Another year has passed in The Althouse Sunrise Project.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of my daily photographs of the sunrise. A few days were skipped for bad weather and once or twice I overslept, but the ritual practice is nearly every single day. I try to get good pictures, but many days are like other days and simply doing it is more important to me than getting a distinctive photograph. Still I rejoice on those days when it looks especially great, and I take this annual occasion to repost a few of the best.

Like this one, with the most unusual color, from May 21:

And this, from April 26, where white showed its worth as a sunrise color:

And just last week, on September 3, brown was a delicate delight:

"There’s something about this haunting insomniac aesthetic that seems to live on in videos like the Waffle House melee."

"[Like the Edward Hopper paintings at the Whitney Museum, t]hey contain something awkward about labor and racial binaries, and even those shot in daylight have a kind of existential darkness, an anarchy associated with late nights. Their collisions are physical. Hopper’s isolated figures hunch quietly while raucous modern diners have to be held back from the staff, but in looking at both you can see an essential American estrangement, the same quality of noirish alienation under jaundiced light...."

 
Writes Niela Orr in "The Waffle House Brawl Belongs in a Museum/In video after viral video, fast-food employees keep being forced to punch above their weight. You can find the disquieting energy of these clips in classic art, too" (NYT).

Here's the Waffle House melée Orr is writing about:

"Sinema reiterates opposition to eliminating filibuster, probably dooming Democrats’ voting rights push."

WaPo reports.

And:

[T]he circumstances in which she reiterated it — as Senate Democratic leaders prepared to launch a decisive floor debate and less than an hour before President Biden was scheduled to arrive on Capitol Hill to deliver a final, forceful appeal for action — put an exclamation point on her party’s long and fruitless effort to counter restrictive Republican-passed state voting laws.

We're told that she wore "purple, a symbol of Washington bipartisanship." There's always interest in what this Senator is wearing. So here — you can look at her as she stands in the breach:

This sounds like the message he ran on, but not much like what his Party has been up to lately.

My plans are not about left versus right — or moderate versus progressive — or anything else that pits Americans against one another. They are about competitiveness, expanding opportunity, and leading the world.

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 30, 2021

It seems to me that Biden got elected by offering to be not much more than the absence of Trump, but his Party seems to behave as if the people elected Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren (and won both houses of Congress with a comfortable margin). 

As long as I'm in the President's Twitter feed, I wanted to show you the vivid bodycon dress Dr. Jill wore:

Jill and I are honored to join the Mattarellas and Draghis at the G20 Summit Leaders Dinner. pic.twitter.com/FrnZUmFFsc

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 30, 2021

"Every so often, a TikTok comes along that physically debilitates me. Sometimes it’s... an overwhelming, full-body gut punch..."

"...one that’s triggered by a deep sense of emotional recognition. It could be embarrassment, fear, or stress. Or it could be positive: excitement, pride, joy..."

Writes Emilia Petracha in "What Will You Wear on the First Day of the Rest of Your Life?" (New York Magazine). Here's the TikTok she's talking about:

"Try to imagine Muhammad Ali without Little Richard’s winking persona, his swing and swagger ('I am the King!')."

"Try to imagine James Brown, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Prince without his electrical charge. Little Richard was an original, and he did not hesitate to remind his students of their debt. He once looked into a television camera and, with affection, told Prince, 'I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!'... Richard Penniman was born in 1932 into a large, poor Christian family, in Macon, Georgia. His father was a brick mason and a bootlegger. One of Richard’s legs was shorter than the other, making him a source of mockery among other children. 'They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine... The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.'... Even as a child singer, Richard was known for his high range and incredible volume. But, in his father’s eyes, he was unbearably effeminate and not to be tolerated. When Richard was a teen-ager, he was thrown out of the house and went to live with Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a local venue, the Tick Tock Club.... Throughout his teens, he was in and out of outfits like Buster Brown’s Orchestra (where he got the name Little Richard) and the Tidy Jolly Steppers. He sang, sometimes wearing a red evening gown, under the name Princess Lavonne, in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show."

From "Little Richard, the Great Innovator of Rock and Roll" by David Remnick (The New Yorker).

I wanted to find a photograph of Little Richard in the Princess Lavonne persona. I did find this description at Talkhouse, "Pour on the Steam: Little Richard at Age 19/Adam Weiner (Low Cut Connie) tells a tale of magical personhood in a Macon, Georgia bus station":

It was a medicine show spiritualist pseudo-psychic passing through town named Doctor Nobilio who was the first to tell Richard he would be massively famous—he just needed to get the hell out of Macon. He quit high school and joined up with a series of amazingly-titled rinky-dink traveling shows, initially billed as Little Richard, and then as the great Princess Lavonne. He performed with Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show, Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam, the Tidy Jolly Steppers, and the Broadway Follies. Princess Lavonne was an intense, hilarious Queen in Pancake 31 makeup. He worked on his schtick, but ultimately was an awkward drag performer. He had a natural gift to electrify and seduce, but with his mismatched legs, he couldn’t figure out how to walk or dance in heels so he would just stand still and wait for someone to open and close the curtain...

I'd also love to hear the story from the perspective of Ann and Johnny Johnson. Who were these white people who took in Little Richard when his father was so cruel to him? Or was his father cruel to him?

Bud Penniman. What voice did that man have?

"If purple walls and a red tinted window surrounded you for a month with no color but purple around you, by the end of that time you would be a mad-man."

"No matter how strong your brain might be it would not stand the strain, and it is doubtful if you would ever recover your reason."

Said the Boston Globe in a 1903 article titled "Dangerous Tints: Some Colors Will Drive a Person Mad if the Eyes Are Continually Looking at Them," quoted in "15 Perfectly Safe Things That Were Once Considered Dangerous" (Mental Floss).

[Purple] wasn't the only color to avoid. Scarlet could push you into a murderous rage, while blue “excites the imagination and gives a craving for music and stagecraft, but it has a reaction that wrecks the nerves.” Meanwhile, “Solitary confinement in a yellow cell … will weaken any system and produce chronic hysteria,” and “sheer dead white, unbroken, will destroy your eyesight.”

Sounds like the key is to vary your colors. What drives you mad is the monotone. Do we really know the effect of one-intense-color interiors on people who stay inside all the time?

This question makes me think of Monet's all-yellow (almost) dining room at Giverny:



I love that, but if you lived there, you wouldn't be in a solitary confinement cell. Look at those open doors. You can un-yellow at the first frisson of hysteria. Just run out into the green. "Green is the king of colors... and no amount of it can do any harm."

"The trim speaker, wearing white pants and a purple cardigan to match her purple Manolo heels, stabbed her fork into one of my home fries...."

"[M]any Democrats see Pelosi as the thin blue line — albeit in fiery orange and hot pink hues — standing between them and a lawless Trump...."

From "It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade/'If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,' she told me" by Maureen Dowd (NYT). I'm just highlighting the colors... because they jumped out at me. Much more at the link.

Also, I think it's funny to talk about Pelosi as the line between order and chaos just as she's breaching the line between my plate and yours — and so agressively: stabbing the potatoes.

At the Bright Purple Café...

... you can talk all you like about whatever you want.

At the Deep Purple Café...

... have your Saturday night conversation.

And here's the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

Let's watch Trump do his Halloween photo op with the children of White House reporters.

Of course, he'll get a few things a little off, and the game is, of course, to find them and use them as much as possible to prove, once again, what a bad person he is:



The New York Times puts it this way:

“I cannot believe the media produced such beautiful children,” President Trump marveled, surrounded in the Oval Office by the Halloween-costumed offspring of White House reporters. “How the media did this, I don’t know.”

The children stared vacantly. The candy had not yet arrived.

For some 180 seconds on Friday, these visitors inspired a quintessential Trump performance — part executive gripe session, part grandfatherly charm, part open-mic night for the under-12 set....

“These are beautiful, wonderful children,” he began, pausing for a beat behind his desk. “Ughhh. You going to grow up to be like your parents?”

When the candy arrives, he hands it out saying: “Who likes this?And you have no weight problems. That’s the good news, right?”

Yeah, but how did Obama handle Halloween? I looked it up. Oh, my...



That guy could be so beautiful (in a way Trump cannot begin to emulate). I blogged that a year ago under the post title "I'm going to miss this man." Seeing a tiny boy dressed as Prince, Obama sings "Purple rain, purple rain."

By contrast, Trump saw a little girl with purple hair and said: "I like that hair. Wow. What color is that? Is that purple?" The little girl just said "Yeah." She was the daughter of a journalist, and yet she politely refrained from retorting: "I like that hair. Wow. What color is that? Is that orange?"

ADDED: Let me pick on the NYT for this:

On the girl with purple hair: “What color is that? Purple?”

That makes Trump sound dumber than he is, because here's the girl in question:

It's a setup to call her "the girl with purple hair." Many girls, if asked "What color is that? Purple?" would give an elaborate answer like: "Well, it's sort of purple, but really, I would call it lilac or maybe lavender." Perhaps Trump has had conversations with his daughters about colors and thought it was giving the girl a good opportunity to say something cute or clever.

But she just said, "yeah," which is okay, but I don't think Trump should be made to look like he wasn't good at talking to kids because he just stated the obvious.

You could even say he was better than Obama, because Obama took the spotlight from the child by singing "Purple Rain," but Trump allowed himself to sound dumb when he was really giving the girl a chance to shine.

I've had many conversations with children over the years, and I think I'm kind of good at it. And I would use simple questions like "What color is that? Purple?" Or maybe I'd have said "What color is that? I've never seen that color before. Is that special color only for unicorns?" The idea is to give the child a chance to say anything and then to show interest in whatever it is and get some kind of riff going in any way that the child can do.

50 years ago today: The Jimi Hendrix Experience released "Are You Experienced?"

I still have my copy. It survived the proposed great album cull of 1976. I vividly remember my first husband going through the pile of record albums we'd lugged from place to place and selecting "Are You Experienced?" to hold up. "You're never going to listen to this again," he asserted.



Here's the "Are You Experienced?" Wikipedia page:

Soon after the [recording] session began, [producer Chas] Chandler asked Hendrix to turn his guitar amplifier down, and an argument ensued. Chandler commented: "Jimi threw a tantrum because I wouldn't let him play guitar loud enough ... He was playing a Marshall twin stack, and it was so loud in the studio that we were picking up various rattles and noises." According to Chandler, Hendrix then threatened to leave England, stating: "If I can't play as loud as I want, I might as well go back to New York." Chandler, who had Hendrix's immigration papers and passport in his back pocket, laid the documents on the mixing console and told Hendrix to "piss off."  Hendrix laughed and said: "All right, you called my bluff," and they got back to work.

Lots more detail about the recording at the link. I'll just pick out one more thing:

Although the lyrics to "Purple Haze", which opened the US edition of Are You Experienced, are often misinterpreted as describing an acid trip, Hendrix explained: "[It] was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea." He speculated that the dream may have been inspired by a science fiction story about a purple death ray. [Noel] Redding stated that Hendrix had not yet taken LSD at the time of the song's writing... It opens with a guitar/bass harmony in the interval of a tritone that was known as the diabolus in musica during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Catholic Church prohibited medieval composers of religious music from using the tritone, or flattened fifth, because as musicologist Dave Whitehill wrote: "to play it was like ringing Satan's doorbell."

"We did not want to make this pink-washed. This is not a girl’s condom."

"It’s not just like, ‘Hey, I’m the guy, I bring the condom.’ It’s people involved together making decisions for their sexual health."

Said Bruce Weiss, Trojan’s vice president of marketing, explaining a new product with "more gender-neutral purple packaging" and "a carrying case that could slip easily (and discreetly) into a purse," quoted in a NYT article titled "XOXO Campaign: Will It Spell Profit or Trouble for Condom Maker?"

The "trouble" is, we're told, that in today's "unforgiving environment,"* Trojan could get criticizes for seeming to shift responsibility onto the woman when it — like the condom — belongs on the man.

Fortunately for Trojan, the NYT extracted a quote from Naomi Wolf, who enthuses:

“It wonderfully addresses women as adults who can take responsibility, not victims of whatever the guy happens to have in his pocket or not,” Ms. Wolf said. “It addresses women as adults who are thinking about their sexual health.”

Victims of whatever the guy happens to have in his pocket — great phrase.

_________________

* E.g., the reaming given to Pepsi for seemingly trivializing Black Lives Matter. 

"Let's go live someplace bloggable — blog some new place."

I hear myself say.

It's not a thought I haven't had before, but here's the precise thing I was reading that provoked my exclamation:

It’s a diet fit for a Prince.

Purple reins* on the distressed wood tables at chic restaurants in Portland....

It doesn't have to be Portland, but don't you want your Althouse from Portland? If not Portland, then where? Do you need me to keep monitoring Madison?

Althouse should blog from...

Madison, as always, only going elsewhere as a traveler.

Portland!

Somewhere other than Madison or Portland.

No fixed home, just move to one location, maybe for a year, then another and another, etc.

Althouse is always only on the internet, no real-life place matters. Althouse is not a home.

 

pollcode.com free polls

___________________________

* The writer screwed up her own joke. It should be "Purple reigns." She knew she had to spell it differently from "rain," but she didn't know which way to spell it differently. It really matters when you're doing a pun. If you can't pull it off, rein it in.

Purple morning.

Just now, as seen from the Meadhouse deck.

I can't believe we're still waiting for Clinton to come out and do her concession speech.

This should have happened last night, and now we've had announcements of speaking times that have been missed. The newsfolk on CNN are blabbing — about Clinton, not the President-elect — on a split screen with an empty lectern in front of a line of American flags. They're talking about Hillary's whole life. I'm hearing about how she does "her homework" and how she was inspired by religion and her mother and how she believes that "Donald Trump would hurt little girls."

It's bad enough that her entitlement to the nomination blocked fresher Democratic prospects and that she created so many problems with the email and the Foundation and ran such a terrible campaign. That alone should generate intense anger at her. But for her to now...

Ah! Here she is!

UPDATE: No, it's just Tim Kaine. He's so proud of Hillary Clinton. The delay goes on.

So I can continue my sentence above: But for her to now absorb all our attention this morning is so enraging. I know there are a lot of people who are mad at Trump for winning (or mad at the people who voted for Trump), but I think the anger should be directed at Hillary Clinton. She lost this disastrously. So much was done to clear competition out of her way, and the news media were dedicated to helping her. What does she have to say for herself?

UPDATE 2: She's finally here. She'd better not say "glass ceiling."

UPDATE 3: She's done. There was a mention of the glass ceiling, but in all, I think it was decently generous. She still believes we're "stronger together," and she urged us to go forward accepting that Donald Trump is President but, at the same time, she said we should never stop fighting — fighting him and his Congress, I presume.

UPDATE 4: On CNN, David Gergen is going on about Bill and Hillary Clinton both wearing purple. It means something. The color of spirituality.

"I will never wear black again."

Said TCU coach Gary Patterson, who, desperate, got out of his all-black clothes at half time and put on a purple shirt, quoted in "In stunning collapse, Oregon Ducks lose Alamo Bowl after allowing TCU a 31-point comeback."

(I'm just trying to get to the real bad news from Oregon — the Occupy Oregon/Cliven Bundy thing — but this distracted me.)

"Former President George W. Bush once went on an awkward blind date with the daughter of then-President Richard Nixon."

"During dinner, I reached for some butter, knocked over a glass, and watched in horror as the stain of red wine crept across the table. Then I fired up a cigarette, prompting a polite suggestion from Tricia that I not smoke."

Aw, that's not so bad. Maybe I need to buy the book. Here. The story is that Bush's father hosted a dinner honoring the commander of Apollo 8, which had flown around the moon in December 1968, and invited young Bush, to mix with the various Washington people. Old Bush had an "ulterior motive": "I also invited Tricia Nixon. I thought it might be fun for you to take her to the party."

Bush was "briefly speechless":

"We'll learn more about why baboons actually love grapes."

Says the lady newscaster in the purple dress as a baboon, smiling, gropes her breast.

RELATED: What happens when you teach a gorilla sign language?

"It is with the greatest confidence that I will pass on the throne on April 30 to my son, Prince of Orange."

Says the Queen of Purple.



I mean Queen Beatrix.