Art, commerce, anomie and the high-tech lifestyle. Here's something I bought. I needed something to carry my laptop around in, so why not a handbag with an Edward Hopper painting of a woman reading on a train? I'll be a woman reading the internet on my laptop while traveling about, and somewhere in the past, there's that Hopper woman, on an old passenger train, reading a book.



I got that Hopper image from this page, which isn't in English, but it has a very lovely collection of paintings of women reading. Here, I'll copy another, which I find especially appealing. It's by Jan Sluijters.

The real difference between Kerry and Auntie Em. I'd like to remove myself from the hook for seeming to portray Kerry as not macho enough here. In fact, I don't like the non-gentle parts of his statement: "lying" and "corrupt." And I don't like inarticulate speech; in this case, "you know" and "lying group of people" (for "liars"). But I've been thinking about it, especially after writing that bookstore post, just below, and I really think that the inarticulate parts of the statement may be the real, and better Kerry showing through. I suspect advisors are telling him to be more masculine and to criticize Bush forcibly. You've got to use words like "corrupt" and "liars." You've got to throw red meat to the Bush-haters. Kerry then tried to do what they wanted and just couldn't bring himself to do it. He started to, but felt the "Auntie Em effect." But I mean that in a good way: it is a sign of character to stop yourself like that. The main difference between Kerry and Auntie Em, is that Auntie Em could not even allow one nasty word out of her mouth. That took real strength. I'd like to see a strong President in that sense.

Of course, Em would have made a terrible President because, despite her inability to mouth off, she also completely lacked the ability to speak up in strong but not profane language and to take action to solve any problems. But at least she knew who the real evil person in town was. Kerry's real weakness problem is one that cannot be solved--or even masked--by mouthing off nastily about Bush. Those who are concerned about the problems Bush is taking action to try to solve are going to want to see shows of strength directed at our real enemies and not just attacks on Bush.

What's this world coming to? Email category. Two more subject lines on email I don't open:

I love you

I'm worried about you

That's rather sad.

MORE: Here's another one:

[re] Democracy.

That was for some impotence remedy. An incredibly lame political joke could be made.

YET MORE: This one's a bit evil:

I've had enough of your lies.

Maybe I wouldn't have wanted to open that one anyway.

Shopping at Borders ... with Kerry. The NYT reports on a Kerry shopping trip to Borders. One of the books he buys is One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Oprah book selection. But how would you like to choose a novel with the press watching? Assuming you were running for President, you'd have to try to pick a book that would reflect on you appropriately. You'd have to pick something like One Hundred Years of Solitude. As he's leaving the store, there's this interchange with a 6-year old kid who's just had his picture taken with Kerry:

"Guess who I hate?" Justin called out as Mr. Kerry walked away. "Bush!"

"Uh-oh," Mr. Kerry said. "We don't want to hate anyone."

That's completely non-macho, and I approve. And by the way, why would the kid say that? He's just an innocent who wants Kerry to like him and has to believe that hating Bush is something to be proud of, like reading a chapter book. He could only have gotten that idea one way.

But what did Kerry say afterwards? No running mike to let us know. Maybe it was "That kid ruled!" or "Even a little kid knows what a corrupt liar Bush is." In my dreams it would be, "Ordinary Democrats are going around casually expressing hatred instead of talking about real ideas. I hope I can help change the political discourse in this country. Clinton-hating was wrong, and so is Bush-hating."

"Crooked, you know, lying group." Excuse me if I don't get all excited about Kerry saying , "these guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen." Of course, like the Dean scream, this is the sort of thing that everyone can get up to speed and have an opinion about instantly. It's almost impossible for me to get outraged at this, even though I deplore the overuse of the words "lie," "lying," and "liar," in political debate. But my main two problems with Kerry's current gaffe is that it shows ineptitude (in not knowing when a microphone is attached to his person) and poor speaking ability. Here he is trying get tough with the word "crooked," then he has to stop and say "you know," to collect his thoughts. He thinks (I'm guessing): do I dare say "liars"?--do I dare to eat a peach?--and then decides to tone it down by avoiding the noun and going with the adjective "lying" followed by the excessively pussyfooted "group of people." He goes all Auntie Em in the end:

For twenty-three years I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you! And now... well, being a Christian woman, I can't say it!

Aw, dammit, now I have to call Campaign Machismo Watch on myself!

Eisner is to Trump as Simpson is to Osbourne? Prof. Bainbridge is thinking of joining me and Prof. Yin in the lawprofs who blog about reality TV shows business. That would be if Disney devised an Apprentice-like reality show to find a replacement for Michael Eisner, as was jokingly suggested.

There will be attempts to replicate The Apprentice, because it's so successful (and it's great too!), but I wonder what they will look like. The Osbournes was (past tense used intentionally, unfortunately) a great show, but could you just follow another celebrity around? It didn't work with Roseanne. But following Jessica Simpson around on the Newlyweds is actually pretty good. That's because Simpson is a great character. Not as supremely great as Ozzy Osbourne, but decently great. Now Trump is a great character, strangely compelling in his loathsomeness. He's the Ozzy of business competition shows. Is there also a Jessica? We'll find out. I'll bet we'll see a Roseanne, though.

Amish day at the Times--Rumpspringa! (Apparently, I think it is my job to detect repetitions.) First, there's this description of Johnny Depp in a movie review by Elvis Mitchell headlined, "Beware of Amish Hitmen and the Anxiety of Influence":

Dressed ominously in a big-brimmed black hat and a work shirt buttoned to the neck — he looks like an Amish hitman — Shooter drawls menacingly, "You stole my book."

(The movie is just some thriller, not about the Amish at all--and Mitchell manages to refer to Popeye and Danger Mouse too, and I will be waiting for random recurrences of these characters.)

The second is the pathetic story "Man Charged After Snack Cakes Stolen" (why report it at all?):

Robert Lee McKiernan, 35, of Cedar Rapids, was arrested Tuesday after an incident in which authorities say he stole a box of Hostess Ho Hos and a box of Cinnamon Crumb Cakes from a barn at an Amish farm near Hazleton, in northeast Iowa.

The third is this correction, surely the Correction of the Day:

An article in The Arts on March 4 about a planned UPN reality show tentatively called "Amish in the City" misspelled the Pennsylvania Dutch term for a rite of passage in which some teenagers experiment with the outside world. Authorities on Amish tradition use various renditions of the dialect, but the most common version is rumspringa, not Rumpspringa.

Law school life. A dialogue from the seventh floor, on hearing sounds of revelry coming from the Faculty Library at the end of the hall:

What's going on?
I don't know.
It sounds like some sort of reception.
They seem to be having too much fun.
That's not right.

Back to work. No one investigates.

3/11. A witness, reported in the NYT:

"There were pieces of flesh and ribs all over the road ... There were ribs, brains all over. I never saw anything like this. The train was blown apart. I saw a lot of smoke, people running all over, crying. I saw part of a hand up to the elbow and a body without a head face down on the ground. Flesh all over. I started to cry from nerves. There was a 3-year-old boy all burnt and a father was holding him in his arms, crying."

Very sad.

Websites I hate; high speed access I won't buy. Just when I was about to order high speed access from my cable company (Charter Communications), I go to their website and try to click on "high speed internet help" to find out about the rates and so on. A screeching noise begins, gets louder and louder, and then an animation of a racing car "breaks through" the page and swerves to a halt--an ad for something. I don't read the ad and have to wait several seconds for a button to appear so I can click it away. (Don't go here unless you want to see that sort of thing.) So then I click on the help link and get a page that says:

"We do not support your Operating System. Sorry for any inconvenience."

And sorry if I hate you. My operating system is OSX, and if you don't support it, I don't support you. I was even going to order the cable box, even though I hate the box, because I wanted to get HBO.

Another ridiculous page at the website says:

Get Access to a Great New Start Page! As a result of an exciting new agreement with MSN®, you now have access to a new start page at http://charter.msn.com. Start Your Surfing Off Smart. Charter.msn.com will take you directly to some of the richest and most up to date news, sports, financial and entertainment content on the Internet. It is just a first step towards a more robust offering from Charter scheduled for delivery later in 2004.

So I can "get access"--they'll actually let me go to a MSN® page--and I can even start my "surfing" there? Yeah, that's really "exciting," Charter.

Solving the Jon Peter Lewis mystery. Prof. Yin wrote:

I actually kind of like Jon Peter Lewis' performance, but I don't think there's a chance he'll get through.

Then, it turned out we saw that the li'l guy outpolled even the clearly best person (Jennifer Hudson). Here's Shack's rebuke at Television Without Pity:

You voted spastic dork Jon Peter Lewis into the finals.

Well, I laughed through Lewis's performance and would never have voted for him, but (with hindsight) I understand why he won the vote of the people. The people in question, the ones who speed dial hundreds of times in the alloted two-hour period, are young girls. Personally, I'm not a young girl, but I once was, and I remember very well how I felt about idolizing singers. I was interested in male singers who seemed to be boys, not men. I wrote a few days ago that the group Them wasn't quite what I liked at the time. This was the reason: Van Morrison sounded like a man. For the same reason, I wanted nothing to do with something like, say, Percy Sledge singing When a Man Loves a Woman. Young girls are interested in a singer who is an idealized boyfriend. That's why they liked Clay Aiken so very much. That's why we loved The Monkees.

Gore's raised eybrows. Dowd ends with some approval for Botox:

[T]hink of all the pols who could have benefited from modern cosmetic techniques. ... Richard Nixon could have used Botox to stop his sweating, as Fortune 500 execs do now. And Al Gore could have frozen those condescending eyebrows during the 2000 debate.

Wait ... Gore had eyebrows?

Candidate Machismo Watch. That Cheney joke, as Maureen Dowd's comment below indicates, belongs on the Candidate Machismo Watch list. (The joke is about searching for "missing biowarfare agents in Senator Kerry's forehead" as Dowd recounts it.)

It depends on what the meaning of "don't" is. When Maureen Dowd asked John Kerry if Dick Cheney's joke about Botox was "a way to mock him for an effeminate vanity," he said:

"No, I don't have it," he says coolly. "Vanity or Boxtox [sic]?" I ask, grimacing. "I don't have Botox, but whatever their game is, I don't care," he replies without a wisp of a wince. "That sort of thing is so childish. In the end, people will care about real choices that affect their lives."

Didn't everyone learn from the Lewinsky incident that when someone answers your question in the present tense, you need a follow-up question about the past tense?

Oh, and since Maureen Dowd had gone in search of info about Botox (and was mostly trying to make him react to something, anything, to see if he could still move his face), didn't Kerry implicitly call Dowd childish? But isn't that really why we read Dowd?

Movieoke. Now that there's movieoke--good for people who would do karaoke but won't sing in public--I'm ready for the reality show. As karaoke led to American Idol, movieoke must lead to American Movie Star.

Sampling--for painters. What are we to think of a painter who paints from someone else's photos? Should a key point be that the photographer is not purveying his photos as art but is a photojournalist? Should it matter that the painter is selecting parts of the photographs and adding new elements and painting in a painterly not a photo-realist style? Should it matter that the photo is 30 years old?

I'm a lawprof not a copyright lawprof, so I'm just offering the usual array of lawprof-y questions and not an opinion on copyright law. Yet I can't help feeling sympathy for the artist. I often do a freeze frame on the TV--another reason to have a TiVo--and do a drawing. Here, it seems to make a difference whether I'm drawing from a news or talk show, which is casually performed and photographed, and a fiction show or movie, which is an artist's work. Let's say I freeze frames from a beautifully photographed film from 30 years ago, like Taxi Driver, and make a series of large paintings. I don't see how I could sell that. But then, if I find segments within the frame, discovering compositions that are in some way mine (but in some way not), and if painted them on a different scale and in a painterly style, so that the original film couldn't even be perceived--well, that seems entirely different to me. What if I don't bother to paint them but just extract them from a DVD and fool around cropping and redoing the image in the computer? Though I don't imagine copyright law has much to do with the fact that the second work of art may have taken far more effort than the one it is appropriating, it's hard not to side with the painter against the photographer. The artistic photo-manipulator--like Meghan on The Apprentice last week--seems to be another matter entirely.