You must embody a great reserve of self-abasement to be the wife of a VP nominee in the Republican Party. Easy for Mrs. Pence: she liked baking cookies. But for Usha Vance, a bit of a challenge. You get to give up your stellar career, revert to “Mrs” VP instead of Ms, act like you truly, really respect the megalomaniacal pussy-grabber at the top of the ticket, and be prepared to explain to your friends why the 1950’s was such an awesome time in American history and worth going back to and that you really, truly enjoy baking cookies and hosting teas– far more satisfying than your boring previous work litigating cases for Disney or the Regents of the University of California. And you also get to explain how your husband, who used to brag about being accepted at Yale and served on the Law Review now mocks his own alma mater and pretends to be just folk (with very, very rich friends in the Tech Industry to subsidize his career). And carefully avoid mentioning that his “military career” consisted mostly of pushing paper and taking pictures. Honorable but skimpy and no match for John McCain whom your boss derided as a loser. Watching “Mrs. Vance” on stage at the convention was dispiriting. As Roger Ebert said, commenting on the wonderful film “Junebug”, we all make our own private accommodations in life.
Trump’s Ear
Some of Trump’s followers apparently see God’s providence in his survival of the assassination attempt. I wonder if maybe God just isn’t a good shot.
Apparently some Republican politicians skipped the Politics 101 class where you learn that politicians criticize each other. And they used to mock self-pitying victimization tropes. So while they go around claiming that Biden has destroyed the country and the Democrats are communists and child-molesters, they get all whiney and teary-eyed when a reporter makes fun of Sarah Huckabee’s worshipful enthusiasm for Trump.
“You can’t believe the media”? I get the feeling that they don’t want you to believe the media because sometimes it reports stuff like the crime rate going down, unemployment at the lowest level in 50 years, sea levels rising, Putin imprisoning journalists, the Taliban winning the war in Afghanistan, Trump having planned to withdraw all U.S. troops the same way Biden did, Hamas didn’t care who was president when it attacked Israel, Brexit was an economic disaster, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than native Americans, most fentanyl comes into the U.S. through land border crossings, vaccines work, Biden won the 2020 election fair & square, and 10% tariffs on everything along with a strict immigration ban will drive inflation up.
Haven’t seen anyone comment on the fact that Trump’s agreeing to debate Biden before the convention might, in the end, be the biggest blunder of the election year.
The Republican Convention 2024
JD Vance is a dud.
The CNN & PBS panelists need to sharpen their wits. If Biden is responsible for inflation why did all the developed nations have it? Inflation in Biden’s first year was about 6.0%. None of Biden’s policies could, at that time, have had an impact. Unless you believe presidents can go back in time, what he inherited was Trump’s inflation.
The Teamsters (Sean O’Brien) did NOT endorse Donald Trump. He has offered to speak at both conventions.
Unreported crime is up. Think about it. (The crime rate is actually down).
Real household income has increased significantly under Biden, even in Vance’s home town!
Trump endorsed the Iraq war before he changed his mind much later.
Home prices went up 27% under Trump.
Trump had initiated the plan to leave Afghanistan before he left office and Biden essentially merely enacted it. What is not often remarked upon is that the U. S. had been losing that war badly by then and short of an injection of 100,000 or more troops, could not have changed the outcome. Evacuations under those circumstances are always going to be horrendously messy.
Unemployment under Trump was 6.7%. (Biden: 3.6%)
Yes, Trump tore up NAFTA… and then replaced it with an almost identical trade deal.
The most promising move to counter China was Obama’s Asian-Pacific trade alliance … which Trump tore up, clearly out of spite.
Most economists predicted that battling inflation with higher interest rates would increase unemployment and slow GDP growth. Biden, remarkably, reduced inflation without the expected recession. Why don’t the Democrats talk more about that? It really was quite remarkable.
The Republicans at the convention keep alluding to decaying infrastructure; Biden is the first president in decades to pass a substantial infrastructure bill.
Trump was a failure in business. He took a large capital stake from his daddy, blew it all on bad real estate deals, built casinos and golf courses that failed, owned a football team that failed, created Trump University (failed again), all while selling his image to gullible fans as some kind of business genius. He finally made money parlaying his fake image to a TV show (“The Apprentice”) which did, finally, make him a lot money. As H. L. Menken (maybe) observed, nobody every went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
The most striking thing about the convention so far is how the party has become the Trump Family Compact. Everything is Trump. Every speaker is required to genuflect to Trump. Every statement is calibrated to flatter and wheedle the divine leader. For a party that used to brag about being “rogue” and thinking independently, this slavish adoration a single personality must be humiliating.
One does begin to shed a few tears for how sensitive they are: they constantly whine about the “media” being mean to them and hurting their feelings. Poor Sarah Huckabee could hardly bear to be insulted by a TV hostess. I guess they all missed Politics 101 in which you learn that politicians should probably have some backbone, or find another profession.
Arthur Miller on Method Acting (The Lee Strasberg School of Mumblecore)
Arthur Miller on Lee Strasberg.
While filming “The River of No Return”, director Otto Preminger apparently grew quite exasperated with Marilyn Monroe because every time he gave her direction she would go to her private “coach”, Natasha Lytess, and take direction from her. Lytess bizarrely coached Monroe to enunciate every syllable cleanly and counteracted Preminger’s desire for a more fluid, compelling performance. Preminger should have fired Monroe on the spot but it was the nature of Hollywood then– and now– that big stars command deference, because audiences are stupid and choose their entertainment based on how much they care about the celebrity actors than the writer or director. That’s why so many small-scale independent films are so much better than major Hollywood productions, especially the ones that feature older celebrities playing characters who should be ten, twenty, or even thirty years younger.
Lytess could never have written a screenplay if her life depended on it– she was a parasite, sucking the blood out of the real artists, and Monroe was a repugnant diva more obsessed with her own image and fame than with artistic achievement though she would frame her narcissism as “artistry”.
Anyway, this is an excellent dissection of the Strasberg school of acting:
The following was posted on Facebook 2024-07-09.
I think [Lee] Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion, evidently) a force which is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing. …But the Method is in the air: the actor is defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in my play I couldn’t hear, and the acoustics in that little theater we were using were simply magnificent. I said to her, ‘I can’t hear you,’ and I kept on saying, ‘I can’t hear you.’ She finally got furious and said to me, in effect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not going to prostitute herself to the audience. That was the living end! It reminded me of Walter Hampden’s comment–because we had a similar problem in ‘The Crucible’ with some actors–he said they play a cello with the most perfect bowing and the fingering is magnificent but there are no strings on the instrument. The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions; I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are only, so to speak, the libretto for the music–that the actor is the main force that the audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. They are told that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever. This is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it, if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction. Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted ‘The Seagull.'”
Arthur Miller Interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron
The Paris Review, 1966
Will Biden Drop Out
I suspect, at this moment, that Joe Biden will drop out. And it will be astonishing.
Why will he drop out? Because his blundering performance at the debate was not an anomaly, and, even when confronted with a very, very serious crisis in his candidacy, he is still unable to present a coherent, assertive presence to the media and public.
It wasn’t Biden being caught in an unexpected situation for which he was unprepared and then responded with a poor choice of words or lack of command of the facts of the circumstance. He had all the time in the world and all the staff in the world and all the resources in the world to prepare for the debate and he still managed to muff it on a ridiculous scale. Then, after creating a dire crisis for his candidacy, he could not even muster a credible display of recovered command and assertiveness to even begin to counter-act the devasting effect of his debate performance.
He has offered excuses: he had a cold. He had jet lag. He works too hard and doesn’t get enough sleep. The fact that he even feels the need to offer excuses in very telling. He knows he has a serious problem.
Both Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn have indicated some reservations, when one would have expected fulsome support and a strong assertion of confidence.
There will be, in the coming days, a monumental clash between the insular coterie of family and friends surrounding Biden and the wider world of Democratic donors, strategists, Congressional delegates, party apparatchiks, and others, who will quietly begin to insinuate the obvious. Will it penetrate? I suspect it will, eventually.
And then… chaos. Representative James Clyburn will surely expect Kamala Harris to replace Biden, but others in the party will be hesitant to back the loser of the 2020 primaries, someone the party has had persistent doubts about, and the challenge of a black woman winning a presidential race in America, particularly after the Hilary Clinton fiasco in 2016.
But what if, instead, they turn to Gavin Newsom, or Josh Shapiro? Will this alienate the black voters the Democrats depend on to win elections?
More dangerously, a segment of the voting public has clearly shifted their support to the repulsive Donald Trump. Having overcome their rational hesitation to adopt him as their candidate, will they, once they have overcome those reservations, hesitate to return to the Democratic candidate? Will an embittered Kamala Harris withdraw from the campaign? Or will she accept a VP nomination with the new candidate?
I doubt we will get a really great replacement like Sherrod Brown or Sheldon Whitehouse. Getchen Witmer would be a terrific replacement. Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar would be viable. Newsom? Probably. Shapiro? Maybe.
Trump is very vulnerable to attack by a vigorous, smart opponent. The Democrats owe it to the world to find one.
If they don’t, history should be as unkind to Biden as it is now to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at least among the more sophisticated observers. He will be the man whose bungling missteps and selfish narcissism gave us the worst president in the history of the United States, again.
Blue Jays 2024-06
Blue Jays are paying a very big pile of money to Springer, Kiermaier, and Turner, batting .196, .190, .233, with little or no power. Springer, to my astonishment, is under contract for 2025 and 2026 at over $20 million. Springer and Kiermaier are 34; Turner is 39. None of these players are going to improve, but, rather than admit they spent unwisely, they keep trotting them out there, game on the line or not, runners on or not, disappointed fans or not.
On the plus side, Varsho and Jansen are relative bargains at about $5.5 million.
It’s not fun, as a Jays fan, to watch them trot Springer out there to pinch hit with a runner on, trailing by a run in the 8th, badly needing a win to get close to .500, with a chance to compete for a wild card, maybe. Not fun to see them waste decent pitching performances by not scoring more than one or two runs.
They should cut their losses and put the rookies in. They can’t possibly do worse, and the rookies will at least mostly improve. As for trades, Guerrero and Bichette are fast losing their value. The others have no trade value.
An Alarming Digital Theft
We live in an age of digital theft, though not the kind you think of. The real digital theft is committed mostly by companies like Google and Meta that steal your data and then resell it back to you in the form of advertising.
But some digital theft feels more like highway robbery, as in this story in the Times about some humble folk artists who were robbed of the ownership of their own original songs.
No one should be surprised that there is theft, even of intellectual property. What is disconcerting is how difficult it is to reclaim ownership of the stolen property. Our “system” of publication and distribution of intellectual property is clumsy and defective.
But I believe the genie is out of the bottle on this issue.
Confusing the Men
A New York Times article by Vanessa Friedman said this:
The clothes were like a dare to the watching world, a refusal to cater to pretty-girls-in-pretty-dresses gender expectations and a good-natured riposte to the idea that provocation is an invitation. An “I see your judgment and raise you one” piece of fashion politics.
The writer is referring to sequence of very revealing outfits worn by actress Kristen Stewart as she toured various events to promote her film “Love Lies Bleeding”. I find it kind of incoherent. Do you? How is a provocative outfit a “riposte” to the idea that “provocation is an invitation”? What is the “riposte” part? Is what she is referring actually better known as a tease?
We are told– endlessly, it seems– that the “male gaze” objectifies and dehumanizes women. Male directors demand that actresses reveal their bodies to gratify fantasies of male sexual desire. Wolf whistles and leering stares are acts of oppression. Choosing a new employee based on sexual appeal instead of skill or qualification is very, very wrong.
So what is the meaning of Ms. Friedman celebrating Stewart brazen exhibitionism? She states:
Ms. Stewart and her stylist, Tara Swennen, have taken the film’s carnality and covert politics and translated them for the promotional panopticon, forcing anybody watching to confront their own preconceptions about women’s bodies, their sexuality and exactly what empowerment means, while at the same time undermining the whole circus of branded celebrity dressing.
Does that actually mean anything, other than, having it both ways? We can decry the male gaze while manipulating it? Instead of admitting that some women– at least– cultivate the male gaze and revel in it, and profit from it, and feel exhilarated by the attention, we can twist the logic into a cultural pretzel in which up is down and down is sideways. Kristen Stewart is getting a kick out of the looks she wants: she is making a political statement. Don’t you dare believe she enjoys the attention.
If you believe Ms. Friedman.
Or you can believe Stewart gets her kicks.
Divas about Divas
Join us for SIX: The Musical, a 90-minute extravaganza inspired by the queens of pop – Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez, and Rihanna.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a less promising enticement. I’m impressed though at the remarkable collection of seven of the most inconsequential talents in the pop universe, seven of the singers I would least likely want to hear, all of them making extensive use of Autotune, all of them products, all of them narcissists of the highest order.
On the same day, someone else on Facebook posted a photo of Taylor Swift at some football game with the comment that she did not “ask” to be on TV at the football game.
On the contrary, all she does is “ask” to be on TV.
The Traditional
My response to this column in the NY Times by Ross Douthat.
“a mechanism to constrain sexual misbehavior that’s more effective than the traditional emphasis on monogamy and chastity.” I like how you sneaked in there the phrase “the traditional”, as if this was some kind of monumental edifice of unquestioned provenance. As if it was not a social mechanism for the control of women’s bodies by patriarchal “authority”. A social mechanism inevitably dispensed with for themselves by privileged men in power. Whether you personally or not love Donald Trump, your side owns him and you could not invent a more ragingly hypocritical avatar of “traditional” values.