Mon très chic New York petit déjeuner français Noel au le resturant Le Coucou avec ma petite famille.

Le Coucou c'est tres bon.

MERRY CHRISTMAS HEAVENS TO MERGATROYD VISITORS!

YOU GET A PHOTO OF A 20-SOMETHING JUSTIN TRUDEAU ON HIS INTERNATIONAL ODYSSEY.

If he was any hotter my head would explode. OMG that belly button with just a hint of a happy trail below. DAYAM.

He can eat my Poutine ANY TIME.

Le plus ca change...

1785

Via Ronan Farrow.

Justin Trudeau: French vs. English

Justin Trudeau has some interesting things to say about the differences between French and English, which I discovered in his autobiography "Common Ground." This is a subject of especial interest to me right now since I am attempting to learn French.

On page 67 he writes:

During my years at (his Montreal school) Brebeuf I began to think about language in a different manner. To sovereigntists (in favor of the Quebec province separating from the rest of Canada which they almost did in 1995) language was a major political issue as much as a medium of communication. You were either an anglophone or a francophone, and each label aligned you with different cultural values and perhaps different goals for Quebec. Until then I hadn't thought of myself as either a francophone or an anglophone; in my bilingual milieu in Ottawa, it simply hadn't seemed necessary to define myself one way or the other. 

At Brebeauf and Quebec generally, the climate made me mindful of the language I chose to speak, depending on whom I was speaking to and what the subject might be. With this new awareness I began to monitor the words that popped up in my thoughts and my dreams, at times second-guessing myself as I spoke. Were the words French? Should they be English? Decisions I had once made without thinking became deliberately conscious.

On the next page he writes...

I have always loved both languages, but I came to realize how very different they are, not just in the way they permit a person to express thoughts but also in the way they guide the creation of those thoughts. For example, French grammar requires you to know how your sentence is going to end before you start to speak or write, which imposes a certain rigor on your expression. If your sentence begins this way, it must end that way. This is why so many French intellectuals seem to be channelling their inner Proust even when they are speaking casually to a mass audience on television. 

In English, I always felt that the grammar allows you to get to almost any conclusion, regardless of how you start your sentence. Halfway through your sentence, you can change the direction of your thought without breaking too many rules. There can be a certain sloppiness in English that is almost non-existent in proper French, where the complexity of the concordance between words and within clauses requires sustained attention. Perhaps this explains why my father, who was never one to mince words on such matters, told me that he found me less persuasive in English compared to in French. Many years later I thought about his comment when I took part in a debate that the McGill Debating Union conducted in French. Afterwards my teammates told me I was a more formidable debater in French than in English, which, coming from anglophones, I took as a backhanded compliment. 

Like many bilingual people, I sometimes flip an internal switch from one language to the other in a seemingly arbitrary way. For example, I do math only in French, because all my life, that was the language of my math classes. When I was teaching French out west, and confronted the challenges associated with getting Vancouver teenagers interested in studying a language that seems so far from their daily lives, I used to point out the more romantic aspects of the French language. When telling someone that you miss them, you say "Tu me marquees." So you is the subject of the sentence - as opposed to the English equivalent, "I miss you," in which it's all about me. It may seem a subtle difference, but hormonally charged teenagers sure got it.

Très intéressant.

Here he is debating in French. I'm able to pick up only about 20% of what is being said here.

Justin Trudeau & his mom

Left to right - Justin, Margaret, Michel and Sasha Trudeau, 1983

I bought a copy of Justin Trudeau's 2014 autobiography Common Ground and it has some interesting stuff in there. He sometimes has fun being the son of a famous politician. He recounts on page 89 of the paperback edition:

On occasion, my background and family name have led to incidents that were comic and surreal. Like the day, during a trip to Paris, I struck up a conversation on Boulevard Saint-Michel with a retired American professor who had made a name for himself translating Robert Frost's poetry into French. He was an interesting and eminent character who, when I mentioned I was from Canada, began rhapsodizing about "that wonderful prime minister you had in the seventies, the one with the beautiful wife who ran away."
I couldn't resist. I said, "You mean Mom?"

I have to say the Trudeaux, père et fils are the most famous Canadian politicians by far in the United States. Americans normally have no idea what is going on up there in Canada, but even I knew there was a Canadian politician in the 1970s named Pierre Trudeau who had a wife "who ran away."

I recently learned how notorious Margaret Trudeau was in those days, allegedly dating Mick Jagger and Ryan O'Neal, and being photographed at Studio 54. Although Monsieur Trudeau himself was no slouch on the boudoir department there is still and certainly was then, a double standard. And Pierre had a controlled and circumspect character verging on Spartan to hear Justin tell it, while Margaret was and still is emotionally volatile.

As Justin mentions in his book, she's had a lifelong struggle with manic-depression which was only diagnosed fairly late in life. But also, from what I have seen in video interviews and which is apparent in this online print interview too, she has an extremely open personality, and is incredibly candid even, apparently, in spite of herself: a trait that I personally find charming and even admirable, but which is completely unadvisable for any politician's wife.

She was so open that in the 1970s a scandalous photo was published of her, without underpants on. You can see the photo here.

Justin was not aware of the photo until a classmate shoved it in his face. From page 62 of Common Ground:

Sometimes things at school got personal. A few students would try to get a rise out of me by bringing up dirty laundry about my parents' separation, which had long been a stable of the tabloids. I had been somewhat insulated  from this in Ottawa, both because I was well surrounded by a great group of friends who had known me since kindergarten, and because elementary-school children tend not to be as cruel and vulgar as older kids. In the Hobbesian world of high school (in Montreal) some kids regard anything and anyone as fair game. One day an older kid came up and thrust into my hands a notorious picture of my mother that had appeared in an adult magazine. 

Hard as this may be to believe, I had never before seen that picture - never even knew of its existence. And obviously it set me reeling. But I knew this was a critical moment. If I acted shocked or hurt, it would be open season on me for the rest of high school. Everyone would know they could get a rise out of me by shoving the latest bit of gossip in my face. So I simply waved it off, leaving  the bully unsatisfied, and he went off to find an easier mark.

Margaret's wild youth wasn't the only thing that stressed out Justin. He recounts an event from his childhood on page 46:

My mother's mental health deteriorated as I grew older. And there were times that I began to feel that I had to take care of her, rather than the reverse.
One day, a few years after my mother had moved out and was seeing a nice guy named Jimmy, she arrived at my school while I was in gym class saying she had to see me, she needed to talk to me, I must listen to her. In the school hallway she seized my shoulders and through her tears said: "Jimmy left me! He's gone! He even took the TV!"
I did my best to console her, giving her hugs and patting her back and telling her it was all right, that things would get better. I was eleven years old.

What an unusual childhood had Justin Trudeau.

La chanson des squelettes

1. When the pendulum rings one, a big skeleton opens his eyes
2. When the pendulum rings two, two big skeletons dress in blue
3. When the pendulum rings three, three big skeletons put makeup on their eyes
4. When the pendulum rings four, four big skeletons brush their hair
5. When the pendulum rings five, five big skeletons eat eggs. 
6. When the pendulum rings six, six big skeletons play a game.
7. When the pendulum rings seven, seven big skeletons dance a little.
8. When the pendulum rings eight, eight big skeletons march two by two.
9. When the pendulum rings nine, nine big skeletons wait in a queue.
10. When the pendulum rings ten, ten big skeletons return to their home.
11. When the pendulum rings eleven, eleven big skeletons go to bed.
12. When the pendulum rings midnight, twelve big skeletons say "good night. "

Bon premier jour d'hiver, tout le monde!

Time to abolish the Electoral Collage

As the New York Times said today:

...why should the votes of Americans in California or New York count for less than those in Idaho or Texas? A direct popular vote would treat all Americans equally, no matter where they live — including, by the way, Republicans in San Francisco and Democrats in Corpus Christi, whose votes are currently worthless. The system as it now operates does a terrible job of representing the nation’s demographic and geographic diversity. Almost 138 million Americans went to the polls this year, but Mr. Trump secured his Electoral College victory thanks to fewer than 80,000 votes across three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

This page has opposed the Electoral College for at least 80 years, and it has regardless of the outcome of any given election. (In 2004, President George W. Bush won the popular vote by more than three million, but he could have lost the Electoral College with a switch of fewer than 60,000 votes in Ohio.) 

Many Republicans have endorsed doing away with the Electoral College, including Mr. Trump himself, in 2012. Maybe that’s why he keeps claiming falsely that he won the popular vote, or why more than half of Republicans now seem to believe he did. For most reasonable people, it’s hard to understand why the loser of the popular vote should wind up running the country.

Ces comptines sont fucké

Je continue à apprendre le français. J'ai regardé "French in Action" et dans un épisode, la petite sœur de Mirielle, (Mirelle est la star du programme) son nom est Marie-Laure, a chanté une comptine. La comptine est bizarre. Mais pas trop mal et j'ai donc décidé de regarder les autres.

Alors je vais a Youtube pour voir d'autres chansons françaises pour petits enfants et quelle horreur! Les comptines sont bizarres et désagréables!

La première chanson, chantée par Marie-Laure n'est pas trop mauvaise, il s'agit d'une souris qui fait de la dentelle pour les dames à Paris.

Regardez:

(Cette version est sans musique.)

Mais les autres comptines - mon Dieu! 

Ce comptine , ("Mon père m'a donné un mari") est sur une jeune femme qui a un petit mari. Le mari est si petit le chat lui mange.

Ce comptine ("Ne pleure pas Jeannette") est sur une jeune femme qui a été pendue.

Ce comptine ("La mere Michel") est sur une dame qui a perdue sa chat. Le chat a été vendu par quelqu'un a acheter un lapin.

Je pensais que M. Guignol était le pire - ces chansons sont encore plus désagréables que lui! Ces chansons sont fucké*!

Je ne suis pas la seul personne qui trouve ces comptines detestable - la pagine ici dit: 10 comptines pour enfants qui sont (en fait) vraiment trash.

Je n'ai pas le courage aller voir ces comptines. ("Ne pleure pas Jeannette" est inclus.)

Voulez-vous lire la translation de ce blog post? Ici.

Le mot "fucké" ce n'est pas français traditionnel, il est un anglicisme inventé par les Québécois.

Trudeaun't go breaking my heart

Hotness Summit

It seems that New York Magazine might be as enthralled by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as I am - I just discovered they have an ongoing series there called Trudeaun't go breaking my heart, the series which dares to ask the question Why Don’t I Ever Run Into Shirtless Justin Trudeau While Hiking? and sadly observes of the meeting between Obama and Trudeau that the Historic Hotness Summit Did Not End With a Kiss.

NYM discusses the wondrousness that is Trudeau:

There are so many reasons to love Justin Trudeau: He appointed a bunch of women to his cabinet. He’s half of North America’s greatest political bromance. He has great hair. But high among them is unwavering dedication to feminism, and declaring himself a feminist.
During an interview with Vox, Trudeau went expanded on his feminist cred. “I talk about the fact that I’m a feminist as often as I can, and each time I do it gets a huge reaction and the Twitter verse explodes,” he said. “I will keep saying that until there’s no more reaction.”

However there are some women who can resist the Trudeau charm and unsurprisingly it's horrific, hate-filled, right-wing women like the MRA's favorite, extremist nutbar Andrea "Judgy Bitch" Hardie, who is Canadian and who (under a new Twitter identity because she was banned under the old one) called for the assassination of Trudeau.

Isn't there a Canadian Secret Service that keeps tabs on freaks like this? Here's her blog where she provides her city/province. Those responsible for protecting the life of the Prime Minister should look into it.

Her paranoid ranting seems completely misplaced though - the fact that his wife is an unhinged right-wing crank who called for the assassination of their Prime Minister four months ago doesn't seem to have had any impact whatsoever on the career of her husband Dr. Tim Hardie. 

Andrea "Judgy Bitch" Hardie

This is the difference between the right and the left. I'm pretty sure if Hardie was an unhinged leftist (and there are no leftists as unhinged as rightists as far as I know) calling for the assassination of Trump, Trump's cultists would have forced Hardie and her family into hiding, using death threats they used on a labor leader; and death and rape threats on a teenage girl, who merely criticized Trump.

I left a message on her most recent blog post about Trudeau, asking her if she ever heard from the Canadian secret service for her treacherous intentions. If she responds I will report it here.


Now to get the image of Women Against Feminism's poster girl out of your mind, here is Trudeau and his splendiferous cabinet, putting the Monster-elect's cabinet to shame. O Canada indeed.

The loneliness of Paul McCartney

Statue of Eleanor Rigby in Liverpool

Although Paul McCartney lost his mother at a young age he had a close relationship with his father, his brother, and a large extended family. Then he had school friends, then the Beatles. And as George Harrison once observed of Elvis Presley:

We took the ups and the downs together and, I think because we had each other, we helped each other from going crazy or having nervous breakdowns. Unlike poor old Elvis, who, although he had 59 friends with him, was not the same. He was the only one who experienced what it was like being Elvis, whereas four of us experienced what it was like being fab.

When the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney had a good marriage and an adopted daughter and eventually four biological children of his own. When his wife died he soon was married to another woman and then when that marriage ended he married another one whom he remains married to at the present time.

So I doubt there have been many people who ever lived who have been less lonely than Paul McCartney.

And yet, thanks to his artistic imagination, McCartney wrote at least two great songs about loneliness. 

No More Lonely Nights is a favorite of mine, released in 1984, when McCartney was 42, into the fifteenth year of his marriage with a house full of children. But he's singing about having no more lonely nights. Allison Krauss did a nice cover version.

More famous and more amazing though is Eleanor Rigby. He wrote this song about middle-aged loneliness when he was twenty-freaking-four years old, in the middle of Beatlemania. The song was justly celebrated right from the get-go and covered by everybody from Aretha Franklin to Alice Cooper.

I've always taken it for granted, it's been around since forever. It wasn't until I was middle-aged myself that I came to appreciate the song - and become in awe of McCartney's accomplishment. Although he did have some help from the other Beatles and their friend Pete Shotton:

McCartney wrote the first verse by himself, and the Beatles finished the song in the music room of John Lennon's home at Kenwood. John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and their friend Pete Shotton all listened to McCartney play his song through and contributed ideas. Harrison came up with the "Ah, look at all the lonely people" hook. Starr contributed the line "writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear" and suggested making "Father McCartney" darn his socks, which McCartney liked. It was then that Shotton suggested that McCartney change the name of the priest, in case listeners mistook the fictional character in the song for McCartney's own father.[12]
The song is often described as a lament for lonely people[13] or a commentary on post-war life in Britain.[14][15] 

McCartney could not decide how to end the song, and Shotton finally suggested that the two lonely people come together too late as Father McKenzie conducts Eleanor Rigby's funeral. At the time, Lennon rejected the idea out of hand, but McCartney said nothing and used the idea to finish off the song, later acknowledging Shotton's help.[12] 

Lennon was quoted in 1971 as having said that he "wrote a good half of the lyrics or more"[16] and in 1980 claimed that he wrote all but the first verse,[17] but Shotton (who was Lennon's childhood friend) remembered Lennon's contribution as being "absolutely nil".[18] McCartney said that "John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80–20 to me, something like that."[19]

Here is McCartney performing Eleanor Rigby in 1984 (same year he released No More Lonely Nights, coincidentally.) Even though by then he was past the incredible beauty of his youth he's still a fine looking man who really rocks a tux.

A day in the life of pre-PM Justin Trudeau

Yes, I am still on a Justin Trudeau tear.

He's basically the perfect man. I love him so much I'm willing to watch him in really boring videos like this one from 2014, before he was elected Prime Minister.

What I love about this video is how unglamorous and nitty-gritty it is. Just a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a talented politician performing his quotidian duties, sitting in a small, harshly-lit conference room,  with his name scrawled on a whiteboard, hashing out issues and sharing stories about being the father of an infant; the origins of his new son's name (Hadrian) as well as his own (Justin - both he and his son are named after two of the good Roman emperors); talking about his father, etc etc etc.

He sure is consistent in his message of Canadian diversity. Based on what I've seen of his speeches that is by far the most frequent talking point he hits.

Even if I don't move to Montreal I have a definite urge to visit again.




Here I am in Montreal in September 2005, long before I ever heard of Justin Trudeau. Only a couple of months before I began this blog.

Asking for a friend...

Is it really necessary to be accompanied by two cats every time you use the bathroom?

Doug Henwood sides with Donald Trump

I was not at all surprised to see Doug Henwood siding with Donald Trump on Twitter. I went to his Twitter account exactly because I expected this.

Henwood never stopped presenting Hillary Clinton as a monster and meanwhile he just can't help joining Trump in pushing back against the CIA's claim that the Russians helped Trump win the election.

Apparently Henwood is too stupid to understand how the electoral college works, or is too stupid to understand that the issue was the CIA knowing that Russia hacked the RNC too, and didn't mention it, and meanwhile the FBI was pushing bullshit about Hillary Clinton.

The Far Left is almost as bad as the Right. And that's pretty horrifically bad.

Still fiddling with the logo

But then I would. And the web site looks completely different now from the first version. I like this one much better so far, it's much hipper than the first one.

Norma Jeane - new graphic direction

I decided to go in a completely different direction for my Norma Jeane logo - inspired of course by the Andy Warhol style seen in the graphic on the right-hand side of this page.

So far I like it. But I'm always capable of changing my mind...

Flowers for Mom

I finally  completed the first draft of my play FLOWERS FOR MOM, which is a re-working of a play I wrote years ago called THE BENEFICENT POWER OF REVENGE.

I had a reading of FLOWERS today and it turned out pretty well. When I was re-reading the first draft I couldn't stop laughing - like dangerous, can't-catch-your-breath laughing. But I thought maybe I was just a little punchy after staying up till all hours trying to finish the draft in time for the scheduled reading.

So I was very pleased when the actors laughed in many spots during the reading. Always a good sign.

I was originally inspired to write BENEFICENT when I was running NYCPlaywrights as a weekly writers group which had readings of members work. One of the group members, we'll call her Marcia, kept bring in all these plays about mothers with dementia. The playwright's mother had dementia and I certainly understood how it might be therapeutic for Marcia to write these plays. But since I was running the group I was at virtually every single damn meeting and so I had to hear every reading of all her mother-with-dementia plays and after awhile I was starting to get fed up. So I was inspired to write my own version - except in my version the mother had been a very nasty women, and she was brought back to her old, psychopathic personality by a new anti-dementia drug.

The play was also inspired by the science fiction story "Flowers for Algernon." I read it in seventh grade and it made a huge impression on me.

So FLOWERS FOR MOM is pretty dark, but it is hopeful at the end. Especially because the psychopathic mother dies.

A web site whose time has come: CORRUPT.AF

5 HOURS SINCE THE LATEST INSTANCE OF CORRUPTION BY DONALD TRUMP
Donald Trump continues to prove himself to be an authoritarian kleptocrat that's corrupt AF—and he's only getting started.

Yes another post about Justin Trudeau - I CAN'T HELP MYSELF!

This video is from 2012, when Trudeau fought a conservative member of the Canadian government for charity. The odds were three-to-one against Trudeau.

You can hear the various dismissive remarks about him from the commentators: they call him a "shiny pony" and refer to his yoga and ballet training, jazzercise, his rope skipping. "He seems like my 4-year-old daughter." "He's a high-school drama teacher and this is called over-acting my friend, he's a dramatic thespian."

Trudeau does not do well in the first round and you can hear the commentators licking their chops for his defeat. The more obnoxious of the two commentators suggests it is a one-round fight.

So it makes it very dramatically satisfying when Trudeau comes back in round two and beats the crap out of "Brass Knuckles" Brazeau. By the end of the last round Brazeau's nose is bleeding. As it said in the next day's National Post: Justin Trudeau scores major upset in Fight for the Cure boxing match over Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau.

Possibly my favorite part of this fight is at the end after Trudeau is declared the winner and he's being interviewed by one of the commentators about Brazeau and Trudea says: "everyone's a winner here tonight."

A speaking of Trudeau's yoga training... 

AHH YOU'RE KILLING ME JUSTIN TRUDEAU!

Just like his father... 

Fun fact - Pierre Trudeau dated a very young Kim Cattrall. Causing 60 Minutes to believe Cattrall was Justin's mother.

Garfunkel and Oates and McInnes

As I mentioned last week, hard-core alt-right misogynist Gavin McInnes made a list  (in 2014) of people he believed: "call a spade a spade no matter what the consequences" and included Steven Pinker, Ann Coulter and assorted other racists/misogynists/nutjobs. I saw the name "Garfunkel and Oates" in the list and it rang a bell, but I couldn't remember where I had heard the names.

Recently I came across those names again and now I know - they are a comedy duo I heard of first in 2009, and I had an idea they were progressive/liberal. 

I believe this is why:

I find it hard to believe that a homophobe like Gavin McInnes would enjoy their mocking of the anti-gay marriage position.

As of March 2016 Ms. Magazine thinks Garfunkel and Oates are feminists.

So why did Gavin McInnes think they were his kind of people? Apparently it's because of this video, in which G&O perform as two women who argue in song over whether they should panic about being single in their early 30s or not.

McInnes is obsessed with proving that female reproduction makes women inferior, and makes women have lives with more limited prospects for love than men. Because he's a gigantic misogynist. And since his followers are also misogynists their response to the G&O video is what you would expect. Here's one comment:

sorry. but these girls are unfunny ugly trolls. have fun going out for vegan food with them. if you’re lucky you’ll get to read some of their poetry. they are DEF. sporting full bush.

McInnes is so desperate to find women who agree with him about their own inferiority that he'll grasp at the tiniest hint of assent. But he was wrong. As usual.

But just to be sure, I tracked down G&O's Twitter account and asked them what they thought of the alt-right approval they got in Taki's Magazine. If they get back to me I will post their response here.

Mac Wellman wants to slap the audience in the face

Almost five years ago I noted that Mac Wellman likes to talk about how much most American theater sucks, but he refrained from naming names - although the interviewer of this American Theatre piece claims otherwise, but this is the first time I have ever seen it:

(Wellman) ...I never wanted to write the American kind of “play.” Some of my plays are disguised—they have five legs instead of four legs. Some of them have tusks. 

(Interviewer) Oh, I know your plays are multi-limbed! 

Careful! 

When you say you’re not interested in writing the American play—what does that mean to you? 

Ooh, I wouldn’t want to list all the plays that I hate! I mean, I’m not a big fan of Arthur Miller or even Eugene O’Neill, though I think he knew a lot about theatre. O’Neill is a great person but you put him next to Strindberg and he disappears. I don’t particularly care for Tennessee Williams. I think, really, American playwriting began to get interesting in the ’60s with Shepard and Fornes. Before that, it’s screenplays that are great. 

I actually think the great period of playwriting is now. The problem is there just aren’t enough theatres willing to do plays. As well you know. 

Aye. 

In New York everything has to make money and be corporate. So it’s hard. But it continually evolves, so I don’t know where it will be in 10 years. 

Looking back at your texts and essays, you never seemed afraid to name names, as in your disinterest in Edward Albee, O’Neill. 

I mean, I like Albee. He likes to think he’s like Beckett, but he’s not like Beckett at all. You can’t imitate Beckett but you can imitate Albee and a million people have, and they aren’t as smart or interesting as he is—it’s hard. I mean, that’s why I always try to get my students to read foreign plays. This country is very cut off, I think.

So Wellman doesn't like the work of O'Neill or Miller or Albee or Williams. And yet audiences persist in wanting to see their work, those plays which invoke unsightly human emotions.

The interview continues...

You often encouraged us to let the play reveal itself, or let the structure reveal itself. Will you talk a little bit about that in comparison to the idea of conflict and resolution? 

In American theatre, structure is just a set of clichés. Plays are not about plots. They are about moments. And moments are about epiphanies when something happens that wakes you up. But mainstream plays are about reaffirming what the audience thinks it already knows. And I think that’s a waste of time. Why do that? Why not give them a slap in the face? Actually the most interesting playwrights I know are practicing a slap-in-the-face kind of theatre, whether they know it or not. I used to have students write a play with no structure.

As Theresa Rebeck said:

I seem to be constantly confronted by theater professionals who are more or less annoyed by the prospect of structure. One time I was at a wedding reception, for crying out loud, and I got seated at a table with a really famous genius of the contemporary American theater who had directed a play I admired. He had deconstructed a well-known play but the essence of the original story was still there, and the artistry and strangeness of his interpretation was beautifully balanced within the original tale. When I told him so, he went into a drunken rage. "All that structure, all that story," he growled, pouring himself more wine. "What a nightmare." 

"I love structure," I confessed. "I think it's beautiful." 

"Yeah, the audience loved it too," he sneered.

I don't know if she was speaking to Wellman in this story, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was.

Wellman doesn't like "cliches" and "plots" because he doesn't see the point of coherent structure that invokes the human sympathetic response. Human emotions aren't progressive - humans respond to various stimuli as they always have since before the theater of ancient Greece.

Mac Wellman should have had a career in technology or mathematics or anything that doesn't involve working with people and their stupid feelings. His current profession must be incredibly frustrating for him. He uses a metaphor of physical assault because he has no empathy for the audience. Or as Donald Trump fans would say: fuck your feelings.

But he is adored in American theater anyway, because many theater writers (critics, interviewers for American Theatre, etc.) are postmodernist pseudo-intellectuals who also feel similar contempt for theater audiences and have a constant yearning for plays that "break the boundaries" as I documented five years ago here - and as this recent review of Wellman's THE OFFENDING GESTURE demonstrates:

One of the many wonderful things about Mac Wellman’s work is that there are no boundaries to where he takes us. Sure, we can be on earth sometimes, but he’d rather not stay anywhere too recognizable for very long, and he would much prefer to be in space or on a different planet (often one of his own creation). Who can blame him? Earth is pretty awful. You know what/who else is awful? Hitler.

But every now and then there will be a critic who isn't as reverential as the rest and refuses to be baffled by Wellman's bullshit, as with these two:

David Barbour in  Light and Sound America: 

Yet these elements somehow fail to add up to a satisfying evening. Wellman's dog's-eye view of the semiotics of power seems awfully thin on ideas; it dawdles, it meanders, it pauses for passages of vocalizing, and scenes seem to repeat endlessly. Even the ravishing musical scenes (composed by Alaina Ferris and beautifully sung by the Mooncats) come to seem like so many interruptions. A last-minute reference to the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq comes out of nowhere in a strange attempt at capping off the show. It is merely mystifying; the circumstances of Hitler's brief and unconsummated flirtation with that country (which was encouraged by anti-British Iraqis) was nothing like the long-running calamity of Bush's Middle East misadventure. If this is the punch line to the joke, it's little better than Noble Wolf's snapper about Goering.

Christopher Kompanek in the Village Voice:

A third pooch, a bulldog named Wuffles who belongs to Winston Churchill, remains offstage (and is solely an invention of the playwright). He's used as a way to introduce Churchill's creation of Iraq (combining the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds — or, in doggyspeak, "Sunfish, Shits, and Turds"). This sort of wordplay appears frequently and amounts more to a source of annoyance than humor. Likewise, Layla Khoshnoudi plays Hitler (named Noble Wolf, the English translation of Adolf) with a farcical abandon, but the material is too opaque for any real levity to land...

...Wellman writes with a unique blend of poetry, puns, and non sequiturs that confound more than they illuminate and never fail to feel written. "I do the gesture as it gives me a please, a pleasure in the right front foot department," is one of Jackie's most straightforward lines, and it could easily have been lopped in half. While the title gesture is repeated throughout and mentioned ad nauseam, the actual offense is that it never rises to more than a background din. The final moments attempt to spell out a theme that should have been gradually building throughout, and only in the last line does Wellman finally pose a question worth asking.

Wellman and other postmodernists have their own cliches - the obsessive need to play with form and word salad at the expense of content, and macho bad-boy posturing, imagining violence upon the audience. Basically the angry young men of the theater, except the men haven't been young since the 20th century.

But you'll never get them to believe they are rehashing the same old shit - they will go to their graves believing they are the last word in daring, novel rebellion.

More and more Mac Wellman sounds like the Darren Nichols character from Slings and Arrows.

NORMA JEANE & Andy Warhol

I had to change the performance dates of my NORMA JEANE show to the end of February so my web site for the show is completely out of date - but now that I know who my actors and stage manager are I can get in there and start redesigning - plus I am not that crazy about the first design now anyway and want to re-work it.

Coincidentally the folks at Artsy.net have asked that I include a link to the Andy Warhol section of their site, which I don't mind doing because I'm a fan of Warhol and also because Warhol's art includes images of Marilyn Monroe. So I asked them if I could post this image along with the link to their site and they granted permission.

The actual link/image is on the right-hand banner of this blog.

And in honor of Andy Warhol, here is a song that Lou Reed wrote for him.

Make Love Not Porn - your business model doesn't work

Dammit, Cindy Gallop's heart is in the right place and her desire to change the views of society toward women her age (and I'm only a little younger than her) is admirable.

I just wished her "Make Love Not Porn" concept worked as a business. The fact that she is now attempting to crowd-fund it shows it is not working as an actual business, and it is now more of a conceptual art project. The crowd-funding page doesn't present anything new so presumably she just wants to keep on doing the same thing - presenting videos of people who are not professional porn actors having sex ("making love") alone or with others.

It cannot work as a business because the videos on offer on her MLNP site - well first off, they aren't immediately available as all other porn on the Internet is. For instance, I could enter "romantic couple making love" or "amateur porn" into any search engine and get a whole bunch of links to videos that I can watch immediately.

Gallop's site requires you to join (free but still a hassle) just to see some previews, and then you have to pay to watch an entire video. Why would you do that when you could see similar content immediately and for free? Except that the free online videos you can access randomly usually feature much better looking people - especially the men.

I'm not saying there are no people in the world who prefer watching unattractive people over attractive people having sex. But I am saying there are not enough of them to make money on  it.

And after a review of the MLNP site today, I see it still has the same old problem that I talked about over a year ago in response to a comment made by, I think, Cindy Gallop herself, on this blog:

The problem, dear Cindy, is the collision between your business model and the Patriarchy. The people who volunteer to make these videos live in a world where women spend hours every day on hair, makeup and cute outfits, plus yoga and/or the gym, while most straight men think they can just shower and shave (or more likely these days, not even shave) and then throw on some baggy t-shirt and jeans they found on the floor, along with ugly sneakers. And if they have a beer belly, well so what? They dress for comfort, not to look good for other people. 

So the people making your videos look exactly like you would expect - the women look good while the men are, at best, blah. That's male privilege and you aren't going to escape it with your average jane and joe volunteers. You are going to get a reflection of the same exact values that drive commercial porn in the first place - it's all about the male gaze. Only in a culture that goes against that tradition, where men are meant to be looked at too, will you have truly attractive men - as in the gay porn world.

You can get an idea of the male gaze problem I'm talking about on the Makelovenotporn Youtube channel.  (None of these videos on Youtube feature any sex, they just show you the people who have the sex in the videos behind the Make Love Not Porn paywall.)

The first video is a perfect example of what I mean about men not making an effort to look good. It shows a heterosexual couple and the woman has obviously had her hair, makeup and nails done recently, and the man looks like he just rolled out of bed and his hair is a big graying mess.

This video has a pretty attractive man except that he is wearing that horrible style too many men have adopted lately, the high-top fade combined with the big gross beard. It's like men are trying to look as ugly as possible these days with this style. The best part of typing "romantic couple making love" into a search engine and seeing the random pornos that pop up is that none of the men in those videos have beards, or high-top fades. 

And the prospect of having sex with someone wearing a cheesy mustache like the one on this man is much worse to me than sex while suffering from a cold sore.

Like most women, I could go out and have sex with unattractive men any time I want, so why would I watch a video featuring unattractive men having sex? I'm only interested in seeing beautiful men having sex. But if Gallop's crowd-funded version of Make Love Not Porn is going to focus on beautiful men, this is not mentioned anywhere on the ifundwomen page she has set up. And I doubt they would consider it even as a special category within the MLNP universe since Gallop apparently doesn't see aesthetics as a serious consideration. 

In case you're wondering what I would watch, Cindy Gallop - maybe if you make your $500K goal you'll consider spending some of it on "making love" videos for people like me: get a male porn actor who looks like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and create a series of videos that show the life of a smoking hot Canadian Prime Minister and all the sex he has with the focus on his face and body during the sex. But make the PM single, it would ruin it for me if the character was cheating on a wife. He could have a hot but secret affair with the sister of his leading political rival, for example. Or maybe an off-again, on-again relationship with a Toronto reporter. Or a forbidden attraction for a hot but married leader of an Indigenous Peoples organization. Or ALL THREE. Stuff like that. But it would take much more time and effort than just asking random unattractive people to upload videos onto your site. But as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

OMG SOMBODY CLONE THIS MAN.

My other French teacher Justin Trudeau

I believe Trudeau is cursing in French Canadian here.

Yes I enjoy looking at him, of course but another good thing about watching videos of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is that he often speaks in French and sometimes he'll say a phrase in French and then repeat it in English, or vice-versa which is very handy.

I really love Justin Trudeau and it isn't just for his manly hotness combined with his proud feminism - although what the hell is not to like there???

No it's also because he is always trying to do the right thing. He's super-conscious and for the most part carries it off with a fair amount of grace and not too much self-consciousness. And he almost doesn't have to -  he's pretty much Canadian royalty, as the son of former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. The fact that he tries so hard to do the right thing makes him so admirable.

Another nice thing is that he's only been PM for a year, and so there are lots of videos from earlier in his political career and even before he went into politics, when he has a Justin from the Hood vibe. Also his hair tended to be longer in the old days and mon dieu, je l'adore!

And in this video I found, shot 10 years ago, see screen cap above - bonus! - he appears to be uttering a French Canadian curse. One of the hysterical things about Quebecois French is that they have an entire system of curse words that are based not on your standard shit-fuck-bitch trilogy beloved of most languages, but instead on ecclesiastic paraphernalia! Hence the "box of baptisms" above. I should mention that I couldn't understand him saying that in French, I only caught it because I had the English captions going - and luckily I had already read about the unique approach to swearing of the French Canadians previously and didn't just assume the caption translator was wonky. I mean WTF is a box of baptisms?

As this article from the Washington Post in 2006 says:

"Oh, tabernacle!" The man swore in French as a car splashed through a puddle, sending water onto his pants. He could never be quoted in the papers here (Montreal). It is too profane. 

So are other angry oaths that sound innocuous in English: chalice, host, baptism. In French-speaking Quebec, swearing sounds like an inventory being taken at a church.
English-speaking Canadians use profanities that would be well understood in the United States, many of them scatological or sexual terms. But the Quebecois prefer to turn to religion when they are mad. They adopt commonplace Catholic terms -- and often creative permutations of them -- for swearing. 

In doing so, their oaths speak volumes about the history of this French province. 

"When you get mad, you look for words that attack what represses you," said Louise Lamarre, a Montreal cinematographer who must tread lightly around the language, depending on whether her films are in French or English. "In America, you are so Puritan that the swearing is mostly about sex. Here, since we were repressed so long by the church, people use religious terms." 

And the words that are shocking in English -- including the slang for intercourse -- are so mild in Quebecois French they appear routinely in the media. But not church terms.
"You swear about things that are taboo," said André Lapierre, a professor of linguistics at the University of Ottawa. In the United States, "it is not appropriate to talk about sex or scatological subjects, so that is what you use in your curse words. The f-word is a perfect example. 

"In Canadian French, you have none of the sexual aspects. So what do you replace it with? You replace it with religion. If you are going to use a taboo word, it would be anything related to the cult, to Christ, the Communion wafer, Jesus Christ, vestments, and elements of the altar like tabernacle. There's quite a few of them."

How much does the alt-right love Steven Pinker?

As I noted yesterday, Steven Pinker is a friendly colleague of alt-right favorite Razib Khan and uses the work of alt-right leader Steve Sailer in his own work. But what of the rest of the alt-right - those who are so extreme that Pinker won't even re-tweet or link their work?

They love him so much, and refer to his work all the time in order to bolster their own white nationalism.

Let us look inside the basket of white nationalist deplorables, shall we? Breitbart is ground zero of the alt-right, and their guide to the alt-right is useful.

STORMFRONT

The gang at Stormfront likes to reference Steven Pinker as "LionAxe" does here:

If you want a milder, more easy-to-show to an anti-racist youth from a popular mainstream authority on human nature, one that not even the garden variety lefties will dismiss as "racist" (don't we all hate it when they do that and shut down), you should show them this excerpt from Steven Pinker's (professor in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, and a canadian jew) book 'The Blank Slate: Modern Denial of Human Nature':

Quote:

Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are purely social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeonholes such as "colored," "Hispanic," "Asian/Pacific Islander," and the one-drop rule for being "black," it is an overstatement when it comes to human differences in general. The biological anthropologist Vincent Sarich points out that a race is just a very large and partly inbred family. Some racial distinctions thus may have a degree of biological reality, even though they are not exact boundaries between fixed categories. Humans, having recently evolved from a single founder population, are all related, but Europeans, having mostly bred with other Europeans for millennia, are on average more closely related to other Europeans than they are to Africans or Asians, and vice versa. Because oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges have prevented people from choosing mates at random in the past, the large inbred families we call races are still discernible, each with a somewhat different distribution of gene frequencies.

JACK DONOVAN

Identified as a "gay masculinist" by Breitbart's guide to the alt-right, Jack Donavan has this to say about Pinker 

During the open bar, a reporter from the online women’s magazine Salon asked to speak with me. She asked me whether or not I thought more women should be involved with “the movement.” Since you never know how they are going to use your words, I figured I’d jot down my recollection of what I said to her, for the record.
I said I thought it was perfectly natural for men to be at the forefront of a political movement, and mentioned that Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate had referenced a list of human universals. Basically, the anthropological data from all known human societies shows that men are universally the primary political movers.

TAKI'S MAGAZINE

Used to be edited by the infamous Richard Spencer of Nazis for Trump fame. Most of the glowing praise for Pinker is from alt-right poster boy Steve Sailer, but Gavin McInnes is also feeling the love for Pinker. McInnes wrote for VDARE too and is considered affectionately a "political punk" by Bretibart. But although he is certainly racist, McInnes' true beat is misogyny and there is much for misogynists to love about Steven Pinker - McInnes gives him a shout-out along with many other famous alt-righters. 

Deep down, liberals know they are full of shit. They believe pretending to believe all this crap is a means to an end and we’ll all be better off when they run our lives. They’ll lament it on their deathbeds but there won’t be anyone there because they never had kids. History will forget these fools and I don’t give a shit about them. I’m inspired by the people who plow through this garbage and call a spade a spade no matter what the consequences. I’m talking about brave souls such as Ezra Levant, Anthony Cumia, Ann Coulter, Greg Gutfeld, Kathy Shaidle, Bill Whittle, Jared Taylor, Dana Loesch, A.J. Delgado, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Charles C. Johnson, Mary Katharine Ham, James O’Keefe, John Bolton, Sean Hannity, Phelim McAleer, K.T. McFarland, Mark Steyn, Steve Sailer, Jon Derbyshire, Steven Pinker, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, Jonah Goldberg, John Stossel, Doug Stanhope, Jim Goad, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Katie Pavlich, Charles Krauthammer, Kevin D. Williamson, and Garfunkel and Oates. These people don’t lie to win an argument. They speak uncomfortable truths because that’s the right thing to do. They’re the ones who will be remembered because, as Horace Greeley put it, “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings.

Yep, there is much love between Steven Pinker and the alt-right and for good reason - they agree on the essential, inferior natures of non-whites and women.

Steven Pinker's ongoing bromance with the alt-right

Welcome Tweeter people. More of my thoughts on Pinker (and evidence of his long-term right-wing beliefs) here.

Link: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/537251361696403456

I have long wondered why there is no mainstream media interest in the connection between Steven Pinker, a well-known writer of books about science, history, etc for a general audience and Razib Khan, identified by no less than Breitbart as an intellectual of the alt-right movement.

Khan denied a connection to the alt-right, but the White Nationalists know a good source for biology-based justifications for white supremacy when they read it.

Khan's long been a big fan of the term "human biodiversity" which is the term racists use to signal the intellectual inferiority of those people who are directly descended from Africans compared to those descended from Africans who migrated to Europe and/or Asia and/or the Americas. "Human biodiversity" has a nice science-y sounding ring to it.

Steven Pinker and other proponents of evolutionary psychology have pioneered the standard racist/evolutionary psychologist response to critics of biological essentialism. First, claim the critic is anti-science. If the critic is a scientist, claim they can't be trusted because they have liberal political beliefs. The alt-right knows a good political tactic when they see it.

Here is Pinker in 2006 showing Razib Khan how it's done on Khan's old, highly racist blog GXPN - only available through the Wayback Machine:

It's hard to say. Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities. On the other hand there was a lot of support for Summers, which may not have come out a decade ago, not least among Harvard undergraduates (one of them gave me a black-on-red t-shirt with a faux-Che portrait of Larry emblazoned with "Viva El Presidente Summers.") I've found that by and large today's generation of students--black and white, women and men--are far less phobic of biology, and are baffled that anyone could find empirical hypotheses to be too dangerous to study.

Here is Jerry Coyne, a self-confessed fanboy of Pinker as quoted by PZ Myers on his Pharyngula blog, continuing the tradition in 2013:

And then we get the ideology-bashing again.

(Coyne quote) Second, it’s pretty clear that the opposition to evolutionary psychology from these quarters is ideologically rather than scientifically motivated. One gets the feeling that research on gender differences shouldn’t be done at all because it’s either designed to repress women, motivated by the desire to do that, or has the likely outcome of promoting discrimination. Well, sexist scientists may try to do that, but I haven’t seen much of that since the Seventies. And gender differences are fascinating. There’s a reason, for instance, why human males are larger and hairier than females, and have more testosterone. Are we supposed to say “You can’t work on that—could have bad repercussions!” Sure, scientific results can always be misused, but I don’t see that as a reason to put up roadblocks against scientific research. After all, what field is more misused and misquoted than evolutionary biology? I am a frequent recipient of emails from Jews trying to convince me to reject evolution because Darwin ultimately caused the Holocaust.

Please. Have I ever said that we shouldn’t study gender or racial differences? No. We know there are going to be differences. The catch is that they have to be studied very, very well, with rigor and careful analysis, because they are socially loaded and because science has a deeply deplorable history of using poor methods to reach bad conclusions that are used as ideological props for the status quo. I’m not putting up roadblocks against scientific research; I would like to put up roadblocks to sloppy, lazy ideological nonsense touted as scientific research. I should think every scientist would want that.

< end Pharyngula quote>

Pinker is of course a gigantic hypocrite since while he claims scientist critics of EP are motivated by politics he himself is in a bromance with Razib Khan who is paid to be a political operative.

More love from Pinker to Khan on Twitter.

Link: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/551419372518928384

Link: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/750440963428999168

Khan returns the favor.

Link: https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/564657995083030528

But Pinker doesn't only love Razib Khan. He even uses the work of Steve Sailer, who is quite proud of his racism - Sailer is such a racist that notoriously too-racist-for-Twitter alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos thought he coined the term "human biodiversity."

As noted by Malcolm Gladwell:

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

Steve Sailer is another "intellectual" of the alt-right according to Breitbart:

Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.

UPDATE - apparently Razib Khan is leaving Unz. He wrote yesterday:

Until further notice this is my last post as a blogger at Unz Review. Just as when I left Discover, this shouldn’t impact regular readers very much in terms of substance and content.

But he doesn't explain why he's leaving. He did tweet:

This is probably the same journalist who spoke to me today. More on that later.

Monsieur Guignol est un mal douchebag a tout le monde

Monsieur Guignol, le détestable petit marionnette homme
en Action

At the end of every episode of French in Action is a brief scene from a puppet show - a puppet show grand Guignol - and the French apparently think Grand Guignol is OK for children.

There's a nasty little man-puppet in almost every scene and he is usually accompanied by his baton - a stick he uses to beat everybody with, including the two puppets portraying the stars of the French in Action romantic comedy, Mireille and Robert. In this screen cap he's beating a third puppet. Damn he's a creep.

According to Wiki:

Guignol is the main character in a French puppet show which has come to bear his name. It represents the workers in the silk industry of France, Europe.
Although often thought of as children's entertainment, Guignol's sharp wit and linguistic verve have always been appreciated by adults as well, as shown by the motto of a prominent Lyon troupe: "Guignol amuses children… and witty adults".

I translated the title of this blog post for you: "Mr. Guignol is a bad showerbag to everyone." The word "douchebag" loses something in the translation.