"I divorced him 10 times the first year of our marriage, getting a lawyer and everything and 13 times the second year."

"He’d plead literally on his hands knees, 'Please forgive me, I don’t know why I did it, give me another chance.'"

Said Mara Corday, about Richard Long, quoted in "Mara Corday, Starlet of Monster Movies and Magazines, Dies at 95/She appeared in Playboy and sci-fi films in the 1950s. Later, in Clint Eastwood’s 'Sudden Impact,' she was a hostage until he uttered five famous words" (NYT).

Wow! I love this poster:

And go ahead, make my day:

When people vote about the visualization of the concept of voting.

Personally lobbied for this sticker with my City Clerk. If there is ever a year to have an unhinged werewolf ripping its shirt off as the “I Voted” sticker…it’s 2024. https://t.co/ZIXxBYMDuk pic.twitter.com/swyb5ok3xO

— Derek Dobies ✊ (@derekdobies) September 4, 2024

(This gets my "monsters" tag, because that is a werewolf.)

ADDED: Was there no pushback over what could be perceived as a reference to Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention?

"What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial."

A good title. It's something I was trying to parse on my own yesterday.

The article is at The New Yorker, written by Ronan Farrow. Subheadline: "The legal issue behind Weinstein’s successful appeal is also at the heart of the former President’s hush-money case." The subheadline in my head was: Big man brought down by sex. Or should it be: Pile everything together and the monster will be visible?

Consider this: Farrow's book about Weinstein was called "Catch and Kill" (commission earned), and in Trump's trial, David Pecker has been testifying about the National Enquirer’s "catch and kill" scheme. 

From a CBS News story about Trump's lawyer's cross-examination of Pecker:

Pecker said he first gave Trump a heads up about a story in 1998.... [Trump's lawyer Emil] Bove had Pecker walk through negative stories that he had killed about other figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.

"So, in Poor Things, Emma Stone’s character is basically a woman with a child’s brain. And in this particular scene, she’s encountering dance and music for... the first time."

"How did you start to develop this dance? It’s such an interesting concept."

Asks the Slate writer Nadira Goff, in "How Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo’s Delightfully Weird Dance in Poor Things Came Together/Choreographer Constanza Macras on the standout scene, working with Yorgos Lanthimos, and expanding the idea of what dance is."

The choreographer answers: "It’s described in the script as a dance that is really going off because she’s just finding out [about dance]. So, with that in mind, I tried to create. [The director] was not convinced about some things; it looked too much like acting. When we passed it to the actors, then it grew and took shape. Emma Stone also had really good suggestions about her character because she was working, already, on this way that she moves. She brought in locking the knees. That gave shape to this dance as well."

Stone's character is a Frankenstein creation, so we may well compare the dancing to the Frankenstein in "Young Frankenstein":

That Frankenstein monster is able to dance smoothly, but his singing is very rough. That's the joke, and that gets to the question I was googling when I found that Emma Stone dance: Why do dancers always try to look as though what they are doing is very easy (for them) and pure joy (for them) while singers often act as though it's quite difficult and even painful? That's a big difference between singing and dancing, and I don't think it's because singing is more arduous and hurtful. Perhaps it's because the opposite is true, and the dancer must hide his feelings lest the audience turn away. But we don't turn away when a singer displays a horrible struggle and deep pain. We like that. What's our problem?!

I formulated my question after watching Fred Astaire and George Murphy in the first part of "Broadway Melody of 1940" (now streaming on the Criterion Channel). The first musical number is "Don't Monkey With Broadway" (modeling, for future satirists, how 2 men dance together in formalwear while wielding canes):

The men are unhappy with their job. We see them complaining back stage before they stride out beaming with joy — joy that does not exist but that the audience demands.

"I believe."

Photographed today.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

"Ideally, we want guests to get excited, but this is one of the first times I've seen a guest get visibly excited."

"They love to look [these characters] in the eye. They love to be able to make a connection.... I see that sort of excitement in everybody's eyes."

Excitement and connection... as the character who is a tree come to life comes to "life" as a robot.

"Who ya think Frankenstein'd vote for?"

That's one of 20 "conversation starters" suggested in the "Epilogue" to "A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing but Using the Bathroom as an Escape" by Joe Pera.

I read that after stumbling into the TV series "Joe Pera Talks With You." We love this TV here at Meadhouse. It takes place in Marquette, Michigan, and we discovered the show about a day after we got back from a nice 3 days in Marquette, Michigan.

Sample:

Writing this post, I noticed an article, published yesterday at uppermichigansource.com, saying that Joe Pera had just donated $11,613 to the Calumet Public School Music Program.

There's also some important background on how Pera developed the show. Calumet-Laurium-Keweenaw Elementary Music and Choir Teacher Matt Ruitta said: "About four years ago, [Pera] reached out to me because, in his TV show, he plays as a choir director that lives in Marquette. And he came and shadowed me here one day....” 

But the real point of this post is who do you think Frankenstein would vote for?

Half Human.

I love that poster. It's for a 1955 Japanese film about the Abominable Snowman.

I ran across that just now researching the phrase "half human" as I was writing the previous post. 

Interesting things about the poster: woman in shorts in a snowy mountain environment, man more suitably dressed in a Tyrolean hat, vaguely indicated male genitalia on the Snowman.

ADDED: Joe Dante explains "Half Human":

 

What the whole thing if you dare: here.

"Biden With Higher Approval Than US Congress & Supreme Court."

"The latest Emerson College Polling national survey of US voters finds..."

....a majority disapprove of President Biden, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Biden has a 40% job approval, while 53% disapprove of the job he is doing as president. Since last month, Biden’s approval has increased two points. The US Congress has a 19% job approval, while 70% disapprove of the job they are doing. The Supreme Court has a 36% job approval; 54% disapprove.

That's a very nice way to deliver Biden's low approval rating. Everyone else is even less popular. 

And Democrats seem to be stuck with him:

"Just watched as a massive crane took down the magnificent and very famous statue of 'Robert E. Lee On His Horse' in Richmond, Virginia."

"It has long been recognized as a beautiful piece of bronze sculpture. To add insult to injury, those who support this 'taking' now plan to cut it into three pieces, and throw this work of art into storage prior to its complete desecration. Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all. President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war. He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country. Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left, and we can’t let that happen! If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago. What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!

Said Donald Trump, in a written statement at his website, here. 

1. I had some trouble finding the original statement. News sites quote without linking, and Trump's website is rather hard to find by casual Googling. They don't want you to see it. So, when I finally found it, I made a bookmark, and now I intend to make a point of checking it every day. These efforts to hide things can backfire.

2. I notice that Trump is far more grounded in aesthetics than your run-of-the-mill politician. The first thing he talks about is the magnificence and beauty of the statue. That's my first reaction to this issue: Richmond, you have had a beautiful statue in your midst! Regardless of the extent to which you want to honor or dishonor the man it depicts, it is a work of art. To tear it down because of the ideas you think it represents is like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.

3. Trump has a visual mind: The "magnificent statue" is attacked by the "massive crane." He's especially drawn to the huge. That's his word — yooge. And here you have 2 huge things in confrontation. It's epic, the crane vs. the statue, like Godzilla v. Rodan. For that link, I Googled "Godzilla vs." and Google wanted to autocomplete that as... let's just say another large movie monster that it would be distracting to name.

4. But I will sidetrack you into this crucial piece of the Trump-and-art puzzle: To prepare the site for Trump Tower, his yooge monument to himself, Trump famously destroyed prominent Art Deco bas-relief sculpture that had been a focal point of 5th Avenue in New York City. In his new statement, Trump observes that the statue of Lee will be cut in 3 pieces, but Trump completely destroyed that stone artwork. 

5. More visuals: The cut-up sculpture is "thrown" into storage. It will be stored, not completely destroyed. On first glance, you might think you read "complete destruction," but Trump writes "complete desecration."

6. To say "desecration" is to say that the statue of Robert E. Lee contained sacredness. 

7. But the rest of the statement is not about holiness but military aptitude. Trump vaunts Lee as a great military strategist. Like a moviemaker pitching an alternative history script, he visualizes Lee in command of the Union Army: "the war would have been over in one day." And Lee in command in Afghanistan: There would have been "a complete and total victory many years ago."

8. It's not enough to end wars. You need to end them well, something we didn't do with Afghanistan, but which Lee — in Trump's telling — did: "He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country." 

9. That makes me think of Trump's January 6th speech. After losing (or ostensibly losing) the 2020 election, Trump could have been more of a "unifying force," "ardent in his resolve" to bridge the partisan divide. He could have pursued "many means of reconciliation and implor[ed his supporters] to do their duty in becoming good citizens."

10. Trump enlarges the picture — I think of the crane shot in "Gone With The Wind" — and we see the entire culture. The Radical Left is destroying not just this one sculpture, but everything. This is Trump's cinematic visual mind operating again. The filmmaker has us concentrating on Scarlett looking for one man then pulls back and exposes hundreds of wounded men. 

11. Trump had us looking at one sculpture, then pulls back and urges us to gaze upon the entire culture. The Left is besetting all of "our history and heritage, both good and bad." He's so protective of our culture that he's alarmed about extinguishing "both good and bad." What's wrong with extinguishing the bad?! And isn't the demand for more teaching about slavery and racism the opposite of extinguishing the bad? Let's see it! Let's make kids look right at it.

12. I'm just noticing the very close similarity in the words "sculpture" and "culture." Just pull the "s" and the "p" out of "sculpture" and you have "culture." Sorry, that's just me being visual about letters and words. Is there any meaning to that? Of course there is! Go farther down that road and you might be a poet.

"Harvey thinks Michael is a soulless, tasteless, lying prick."

From "How Harvey Weinstein Survived His Midlife Crisis (For Now)," a 2004 article in New York Magazine. The "Michael" in question is Michael Eisner. If you care. 

I'm seeing that quote because it is in the Oxford English Dictionary, the most recent example of the use of the word I looked up, "soulless." That is, most recent for meaning 2a: "Of a person: lacking spirit, sensitivity, or other qualities regarded as elevated or human; (now esp.) lacking in human warmth, feeling, or sympathy; cold, heartless." 

I'm actually more interested in meaning 1, "Having no soul," because I was having a real-life conversation about the notion that some people don't have a soul, and whether, if that could be true, the soulless person could acquire a soul, and whether a person who regards another person as soulless has a moral or intellectual obligation to look inside himself and seriously examine whether he himself has got a soul.

I read the news today....

"Legendary Drummer Nick Barker Thinks Modern Death Metal Has Become Soulless "There's very little artistic merit these days'" (Metal Injection).

"Millionaire Sandbanks residents are at war with developers over £250m plan to build 'soulless' block of 119 flats on site of Victorian hotel where radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi set up wireless station in 1898" (The Daily Mail).

"Internet slams ‘idiot’ senator who tweeted graphics attacking infrastructure bill" (Raw Story)("Each of you Republican Senators is just a soulless husk void of a heart, morals, or any ideas of value-- mere grifters and racists willing to say and do anything for money, the future be damned. What a legacy"). 

"Justin Bieber Continues to Gush on the Soulless ‘Justice’" (The Emory Wheel).

 "Godzilla vs Kong Review – Soulless CGI MonsterFest" (NerdFest).

"Safaree Samuels Explains How Social Media Creates Culture of Soulless Materialism and Vanity: ‘The Reality Is Nobody Shows the Struggle’" (Atlanta Black Star)("Social media got 22-year-olds wanting to off they selves cause they don’t make 6 figures and drive a 7 series. S–t is terrible. Got Women thinking if you can’t afford a Chanel bag, you doing bad in life and offer them nothing. Got dudes thinking a good 9-5 is slavery. Nobody likes their body, nobody like their home. Just a mass group of people wanting what others have. Or pretend to have"). 

***

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"If you can’t annoy somebody … there’s little point in writing" —Kingsley Amis/"Whatever they criticize you for, intensify it" —Jean Cocteau.

A couple quotes that jumped out at me from "Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany," a book I'm enjoying immensely. Garner is Dwight Garner, a NYT book critic. It's a very smart sequence of quotations. 

Just a few more:

"I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."—William S. Burroughs 

"Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation" —W. H. Auden 

"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane" —H. P. Lovecraft 

"A monster is a person who has stopped pretending" —Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”

"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split" —Raymond Chandler

"If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal" —Fran Lebowitz, in The New York Times 

"Don’t own anything you wouldn’t leave out in the rain" —Gary Snyder 

"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante"—Samuel Beckett 

I hope that annoyed some of you or what's the point?

"I ask you to blame the Russian Federation for my death."

Wrote Irina Slavina on Facebook, quoted in "Russian editor dies after setting herself on fire" (BBC).

Irina Slavina was editor-in-chief of the small Koza Press news website. Its motto is "news and analytics" and "no censorship". Its website went down on Friday, as news of her death was confirmed. She was one of seven people in Nizhny Novgorod whose homes were searched on Thursday, apparently as part of an inquiry into [the pro-democracy group] Open Russia. Last year, she was fined for "disrespecting authorities" in one of her articles.... In a Facebook post on Thursday, she said 12 people had forced their way into her family's flat and seized flash drives, her laptop and her daughter's laptop as well as phones belonging to both her and her husband....

The investigative committee insisted that Slavina was only a witness in their case - "and neither a suspect, nor accused, in the investigation of the criminal case", a spokesperson told Ria Novosti. That criminal case appears to focus on a local businessman who allowed various opposition groups to use his spoof church for forums and other activities including training election monitors. Mikhail Iosilevich created the so-called Flying Spaghetti Monster church in 2016 whose followers were dubbed Pastafarians....

Here's the Wikipedia article "Flying Spaghetti Monster." There's no mention of Iosilevich, and activities go back to before 2016. It wasn't invented in Russia, but presumably people all over the world take up Pastafarianism as they see fit. In the U.S., it seems to be a way to make fun of serious religion, to make atheism less grim, and to litigate about freedom-of-religion issues. Try to imagine how it would be used in Russia, where the landscape of freedom is completely different.

Irina Slavina was 47 years old, according to Wikipedia, which gives some insight into the seriousness of humor:

"I know a predator when I see one," said Kamala Harris.

At the Democratic Party convention last night. Transcript.

I found a clip of it:



And YouTube thought I'd like to see this next:

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

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

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

"The boogeyman plunging him and the family of his late wife into the very worst of memory holes is a conspiracy-theory-loving, twitchy-fingered and often shameless tweeter who also happens to be the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump."

Writes Kara Swisher in "Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain/The president is spreading a vile conspiracy theory on the platform. Maybe Twitter should finally hold him to its rules" (NYT).

The "conspiracy theory" in question is that Joe Scarborough had something to do with the death of a woman long ago. The woman's husband wants some Trump tweets deleted. There's also the idea — pushed by Mika Brzezinski (Scarborough's wife) — that Twitter should throw Trump off the site entirely.

But what exactly did Trump tweet? The woman's husband is quoted saying that Trump "allud[ed] to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough." Alluded! We need the text of the tweet, but, incredibly, it's not in this long column.

I had to look it up. I found: "A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida...and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!"

One reason not to quote the tweet is that it's just asking questions, and we'd have to spend time going into a subject we don't know. The woman's husband implies that the questions have all been asked and answered, but all he says is that there is one "falsehood" — that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman (Lori Klausutis). But Trump didn't tweet that statement. Does the debunking of the idea that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman make the things Trump actually did tweet into the sort of statement Twitter should take down?

First, Trump just asked questions, but even if we reject that loophole — I'm only asking! — it is true, I take it, that the woman suffered a blow to her head, that her body was found under his desk, that he left Congress suddenly, that it's a big topic of discussion in Florida, and that "Morning Joe" has bad ratings. And it's nothing but inane opinion to call Joe Scarborough "a Nut Job." Trump is called things like that constantly on Twitter, so there's no way there's a Twitter policy against calling famous people mentally ill.

"Also, the author of 'Dracula' was incorrect. He is Bram Stoker, not Jane Austen. "

From a correction appended to "No Lack of Chemistry, Onstage or Off/When Kate Hamill first met Jason O’Connell there was an immediate spark that neither could act on. He later went from being her leading man to her real-life beau" in The New York Times.

How do you do something that wrong? It's one thing to think "Dracula" was written by Mary Shelley. But how do you get all the way to Jane Austen?

Now, it's a wedding story. Maybe it's a sneaky way to get clicks, because I wouldn't have clicked on that headline, and I don't routinely read the NYT wedding reports.

From the article:

Ms. Hamill, who is currently starring in her own adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” an Off Broadway production running at the Classic Stage Company, that she described as “a feminist revenge fantasy,” was equally thrilled to be dating Mr. O’Connell.

Well, so... feminist revenge fantasy... that calls to mind Jane Austen, doesn't it?

As long as I'm there, let me extract this for you:

Two months into dating the bride, the groom had a wisdom tooth removed and was given powerful painkillers. “He was really out if it,” the bride said. “I made him soup and just as he was about to fall asleep, he rolled over and asked, “Will you marry me?”

Is that a feminist-revenge twist on rape drugs?

"Sometimes [Maria] Qamar’s women are crying and lovelorn. Other times they’re glossy-haired containers of rage that leap colorfully, fantastically off the canvas."

"In the installation’s titular work, a bloody, disembodied male hand grabs a lavender-skinned woman by the arm. 'FRAAAANDSHIP?' he asks. The woman’s 'NO' reverberates through the gallery’s white walls.... 'Obviously there are parts of our culture that are deep and dark and that evoke rage. And then there are certain parts that are just silly. I like that it doesn’t have to make you cry all the time. That’s the motive of what I do. You can have fun. You can sit on a samosa chair and talk about patriarchy. The first step we should take is laughing in the face of adversity. Or devastation, rather. That’s how I deal with it.'"

From "The Artist Blending Pop Art and Indian Soap Operas" (The Cut).

View this post on Instagram

🤩NEW YORK - IT'S ALMOST TIME FOR THE BIG SHOW🤩 INTRODUCING FRAAAANDSHIP: THE FIRST SOLO HATECOPY EXHIBIT IN NYC AT @richardtaittingergallery GOING ON ALLLLLL MONTH. 🌶️ 11 NEW PAINTINGS / MASSIVE LOTAS / FLUFFY SAMOSAS AND ALL THE MERCH YOUR LITTLE DIL DESIRES. 🌶️ OPENING NIGHT JAM. EVERYONE WELCOMED. 6-8PM. NO TICKETS LEKEN KUCH KHAREEDNA ZAROOR BEFORE ITS ALL GONE 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🍆

A post shared by Maria (@hatecopy) on Jul 26, 2019 at 9:14am PDT

Obama comes to Wisconsin to rally for the Democratic Party candidate for governor and repeatedly mispronounces his name.

Reminds me of the time John Kerry came to Wisconsin — at least he came to Wisconsin — and talked about getting himself a "brat," as if he was coming to take one of our devilish children.

Here's Obama in Wisconsin yesterday:



I haven't watched much of that, but the Milwaukee State Journal says:

At several points, Obama mispronounced Evers' name, which rhymes with “weavers,” not “endeavors.”

It rhymes with "cleavers" and "beavers" and "fevers" and "grievers" not "severs" and "whoever's."

Maybe somebody told Obama it rhymes with "levers."

But, man, somebody is serving Obama badly. He comes all the way to the state, then gets the name of the candidate wrong.

If you want to compare crowd-drawing power: Obama got 3,500 in Milwaukee yesterday (with 600 in the overflow room). Milwaukee is the biggest city in Wisconsin. Trump did a rally on Wednesday in Mosinee, Wisconsin, a town I've never heard of, and I've lived in Wisconsin for 34 years. I'm having trouble finding the crowd-size number for that rally, but I am seeing this, in the Wausau Daily Herald:

Meanwhile, [Trump] mispronounced the name of his choice Senate candidate, referring to her as "Leah Vyook-mar" at one point in the night. He also said Evers' name incorrectly as if it rhymes with "levers," not "weavers."

As if it rhymes with "levers"?!!! So my theory may be correct. Advisers are giving exactly the wrong word to say "Evers" rhymes with.



AH!!! GET AWAY FROM THAT LEVER!!! YOU'LL BLOW US ALL TO ATOMS!!!!

"Leslie Cockburn, a Democratic congressional nominee in Virginia, accused her Republican opponent, Denver Riggleman, on Sunday of... being the author of Bigfoot-themed erotica."

The NYT reports.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Riggleman said he was writing a book about people who believe in Bigfoot but denied that it contained any erotic content. He said any eyebrow-raising images of Bigfoot on his social media accounts were a result of “a 14-year practical joke between me and my military buddies.”...

Mr. Riggleman says the whole thing is a joke that has been misconstrued by Ms. Cockburn. The naked drawing of Bigfoot that she tweeted was a gag that was sent to him by friends — although it was a reference to the title of a real second Bigfoot book that he says he is currently writing: “The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him.”

He describes the book as “a sort of joke anthropological study on Bigfoot believers.”

Here's the ludicrous tweet by Cockburn:

My opponent Denver Riggleman, running mate of Corey Stewart, was caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist. Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica. This is not what we need on Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/0eBvxFd6sG

— Leslie Cockburn (@LeslieCockburn) July 29, 2018

It's just by chance that Riggleman and Cockburn have smutty looking names.