, if I didn't know it was a true story, I would have turned it off. It's incredibly melodramatic. But if it's true, it's not incredible. It's credible.

2. I loathe movies about children in danger, both because I don't enjoy seeing children suffer and because I don't want to watch an actress ham it up pretending to be a mother who is agonizing over her suffering child. But I shielded myself from knowing what the story was going to be because I was told — by my son Chris — that the movie contained the greatest acting performance of the last decade and once I decide I will see a movie, I avoid reading anything about the plot.

3. I'd never seen an Angelina Jolie movie before. Looking at the list of movies she's made, I can see why. Although she seems like the biggest movie star in the world, she hasn't made many movies, and they aren't very good. She's done genres that I don't much follow (anymore). For example, she did one of the voices in "Kung Fu Panda." When I think of "Kung Fu Panda," I think of the Joshua Ferris short story "The Dinner Party":

“They just got their dates wrong, is all,” he said, “and tomorrow, when they call, they’ll tell you how sorry they are. They had to turn their phones off during the late showing of ‘Kung Fu Panda’ or something.”

“So they went to see ‘Kung Fu Panda’ tonight,” she said.

“Or something like it.”

“And they turned their phones off so they wouldn’t ring during ‘Kung Fu Panda.’ ”

“Or,” he said. “Or.” He put his finger up. They were standing near the bedroom doorway. There was dim light coming from the dark room and he was suddenly irrationally afraid, as he had been as a child, that if anyone stepped inside, if she stepped inside, she would plummet to the center of the earth. He lowered his finger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think they went to see ‘Kung Fu Panda.’ ”

One wouldn't see "Kung Fu Panda."

4. Jolie emotes. That's for sure. It's what's called for and she does it. She goes all out and does it. She's the female Jack Nicholson. And this movie has a good dose of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in it. Now, take your medication. Or we'll give you an electroshock treatment. "Changeling" also made me think about another great Jack Nicholson movie, "Chinatown." Lots of L.A., lots of corruption.

5. Did Jolie out-act Kate Winslet? Winslet won the Oscar that year — for "The Reader." "The Reader" is also a melodrama, but it presents itself in less of a melodramatic style. Although "The Reader" is set in the Holocaust, the character is fictional, and her story is presented in a more dignified Oscar-worthy vehicle.

6. Quite oddly, there is a scene in "Changeling" in which the main character is listening to the Oscars presentation on the radio and rooting for her favorite movie to win. The movie is "It Happened One Night," and Jolie's character expresses her fondness for Claudette Colbert, who won an Oscar for her role. "It Happened One Night" swept the top 5 categories at the Oscars, and it wasn't until "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that another movie swept the Oscars. I wondered what Clint Eastwood thought he was saying to the Academy by putting that Oscars scene in "Changeling." I don't think he was kissing their ass trying to get Oscars. Maybe it was a way to say Oscars are amusement for the people and they don't really matter to me anymore. But it would be pretty funny for Jolie to win an Oscar for a role where we'd have a clip of her in character getting excited about an Oscar win. It would be cute. Maybe she got some votes from Academy members who liked that.

7. Like "The Reader," "Changeling" has a scene that depicts

a hanging and uses a closeup of the hanged person's dangling feet — or is it just the shoes on the floor in "The Reader"? I forget.

(Mouse over Highlight to reveal spoiler.)(I think that's the first time I've used HTML that way.)

8. If you like red lipstick, this is the ultimate red lipstick movie. You've got, first of all, Angelina Jolie's famous, immense lips, and then you've got red red lipstick — of the historically accurate matte texture. And it looks like it was put on amateurishly by the character.

9. You like cloche hats? You will see cloche hats. Angelina Jolie's character seems to require a cloche hat — and gloves. (I couldn't figure out how she avoided getting red lipstick all over her gloves.) This is the ultimate cloche hat movie. What does the cloche hat mean? It speaks of the character's vulnerability and need for armor, which makes it

especially painful for us to see her without its protection when she's thrown into the psycho hospital.

10. What's with Angelina Jolie's hands?

11. Jolie calls Clint Eastwood "very much the ideal man":

Maybe it's generational, but I think we could use more of it. People look up to him. He is absolutely who he is. He doesn't apologize to anybody. He has very, very strong, decisive opinions and is very gracious as a man, as a friend and somebody on set as a director, too.

She tags on the wifely niceness — "Brad knows that he's my ideal man" — but, reading that, I hear the emphasis on "my." Brad may be her ideal man, but Eastwood is the ideal man.

Oh! I went to 11. I thought it would be hard to get to 10. Ha. I guess I enjoyed that movie. Maybe I'll watch it again with somebody who hasn't seen it before. Back in the 80s, we used to love showing "The Terminator" to people who hadn't seen it yet. All the surprises would be new again. Last week, I was flipping channels and came to rest on "From Dusk to Dawn," which had just started. I'd seen it before, but Meade hadn't. Great vicarious fun for me.

Buzz Bissinger tries to write about Tiger Woods.

The Vanity Fair article has a fascinating Annie Liebowitz cover photograph of Tiger Woods's without a shirt — fascinating because the great athlete looks so different from those Men's Health-type torso models who work their muscles solely for the purpose of getting their muscles to look the way people these days want to see muscles looking and who squeeze out the excess fat so we can get the best look at those muscles. By contrast, Tiger looks slightly porky and squishy. That's not a criticism. That's a suggestion that, knowing the functionality of the torso we're gazing at — and I'm including the sexual functionality — we ought to adjust our taste in male beauty.

But on to Bissenger's silly writing. Here's a sentence — one sentence:

Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet.

Diagram that. The subject and verb are: story and has been driven. Yes, that sets up a list, and you can go very long, quite grammatically, with a list. But it purports to be a list of all different varieties of sex, and not everything on the list is a variety of sex. A confession about why you got married isn't a variety of sex. A payment of money is not a variety of sex. A preference for a type of woman isn't a variety of sex. And "lips almost as thick as their very full breasts" — I'm sorry... that's a hell of an "almost." The picture that put in my mind is just absurd. Lips as big as really tiny breasts would be scarily huge.

Then there's this insight into emptiness:

In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, travels nearly 330 days a year to fire people with a sympathetic look on his face.

Presumably, it's Bingham that has the sympathetic look on his face, not the people getting fired, as the sentence construction would have it.

... It now seems that when [Woods] returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.

This is the first mention in the article of Bingham’s Omaha apartment. We've been told about Bingham's emptiness, but suddenly the comparison is to Bingham's apartment, where there are — ooh, tragic! — pieces of furniture without any meaning. This is as silly as women with lips as big as their breasts... almost.

At the end of Up in the Air, Clooney realizes....

I'll spare you the spoiler.

But Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back.

What bitter end? Woods isn't a movie, and he's still alive. A kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance... These qualifiers are as meaningless as the furniture in Bingham's Omaha apartment. There's some particular kind of hubris involved? He's not just arrogant; he has fundamental arrogance? Bissinger fleshes out his point with nonevidence. Woods used a fake name at the hospital, like any celebrity who needed privacy. That's not arrogant. Woods avoided talking to the police. That's not arrogant. That's what your lawyer would tell you to do.

It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit....

The most sensible thing for him to do was to keep quiet and request privacy. That wasn't arrogant. And about that trite cockroaches simile — were their mandibles almost as big as their mesothoraxes?

With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless.

Bissinger gives no reason for his pat assertion that having endless opportunities makes it completely right to be a sex addict. He just goes on to make the obvious point — bolstered, despite its obviousness, with the dubious concurrence of Hugh Hefner — that Tiger was cheating on his wife.

Things are only continuing to cascade downward for Woods.

Cascade downward? Does anything ever cascade upward?

... The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf.

Swirling, eh?  Is it swirling upward or downward?

... In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are.

Well, I don't know who you are, but life is not a movie, and satisfying narrative arcs are not inevitable. For example, Woods could have died when his SUV hit that tree. And then we wouldn't have witnessed the age-old clash you're pontificating about.

"I need a moment alone... I don't want to talk to anyone."

A bonus clip from "The Comeback" — the great, great HBO comedy with Lisa Kudrow. I was looking for a different clip, but wanted to share this anyway, or let's just say it fits today's blog theme.

What I was looking for is the scene where Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) is posing for a publicity photograph and keeps doing that ridiculous pouting thing in an effort to make her lips look sexy. I was looking for that to go along with this hilarious slideshow of "Celebrity pouters."

"Take your hand off my hand."

"Take your hand off my hand."

Thanks to Palladian for syncing the audio and video on this clip I wanted to post yesterday — over here.

I'm will bet this is the funniest 3 minutes of comic acting that you've never seen by an actress you've never heard of or seen before:



The movie is "Husbands," and the actress — assuming the role is "The Countess" — is Dolores Delmar. This Wikipedia entry makes me suspect that "Dolores Delmar" is a pseudonym. So who is that lady, about whom Palladian wrote:

What a face that actress has, like it's made of latex, and that gaping mouth. Watch her lip movements. Very, very odd, and compelling.

Anyway, I haven't watched this movie in years, but I loved it when it came out in 1970 and enjoyed parts of it, despite the rambling length, when I watched it a couple decades later. If I was putting together a film series called "Studies of the Male Human Animal," I'd include "Husbands." (And what else?)

Look at the very cool poster:

Thinking about going to the movies.

Look at how this silly man is outraged that I talk about movies when I haven't seen them. It would be a nice advantage for the folks who make movies if they could get people to believe that it was inappropriate to talk until you'd paid up and wasted your time. I think a key skill in modern life is figuring out which movies to avoid. Well, why don't I just keep my thoughts to myself? I'm a blogger: we display our thought patterns in real time. If you aren't interested, don't read. Really, why is that silly man upset? Does he have a financial interest in the movie? Or is he some fanboy who really, really wants Peter Jackson to succeed?

Occasionally, I actually put three hours of my precious life into movie-viewing. Usually, it's not worth it, even though I rarely do it and am highly selective. Having something bloggable does create a little additional value, but trotting out an actual movie review, MSM-style, doesn't interest me much. If I were paid to do it, I'd put in the effort needed to find new ways to say "X gave a great performance" and "the plot was confusing" and so forth.

All that said, I am giving a tiny bit of thought to seeing a movie today and blogging about it. Here's what's playing in Madison. Actually reading that list reduced my interest in going to the movies about 80%. The only one I really want to see is "Capote," but I don't know that I want to see it in the theater, especially the crap theater where it's playing. Then there are some that I think I've heard are -- in the inevitable cliché -- "supposed to be good"? "The Squid and the Whale"? Well, what the hell is it? I'd have to do some research to have any idea. What a drag! "The Family Stone"? The clip looked good when Sarah Jessica Parker was on "The Daily Show" the other day. But have I heard that it's "supposed to be bad"? I can't remember. Again, research is required! "King Kong"? You know how I feel about that. I'm just not that into nostril-gazing.

I spend much of the day staring at a screen already. For diversion, why look at another screen? There is that famous real world that I've heard so much about. I could go out there.

BONUS QUESTIONS, thought up on rereading this post: What actress has the most beautiful nostrils? How much harder is that question to answer than what actress has the most beautiful eyes or the most beautiful lips? There's a reason it's harder: you don't really want to look at nostrils, even on a beautiful face. Sometimes you get an actress who does too much nostril acting. You know, that flaring and re-flaring. Once you start noticing it, the performance becomes comic. Can you think of any actresses or actors who belong to the nostril-flaring school of drama? Any examples of an actor or actress that does nostril-flaring spoofily, for deliberate comic effect? And can someone clue me in on how much Peter Jackson's Kong goes in for nostril-flaring. Nostrils, nostrils, nostrils. There, I've said it! I'm obsessed with nostrils. Nostrils are the body part of the week, here on the Althouse blog.

UPDATE: Can you believe it? The very next day I write an elaborate post about another movie I haven't seen. I'm starting to think that this actually is a specialty of mine -- check out my old posts on "Alexander" -- and I'm going to pursue it actively and intentionally now. I note too that some of my critics are perplexed about the nostril-focused material in this post. They really aren't understanding the unique mix of topics that is Althouse. The most flat-footedly pedestrian of these critics feel compelled to point out time and again that I am a law professor: in their regimented world, everyone is supposed to stay neatly on track, doggedly pursuing the matters of their occupational specialization. The dentist must blog about teeth, and the conlawprof about conlaw. How terribly dull! What grim little minds!

"None of us floozies was that nuts!"

Researching the update to the previous post, I wanted to track down the expression "bee-stung lips," which I knew went back to the 1920s. All signs pointed to the actress Mae Murray, "The Girl With the Bee-Stung Lips." The quote above is from her, commenting on the movie "Sunset Boulevard." What a great quote! I love the way it admits they were floozies and they were nuts! Born in 1885, she goes back to the really early days of film and, it seems, is quite forgotten, though bee-stung lips are still perceived as beautiful. I note that her lower lip exceeds her upper lip in size. Or does it? Here's a fabulous movie magazine illustration of her. Here's another. Beautiful!