"Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows."

This post is a present to those of you who seem to be looking for a place to honor Marvin Hamlisch, who died yesterday. I don't post about every obituary, and my standard for posting is whatever it is, and it's not that my commenters keep announcing, in random posts, that somebody famous died. But I got enough of that on Hamlisch that I looked up the obit out of curiosity. What was it that people are so worked up about? I'd rather post about the death of Robert Hughes. Why Hamlisch? He was on all those awards shows, associated with a lot of movies that I don't care about, like "The Way We Were." But I saw that he wrote the old Lesley Gore hit, and I'm up for embedding that. So here's the post people seem to want.

Here's the Robert Hughes obit. He was the big "Shock of the New" art critic. (Factoid: He caught gonnorrhea from Jimi Hendrix... second hand... through his wife... or so he thought.) And for those who look for death triads, there's Judith Crist, who was certainly the first film critic I ever read. She was in TV Guide. Here's something she said about Anne Bancroft: "She seems a cowlike creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis."

There you go. There they go. Are you happy now? Is your life sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows?

At the Drowned Lollipop Café...

... let's put an end to all our sorrows.

ADDED: Commenters think this message sounds suicidal. Not at all! You drown your sorrows. It's just a phrase to go along with a submerged lollipop. The café posts are just open threads, and the message is intended to be a riff on the photograph that essentially says: Go ahead and talk about anything you want.

An Althouse blog Christmas tradition: the 1953 Santa Claus.

Here we are, probably at Wanamaker's in Wilmington -- or was it Newark? -- Delaware. I will be 3 in January, and my sister is 6. I don't think either of us is buying that beard, but my doubt is tinged with trepidation, perhaps because the right jolly old elf has got me in his grip...



... Meanwhile, I seem to have a lollipop.

Brick, pear, cello, goblet, apple, cornet, column, bell, lollipop, skittle, vase...

... hourglass. These are the 12 possible shapes for a woman's body, in case you didn't know. Life for women is too complicated. If you're a woman, could you figure out which one of these you were or what clothes are supposed to cure whatever it is that's wrong with it? If you're a man, could you imagine an equivalent article aimed at men?

IN THE COMMENTS: Mr. Forward lists the 10 shapes of men: "Prick, bear, jello, goober, apple core, colander, shell, my old pop, fiddle bass, and beer glass." And Roost on the Moon adds: "Don't forget condom hastily stuffed with an old sock!"

CORRECTED: That was 10 shapes of men, not "10 shapes of me" (rather frightening!).

When does a song "demobilize" a word, so that no serious lyricist can use it again?

Laurence Maslon writes a long, interesting article about the song "Over the Rainbow." (Via A&L Daily.) Read the whole thing, but let's discuss this:

In turning to the rainbow as a metaphor for happiness, [lyricist Yip] Harburg also drew on decades of American songs. In 1918, a minor Broadway show, Oh, Look!, gave the world a major tune, “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, one of the most popular of its day. (Its closing lyric runs, “I’m always chasing rainbows./ Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.”) Ten years later, Billy Rose and David Dreyer contrived a popular hit, “There’s a Rainbow Around My Shoulder”....

Why would Yip Harburg, a man of considerable imagination, take yet another drink from such an oft-dipped well? Part of it was his conviction that the rainbow image would be useful for the rest of the picture.... Also, Harburg must have intuited that such an image would have seemed ridiculous and corny if were sung by, say, a Manhattan cigarette girl singing on a penthouse balcony. But for an untutored farm girl from Kansas, living in some indeterminate point early in the 20th century, the very predictability of the rainbow image speaks to her old-fashioned values and lack of pretense....

[The song] is a seminal influence on the imagination of impressionable youths to this day, truly a brilliantly crafted song, with Arlen’s achingly adult melody set off by Harburg’s sophisticated use of childlike simplicity. Rarely has such a juxtaposition yielded such a felicitous result. Harburg’s lyrics are so successful, in fact, that they essentially demobilized the words “rainbow” and “bluebird” from serious use in popular song forever after. (The two exceptions, ironically, are Harburg’s own “Look to the Rainbow” from Finian’s Rainbow and Arlen’s collaborator, Johnny Mercer’s, use of “rainbow’s end” in “Moon River.”)

But now aren't you thinking of exceptions? I immediately thought of Lesley Gore singing "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" ("Everything that's wonderful is what I feel when we're together"). And for "bluebird"... come on, I feel sorry for Stephen Stills that Maslon threw in the part about "bluebird":

Listen to my bluebird laugh.
She can't tell you why.
Deep within her heart, you see,
She knows only crying.

Somehow I don't feel sorry for Paul McCartney ("I'm a bluebird, I'm a bluebird, I'm a bluebird, I'm a bluebird, Yeah, yeah, yeah"). I don't think he was really even trying there, and besides, he's demobilized "blackbird."

Yet copying the Stills' lyrics, I see that it is obvious that the lyrics without the music don't make much of an impression at all. Perhaps it's not -- after all -- a "serious use" of the word.

So, what songs have used a particular word in such a way as to take it off the list of words a serious lyricist can use? (Do we still have such people?) What does it take to demobilize a word?

Perhaps sometimes this happens only within a particular type of music. Can I think of a good example of that? Betraying my age once again, I think of the mid-60s word "groovy," which spiked in popularity and then became unusable. In 1966, there was "A Groovy Kind of Love" (which was 34 on the Billboard 100 that year -- that great year). When that song came out "groovy" was nearly unknown slang (at least in the U.S.). The following year there was "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," the Paul Simon song that was a hit by Harper's Bizarre. It's 98 on the Billboard 100 for that year. And, the same year, there's also "Groovin'" by the Young Rascals (11th). When these songs were hits, "groovy" had become a word that no one would actually use in conversation. You might hear it on a TV show, but it would be embarrassing to say it unless you clearly conveyed that you were making fun of the word. But this is a big digression, because no song lyric killed "groovy." "Groovy" was killed by its own sudden, extreme popularity.

So back to the real question. Can you think of a word that is used so decisively well in a song as to remove if from a good lyricist's vocabulary?

The article about "Over the Rainbow" raises a second issue: "it’s the only adult song in the popular canon to be sung by a child." Is it?

(Here's the recent example of a 6-year-old singing the song -- with the audience melting like lemon drops. And here's Katharine McPhee singing the song to great acclaim on "American Idol." I'm on record hating it, by the way.)

Vexed about lollipops?

Arise, vexillologists!

"Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir, so that every mouth can be fed. Poor me, the Israelite."

Goodbye to Desmond Dekker. The ska legend's biggest hit was "The Israelites." In 1969:

The Jamaican rhythm of ska had already generated hits in the United States, notably Millie Small's 1964 hit, "My Boy Lollipop." But that song was treated as a novelty. "The Israelites," with its biblical imagery of suffering and redemption, showed the world reggae's combination of danceable rhythm and serious, sometimes spiritual intentions.

Yes, I remember loving that hit and experiencing it as a novelty song (though that doesn't mean that we American kids didn't pick up the spirit of suffering and redemption). Another seeming novelty song that we heard and loved that same summer was "In the Year 2525."

In the year 7510
if God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
maybe he'll look around himself and say
"guess it's time for the Judgement Day''

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
he'll either say "I'm pleased where man has been''
or tear it down and start again...

I remember listening to "The Israelites" and "In the Year 2525" -- both were played on the radio constantly -- and feeling really strange in that really strange year 1969. Two infectiously poppy songs with a painful, religious edge.

Did you know that Paul McCartney named his "Ob-Bla-Di, Ob-Bla-Da" character "Desmond" after Desmond Dekker?

Desmond has a barrow in the market place...
Molly is the singer in a band...
Desmond says to Molly "girl I like your face"
And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand...

Extremely fussy bedding.

Here's an article about how women are layering their beds with all sorts of fancy pillows and "bed scarves" and other paraphernalia:

"I could go weeks without ever seeing my living room," said Judy Roaman, an art collector and retailer in Manhattan and East Hampton whose bed is as crowded and graphically articulated as the wall of artwork leading into her bedroom. "The bed for me is about having everything around me. We have the takeout on trays, and lollipops and Kleenex and every magazine known to man — and the dog, who has his water bowl on the floor. I hate to tell you this, but the dead dog's ashes are right by the bed, too."

The bed, Ms. Roaman said, warming to her theme, has two lives, "a glamorous, gorgeous day life, where she's made up in the morning, all fluffed with her glammy pillows and her propping pillows and her duvet and her chic little blanket at the bottom — and she's definitely a she — and the nighttime life, where we all jump in."

The least convincing thing in this article is the repeated assertion that an exciting and messy life goes along with a complicated bed system. Do you really think a woman -- they're all women -- who maintains a bed like this is enthusiastic about sticky kids jumping in? Do you really think she lets them bring whole takeout meals on trays into her insanely fancy bed? Does anyone ever actually have sex here or does the whole setup scream sublimation?

Getting some words written.

Today was the deadline for the papers for next week's "Bloggership" conference. Here's a list of the words in my essay least likely to appear in any of the other essays: oblivion, lollipop, Sopranos, bloxxing, psychotic, whore, squishy, gooey, strumpet's, ankle, fairy.

UPDATE: The papers will be posted here. Some are up already.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mine's up.

The Madison Lollipop sees its shadow on Holy Saturday.

Does this mean 4 more weeks of winter?

"Mr. Novak responded with a profanity."

Here's how the NYT describes Bob Novak's recent outburst:

After Mr. Carville tried to interrupt Mr. Novak twice, Mr. Novak said: "I know you hate to hear me. But you have to."

Mr. Carville interrupted again, saying of Mr. Novak, "He's got to show these right-wingers that he's got backbone."

A moment later, Mr. Carville said directly to Mr. Novak: "The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show them you're tough."

Mr. Novak responded with a profanity, before telling Mr. Carville: "I hate that. Just let it go."

He stood up, removed his microphone and walked off.

I say, it's ridiculous to report it that way. You should at least have the word with asterisks -- otherwise we're left to imagine he said something worse than "bullshit," which is, so often, the perfect word. Why there's that bestseller, "On Bullshit," written by a philosophy professor, and that Penn and Teller TV show "Bullshit!" Bullshit is pretty mainstream. With the Times's circumlocution, we might imagine Novak had called Carville a f***ing c***.

My son -- John Althouse Cohen -- says it's like that thing in McSweeney's. What? This:

MEDIA MOMENT 37: HURRY! BLOOMBERGCHUPAFAN.COM AND BLOOMBERGBREASTISBEST.COM ARE STILL AVAILABLE

"Among the hundreds of Web addresses owned by Mr. Bloomberg... are more than a dozen with names like NoBloomberg.org and IhateBloomberg.com.... Many of these names, including some registered last week, include a slang expression of contempt, labeled vulgar in some contexts by dictionaries. The pure-minded could construe it to mean that Mr. Bloomberg has a fondness for lollipops."

— The New York Times, May 12, 2001

"An Internet site for the posting of complaints about American corporations, celebrities and political figures can continue to use a Web address that denigrates Michael R. Bloomberg, the New York City mayoral candidate, according to a ruling a week ago.... The protest site, which is run by Dan Parisi, a pornography publisher, uses many addresses created by adding to the names of companies or politicians a slang expression of contempt associated in other contexts with baby bottles."

— The New York Times, June 14, 2001

The Times needs to get back to these more scrutable circumlocutions. Or just cut out the circumlocuting altogether. I know it's their thing to show off their "fit to print" standard, but a quote's a quote.

Countering V-Day with P-Day.

Christina Hoff Sommers describes the College Republicans' response to the overpromotion of "The Vagina Monologues" at Roger Williams University and the predictably repressive/humorless response from the admininstration. Read the whole piece (in the National Review), but here's a funny excerpt:

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations.

The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese [the P-Day penis-shaped mascot] reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America....

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses.

Very funny! Seems to me the university shouldn't be engaging in viewpoint discrimination. There should be vagina/penis parity. Quite aside from all of this, why isn't everyone tired of "The Vagina Monologues" by now? It was always a bad play.

UPDATE: Be at Bebere has an answer to that last question.

First encounter with Santa Claus.

Here I am, the skeptical one in the center. I'm almost 3, and the year is 1953. My sister Dell is enjoying the moment, while I'm suspicious about that beard and the lack of convincing attachment around the mouth.