Snark vs. Smarm

Really great piece at Gawker by Tom Scocca, On Smarm which I found via my FB friend Roy Adroso.

I love that it gets at what the pleas for niceness are really about - people at the top of the hierarchy striking back at those beneath them, as revealed by certain ways the Very Serious People express themselves. I knew I loved this article when it called out Niall Ferguson:

The plutocrats are haunted, as all smarmers are haunted, by the lack of respect. Nothing is stopping anyone—any nobody—from going on a blog or on Twitter and expressing their opinion of you, no matter who you think you are. New media and social media have an immense and cruel leveling power, for people accustomed to old systems of status and prestige. On Twitter, the only answer to "Do you know who I am?" is "One more person with 140 characters to use." 

So the smarmers deplore the coarseness of the tone, or try to invoke the old credentials, or both. Niall Ferguson, the prizewinning Harvard historian now practicing the craft of a tendentious magazine hack, came unhinged on his blog after people pointed out his magazine work had been done sloppily and dishonestly:

What exactly are his credentials? 35,550 tweets? How does he essentially differ from the cranks who, before the Internet, had to vent their spleen by writing letters in green ink? 

(Elsewhere in the same post, he wrote that his critics had breached their duty to "exchange ideas in a humble and respectful manner.") 

 I blogged about Ferguson in October, how Krugman went after Ferguson for his rank-pulling. And as the Scocca article points out, the plutocratic smarmers are acutely aware of the power differentials:

The critics—the snarkers—are haters, smarm says. The snarkers are driven by "their resentment," Denby writes. Their resentment. ("It's Personal," his subtitle says.) They are "pipsqueaks" and "brats." Young. Malcolm Gladwell, another target for the haters, has a conversion narrative interchangeable with Eggers', if more quizzical in tone:

I am everything I once despised. When I was 25, I used to write these incredibly snotty, hostile articles attacking big-name, nonfiction journalists. Now I read them and I'm like, "Oh my God, they're doing a me on me!"

Above (or beneath) it all, they are little. Eggers writes of his former critical self, "I was a complete, weaselly little prick." He asks: "What kind of small-hearted person wants an artist to adhere to a set of rules, to stay forever within a narrow envelope which we've created for them?" He answers, and answers, and answers: "the lazy and small ... small and embittered ... narrow-hearted ... the tiny voices of tiny people."

The Very Serious People (a favorite term of Krugman's) are not especially subtle about their disdain for people who haven't been as blessed in their literary endeavors by the Invisible Hand of the Market as they have been. My first encounter with a high-status smarmer was when Daphne Merkin responded to something I said about her on this blog, way back in 2006. Please note that what she is responding to is me, an unpaid blogger, questioning why she gets paid to write, since what she was paid to write was essentially a long whine about how obnoxious men are on online dating sites. There are a whole bunch of entire, unpaid websites devoted to the topic.

But I was questioning the wisdom of the Invisible Hand of the Market, and Merkin was certain that she had already received its blessing and I hadn't and so how dare I criticize her?

This is the whiney and unfairly remunerated Daphne Merkin reporting in, having stumbled on your blog late this night instead of sleeping or finishing reading D.H. Lawrence's THE RAINBOW. Aside from insulting me, you sound like a generally unreflective and overly self-regarding person. >From glancing quickly at your bio, I gather your own "feminist" credentials are less than wonderful, since you seem to have abandoned one early putative interest (illustrating) for another ( playacting) on the basis of meeting a "beautiful young man." Your blog makes me shudder on behalf of bloggerdom, seething as it is with envy and bravado and received wisdom. I hope your plays are better than this.

Now she doesn't actually say "do you know who I am?" because clearly I do, but she had to make sure I was aware of her intellectual stature via her reading selection, which she just happens to casually mention.

Merkin isn't only a literary plutocrat, her family comes from money and was permitted by the NYTimes to write an op-ed piece defending her brother, a business associate of Bernie Madoff.

As all those blessed by the Invisible Hand like to believe, Merkin imagines I'm motivated by envy. Dave Eggers demonstrates how it works:

The most significant explicator of the niceness rule—the loudest Thumper of all, the true prophetic voice of anti-negativity—is neither the cartoon rabbit nor the publicists' group nor Julavits, nor even David Denby. It is The Believer's founder and impresario, Dave Eggers. If there is a defining document of contemporary literary smarm, it is an interview Eggers did via email with the Harvard Advocate in 2000, in which a college student had the poor manners to ask the literary celebrity about "selling out." 

In reply to the question, Eggers told the Advocate that yes, he was what people call a sellout, that he had been paid $12,000 for a single magazine article, that he had taken the chance to hang out with Puffy, and that he had said yes to all these opportunities because "No is for pussies." His response
builds to a frenzied peroration:

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.

Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity. Eggers used to be a critic, but he has grown out of childish things. Eggers has done the work—the book publishing, the Hollywood deal-making—that makes his opinions (unlike those of his audience) earned and valid opinions. 

It is no accident that he is addressing undergraduates here; he tells the Advocate that before he sent back his reply to its questions, he had already delivered a version of the text as a speech at Yale. He is explicitly performing, for an audience of his inferiors. ("The rant is directed to myself, age 20, as much as it is to you, so remember that if you ever want to take much offense.") 

It is also no accident that Eggers is full of shit. He is so passionate, and his passion has such rhetorical momentum, that it is almost possible to overlook the fact that the literal proposition he's putting forward, in the name of large-heartedness and honesty, is bogus and insulting. Do not dismiss ... a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron's Unstoppable? Movie criticism, Eggers is saying, should be reserved for those wise and discerning souls who have access to a few tens of millions of dollars of entertainment-industry capital. One or two hundred million, if you wish to have an opinion about the works of Michael Bay. 

And now here is Dave Eggers 13 years later, talking to the New York Times about his new novel, The Circle, a dystopian warning about the toxic effects
of social media and the sinister companies that produce it:

I've never visited any tech campus, and I don't know anything in particular about how any given company is run. I really didn't want to.

Someone has come a long way from "do not dismiss a book until you have written one." But Eggers was never laying down rules for himself. He was laying down rules for other people.

The other people of course being the little people. Snarkers make Dave Eggers as well as Daphne Merkin shudder on behalf of bloggerdom.

More on smarm from Scocca:

People want to be uplifted, and through social media people want to demonstrate to other people that they are the kind of people who appreciate being uplifted. Negativity is a bad market niche, according to no less a figure than Malcolm Gladwell—a known expert, in theory and practice, on the marketing power of popularity:

[T]here's very little negative stuff you can put in a book or an article before you turn most of your audience away. Negative stuff is interesting the first time, but you'll never re-read a negative article. You'll re-read a positive one. Part of the reason that my books have had a long shelf life is that they're optimistic, and optimism permits that kind of longevity.

One curious fact about this long view is that it's quite untrue. I can't recall ever, unless compelled by duty, rereading a Malcolm Gladwell article. What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon, and Dorothy Parker on most things—to say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on racism, or David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise. This belief that oblivion awaits the naysayers and the snarkers shouldn't survive a glance at the bookshelf.

Although I was favorably disposed towards Gladwell because of his calling out Steven Pinker for his racist intellectual bedfellow Steve Sailor, when I saw this New Yorker Festival talk he gave on Pioneers, Tokens and Pariahs I was forced to conclude that Gladwell feels he can slap together any shaky premise on the morning of a talk and expect it to be taken seriously.

Although if you want to see worst ratio of privilege to content ever, check out Delia Ephron's rant against Citi Bikes.

New Yorker writers appear to hold onto their jobs until death, so Gladwell is secure and needn't respond to criticisms with angry jabs. But for those like Daphne Merkin and Niall Ferguson, the changing of the old rules of prestige is upsetting. As Scocca notes:

The old systems of prestige—the literary inner circles, the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadership—are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no one has a career. 

Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but the appearance of authority is usually enough to get by with. Without that protection, to hold an opinion is to feel bare and alone, one voice among a cacophony of millions. 

The prophetic Mary Tyler Moore show

At 11:55 of this video Georgette says:

I don't care what anybody says, I think we look like the top of a gay wedding cake.

The best thing ever said on TV

I cannot believe Jon Stewart has done it again - he's topped himself!

I didn't know that Stuart Varney was a smug, contemptible, self-adoring piece of shit, but I do now - and I got to see Stewart give him the best smack-down ever.

"Pope doesn't come over to where you work and slap Jamie Dimon's dick out of your mouth."

He has reached the pinnacle of his career.

The only thing preventing this from being huge is that too many people are so ignorant they don't know who Jamie Dimon is, and so don't understand why Stewart said this about a guy who is a financial commentator.

There used to be a Jon Stewart show, back when he was less successful - here is the last episode. But ye gods, he was young and hot. 

And that Newt Gingrich joke is still relevant.

And David Letterman is at his charming supportive big brother best here.

 

Fun facts from the NYTimes

 I came upon this NYTimes article accidentally and I am glad I did - I learned some fascinating facts:

• Marilyn Monroe loved Abraham Lincoln: 

She was obsessed with Lincoln. She thought of him as her father. And she always kept a copy of Carl Sandburg’s biography and a photograph of Lincoln in her bedroom.

• Lincoln told Matthew Brady that the Cooper Union portrait made him president.

• Barack Obama loves Lincoln:

KEYA MORGAN: He wrote a full article about my photo for Time magazine, and the editors got the date wrong.
ERROL MORRIS: You mean O-118?
KEYA MORGAN: Yes. I told him that the date was the 5th of February. And later on, one of the publishers of Time magazine put “April 10, 1865” under the photograph.
ERROL MORRIS: But Obama liked the photograph?
KEYA MORGAN: Obama said it was his favorite photo of all time. He wrote a whole article about it. I didn’t know who Barack Obama was. I thought he had a funny name. I Googled him and found out he was a senator. I thought, “Wow! That’s nice. Here is a senator who is African-American.” I thought, “That’s very unusual.” He was very polite and very nice.

• Barack Obama is a great writer. Well, I kind of knew that. But I mean a great writer.

The article by Barack Obama appeared in the July 4, 2005, edition of Time magazine was entitled “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes.” The article is accompanied by O-118 with the crack. Obama wrote:

My favorite portrait of Lincoln comes from the end of his life. In it, Lincoln’s face is as finely lined as a pressed flower. He appears frail, almost broken; his eyes, averted from the camera’s lens, seem to contain a heartbreaking melancholy, as if he sees before him what the nation had so recently endured. It would be a sorrowful picture except for the fact that Lincoln’s mouth is turned ever so slightly into a smile. The smile doesn’t negate the sorrow. But it alters tragedy into grace. It’s as if this rough-faced, aging man has cast his gaze toward eternity.

The motherlode of Congressional archives

I'm 3/4 through my play DARK MARKET about the 2008 financial meltdown, and finally dug up the relevant congressional records.

Here is the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000

• The House of Representatives version:  H.R.5660 - Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000
• And the Senate version.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) is United States federal legislation that officially ensured modernized regulation[1] [2]of financial products known as over-the-counter derivatives. It was signed into law on December 21, 2000 by President Bill Clinton. It clarified the law so that most over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions between “sophisticated parties” would not be regulated as “futures” under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 (CEA) or as “securities” under the federal securities laws. Instead, the major dealers of those products (banks and securities firms) would continue to have their dealings in OTC derivatives supervised by their federal regulators under general “safety and soundness” standards. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) desire to have “Functional regulation” of the market was also rejected. Instead, the CFTC would continue to do “entity-based supervision of OTC derivatives dealers.” [3] These derivatives, including the credit default swap, are a few of the many causes of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent 2008–2012 global recession.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000

But the real smoking gun is the Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets

and the Commodity Exchange Act - Report of The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. Here is where Greenspan and friends cut off all opportunities to regulate OTC derivatives:

The elimination of impediments in current law to the clearing of OTC derivatives, together with a requirement that any clearing system for OTC derivatives be regulated by the CFTC, another federal regulator, or a foreign financial regulator that satisfies appropriate standards;

How Objectivists test things

It's always fun to argue with Objectivists over Atlas Shrugged, which I have been doing for the past couple of weeks. They actually believe that the characters in the novel are some kind of reflection of reality, and evidence that we should do things like drop testing standards for industrial equipment, and any other kind of regulation because the market will separate the good guys from the bad guys.

The key to this is that Objectivists are OK if a few people die along the way - that's how we determine which companies are the bad guys - they kill people, and so they should, theoretically, go out of business.

One Objectivist recently claimed that the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart should be allowed to collude with Hank Rearden in order to test Dagny's train, and Hank's magical metal by driving a train full of people over the bridge, and then by driving the train at a hundred miles an hour through residential districts.

Firstly, this highlights the complete incoherence of the world Rand invented for the novel - the US government appears to be incapable of enforcing industrial testing standards, which is why Hank/Dagny (Hangny? Dank?) have the option to testing their bridge any damn way they want - they could load the train up with babies if they felt like it for the test trip over the bridge - and yet somehow the government is able to enforce zoning laws when it comes to train speeds - which is why:

He stood on the platform, surrounded by Taggart executives, division heads, civic leaders and the various local officials who had been outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour.

This recent New York train crash demonstrates the problem with running trains at high speed.

The Objectivists make a big deal about how they are against the initiation of force. I've yet to find one who acknowledges the existence of the problematic "threatened" passage - but Randians like to re-write Rand's work to suit themselves.

Anyway, so this Objectivist I'm arguing with says that everybody trusts Dagny because she has a reputation for excellence like Steve Jobs. Firstly, nobody knows how Dagny's reputation got around since in the world of Atlas Shrugged all the newspapers (which appear to be for-profit and untroubled by the government in any way) have colluded for the past five years around the idea that they would no longer report facts, out of an apparent case of rampaging post-modernism.

Secondly, this Objectivist is apparently unaware of how Steve Jobs really operated:

At the time of the announcement, only 100 iPhones existed, with some of those featuring significant quality issues like scuff marks and gaps between the screen and the plastic edge. The software, too, was full of bugs, leading the team to set up multiple iPhones to overcome memory issues and restarts. Because of the phone’s penchant for crashing, it was programmed to display a full five-bar connection at all times.

Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. "If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that," Grignon says. "So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars."

The difference of course between Steve Jobs and a real-life Dagny Taggart (in Atlas Shrugged the heroes are basically infallible so of course nothing goes wrong with the bridge and train) is that unlike a bridge or train, if the iPhone radio crashes, nobody dies.

Such delusions fed by the wack-jobbery of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged!

Ayn Rand's eye tic

I've speculated that Ayn Rand might have been on the autism spectrum due to both personal traits of hers which seem to align with those said to indicate autism, as well as the odd natures of her heroes in Atlas Shrugged, and the bizarre way that Rand portrays "collectivists" - as jealous sadists who don't really believe what they say they believe - which appears to have nothing at all to do with Communism or any other socio-political system that has ever existed on planet Earth.

I recently noticed that when Rand appeared on television, she seems to have an ocular tick - her eyes often flick off-center, especially to the left for no apparent reason. I recommend you watch these with the sound off - if not you may end up, like me, wanting to throttle her for being so incredibly obtuse.

Woodwinds vs. Harps

My favorite woodwind piece is an odd one - it's sort of the Celtic Bolero - the Belfast Harp Orchestra and the The Chieftans playing MacAllistrum's March. It starts off with percussion and harp and gradually adds instruments while reiterating the melody, but what really makes it work for me are the woodwinds. The first time I can really discern one - I assume it's an Irish flute - happens at 00:58. Then other woodwinds pile on and the musicians sound like they're really wailing to make themselves heard over the harps. And then you can hear what might be a trilling pennywhistle just make it over the top into audibility at 1:30. By 1:35 you can hear them struggle to play and breathe at the same time, and by 1:55, the flutist is like "forget this, I am only hitting the highest notes."

And that's why it's great.

I like this song so much I'm thinking of writing a theme and variations piece for it.

Please ignore the "Souvenirs of the Celtic Lands" images used in this video. I hate that leprechaun crap.

Pernicious post-modernism

My music theory teach had us listen to some woodwind music prior to attempting to orchestrate woodwind music. He had us listen to the woodwind pieces in Luciano Berio's Sequenzas. Straight-up postmodernism and supports my theory on post-modernism - it's true of all the arts, but especially so in music: post-modernist music is nothing more than a hired companion of the wealthy jerking off before an audience. You may remember that the jerking off occurred before an audience, you may remember how long it took to do the jerking off, you may remember the size and color of the instrument being jerked off, but everything else about the performance is unremarkable and unmemorable.

Crude, but it must be said. Berio's clarinet piece below is indistinguishable from anybody just trying out a bunch of sounds.

The difference of course is that Berio expects critical acclaim for it, on top of being paid for it. And if audiences won't pay for it, well there are always some members of the upper class with plenty of spare change and a desire to be hailed as a brave and formidable intellectual who isn't afraid to present a guy jerking off as art.

More about Granpa Walton

Several years ago I blogged about Will Geer - I was fascinated that not only was he the father of actor Ellen Geer (who played "Sunshine Dore" in the movie "Harold and Maude." If you've seen that movie, I don't have to remind you who Sunshine Dore is.) I also found it very amusing that Grandpa Walton was once a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Somehow I missed the part where he was also bisexual and had an affair with Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society and one of the leaders of the gay rights movement.

All that and Theatricum Botanicum too - what a full and varied life he led.

80 Washington Square East - the Mizer show

And then after I see the Frick show I'm heading over to 80 Washington Square East to see the Bob Mizer show. Mizer took lots of photos of sexy men in the 1950s for "physique" magazines. He took many beautiful photos of Joe D'allesandro. I'm hoping there will be at least a few Little Joe pix in this show.

An awesome Frick'n show

Girl With a Pearl Earring by Vermeer

I am so going to the Frick ASAP. I love the work of Vermeer. Only Velasquez and the drawings of Ingres present subjects which are, thanks to amazing draftsmanship, so vividly alive.

...the Frick Collection’s own three splendid Vermeers and three Rembrandts joined briefly by 15 works on loan from one of the world’s best Dutch collections, the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, including one of the most famous faces in Western art, “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”

The painting on the right is Las Meninas by Velasquez. You can click on it to get a better look at the details.

More financial regulator humor

Ah yes, the go-to currency for money launderers, Bitcoin.

I wasn’t trying to manipulate an underground economy. I was just doing my job as a blogger for the website Gawker when I broke the story of the online underground illegal drug market Silk Road, on which bitcoin was the only accepted currency because of its relative anonymity. The article went viral and introduced hundreds of thousands to bitcoin. 

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, helped, too. During a news conference a couple of days after my article was published, he called bitcoin “an online form of money laundering.” I suppose a lot of people thought that sounded pretty cool. The price of bitcoin surged to $14.

The Godot pronunciation controversy

Really I just wanted an excuse to post this awesome graphic.
Letters to the NYTimes on the Godot issue

The quintessential Ayn Rand

After having read three biographies, two memoirs and one sycophants' web site about Ayn Rand, the most quintessential description of Ayn Rand comes from Barbara Branden's biography The Passion of Ayn Rand:

A highly intelligent young woman of twenty, a dancer and a member of the "junior collective," had personal problems in her romantic relationship with a friend of Ayn's. Ayn, Frank (O'Conner, Rand's husband), her lover, and I were present when Nathaniel (Branden) called her in for a discussion of her psychology. Such evenings were becoming a commonplace in Ayn's dealings. The evidence was presented, the diagnosis of social metaphysician was made. 

In a paper she later wrote in an attempt to organize her thoughts, the young woman said - in an echo of others who felt as she did - 

"I have not been this unhappy since I was a kid, when I used to look out the window and calm down by watching the stars. But then I had the promise of a brilliant, beautiful future. Now I have the echo of an empty, futile past... Everything is gone. Everything... I began to see the pattern as Nathan went thorugh example after example of what I had done. It was when he said 'and your self-esteem is tied to what other people think of you,' that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what was being said to me - the worst degradation, the worst muck. I had betrayed everything that has ever meant anything to me... He said I could work to correct it and become a proper human being, or be like the people I hate for the rest of my life... I'm afraid to care about anything, because I'm afraid I'll get all mixed up again. I have to find out if it's safe to care about something again. I don't know any longer what I want in a career, in anythin g- it doesn't seem to matter, and I'm afraid of the day when it is going to matter... Yet I will always remember the day I met Ayn as one of the happiest days of my life..."

That evening, Ayn exhibited a lack of human empathy that was astonishing. As Nathaniel, who conducted the conversation - it had the aura of a trial, except that the accused had no defense attorney - was pointing out the young woman's psychological deficiencies, he occasionally made some especially compelling point, succinct and well phrased. Each time, Ayn chuckled with appreciation - and clapped her hands in applause.

The girl, like others of Ayn's friends caught in similar situations, was to find a means of ridding herself of guilt. The means, as her paper indicates, was emotional repression. "I'm afraid to care about anything, because I'm afraid I'll get all mixed up again." She, like they, began the process of changing from an open, spontaneous, enthusiastic young woman into a rigid thinking machine. It was done as an act of self-preservation: one most not experience emotions that might brand one as immoral. 

The distance between the self-created myth of Ayn Rand and the real woman who lived and acted outside the world of her study, was growing steadily greater. In retrospect, it is evident that none of Ayn's young friends, including Nathaniel and myself, were helping Ayn to deal with the tensions that drove her. No one achieves power who does not seek it; had she not insisted upon being viewed as a goddess, she would not have been so viewed. Nevertheless, the adulation she received was a great disservice to her. She needed to be challenged when she applauded a young woman's agony - or when she spoke of Aristotle as the only thinker in history from whom she had had anything to learn - or when she demanded, in her affair with Nathaniel, that a set of rules be held as applicable to her that were not applicable to others - or when she flew into a rage, as she did with her attorney, Pincus Berner, at his suggestion that everyone, including herself, had at some time done what they knew to be wrong - or when she made it implicitely clear that any criticism of her was an act of treason to reason and morality. But had the attitude of her friends been different, it is likely that she would have renounced them and surrounded herself with people who would give her what she needed. It was not chance that her chosen friends were so many years younger than she - as it was not chance that her lover was so man years younger than she.

Truly Rand was a malevolent little troll of a woman.

I agree with only some of this...

Ranking Every Episode Of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer"  on Buzzfeed.

I do agree with most of the low-ranking episodes. And I do get behind the anti-Riley sentiment, completely. And I'm so glad they called out "Flooded" which was the dreariest Buffy episode of all time.

But I will never get why so many rate the "Hush" episode so highly. One of the primary reasons for watching Buffy is for the dialog - and the episode has no dialog.

I also don't get why people say they don't like Season 6, and that it's "so dark." Hello? Guess which season Buffy dies in? Seasons 1 and 5. Not Season 6.

No, in Season 6 Willow raises Buffy from the dead. In Season 6 Buffy and Spike have the hottest sex ever shown on network television (and the Buzzfeed list rightly mentions how unusually explicit the episode "Smashed" is.) Season 6 has one of the most popular episodes, the musical "Once More with Feeling" episode.

Season 6 has the funniest bits with "the Trio" and it has the most tragic and dramatic bits with Dark Willow the season's "Big Bad" - especially when Dark Willow and the Trio collide.

And how awesome of a switch-up is the whole premise of Willow as the Big Bad? In every other season the Big Bad was some scary supernatural alien force. In Season 6 Big Bad is a character who was completely mild mannered and good, but gone berserk on magic and grief. Only Spike has a more extreme character arc, in the other direction. Oh, and Amy who turns herself into a rat in Season 3 and is turned back to herself by Willow in guess which season? That's right, Season 6, and in fact in the episode Smashed - truly one of the greatest Buffy episodes.

Oh, and in Smashed Amy and Willow join magical forces to punish homophobes.

Best episode ever.

There are a few crappy episodes, but Buffy Season 6 is the absolute best. The other seasons in order from best to worst:

Season 5
Season 3
Season 2
Season 1
Season 4
Season 7

I certainly don't count any of the Buffy comic books as actual "seasons" although some misguided souls do.

Lilias Yoga and You

Lilias Folan is a little old lady now, but she was a yoga maverick back in the 1970s, and my first introduction to yoga was through her public television show Lilias, Yoga and You.

You can watch an entire episode from the 70s here. I find Lilias charming in her earnestness and her suburban housewife-hippie chick vibe.

People Magazine did a profile of Folan in 1980.

Originally from Pound Ridge, N.Y., Folan was born Lilias Antoinette Moon and known thereafter as "Muffin" ("Can you see Muffin, Yoga and You?" she asks with a giggle). Her parents divorced when Lilias was 2, and her mother remarried several times, sending her daughter off to boarding school at the age of 9. Lilias later spent two years at Bennington, continued her art studies in Italy and returned home to an early marriage and postpartum depression.  

"I had everything," she says. "A successful husband, two children, a lovely home and a boat in Long Island Sound. But there was a longing in me that just wasn't filled up. I had the blahs." A doctor prescribed exercise, and Lilias spent three years in psychotherapy. Then she discovered yoga. "From the beginning I felt better as a person and a woman," she says. "Also, no one was into yoga then, and part of me liked being a little weird. If anyone asked me at parties, I'd get my leotard and do a headstand. It wasn't until I crashed into a coffee table that I saw how ridiculous it was."  

When her husband, Bob Folan, now president of his own transport company, was transferred to Cincinnati in 1967, Lilias went along and taught yoga. "The anxiety and depression had begun to lift," she recalls, "and I needed a broader, deeper vision. Slowly I began to feel a call." In 1970 she began a series of instructional shows for the local PBS affiliate. By last fall she was carried in 193 cities, pulled in 150 letters a week and boasted converts to yoga like Alan Arkin and Carol Burnett. 

Folan has her own Youtube page.

Lou Grant

One of the things I like about watching the Mary Tyler Moore show is that Lou Grant reminds me of my father. My dad, who has been dead for ten years this June adored Lou Grant - I think he related to him - they definitely had quite a bit in common. Lou Grant was probably the primary reason why my father never missed an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show on Saturday nights.

Ed Asner, who played Lou Grant was five years older than my father, so they had the same cultural references - although Lou Grant was supposed to be a little older than that, which is why he served in World War II, whereas my father served in Korea. Lou Grant was a solid family man, and had a nice paternal relationship with Mary Richards, and was pretty conservative, like my father.

Ed Asner is not a conservative - he's a pretty hard-core lefty. It's widely believed that this is why his spin-off from the MTM show, Lou Grant, was canceled in spite of the fact that it was doing very well in the ratings. I've still never seen the Lou Grant show, I will put that on my to-do list after I watch the complete run of MTM.

So it's hard for me not to feel lots of affection for Ed Asner, and I'm glad he's hanging in there at 84.

Mary Richards is stalked and it's just hilarious!

The phenomenon of stalking and the serious consequences it can have were not recognized during the run of the Mary Tyler Moore show, and so when they wrote Episode 19, in Season 3, about Mary being stalked it was played entirely for laughs.

And worse...

Warren the stalker tells Mary he loves her after one date, and then proceeds to pester her for weeks in spite of her giving him no encouragement at all. Mary asks Rhoda to tell Warren's friend to tell Warren to "bug off."

Instead of bugging off, Warren pays to have the message "Warren loves Mary" on a billboard across from where Mary works, and Lou Grant thinks it's funny. Next Warren shows up to demand Mary come to lunch with him. She refuses to go to lunch and so Ted Baxter tells her she's taking the "hard-to-get routine too far." Then Warren handcuffs himself to Mary, and says "now we're prisoners of love" and tells her the maitre d' at the restaurant has the key so she has to go with him.

Instead of somebody calling the police, Mary is forced to go to lunch with Warren, and when she comes back she is crying, but no longer handcuffed. At least they don't laugh at her, and Lou offers to assault the guy. Mary says it's her own fault for being afraid to hurt his feelings.

By the end of this treatment Mary is cowering in her apartment, with the drapes closed and refusing to answer the phone because she's afraid, that after Warren doing "something humiliating to me for the last eleven days in a row" she's afraid of what he's going to do next. Rhoda comes by and tells her it's her fault because she's "afraid to make a scene."

Mary decides that she won't be afraid to make a scene in the future. So the writers of the episode, Jim Mulholland and Mike Barrie, resolve the stalking like this: soon after the scene where Mary is cowering in her apartment, she is having a "normal first date" at a restaurant with another man, and Warren appears with a mariachi band and a cake that says "will you marry me." Mary naturally assumes it's for her because it's the most logical assumption. So she makes a scene, and it turns out the cake is for another woman that Warren is asking to marry.

But because Mary made a scene, it ruins any chance she had with the other guy. They even have a scene at the end of the episode where she calls the guy and tries to explain why she made the scene - and since stalking wasn't a concept back then she doesn't have the words to explain it, and just gives up and hangs up on the guy.

So in other words, the writers of the show have set up a situation where Mary cannot win: when confronted with a man who won't say no it's either her fault because she's afraid to make a scene, or she'll be punished for making a scene by being humiliated and losing a guy she likes.

Don't ever let anybody tell you that feminism hasn't made things better for women. Things may not be perfect now, but it was much worse 40 years ago.

Well it didn't bother your third husband

Well I'm in the middle of season 3 of the Mary Tyler Moore show and I am getting a little tired of the fact that some guy falls in love with Mary in every other episode. Sure I know, she can turn the world on with her smile, but this is getting ridiculous.

In episode 12 the sixteen-year-old boyfriend of Phyllis's daughter Bess falls in love with Mary. Although it is portentous that she asks him: ""Does't it bother you that I am 15 years older than you are?"

Seven years later Mary Tyler Moore married her mother's doctor Robert Levine, who is eighteen years younger than her.

Tea Reviews

The Tea Reviews web sit I linked to yesterday doesn't list Awake in its top ten best teas, which are:

Rank	Tea	Average
#1	ThepuriTea Red Dragon Pearl	9.85
#2	Jacksons of Piccadilly Fair Trade Assam	9.75
#3	Mariage Freres Marco Polo	9.67
#4	Canton Tea Co. Superior Bai Lin Gong Fu	9.65
#5	American Tea Room Toasted Fig Pu Er Blend	9.57
#6	Culinary Teas Chocolate Mint	9.50
#7	American Tea Room Organic Yunnan Golden Ne	9.49
#8	T-oolongtea.com Ruaysui Sky Crane Honey Bl	9.47
#9	American Tea Room Ruby Black	9.43
#10	Art of Tea Classic Black	9.38

Call me a purist but I don't think tea mixed with flavors like Fig and Chocolate count as real teas. But the American Tea Room Ruby Black and the Art of Tea Classic Black sound pure - and without added flavors.

American Tea Room is their favorite tea company, and I have to say, their Arya Diamond 2013 First Flush Darjeeling SFTGFOP1 looks primo.

I recommend Tazo Tea

They sell Tazo Tea (pronounced tah-ZOH) in the health food section of my supermarket so I hadn't really bothered with it. But now that I'm watching what I eat more these days I tried it and to my surprise it's really good - better than my former favorite brand the British Twinings.

Actually the only Twinings that is really good is Darjeeling. But the Tazo version is even better and the Tazo English Breakfast is way better than the Twinings version. They don't just call it "English Breakfast" though, they have to be fancy and call it "Awake."

At least they just call Darjeeling, "Darjeeling." Although that might be because Darjeeling is its own brand - it's like Champagne, in that it has to come from a specific place - one of the designated tea estates in the Kalimpong area of Bengal. Darjeeling even has its own logo.

Apparently Tazo has been bought by Starbucks, and I have to hand it to Starbucks, they know quality. And I'm sorry, I like their coffee too. I've been told it's not that great, by people who know coffee but I really don't know coffee. Before I ever tried Starbucks, in the late 1990s, my idea of coffee derived from whatever they made at the office. I prefer tea anyway so never really thought much about coffee.

I have to say, the first time I had a Starbucks latte it blew my mind. I didn't know a coffee drink could taste so good. Now latte has too much milk for my taste, and I switched to cappuccino, and I think it tastes great too.

I still like tea better, but it's harder to get good tea than good coffee - although it seems that Starbucks, which makes Tazo available in its coffee shops, has solved that problem too. Although it is annoying that they call everything from Tazo a "tea" when actually, unless the main ingredient is the leaf of the camellia sinensis it isn't really tea, but rather an infusion, or as Wikipedia would have it, a tisane.

Here's someone else who really likes "Awake."

Moving on up

Another fashion observation - the woman on the right is wearing the most modern-looking dress that we've seen yet on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, in this episode from season 2 from 1972.

And the woman on the left of course is the actor Isabel Sanford before she got the gig as Louise Jefferson.

Norwegians would

Speaking of zany MTM fashions...

WHAT is this thing that Mary is wearing? Is she supposed to be Mary Queen of Scots? And for a date with Principal Kaufmann from Room 222?

I don't remember the outfit but strangely enough I do remember the conversation where he tells her that she isn't his type, he needs a "meat and potatoes" kind of woman and she's more like "dessert." Although in my memory I thought Lou Grant said those lines. Thought it's impressive I remembered that much dialog from decades ago.

Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum!

Zephyrus and Hyacinthus. Attic red-figure
cup from Tarquinia,  c. 490 - 480 BCE

This is one of the best things I've ever found on the Internet, this Corpus of Ancient Vases.

I've been fascinated by ancient Greek vases since art school, and here I find that someone has done the sensible thing of collecting information about all ancient Greek vases known to humanity and making that information available in one place - and making it browsable and searchable.

These vases are so fascinating for many reasons - there are so many of them - Wiki claims there are over 100,000 in the CVA - that they give vivid insight into the social customs and beliefs of these people. One of the most riveting being of course the fact that the ancient Greeks were very OK with homosexuality, and scenes of men embracing, courting and even having sex appear on lots of vases.

My favorite type of Greek vase is known as "red figure" - the drawings on those vases are the best of all, thanks to the red images allowing a nice use of brush to create the inner lines. The black figure vases, which preceded the red figure, while beautiful in their own right, tend to have fairly primitive drawings.

They had plenty of other subjects besides homosexuality of course, but their openness about homosexuality is so fascinating because it's such a contrast to our own culture, even now in the age of gay marriage.

And thanks to the Greeks' unashamed love of beautiful men, the men on the red figure vases are often quite cute. Many of the men in ancient Greek vases are often actually desirable, which is much more than you can say for the vast majority of the men depicted in old (if not exactly ancient) Indian or Japanese erotic paintings.

In the case of Indian art the men invariably have cheezy little moustaches, but if they didn't you might think they were women, they have such feminine faces.


And in the case of the ancient Japanese erotica all the men look like they're balding, thanks to the fashion of the time.

I do like the elegant lines, but that fat balding baby look just does not do it for me. If they didn't have arranged marriages their society would have surely died out from lack of female desire.

And don't even get me started on what was supposed to be hot for European men prior to the English Regency period.

So I plan to do lots of checking out of this online Greek vases  repository - not just for the cute guys though, but also just to see some of the vases I've never seen before. Although there are 100,000, only about 100 are shown on the Internet, and museums rarely show their entire collections all at once.

To get a sense of how many vases there are, I've done a  search on just red-figure vases, with the inscription "kalos" (the boy is beautiful) on the vase, and only those in the catalog that have images. The search resulted in 538 vases.

Admittedly the vase images that tend to get reproduced the most are those with the best artwork, but it's still fascinating to look at even a poor drawing by somebody from two thousand years ago.

Fashions on the MTM show

In this image you can see the strange 70s fashions of the Mary Tyler Moore Show - Mary going braless under a hot pink turtle neck and Phyllis wearing a horrendous monstrosity that makes my eyes hurt. Only Rhoda looks modern in her all-black ensemble, except for the gigantic red-white-and-blue scarf she's wearing in her ponytail.

I don't remember the crazy colors because we had a black and white TV.

I also don't remember that Mary went braless. What a unique moment in TV history - I don't think anybody today on TV would go braless.

In this episode Phyllis asks Mary to tell her daughter Bess about sex. I don't remember that either, but it's possible that my mother made my father turn off the TV at that point. So I don't remember that Bess tells Mary that she already heard about sex, because another kid told her about it, and she didn't believe it at first.

That's how I found out about sex too - some kid in school told me, and that was my reaction too - I thought the kid made it up to gross me out. Only when I read my first adult non-fiction book Black Like Me, which describes some sexual situation (I forget what now) did I believe it was true.

"Liking sex” was the preferred euphemism for making or consuming porn

I read something in the NYTimes today which reminded me of our buddy Antonia Crane because it's about attitudes of people in the wonderful world of commercial sex. The writer is at a porn convention:

Instead, over the next few days I found myself absorbing one unrelenting, expertly media-trained “celebratory” paean to commodified sex-positivity after another, and feeling more and more depressed by the hour. The conference’s best-known attendants seemed to respond to all but the most ingratiating questions by swiftly shaming the interlocutor. The porn stars stuck to their talking points and stayed on message. “Liking sex” was the preferred euphemism for making or consuming porn. Conversely, harboring even the slightest ambivalence about porn meant that you categorically “hated sex” and were out to ruin it for everyone else. 

A dominant narrative soon emerged at the conference, in which pornography — and not the Victorian kind with the bloomers and the spankings or whatever — was presented as a bastion of orgiastic disinhibition; a filthy fun-times Arcadia from which sprang nothing but joy and empowerment and marriage and children and unicorns. 

Like all good stories, this one had a villain: “the girlfriend.” A sex-hating, man-foiling human barricade whose cruel, withholding ways sent armies of disconsolate men into the tender embrace of their “favorite” porn stars daily. I was taken aback. I was a girlfriend! I mean, I wasn’t that girlfriend. But the more this version of reality was reified throughout the event, the sadder, the more isolated, the more diminished I became. The worst thing about it was how overwhelming the experience was, and how deviant it made me feel.

It's clear that Antonia Crane has the same attitude, with the slick way she tried to conflate protestations about using sex slaves with disapproval of prostitution. Her message is the same: if you have complaints about any sexual scenario, it means you are anti-sex.

Now I'm sure that Antonia Crane believes she's against rape. But it is clear from her response to commenters in this article that as far as she's concerned, what Max did - having sex with a sex slave, knowing that as a sex slave she couldn't give consent - was a regrettable minor indiscretion.

Now unfortunately Max will never be caught and punished for rape, but what he did was in fact, rape, and he should be punished for it. And it doesn't matter how "remorseful" he is. Instead Crane tells him - and any other rapists - that what they did was understandable human weakness, and it isn't really rape if you pay someone for it.

Antonia Crane makes her living as a dispenser of commercial sex, or more recently as a raconteur of the glories of dispensing commercial sex. And she is vigilant about protecting her product - if she acknowledged that people who use sex slaves are guilty of rape, she'd just ruin the good times for some people, who, like Max either have had sex with sex slaves, or just don't care if the prostitute they are using is a sex slave. You don't want to kill any potential customer's woody with guilt or concern for other human beings' welfare. The attitude that Crane is promoting is that anybody who isn't cool enough to simply brush away concerns about sex trafficking must hate sex.

Antonia Crane, rape apologist

I was amazed and appalled by this "honest" and "human" article which I found via Slate in which sex worker Antonia Crane interviews a former john and he admits to using a woman who was the victim of sex trafficking, knowing she was:

Rumpus: But it’s not consensual. It’s coercion. It’s sex slavery.
Max: And I felt very remorseful when I learned this. And then I did it again.

Crane wants you to believe that this is just a sad but understandable human weakness. In the comments beneath the story she exonerates Max and herself:

It’s clear from the comments above (particularly Mia, Laurie and LDB) that this is a topic where people experience strong visceral feelings. I found Max’s transparency about his experiences with women in the sex industry brave and honest. What’s interesting is human desperation. I don’t think that being a kind, generous client in that situation makes Max a self centered, unfeeling asshole. It makes him honest and human. The disdain that some of you have for this client is, sadly, what my article exposes. You helped me do that. It’s not an article about sex trafficking, but the places we hide ourselves and the ways we connect with people sexually. I’ve never met anyone who condones sex slavery. It’s a horrendous, monstrous thing. Perhaps his interaction with them was a bright spot in their day. Have you ever talked to a woman who has been pimped out and sold? Have you ever given her money? Shelter? 

See it's "human desperation" and the article wasn't about sex trafficking so why are you people making such a tiresome big deal about it? And unless you have personally tried to rescue sex slaves, you are a big hypocrite to point out that having sex with someone who is being held against their will in the sex trade is rape. How dare you insinuate that Max paid the slave master to rape the slave!

Max isn't some poor guy reaching out for human companionship, he's a rapist. And Antonia Crane is fine with rape and she finds you weird and puritanical for having such qualms.

It's people like Antonia Crane who help the sex slavers do what they do. And she's not ashamed to tell the world about it, because she is a moral cretin.

She has a blog - here we see Naomi Wolfe giving her tacit approval to rape apologist Antonia Crane.

More on Moore

So in episode 19 season 1 of The Mary Tyler Moore show Murray has his play produced and the show is trashed by a local critic, but it turns out the critic hates everything, including My Fair Lady and Hamlet.

This inspired me to see what critics had to say about the MTM show back in the day. Well the New Yorker, which can't STFU about the current TV series Girls had nothing to say about the original Girls.

But the New York Times's John J. O'Connor wrote this weirdly snarky review about what is now generally agreed to be the gold standard of television sit-coms, on April 21, 1971:

"Mary Tyler Moore" is a sitcom. 

That is not my latest contribution to the literature of graffiti. That is a fact. A sitcom, as the trade pros would have it, is a situation comedy, one of the most fragile, abused and perishable of television formats. For one super-successful "I Love Lucy," there are probably a couple dozen super-embarrassing duds. A few still manage to survive, though, and at least occasionally are worth closer inspection. 

The "Mary Tyler Moore Show," already on TV's crowded re-run trail, can be seen Saturdays at 9:30 PM over the Columbia Broadcasting System. Among the magic few, it is a new half-hour comedy series this year that actually will be returning next season. 

The format? Mary, a bachelor girl perched precariously around age 30, works for a TV news station in Minneapolis, where - as the bouncy introductory song puts it - she "just might make it after all." So the situations revolve around Mary at work as indispensable secretary-Girl Friday, and Mary at home, as an attractive unmarried on the brink of affairs as numerous as the series is long. 

All right, already, it's a format, no better or worse than most formats. There's the potential for mass empathy, with all those bachelor girls out there in the real world, along with their families and myriad suitors. And there's the potential for longevity, with Mary looking healthy enough to keep cavorting at least until the ripe old age of 45. 

With little or no need for character development, the emphasis is on plot, and that is the key ingredient in the long-running television series…
The creators, writers and producers of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" are James Brooks and Alan Burns. The plots tend to be breezy, somewhat inane and, after three minutes, utterly predictable. It's all much like your average Broadway comedy. And of course there are the contemporary "swinging" touches, much in the way pre-marital sex and a certain eight-letter word were used to update the cliche format of the film "Love Story." 

Within the familiar plots, however, the viewer can find a good many first-rate bits and pieces. The program's strongest points are the actors. Miss Moore's Mary is a most agreeable bundle of leggy charm. And her two steady friends make effective foils - Cloris Leachman as Phyllis and especially Valerie Harper as the wise-cracking Rhoda. Miss Harper, currently in Broadway's "Story Theater," can pick up a piece of candy, mutter "I should just apply this thing directly to my hips," and manage to make an ordinary line very funny. 

At the television station, Mary's boss is Grant, played to a superb Edgar-Kennedy slow burn by Edward Asner. Grant's complimentary nature runs to exhortations such as "Keep up the fair work, Murray!" Murray (Gavin MacLeod) is the resident copy supplier, and Ted (Ted Knight) is the egomaniacal newscaster, complete with silvery mane… 

…And so it goes in the world of situation comedy. Nothing terribly significant but, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show" at least, enough to pass a pleasant half hour.

Some thoughts:

"Certain eight-letter word"? What does that mean?

The critics adored that line "can pick up a piece of candy, mutter "I should just apply this thing directly to my hips" - they always mention it.

What does Edgar-Kennedy slow burn mean?

Oh, never mind, found it.

Something else I discovered - thanks to the MTM show I learned that they packaged ice cream in Minneapolis in 1970 like Chinese takeout. (Mary Richards had her tonsils out and everybody kept giving her ice cream.)

How awesome would it be if they both ended up as president of the US?

More young politicians... although some of these are certainly not my "favorites"

Financial regulator humor

I did find this piece in the New Yorker pretty funny...

Excerpt:

Dimon: Now, in terms of a fine . . .
Holder: Yeah.
Dimon: I was talking with some of the guys here and we were thinking, like, a billion maybe would be good.
Holder: Huh.
Dimon: Were you thinking that would be a good number?
Holder: No-o-o.
Dimon: Oh. What were you thinking, hypothetically?
Holder: Hypothetically? Not less than thirteen.
Dimon: Thirteen. Wow. And that . . . that would be as in billion?
Holder: Yes, definitely billion.
Dimon: Of course. Because thirteen million . . . I mean, my pants are worth more than that . . . ha ha . . . I’m kidding, they’re not, they’re just regular pants. I just think the word “pants” is . . . Anyway. Wow. So thirteen billion.
Holder: Yeah.
(A long beat.)
Dimon: So you feel like we were . . . were bad, the guys and me, at the bank here.
Holder: Pretty much, yeah.
Dimon: Huh. That’s so weird, because we weren’t thinking that at all. We were thinking, you know, we made a lot of money and that that was, like, good.
Holder: Interesting. I guess for me it’s how you made the money?
Dimon: Not sure I understand. Why would that matter?
Holder: Well, over here it’s kind of the . . . what’s the word . . . the essence of the whole thing.
Dimon: Like . . . rules and stuff.
Holder: Exactly.
Dimon: Like that . . . what do you call it . . . Vulcan Law?
Holder: Volcker Rule.
Dimon: Yeah, that one. That’s funny, because we didn’t really take that one very seriously. We actually have a copy of it up on a wall and people kind of point at it and laugh, because, I mean, it’s just funny.

American Theatre mag asks: Can an online database bring transparency and efficiency to the play-submission process?

And the answer is no.

No matter how great a database it is, producers still have to - or designate somebody else to - read the damn script.

They quote Adam Szymkowicz in this piece - it seems like I can't go anywhere online anymore without running into Szymkowicz. He's interviewed a whole bunch of playwrights. How that makes him the go-to guy for an article about a play database and getting producers to read playwrights' scripts is apparently because one out of his 600 interviewees said:

"It is logistically impossible for theatres to have an open submission policy. There are too many plays and not enough time to read and consider them all. I would like to change that."

What I would have been interested in finding out is how Szymkowicz ended up writing the dude-bro "romantic" comedy web series Compulsive Love.

Bruce Norris likes to imagine he's some kind of rebel

I thought that Clybourne Park sounded like bullshit and had no desire to see it - and although I can't really decide until I read it (I will not pay to sit through it) I think this article makes some excellent points: Guthrie Theater's smug and offensive "Clybourne Park" perpetuates the illusion of a "post-Civil-Rights" society .

But Domesticated sounds even worse. I thought it sounded like standard evolutionary psychology bullshit when I read this pre-opening article in the NYTimes a couple of weeks ago, and the reviews make it sound even more obnoxious:

I’m not diagnosing Norris, as the harpies diagnose Bill, with “you just don’t get it” disease. Domesticated is a play, not a manifesto. But with its biological framework and Big Picture perspective, it does sometimes seem like a treatise. Near the end, Bill offers the topic sentence: “In the last 50 years, we’ve reached a remarkable turning point in history where, in a precise inversion of how we treated you … anything a woman could possibly want is universally construed as good, and all of a man’s desires — for all intents and purposes — are bad.” 

Sounds like Rush Limbaugh or some Men's Rights Activist.

Norris's belief, which is absolute gospel in evolutionary psychology circles, is that men are naturally polygamous and women are naturally monogamous. And the history of the world is women forcing men into marriage.

But actually the history of the world is the history of the sexual double-standard: wives and mistresses and prostitutes for men and extreme punishments for women who stray - or even wear the wrong clothing at the wrong time. And this is in fact true in some places in the world right now. And the only way for anybody to buy into the bullshit tenets of evolutionary psychology is to deny that reality.

So Clybourne Park was about race, and Domesticated is about gender, so when is Bruce Norris going to write about homosexuality? Of course a straight white man would be the perfect playwright for that topic too. By all means give him another commission.

And here's that asshole dissing Angels in America:

When I received the Steinberg Award, Tony Kushner made the introductory speech and talked about the greatness of theater and so forth, and I realized as I was sitting there, that my father— 

But Tony Kushner didn’t introduce you, John Guare did. 

Tony Kushner went first. 

Right, but then John introduced you, and he called you a suicide bomber, which I have a feeling you’re about to demonstrate. Go ahead. 

I’m just saying, my father, who lives in Texas, is not in any way related to theater. Not only has he never seen Angels in America, ostensibly the most important work of theater in the past twenty years, as we’ve all been told, he’s never heard of it. So if the most important work of theater goes unheard of by a hard-working citizen of the U.S., what does that say about how important theater is? 

I think it says more about your father. 100 years from now, more people will remember Tony Kushner than your father. 

I suppose so. I’m not sure Angels in America is that important. I certainly don’t think the plays I write are very important. Angels came and went in a cultural moment and it excited a lot of people, and it probably led to other things like Will and Grace, but I don’t know if it’s “important.”

100 years from now more people will remember Tony Kushner than this douchebag and his ignorant Philistine of a father. I guarantee it.

This is him again:

“I would say it’s not about a mission to unmask the privileged bourgeois hypocrites,” he says of his oeuvre, “and it’s not a campaign to bring down the American way of life. I guess, if I were to be really pretentious about it, it’s a campaign to bring down the species. I think as a species we have some big problems that are insurmountable. I think we are kind of doomed, and our responsibility is to just be perpetually vigilant to our worst tendencies.”

Oh brother.

Of course he's worshipped by the idiots who run theater. Because he's so macho and manly and uncompromising. And a suicide bomber. Jesus fucking Christ. I realize that in order to make a playwright cool you have to emphasize how his work will be painful and how rigid and uncompromising and macho he is, but really? "Suicide bomber"? He must be the best playwright of them all. 

And it's not like evolutionary psychology is such a taboo - most of the writers for the NYTimes, and plenty of other so-called liberals, completely buy into gender essentialism. Bruce Norris is not a rebel in the slightest. 

Not surprisingly, professional racist Steve Sailor loved Clybourne Park. I bet he's going to love Domesticated too.

The Tree That Owns Itself

I discovered The Tree that Owns Itself a few weeks ago via my Facebook friends They Might Be Giants.

According to Wikipedia:

The earliest-known telling of the tree’s story comes from a front-page article entitled "Deeded to Itself" in the Athens Weekly Banner of August 12, 1890. The article explains that the tree had been located on the property of Colonel William Henry Jackson (no relation to the photographer).[1] William Jackson was the son of one James Jackson (a soldier in the American Revolution as well as a Congressman, U.S. Senator, and Governor of Georgia), and the father of another James Jackson (a Congressman and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia). He was the brother of Jabez Young Jackson, also a Congressman.[2][3] (William Jackson was reportedly a professor at the University of Georgia, and is sometimes given the title of Doctor. The nature of his military service and the source of the title "Colonel" are unknown.[4]) Jackson supposedly cherished childhood memories of the tree, and, desiring to protect it, deeded to it the ownership of itself and its surrounding land. By various accounts, this transaction took place between 1820 and 1832.[5] According to the newspaper article, the deed read:
I, W. H. Jackson, of the county of Clarke, of the one part, and the oak tree… of the county of Clarke, of the other part: Witnesseth, That the said W. H. Jackson for and in consideration of the great affection which he bears said tree, and his great desire to see it protected has conveyed, and by these presents do convey unto the said oak tree entire possession of itself and of all land within eight feet of it on all sides.

I couldn't help noticing this bitter fact - if the transaction granting the Tree ownership of itself happened between 1820 and 1832 it means that for around thirty or forty years there was a tree in Athens Georgia that owned itself, while millions of human beings in that state and adjoining states did not own themselves.

Other famous trees.

Honeygate!

This might be my favorite response to cranky old man Richard Dawkins telling the TSA to get off his lawn.

Skepchick has some excellent responses.

Even Joyce Carol Oates gets into the act.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Oh no you don't! 

I've seen episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show both as an adult and as a child. But I don't remember the episodes I saw as a child, and certainly didn't get the jokes, and I've only seen a few episodes as an adult, including the notorious "Chuckles Bites the Dust" and the one my great grand-uncle Iggy Wolfington was in - his entire dialog is "What is she, nuts?"

My father adored the show, especially Ed Asner's Lou Grant, and never missed an episode. And it was one of the few shows my mother didn't consider too risque.

When the show started I was too young to stay up to watch it, and by the time it was ending I was a teenager, out hanging with friends and missed the last seasons. This was before the Internet or even VCRs (Videocassette Recorders in case you forgot.)

But since there is the Internet now, you can watch the entire show's run on Hulu, which is what I'm doing. It's a strange experience, part nostalgia and part a new appreciation for the show. It's forty years old but I have to say, it seems pretty modern, or at least no less modern than episodes of Friends.

Although there are moments when you realize how old it is - in season 1, episode 6, Lou Grant is talking about what a great job it is to be a sportscaster - 20 minutes of work a night and for that you get a whopping $20,000 a year! 

I vaguely remember the opening credits of the first season, but it's so different watching it from an adult perspective. It's starts with a cross cutting between Mary driving down the highway to Minneapolis and what looks like a going-away party held at Mary's prior job. Just as she's leaving this middle-aged guy in glasses tries to get a kiss from Mary and she's all - oh no you don't! So what I'm wondering is, who are these actors and do they ever get any credit anywhere for these opening sequences?

Another observation: Rhoda Morgenstern is supposed to be so fat and dumpy compared to Mary, and yet she is gorgeous - you could cut glass with those cheekbones. What were they thinking? And on top of that, she has some of the best lines in the show, especially in her rivalry with the ever-annoying Phyllis over who gets to be Mary's best friend.

I wish I could look like the Charcoal Donut lady

The New Yorker reports that this Charcoal Donut image has sparked a racism debate in Thailand. Apparently Thailand is a pretty racist place, and having light skin is all the rage there. But I think this woman looks amazing. Although I don't like the color of the lipstick - it should be darker and redder - I don't think they should have tried to match the Dunkin Donuts logo color so slavishly.

Adolescent libertarian fantasies

I love how the Mighty Krugman can be counted on to trash Ayn Rand on at least a monthly basis, as in today's NYTimes column:

So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.

And what "this" is all about is the Republican war on the poor, which of course would be inspired by that eccentric hack novelist who got her first big break in life from the Bolsheviks.

As Krugman says:

All of this hostility to the poor has culminated in the truly astonishing refusal of many states to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Bear in mind that the federal government would pay for this expansion, and that the money thus spent would benefit hospitals and the local economy as well as the direct recipients. But a majority of Republican-controlled state governments are, it turns out, willing to pay a large economic and fiscal price in order to ensure that aid doesn’t reach the poor.

Astonishing only if you weren't already aware of what a bunch of evil freaks Republicans are.