About that talus cone and the fossilized tooth plaque....

I'm reading "10,000 Tales From a 17th-Century Crypt/In Milan, bones that piled under a hospital over a half-century shed light on the health and habits of some of the Renaissance era’s most impoverished people" (NYT).

The burial vaults formed a sort of subterranean potter’s field. After a heavy granite lid was removed from one of the square holes in the church floor, bodies would be dropped into a vault of the brick-lined tombs. Over time, the corpses accumulated and formed a funnel-shaped pile, called a talus cone. These pyramids of remains grew over time, widening at the base and tapering to a point at the top. When a talus cone reached the ceiling and could not hold more bodies, a new underground vault would be used....

"Their first words to each other when they met were “I love your teeth!' 'I love YOUR teeth!' And then Mike White wrote it as their first lines of dialogue."

A discussion on the "White Lotus" subreddit draws attention to Charlotte Le Bon’s (Chloe’s) teeth, which are odd, but not as odd Aimee Lou Wood’s (Chelsea’s) teeth, which are very conspicuously odd and are the "White Lotus" teeth that get the most attention. 

The photo at the link is of Le Bon, so if you don't know what I'm talking about and you need to see Aimee Lou Wood, here's a clip:

Lots of people are enjoying the off-the-norm teeth, and I hope this is part of a trend toward seeing beauty in what is natural and not trying to "fix" everything. 

"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

"Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?"

Said Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, quoted in "The Anti-Fluoride Movement Vaults Into the Mainstream/With the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, a formerly fringe opinion suddenly gets wide attention" (NYT)(free-access link).

"And by the aughts, oversize teeth, white as a camera flash, suited the broader popular aesthetic of exaggerated perfection: larger breasts, smaller waists, and deeper fake tans."

"Jon Marashi, an L.A.-based dentist whose clients include Halsey, Ben Affleck, and Kate Hudson... noted that large white veneers appeared on the red carpet 'at that exact moment that you saw people wearing True Religion bell-bottom jeans. The flare couldn’t be big enough, and the pocket flaps could not have been more ornate.' These ostentatious teeth — 'obscene,' said Marashi — were also the result of too much demand. As veneers became more popular, Marashi continued, there weren’t enough skilled dentists and ceramicists to keep up, and people without the proper training began to fill the gap in the market. The results were often bulky and clumsy.... Blocky veneers became ubiquitous on reality TV, especially on dating shows like Love Island, where contestants were said to have 'Turkey teeth' — shells from cheap procedures in Eastern Europe.... In the past few years, the 'more is more' aesthetic has crested. Now it’s the Hollywood actors who have left their teeth alone who have a special charismatic pull...."

From "Jawbreakers/Young patients want beautifully imperfect veneers. They’re getting pain, debt, and regret" (NY Magazine).

The celebrities with their ridiculous veneers have access to the best dentists. The ordinary people who aspire to look like them are having some horrible experiences, detailed in the article. 

"Modesty garments — multiple layers of underwear, flesh-colored shorts and fabric with genital-shaped silicone barriers..."

"... make contact without direct contact possible, and, along with having bathrobes on standby, help provide a modicum of security, further differentiating between character and actor.... Managing sweat and jiggly phallic simulacrums are all part of the grab bag of a body-centric show. A lake scene means water shooting into mouths and splashing into eyes; and fake blood often splatters onto faces and hair — and even onto the front row (choose your seats wisely!). That balance of levity and reverence lives at the heart of intimacy direction, a serious job with, at times, an absurdist bent. 'We’re still adults telling a story about vagina dentata... If it’s not making us laugh, we’ve somehow missed the boat.'"

From a NYT article called "Death by Genitalia? How an Intimacy Director Made Those ‘Teeth’ Work. Creating the sex scenes for the horror musical required close attention to detail, extra communication and some strategically placed silicone."

jiggly phallic simulacrums... "Simulacrums" is fine, but I prefer the plural form "simulacra." Simulacra feels more like genitalia, and I usually say "genitalia," even where "genitals" will do. I have tags for "genitalia" and "simulacra," and I didn't just create them for this post.

The "simulacra" tag began with "Am I the only one who is noticing that the TV talking-heads news shows are shifting their approach to..."

"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

The dentist is going to clean your mind and your soul.

A TikTok video, so I'm putting it after the jump:

The morning ritual — in Mongolia.

"The geometry of a throuple is complex. With a couple, there’s only a straight line connecting two dots. But introduce a third point..."

"... and so many more possibilities emerge — only one of which is an equilateral triangle. Although the Third slept between us in bed, sat across from us at dinner and walked between us holding both of our hands, the angles in our throuple kept shifting."

From a NYT "Modern Love" essay, "A Throuple’s Tricky Geometry" by Evan Sterrett.

I found this story hard to believe — 3 men and a chihuahua sleeping night after night in a queen-size bed?

One early July morning, I opened my eyes to my boyfriend making out with the guy who had been living with us for the past month. Not really a fan of sex before tooth-brushing, I smiled, mumbled “hot” and turned over....

I see I have a tag for "geometry." When did I ever blog about geometry before?

"[Matthew] Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket."

"(He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: 'Yes, all of them.')... He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, 'in a kind of weird but loving way,' that the group knew he was drinking again. 'We can smell it,' she said — and, he writes, 'the plural "we" hits me like a sledgehammer.' Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room. Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: 'I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in "Friends," the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician."'"

From "The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir/In 'Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,' the actor gets serious about sobriety, mortality, colostomy bags and pickleball" (NYT).

"She recalls an airline employee who glanced at her driver’s license and said, 'Oh, Jennifer Grey, like the actress.'"

"When Grey said, 'Actually, it is me,' the woman responded: 'I’ve seen Dirty Dancing a dozen times. I know Jennifer Grey. And you are not her.'... In the two hours she sat on a blue banquette in a Beverly Hills restaurant, matter-of-factly scooping a soft-boiled egg, spreading butter on rye toast and chatting about her memoir, only one person appeared to recognize Grey. The woman’s face lit up, then softened as if she’d spotted an old friend who’d survived a terrible ordeal."

From "Don’t Call Her ‘Baby.’ At 62, Jennifer Grey is Taking the Lead. In her memoir, 'Out of the Corner,' the 'Dirty Dancing' star opens up about rhinoplasty gone wrong, the implosion of her career and why she’s telling her story now" (NYT).

What a terrible mistake it is to think that your off-the-norm feature is dragging down the rest of your good looks rather than what's making you stand out! I was just having a conversation about Gene Tierney, the 1940s actress with an overbite, who said it was in her contract that they couldn't make her get her teeth fixed. Here's her NYT obituary: 

"A few years ago, after Mr. Probst noticed some contestants blaming producers for their 'bad edit,' he wrote a 'Survivor' mission statement that he and his team still consult."

"'Our job is to tell the most authentic version of each person’s story in an electric, visceral, dramatic, and entertaining way,' it reads. 'But it must be authentic.'... Authenticity, 'Survivor' fans have come to know, means warts and all. It means the show can’t, per Mr. Probst’s directive, change the intent of someone’s words during editing. It’s meant watching one contestant demand another remove her fake teeth during a tribal council as payback for a blindside. It’s even meant watching a gay contestant out a trans tribemate, equating his choice not to disclose his transness with deception."

From "Jeff Probst Is the Ultimate ‘Survivor’/Despite many changes to the reality show over the last 21 years, he has been a constant" (NYT).

ADDED: The top-rated comment over there:

No mention of Probst’s mentor Mark Burnett foisting Trump on us, and getting rich , via his other show the Apprentice. Don’t know about you but that proximity to evil would bother me. Like having your tv parents also make napalm in their other job. Maybe being far away in Fiji helps.

"Your daily tooth-brushing routine is a great opportunity to... try doing calf raises, squats or lunges... to meditate by focusing on the taste of the toothpaste and sound of the water."

Ludicrous advice in the NYT, in "Day 7: Brush Your Way to a New Habit."

"See-through socks?" — Joe Rogan tries to keep up with David Lee Roth and David Lee Roth just barrels along.

 

You can scroll back to the beginning to watch that whole 12-minute clip. I actually listened to the entire 3+ hours of the podcast on Spotify. Roth is such a motor mouth, but it's all pretty interesting. He did leave Rogan in the dust, though. The main thing Roth got across — if you take the 3 hours as a whole — is that he's internalized the lesson his father taught by asking — every night at the dinner table — what did you contribute? 

In case you're wondering, Roth will be getting a new tooth. I forget how he said he got that one knocked out.

Speaking of Spotify, I like that — at the age of 70 — I've been able to hear something new now and then and genuinely adopt it as a personal favorite. When I was a teenager, it was so easy to accept new musical artists and really love them — internalize them. Now, it's an amazing delight when something leaps into the place in my head that was so open when I was young. Yesterday, I clicked on this and immediately took it to heart:

That's the live version, obviously. The version on the album is what especially appealed to me.

How old is thought? I don't know. Maybe thought is so old, it's dying out.

It sometimes seems that way. Here's a headline on the front page of WaPo:



Click through and you get a headline that has one more word — "Ancient teeth show history of epidemics is much older than we thought" — a mere 2-letters without which you have a ludicrous second meaning.

From the article, presumably a worthy article by a man who surely didn't write the front-page teaser:

Scientists and archaeologists now believe... that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death that killed up to half of Europe’s population, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age. The bacteria, after it had entered the bloodstream and likely killed the host, circulated into the pulp chamber of teeth, which kept its DNA insulated from millennia of environmental wear and tear. In the past decade, scientists have been able to extract and analyze that DNA. The Stone Age plague was, however, an ancestor with a slightly different genetic identity....

When did political leaders first start showing their teeth in official photographs?

This is a question that occurred to me as I was looking at Wikipedia's list of Vice Presidents of the United States to try to answer a question I had about former Vice Presidents who run for the presidency.

Most of these VPs are not smiling at all, and it seems that only a hint of a smile seemed consistent with the exercise of political power. They look grumpy to us today, but presumably the idea was to look completely serious. We expect smiles now. The emergence of teeth comes in 1953 with Richard Nixon, a person whose smile made many people uneasy and suspicious, oddly enough.

Here's the list of U.S. Presidents, with their official pictures. The first one to smile showing teeth is JFK. Beginning with Gerald Ford in 1974, all the Presidents are smiling showing teeth, except one — Barack Obama.

The baring of teeth is a serious matter. How and when did it become part of a nice, warm smile? "How Did the 'Smile' Become a Friendly Gesture in Humans?" (Scientific American):

Anthony Stocks, chairman and professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, responds: "The evolution of smiles is opaque and, as with many evolutionary accounts of social behavior, fraught with just-soism. Among human babies, however, the 'tooth-baring' smile is associated less with friendship than with fright--which, one might argue, is related to the tooth-baring threats of baboons. On the other hand, a non-toothy, not-so-broad-but-open-lipped smile is associated with pleasure in human infants. Somehow we seem to have taken the fright-threat sort of smile and extended it to strangers as a presumably friendly smile. Maybe it is not as innocent as it seems. All cultures recognize a variety of mouth gestures as indexes of inner emotional states. As in our own culture, however, smiles come in many varieties, not all of them interpreted as friendly."

Here's "When did humans start to smile?" by Professor Antony Manstead (British Academy):

"Seth Lookhart performed a dental extraction procedure on a sedated patient while riding a hoverboard and filmed the procedure and distributed the film to persons outside his dental practice."

From "Hoverboarding dentist found guilty of 'unlawful dental acts'" (NBC News).

I saw that John Kennedy was trending on Twitter, and it's a little early in November for the annual meditation on the long-ago assassination.

But it's not that John Kennedy. Took me a few minutes to absorb that there's nothing about the John Kennedy whose death mindscaped our generation. I was wondering why I'm seeing a Trump rally. But it was this guy, this John Kennedy:

How about John Kennedy get some upper teeth before he starts slagging people smarter than him. https://t.co/skJbynnM56

— Stormdog 🇨🇦 (@gwstevens911) November 7, 2019

"I know a guy — he collects unemployment even though he’s employed — who just had his teeth veneered bright white, with ceramic laminates."

"I ran into him recently, and he dropped to his knees to coo over how my puppy has grown. As he went to kiss her freckled nose, he flashed his crocodile smile. That same week, I heard from another guy — last I knew, he was a real mess, drove his marriage off a cliff, with his kids in the back seat — letting me know he’s now a life coach and focus counselor. He wants to help me live my best life and was offering me a 20 percent discount."

I just think it's funny that those are the first 5 sentences of an article about artichokes — "Don’t Fear the Artichoke. Cook It Whole."

Vegetables have gotten so meaningful lately. There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez politicizing cauliflower and yearning for "yucca" (presumably yuca).

By the way, for a meaningful dose of artichokes, you might want to see the revival of the Sam Shepard play "Curse of the Starving Class," which is off Broadway until June 2. They throw a lot of artichokes around in that play. I literally got hit by artichokes, sitting in the front row in 1978. I can't remember what the artichokes meant, but they were important. I remember getting hit and I remember the line "So that's what artichokes smell like" but I don't remember what they were supposed to mean, though of course they had to mean something, since everything in a play means something.

The artichoke is the most fearsome vegetable. All those points, and if one sticks you, it might still hurt the next day, as if those stickers are venomous.

I was going to punch up this post with other vegetables in pop culture (other than those artichokes in "Starving Class"), but it was hard to Google. I thought I had something in "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables," a 2011 NYT article, but it's about watching movies and TV shows that are supposed to be good for you (i.e., metaphorical vegetables).

In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”...

A friend messages me: “Oh, you have to see ‘Mildred Pierce,’ ” and she’s right: I do have to.... But that doesn’t mean that, as Kate Winslet bakes yet another pie, I won’t sometimes wonder if those five hours might be more profitably spent aspiring in a different direction: exercising, maybe, or reading a book or just watching 10 episodes of the hilarious (and not at all contemplative) cartoon “Bob’s Burgers.”...

Yes, why watch something long if you prefer reading or exercising, both of which are at least as good for you as some aspirational film or TV series? Lately, the only TV I watch is "Jeopardy!" Do you think James Holzhauer has had his teeth veneered with bright white ceramic laminates?