"Augustus Gloop now ‘enormous’ instead of ‘fat’, Mrs Twit no longer ‘ugly’ and Oompa Loompas are gender neutral."

"Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive" (The Guardian).

Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added.... 

In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.... 

References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”....

"Have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of the students are. They're deliberately uglifying themselves. You see them on TikTok..."

"They're out of shape. They're asexual. They're, like, rejecting the truth in beauty. They all look like rejects from a loony bin. I'd steer clear of college too."

Said Greg Gutfeld on "The Five" a few weeks ago, and it's become a much-used sound on TikTok. Videos collected here. You can scroll through them for yourself. I'll just select one to show you how young people are arguing back at Gutfeld:

A sign that says "The right to openly discuss ideas must be defended" brings out the absolute worst in people.

The spirit of wokeness. https://t.co/CkoVeXOleE

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 11, 2020

Another look at Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" — does it hold LBJ responsible for the Kennedy assassination?

There are some lines in the song that had me thinking that. In the first verse, the men who come to kill Kennedy say "We've already got someone here to take your place." There's the proximity of Johnson's name to the song title accusation: "Johnson sworn in at 2:38/Let me know when you decide to throw in the towel/It is what it is, and it's murder most foul." In "Hamlet," "murder most foul" is the murder of the king by his close relation, his brother, and, though Kennedy famously had brothers, the Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, had a proximity to the President that would make the murder "most foul."

But here's something more subtle that I only noticed on the third listen:

Zapruder's film I seen night before
Seen it thirty-three times, maybe more
It's vile and deceitful, it's cruel and it's mean
Ugliest thing that you ever have seen....

I have never forgotten the Lyndon Johnson quote: "That’s the ugliest thing I ever saw." He was looking at a portrait of himself — seeing it for the first time.

I'm just trying to understand the song, not unravel the mystery of John Kennedy's death. I did once write on the blog: "I must say that when I read 'The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV' by Robert A. Caro, I kept wanting to hear more about how LBJ managed to avoid being the target of suspicion. There's so much material in that book that makes you think he had the motivation."

I don't think the song is better if it is intended to push this theory. Quite the opposite. And I tend to hear in it some sort of notion that we all killed Kennedy, but I don't want to go there because I happen to know that Dylan is on record hating that idea:

"Despite all of these alluring architectural features, folks in Madison still moan, 'oh, the Humanities (Building)!' or call it a 'munitions plant from some bleak dystopian fiction.'"

"Brutalism often gets dismissed as the most hated or ugliest architectural style... To people coming of age during the height of the style's popularity, Brutalist buildings were ready symbol of the establishment that spawned protests and punk songs. Folks of that generation perhaps started the 'Brutalism is ugly' myth, taking Brutalist buildings as symbols of the cold bureaucracy, ignoring the human-scale articulation and thoughtful formal elements that are characteristic of the style. But the progressive, utopian, often socialist ideals that Brutalism also represents are back in vogue for today's young people. The resurgence of the left, in combination with the fact that Brutalist buildings' bare concrete exteriors look great on Instagram, could be fueling a renaissance of the style. Brutalism is back, baby!"

From "Towards an appreciation of Brutalism: Or, the Humanities Building is very good/Madison's most-maligned structure embodies a misunderstood, utopian school of architecture" by Mary Dahlman Begley (Tone).

Here's the "look great on Instagram" link, so judge for yourself if Brutalism looks great in Instagram's glossy little squares. I've experienced walking-around life with that Humanities Building for more than 30 years, and it's pretty horrible, but maybe I'm just a creature of the age group that hates it. I've walked by and through it many times, and I've done figure drawing sessions in the gloomy top floor where (I seem to remember) the windows are at ankle level. It will be very disruptive to tear it down, and maybe it is wrong to tear down a monument, even if you believe it's a monument to ugliness.

Thanks to our regular commenter David Begley for sending me that link. I don't know if I'd ever noticed Tone before. Here's another article there: "Madison dodged a monorail grift and barely even noticed" by Scott Gordon. We talked about that crazy thing a few days ago — here. Gordon writes:

In most of Transit X's renderings, and a hilariously bad video the company produced, the pods seem to be about 15 feet above ground and improbably tiny, looking more like weird oblong suitcases than passenger cars holding multiple people. The sense of scale here is severely off. City staff, perhaps fearing decapitation by massive black jellybeans, have wisely advised that we stick to the plan to bring bus rapid transit to Madison.

The video, at the link, is indeed hilarious.

"He made particularly disparaging comments about President Obama. And as the Republican nominee for president, I just couldn't subscribe to that in a federal judge. This was not a matter of qualifications or politics. This was something specifically to that issue as a former nominee of our party."

Said the U.S. Senator who refers to himself as "the Republican nominee for President" because, I guess, there's some idea of forefronting your highest or most elite accomplishment, and Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for President. He's a Senator now, elected by the people of a state, but he was a nominee for a higher office, and that's apparently more important, even though he didn't win, and he's not even the party's "standard bearer" (not the most recent nominee). But Romney is apparently proud of his distinction, and there's only one other person on the face of the earth whose highest level was Republican nominee for President (and he's 95 years old). Maybe the idea is that Trump is illegitimate, so exclude him, and that leaves Romney as the leader of his party.

But he didn't beat Obama. He showed he could beat Obama if he wanted. He came on strong in the first debate. But he stood down in the second debate, and his party lost. Now, he's voted against one of Trump's judicial nominees, and he was the only Republican Senator who voted no, and he voted no because the person, Michael Truncale, once called Obama an "un-American impostor." Truncale testified that he was "merely expressing frustration by what I perceived as a lack of overt patriotism on behalf of President Obama" and did not mean to suggest that Obama was not a natural born citizen.

I'm reading about this in Politico, where the text is he "believed Obama was born in Hawaii and did not subscribe to 'birtherism,' a racist theory that the president was not an American citizen." The Politico text is shocking for 2 reasons. First, the question under the Constitution wasn't whether Obama was an American citizen. Citizenship isn't enough to qualify a person to be President. He must be born a citizen. Big difference. Second, a news organization shouldn't casually toss in the opinion that this suspicion about Obama is a "racist theory." That's not decent journalism. I accept the use of the term "birtherism" because I think Truncale used it in testifying. If Truncale himself called birtherism "a racist theory," it would be good journalism to quote him, but you can see that it's not in quotes.

I actually don't have a problem with Romney's voting against Truncale. But Romney's stated reason — if this is all he said — is inarticulate. He could have said that he lacked sufficient confidence in Truncale's judicial temperament. There were other things about Truncale that were disturbing, and not just the one thing Romney is quoted as citing — "disparaging comments about President Obama." I'm seeing in The Salt Lake Tribune that Truncale was quoted as saying "With regard to immigration, we must not continue to have the maggots coming in" and later that the word was not "maggots" but "magnets." I can see not bringing that up, because of confusion over whether Truncale said "maggots" (though I note that in immigration discussions, the word "magnet" is applied not to the immigrants but to the United States (for example, candidate Trump said he wanted to "turn off the jobs and benefits magnet")).

By citing only the "disparaging comments about President Obama" and stressing his own status as the one-time Republican Party nominee, Romney elevated himself. He's special.

ADDED: On rereading, I question my assertion that "Romney's stated reason... is inarticulate." I was assuming that Romney looked at everything about Truncale and formed the opinion that he didn't have what it takes to be a judge — that he was too political and intemperate. There are clearer ways to say that. But the statement Romney did make was, I think, rather revealing of his psychology and his plans for himself as a Senator. It's more revealing perhaps, than he intended to be. I wouldn't call that inarticulate, because "inarticulate" connotes that he meant to say something and couldn't come up with the right words, and I don't think Romney meant to reveal that much. What then is the right word? Maybe — ironically — it's "intemperate."

IN THE COMMENTS: Nobody points to a Slate article correcting the FALSE assertion that Truncale  said "maggots." The video there — at 1:25 — shows him saying "we've got to stop the magnet that draws people over." Not only is it clear that he's saying "magnet" not "maggots," he's using the word "magnet" in the standard context, referring to government benefits. He's not calling the immigrants "magnets." He's saying they are drawn to the metaphorical magnet that is welfare benefits. The "maggots" slur is truly evil. Shame on The Salt Lake Tribune.

ALSO: I wrote this in the comments but I want to frontpage it:

Making up racial hatred is truly evil.

I was careful to write, in the original post, " I'm seeing in The Salt Lake Tribune that Truncale was quoted as saying..." Was quoted. I avoided saying that he said it, because how do I know? I only said what I knew, that the SL Tribute presented that statement as a quote.

But with the video there and available for weeks, there's no excuse for passing along the "maggots" quote.

It reminds me of the continued reporting that Trump said Nazis were "fine people." The corrective material is available and plain, and there are some horrible journalists and politicians who want to make people feel that there's some deep ugliness out there -- want people to feel hurt and diminished and afraid. It's disgusting to have a personal stake in doing that to people.

I've been looking at real estate... because we might move somewhere (where??)...

... but I'm dismayed by how bad the architecture is. Zillow and Trulia send me things from a particular city I've shown interest in, but every single thing is badly designed and much of it is atrocious. Even if I found one house that suited my taste — and all I want is something clean and simple — I'm afraid I'd have to look out on ugliness. It's really discouraging! Why haven't people figured out how to design a house? I know, what I'm seeing is what people have figured out. So then, my problem is with people?

Also, it's often hard to see what's really there, because the photograph is taken with an extremely wide angle lens (so widened and curved it nauseates me) or because there's some insane furniture that distracts me and scares me. Example:



ADDED: Reminds me of the Pope's fanciest stage:

Conan O'Brien learns the extent to which he will be liked in Japan.

"[I]t can be hard to remember why ugliness matters because ugly paintings are now everywhere."

"Ugly paintings hang in every major museum, and ugly work has been accepted as part of the canon. But while ugly art crosses genres and time periods, it can still be useful to think of ugly art as falling into its own unified aesthetic category...  Ugliness is about discomfort. It makes us feel a little unsettled—not because we’re looking at a depiction of something unsettling, like a gory religious scene or a photograph of a war zone or a painting of a warted nose, but because we’re confronted with a sense of disorder.... There’s a sense of brazenness to unintentionally bad art—it embodies desire gone awry. And being able to enjoy ugly art isn’t simply about making fun of it. It’s also about being able to sit in discomfort and recognize mistakes. Ugly art demands a sense of looseness; it asks you to dip into a slippery state of mind where you can hold multiple beliefs simultaneously. The piece can be both ugly and unappealing, and it can also delight and appeal for those very reasons. It can pull you closer—you want to know why this ugly art was made, what it means, and what the artists were thinking. And if you let yourself get unbalanced enough, you might just find yourself a little bit in love."

From "Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings" by Katy Kelleher (The Paris Review).

The essay is about painting, not politics, but it would be easy to connect this to Trump. All that ugliness... and yet... if you let yourself get unbalanced enough, you might just find yourself a little bit in love.

"If, in a spirit of free intellectual and imaginative inquiry, you dared to suggest that a man who masturbated in front of a woman he barely knew without her consent..."

"... might have been acting out, in an attitude of aggressive contempt, his own shame and emasculation — if you tried to understand his actions, without justifying them — you would be shouted down and vilified. Imagine the outcry if you went further and speculated about why Harvey Weinstein allegedly manipulated some actresses dependent on his power into watching him while he was naked. Could it be that Mr. Weinstein, who reportedly had often been mocked for his appearance, wanted to dehumanize these women as well, while at the same time turning himself into a person who is watched and admired, like a person of beauty?... [I]n the realm of the free operation of intellect and imagination that is culture, let there bloom the suspension of moral judgment for the sake of a better understanding of our moral natures. It’s not because we owe anything to the likes of Harvey Weinstein; it’s because of what we owe ourselves."

Writes Lee Siegel in the NYT in "Whatever Happened to Moral Rigor?" — remembering the old days when James Baldwin, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer engaged in the "imaginative inhabiting" of evildoers.

ADDED: Siegel writes:

Closer to our own time and place, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman in the novel “Native Son,” and then rapes and murders a black woman; Gore Vidal wrote with sympathy about Timothy McVeigh; and David Mamet composed “Oleanna,” a prescient play about sexual harassment, accusation, guilt and innocence that, famously, had no clear resolution.

But he seems to have missed the news (last February) that David Mamet says he's written a play about Harvey Weinstein.

"You were born rich and privileged and you were handsome. I was born poor, ugly, Jewish and had to fight all my life to get somewhere."

"You got lotsa girls, no girl looked at me until I made it big in Hollywood. Yes, I did offer them acting jobs in exchange for sex, but so did and still does everyone. But I never, ever forced myself on a single woman."

Said Harvey Weinstein to Taki Theodoracopulos, quoted in "Harvey Weinstein: ‘I offered acting jobs in exchange for sex, but so does everyone – they still do’/The disgraced movie producer reached out to Taki with a ‘world exclusive’ about Rose McGowan and Asia Argento" (Spectator USA).

Taki adds:

Call me naïve or stupid, but in a funny way I believe him. I’ve seen Harvey in action during my annual Christmas party, the one I throw every year in New York with Michael Mailer. He hits on every young woman but in a naïve way. “Will you give me your address and I’ll make you a star,” is the theme of the pickup. Some say yes, some say no. His reaction was always the same. Smile and laugh and hit on the next one.

This got me thinking about something the Superman actor Henry Cavill said — and got in trouble for saying — in his recent GQ interview. He was asked what he's learned from the #MeToo movement:

Have the revelations made you reflect on your own behaviour with women? “I like to think that I’ve never been like that. I think any human being alive today, if someone casts too harsh a light on anything, you could be like, ‘Well, OK, yeah, when you say it like that, maybe.’ But it’s such a delicate and careful thing to say because there’s flirting which, for example, in a social environment is in context – and is acceptable. And that has been done to me as well, in return. Stuff has to change, absolutely,” he adds, addressing men’s behaviour. “It’s important to also retain the good things, which were a quality of the past, and get rid of the bad things. There’s something wonderful about a man chasing a woman. There’s a traditional approach to that, which is nice. I think a woman should be wooed and chased, but maybe I’m old-fashioned for thinking that. It’s very difficult to do that if there are certain rules in place. Because then it’s like: ‘Well, I don’t want to go up and talk to her, because I’m going to be called a rapist or something’. So you’re like, ‘Forget it, I’m going to call an ex-girlfriend instead, and then just go back to a relationship, which never really worked’. But it’s way safer than casting myself into the fires of hell, because I’m someone in the public eye, and if I go and flirt with someone, then who knows what’s going to happen? Now? Now you really can’t pursue someone further than, ‘No’. It’s like, ‘OK, cool’. But then there’s the, ‘Oh why’d you give up?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, because I didn’t want to go to jail?’"

By the way, Cavill is extremely good looking, and it's hard to understand what he's talking about, what elaborate conversational moves he's worried about figuring out. There's "hi." He wouldn't even have to dangle the "make you a star" prospect. Access to sex with Cavill is the end in itself.  What "chase" did he ever have to undertake? Now, Harvey Weinstein... he is and always was — as he knows and admits — ugly. Sex with Harvey would always only be a means to an end.

I like the name "Cavill." It's a verb — "cavil." It means "make petty or unnecessary objections."

"I think that Twitter is a useful reporting tool sometimes, but an utterly toxic swamp that nonetheless I engage in more than I probably should."

"Look, it’s still a great way to promote stories. It’s also a great reporting tool in the sense that I’ll tweet a piece of information, and someone will contact me, and they’ll have more information. In that way, it’s great. But it’s just a time suck. Look, a lot of us need an editor, right? I need an editor. I don’t have an editor on Twitter. I have an editor in the paper, and so I tend to be less precise in 140 characters and sometimes I leave people confused as to my meaning. And then I make the mistake of engaging and trying to explain it, which just leads you down a rabbit hole. Less time spent there is probably better."

Says NYT reporter Maggie Haberman in an interview at Slate.

There seems to be a lot of hating of Twitter. I was just reading that Andrew Sullivan piece, blogged in the previous post, and it had a stray line of Twitter hate that stuck with me:

[A decade ago,] The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites... and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing.

Twitter swallowed blogging.... yet blogging was better. Things have gotten uglier. I keep my distance from Twitter (and Facebook), but I think there's an idea that the interactivity is better on Twitter — so fast and intense. By comparison, blogs don't seem to happen. The very thing blogs did that was so exciting 10 years ago is what blogs just don't seem to do at all anymore. And yet people are powerfully unhappy with Twitter. Everything looks so ugly and cruel. And it's Trump's milieu. So painful for Sullivan, Haberman, et al.

In China, the questionable aesthetics of "refining" cities and getting rid of whatever is zangluancha.

By Zhou Wang (assistant professor at Nankai University’s Zhou Enlai School of Government) in Sixth Tone:

First, municipal officials have embraced the need to “refine” the country’s cities. From vast metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to thousands of smaller Chinese cities, the same government-sponsored buzzwords appear: “high-end,” “aesthetically pleasing,” “cosmopolitan.” Chinese urban planners strive to realize socially positive notions of “modern” and “green” cities, and the most successful are recognized by government ministries in a series of competitions. Cities are also eager to earn national awards for being exceptionally clean or “civilized.”

Municipal officials define “refinement” in remarkably similar ways. Typically, it involves inviting a renowned international architect to design a capital-intensive landmark building — say, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House or Meinhard von Gerkan’s Chongqing Grand Theater. Officials may also clear huge public squares in front of municipal government buildings, construct avant-garde statues largely devoid of any local cultural or historical significance, and erect “central business districts” that resemble cut-and-pasted copies of the Manhattan skyline. The natural result of this is cities that are indistinguishable from one another, something that continues to be a source of public complaint.

“Refinement” also means clean urban environments, a sense of order, and standards for the appearance of residences and street advertisements... Urban managers don’t want their cities referred to as zangluancha — a colloquial term used for anything substandard that comprises the characters for “dirty,” “messy,” and “inferior.”...

ADDED: There's a link on zangluancha that goes to "My Mission to Clean Up China’s Atrocious Public Toilets" by the founder of an organization devoted to that mission:

Meanwhile, Trump is moving in on the video game world.

I'm trying to read "Trump Draws ‘Lively’ Opinions on Video Game Violence but Shrouds His Own" (NYT). Shrouds his own what? Does he have a video game? I know he has a old time-y board game (because someone gave it to me, anonymously, back when I was blogging "The Apprentice").

As with his thoughts on gun restrictions, it remains unclear exactly what Mr. Trump thinks can be done on this issue, or what he truly believes....

Oh, I get it. He's "shrouding" his own opinion. Shrouding. Good Lord. So macabre.

The administrations of President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama had tried to understand the issue with wide-ranging initiatives and recommendations after massacres at Columbine High School in 1999 and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

And nothing happened, including the recommended funding of research on the connection between violent video games and real-world violence. And yet I'm seeing gun-control advocates flatly asserting that there is no connection.

People involved in listening tours during past administrations doubted that Mr. Trump’s meeting would lead to productive policy.... On Thursday, White House officials kept the aims of the meeting vague, and declined to say why they had revoked journalists’ planned access to it.

Nothing will happen. We're averse enough to censorship, fortunately. Concern was shown. That's all you're going to get from the government. I hope.

But, come on, resist violent media. Not just video games, but movies and television. If people would boycott this ugliness, it would go away. Why do we encourage a taste for violence in our children?

I'd like to see the Hollywoodlanders who hate gun violence embrace a moratorium on guns in movies. Make stories that don't have any shooting or brandishing of guns. And don't substitute other weapons like knifes and poison. Find a way to entertain us that does not require inflicting violence on the human body.

#NoGunsInMovies

"Spelacchio mirrors the decadence of the city.... Without meaning to, this poor tree has become a symbol of Rome today, it is paying the price of this decadent time."

"Spelacchio" means "mangy," and it's the name for the low-quality 72-foot-tall Christmas tree in the center of Rome, the NYT reports.

I love the word — Spelacchio — and it's funny to personify and bully a tree. The tree has no feelings.  I mean... wait... if this were a Christmas story Spelacchio would have feelings. The mocking would hurt, and Spelacchio would find some way to express its sadness, its compassion for the poor and the sick. Spelacchio would find a way to express the true meaning of Christmas....

But the old "Charlie Brown Christmas" got there first. It's a key plot point that the tree is low quality.

In fact, now I see that the NYT story ends with the idea of taking the tree's point of view. It quotes from a column in an Italian newspaper that imagines the tree lashing out:

“You have a dark, chaotic, dirty city, you throw everything on the ground, nothing works and tourists are supposed to think it’s all my fault. Look, I am not a metaphor of Italy. It’s you.”

That's not my true-meaning-of-Christmas idea. That's just about the opposite of the true meaning of Christmas: I am not the problem; you other people are awful.

"Saturday Night Live" had a sketch designed to address the Harvey Weinstein story that was so obviously avoided the week before:

Here:



That's Leslie Jones as Viola Davis, Cecily Strong as Marion Cotillard, and Kate McKinnon as the fictional character Debette Goldry.

It's too late and I'd also say: too little.

They lined up some chairs, plunked female cast members and had them say there's a lot of sexual harassment in Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein is ugly.

Harvey Weinstein's ugliness was joked about in terms of how he looks, not what he has done and is accused of doing, which really is ugly.

The cheap joke, which could be used against any man, was that he was hanging upside down naked and he looked pretty much the same as if he were not upside down. A man's face is as ugly as genitalia. Notice all the problems:

1. Judging people by the way they look.

2. The baseline assumption that male genitalia is ugly (which undercuts the complaint about sexual harassment by trading on the notion that the male body is inherently repulsive and nothing a woman would want).

3. The lack of anything specific about Harvey Weinstein. (He is said to have done many things, but I don't think hanging upside down naked is one of them).

4. If the idea is that Harvey Weinstein is ugly, so no one would want to have sex with him, that actually sounds like a form of humiliation that has often been directed at women. It's like the terrible old rape jokes that responds to a rape accusation by talking about how unattractive the woman is, so who would rape her? (And some of that "Debette Goldry" material was supposed to be funny because she's physically unattractive — she's old (get it??) — and yet even she had experienced sexual harassment.)

Later in Saturday's show, in the "Weekend Update" section, there were a few Weinstein jokes and again the idea of his physical ugliness dominated. As the NYT described it:

Michael Che, the other co-anchor of “Weekend Update,” noted that the Weinstein scandal put comedians in a “tough spot” because it was hard to make jokes about sexual assault. Then, with a photo of Mr. Weinstein on the screen, Mr. Che added:

“But it’s so easy to make jokes about a guy that looks like this. I mean, he looks like chewed bubble gum rolled in cat hair.”

It's hard to make jokes that are actually on the subject of what Weinstein did wrong, so let's make jokes that could be made against him if he were a great guy. I wish Che had entered into the realm of self-deprecation and said something more like:

We know we have to make some jokes about Harvey Weinstein. We know because we got scorched in social media last week for weaseling out of it. Lorne Michaels said "It's a New York thing." What's a New York thing? Running away from humor that too hard to do? So we are scampering this week. The weasels are scampering, trying to come up with something we can say to make you laugh about sexual harassment, and I've got to admit, 99.9% of the ideas we came up with boiled down to the fact that Harvey Weinstein is ugly. We were coming up with material like "he looks like chewed bubble gum rolled in cat hair." It's like we were liberated to do jokes about physical ugliness because a guy who did horrible things is, fortunately, ugly. It was funny because half the people pitching the jokes to Lorne were also physically ugly. Maybe they knew so many jokes because they've been hearing them all their lives. Probably a lot you out there, staying home watching TV on Saturday night, are ugly too. And just saying that, I feel ugly... on the inside.

If the "smartest move" — in making a serious TV drama about porn — is "exploiting the contradictions," then how can you say "'The Deuce' is certainly a feminist series"?

I don't watch this show, and there's no way I will, but I do read The New Yorker, and that means I'm often challenging myself to understand TV shows (and movies) that I do not and will not watch. I'm keeping an eye on the culture from the safe distance of reading. For example, I read this about the Emmys show, which I did not watch:

“I haven’t had a TV since I moved out of my parents house at 18,” [Shailene Woodley] told E! News in the pre-show on the red carpet at the 2017 Emmy Awards Sunday, where Big Little Lies had received 16 nominations.

“All my friends who watch TV, I always ask them when they have time to. When do they have time to?” she said. “I’m a reader. I always have a book.”

That's reported at People under the headline "Shailene Woodley Slammed After Revealing She Doesn't Own a TV on Emmys Red Carpet: 'I'm a Reader.'" Slammed? Why? Actors are supposed to tout the industry? Or does claiming to be "a reader" sound snobby? Tell me what books Shailene Woodley reads and I'll have an opinion on that. It seems to me many of these TV shows and ponderous and hard work to watch, and lots of books are lightweight. My preference for reading is more about wanting control of my own time, to go fast or slow, to switch into my own thoughts, and to retrace my path and skip around.

Ah! I found an answer to the question what books does Shailene Woodley read:

[Shailene's] favorite is Henry and June by Anaïs Nin, a memoir about the author's passionate love for Henry Miller and his wife, June. "Anaïs is like the ultimate goddess," Shailene says. "I feel really connected to her femininity." Much like we feel connected to your femininity, Shai. (Did that sound creepy?)

That's Teen Vogue, which might explain the cutesy dancing around carnality. So, onto the subject of the New Yorker article: "'The Deuce' and the Birth of Porn/The show is a classic David Simon joint, in which sex workers and porn actors are treated like any other alienated workforce," by Emily Nussbaum:

“The Deuce” is certainly a feminist series—and half its directors are female—but its smartest move is to resist turning sex into a thesis, exploiting the contradictions instead. 

You're a connoisseur of contradictions, a resister of sex as a thesis, and yet you dictate to me: "'The Deuce' is certainly a feminist series." Why the certainty?! Why shut the door to the exploration of contradictions in the contention that this show — about pornography — is certainly feminist? I'm outraged by this pronouncement. I would begin with the hypothesis that a show about pornography is anti-feminist, but you want me not even to think about it.

I continue reading this article precisely because I'm so annoyed:

Often, this means visually scrambling cable clichés, starting with a rape role-play in the première that spills into genuine violence. In the aftermath, Darlene, dabbing her bruises, is nude, but she’s never the camera’s focus. Instead, our gaze keeps settling, with nosy clarity, on her bald trick’s big-bellied torso, his matted back hair, his exposed crotch, forcing us to consider that body—both pathetic and intimidating—not hers.

There’s warmth, too, particularly through [Maggie] Gyllenhaal’s mournful, electric presence, her fame itself upending the hierarchies of cable, which typically dictates that extras bare it all while the stars cover up. With the polarities reversed, and the biggest celebrity somehow exposed and not objectified, I found myself craving a sex scene between the one non-sex-worker African-American couple on the show: in this context, such a sequence became elevating, not debasing, a sign that the characters were taken seriously enough to see their private world.

What is the argument that this is even uncertainly feminist? I really have no idea. Getting the star to go nude is an old trick, and not one I associate with feminism. Showing an ugly man having sex with a beautiful woman is a tale as old as time. Maybe somehow the graphic depiction of rape and the bruised body of a woman is supposed to be flipped into something meaningful, but Nussbaum doesn't explain how this happens and why this isn't just another way to palm off the same misogyny that the recently departed Kate Millett wrote about in "Sexual Politics."

Is it that half of the directors of "Deuce" are women? So they hire on women to get immunity from the charge of misogyny. We're supposed to support the furthering of the careers of women and see that as feminism. Could Nussbaum please explain why the gambit of hiring women to work on projects like this is certainly feminist and not actively anti-feminist?

There's always a woman who will take the work. They can put the face of a woman on any project they want. Is it that easy to get the Certainly Feminist stamp? (If so, porn itself is certainly feminist.)

"To the fashion world’s apparent dismay, there was no level of sheerness a publicity-hungry celeb-gal would turn down."

"We see the above ensemble as a throwing down of the gauntlet by the fashion world, as if to say, 'You want sheer dresses ad infinitum, ladies? Fine. We’re gonna start making HIDEOUSLY UGLY jockstrap inspired underwear for you to sport in public.'"

"Be honest: the roses one encounters in daily life are, mostly, hideous."

"Think of the colors: syphilitically inflamed orange, or highlighter-pen salmon, or nylon pink, or overripe-banana yellow. How often have you bent to smell a neighbor’s rose, ready to snort up a lungful of Turkish-delight deliciousness, only to discover no scent at all?... What’s more, they are dangerous.... Haven’t you heard the stories of gardeners who, after a single rose-thorn puncture, lost an arm, or more? Would you keep a shark in your front yard?... Roses are not urban beasts. So, although we may dream of an elegant granite wall with a Mme. de Something rose arching against it in sweet-smelling pearly swags, the reality is considerably grimmer: my taxi-driver neighbor’s viciously pruned, yellow-budded toilet brushes, or the suburban crematoria whose residents are united by the horrible lollipop standards on their resting places. There is a simple solution: let’s give up on the scentless, hard-pruned, spiky Day-Glo disasters. Henceforth, licenses will be issued only to those with space to do them justice...."

From "Let's Ban Roses" by the novelist Charlotte Mendelson (in The New Yorker).

"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...