"Trump... took the stage to ominous instrumental music. He stood on stage for several minutes as it played out."

Writes Jake Traylor (of NBC News) on X, inviting the world to look upon Trump and wonder at his weirdness...

Trump (who was 3 hours late to his rally this evening) took the stage to ominous instrumental music.

He stood on stage for several minutes as it played out. pic.twitter.com/Ruwlyg1idG

— Jake Traylor (@jake__traylor) October 26, 2024

... which is going to feel different to different people, perhaps depending on whether the music has any context for you. Me, I know the music is called the "Undertaker" theme, and though I know what an undertaker is — and I don't think you want the leader of your country analogized to a professional who disposes of the dead — I don't know who "The Undertaker" is — some movie/TV/video game character? Just off-hand, I'm reading Trump's message there as a threat to his antagonists, the so-called "enemy within," to whom he's going to say "You're fired" when he wins, which he wants them to believe he will. It's some scary music for them, but it's delightful to his admirers.

"I have always loved immersion journalism, the fish-out-of-water yarn. I tried tantric sex when interviewing a practitioner..."

"... both of us cross-legged in kimonos, impaled on one heel. I trained in pro wrestling for six months after interviewing wrestlers and taking a shine to flying through the air. I’ve been 'choked out' by a black belt in jujitsu and roundly thrashed by a BDSM dom.... I recently shadowed two [bodybuilders]... But as it transpired, neither woman I followed took steroids, which seemed like an oversight. So I thought I’d take some myself.... A blast of testosterone might jazz things up a bit.... ... I decided to write about the experience of visiting a Melbourne anti-ageing doctor – one who offers everything from hormone replacement therapy to peptides and human growth hormone, and who looks pleasingly like Flash Gordon’s nemesis Ming the Merciless. I wanted to see what might be prescribed to a forty-something woman with no real business taking steroids.... I accepted a prescription for a testosterone gel, but turned down his offer of the steroid hormone DHEA.... He pulled me to a halt just before we reached the reception desk. 'I like to see people at their superhuman best,' he said softly...."

Writes Jenny Valentish, in "Journalism on steroids" (in The Monthly).

I'm reading that as a consequence of googling "journalists use performance enhancing drugs" while reading the WaPo article, "Trump keeps baselessly claiming that Biden will be on drugs at debate/The presumptive Republican nominee lodged similar evidence-free allegations in 2016 against Clinton and 2020 against Biden." Excerpt:

"Toxic masculinity. Fragile masculinity. Like most pop-sociological truisms that gain traction on social media, these are great buzzwords but they fail to grapple..."

"... with nuance.... 'The Male Gazed,' by the queer Colombian writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt, is a smart, refreshing essay collection.... Take one of the collection’s most compelling essays, 'Wrestling Heartthrobs,' which shows the author 'wrestling' with his attraction to the high school jock archetype, especially Mario Lopez’s singlet-clad character, A.C. Slater, in 'Saved by the Bell.' 'The image of the wrestler, even one as charming and unassuming as that of Slater, can’t help but conjure up both aggression and eroticism; the male body so revealed is both a come-on and a threat,' Betancourt writes. 'It is manhood distilled.'... Betancourt later dons a singlet himself, literally stepping into his high school fantasies so he can harness their carnal powers to appeal to other men and to become, if only on an aesthetic level, one of those jocks who excited him. His outfit is a celebration and a self-flagellation all in one."

Writes John Paul Brammer in "What’s the Deal With Men? In his new essay collection, 'The Male Gazed,' the writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt explores society’s portrayals of masculinity" (NYT).

Grappling with nuance.

ADDED: This made me think of the famous nude wrestling scene in the 1969 movie "Women in Love."

Trump's performative religion, as interpreted by Joe Rogan.

Watch the whole thing... there are many interesting leaps of speculation. What's more likely — that Trump is sincerely religious or that Trump is "banging" Paula White?

"You have said before that you haven’t seen any of the 'Star Wars' films. Do you feel that affected your performance in any way?"

Variety asks Werner Herzog in "Werner Herzog on Why He Didn’t Need to See ‘Star Wars’ Films for ‘The Mandalorian’ Role" (The "The Mandalorian" is Disney’s live-action “Star Wars” series.)

Answer:

No, it doesn’t really matter. You see, it was a very lively exchange, man-to-man so to speak, between Jon Favreau and myself. I was not tossed into unknown territory. I was very well briefed. I knew what was expected of me — I knew the interior landscape of the character and I knew the exterior landscape. You shouldn’t feel upset that I haven’t seen the “Star Wars” films; I hardly see any films. I read. I see two, three, maybe four films per year.

Asked if he watches television, he says:

I do, I watch the news from different sources. Sometimes I see things that are completely against my cultural nature. I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity, but sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch “WrestleMania.”... You have to know what a good amount of the population is watching. Do not underestimate the Kardashians. As vulgar as they may be, it doesn’t matter that much, but you have to find some sort of orientation. As I always say, the poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them.

I like that — "The poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them." It's an idea I associate with another film director, Akira Kurosawa. Perhaps Herzog read the same obituary I read in 1998. I blogged about it in February 2004:

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes." On this topic of disgust and shock... let me share a passage from the obituary, written by Rick Lyman, for Akira Kurosawa, which is one of the most influential things I've read in my life....

What's Trump doing today? He was in a sumo wrestling ring in Tokyo giving a 60-pound trophy to a 243-pound tournament winner.

Nice photograph at "Trump climbed into a sumo ring to present a 60-pound trophy in gilded manifestation of Japan trip" at The Washington Post which seems willing to have fun with the erstwhile monster Trump:

Trump forwent the traditional samurai-style topknot in favor of his routine orange coif, and he sported a dark suit and pink tie in place of the thong-like mawashi — or loincloth — that the Japanese wrestlers wear.

Then there's the whole "respect the cushion" controversy:

Some were annoyed that Trump and his wife, Melania... were allowed to sit in chairs close to the ring. Normally, attendees on the lower levels sit on cushions, called zabutons, and VIPs opt for seats on the second floor designed specifically for them....

“He’s a crazy guy, yeah?” said Ryugo Kato, 45, a salaryman in Tokyo. Kato said he thought Trump should have sat on the floor if he wanted to be close to the ring. “That’s the way this place is set up,” Kato said. “He should respect the custom. It’s the culture.”

"There is something that I really do find problematic about the idea of wrestling with a girl, and a part of that does come from my faith and my belief. And a part of that does come from how I was raised to treat women as well as maybe from different experiences and things."

Said Brendan Johnson, quoted in "Rather than wrestle a girl in the state championship, this high schooler forfeited" (WaPo).

Johnston, who has never wrestled a girl since he picked up the sport in seventh grade, has said that the physical aggression required in wrestling isn’t something he’s comfortable showing toward a girl, on or off the mat....

"I don’t think that I am looking at them as not equal...I am saying that they are women and that is different than being men, because I do believe that men and women are different and we are made differently. But I still believe that women are of equal value to men....”

Jaslynn Gallegos, the girl to whom he forfeited, said, "My whole thing is that I’m not a girl wrestler; I’m just a wrestler. So it kind of doesn’t hurt my feelings, but I do kind of take it to heart."

The most-up-voted comment is: "I will disagree with him all day long and still have MAD PROPS for his conviction and dedication to his personal beliefs. He handled the situation with dignity and so did the young lady involved. Perhaps there is hope for a congenial society."

"'Nobody ever came from nowhere more completely,' Welles says, drawing a big studio-audience laugh..."

"... with this description of not just Latka but Kaufman as well. Asked how he came up with such a distinctive character voice, Kaufman says only that he 'grew up in New York, and you hear a lot of different voices in New York' ('You don't hear that one,' replies Welles). He also cites the accents of a high-school friend from South America and a college roommate from Iran."

Open Culture (via Metafilter) about this 1982 interview (in which Andy Kaufman seems almost to hypnotize Orson Welles into doing all the talking):



Welles was obviously not a natural interviewer, and he did not — despite how this looks — have his own talk show. Orson Welles was a very common talk show guest in his later years, and on this occasion he was subbing for the regular host, a man who was a natural interviewer, Merv Griffin.

I wish I could show you a wonderful example of Merv interviewing Orson in which you'd see comfort and pleasure replace awkwardness and confusion, but — like the way Andy Kaufman wanted to do wrestling — Orson Welles wanted to do magic tricks:



But wouldn't we all be better off quitting our career — whatever it is — and becoming a magician? 

And if you were reading this blog in its 5th week, maybe you'll realize why I'm nudging you like that. Here, from February 23, 2004:

I saw Get to Know Your Rabbit when it was shown, pre-release, in 1971, to a test audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I and it seemed like everyone else in that theater experienced it as the funniest movie we had ever seen. Somehow, even though it was directed by Brian De Palma and has Orson Welles in its cast, it fell into oblivion. I still have never come close to laughing as much at a movie as I did that night....

Here's Orson Welles schooling Tommy Smothers in showbiz magic:

That was the first time I ever wrote the word "genteel."

In the post about the NYT explaining Trump and wrestling: "[Trump's] tweeting of the wrestling-with-CNN video has caused the NYT to explain the context, which may be alien to its genteel readers."

I had to look up the spelling. You have to be careful not to write "gentile." "Genteel" actually looks wrong, like crudely phonetic spelling. Meade says it looks wrong "because it has an eel in it."

Ah, yes. "The Genteel Eel," that's the title of a children's book I want to write.

Here's the etymology of "genteel" from the (unlinkable) OED:

A re-adoption, at the end of the 16th cent., of French gentil , which had been previously adopted in the 13th cent., and had assumed the form gentle adj. and n. The re-adoption first appears in the form gentile, distinguished < gentile adj. and n. (= non-Jewish) by retaining the French pronunciation of the i and the stress on the last syllable. It is probable that it was originally fashionable to retain the French nasal sound in the first syllable; hence the vulgar pronunciation represented by the spelling ‘jonteel’, which occurs in comic literature of the early 19th cent. The fully anglicized spelling genteel came in at the end of the 17th cent.... Another attempt to render the French sound is jaunty n.

A few years before the middle of the 19th cent. the word was much ridiculed as being characteristic of those who are possessed with a dread of being taken for ‘common people’, or who attach exaggerated importance to supposed marks of social superiority. In seriously laudatory use it may now be said to be a vulgarism; in educated language it has always a sarcastic or at least playful colouring.

Wow. Did you know that gentle, gentile, genteel, and jaunty were all basically the same, all based on the French word gentil?

ADDED: How does the idea of not being Jewish get connected to those other words? The French word "gentil" comes from the Latin noun "gens," meaning nation. In Latin, the adjective, gentīlis, meant belonging to the same people or race. In French, the adjective, gentil, took on the meaning of belonging to a good family. The oldest meaning of the English word "gentle" was "Well-born, belonging to a family of position; originally used synonymously with noble." The word "gentile," meaning not Jewish, seems (as I read the OED) to be more directly connected to the Latin meaning, though I find that confusing, since many different peoples are not Jewish. I guess it makes sense if the word caught on in the plural form.

ALSO: I felt as though it was the first time I'd written the word "genteel," but a search of this blog's archive shows I'd written it twice before. (Not counting the times it appeared within quotes.)

The first time was in an October 2008 post in which I paraphrase what Dana Milbank is really saying about Sarah Palin: "Yes, dammit, why can't Palin simply resign herself to the fate of the campaign?... ... Palin responds with 'rage.' Anger is stage 1. Get with it, lady. You belong at stage 5, resignation, where the nice, genteel Mr. McCain is."

The second time was in November 2013, when Alec Baldwin got suspended from his MSNBC show after he got caught on camera calling a paparazzo a "cocksucking faggot." That presented a problem not because it's sexual, but because it's anti-gay. I said: "[S]hould he have a political talk show on MSNBC? That's for MSNBC to decide, and obviously they have. MSNBC has chosen to be more genteel and respectful toward the cultural elite. It doesn't seem to know how to foster vibrant discourse about politics, and the gambit of putting on the over-passionate Baldwin was always lame, even before he embarrassed them."

These days Baldwin is know for his impression of Donald Trump. We don't have any old video of Trump uttering anti-gay slurs, but, interestingly enough, we do have photographs of Alec Baldwin using wrestling moves on a media opponent.

Getting NYT readers up to speed on the pro wrestling milieu that, understood, makes Trump look far less psycho and weird.

I don't know if Trump deliberately sought to make this happen, but his tweeting of the wrestling-with-CNN video has caused the NYT to explain the context, which may be alien to its genteel readers. That little NYT video — it's only 2 minutes — tells us a lot about Trump's showmanship and how it has roots in the pro wrestling context and how Trump repurposed the pro wrestling style in politics. It says something about politics that the transplant worked.

I wonder how many people failed to realize that the wrestling-with-CNN video was real footage of Trump fighting a guy and the only "doctoring" of the video was to stick the CNN logo on the opponent's face.

"Doctoring" is the NYT word, and it makes it sound as though there were some deceptive manipulation. I think the most deceptive thing about the video is the extent to which it's not manipulated, if some people think the Trump head was faked.

By the way, I think if a politician the NYT liked — e.g., Obama — were depicted fighting his media opponent — e.g., Fox News — in a cartoonish, over-the-top video, the NYT would approve of the comic fun. Anyone who complained that the video encouraged violence would be deplored as not understanding humor and the difference between real and metaphorical fighting.

Trump tweets video of himself wrestling with CNN.

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

Wow. He really is doubling down and apparently not worried about the recent accusation that his statements about journalists are going to lead to violence against journalists.

As a metaphor, there's a bit of a fakeness muddle. Fakeness 1: CNN is — in the Trump rhetoric — fake news. Fakeness 2: that kind of wrestling is fake. So Trump has himself fake-fighting fake news. Might be kind of like writing a sentence with a double negative.

Anyway, a President showing us video of himself physically brutalizing the news media... that's something we've never seen, and if the question is whether that's presidential, we know Trump's answer is it's modern-day presidential.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison calls for censorship: Twitter should kick Trump out. Twitter does have the power to pull the plug, but what are the consequences?

What happens to Twitter after it shows itself looking plainly political? There's always another social media platform. It wasn't that long ago when Twitter didn't exist. There's nothing that special about Twitter other than that it has a lot of users. They could have them today and lose them tomorrow. Trump has 33 million followers. Anywhere he goes, he will be followed, leveraging Twitter's competition.

As for the censors like Ellison, why do they not worry about how they will be seen? Why don't they worry about the demands for equal treatment? Ellison said: "I personally think that Twitter should treat him like any other social media harasser and snatch his account." Turn that around. If Trump's account is snatched, then everyone else whose account was equally "bullying" toward anybody would have to get their account snatched. That would be a lot of snatches.

In last night's post about Trump's tweeting, the commenter rcocean wrote that he was "surprised Althouse isn't pulling out her 'Civility Bullshit' tag." I see the point. This is squarely within what I use that tag to mean, which is that calls for civility are always bullshit. That is, I have observed again and again that when somebody issues what purports to be a lofty call to civility, they're bullshitting. They don't really mean it. They just want someone who's not on their side to disarm, tone it down, and recede into boring innocuousness. If their side were coming on strong, scoring hits, they'd be exulting and proud of their effective rhetoric.

"The visceral instinct to physically attack a person who has just attacked you is strong; the surge of adrenal hormones makes it feel possible and necessary."

"That circuitry is increasingly vestigial, but overriding it and playing the longer game requires an active decision," writes James Hamblin — in "How a Man Takes a Body Slam/In an assault in Montana, two very different ideas of masculinity" (The Atlantic) — praising the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs for his "judicious, prescient reaction" to the body-slamming he seems to have received from Greg Gianforte.

Hamblin likes the idea of "redefining strength" by accepting, in the moment, that one has been "physically overpowered" and not getting caught up in "the idea of masculinity as an amalgam of dominance and violence." Instead, Jacobs, speaking "as if narrating for the audio recorder," said “You just body-slammed me and broke my glasses." He also "started asking for names of witnesses to the assault who will be assets to his case as it plays out in courts of law and public opinion," and reported the incident to the police.

Of course, Jacobs's choices were not merely a matter of overcoming physical impulses and meritoriously eschewing violence. I don't know how much of an impulse to retaliate on the spot he may have felt. I don't really know how violently he was hit. I don't even know if he did something first toward Gianforte and Gianforte was doing the old tit for tat retaliation. But narrating the audio, dropping it on line, going to the police, and taking names for litigation purposes is also a form of dominance. Some people would even call it violence. Why, here's an article in The Atlantic from just last June: "Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent/A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify."

You know, if somehow I were given the choice between getting body slammed and getting charged with a crime and the question were How hard would the body slam need to be before you'd prefer to get charged with a crime?, I'd say pretty damned hard. And I'm just a little old lady. I'd rather be body-slammed than get sued in tort. If you body-slammed me, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hit you back.* But I'll tell you one thing: If you sue me, I will defend to the hilt, and —  where ethically appropriate — there will be counterclaims.

___________________

* And I have been body-slammed, at rock concerts, when I was trying to stand out of the range of a mosh pit and some young man came flying out obliviously. And sometimes it was intentional, an effort to provoke non-moshers to listen to the music the properly physical way. But I didn't call the cops or take names or file lawsuits.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says:

A "body-slam" is lifting someone completely of the ground and then driving their body to the ground.

It's not the same as "slam-dancing" on the periphery of a mosh pit, where one person slams his body into someone else's.

Wait. Let's get some shared understanding here. Does anybody think Jacobs intended to refer to the professional wrestling move? Here's a careful, precise demonstration of what that is:

"Look at how beefed up she is. It’s because she’s taking an enhancement. Whether she’s a boy, girl, wants to be purple or blue it doesn’t matter."

"When you’re using a drug and you’re 10 times stronger than the person you’re wrestling because of that drug, that shouldn’t be allowed."

While Beggs has said he’d prefer to wrestle against boys, University Interscholastic League rules force Beggs to compete as a girl. The UIL uses an athletes birth certificate to determine gender, a measure overwhelmingly approved by the state’s school superintendents a year ago.

The rule prohibits girls from wrestling in the boys division and vice versa.

UIL provides an exception for a steroid that is prescribed by a medical practitioner for a valid medical purpose. The UIL has reviewed Beggs’ medical records and granted him permission to compete while taking testosterone.

Mack Beggs is 55-0.

"For all his well-honed sheepishness, Priebus’s 'just a kid from Kenosha, Wisc.' shtick belies a penchant for main stages, big-ticket rooms and high-level company."

"No shortage of Reince Priebus photos hang on the walls of the R.N.C.’s headquarters on Capitol Hill. He can be a little star-struck. He travels far and often to appear with candidates and party dignitaries at events where his presence is not necessarily required. Priebus was giddy when I spoke to him last spring as he prepared to attend a party for Time’s '100 most influential people' at Lincoln Center. We were on the phone, him walking through the lobby of the J.W. Marriott after a packed day of fund-raising. He sounded almost out of breath, less from exhaustion than what seemed like pure excitement. He told me how stoked he was to meet the golfer Jordan Spieth and the pro-wrestler-turned-actor the Rock. 'Those are my top two,' Priebus said, especially the Rock. 'I was a big pro-wrestling fan back in the day,” he added, noting his childhood admiration for Hulk Hogan and Mad Dog Vachon.' 'Growing up in Kenosha, Wisc., being named to the Top 100 list is a pretty cool thing,' Priebus told me. At this point, I reminded him that no national party chairman would ever be named to the Top 100 except in extraordinary circumstances like these — and these were not particularly enviable ones."

From "Reince Priebus, Normalizer in Chief/As Trump’s new chief of staff, the lifelong G.O.P. loyalist will have to guide an outsider president and his band of radicals through a city they’ve pledged to upend" — by Mark Liebovich in the NYT.

ADDED: This post brought email from a former student who became an associate in 2000 at the law firm where Priebus worked. I published her email in a new post, here.

"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?

Wrestling voted back into the Olympics.

"The sport - one of the original disciplines at the Ancient Olympics - had been due to end its Olympic participation at Rio 2016 following its dismissal by the IOC earlier this year."

Wrestling's triumph in the vote follows a number of sweeping reforms made following its exclusion, including overhauling its rules, administration, gender equality and operations.

"There is a 400 year old tradition in Japan to make babies cry."

"Every year mothers hand over their babies to sumo wrestlers who make them cry. Baby crying is considered healthy and a prerequisite for good luck. The winner of the contest is the sumo wrester who makes the baby cry faster, usually by scaring them...."

What's the best comic remark you ever made that was not laughed at by the people you were with at the time?

This is a question based on a story Meade just told me, about something he said to some other guys when he was in high school. He's remembering: 1. what he said, 2. how funny he thought it was at the time, and 3. that the other guys — 3 boys who were on the wrestling team — reacted with cold silence and, then, departure. And for all these years, Meade has continued to believe that the remark was really funny.

Tell me your stories like that. And feel free to try to figure out Meade's joke.

He was in his art class, working on a painting. The project was to do a painted interpretation of a famous painting, as Picasso did here, painting his version of this Velasquez. The painting he was doing was this Van Gogh of sunflowers. The 3 wrestler boys — one of whom was a friend — had dropped in to hang out in the art room, and they'd been saying things like "Look, it's art boy" and "Meade's a real artiste."

What's Billy Corgan doing these days?

The Olympics have cut wrestling, and one young man grapples with disappointment.

Kyle Snyder, 17, "a 5-foot-11, 215-pound marble slab of an athlete — undefeated in his high school career, and the top-ranked prep wrestler in the country at his weight class."

“I just grew an overwhelmingly powerful love of wrestling, and it was all I could think about,” Snyder said. “I didn’t want to be out on the football field. I wanted to be getting better at wrestling. I think I have an addictive personality, and when I fall in love with something I keep thinking about it and thinking about it.”

“Wrestling is his calling,” said Snyder’s coach.... “He probably spends 80 to 90 percent of every waking hour thinking about wrestling.”

Sad that they took wrestling out of the Olympics... and it's also sad that a determined, competitive kid like this has absorbed a message from modern American culture that extraordinary concentration and dedication is a mental disorder.

I think I have an addictive personality....

How did a 17-year-old American learn to talk about himself like that? Is it a disarming faux-modesty that he's developed so that other kids don't lose their self-esteem (like they could do as well if they were weird enough to spend all their time on one thing)? Or does he genuinely think of himself as deranged and analogous to a junkie? Shouldn't a successful high school athlete be regarded as someone to be emulated by other kids (and not a bizarre outlier to be observed for entertainment's sake but disregarded as any kind of example of how to live)?

Here's some discussion of what psychiatric experts consider to be the characteristics of an addictive personality:

- Impulsive behavior, difficulty in delaying gratification, an antisocial personality and a disposition toward sensation seeking.

- A high value on nonconformity combined with a weak commitment to the goals for achievement valued by the society.

- A sense of social alienation and a general tolerance for deviance.

- A sense of heightened stress.

This isn't at all the same thing as exceptional dedication.

I'm not knocking Snyder. He's 17 and a great achiever. I'm knocking the culture that got a message through to his still-developing mind.