"Ink Coffee in Denver became a target for vandalism and outrage after the cafe posted a sign saying it was 'happily gentrifying the neighborhood.'"

It was supposed to be funny, writes NYT,  but maybe the nongentry don't share that sense of humor.

[A] flippant sidewalk board had grown from an ill-conceived advertisement into a full-fledged symbol of the pain and anger that have accompanied urban transformations from Brooklyn to San Francisco....

Ink’s sidewalk sign, created for the coffee shop by an advertising agency, appeared just before Thanksgiving on a retail strip full of new bars and boutiques. The message on the back extended the theme, and for some, rubbed salt in the wound: “Nothing says gentrification like being able to order a cortado.”

On Saturday, the sidewalk outside the shop was crowded with protesters, clustering in the autumn sun, some with small children perched on their shoulders. Men and women carried posters: “Gentrification = Urban Colonialism.” “Black Lives Matter. White Coffee Doesn’t.” “Eat the Rich.”

Now, that's funny. Can't the gentry take a joke?

"Denver, where have you gone?/Last night we walked your streets in search of you/Bounced around like a schizophrenic firecracker/Handing out missing persons fliers that bore your image...."

This is a powerful piece on gentrification from local artist Bobby LeFebre. "Denver, where have you gone?" pic.twitter.com/3Sc1lyYNbW

— julieturkewitz (@julieturkewitz) November 25, 2017

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

The quote is from William Morris, or "Willy Morris," as he's identified on the sticker on the refrigerator that we saw on the street we call Willy Street.

When looking for useful and beautiful things on line, please do that useful, beautiful thing of using The Althouse Amazon Portal.

"For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality."

"In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself."

From "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido" by Stephen Marche (in the NYT). Marche gets a little too personal:

Professionally, too, I have seen just how profoundly men don’t want to talk about their own gendered nature. In the spring, I published a male take on the fluctuations of gender and power in advanced economies; I was interviewed over 70 times by reporters from all over the world, but only three of them were men.

People not being interested in your book is not "profound." Especially if you promoted it with the phrase "fluctuations of gender and power in advanced economies."

Acknowledging the brutality of male libido is not, of course, some kind of excuse. Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.”... Freud also understood that repression, any repression, is inherently fluid and complicated and requires humility and self-searching to navigate....

We're taking Freud seriously again?! This makes me want to go back and reread what Andrea Dworkin wrote about Freud. Just a snippet*:

Inescapably, a woman’s body incarnates shame, her genitals especially signifying dirt and death: whether referred to in a Playboy party joke as “gash” or expounded on by Freud:

Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain.

Just seeing those genitals turns a man gay or makes him rub up against rubber for a lifetime; to “surmount it,” this great fear caused by these monstrous female genitals, means to mount her successfully, unintimidated by the wound, her castration, the blood, the slime, the filth. “Oh yes,” wrote Freud to Jung, “I forgot to say that menstrual blood must be counted as excrement.”

Dworkin, Andrea. "Intercourse" (pp. 231-232). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
___________________

* Freudian innuendo intended.

"So why, in an age of information overload and in a news-saturated city like New York, are written horoscopes still so popular?"

Asks Alexandra S. Levine in the NYT.

I'm going to read this because the National Review, linked by Instapundit, is reviling the NYT for "taking astrology seriously." Before reading the NYT piece, I'm just going to guess that the NYT is only taking astrology seriously in the sense of seriously inquiring into why people still read horoscope columns — do they believe in the pseudo-science, are they just having fun, or is there some deeper psychological need that is fulfilled by visualizing one's fate out there in "the stars"?

The NYT doesn't run an astrology column (like its NYC rivals The Daily News and The NY Post), and it must fret over missing out on the traffic. Why don't people want to read real news? Or is it that people want to read fake news (in which case, astrology fits right in)?

Now, I'm reading the actual NYT article. Ah, yes, it's the deeper psychological need:

“What makes us feel safe in the world is order, boundaries and sequence, and those three things are things that astrology can give us,” [said Galit Atlas, a clinical assistant professor in New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis]. “Especially in a time when the world doesn’t feel safe, we tend to search for an order that makes sense. That’s not a negative thing.... The more secure we feel in the world, the more we’re able to be productive — to live fully, to love and to work.”

Another thing, which I hadn't thought about, is art:

“I had no interest in astrology; I couldn’t see the use of it and it didn’t seem practical,” [said Eric Francis Coppolino, who writes the Daily News horoscope column]. “But when I started reading Patric Walker in The New York Post, I suddenly found myself with a guy who wrote like Steinbeck....  Between different astrologers, describing a chart is like poets describing a tree... You’re going to get 20 different poems.... But the conversion from that to that,” he added, waving a finger from his astrology table to a draft of his next horoscope column, “that’s where the mystery is. That’s where the art is.”

ADDED: I went looking for Coppolino's horoscope column, because I wanted to see how good his writing is. The first thing of his I found, however, was not about astrology, but sexual harassment: "Men get preyed upon sexually, too." That's a subject I'm very interested in. Let's read:

When I heard Weinstein’s voice from the episode when Ambra Battilana Gutierrez wore a recording device preparing for a possible sting by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, I got a serious case of the creeps: I had a memory triggered. I was so disgusted, I had to stop the recording, wait a while and play it again.

His voice and mental posture were nearly identical to someone I knew half a lifetime ago. It was that same mix of guilty, pushy and desperate. When I was 23 years old, fresh out of college and an aspiring young writer, I was given the name of someone who I was told could be helpful to my career....

He would hire young men, ostensibly for a day of work, which would take about an hour. It consisted of tearing up résumés, each of which he glanced at for exactly half a second. Then, on the second or third visit came the offer of drugs (his preferred libation was LSD). I liked to trip, so I took him up....

I'd only use the word "libation" for a drink, but I think this is good writing. I liked to trip, so I took him up. Okay. Oh, I don't know. I can't even understand that. If you like to use LSD, you presumably know enough about it to know not to use it in the wrong environment, like with a boss or someone you don't fully trust.

Ah, here's the Coppolino horoscope page. Am I "taking astrology seriously" if I opt to sample it by clicking on my own astrological sign? I've got to pick one:

You must be decisive, and yet carefully check to ensure there's not a trace of self-destructive impulse in any choice you make. That doesn't mean refusing to take risks; it's about the kinds of risks, your motives for taking them, and your probability of success. Pay close attention.

Pay close attention. That's practically my motto. Paying close attention to this advice, I'd say it's damned good advice, but, of course, it's good advice for anyone, and I'm not looking at the other signs, because who's got that kind of time? But I'm not reading this for advice. I'm reading it for literature. Does it reach the Steinbeck level?

"CBS boss told me to sleep with coworkers to get ahead..."

Alleges Erin Gee, referring to Robert Klug of “CBS Evening News,” the NY Post reports.

Klug... said “she should ‘have sex’ with [the] video editor who had been difficult to work with to ‘break the ice,’ ” according to court papers.

“I couldn’t believe that was his advice,” Gee said. “I was looking for help, and he looked at me like, ‘You don’t matter, and this is what you should do to make this guy like you.’"...

Klug was eventually promoted to executive director for CBS News, and shortly after, another male boss told Gee that Klug “had asked him whether he had had sex with her or the other women under his supervision,” the suit says.....

Gee reported that incident internally, and she was later demoted to weekend news.

Lots of talk of religion and "royal blood," but not a word about race in BBC's announcement of the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle."

"Their married home will be the prince's current residence Nottingham Cottage, on the grounds of Kensington Palace - where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, with Prince George and Princess Charlotte, also have an apartment," BBC reports.

Until recently, a union with Ms Markle would have ruled Prince Harry out of succeeding to the throne - due to her being a Roman Catholic. But new rules on royal succession came into force in 2015, allowing members of the Royal Family to marry a Roman Catholic and become king or queen.

The instant Prince Harry and Ms Markle are pronounced "man and wife" she will automatically become Her Royal Highness, Princess Henry of Wales. However, she does not automatically become Princess Meghan - because she is not of royal blood.

Here's a NY Post column by David Kaufman from September: "Why almost no one is talking about Meghan Markle’s race."

... Meghan Markle is black — or at least as black as our first black president, Barack Obama — born to an African-American mother and white father in Los Angeles. Yet, in stark contrast to the endless clamor surrounding Obama, there’s been surprisingly little discussion about the skin color of the world’s highest-profile potential bride.

Don’t blame the silence on Markle — who’s hardly shied away from sharing her multi-culti background....

Part of the reason for the lack of discussion around this admittedly sensitive subject may be because of what happened when the British press tried talking about her background initially: UK tabloids used terms like “gangsta,” “slave ancestors” and “crime plagued” to describe Markle, her family and her childhood neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Harry’s reaction was swift and clear — lay off. But in removing racism from the Markle story, the palace also erased race, reducing Markle to just another raven-haired pretty face rather than the African-American pioneer she actually is (and the cultural modernizer the royal family so desperately needs).....

Kaufman thinks we should talk about Markle's race. It's "a big deal — and we should say so." But the prevailing opinion seems to be something like: 1. Markle should be spoken of as the individual that she is (and we all are), 2. Talking about race is theoretically a good idea, but we're actually not very good at it, 3. We want to keep things pretty for Harry and Meghan (because that makes us feel good), 4. Even if Markle has already spoken about race, it remains her prerogative to decide just how much her race will be talked about, and 5. It's not like Obama, because he was a politician, and millions of people were deciding whether to merge our identity with his, but Meghan and Harry are getting married and it's (mostly) about them deciding to devote themselves to each other.

"If you want to be tough about it — okay, it's a pretty silly yarn and it is played in a manner no less fatuous by the sundry members of the cast."

"But Mr. Lang is still a director who knows how to turn the obvious, such as locked doors and silent chambers and roving spotlights, into strangely tingling stuff."

Wrote the movie critic Bosley Crowther in 1948 about Fritz Lang's "Secret Beyond the Door," which I'm reading about because I saw this fabulous screen grab:

"I accidentally texted my wife with voice recognition...while playing the trombone..."

I accidentally texted my wife with voice recognition...while playing the trombone pic.twitter.com/tWCPSXbbrO

— Paul The Trombonist (@JazzTrombonist) November 21, 2017

"Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond."

The NYT has a third article about that one Nazi/"Nazi" it found in Dayton, Ohio. We're already talking about the first 2 articles, the first one, which didn't make much sense, and the second one, in which the author said the editors challenged him to make some sense, but he couldn't. I said:

But why was he important enough to drag into the spotlight in the first place?.... The answer must be that he serves a purpose for you and the NYT. You could put some effort into self-examination: Why are you using him?

In the comments, Matthew Sablan — anticipating the subject matter of the third NYT article — said:

I don't understand. The NYT takes someone everyone thinks is an extremist and does everything they can to make him seem evil and wrong, and people STILL think the NYT is trying to make him look like a regular Joe? They go out of their way to try and downplay his every day Joe-ness, even burying the fact he wasn't even AT Charlottesville.* Anyone who thinks the NYT is defending or promoting Nazis needs to re-read the piece and figure out how they misread it so epicly bad.

So the readers over at the NYT — according to the third article —  found the story offensive:

“How to normalize Nazis 101!” one reader wrote on Twitter. “I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,” wrote another. “Attempting to ‘normalize’ white supremacist groups – should Never have been printed!”...

But far more were outraged by the article. “You know who had nice manners?” Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. “The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis.”

One reader characterized the profile of Hovater as "glowing." Why didn't the NYT pick a more obviously evil American Nazi to profile? It says it didn't intend to "normalize" Hovater but to show how "hate and extremism have become more normal" than we want to think. That is, the NYT claims to be showing what is, and the readers are saying Don't do that. You're helping them. You must keep them as monsters, make them toxic.

The NYT says the idea of the article was to figure out "Who were those people" who marched in Charlottesville last August:

"John Conyers Steps Aside From Judiciary Post Amid Sex Harassment Inquiry."

The NYT reports.

“After careful consideration and in light of the attention drawn by recent allegations made against me,” Mr. Conyers said in a statement on Sunday, he is stepping aside on the Judiciary panel “during the investigation of these matters.... “I deny these allegations, many of which were raised by documents reportedly paid for by a partisan alt-right blogger,” Mr. Conyers said in the statement. “I very much look forward to vindicating myself and my family before the House Committee on Ethics.”...

What's important — beyond the Conyers resignation — is changing the procedures in Congress and disclosing the suppressed settlements that taxpayer money funded. On "Meet the Press" today, there was some attention to this issue:

CHUCK TODD: [Conyers] took advantage of a situation where he had a - the rules of Congress and I know you guys want to change these rules, but he got to hide his settlement, he got to - his accusers had to go through all sorts of craziness, so why is he entitled to new due process in this case?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: No, I I - we are talking about what we have heard. I’ve asked the Ethics Committee to review that. He has said he’d be open - he will cooperate with any review....

CHUCK TODD: Will you support Congress retroactively making public all of these private settlements that taxpayer dollars have been used?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: Not necessarily. Sometimes the victim does not want that to happen.

CHUCK TODD: But if the victim wants it public, will you side with the victim?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: What I have-- yes. But what I--

CHUCK TODD: 100%?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: Well, here's the thing. It's really important. Because there is a question as to whether the Ethics Committee can get testimony if you have signed a nondisclosure agreement. We're saying we think the Ethics Committee can, but if you don't agree, we'll pass a law that says the Ethics Committee can, a resolution in Congress that the Ethics Committee can....  But there's no-- I don't want anybody thinking there's any challenge here to our changing the law and see how people-- when we know more about the individual cases. Well, because you know what our biggest strength is? Due process that protects the rights of the victim, so that, whatever the outcome is, everybody knows that there was due process....

That's some mind-numbing babble from Pelosi! Keep up the pressure to break those nondisclosure agreements! We the taxpayers were left out of the loop as these secret, self-serving agreements were made. Protect the victim's privacy, sure, but shine a light on the machinations of the members.

At the Monochrome Café...

... may your Thanksgiving weekend come in for a gentle landing.

(And this is an open thread, so I must follow my ritual of steering you toward The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

The building unfolds.

"Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, 'edgy'... "

"... with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable. 'I don’t want you to think I’m some "edgy" Republican,' he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy. 'I don’t even think those things should be "edgy,"' he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and 'appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.'"

This guy says a lot of things "while" saying other things. How is this even done?*

The text is from "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland" by Richard Fausset in the NYT.

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

The story seemed to need a second story to explain it. Published on the same day at the NYT is "I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With?":

And yet what, of any of this, explained Mr. Hovater’s radical turn?... After I had filed an early version of the article, an editor at The Times told me he felt like the question had not been sufficiently addressed. So I went back to Mr. Hovater in search of answers. I still don’t think I really found them...

Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader. I beat myself up about all of this for a while, until I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect....

These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about.... You're already writing him off as an enigma. But why was he important enough to drag into the spotlight in the first place? You're ending your mini-opus in the style of "Citizen Kane,"** but the Kane character was undeniably an important man. Why not leave Tony Hovater alone? The answer must be that he serves a purpose for you and the NYT. You could put some effort into self-examination: Why are you using him?
___________________

* Is it like Tuvan throat singing?



I was walking along the Lake Mendota shoreline the other day, and I said "What is that sound?" Nearby was a man standing on a short pier facing the lake, and as I walked closer I realized all that sound was coming out of him. Unearthly and beautiful, just like in that video clip. I felt very strongly at that moment, yes, that is what human beings should be doing with the lake. There should be a person every 50 feet or so along the shoreline, facing the lake, speaking to it in celestial sound.

**

"Despite not being included in participation, ['Inappropriate Song Night'] has not received much push back from men or trans men about attendance."

That's an observation by the Wisconsin State Journal in its article about a burlesque dancing event at a Madison place called Dance Life. We're assured that the dancing expresses sexuality but is not "a sexual event." It's a "safe place" where "women or non-binary people" can "be ourselves." The audience, we're told, is 100+ each week, with "men and trans men"* excluded.

[Dance Life owner Arielle] Juliette said even those who come into the event not knowing it’s an “escape from the male gaze” still leave with that strengthened feeling.

Being able to express whatever needs expressing is, in part, what makes something like ISN so special according to [Finn Enke — a nonbinary trans male and UW-Madison professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, History and LGBTQ Studies] who said “however they want to use their bodies, to show whatever they have experienced and to do something in a space where there is no question about validation from men — there is no question of evaluation from men. There is none of that (stuff) that is so pervasive in our culture. That strikes me as a super important thing to have.”

I remember stuff like this from the 1970s — the reclaiming of sexy dancing by feminists. Get the men out of the room and the meaning is transformed. I guess this is a recurrent theme, because I found a Feministing article from 8 years ago: "Musings on Feminism and Belly Dancing." I'm guessing the word "empowering" appears. Yes:

To my pleasant surprise, most women in the class took her up on the offer—women in their fifties, women with stretch-marks, women of all shapes and sizes were dancing exuberantly, their bellies revealed, and, you know, all of us had a wonderful time. It was incredibly empowering....

The other students in my anthropology class were impressed by my story, until I admitted that some (male) significant others of the women in my class (and their children) were in the audience at the hafla. One of my classmates raised her hand to say that this meant my fellow belly dancers were therefore performing for the benefit of their male significant others, and that this fact undermined anything feminist or challenging of norms about the whole experience....

With so much legitimate and vital concern about the objectification of women, sometimes it’s hard to say what’s objectifying and what is an empowering enjoyment of one’s sensuality....

Beyond dancing, I wonder about sex itself. Should men be excluded, for feminist empowerment?
____________________

* Isn't "men and trans men" an inappropriate locution? Why not just say "men"? If a two-part expression is desired, why use the modifier for the trans men and not the cis men? Perhaps the trans men are more emphatically excluded, as they may assert a stronger argument for inclusion, but I see no evidence that any trans men (or other men) are seeking inclusion. Ah, I see the answer in the article. There was concern that if trans men were not specifically excluded, they might feel offended by an unintended message of inclusion. It was therefore important to signal to them that they are regarded as members of the male group, the ones who are excluded. That is, they were shown the respect of being included in the exclusion.

"Okay, I am just going to right out and say that Time's Man of the Year should have been me."

Lewis Wetzel wrote in the comments to yesterday's post "It can't be that Time colludes with prospective Persons of the Year to see what access it can get out of the process of honoring somebody." Wetzel offers these "bullet points":

-changed the oil -- myself -- on the 2001 Explorer.
-learned how to make a darn good Alfredo sauce.
-read both "Iliad" and "Odyssey."
-hired a guy to do some yard work I've been putting off.
Have you done better? Your immediate response will be to say "Yes!", but then look at the bullet points again, especially the one where I changed the oil in the 2001 Explorer. By myself.

Also in the comments Leslie Graves wrote: "Who would be on the cover of Time this year if the Koch acquisition had already taken place?"

Meade answers that question: "Someone born November 27, 1953 in Norfolk, VA maybe?"

Google tells me Meade is talking about Steve Bannon. That brings up 2 points:

1. Why would the Kochs want to highlight Bannon? The Kochs don't like Bannon publicly, but Bannon was instrumental in getting Trump elected and he's gone now. The Kochs haven't publicly liked Trump either, but as Bannon famously said: “If Pence were to become President for any reason, the government would be run by the Koch brothers—period. He’s been their tool for years... I’m concerned he’d be a President that the Kochs would own" (quoted in "The Danger of President Pence" in The New Yorker).

2. In yesterday's post, I expressed suspicion that Time did have the idea of making Trump Person of the year again this year, but only as a co-winner, and pairing him with someone in a negative way, which is what Time did to Bill Clinton in 1998 (making him co-Person with Kenneth Starr). Now, I'm seeing that the co-winner could very easily have been Steve Bannon.

"To my Czech mates who were arrested. Send me your details and proof that it was you, and I'll pay your fine."