Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"If you didn’t know Ms. Anglund’s stories, you probably knew her drawings of children: Their faces were blank orbs with just two wide-set dots for eyes."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 03:48 PM PDT

"They became ubiquitous, appearing on Hallmark cards, dolls and ceramics, as Anglund merchandise secured a prominent niche in the collectibles market... Ms. Anglund's illustrations were particularly distinctive. While the adults in her drawings all displayed fully formed and expressive facial features, the children had none at all, save for those dots for eyes. Ms. Anglund, who used her own children as models, said she had never made a conscious decision to omit her young characters' mouths and noses. But over time, she said, she realized that unformed, untouched faces better evoked the innocence of childhood. 'I think perhaps I am trying to get down to the essence of a child,' she said, 'not drawing just a particular, realistic child, but instead I think I'm trying to capture the "feeling" of all children, of childhood itself, perhaps.'"

 From "Joan Walsh Anglund, 95, Dies; Her Children's Books Touched Millions/Her first in a prolific career, 'A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You,' was a phenomenon. And her illustrations capturing childhood became a cottage industry" (NYT). 

Anglund wrote the line "A bird doesn't sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song" — which Maya Angelou, author of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," took to quoting.

That caused some people to think Angelou had written it. Among the misinformed was the U.S. Postal Service, which made an Angelou stamp with Anglund's line. Anglund was gracious about it, not that she had much choice in what to say about it. And the association with the much-celebrated Angelou helped Anglund. Who would know that one line of hers without Angelou? [CORRECTION: Originally, I wrote that Anglund's line inspired the book title.]

Speaking of copying, I wonder who first got the idea to draw children with a big blank face and dots for eyes. Where else have I seen that? I thought of Hello Kitty, but Hello Kitty has a nose. And whiskers.

Here's the incredibly popular book from 1958:

"The plan, set to be introduced by Biden in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, says it will enable drivers across the country to find electric charging stations for their vehicles on the road."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 11:12 AM PDT

"Every lead pipe in the country would be replaced. All Americans would have access to high-speed Internet broadband by the end of the decade. As many as 2 million homes and housing units would be built, retrofitted or renovated. Biden released the spending plan with a slew of tax hikes on businesses that is likely to be the most contentious part of his proposal. The White House says the proposal would pay for itself over 15 years because many of the tax increases would remain even as the spending proposals only last for eight years.... On the tax side, Biden's plan includes raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent; increasing the global minimum tax paid from about 13 percent to 21 percent; ending federal tax breaks for fossil fuel companies; and ramping up tax enforcement against corporations, among other measures."

WaPo reports.

"The man accused of beating an Asian American woman during a broad-daylight hate-crime attack in New York City on Monday was on lifetime parole for murdering his mother..."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 12:30 PM PDT

"... years earlier in front of his 5-year-old sister, police and sources told Fox News. Brandon Elliot, 38, was arrested shortly after 1 a.m. Wednesday in Manhattan. He has been charged with attempted assault as a hate crime, assault as a hate crime, assault and attempted assault, police said Wednesday. Around 11:40 a.m. Monday, Elliot is said to have attacked a 65-year-old woman on West 43rd Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues in Manhattan while she was on her way to church..  A startling video shows a man, identified by police as Elliot, punching kicking the woman as she walks along the sidewalk, which [causes] her to fall to the ground. He then continues viciously kicking her in the head and body, according to the video and police. As he continued his assault, the suspect told her: 'F--- you, you don't belong here'..."

Fox News reports.

The article doesn't mention Elliot's race, even though he was charged with a hate crime. I presume the photograph is supposed to do the delicate work of conveying the information.

Biden dog update.

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 10:57 AM PDT

"The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled Gov. Tony Evers acted unlawfully when he issued multiple pandemic emergency orders — including face mask requirements..."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 10:43 AM PDT

"The order means the governor will be barred from extending the state's current COVID-19 emergency order and mask mandate, which was set to expire on April 5, unless the Republican-controlled Legislature votes to extend it. Otherwise, it will continue to be up to local governments, such as cities and counties, to impose their own virus restrictions. Dane County's mask mandate remains in place. The court's 4-3 ruling on Wednesday, with conservative swing Justice Brian Hagedorn joining the conservative majority, follows a pattern of skepticism the state's highest court has exhibited toward the governor's mitigation efforts since the pandemic began. Hagedorn delivered the majority opinion where he wrote that Wisconsin law gives Evers extraordinary powers for only a short duration, 60 days, following the declaration of a public health emergency. 'The plain language of the statute explains that the governor may, for 60 days, act with expanded powers to address a particular emergency,' Hagedorn wrote. 'Beyond 60 days, however, the legislature reserves for itself the power to determine the policies that govern the state's response to an ongoing problem. Similarly, when the legislature revokes a state of emergency, a governor may not simply reissue another one on the same basis.'" 

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Okay, then. The governor exceeded his powers under the statute.

"Dane County's mask mandate remains in place" — that's the answer for me. 

Response from the Democrats. The court is just doing right-wing politics:

"There’s some precedent for a company trying a 'fake news' joke. In 2018, the food chain IHOP briefly tried to convince consumer it was exchanging the 'P' in its name to 'B,' trading pancakes for burgers."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 06:09 AM PDT

"[Volkswagen spokesman Mark] Gillies, after presenting the false information the day before, came clean on Tuesday... '[W]e didn't mean to mislead anyone. The whole thing is just a marketing action to get people talking' about its new car model." 

From "An unwelcome prank: Volkswagen purposely hoodwinks reporters" (AP).

VW must have thought that it's so clearly not true that the longstanding brand name Volkswagen of America would be changed to "Voltswagen of America" that it would work as an Onion-style headline, funnier because it looks like real news. 

But the Associated Press, USA Today, CNBC, and the Washington Post all took it seriously and reported it as news. And some of them are now acting outraged. E.g.: "This was not a joke. It was deception. In case you haven't noticed, we have a misinformation problem in this country. Now you're part of it. Why should anyone trust you again?"

"It's March 2021, and I'm looking back on this comments thread about drawings from Van Gogh Museum. It's so weird to see the one commenter breaking in..."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 04:16 AM PDT

"... with the emergency news that Peter Jennings has died and I must get right on it," I write in the comments to a post I put in 2005. 

We were talking about a post that had my ink drawings of Van Gogh and of a museum guard yelling at a baby who'd sat down on the ledge that is there to keep people from standing to close to the paintings, and of the baby muttering "Bummer, bummer, bummer." 

I thought that was pretty amusing, but the commenter was all: "Ann, if you're still up, Peter Jennings' death was just announced 15 mins ago. I have a link in my blog, but so far, only lgf have the story. Since you're doing Glenn's blog this week, it seems you're going to be doing extra-duty on the obit watch -- they'll start to pour any second."

The notion that I'm here to hop to it when there's breaking news... it was absurd then and it's absurd now. Everyone knew Peter Jennings was dying. It was one of those death-watch situations. And yet it seemed important to some people to burst in and be first! when the dying man is actually dead. Why?!

"Two days ago, I decided to stop doing the dishes. I make all the dinners and I am tired of having to do all the cleaning too. SINCE THEN..."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 03:50 AM PDT

"... this pile has appeared and at some point they are going to run out of spoons and cups and plates. Who will blink first? Not me."

Tweeted Miss Potkin, with lots of photos (keep scrolling). 

Via Metafilter, where somebody says "So it's like Wages for Housework, except you get Twitter faves instead of wages, and instead of a deep feminist critique of capitalism, you get a resentful critique of your shitty family?"

"At this point we’re missing our tourists again. But I think there was a moment of really big joy in getting our city back."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 03:54 AM PDT

Said the owner of an Amsterdam restaurant, quoted in "In Empty Amsterdam, Reconsidering Tourism/Before Covid-19, the city was packed with visitors. Now efforts to rein in the expected post-pandemic crowds are ramping up, but not without controversy" (NYT). 

In 2019, a record-breaking 21.7 million people visited Amsterdam, a city with a population of about 870,000.... On a typical Saturday night before the pandemic, the district, known as De Wallen, would have been heaving with young men going from bar to bar — perhaps stepping into sex shops or coffee shops or eyeing scantily clad prostitutes posing in their windows.

Several Amsterdammers interviewed for this story said that they would never consider visiting the neighborhood at such a time because of the rowdy, crowded scene. "The public space is dominated by facilities that are almost all redolent of sex, drugs and drink," Ms. Halsema wrote of the historic city center in an official letter to the city council in July 2019....

[One proposed solution is] the relocation of sex workers to a "prostitution hotel" elsewhere in the city... Another headline-grabbing proposal... would make it illegal for visitors to buy cannabis in Amsterdam's coffee shops, which are concentrated in the Red Light District and which have long been popular with tourists...

A tourism "monoculture" has [pushed out] residents... Businesses and services that used to cater to locals — high-quality bakeries, butcher shops, and the like — have been replaced by trinket shops, ice-cream parlors and "Nutella shops," which serve takeaway waffles and other treats smeared in the hazelnut spread, mainly to tourists. Meanwhile, rising housing prices — due, in part, to the rise of Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms — have made the city center unaffordable for many locals.

I went to Amsterdam, solo, in 1993. I was interested in the art, and I had my pen and notebook. I never set foot in a marijuana coffee shop, and I tried to move quickly past the sleazier things, but I did stop to record some of the sleaziness:

Amsterdam Notebook.

Amsterdam Notebook. 

The fabulous aesthetic pleasures of the historical city with its grand museums was undermined by some awful, ugly junk even back then, nearly 30 years ago, so it is hard for me to imagine what the residents are complaining about today, which is the crowds and worsening conditions of the last few years.

"Unlike so many Hollywood roles, the sexuality at the core of hers wasn’t cute or passive or submissive."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 03:04 AM PDT

"It was challenging, confrontational, defiant; she stared into the camera with those remarkable eyes, almost daring us to return her gaze. The parts became increasingly transgressive: in The Night Porter, Rampling has a sadomasochistic relationship with her Nazi torturer; in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore she has an incestuous affair with her brother; and in Max Mon Amour, she cheats on her diplomat husband with a chimpanzee. 'Ah, the ape – I love it,' she says affectionately.... Rampling says she simply wasn't interested in Hollywood. 'Let's use a nice old English expression: it just wasn't my cup of tea. I wanted to go into the auteur and European world of the semi-darkness.'"

 From "Charlotte Rampling: 'I am prickly. People who are prickly can't be hurt any more' She's best known for her dark, difficult roles, and doesn't suffer fools gladly. The actor talks about swinging in the 60s, family tragedy – and why she's still got It" (The Guardian). 

Rampling is 75, and she's still doing movies. She's been in so many things over the years, beginning with the uncredited role of Girl at Disco in "A Hard Day's Night." I haven't seen many of them at all. Avoided "The Night Porter," which was a big deal in its time (1974). I did see "Stardust Memories" (1980):

I looked up "Max Mon Amour," and I've got to say the poster is very nice:

From the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes (where it has a 22% rating): "Impossible to take seriously or as satire, this film is an embarrassment to humanity and our cousins in the jungle"/"A wry mix of King Kong and My Man Godfrey, it's a potent premise that somehow never catches fire."/"On the whole, it works as a witty, black comedy of manners that judiciously avoids the vulgarity inherent in the subject."

The Guardian says "the sexuality at the core of hers wasn't cute or passive or submissive," but are we to take these movies — which she did not write or direct — as expressive of Rampling's sexual core? She got the roles she got. This seems like a good place to bring up Sharon Stone's new memoir. Here's an article about it in TNR, "Sharon Stone and the Fantasy of Female Domination/At the peak of her fame, she exuded total control on screen. According to her new memoir, a different story played out behind the scenes." 

A woman's performance of power in public—the all-knowing sexual omnipotence built into the idea of Sharon Stone's celebrity, you could say—has had little to no correlation, in her experience, with her day-to-day life.... As an adult, Stone saw the famous crotch-shot in Basic Instinct for the first time in "a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project." All she had been told was, "We can't see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on."...

In 2018, an interviewer asked Sharon Stone if she had any #MeToo stories, and she laughed long and bitterly....

"Why operate your business from an expensive midtown office when all you need is a smartphone and laptop, a tasteful backdrop for your video calls, and Amazon Prime?"

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 02:30 AM PDT

"Ask the same question on a societal level... why... pour billions into a staggeringly expensive system of urban infrastructure when all you need to keep the wheels of commerce turning is Zoom, Signal, and a reliable, super-fast wireless network…. After Covid, nothing defined 2020 more than an explosion of crime across urban America, even though there were far fewer people outdoors to victimize…. [A]re nightclubs as much of a draw when dating can be now conducted online?… Covid has [sped the] demise of retail stores…. [M]useums and concert halls [and] sports stadiums and arenas to theaters and neighborhood cinemas… are all under assault, [from Covid and from] streaming video and virtual events. Another potential threat to density is the green movement… The manufacture of density's core ingredients, steel and cement, produces some 15 percent of the world's carbon emissions…. The fates of major metropolises are hanging precariously as they grasp at untested policies predicated on borrowed stimulus dollars, short-term business bailouts, non-eviction mandates, and other spit-and-glue measures that are most likely unsustainable…. All these challenges will be made even greater as the politics of cities grow increasingly polarized." 

From "The Death of Density?/To survive and thrive, cities will have to overcome a number of formidable trends" by Richard Schwartz (who has "served in senior positions under 3 New York mayors).

I've compressed a lot, and I completely omitted the last paragraph — which calls for hope, hope for density. But the argument against density is so strong. You've got environmentalism counting in favor of the suburbs now. You've got all the new patterns of work and social life, all the speed and connection of the internet replacing the physical proximity maintained within a city. And you've got the crime in the city. And the politics, which will skew evermore to the left as people who want the benefits of nondensity — and want out of the ever-tightening grip of left politics — exercise their option to leave.

At the Tuesday Night Café...

Posted: 30 Mar 2021 04:53 PM PDT

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Grumpy old white dude assholes frantically trying to pivot to Professional White Ally, on the theory that this will make them money, aren’t making money."

Posted: 30 Mar 2021 04:47 PM PDT

"Tweedy party-at-the-Verso-loft n+1 leftists aren't making money. 33 year olds who follow Tik Tok trends for a living and communicate in slang that's fifteen years too young for them aren't making money. Arrogant white nerdoliberals with Warby Parkers and Moleskine collections aren't making money. Sports bloggers who provide sports news and commentary but with attitude aren't making money. Softening khaki dads struggling to understand Bitcoin and intersectionality in an effort to survive their next inevitable layoff aren't making money. Talented and unfulfilled women writers who have learned too late that women's media is a ghetto they will struggle to escape for the rest of their careers aren't making money. Aspiring young data scientists who labor over their spreadsheets for hours only to see others copy and past[e] their R graphs without attribution and receive 40x the pageviews aren't making money. And you won't either." 

From "If You Want to Make It As a Writer, For God's Sakes, Be Weird/you're in a market, so sell something other people aren't" by Freddie DeBoer (Substack).

"I only know that it has to do with women. I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward."

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 01:38 AM PDT

Said Matt Gaetz, quoted in "Matt Gaetz Is Said to Be Investigated Over Possible Sexual Relationship With a Girl, 17/In inquiry into the Florida congressman was opened in the final months of the Trump administration, people briefed on it said" (NYT).

UPDATE: Gaetz went on Tucker Carlson's show last night and made some elaborate counter-allegations. I found this hard to follow. He accuses the NYT of interfering with something. The word "extortion" comes up a lot, and after he leaves, Carlson — perhaps wanting to distance himself from the factual assertions — calls it "weird."

 

UPDATE 2: I received a press release from Gaetz in my email. It says: 

"Over the past several weeks, my family and I have been victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25 million while threatening to smear my name. We have been cooperating with federal authorities in this matter and my father has even been wearing a wire at the FBI's direction to catch these criminals. The planted leak to the New York Times tonight was intended to thwart that investigation. No part of the allegations against me are true, and the people pushing these lies are targets of the ongoing extortion investigation. I demand the DOJ immediately release the tapes, made at their direction, which implicate their former colleague in crimes against me based on false allegations."

On Carlson's show, he named the man he was accusing of an extortion scheme.

Major... minor... Biden's dog bites again.

Posted: 30 Mar 2021 04:58 PM PDT

 

ADDED: This is a new incident. Here's the CNN report: "Bidens' dog Major involved in another biting incident."
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