"There Must Be More to Life Than..."

I didn't blog this yesterday because I thought Trump's Fight, Fight, Fight cologne was just a joke.

It is funny, but the product is apparently real:

It's possible that the product idea was created in response to the glorious photographs of Jill Biden seemingly flirting with Donald Trump at the Notre Dame festivities in Paris. I see news articles from 2 days ago saying that Trump had just "launched" the product. So I'm thinking first came this hilarious idea for a fake ad and then came the idea that it can be an actual product.

Because, look, that bottle is completely basic — it's not shaped like an upraised fist — and the lettering is very plain and the product name is close to the first thing you'd think of.

It's like an episode of "The Apprentice." Here are these photographs of the President's wife adoring the former President. Your challenge is to design a Trump-branded product and to use one of the photographs in an ad campaign. 

The joke alone would have been great, but the idea of turning it into a money stream like this is brilliant. Now you know what to get your Trump loving dad Christmas... even though it's utterly well known that Dad never wants cologne.

"My concern is this is instrumentalizing the dog. This is not giving the dog any choice in the matter."

"If your dog wants to rub itself in coyote scat or fox scat, that’s the dog’s choice. But if it gets a spray of Dolce & Gabbana on it, that is not its choice. We need to be far more respectful of dogs and their wishes."

Said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine, quoted in "Dolce & Gabbana Has New Dog Perfume. Veterinarians Turn Up Their Noses. An extravagant scent might seem like the height of pampering for your pup. But veterinarians are raising red flags: 'Overall, it’s a very bad idea'" (NYT).

"Young enthusiasts say that cultivating an air of sophistication is what separates the boys from the slightly older boys."

"Using terminology they absorb online, middle schoolers at sleepovers are discussing high-end fragrances the way that sommeliers might analyze wine.The scent Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier has 'a really good honey note,' said Luke Benson, a 14-year-old who lives in Orlando, Fla. Tom Ford Noir Extreme, on the other hand, is 'a lot spicier and a little bit darker.' Other young scent aficionados throw around vocabulary like 'sillage,' a French term for how heavily a fragrance lingers.... Asked why middle schoolers have suddenly developed a nose for Dior, almost every teenager, researcher and merchandising expert offered the same answer: TikTok.... 'Social media and TikTok make people want to be more grown-up,' said Luke, the 14-year-old.... Some parents and teachers wonder about the appropriateness of these products for a young audience. Teenagers are especially fond of the packaging of Angels’ Share by Kilian, which resembles a glass of cognac, and Le Male, a strapping torso with wide shoulders and a bulging crotch. 'They make it so sexy,' said Ms. Glover, the middle school teacher, 'and an 11-year-old is like, I want to wear that to school.'"

From "When Did Teen Boys Get a Nose for $300 Cologne? Some Gen Z kids can’t seem to get enough of the luxury fragrances" (NYT).

A few thoughts:

"Look at the way Mary looked then! Good Lord, she was only 15! She had the perfect tough girl image."

"Hers was a look that in those days -- where I was anyway, in northern New Jersey -- we called 'hoody.' It was the alternative to the mod look, which I personally favored. I knew one girl, a friend of my sister's, who had the Mary Weiss look. It was sort of the dark side to the candy-colored mod/psychedelic style that I believed would conquer all. But this other thing! It came from the wrong side of town. My sister's friend scared me a little. She didn't live with her parents. She was from over in Boonton. She wore Tabu perfume. Really, I would never wear Tabu perfume. It's unbelievably sweet and strong. But I'd love to have some to dump into a handkerchief to inhale while listening to old Shangri-Las records."

I wrote, about Mary Weiss, back in 2007. 

Now, I see this morning, she has died.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no no no no no.

Annual nonsense.

That's a tag of mine. Possibly useful on this last day of the year. Do you have any annual nonsense?

Things I've labeled "annual nonsense" over the years: Time's Person of the Year, lists of best posts of the year, Valentine's Day, the Met Gala, the Super Bowl half-time show, the anniversary of the day I started blogging, New Year's resolutions, New Year's predictions, the Oscars, setting the clocks forward/back (and critiquing the practice), Groundhog Day (and citing the movie), Thanksgiving (and pardoning turkeys), Rock and Roll Hall of Fame "inductions," April Fool's Day, Drynuary, the White House Correspondents Dinner, the Mummers Parade (controversial in 2016), adults doing Halloween, No Pants Subway Ride....

Here's something I counted as "annual nonsense" a decade ago that I haven't noticed happening anymore: the "war on Christmas."

And here's some "annual nonsense" that I used to notice that hadn't come to my attention in years but is still around, "The List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." Back in 2008, I blogged about being told to quit saying "maverick," "from Wall Street to Main Street," "desperate search," "monkey" (the suffix), "game-changing," "carbon footprint," "winner of five nominations," "green," "going green," "first dude," "staycation." 

But look, here's a new list of "banished words" for 2023. I'm surprised they're just getting around to "amazing," "irregardless," "absolutely," and "It is what it is." I've got to agree strongly about "GOAT," "inflection point," and "Does that make sense?" I'd say "quiet quitting" and "gaslighting" are too useful to let go of, not yet. And I don't see a problem with "moving forward" (because, despite the explanation given, there are other directions to move (unless you're talking about moving forward in time)). 

Also, I haven't checked other recent years of banished words, but the one that's driving me up the wall is "obsessed." The claims of obsession are beyond ridiculous to pathetic these days. Somebody likes something — a food, a lipstick, and TV show — and they'll say with giddy emphasis: "I'm obsessed."

I remember when "obsession" was reserved for unwise love affairs, but that tipped over into a winking joke around 1985...

 

... and it's been downhill from there.

"He made sure I was aware that he was taking me to one of the finest Italian restaurants in New York. He knew the owner..."

"... who was John Huston’s father-in-law. He was acquainted with just about everybody. And he was interested in everything. He spoke of paintings and antique furniture and the joys of the English countryside. He was as charming that evening as he had been rude the first time we met. I remember his taking a sip of wine and looking at me for a long moment through the candlelight. 'I would rather be dead than fat,' he said."

Wrote Patricia Neal — the actress and Roald Dahl's first wife —  about her first date with Dahl, quoted in "Making It Big/In Roald Dahl’s stories, cruelty begets cruelty, children grow large, adults grow small, and everyone is trapped in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors"  (NYRB).

"It was sometime during the 2012 season when Alcides Escobar of the Kansas City Royals grabbed a bottle from his locker and sprayed some of its contents..."

"... onto Salvador Pérez. Caught off guard, Pérez warned his fellow Venezuelan and close friend not to mess with him, punctuating his emotion with some colorful language in Spanish. Hours later, though, Pérez was far from bothered. He collected four hits that day and smelled great in the process. The mysterious substance in the bottle, from his point of view, had become a performance-enhancer: women’s perfume. 'From then on, I bought all the Victoria’s Secret there was,' Pérez recalled recently in Spanish.... 'If I don’t have perfume on, I feel strange,' said Seattle Mariners third baseman Eugenio Suárez, a Venezuelan.... Even though most players are often several dozen feet away from each other on the field, Suárez said he likes hearing that he smells good. Pérez said he can sometimes pick up the aroma of Luis Severino, a Dominican pitcher for the Yankees who uses a women’s body splash, despite Severino being 60 feet 6 inches away when facing him. 'I’m a catcher so I sweat a lot,' Pérez said, pointing to all his gear. 'So a little perfume helps. The umpires say, "Oh Salvy, you smell good." I say, "Thank you. Give me some strikes."'"

From "Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good? Baseball is full of traditions and superstitions. For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women’s perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers" by James Wagner (NYT).

I don't know what the "colorful language in Spanish" was. Something not fit to print. But what was the Victoria's Secret perfume? I'm guessing Bombshell. But maybe it's Amber Romance perfume. I see something from 2019 about the LSU baseball team and their use of Amber Romance to repel gnats. (And, yes, I know there's an MLB team called The Gnats.)

ADDED: "Amber Romance" — I'm not picturing hurled baseballs but hurled vodka bottles that shatter and cut off your fingertips.

"The priciest Advent calendar on the market is probably the new $150,000 Tiffany version, a four-foot-tall cabinet with a reproduction of the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting... on the front and 24 gifts inside."

" So why has the Chanel version gotten people so het up?... ... Chanel does lay out all the contents of the calendar on its website, so it’s not a secret what anybody is getting for their money. It’s not apparent that their offering is any more flimflam than that of other brands. But because it was new, and because it cost so much [$825], and because it was Chanel, with all the mythology built into the name, the stakes and expectations may have been higher. And the sense of betrayal when those expectations were not met, greater — and, it would seem, the desire to publicly pile on in response, irresistible. Those who profit from perception can also lose because of it. What Ms. Harmon opened up wasn’t just a new mini perfume. It was a new reality, now completely out of the box."

 
From "Chanel, TikTok and the Beauty Advent Calendar Controversy/Some social media users are not feeling the Christmas spirit — or this box of mini lipsticks and branded stickers" (NYT).

Here's Elise Harmon's viral TikTok video, showing her unboxing the Chanel Advent calendar. Here's Chanel's presentation, revealing what you get for the money (click to enlarge):

"Smell of horror, the panic, the fear..."/"It's creepy, isn't it?"

Who first came up with the idea of a bottle shaped like a woman's body?

You may have noticed in the news today that Kim Kardashian West has been accused of copying a design idea from Jean Paul Gaultier — a perfume bottle shaped like a woman's torso.



The Gautier design (on the right) goes back to the early 1990s. But surely the idea of a bottle shaped like a woman is older than that. What about the famous Coca-Cola bottle? Wasn't that designed to look like a woman's body? At the Coca-Cola website, I see the company wanted a distinctive bottle (so it could fight off trademark infringers — e.g., Koka-Nola, Ma Coca-Co, Toka-Cola, and Koke):

On April 26, 1915, the Trustees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Association voted to expend up to $500 to develop a distinctive bottle for Coca-Cola. So, eight to 10 glass companies across the U.S. subsequently received a challenge to develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”...

In Terre Haute, Indiana, the Root Glass Company received the brief and had a meeting to begin to work on their design. The Root team was composed of C.J and William Root, Alexander Samuelson, Earl Dean and Clyde Edwards. Samuelsson, a Swedish immigrant who was the shop foreman, sent Dean and Edwards to the local library to research design possibilities. When the team came across an illustration of cocoa bean that had an elongated shape and distinct ribs, they had their shape....

Ah! So it wasn't a woman's body! It was a cocoa bean! But:

The Coke bottle has been called many things over the years. One of the more interesting of the nicknames is the “hobbleskirt” bottle. The hobbleskirt was a fashion trend during the 1910s where the skirt had a very tapered look and was so narrow below the knees that it “hobbled” the wearer. The bottle was also called the “Mae West” bottle after the actress’s famous curvaceous figure....

It became a woman's body in the mind of the beholders. Whether you want to credit Coke or not, you've got to concede that Mrs. Butterworth beat Jean Paul Gaultier. We've been seeing this bottle since 1961:



To be fair to Gaultier, his bottle omits the head and just has the bottle cap on top of a torso, a design idea copied/arrived upon by Kim Kardashian's people. Mrs. Butterworth has a head, and the bottlecap  goes on top of that head. The cap is a cap. To leave off the head and just put a cap at the neck... that's a bit disturbing, like the truly offensive "Bitchin' Bod" comic by R. Crumb:



For refreshment, this is a hobbleskirt:



And this is Mae West:

"For the first time, Jamie’s getting irrational criticism from her fellow liberals, who think that if you represent anyone associated with the other side, you must be a Republican in hiding."

"Jamie is obviously a liberal Democrat, but this is not a betrayal. Jamie is being patriotic and heroic and consistent with the best traditions of the bar. We have to resist zealotry on both sides."

Said Alan Dershowitz about Jamie Gorelick, quoted in "When a liberal power lawyer represents the Trump family, things can get ugly" in The Washington Post. Gorelick took on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner as clients.

How did "things... get ugly"? Well, obviously, it's people who are being ugly. Here are the 3 examples of ugliness given in the article:

In the most public slap, Hilary Rosen, a prominent Democratic strategist and lobbyist, tweeted, “Hey Jamie Gorelick, you’ve just poured that ‘Complicit’ perfume on yourself,” a reference to a “Saturday Night Live” parody ad that imagined an Ivanka Trump-branded scent. (Rosen declined to elaborate on the tweet, saying only, “It is what it is.”)

“Representing Jared and Ivanka is a case of pushing the ethical envelope, helping a wealthy family on the brink of using the presidency to further enrich themselves,” said David Halperin, a speechwriter in the Clinton White House and former counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Gorelick is a Clinton supporter embracing the family that wanted to put Hillary Clinton in jail. People in Washington are all too willing to forgive that.”

This being Washington, some of Gorelick’s critics tuck their attacks behind the cloak of anonymity. “Do you want to be seen as a fixer available to all or a fixer for principles you believe in?” said a lawyer who has worked with Gorelick on campaigns since the Clinton and Gore era. “One probably pays better than the other, but every step you take has consequences.”

Here's that parody ad, which I'd known about but never watched before just now:



Speaking of ugliness, what dominates that SNL clip is beauty. You get completely caught up in the beauty of Scarlett Johansson (as Ivanka Trump). That makes it very funny when she glamorously puts on her lipstick and the reflected image in her mirror is Alec Baldwin (as Donald Trump). So, suddenly ugliness. You think you're pretty but you are really ugly.

Interesting that another woman, Hilary Rosen, chose that idea to discipline Gorelick, the metaphor of outward physical beauty to represent inner virtue.

ADDED: Hilary Rosen... why did I already have a tag for her? Ah, yes! It was back in 2012: Rosengate. Remember that?

"Adviser to Obama, DNC Attacks Ann Romney"... DNC advisor Hilary Rosen, trying to say that Mitt Romney "doesn't connect" on the issue of women struggling economically: He's "running around the country, saying, well, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing." She pauses, then blurts out the unfortunate line, which she clearly thinks is a great zinger: "Guess what? His wife has actually not worked a day in her life."...

Women attacking women. Ha. I heard about a special place in hell...

"Michelle Obama proves there is a grown-up way to do the cold shoulder trend."

No, this is not an article about how — unlike Melania Trump* — Michelle Obama has a good way to keep her husband from touching her, it's about that not-dead-quite-yet fashion trend of wacky necklines that expose the shoulder.

And I have no idea why this particular blouse of Michelle's is supposed to look "grown-up" — or why children are getting blamed for what has always looked to me like just a last-ditch effort to find a new approach to baring female flesh. Okay, we did midriffs, we did lower back, we did ass cheeks, so... how about shoulders? Yes, let's break out the shoulders! Most women want to wear bras and most bras have shoulder straps, so it's at least a challenge of some sort, even if no one's too fixated on shoulders, but maybe they once were.

There was a 1931 movie "White Shoulders":



And not long after that, Evyan introduced White Shoulders perfume:

Actually it is probably the iconic American fragrance. Classified as a Floral Aldehyde, it is: beautiful, sweet, sexy, powdery, radiant, maternal, refined, approachable, fresh, gracious and warm but at [its] core — very "night"...

Anyway, sorry to veer over into all that whiteness. The correct answer — I think — to why the UK Telegraph article characterizes Michelle Obama as "proving" that the bared shoulder look can be worn in a "grown-up way" is simply that Michelle Obama is doing it. In syllogistic form: Whatever Michelle Obama does is grown up, Michelle Obama is wearing a "cold shoulder" garment, therefore it is possible to wear the "cold shoulder" look in a grown-up way.
____________________

* Twice, Melania has been shown on video seemingly rejecting Trump's effort to hold hands with her. She doesn't just let him (to coin a phrase — have you ever heard that phrase? I just came up with it!). And speaking of Melania, did you see that she (and Ivanka) wore a black veil on her head to meet the Pope? She didn't cover her head for the Muslims, but she covered her head for the Catholics? I'd say, she didn't cover her head for the political leaders in Saudi Arabia, but she did cover her head for the religious leader in the Vatican. As for the flicking away of her husband's hand, I'd defend her this way: He has expressive hands and instinctive affection, but she is a model, more concerned with appearances and focused on walking with professional elegance in high heels and not getting thrown off balance. There's a bit of a conflict there, and the subtle flick of the wrist would normally go unnoticed, and it would work just fine. But a million eyes are scanning each microsecond of video, and the tiniest gestures will be detected and magnified. And if they want to use you to show that your husband is hateful, they will find whatever they can. Just as anything Michelle Obama does can count as how to be a "grown up" — or whatever the hell — anything Melania does might count as evidence that Trump is loathsome.

A visual/aural depiction of smell.

Much appreciated by me, an anosmiac:



Great ad!

I ended up looking at that because a reader sent me to this other recent, lovely Chanel thing, the complete 20-minute fashion show in the Paseo del Prado in Cuba:

"She's Not There"... the great old Zombies song... is playing out of my computer...

... and Meade asks "Is that about Hillary?" (He imagined someone had cranked out a comic take on Hillary's failure to make it back to the debate stage on time last night.)

I said: "No, it's a Chanel ad. I'm just putting up with it so I can watch the new Bill Cunningham video...."



Here's the Bill Cunningham. He's observing the color white this week — white, as a pre-Christmas phenomenon, in store windows, ladies' coats, and the spats of Tom Wolfe.

Here's Hillary returning late to the stage, which we found very funny — the disruption, even as she tries to be inconspicuous; the applause, like it's an achievement (or relief that she's okay); and the utterly minimal "sorry" (which we replayed 10 times and laughed every time).



ADDED: The ad is excellent, connecting perfume to the memory of a woman who is not there. A woman — in white — tosses the perfume bottle to the man and walks toward him, and then a woman in black crosses her path and the woman in white dissipates and disappears. Pretty impressive ad placement, considering that the Cunningham video is about the color white.

AND: Speaking of Hillary and fashion, can anyone explain the extremely frumpy knee-length coat she wore last night?

I'm especially curious about the big patch pockets at belly level. I understand that's something a woman might choose as an alternative to carrying a purse, but Hillary has people to hold her things for her, and the pockets are so crude — huge and stuck on and bulgy. If I had to guess, I'd say she wears clothes as a deflection of attention from her body. Don't even look at it. I'm only a head.

It made me think of The Little King:

A nurse said: "We all play a game called Interesting Things I Have Found in Obese People’s Rolls of Fat."

"So far I’m sitting in third with a fork, second place is an ICU nurse who found a TV remote, and the winner is an ER nurse who found a tuna fish sandwich."

Quoted in a WaPo article called "Nurses make fun of their dying patients. That’s okay," by Alexandra Robbins, who has a book called, "The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles With the Heroes of the Hospital."

Robbins says:

I learned that some units have a dedicated “butt box” for items retrieved from patients’ rectums — glass perfume bottles, an entire apple, etc. — though after Indiana nurses pulled out a G.I. Joe, the real unfortunate hero assumed pride of place in the nurses’ station.

Her point is that usually the jokes are about "situations and symptoms"...

But even when patients do become subjects of derogatory humor, we shouldn’t rush to criticize medical professionals for using it. Bioethicist Katie Watson suggests that kind of humor may result when health-care providers feel powerless to heal. “Derisive joking does the unspoken work of reframing physicians as blameless for their inability to help,” she wrote in 2011 in the Hastings Center Report....

Humor has a place in hospitals, even if it’s dark, even if it’s derogatory — as long as it isn’t cruel.... Humor is a way for nurses to empower themselves and to unite with one another, determined and defiant, against disease and injury...

... and rolls of fat.

73-year-old fashion designer Roberto Cavalli offends me and some Sufis.

1. I'm offended by his absurd shorts — cut-off stone-washed jeans. But I must say I got a kick out of the photograph of him with his 26-year-old girlfriend Lina Nilson because — she's also in shorts — the 2 have virtually identical legs.

2. The Sufis are offended that his new cologne, Just Cavalli, has a logo that looks a lot like a symbol the M.T.O. Shahmaghsoudi school of Sufism has used for 150 years — and have had trademarked for 27 years. It spells out the words "Allah" and "Ali." According to Georgia May Jagger — the 22-year old model (and Mick Jagger daughter) who appears in the video ad — the perfume's logo is supposed to look like "The tattoo is the bite, the snake bite. It draws us together. And it’s basically the sign of seduction." That kind of talk tends to irk the Sufis, whose symbol is said to represent "peace, purity and the name of God." The Sufis lost in court on the trademark infringement issue, but it seems obvious that the Cavalli people would have selected a different logo if they'd seen that their effort to seem very sexy was going to get mixed up with Islam. Here's the ad:



And here are the 2 logos, side by side (with the Cavalli logo tipped sideways):

"Scent designer Sissel Tolaas and photographer Nick Knight teamed up to explore a fragrance that charts the emotional landscape of violence."

"Collecting sweat samples at cage fighting matches and analyzing the chemicals by means of gas chromatography, Tolaas and Knight evoke a provocative portrayal of aggressive dominance and sexual behavior, captured in the throes of violent action itself."

A product/art project, commented on by Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I did not want to open it. It appears that I shy away from violence even as a smell: sweat, body odor, the dankness and rankness of gyms and locker rooms, the certainty that it will make me wrinkle my nose like a packed summer subway or a urine-soaked stairwell. The thought of a smell wrung from the sweat-soaked t-shirts of cage fighters creates a ripple of distaste and even fear at the imminent prospect of inhaling, a sensory reaction before the sense in question is even engaged.

She shies away from violence, this lady named Slaughter. Yet she promotes a twee art project that taps the allure of violence.

Isn't "taps" so the right word there?

If you think the NYT is inclined to explain the racial angle to all manner of stories...

... you should notice when it fails to do so, as here: "Era Fades for Helping Hand at the Washroom Sink."

The NYT readers did. One reader wrote:

I'm surprised that racism is not mentioned.... I have not seen many bathroom attendants, but I never saw a white man in the position and always felt that my tip was like a vote cast in favor of a miserable and humiliating caste system.

Ha. This is a reason not to tip?!

Another wrote:

In September I took my 14-year-old daughter to Manhattan and to our very special lunch in the City. More than the food or excitement of Balthazar's lively atmosphere, or the fantasy that she was in a Parisienne cafe, is her memory of the bathroom, and the bathroom attendant. She was astonished at the idea of a bathroom attendant even after I, her 70s disco clubbing worldly mom explained, even after our teachable moment about racism, economics, education, sexism, fine dining, NYC, etc. She thought it had to be the worst job ever -- cooped up in that tiny smelly space hoping someone would give you a dollar for a paper towel; how would a poor old lady have money to spend for a stranger's perfume? It looked like slavery to her, too. I have to agree; although I see the need for reliable sanitation throughout the workday it really is archaic and peculiar.

(I added the link to that last word.)

"When the advertising gods cast my soul into hell as punishment for writing negative reviews..."

"... I'll probably be forced to watch a witless, artsy perfume commercial like this Dior Homme spot on an endless loop for all eternity."



"Moody monochrome images of Rob Pattinson's 'smoldering stares' will sear my eyes forever, while the clip's soundtrack — Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love' — scalds my ears like the screams of the damned."

Way, way down inside... the fiery pit of hell.