Monday, February 7, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 04:07 PM PST

IMG_9115 

... you can talk about whatever you want. 

IMG_9117X 

Finally, we got a day when it was perfectly warm — February warm.

"It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts."

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 08:02 AM PST

"They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.... Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary. And professional organizations are hurrying to catch up, exploring approaches to treating anxiety that is both existential and, many would argue, rational... [M]any leaders in mental health maintain that anxiety over climate change is no different, clinically, from anxiety caused by other societal threats, like terrorism or school shootings. Some climate activists, meanwhile, are leery of viewing anxiety over climate as dysfunctional thinking — to be soothed or, worse, cured. But Ms. Black... needed help right away... The plastic toys in the bathtub made her anxious. The disposable diapers made her anxious. She began to ask herself, what is the relationship between the diapers and the wildfires? 'I feel like I have developed a phobia to my way of life'...."

From "Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room/Ten years ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would suffer anxiety and grief over climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone" by Ellen Barry, dateline Portland, Oregon (NYT).

Zuckerberg cried.

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 07:40 AM PST

TikTok mocks:
@dollarmotivationclub Mark Zuckerberg Cried to Facebook staff over losing $30 Billion in 1 day #markzuckerberg #facebook #billionaire #business #news #fb #money ♬ original sound - Dollar Motivation Club

Let's listen in as Spotify renegotiates its contract with Joe Rogan...

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 07:00 AM PST

"But controversy attracted by Rogan has not been limited to COVID. Singer India Arie this week said she was pulling her music..."

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 06:44 AM PST

"... and podcasts off Spotify, saying that 'I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than COVID interviews… For me it's also his language around race.' Arie subsequently posted a video clip on Instagram compiling 24 times Rogan used the N-word on his podcast. 'He shouldn't even be uttering the word,' Arie said in the post. 'Don't even say it, under any context. Don't say it. That's where I stand. I have always stood there.'"

From "Spotify Removes 70 Episodes of 'Joe Rogan Experience'; Podcast Host Apologizes for Using N-Word/None of the dozens of segments pulled by the streamer were related to COVID misinformation" (Variety).

If we're going to take the "language around race" seriously and withdraw from group projects that include you with someone who's said something racially wrong, then where can you go? What can you do? And won't we also take the language around gender seriously? All of the machinery of pop culture will collapse. 

ADDED: I've asked where's the stopping point, and I can see an answer in this quote from India Arie: "You" — Spotify — "take this money that you generate and you use it to invest in this guy." It is the special and huge investment in Joe Rogan that makes him different from all the other performers on Spotify whose "language around race" might be considered wrong. That link goes to Independent, where you can see the montage India Arie presented. It's hard to listen to carefully, because the "n-word" is bleeped with a piercing sound, but it seemed to me that Rogan was (always?) talking about the word, not actually using the word. Is there any reason to think that Rogan is a racist? Well, there's reason to think that racism is unavoidably woven into every human organism, but that returns me to my where's-the-stopping-point question.

ALSO: If you search Spotify for the "n-word" (written out), you'll find lots of songs and spoken word. There are artists who use that word as part of their name and at least one who has that as his entire name. And I saw multiple profiles that had just that word as their name, including one whose profile picture is a photograph of a naked, erect penis.

"[T]he movie version of 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s,' while certainly beloved, isn’t nearly as interesting to any Capote fan as the novel..."

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 04:06 AM PST

"... in which the author's voice comes through (and where the character was imagined as more of an 'unfinished' type, à la Marilyn Monroe, whom he wanted for the role). Capote was disappointed by the casting of Audrey Hepburn; ergo, clips from the movie actually misrepresent his vision."

From "'Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation' Review: An Imagined Tête-à-Tête Between Capote and Williams/Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland uses the friendship between two icons as a leaping-off point for an affectionate if somewhat forced dual portrait" (Variety).

I watched 2/3 of that documentary last night and stopped only because of streaming problems (which I attribute to my internet service, AT&T, not to the streaming service, Criterion Channel).

 

In that trailer, Capote, at 1:12, says "Here is a man who has devoted his whole life to art and is a genius" and then, at 1:28, "Most people think because somebody is a creative individual, they must be intelligent. It is not so. Like Tennessee Williams."

"After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959 at 16 as class valedictorian, he studied mathematics at Harvard. A clean-cut supporter of Adlai E. Stevenson..."

Posted: 06 Feb 2022 03:36 AM PST

"... he fell in love with a woman whose parents had been communists. She opened his eyes to folk music and to an outlaw culture that fascinated him, and he became involved with a peace group called Tocsin. Before he graduated in 1963, he met Tom Hayden and other leaders of what was then a tiny organization, Students for a Democratic Society. 'I wanted to be like them,' [Todd] Gitlin wrote in 'The Sixties.' 'These exalted, clear, somehow devout souls so loved the world.'"

From "Todd Gitlin, a Voice and Critic of the New Left, Dies at 79/He earned his stripes in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. In his later years, he was often critical of his erstwhile kindred spirits" (NYT).

Note the centrality of love. You have someone super-smart — valedictorian at Bronx Science at 16 — and studying math at Harvard, supporting the Democratic Party candidate, and he falls in love. He joins up with radicals because, in them, he perceives love. 

Or so his story is told in the NYT obituary.

I see I have a tag for Todd Gitlin, and I'm surprised to see that I've used it 9 times in the 18-year history of this blog. In 2015, I quoted something he'd written in 2003:

"My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks."

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Generate a catchy title for a collection of newfangled music by making it your own

Write a newfangled code fragment at an earlier stage to use it. Then call another method and make sure their input is the correct one. The s...