Trendlist: Althouse

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Althouse

Bloodroot.
Goodbye to Cousin Itt.
"Think of all the fat celebrities — predominantly Black women and women of color — who have paved a path in plus-size fashion, allowing so many of us fat folks to explore our personal style."
6:04 a.am.
"This talk show was so elegant and respectful, that even the comment section of a video like this isn't infested by angry people shouting from both extremes of the issue."
"In the war of racism, we don't want scouts, we want soldiers."
Scarlet elf cups.

Posted: 18 Apr 2021 10:14 AM PDT

Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:51 AM PDT

"Actor Felix Silla, who portrayed Cousin Itt on the 1960s TV series 'The Addams Family,' died on Friday. He was 84....The actor did stunt work on 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,' 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' and 'Poltergeist.'... Silla was 3 feet, 11 inches tall and his wife is 4 feet, 8 inches tall... 'Felix used to tell everyone he married a tall blonde.... He is beloved by all that knew him.'"

CNN reports.

"Think of all the fat celebrities — predominantly Black women and women of color — who have paved a path in plus-size fashion, allowing so many of us fat folks to explore our personal style."

Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:53 AM PDT

"The choice [by plus-size luxury retailer 11 Honoré] to collaborate for the first time with rich white Lena Duhnam, who flashes her privilege like it's a joke... speaks volumes. It's a reminder that plus-size fashion is still an exclusive club intent on keeping authority and power rotating in the same circles, desperate to do anything but give fat Black women their flowers."

From "The Problem With Lena Dunham's Plus-Size Collection" by Kendra Austin (at The Cut). Austin calls Dunham a grifter: "She grifts."

Here's what the page over there looks like (on my computer):

That Marc Jacobs ad is mindbending. Click to enlarge and clarify. Speaking of giving "women their flowers" — look at those big bulgy roses bursting forth from the model's breasts. And what is she so glum and leg-spread-y about — shopping?!

How emotional is shopping for clothes? Apparently, there's big racial turmoil, such that a white woman promoting plus-size clothing is heard to "speak volumes" about white supremacy. If I'm reading Austin correctly, she's observing that black women made clothing for fat women trendy, and Dunham is appropriating their creation. But I read Dunham to say — in so many words — that white women are fat in a different way, a way that is so uncool that they need special help from a white woman who openly admits she's fat like that:

[Dunham] describes the changes she has witnessed as "not the cool kind that make you muscular" but "just the kind that make your face fat."...

Later, Dunham complains about the language around plus-size fashion, arguing that descriptors like "plus," "curve," and "body-positive" are used to describe a community of "curvy bodies that look like Kim Kardashian has been up-sized slightly," who "want big beautiful butts and big beautiful breasts and no cellulite and faces that look like you could smack them onto thin women."

ADDED: I think the model in the Marc Jacobs ad is Madonna's daughter Lourdes. I'm just noticing "Madonna's daughter Lourdes announced as the new face of Marc Jacobs" (CNN).

6:04 a.am.

Posted: 18 Apr 2021 05:06 AM PDT

"This talk show was so elegant and respectful, that even the comment section of a video like this isn't infested by angry people shouting from both extremes of the issue."

Posted: 18 Apr 2021 03:43 AM PDT

A comment written one month ago on a video put up on YouTube a year ago:

The show aired in 1970. Watch the whole thing. The person at the extreme left of the talk-show couch — who eventually pipes up — is Grace Slick. The host Dick Cavett engineers the mood — which is serious and comical, tense and relaxed. It's quite something.

The 70s vibe is mesmerizing. Somehow the colors brown and orange dominated. And who remembers that there was once a feminist notion that women should travel in pairs so that no one becomes a celebrity?!

Hugh Hefner takes the position that maleness/femaleness is the very beginning of who you are as a person. He also attempts to bond with the feminists over his strong support for abortion rights. And he gets out his pipe and smokes up a storm. One of the feminists smokes a cigarette, and makes a theatrical point of lighting it for herself, rejecting Cavett's straight-man offer to play the old chivalrous role of cigarette lighter.

I cannot tolerate today's TV talk shows. The mood is so poisonous. One alternative is to watch half-century old talk shows on YouTube.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"In the war of racism, we don't want scouts, we want soldiers."

Posted: 18 Apr 2021 03:00 AM PDT

That's a comment, from Washington Blogger, that was emailed to me after I noted the absence of any Critical Race Theory analysis in the New York Times story about the West Point cheating scandal.

The "scout"/"soldier" terminology harks back to a post 5 days ago about the "tech elite's favorite pop intellectual Julia Galef." As NY Magazine put it:

"Galef argues for what she calls 'scout mindset,' which she contrasts with 'soldier mindset.' The idea is that evolution has wired our minds to be soldiers (focused on winning) instead of scouts (focused on ensuring our mental maps accurately reflect the territory of reality). To adopt a scout mindset is to resist falling prey to 'motivated reasoning,' in which we distort our thoughts to achieve a desired outcome."

Here's the graphic comparing the 2 mindsets:

I read Washington Blogger's statement — "In the war of racism, we don't want scouts, we want soldiers" — as satirizing the present-day "woke" pose. And I want to add that I think that mentality is at odds with Critical Race Theory as it was originally understood and used by legal academics in the 1990s. Based on personal contact, I believe that these scholars were — to use Galef's model — scouts, not soldiers.

The phrase "war of racism" is a bit confusing. I'm assuming the commenter means "war on racism." Obviously, there is room to say that there once was a war on racism but those fighting racism used racism too and, at this point in the evolution of the war, with racism on all sides, "of" is more accurate than "on."

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

Scarlet elf cups.

Posted: 17 Apr 2021 06:03 PM PDT

"Sarcoscypha coccinea, commonly known as the scarlet elf cup, scarlet elf cap, or the scarlet cup, is a species of fungus in the family Sarcoscyphaceae of the order Pezizales."