"... of an apparent drug overdose...." He was 46.
Another great actor died yesterday, Maximilian Schell. He was 83.
UPDATE: Hoffman "was found unconscious in the bathroom of his fourth floor apartment in the Pickwick House around 11:15 a.m. by screenwriter David Katz, who called 911, a law-enforcement official said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. 'He had a needle sticking out of his arm,' the official said."
২ ফেব্রুয়ারি, ২০১৪
"Perhaps man-made climate change is all in the mind... in our instinctive terrors, we always think that something wicked this way comes..."
"... especially from the sky: as a punishment from God, for things we have done. This paranoia, should it exist, would be hardwired into the human psyche, so we would rarely notice it – as the mind deceives itself," writes Sean Thomas, cherry picking from a database of centuries of expression of British fears about unusual weather:
There are thousands more entries like this – “worst deluge in living memory”, “the worst rains ever witnessed”, “floods and rains the like of which no man has seen” – but you get the gist. This vast database shows that any notion that our rain, right now, is getting “worse” is farcically incoherent. What does “worse” even mean? Worse than what? Worse than the Ice Age? Worse in the sense of “colder”? “Spittier”? What?
"When he first played it for Bobby Womack, who was his protégé, he said, 'What's it sound like?' And Bobby said, 'It sounds like death.'"
"Sam said, 'Man, that's kind of how it sounds like to me. That's why I'm never going to play it in public.'"
50 years ago, Sam Cooke wrote and recorded "A Change Is Gonna Come."
50 years ago, Sam Cooke wrote and recorded "A Change Is Gonna Come."
"What's your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know..."
Dylan Farrow puts her sad face between you and whatever Woody Allen movie you might have been hoping to enjoy.
Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie looks like he's working up to a response, a reasonable response, to the questions he frames — "Did Woody Allen Molest His Daughter, Dylan Farrow? And If So, Should You Disavow His Films?"
Gillespie reveals that he doesn't even like Woody Allen. He says Allen "ceased to produce consistently interesting movies decades ago," which either means that he hasn't noticed "Blue Jasmine" or that he really meant to write "ceased the consistent production of interesting movies decades ago." "Blue Jasmine" (2013) is certainly consistently interesting. So was "Midnight in Paris" (2011). Maybe "To Rome With Love" (2012) was only interesting in parts. But, good lord, Woody Allen has consistently made interesting movies. Look at the IMDB list. He has made at least one movie in every year since 1977, which is probably when Gillespie imagines that he stopped being interesting.
Gillespie shifts the topic to the more general question — "When — if ever — does the biography of a creator mean that you cannot or should not in good conscience patronize an artist?" — and he doesn't even answer that. He throws it over to the readers: "What do you think readers?"
But I want to get back to Woody Allen. Dylan Farrow writes: he "sexually assaulted" her. I'm putting that in quotes not to express disbelief, but to observe the generality of the term. We're told that she was playing with an electric train but not what body part of his came into what sort of contact with what body part of hers. We're told "what he did to me in the attic felt different" from other things he did that she also did not like. Those other things are specified: He had her under the covers in bed with him when he was "in his underwear." He put his thumb in her mouth. He put "his head in [her] naked lap."
These charges are not new. I read the 1992 Vanity Fair article that had all of this material, and I've seen maybe 15 Woody Allen movies since then, some more than once. "Blue Jasmine" is, I think, the only movie I saw this year in the theater, and I returned to the theater to see it a second time. So, through my own actions, I've obviously answered Gillespie's question yes, in the case of Woody Allen movies. I can in good conscience go to see his movies. For one thing — unlike Gillespie — I like Woody Allen. It's fine to have your "good conscience" about avoiding things you don't even want to do. The morality test only applies when — to useWoody Allen's Emily Dickinson's expression — "The Heart wants what it wants."
I feel empathy for Dylan Farrow, but I think we are living in a fallen world, and we are surrounded by human beings all of whom have their sins, known and unknown. To purport to know what cannot be truly known is also a sin. To punish and shun one person out of preference for another when the truth is not known is surely not an exalted virtue, if it is a virtue at all. The works of art exist and are real and apart from the artist. And when someone chooses — as Woody Allen has — to remain silent all these years, to keep to himself, producing good work, incurring no further charges of harming anyone, I think we are not doing something morally wrong to receive that work for whatever value it has, independently, as art.
That said, it appears that the celebration of Woody Allen, the man, on the Golden Globes TV show is what provoked Dylan Farrow to come forward. But Woody Allen was thousands of miles away from that event. He was not soaking up the adulation. The art/artist separation remains, and yet we can reframe Gillespie's question to focus on a more particular consumer-end moral problem: At what point do accusations of wrongdoing against an artist make it wrong to enjoy a staged celebration of the man?
Woody Allen himself seems to loathe all staged celebrations of artists. Has he ever appeared at any awards show? Perhaps he's got a personal awareness of guilt that shames him away. But we are all sinners, and it might be best if we all had an aversion to the celebration of celebrities.
To paraphrase Jesus: Let him who is without sin among you be the first to watch the Golden Globes.
UPDATE: "Mr. Allen has read the article and found it untrue and disgraceful. He will be responding very soon."
Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie looks like he's working up to a response, a reasonable response, to the questions he frames — "Did Woody Allen Molest His Daughter, Dylan Farrow? And If So, Should You Disavow His Films?"
Gillespie reveals that he doesn't even like Woody Allen. He says Allen "ceased to produce consistently interesting movies decades ago," which either means that he hasn't noticed "Blue Jasmine" or that he really meant to write "ceased the consistent production of interesting movies decades ago." "Blue Jasmine" (2013) is certainly consistently interesting. So was "Midnight in Paris" (2011). Maybe "To Rome With Love" (2012) was only interesting in parts. But, good lord, Woody Allen has consistently made interesting movies. Look at the IMDB list. He has made at least one movie in every year since 1977, which is probably when Gillespie imagines that he stopped being interesting.
Gillespie shifts the topic to the more general question — "When — if ever — does the biography of a creator mean that you cannot or should not in good conscience patronize an artist?" — and he doesn't even answer that. He throws it over to the readers: "What do you think readers?"
But I want to get back to Woody Allen. Dylan Farrow writes: he "sexually assaulted" her. I'm putting that in quotes not to express disbelief, but to observe the generality of the term. We're told that she was playing with an electric train but not what body part of his came into what sort of contact with what body part of hers. We're told "what he did to me in the attic felt different" from other things he did that she also did not like. Those other things are specified: He had her under the covers in bed with him when he was "in his underwear." He put his thumb in her mouth. He put "his head in [her] naked lap."
After a custody hearing denied my father visitation rights, my mother declined to pursue criminal charges, despite findings of probable cause by the State of Connecticut – due to, in the words of the prosecutor, the fragility of the "child victim."So there will always be a cloud on Woody Allen's reputation, but it's not as though he could have removed the cloud if only he'd been prosecuted and had his day in court. He'd have enjoyed the presumption of innocence, and that means suspicion would remain even if there were a not guilty verdict.
These charges are not new. I read the 1992 Vanity Fair article that had all of this material, and I've seen maybe 15 Woody Allen movies since then, some more than once. "Blue Jasmine" is, I think, the only movie I saw this year in the theater, and I returned to the theater to see it a second time. So, through my own actions, I've obviously answered Gillespie's question yes, in the case of Woody Allen movies. I can in good conscience go to see his movies. For one thing — unlike Gillespie — I like Woody Allen. It's fine to have your "good conscience" about avoiding things you don't even want to do. The morality test only applies when — to use
I feel empathy for Dylan Farrow, but I think we are living in a fallen world, and we are surrounded by human beings all of whom have their sins, known and unknown. To purport to know what cannot be truly known is also a sin. To punish and shun one person out of preference for another when the truth is not known is surely not an exalted virtue, if it is a virtue at all. The works of art exist and are real and apart from the artist. And when someone chooses — as Woody Allen has — to remain silent all these years, to keep to himself, producing good work, incurring no further charges of harming anyone, I think we are not doing something morally wrong to receive that work for whatever value it has, independently, as art.
That said, it appears that the celebration of Woody Allen, the man, on the Golden Globes TV show is what provoked Dylan Farrow to come forward. But Woody Allen was thousands of miles away from that event. He was not soaking up the adulation. The art/artist separation remains, and yet we can reframe Gillespie's question to focus on a more particular consumer-end moral problem: At what point do accusations of wrongdoing against an artist make it wrong to enjoy a staged celebration of the man?
Woody Allen himself seems to loathe all staged celebrations of artists. Has he ever appeared at any awards show? Perhaps he's got a personal awareness of guilt that shames him away. But we are all sinners, and it might be best if we all had an aversion to the celebration of celebrities.
To paraphrase Jesus: Let him who is without sin among you be the first to watch the Golden Globes.
UPDATE: "Mr. Allen has read the article and found it untrue and disgraceful. He will be responding very soon."
"Here we are... Super Bowl, in New Jersey... Christie can appear on the scene... look like he’s got all this behind..."
"... him, and the lawyer releases the letter precisely on the eve of the big day in order to ruin it."
ADDED: TalkLeft — who's no Christie fan — says:
ADDED: TalkLeft — who's no Christie fan — says:
The lawyer's letter, which was carefully and ambiguously worded, didn't prove anything, let alone that what Christie said at the news conference was false....She's looking closely at the text of the letter and the transcript of the press conference.
The letter doesn't even allege to whom the Administration Order was communicated. If the lawyer meant it was communicated to Christie, why didn't he say so? And alleging evidence exists "tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge" isn't a claim there's evidence Christie did have knowledge. Why the word play?More at the link.
"MOTH: Sloth? This is Moth./SLOTH: Hello, Moth."
I wasn't going to link to this, because we already talked about the sloth-moth article in the NYT, but in last night's "Retriever Café," roger wondered "when are we going to get back to discussion of sloth shit............" Yeah, those are roger's dots, and I wanted to help.
This blog is about helping people, you know. For example, I also helped the person who said that "Daily Show" embedded video was autoplaying. I edited in a page break so you'd have to click "more" to get to it, even though another commenter (rh) had already given some tech advice about how to prevent autoplay — which is something, I guess, that's built into Safari, because it wasn't autoplaying for me, but I don't want it autoplaying for anybody.
And Kevin asked (about the photo at the Café): "Was that imac back in the corner bad? Is that why you gave it a 'time-out'?" So I'm helping Kevin by answering: That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever. If only mild, maternal chastisement would restore its goodness, but it was good for a long time, and I'd love to give it a nice send-off, but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer. Even though I have tech people to help me, I have 25 years of expired Macintoshes in corners of my various rooms, all unburied.
Quaestor drops down out of his tree to poop on iMacs:
This blog is about helping people, you know. For example, I also helped the person who said that "Daily Show" embedded video was autoplaying. I edited in a page break so you'd have to click "more" to get to it, even though another commenter (rh) had already given some tech advice about how to prevent autoplay — which is something, I guess, that's built into Safari, because it wasn't autoplaying for me, but I don't want it autoplaying for anybody.
And Kevin asked (about the photo at the Café): "Was that imac back in the corner bad? Is that why you gave it a 'time-out'?" So I'm helping Kevin by answering: That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever. If only mild, maternal chastisement would restore its goodness, but it was good for a long time, and I'd love to give it a nice send-off, but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer. Even though I have tech people to help me, I have 25 years of expired Macintoshes in corners of my various rooms, all unburied.
Quaestor drops down out of his tree to poop on iMacs:
All iMacs are bad and should be relegated to the darkest corner of the unsold merchandise warehouse. With a lot of swoopy plastic style to wow the yokels, and a lot more instant obsolescence built in (not a bug, but a feature)....Not a bug, but a moth......... Hey, Quaestor, my last 4 iMacs are metal and they're no more "swoopy" than an iPhone, which wowed people — those whom you call "yokels" — with the simplest possible design, in glass and metal, back when they were used to plastic phones with the kind of linear ridges about which carmakers are sometimes delusional.
১ ফেব্রুয়ারি, ২০১৪
"Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors."
"Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths."
Writes Christina Hoff Summers in a piece called "No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men."
ADDED: If working with people is considered a plus, such that job-seekers accept lower pay to have that kind of work, is there a problem? What if job-seekers tended to feel it was bad to have to work with others and avoided these jobs? The pay would go up. I think what we're seeing is that working with people is more likely to be a plus among women, and there are a lot of female job-seekers bidding the price down. You might say this is acceptable because it's not intentional discrimination against women; it's just everyone making individual personal choices, and a neutral market producing this effect. Those who still see a problem and want us to care should find a way to say it still matters, because the skewed preferences of women are leading to a disparate impact. I just wish they'd say that clearly and be accurate about the facts and not continually prod people to feel that there are nefarious employers deliberately short-changing women.
Writes Christina Hoff Summers in a piece called "No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men."
ADDED: If working with people is considered a plus, such that job-seekers accept lower pay to have that kind of work, is there a problem? What if job-seekers tended to feel it was bad to have to work with others and avoided these jobs? The pay would go up. I think what we're seeing is that working with people is more likely to be a plus among women, and there are a lot of female job-seekers bidding the price down. You might say this is acceptable because it's not intentional discrimination against women; it's just everyone making individual personal choices, and a neutral market producing this effect. Those who still see a problem and want us to care should find a way to say it still matters, because the skewed preferences of women are leading to a disparate impact. I just wish they'd say that clearly and be accurate about the facts and not continually prod people to feel that there are nefarious employers deliberately short-changing women.
"The reason I’m leaving Congress."
By Henry Waxman.
An actual article by Henry Waxman, but it feels like a set-up for a joke.
Please tell the joke.
An actual article by Henry Waxman, but it feels like a set-up for a joke.
Please tell the joke.
"You know, Republicans are getting a lot of flack these days, as they should, for waging a war on women. But what's the excuse for the country's most progressive mayor?"
"How can this strain of puritanism endure in the same city that pioneered the kinky hollowed parade? It was bad enough with New York City went all Rick Santorum on Eliot Spitzer to begin with. He's only the guy who arguably did more to reform Wall Street than any other American. Yeah, his libido got the best of him and he paid dearly for it. A brilliant man was reduced to a punchline and banished from public life. But now, anybody he touches has to go?"
Said Bill Maher on his show last night, criticizing Bill de Blasio, "a man so liberal he married a black lesbian," for rejecting a woman seemingly because she was dating Eliot Spitzer — "Lis Smith who ran Mayor Bill de Blasio's communications department in last year's campaign was all set to take over the job that she earned as his top spokesman." How do you "earn" a job as someone else's spokesperson? De Blasio gets to pick the person who speaks for him. If he didn't want to get any Spitzer on him, he's entitled.
Said Bill Maher on his show last night, criticizing Bill de Blasio, "a man so liberal he married a black lesbian," for rejecting a woman seemingly because she was dating Eliot Spitzer — "Lis Smith who ran Mayor Bill de Blasio's communications department in last year's campaign was all set to take over the job that she earned as his top spokesman." How do you "earn" a job as someone else's spokesperson? De Blasio gets to pick the person who speaks for him. If he didn't want to get any Spitzer on him, he's entitled.
#WhiteFeministRants...
... a trending hashtag.
Related to the Michelle Goldberg article we were talking about yesterday.
Hard to tell if these are right-wingers risking attempting to use the kind of third-rate humor that breeds on Twitter or whether non-white feminists are advancing in what Goldberg called the "toxic twitter war" amongst the feminists.
Whatever it is, it's not very funny, and I don't think conservatives have anything to gain by inserting themselves in an intrafeminist conflict, especially if they're feeling they've got something funny to say. As the feminist in the light bulb joke said: "That's not funny."
Related to the Michelle Goldberg article we were talking about yesterday.
Hard to tell if these are right-wingers risking attempting to use the kind of third-rate humor that breeds on Twitter or whether non-white feminists are advancing in what Goldberg called the "toxic twitter war" amongst the feminists.
Whatever it is, it's not very funny, and I don't think conservatives have anything to gain by inserting themselves in an intrafeminist conflict, especially if they're feeling they've got something funny to say. As the feminist in the light bulb joke said: "That's not funny."
Amazon.
If you're enjoying this blog, please consider doing your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal. If you go into Amazon through that link — which is also always in the banner at the top of this blog — and complete a purchase before clicking away, you will be directing a percentage of the purchase price to this blog, at no extra cost to you. Thanks to everyone who's been doing this.
If you're looking for suggestions, here's the slow cooker we just got that we like. And here's the main camera I've been using. And the bag — a men's bag — that i use to carry my casebook around in.
If you're looking for suggestions, here's the slow cooker we just got that we like. And here's the main camera I've been using. And the bag — a men's bag — that i use to carry my casebook around in.
Is Mary Burke even trying to defeat Scott Walker?
I'm reading this article in the Wisconsin State Journal about how, in the second half of 2013, Gov. Scott Walker raised $5.1 million and his Democratic challenger Mary Burke only raised $1.8 million:
It must be hard to inspire donations if that's all the campaign is about, especially when Burke doesn't seem to be doing much to tear Walker down. She doesn't even seem to be distinguishing herself from Walker. And look, she declined to show up with President Obama when he did that appearance at the GE plant in Waukesha (Wisconsin) the day after the SOTU. She claimed to be "too busy"!
Is she simply a placeholder to avert the humiliation of no opponent for Walker and because she has her own money? But if it's so obvious that I'm asking that right now, it is humiliating.
ADDED: State Rep. Brett Hulsey, D-Madison says:
As for Politics 101, maybe Politics 102 says when a candidate avoids appearing alongside the President, it means she strongly believes that the picture would not help her.
Burke, a former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive and member of the Madison school board, is running her first statewide campaign in an attempt to dim Walker's rising political stardom. She already has tapped $400,000 of her personal wealth on the effort.Maybe that paragraph was just sloppily written, but it seems to say that the goal of defeating Walker is understood to be out of reach. There's nothing but an attempt/effort to diminish Walker's stature and impede his ability to run for President.
It must be hard to inspire donations if that's all the campaign is about, especially when Burke doesn't seem to be doing much to tear Walker down. She doesn't even seem to be distinguishing herself from Walker. And look, she declined to show up with President Obama when he did that appearance at the GE plant in Waukesha (Wisconsin) the day after the SOTU. She claimed to be "too busy"!
Is she simply a placeholder to avert the humiliation of no opponent for Walker and because she has her own money? But if it's so obvious that I'm asking that right now, it is humiliating.
ADDED: State Rep. Brett Hulsey, D-Madison says:
“If the president comes to your state and you’re running for governor, you drop what you’re doing and go. That’s just politics 101... The picture of her standing next to Obama (would have helped) her, especially because most people in Wisconsin don’t know her.”Oh, really? Click on the Brett Hulsey link if the name's not familiar and you want to know why Meade laughed when I read "He also won’t rule out a possible long-shot gubernatorial bid" out loud.
Hulsey, who last year said Burke had the personality of a turnip, tweeted “@MaryBurkeGov is too chicken to greet @PresidentObamaB, #toochicken to repeal Act 10, #toochicken to be governor too?”
But Hulsey himself remains noncommittal about whether he’ll run for re-election, and if so, whether he would do so as a Democrat or independent. He also won’t rule out a possible long-shot gubernatorial bid.
As for Politics 101, maybe Politics 102 says when a candidate avoids appearing alongside the President, it means she strongly believes that the picture would not help her.
Why did the President say "art history"?
We were talking about this yesterday, and here's Virginia Postrel — via Instapundit — talking about the factual inaccuracy of pointing to art history, in particular, as a college major that might not correlate with a good income:
[A]rt history isn’t a major naive kids fall into because they’ve heard a college degree — any college degree — will get you a good job... [I]t’s famously elitist.... It’s stereotypically a field for prep school graduates, especially women, with plenty of family wealth to fall back on. In fact, a New York Times analysis of Census data shows that art history majors are wildly overrepresented among those in the top 1 percent of incomes. Perhaps the causality runs from art history to high incomes, but I doubt it.That is, it's not that studying art history leads to a high-paying job, but that people who are already in a very affluent social class choose this major and then do very well exploiting pathways that exist for them because of pre-existing wealth.
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