so apparently people aren’t drinking sodas anymore. which is SHOCKING because surely i drink enough soda to keep the soda industry afloat but apparently no. and lo, coca-cola is branching out… to milk. (as i also pretty much keep all the cows in business, this officially makes me a trend setter.)

this (1) seems ridiculous because aren’t all the new fad diets completely anti-dairy? (or is that just gwyneth?) and (2)… well, they’re not exactly going about it in the awesomest of ways.

behold:

i know, i know, you are like OLINE THIS LOOKS SO FAMILIAR. yes, yes. it does.

wow. that got real tragic real fast.

so it looks familiar except for the fact that monroe was wearing proper clothing and these women appear to be caught in windgusts of dairy.

here’s the daily mail‘s description:

and, of course:

so, amongst the many great tragedies of our time (along with “marilyn monroe reading” and whatever the weird thing is going on with jackie’s pink suit) is, i would argue, monroe’s recent association with skirts blowing up. this is what her name has become shorthand for, thanks in big part to a certain duchess…

and yeah, she’s not the only one…

but she’s certainly leader of the Public People Who Wear Flippy Skirts And Fail To Put Weights In Their Hems brigade…

so that’s that status of monroe in our daily lives. just as jackie onassis refers to sunglasses, so monroe refers to skirts flying up in the air and revealing underwear. (yes, that was dire rhyme-y. it was unavoidable.)

which brings us to fairlife and The New Milk. (which is a little like the new math, which went NOWHERE, remember?)

now, i don’t want to brag, but i drink more milk in one day than most adults probably drink in a month. this is not an exaggeration or a claim, it is a truth.

so i’m somewhat qualified to talk about how people look when they drink milk. i, for instance, have been caught drinking milk and it has looked like this…

a far, far cry, as you will note, from this:

you guys, even the daily mail has noted the disconnect between the banality of daily milk drinking…

and this:

and lemme just say, we are in DANGEROUS WATERS when THE DAILY MAIL calls you out on the absurdity of your ad campaign. just saying.

except they’re not really critiquing the ad campaign so much as women wearing milk dresses and the business sense of putting all your eggs in the basket of New Milk. the daily mail is not known for its subtlety but i feel they are extra not subtle here.

MILK! this despite the fact that even the daily mail‘s researchers were capable of conducting a google search that showed that americans don’t even drink milk.

to recap: the daily mail is cackling into the dark over the stupidity of the idea of marketing a new milk at double the cost of the old milk when americans don’t even really drink milk. which, well… fair point.

so, over the weekend,  the guardian had a piece on how these ads are gross. a number of provocative questions were raised.

Is this milk for drinking, or are you just expected to pour it lavishly over your head as you sit at the breakfast table, pouting sexily at your dry cereal? Why don’t men seem to be invited to partake in this new gastronomic experience? And given the enormous levels of dairy wastage likely to ensue, can you really justify charging double the price for it compared to normal milk?

touché.

but, because i never come to things directly, i’m intrigued by a slightly sideways thing here and i want to dig into that.

(btw, yes, this post sounds as though it’s a transcript for a public lecture i’m giving on new milk and marilyn monroe. i am not and it isn’t. i’m just apparently incapable of writing today without sounding very pedantic. do forgive the teachiness!)

this new milk is marketed to women, quite clearly. and yes, the marketing campaign is decidedly retro. but it strikes me, in its use of the pin-up imagery of monroe, that it is more evocative of alcohol adverts.

come now, as miss bingley told elizabeth bennett, let us take a turn about the room…

there’s the whole women being sexily independent while men watch thing:

women being sexy for men:

women making wholesome drinks for men…

and women drinking as a sign of their independence totally apart from men (though she’s got to have a pool partner, non? who’s drinking that other drink, hmmm??):

or to attract a man:

you could seriously write a dissertation on women and martini & rossi vermouth.

1959

1966

(1966)

1968

1983

yeah, allllllllllllllllll that happened.

and do NOT get me started on vodka.

THOSE GLASSES WERE NOT MADE FOR HOLDING WOMEN.

ok. now’s when i’m realizing how far afield i’ve just strayed and that i have to bring it all back together and it has to mean something.

so, let’s recap. what do we have?

marilyn and “marilyn moments”.

the reality of drinking milk vs. this imagined ridiculousness where drinking milk is a “marilyn moment”.

ok, so, i’m particularly interested in the question of why monroe. not in a john maloofian way of omgwhythiswoman??!? but in the deeper sense of what monroe is being used to do here in these dairy ads.

on the surface it is precisely because of she’s a quick and easily accessible cultural referent as well as a pin-up.

but milk and monroe.

these are obviously sexist ads. there’s no corresponding set of men slathered in daily with their pants coming down. no sexy shots of men.

it’s like the milk mustache campaign combined with girls gone wild. which is not cool.

but, again, i’m just circling the issue of why monroe?

what is happening here with monroe? how is her image being deployed?

i’m tempted to stay on that surface and think it’s as easy as her being such an easy reference. but then, as signaled by my use of the word “easy” twice in 14 words, that seems too easy. so i’m also tempted to think there’s something weirder going on.

something in the connection between milk and monroe. in what the milk people are doing in using monroe here. let’s think this through… (good grief, this is becoming like a math proof or like a close reading of lacan, but we’ve come this far! let’s go forth, persevere! it will come together in the end!)

so milk is a wholesome drink in that we initially get it from our mothers, it’s usually what you drink as a kid, it accompanies cookies, and most people stop drinking it when they become adults until they start developing osteoporosis, at which point they then drink it medicinally.

ya’ll. none of that is particularly sexy.

the images here, then, through the reference to monroe, are sexing up milk. they’re sexy shots and, in being sexy  and by calling upon monroe’s image, they’re applying a veneer of sexiness to a wholesome drink.

(i was going to turn to jennifer aniston and smart water for a comparison but aniston appears to be topless in half those ads so that didn’t provide any sort of contrast but only opens up a whole new line of thought about WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH SEX AND BEVERAGES? and so i’mma back away. we’re in it to win it with monroe…)

and yet there’s something wholesome about monroe too, is there not? something innocent and vulnerable, which is, in huge part, the reason for her massive appeal– that combination of sexiness and innocence, both in the extreme.

that is the marilyn moment. sexy and, crucially, also vulnerable, all at once.

that duality is reflected in the “marilyn moment”: when your skirt blows up, the blowing up of your skirt is perceived as titillating, sexy, but you are exposed, you are vulnerable.

framing it as “a marilyn moment”, in the instance of kate middleton say, seems to tie it into a tradition of sexy women’s skirts blowing up. we’re all supposed to look up to kate middleton because kate middleton is desirable (she is married to a prince) and her attractiveness is proven by the fact that she had a “marilyn moment”, which directly links her to the sexiness embodied by monroe.

but the other side of the “marilyn moment” is that exposure.

those women in the milk ads, they are exposed. like kate middleton or kim kardashian or anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of having their skirt blow up with the press corps present. that, most likely, wasn’t intentional.

the “marilyn moment” is sexy because it is a moment of going up-the-skirt. and it makes the woman to whom it happens vulnerable for precisely the same reason.

the “marilyn moment.” i’ve been alarmed by how frequently and casually this gets used now, not just in the daily mail but in real life.

because i like monroe and i think she should be taken seriously and all too often she is not.

and because i write about women and i don’t think anyone should be reduced to that one time their skirt blew up in a movie just as no one should be reduced to their sunglasses or their shift dresses.

and also because what the “marilyn moment” implicitly points to is just as not awesome as the explicit sexism of these ads. to call these moments “marilyn moments” makes a joke out of monroe and whoever’s skirt happened to blow up on a given day.

the phrase “marilyn moment”, just like the phrase “marilyn monroe reading“, needs to be banished from our vocabulary. because when we start delving into what it might mean, how is used and operates, it is symptomatic of larger problems in how our society thinks and writes and talks about women.

it’s demeaning. to monroe and to women. because the phrase freezes monroe at the point of her skirt blowing up. and when it’s applied to women in the present day whose skirts are/have blown up, it’s covering a moment in the aura of monroe’s glamor, a moment that isn’t so much sexy as, if not a violation, then certainly a trespass.

we are seeing something we are not supposed to see and without consent.

you could argue i’m taking this waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. OLINE THEY’RE JUST MILK ADS!! and they are just milk ads. just as these are just celebrities who don’t have the sense to sew weighs into their hems and she’s just an actress who died a long time ago. but the point i’m making is that all of this points to something else, something decidedly nasty and, thus, difficult to articulate, most especially because it is a matter of women’s clothing and, therefore, does not happen to men.

imma let these photos speak for themselves.

(via)

so this is All of the Things.

and to avoid doing what i so often criticize the daily mail for doing, imma tell you right up front which of The Things it is:

*will and kate

*beyonce and jay-z

*hillary and obama

*eric garner and michael brown

for real. 

i always joke that the daily mail is rigorous in the extreme in condensing the full content of their articles into the subheading of the post. let this be a testament to the richness of this piece…

so will and kate are in new york.

the empire state building is lit red, white and blue…

because, y’know, “imperial” colors. conveniently also american colors. except perhaps these are different colors because…

lest you think the mail has invented a new color, yesterday, they called the duchess “Hate” so let’s just assume their proof-reader has the week off.

so “hate” and the man with the title i keep mis-typing as “duck” are in new york and they’re meeting some people.

prolly listening to a lot of this:

would that they were also meeting these people:

(omg, vanessa ruins everything.)

blair waldorf, let us not forget, was ever so briefly a grimaldi. before, y’know…

anyway, william flew to dc and met some people…

whilst kate went to harlem where she was mistaken for the princess from frozen…

wrapped some presents:

and attended this meeting with ridiculously ginormo tabletents:

that someone instagrammed with a terrible filter.

upon william’s return, they met the clintons.

who are either waaaaaaaaaaaay petite or kate and william are giants or the photographer is 12 feet tall or a combination of all three.

and then. the ballgame.

which, first, i’m pretty sure william is pedantic man.

right??! i imagine he spent the whole game explaining the game to kate, which doesn’t sound like fun.

anyway, so the ballgame. which is where things get interesting. not, mind you, because of this…

but because this:

so this article just took A Turn.

there was no word of this in the header, which- remember- was nearly 250 words long and told us, amongst other things, what beyonce and kate were wearing and that the “royal couple were separated.” (again: proofreader, where art thou?)

there’s TEENY TINY mentions of garner in the article itself. just this:

another sentence, plus, the caption of this photograph mentions michael brown:

so the references that are made are about lebron wearing the shirt and the protest, and they’re almost non sequitors…

and…

there’s more on that at the guardian. and on derrick rose of the bulls here.

this feels so so random as a reader, these abrupt shifts towards and pivots away from these protests. it’s obviously a part of the story: the protest was both inside and outside the arena and it is explicitly linked to concerns for the duke and duchess’s safety.

but it’s a small part of the story, it’s not the main story. and it’s a small enough part of the story that one wonders what it’s doing there.

there are 82 pictures here. only 6 of them are on the protests.

this is not a story about the protests. it is the story of the duke and duchess in america, but the inclusion of the protests acts as a provocative interruption, a slice of reality intruding into the fairytale of the british royalty coming to america and meeting american pop royalty- which was what this story was billed as being about.

the protests are introduced half-way into an article that is essentially the longest photo essay of all time/the most boring celebrity-studded vacay pics you will ever see.

they appear after william has purchased popcorn.

the photo that directly preceeds the first mention of garner is this:

as if that weren’t awkward enough, the photograph directly preceding images of lebron’s shirt is this:

where will and kate are met by the man whose hand we previously met in this photo:

ok, so, bear with me… in my characteristically circuitous way, i’m now going to try to make this all Mean Something in terms of celebrity and media.

in writing about jackie, i’m always trying to push the idea of how celebrity trickles down into daily lived experience. like how my mother remembers waking up ridiculously early and putting on her make-up for work while watching the wedding of charles and diana in 1981 and i have a similar memory of 2011. these celebrity events become memories of our own.

those are rather grand examples. it’s not always grand.

because i was going through a breakup at the same time as jessica simpson in 2005, she will always hold a soft-spot in my heart.

celebrity trickles down and becomes interwoven into everyday experience. so that i remember my own break-up through jessica simpson’s, i remember watching will and kate’s wedding because i was really excited about the pancake breakfast we were having after. the trickle down imbues our everyday experience if not with a touch of glamor then at least a link to it.

it goes the other way too, which is what we see here. and so, with will and kate and this daily mail story of their visit to america, there’s spillage of the everyday- ie. the protests around the garner and brown cases, which are occurring at the local level in a number of cities right now- into what is essentially a celebrity story.

that’s a problematic statement because it seems to banalize (wow- that is actually a word) the protests, putting them on par with my break-up or my pancake breakfast, when what i’m actually trying to suggest is the slippage of the concerns of everyday life- encompassing breakfast and break-ups but also political protest, social inequality, etc.- into the celebrity realm. (slippage is really too gentle a term as this is more of a collision.)

and yes, even that contention on the slippage of everyday concerns into the celebrity realm is problematized here by the fact that half the slippage here is celebritized by dint of it’s being lebron and his teammates wearing “i can’t breathe” t-shirts rather than non-celebrity protesters. maybe the daily mail would have included this element of the duke and duchess story without that, but there are 6 photos having to do with garner/brown and 3 are of athletes, so it seems unlikely.

this is news-lite, mind you. there are minimal details. you wouldn’t learn a lot about the garner and brown cases from the daily mail‘s photo captions, and the mail doesn’t go into the protests in-depth, or really even in shallow, as it’s not noted that they’re known as “die-ins”- a phrase that seems ripe for the melodrama of the daily mail, one which the daily mail is aware of (per this article critiquing the inability of protesters to play dead because they keep checking their phones where the mail has CSIed a bunch ‘o photos to illustrate this), but also a phrase which maybe doesn’t fit alongside pics of the duke and duchess.

because, let’s be real, this is essentially a duke and duchess propaganda piece.

BUT. there’s something about the proximity of this:

to this:

the shot that comes directly after it.

the protest introduces a pathos into this article on pretty people, which is why it is doubly-jarring. it feels intrusive, disruptive. it sits uneasily alongside everything else, like the woman who, using context clues, appears to have been a seat warmer for dikembe mutombo, but whose presence is never explained and whose dress looks like an apron.

i am reminded of the new york city matron co-chairing a benefit on the evening of the october 1969 moratorium to end the war, who gave an interview to the new york times about her event wherein she editorialized about the slowness of president nixon’s vietnam withdrawal by likening it to moving out of an apartment and having to clear out all the closets. reading that in 2014, i thought, girl, you were on the wrong side of history. 

the inclusion of the protests makes everyone else in this article look deeply ridiculous: #blacklivesmatter vs. bey meeting kate/hillary meeting kate/the president meeting kate/kate meeting kids/kate wrapping a present/william schooling everyone on everything because he is pedantic man.

it makes everyone looks ridiculous to the extent that i wonder why the daily mail has included these images, as what they represent undercuts the mail‘s attempt to convey william and kate’s great importance and the very great significance of their meeting bey and jay-z and william’s going to the white house for the first time. here, will and kate appear impotent.

maybe these images were an afterthought, thrown in to tip the scales past 80 pictures.

maybe the daily mail bought them and figured they might as well use them.

maybe they’re planning a longer article on lebron for later in the day.

maybe it’s me, maybe i’m reading too deeply.

but it’s the daily mail… so shallow that it begs to be read deeply because it casts in HUGE GLARE things that are otherwise difficult to see.

there’s something simultaneously so tone-deaf and so titanic about this article on will and kate in america that it puts in stark relief not just the disconnect between celebrity and non-celebrity experience but the grave disconnects within my own country, raising the possibility that this is actually what coming to america means: sitting at a basketball game, meeting celebrities, and pretending to be unaffected by all else.

reading this article, i assume either they are doomed or we are doomed. i cannot tell which.

i’ve written about this before. about how the way we write the obituaries of women is infuriating. by which i mean not just the fact that so few of them are written.

which is a special kind of maddening that we can kind of justify by saying, well, the accomplishments of women weren’t covered in the press as often in the first 3rd of the 20th century so there are fewer well-known women to eulogize.

(we can say that, but also look at how saying that perpetuates the idea that only a very limited number of women had any accomplishments until around at least 1963 and that such stories don’t exist, that they aren’t out there- maybe not in newspaper archives but ON THE STREETS- if the reporters who write eulogies would only go out there and get them.)

but i don’t want to talk about the writing we’re not doing about women’s lives. i want to talk about the writing we do, because that’s more tangible and another kind of maddening.

we’re been here before: in terms of aging, and more specifically in the cases of lauren bacall, joan fontaine. but i don’t know that i’ve ever explicitly tied this to biography, to the power that obituaries wield in crystallizing the story of a life, not just the lives of women but the lives of EVERYONE.

not just famous people, but EVERYONE.

when a relative of yours dies and you write an obituary, that is an act of life-writing. you are writing about a life. and, perhaps a biographer will see what you’ve written and decide to write a book about that person or perhaps only three people will see it in the local paper and think, oh i knew her when… or perhaps no one will see it because, in your grief, you forgot to submit it to that local paper.

or perhaps your relative was jackie onassis and hundreds of people you don’t know wrote her obituary for you.

obituaries are a bit of life-writing that goes up and down the spectrum of society. maybe not everyone has one, but most people do, whether it’s in the NYT, the local paper, the church newsletter or just a family-selected photograph on a funeral home website. and, if you’re the writer in your family, you’re most like gonna have to either write or proof one at some point.

obituaries are memorializations. at the micro, an obituary is a family remembering a loved one and alerting the community to his/her death. at the macro, it’s a society wrestling with the life and legacy of a well-known person who has died.

the obituary is also an early form of posthumous biography, in that it reflects upon the whole of the life; it is writing reflecting on the life in a more analytical way that one gets in contemporary press reports or gossip. the problem with this is that obituaries, as written in most of the mainstream press, are not all that reflective or all that analytical. whilst they wear the vestiges of a biographical piece, they’re still press, and so they more often memorialize the life as presented in the press than reevaluate the life itself.

which means bacall is still “sultry” and jackie is still “silent” and fontaine is jealous of her sister forever and ever always. myths every good biographer ever after will have the responsibility of dismantling.

i have set up camp in that point of dismantlement so it’s probably no surprise that i find this obituary stuff SO PROBLEMATIC and it fills me with righteous anger.

because if the media has historically treated women unequally and you sum up a life by looking at the media reports, you wind up producing a document steeped in all of that sexist press. and that is what sticks. why is why i am asked why jackie never gave any interviews- despite the highly publicized release of the 11 hours of schlesinger interviews 3 years ago. because, twenty years ago, she was eulogized as silent.

here is my ideal world:

elizabeth taylor dies…

well, in my ideal world, elizabeth taylor would never die but since she has too and has, in fact, already done so, let’s begin there…

so elizabeth taylor dies. and someone is given the assignment of writing her obituary. and that someone sits and reflects and contemplates the meaning of elizabeth taylor’s life, her whole life set alongside her accomplishments and analysis of what her legacy might be. right then and there in 2011, upon elizabeth taylor’s death, someone would sit down and do and write that.

alas, that is not how the world of obituaries works. and so, when elizabeth taylor died, we got a summary of her life from someone who died SIX YEARS BEFORE HER.

much was made of this for, like, a day and the people who write obituaries, with some glee, sallied forth to say, oh but that is the way we do things! so we can be totally prepared and really do the life justice by having spent all this time before it was over thinking about it and producing this glorious piece of writing on it.

this is bunk, this procedure. not just in terms of obituaries of women but in terms of obituaries of EVERYONE who has their obituary written at this level of the press. just because it’s standard, because they’ve been doing it for years, because it is how papers have always done obituaries, doesn’t mean it’s right.

it is dysfunctional.

not because it’s weird to write about the undead, but because you write about someone entirely differently when you imagine his/her death versus on the event of his/her death. and because writing obituaries this way culturally sets us back.

GIANT CLAIM. that i’m not going to support further right now, at least not explicitly. (tho perhaps implicitly?)

because, to finally get to what i wanted to talk about… THIS.

in truth, this may not have been written in advance. who knows? the NYT is up-front about the fact that news of her death came to them via a funeral home website.

which suggests to me that it was prepped, or at least the legal stuff was. the biographical end, not so much. so we get a lot of legacy and not a lot of life.

well, there are hints. she “defied” police, “resisted a search”, “refused to admit them” in “a small gesture of defiance” that had wide-ranging legal consequences. she stuffed a warrant down her shirt and was called “belligerent.” there were sexually explicit materials in the house. she lived “quietly” after the ruling. there are doubts about her birthdate. doubts about what she’d done subsequently. doubts about survivors. basically all they do have is her rap sheet and props to them for acknowledging the gaps.

but what do we know about her, besides her defiance?

well, there’s this:

notice anything odd there? here, let me use my heinous paintbrush skills…

well, now, this is interesting. she was a “colorful, sometimes brash” person, which is a provocative comment on her personality, leading one to wonder: in what ways was she colorful? how was she brash? two things this paragraph- if we are operating under the rules of high school freshman year composition class- will illuminate.

except naw. this is a paragraph about the men to whom she was married/engaged/affiliated.

my point would be: DO NOT SAY THAT. tell us about her marriages. tell us facts. do not make a judgement on her personality and then, without supporting it with an anecdote or linking it to anything, pivot to her love life.

to return to my earlier giant unsupported claim- that writing in obituaries culturally sets us back- behold: if we’re trying to make sense of this assessment in the opening clause and place it to some context in the paragraph, then she was “colorful, sometimes brash” because she ran with boxers, there’s some casual but nasty gender, race and class implications wrapped up in those three words and their appearance in this paragraph on this african american woman’s relationship with three african american men. i doubt william yardley or the NYT gave much thought to this seemingly throw away line- the legal stuff is clearly their main concern and why they’ve run the obit at all- but it’s this casualness, this lack of attention to the way we’re writing these things (also reflected in the fetishization of the completely bizarro way they are produced), the words we’re using and the tone.

these are people’s lives we’re writing. a reality about which, within the genre and the writing itself, there’s an appalling lack of care.

HOLY MOSES, ya’ll, it is like the gossip week that keeps on giving. the sony emails, which i’mma leave you on your own with for now, and then this crazy story about leonardo dicaprio leaving a club with twenty women.

if you’ve been around here awhile now, you know leo dicap is my forever love because…

if you’re here simply because you googled “leonardo dicaprio manbun,” (1) welcome, and (2) leo dicap is my forever love and that is because…

so leo is my forever love but that love has limits, fyi. it is not unconditional. i’m not particularly in love with his manbun though i admire his commitment too it. and i don’t love his karate moves or his dance moves or his penchant for dating victoria’s secret models under the age of 23.

he is my forever love in spite of those things.

(meta moment: to let you in on the wormhole i just went down, vladimir putin called leo a “real man” in 2010, after he made a donation at russia’s tiger summit- which ever so briefly sent me spiraling off into the memory of viktor pentrenko skating to salt ‘n peppa’s “whata man, whata man” in the mid-90s: because, in my mind, viktor petrenko would play vladimir putin in the lifetime movie of vladimir putin’s life and vice versa.

EXCEPT really vladimir putin’s praise of leo as a “real man” had nothing to do with the donation and everything to do with the fact that leo’s planes kept having problems and he had to brave strong headwinds to get to st. petersburg.

oh and then there’s this…

which, well, WOW.)

so yeah, we were at leo as my forever love and how i love leo in spite of a lot of things. i wrote about this last summer when my forever love leo dicap was masquerading as leo “SUMMER OF MY LIFE” dicaprio and i was rather annoyed and all like, leo, come now, GROW UP.

where we at now? this report of how leo left art basel with 20 women.

no, wait. we’re actually at this quote from what new york identifies as “this witness”- which is journalistic code for “this rando”- talking about leo:

“He left with 20 girls. Leo and 20 girls. He is my hero. He was overflowing with models everywhere. The Jonas brother looked scared, like he was going to drown and suffocate in the women. His face was hilarious.”

who is this rando? according to this report: “A eye-witness was quoted in various magazines.”

oh, come now. not to lawyer you or anything but… 

COME ON. is “A eye-witness was quoted in various magazines” the legit-est thing? not to mention that they didn’t get the indefinite article right. (srsly, are the proof-readers on strike this week???)

following the trail of links we go from the telegraph (“THIS is next level — even for Leonardo DiCaprio”) to the new york daily news, which is where rando seems to have orginated, as “a spy in South Beach during Art Basel”/”our awestruck snitch.”

note how they do not explicitly say rando was at art basel, but “in south beach.” so, basically, dude was in the same town. and i’m assuming it’s a dude because it makes waaaaaay less sense for leo to become a female onlooker’s hero for taking 20 women out of a club.

so, um… does any of that change the story for you?

personally, i want pics. and i say that as someone writing a biography that is, at times, hugely dependent upon photographs and who, therefore, realizes the extreme limitations of photography- all the things that are left out and all the things we read in- but still. i want pics.

like, when you first heard of this story, how did you envision leo? manbun, likely. but beard? fyi, it’s FULL-ON GETTYSBURG at the moment.

leo dicap, december 2014

gen. james longstreet, 1860(ish)-something

which, loving gettysburg, i- of course- <3

and when you saw this picture:

did you think: aha, leo leaving a club with 20 women!!! 

???

yahoo! celebrity uk & ireland (good heavens, get a catchier name!) would have you think that is what this was…

and, while i don’t know how yahoo! played this story in the US, i do know they played it super gross in the UK…

as though, if he left with 20 women, he banged every single one.

when you first encountered the rumor that leonardo dicaprio left a club with 20 women, did you assume he banged every single one?

it’s amazing how quickly the story shifts from leaving a club to banging…

(fyi, to spare you the agony of this gallery…

so that was très inconclusive…)

what is up with this?? that leap from taking 20 girls home to banging 20 girls? that’s weird. and what does it say about what we’re ready to believe about dicaprio???

i don’t know what happened at art basel or in leo’s hotel room and i don’t really care beyond the fact that i saw this was a story that was “trending” and was curious to see what there was to trend. and once i got looking- because i’m writing a biography primarily tracing stories through gossip and the press- i saw all of the things happening with this story that i see happening in stories from 1970.

turns out there’s not much to this story beyond the fact that some random guy said leo left art basel with 20 women. something that, given dicaprio’s reputation as a modelizer, as well as his compelling portrayal of jordan belfort in wolf of wall street…

has the tiniest, tinniest ring of truth, but for which there is squat for proof.

which isn’t to say there aren’t photos…

Lol caption this… 📷 LIV Miami last night #ArtBasel @zoeisabellakravitz @Usher @LeoDiCaprio pic.twitter.com/WlI2zdSTm4

— Jordan Taylor Wright (@TaylorCutFilms) December 4, 2014

Leonardo DiCaprio spotted at Art Basel! Perhaps we’ll run into him while we’re in Miami. #agirlcandream #wanderlust pic.twitter.com/tMjs8J4dxv

— Jet Set Candy™ (@JetSetCandy) December 4, 2014

there are photos. deeply boring photos.

and they feature a decided lack of women.

it seems only cosmopolitan has questioned the validity of this report of leo taking 20 women home. other outlets have simply printed it with glee. but cosmo- seldom the voice of reason and yet seemingly the lone one here- asks:

But could this possibly be true? How do you get that many women out of a nightclub and into wherever you’re taking them without anyone managing to get a photo of it? That’s like the size of a third-grade class going on a field trip. People will notice. Unless the women are invisible. Maybe they were invisible?

AMEN. amen.

of course, though, then they backtrack and say “But if anyone could pull off such a massive girl heist, it would be Leo.”

would it? is that really what we believe? and if so, aside from what that tells us of what we think of dicaprio, what does it tell us about ourselves?

riddle me this: do we need leo to be extra next level because george clooney is a married man?

in case you were in a turkey coma and missed it, THIS.

i was reading the guardian‘s report aloud to my mother as a spot of boxing day entertainment. it begins innocuously enough: “Man once known as Screech charged with possession of switchblade, carrying concealed weapon in Ozaukee County.”

and my mother said, why was he arrested for that?

it’s when you get to the  “alleged stabbing at a bar” and the charges of “felony second-degree recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon” that his arrest becomes explicable.

i think it’s fairly safe to say at this point that screech has become the #1 embarrassment of bayside.

last spring, zack morris refrained from saying anything but his current co-star, travis from clueless, denounced screech (real name: dustin diamond, but then- if you’ve stuck with me this long- surely you already knew that) as a phoney because his sex tape wasn’t legit.

which it wasn’t.

EVERYTHING IS A LIE, ya’ll.

which brings us to the pièce de résistance in the guardian‘s report on screech’s “accidental stabbing” of someone in a wisconsin bar:

observations:

(1) when your claim to inculpability hinges upon the assertion that you’ve never used the term “douchenozzle,” your claim is shaky, at best.

(2) when the highlight of your recent roles is a star-turn alongside aaron carter- he of the (faked?) new kids on the block turf war- you maybe need to reevaluate your career.

(3) when, within a decade, you’ve been involved in a faked sex tape, a faked memoir, an accidental stabbing, and received the scorn of zack morris and travis from clueless, it is maybe time to reevaluate your life.

and while we’re here… because i can’t write about saved by the bell without getting this stuck in my head:

and lastly, how epic that when you google image search for “90s fabric”, it is like looking into a.c. slater’s closet.

it is like the gods looked deep deep into their grab bag and said, YES. 

yes, yes. it’s for real. THANK YOU FOR THIS MOMENT: THE MOVIE. i die.

because, for real, the only thing better than a “revenge memoir” is a bio-pic. picture it, please…

they pretty much already look like they’re in a bio-pic as it is, amiright?

but wait. maybe you’re like, OLINE, WHO ARE THESE FRENCH PEOPLE AND WHY SHOULD I CARE? in which case, start here. then go here. and then here. then come back.

ARE YOU RIVETED??!

i am riveted.

i am also slightly worried, because it seems this bio-pic is being produced by a french company. the same french company that brought us the BIG SNOOZE that was the nicholas sarkozy bio-pic of awhile back- which, if you’ve ever endured it, then you know that, whilst the french are very good at a very many things (pastries! champagne! fashions!), they maybe are not the best at bio-pics of living figures.

i’m also slightly worried about the producer’s claim that “the theme is universal.” it’s unclear whether that refers to “the struggle of a woman in love” or REVENGE.

the fact that trierweiler is collaborating on the script and the producer’s assurance that “we will discover new things” seems to suggest the latter.

the producer is a friend of trierweiler’s and has said “I’d like the main character to tell her story to a confidant, to better understand the political world, and the woman,” which makes it sound like this is basically going to be a movie wherein actresses depict the conversations of the producer and the writer. fun times.

i have low hopes. can you tell?

i have low hopes largely because i find trierweiler’s game-plan so far tremendously interesting and it seems likely this movie ain’t gonna be delving into any of the things about it which i find interesting.

as the guardian noted, “Trierweiler won much public sympathy after Hollande rejected her in a public statement, following which she had a stay in hospital, but that has largely evaporated since the publication of her book.” the evaporation of that good will is compelling, tied as it is to a woman trying to tell her story.

if she’d not written the memoir, if she’d gone quietly into the night, trierweiler could have been beloved. well, maybe not beloved, as she wasn’t exactly liked before this either, but still. she might have been spared hatred and the loss of the majority of her friends.

but she wrote the memoir.

and did the book tour.

and when she was asked if france was misogynist, she said “In the realm of politics, yes. Women in politics encounter opposition as a matter of course.”

which is uh-mazing and more than any american former first lady has ever explicitly said. so props there.

but this is all rather a bit messy, non? which seems to be where the majority of the complaints against trierweiler fall… along the lines of HOW DARE SHE!

because this isn’t just good gossip. it all matters for a number of reasons. one of which is that this movie, the memoir and trierweiler just in general, are all serious political liabilities for hollande, who’s standing for re-election in 2017.

which is important, but not what especially intrigues me here.

riddle me this: do men pen “revenge memoirs”?

would this headline- which reminds me very much of “prince charles’ ex-girlfriend gets engaged“-

be written of a dude? (btw, it’s not nearly so bad as it sounds. after the article’s 2nd paragraph notes that 2/3rds of the french hate her, the 3rd paragraph reveals, “she was all smiles when she arrived at the Banana Café in central Paris to join a wedding anniversary party for a gay couple.”)

why is it always the woman’s story that is “sordid”?

trierweiler’s rather than hollande’s? monica’s rather than bill’s?

i am intrigued by trierweiler because there is no parallel. she is in uncharted waters.

a first lady who wasn’t married to the president. a first girlfriend dumped. a woman trying to put herself back together- in record time, really- by writing her story, telling her story, and selling her story.

what will we do with her?

a naive sounding question but a legit one. i write a lot about women in the media, about the way the media use women and we women use women in the media to make meanings, and how the lives of women as portrayed in the media and as consumed by us become trammeled up with all this other cultural, national, sexual, political business.

and i write about what we do with that.

and this, right here?

this is the trammeling of trierweiler with all sorts of french lady life-writing/love affair etiquette norms.

there are rumors trierweiler is planning a sequel.

“what she didn’t say is worse than what she wrote,” according to the weekly magazine VSD, via the telegraph.

there are, supposedly, hundreds of texts and a little black book.

“Valérie is the embodiment of a woman’s struggle to scream the truth,” the film’s producer has said.

read: she is dangerous, this woman. that is the story i want to read.

dear my boyfriend adrien brody.

riddle me this: how is it you have been in a tv miniseries on houdini and you have not yet starred in a biopic on dali?

remember midnight in paris? presumably, yes, as you were in it.

remember when you were onscreen for like a total of a minute and a half as dali…

and in just that minute and a half, everyone in the audience forgot a decade of things like this…

and this…

and this…

(WE WILL NOT EVEN SPEAK OF YOUR HOUDINI HAIR.

MINE EYES.)

and was like oooooh yeah that’s why he won an oscar.

BECAUSE HE IS UH-MAZING. remember that?

that was cool.

so here’s my thought: gala and dali, the movie.

THE MOVIE, mind you. this ain’t some lifetime business. this is big screen.

and it has to be both dali AND gala.

because, well…

they were amazing and it has to be a film about their relationship…

and it has to be whole-life.

none of that focusing on the young and pretty years. we need to see this:

we absolutely must be told how they wound up here:

and the press conference of the leopard print coat MUST be involved:

so i know i’m basically no one outside of the world of developing lifetime movies on the internet that will never be made, but still. this is GENIUS is it not… this career move you should be making?

IT WILL BE EPIC.

edith will co-star.

and you’ll show up at the premier wearing something like this…

making faces like this…

and i’ll be all like, i love you but…

but then…

you can see it, yeah?

in random things i happened upon whilst writing about 1972…

HOLY MOSES, you guys. let’s dispatch with the easy stuff first…

kelly taylor picked up her dog from daycare.

donna martin had a hard time renting a DVD from redbox on NYE.

though she was goodnatured about it:

i feel like the daily mail showed some real restraint when it refrained from a headline screaming: TORI IN MELTDOWN RENTS DVDS TO WATCH ALONE. just saying.

what else??

oh yeah. ahhhhhhhhhndrea.

the DM CSIs the shit out of this photo:

in an effort to explicate this “random grouping” and determine whether rachel green and ahhhhhhhhhndrea have been BFFs all this time. alas the evidence proves inconclusive: “It’s unclear if Aniston and Carteris are friends but the 90210 star could be seen clapping along as Aniston’s name was read and sat just across from the former Friends star with her gold patterned shawl draped around her shoulders.”

though some serious pains are taken to make sure we remember ahhhhhhhndrea was “uptight.”

which brings us to brenda…

who is on a media tour promoting some reality thing she’s got with holly marie combs, during which they posed with steve:

and during which she took questions on 90210, at one point, claiming brandon (ie. jason priestly) has memory problems stemming from his 2002 auto accident- a claim made in the context of her saying his memoir wasn’t entirely true.

the thing is, brenda just didn’t remember complaining about planes and limos like he claimed in his memoir that she did.

‘Supposedly I wanted a limo, and I’ve always hated limos my entire life,’ she explained.

‘I find them embarrassing and grotesque. I mean, there are things that would in no way happen. Like I didn’t even go on that jet at that point in time. It’s like, “Wait, wait, wait! You totally confused me with somebody else maybe from the show?!”‘

so this created a brouhaha which led to brenda and HMC saying they felt “bamboozled” and misunderstood because this wasn’t a “diss” against brandon.

if you’re all like, OMG BRENDA AND BRANDON ARE FIGHTING!!!!! fear not. they aren’t. he called her. they made up. she told the reporter, “he just said he loves me.”

<3

OH BUT WAIT. there’s more.

so there’s backstory here. imma leave you alone with that to fend for yourself and suss it out. google daily mail and tori spelling and you’ll go far in the way of required reading, but suffice to say, donna martin has a reality show about her marriage which is pretty much the reality tv equivalent of a colonoscopy.

please know that i say that as someone who- thanks to so notorious- believes tori spelling has the power to be one of the great comedic actresses of our time. so i’m not knocking donna martin’s talents, i’m questioning her choices in doing a reality TV show that is this invasive.

brenda apparently watches it. and it makes her uncomfortable.

doesn’t that header photo make us ALL uncomfortable?? way to be subtle daily mail.

but more than her confession of discomfort, i’m intrigued that she watches it at all. and that she admits to watching it on national TV. what must it be like to find out about your friend’s imperiled marriage by watching it unfold weekly on television? uncomfortable and heart-breaking, obviously, but surreal too, non? and deeply strange.

but this is the world these people have lived in for years. they are TV characters to such a degree that i have here, almost exclusively referred to them  by their TV character names. so perhaps it’s normalized, the idea of finding out about your friend’s life on his/her reality show or in his/her memoir, just as you or i check facebook and see what your friends just had to eat. maybe a memoir isn’t so strange when you already have a doll.

while we’re here in the 90s… surely, by now you’ve seen this:

which brings us to a cultural moment where it is like screech never happened. probably in large part because of this and this:

of all the times to have a “clown girlfriend”…

surely we’ve all been around the block together enough that i don’t have to preface my close reading of a seemingly deeply shallow thing– in this case, a fashion magazine editorial (the captions! the prices! the open mouths! the ennui!)– with a disclaimer that i don’t always take a magnifying glass to a fashion mag to study the fine print in the posters the model’s affixing to the wall, yeah? surely it’s understood by now that i’d only do that when it leads us to a cultural Deep Point? yes?

i’mma go with yes. and assume you’re with me.

anyhoo, so in the past week, steinem has suddenly been EVERYWHERE. by which i mean she is probably no more or less present in all your lives than usual but, in my own, because i’m writing about the 70s, she is increasingly, every day, coming up.

in this context in a chapter:

where i need to figure out how to encapsulate her significance in late-20th century american life in one clause.

with this fabulous quote that gives me a reason- that isn’t a total stretch- for introducing her at this point:

and in this really bizarre way in an article by someone deeply off-put by her speech patterns:

so steinem’s been floating around in the general flotsam and effluvia that surrounds one when one is writing a biography of someone who lived during steinem’s times.

kind of like how if you write about britain in the 1940s, the mitfords are inevitably going to come up- if not the whole lot of them, you’ll at least run into one or two at emerald cunard’s.

except there were five of them and only one of steinem, so this is an impressive feat, to be floating to the surface of a narrative that isn’t your own with such frequency.

all of which i would never have thought to write about had not a friend directed me to a steinem-related fashion editorial in this season’s issue of porter.

confession: i’ve the sense this is psuedo not allowed, so i’ve purposefully taken crap images for the purposes of our discussion here. if you’re all like, OMG I NEED TO SEE THE STUDDING DETAIL ON THOSE £150 JEANS!!!! by all means, go forth, buy this issue of porter and enjoy the pretty pictures in high quality.

because they are very pretty pictures.

but. BUT. and you know how i love solving problems so you probably assumed from the get-go that there would be problems galore here… i would say it isn’t so much a galore as a PANOPLY of problems. specifically with the way steinem is being evoked. let’s take a look…

oh yeah. first. this is gloria steinem, at the Women Strike for Peace and Women Waging Peace Organization Luncheon in new york on 8 june 1973.

and here are some assorted- BY NO MEANS ALL ENCOMPASSING OR REPRESENTATIVE OF EVERY WOMAN’S EXPERIENCES- images from the US women’s movement in the early 1970s…

SALLY RIDE, yo!!!!! an image from steinem’s 50th birthday in 1984, but which, while we’re here…

BOOM.

and back to steinem…

so steinem’s a big deal. she’s not THE ENTIRETY OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, mind you. but she’s an important figure in the women’s movement and in women’s history in the US in the last century. and she continues to be a powerful (and divisive) voice for equality today.

i’m guessing that is what the team at porter were going for. at their editorial meeting, they were all like, STEINEM ROCKS! LET’S MAKE A TRIBUTE! 

and, of course, because porter is a fashion magazine, the tribute would be one framed in terms of fashion.

and, because the end game of fashion magazines is to sell luxury goods, this celebration of the fashion and style of gloria steinem as explored in the pages of porter would involve some swanky stuff.

in particular, i would point your attention to these four things:

* the title of this is “the way we were”, a phrase suggesting that this is nostalgia and we have come a long way from here, whilst also harkening to the barbra steisand/robert redford movie where the smart, liberal, activist woman with the wild hair lost her man.

which, if you don’t remember it from the way we were, perhaps you will remember from this.

so, “the way we were.” remember it.

note also these phrases:

* “liberating agenda”

* “a clarion call to women”

* “still inspires and resonates today”

i’d also encourage you to read the steinem quote up there in that intro page as it’s the last we’ll see of steinem in this piece.

which brings us to the piece itself. which, call me cynical, does not make feminism, activism or womanhood look particularly fun.

right?!

basically, i’m deducing, it involves a lot of standing around and wearing sunglasses indoors…

and holding things…

and maybe every once in awhile hanging a poster…

before collapsing from the ennui…

(fyi, the only words i could make out other than “MANIFESTO” was the phrase “SHE IS HOT”)

and yeah, there are some dudes here.

equally decked in pricey things and just as stricken with ennui.

activism = exhaustion. stylish exhaustion, yes, but exhaustion all the same.

in reality, activism can look like this. yeah, you talk on the phone and hang things on walls and look at books. that happens. and, as is the case with so much in life, there are many times where there are things in your hands, so that your jewelry is shown off to best effect…

activism is all about clipboards, you guys.

and pamplets.

and legal tomes.

and inter-office routing.

but where are the rallies? i want to see legislation. for some reason i thought the “liberating agenda” was going to lead to legislation. not to the admonishment that i should…

the peeps at porter seem to be deliberately echoing images of steinem…

but how discouraging, really. even just the juxtaposition of those two. that we’ve gone from steinem to a woman wearing a ferregamo cape (£1,800) and skirt (£1,130), and sunglasses by cartier (£824). but also that we’ve gone from steinem writing women’s liberation to this drugged-looking lady with this rather feeble sign reading: women.

to give credit where credit is due, there was an amendment to this sign. if you’re doing a deep reading of this editorial, perhaps you’d notice this:

freedom? pride? idk.

again, call me cynic, but i assume it’s only there to lure our eyes down to the model’s £1,430 tom ford platforms and £11 calvin klein socks.

so this isn’t entirely ahistorical.

these model’s were photographed open-mouthed…

steinem also was photographed open-mouthed…

as is pretty much everyone in public life…

but who would you think gloria steinem was from viewing this editorial?

if you’re thinking she was someone who occasionally opted to sit on the floor, well, yes.

but, as a biographer, i’d caution us not to read to deeply into the fact that someone occasionally opted to sit on the floor.

you’d have a pretty good notion of how she looked in the early 1970s, in terms of long hair and sunglasses. you might assume she liked to do menial office work and carry clipboards. and from the quote, you can deduce she liked to imagine and dream and plan.

but who was she?

actually, that’s not the question. the question is: why should we care?

among the many things that annoy me here, what annoys me most is the title.

the way we were.

were it called anything else, the feature would still be offensive simply because it’s so utterly tone-deaf. but under a different title, though it would still be a sexist way of celebrating a feminist icon, it wouldn’t carry the implication of the past.

that is what bothers me. that, in the context of celebrating steinem, one would do so with a mere two sentences of her own words within a 12-page fashion editorial that includes this caveat:

the subtext being: LADIES, SHUT UP AND SAY IT THROUGH YOUR SHADES! 

i know, i know, it’s a fashion magazine. but as someone who rather loves fashion and thinks we should all be collaborating at every possible level and every discipline to change the world through the development of stories about lives, this strikes me as an opportunity missed.

it was bold that they used steinem (though it would’ve been bolder to use bella abzug). it is disheartening that they used her in such a stale and unilluminating way.

it’s delusional to pretend this is the way we were when, in reality, it’s the way we are.

Backstage with #DerekZoolander, Hansel and Anna Wintour #Zoolander2 #linkinbio http://t.co/PJEiinPc7E pic.twitter.com/yztEtgX3lq

— Valentino (@MaisonValentino) March 10, 2015

so this was terrifically exciting for about five minutes.

NEW THINGS!!!! COMING OUT OF THE VAULT. (join me in remembering this.)

so yeah, JACKIE STUFFS COMING OUT OF THE VAULT INTO THE LIGHT OF DAY. MASSIVELY EXCITING.

except then it became significantly less exciting upon an encounter with the finding aid and the realization…

you will note: [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED] [CLOSED].

which i feel so complainy complaining about because there’s so little open in her files that just a mere folder feels like a pot of gold, so to have these files opened does represent a massive infusion of new material. and maybe there’s a (tiny) chance they’ve not yet updated the finding aide to accurately reflect what’s been opened. but.

BUT.

i should be so grateful.

“Thayer, Molly: ‘Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years’ notes and edits” sounds promising, as does “White House: Secrecy pledges,” “Dinners: Private, friends,” “King, Martin Luther, Jr.: Funeral,” “Matchbooks: Jacqueline Kennedy (1 of 2 Folders).”

there’s so much here.

i should be so grateful. who cares about “Yucatan, 1966 [CLOSED]”… “Parks Springtime Seed Catalog, 1979″ is now available for research!!!!

i am, of course, grateful and i accept what they give me, gratefully.

but it is so TOTALLY ARBITRARY, ya’ll.

THIS IS AMERICA. whycome we are prohibited from viewing jfk’s doodles??

i know, i know, think of what we can see!! and believe you me, i’m now rearranging my whole boston trip and screwing all the other files i planned to look at in order to see these, so i’m not unaware of the gift. but it’s a mixed blessing, this. they open so much, and yet they’ve held back so much more.

i am grateful, but it is, at once, soooooooooooooo exciting and deeply, awfully absurd.

true story: in psychology, “the martha mitchell effect” is the process by which everyone assumes the patient is delusional when she/he is, in fact, describing reality.

(AP)

i’m sorry, i’ve been horribly remiss in celebrating my boyfriend adrien brody’s sartorial choices for this year’s met ball. all apologies. voila! WHAT IZ UP?! 

now, surely you know i love this. and surely you see why.

HAS HE EVER LOOKED MORE MALE RUSSIAN FIGURE SKATER?!?!?! um… no.

because OBVIOUSLY this ensemble is a distant cousin of viktor petrenko’s 1988 winter olympic games men’s figure skating long program costume. (OF WHICH THERE ARE FAR TOO FEW PHOTOGRAPHS ON THE INTERNET.)

would that everything men wore were a distant cousin of viktor petrenko’s 1988 winter olympic games men’s figure skating long program costume… i’m pretty sure the world would be a better place.

but its influences are myriad, let’s be real. and this…

is also shades of evgeni plushenko in 2010.

(geez. 2010 doesn’t seem that long ago and yet how dated lysacek’s vera wang with swarovski crystal snake looks now… [to say nothing of the scott disick slick-back])

it is also, of course, a very subtle homage to dmitri dmitrenko’s less subtle homage to cardinal richelieu via a studded brocade cosby sweater.

which, in turn, feels like an homage to the brocade love seat my parents bought when i was a teenager as a crucial move in the pivot of our living room into the decor of the 1990s.

there is also, as is usually the case of things fashionably hardcore, more than a little bit of tonya harding to be found here. in the wine tone and the beaded flowers and the pathos of its gems.

though the deepness of her V would make anyone unfamiliar with the audacity of figure skating necklines blush and, simultaneously, lends my boyfriend’s rather more chaste arrangement- the satin! the velvet! the shirt! the bowtie!- the tyrannical repressedness of a character in a wharton novel.

all of which to say, well played, my boyfriend adrien brody. you have pulled off a veritable matryoshka doll of homages with this blazer.

you have successfully, in this one ensemble, combined all of the most essential elements for costuming on ice.

a minor point, maybe, but a worthy one nonetheless.

and my career advice still stands… FOR THE LOVE OF GALA, PLEASE DO A BIOPIC OF DALI.

 so there’s this vanity fair article this month. “How Jackie O Played Matchmaker to Two of America’s Greatest Minds.” it has unsettled me and i’m not entirely sure why so let’s dig in…

 this article is- and i’m being very reductive but this is, indeed, the crux- about how the writer brought together his harvard professor  and a journalist by using jackie onassis. he writes: “I wrote Jackie—from now on in this story she’s not Mrs. Onassis anymore—and asked if she’d seen the piece on Stone [the journalist], and did she remember our conversation about Finley [the professor]? Wouldn’t it be fascinating if these two men met? Snail mail being quicker then, in less than 24 hours the unmistakable throaty whisper on the phone was telling me what a perfect idea this was.”

the dinner party was a collaboration: “Jackie and I discussed who else should be there, and we came up with a couple of Harvard men and their wives whom she knew, men Finley had known as undergraduates. The idea was we’d be comfortable wallpaper decorations for Finley, putting him at ease and making Stone feel like performing to impress us.”

if you’re like, omg, this is the most uninteresting story ever, yes, yes. it is an amazing job of intellectual wanking, but bear with me. i am setting the stage and now arriving at a point.

what of jackie? “I have absolutely no idea what Jackie wore. Whether she glided around the room in a diaphanous gown or a simple blouse over a peasant skirt—in both of which outfits I later saw her—I haven’t a clue.” BUT. “She was a sylph; isn’t that enough? It will have to suffice that in my memory she was, like Flaubert’s idea of an author and God, everywhere present, nowhere visible.”

let’s acknowledge that, even though it’s 1978 when this is taking place, we are DEEP in the camelot dream… “The evening’s atmosphere comprised equal parts of light and warmth. You wanted to be there, and you wanted it to go on forever.” which is all well and good, but what i do not like, what has made me uneasy, is this:

“In the presence of Izzy Stone and John Finley, Jackie Onassis transformed herself into the most benign of interviewers—curious, searching, probing, improvising as she went along. But she was not only a good questioner; in fact, that wasn’t her greatest talent. What she did best was listen. In a way this made her a very old-fashioned woman, always alert to absorbing the tales and lessons of men. Yet in her it was different; in her, as she listened, it was clear she was not simply a blotter for others’ words but a discerning judge. She raised listening to an art form. Her large shining eyes, glowing from some hidden well, would fix a speaker as though he were in a spotlight. He—yes, it usually was he—had to be brighter, more pointed, concise, with a better dénouement, or at least punch line, than he knew he had in him.”

so here’s the thing. this is not the first time a man- and it is always a man- has testified to the fact that jackie’s gaze was a beam of light in which men came alive and attained a brilliance they had not, outside it, known. i actually quote two of them in the draft of my book without ever thinking too deeply about it. but let’s think deeply about it.

let’s break this down. what is this paragraph doing? what do we mean when we say jackie was a dazzling listener?

to me, this paragraph- through the evocation of “a very old-fashioned woman”- suggests she listens because that is what she was trained to do. not because these dudes are talking about subjects she’s genuinely interested in. she listens because she is the hostess.

“The talk was not merely sparkling but inspired. Even inspirational.” and yet her questions are “good” but “benign.” and so when she speaks she’s merely, passively, guiding the tenor of the conversation rather than contributing to it. (in the writer’s defense, he’s a by-stander too and they’d agreed to play “wallpaper”, but this isn’t a story about the writer. it’s a story about how jackie fostered what is essentially an academic bromance, and in that story, she is “old-fashioned” in her passivity. what i’m critiquing is the way she is written.)

her greatest strength here, he suggests, “her greatest talent” even, “What she did best was listen.” if these guys were “america’s greatest minds,” she is, here, america’s greatest listener: “a discerning judge” who “raised listening to an art form.”

and i do think she was a great listener.  i’m not contesting that. what i’m contesting is the way the listening is rendered here and elsewhere.

FILE – In this Feb. 22, 1978 file photo, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., left, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis speak at a publishing party in New York City. During the first half of 1964, just months after her husband was assassinated, Jacqueline Kennedy sat for seven interviews with Schlesinger, an historian and family friend. Now, with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration coming next year, Caroline Kennedy is allowing the conversations to come out. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

i am contesting the gender business at play… “Her large shining eyes, glowing from some hidden well, would fix a speaker as though he were in a spotlight. He—yes, it usually was he—had to be brighter, more pointed, concise, with a better dénouement, or at least punch line, than he knew he had in him.”

in these portrayals where jackie listens to a man, she is never portrayed as a thinker. it is not that she is listening to this guy because she is intellectually engaged in the issues they are discussing. it is because it is because she is a hostess and it is her destiny to listen as a great listener so that the man/men can achieve new heights in his/their thinking. greater thinking “than he knew he had in him.”

listening, jackie enables men to be their best selves.

(if we were portraying these men as women are portrayed, then we would say that under jackie’s gaze, the men perform more adroitly…)

alas, the greatness of her listening as an achievement is totally undercut by the admission: “Not that the guests of honor needed much prodding.”

“the gregarious Stone” “was eager to dispense his newfound wisdom about Socrates’s anti-democratic tendencies.” Finley “spoke a little haltingly, appearing reluctant to interrupt.” btw, i’m glad it was the writer’s dream come true because this dinner party sounds hella awkward. behold: “When Stone paused for a bite, and Finley proposed something as modest as the fact that Socrates after all bequeathed the very kind of dialogue they were having that evening and that Plato, to his credit, understood that, Stone came right back with the bias against democracy that Plato had shown in his defense of Socrates. At precisely this moment, Esther Stone [Stone’s wife: “as winning in her way as our hostess”], like a judge who had heard quite enough from the prosecution, said, ‘Shush, Izzy, this man really knows.'”

after dinner, stone holds forth on the importance of slavery in democratic athens and “The effect was of an electrical current coursing through Jackie’s living room; we were not so much being instructed as illuminated.”

when it was all over, jackie was deluged with thank yous. stone: “one of the most wonderful evenings we have ever spent. Meeting Prof. Finley at dinner with your engaging young friends made us think of the 18th century, when great ladies in Paris attracted the philosophes to their salons, and in that setting, before an audience of beauty, turned learned debate into an adventure in wit. Your lovely presiding presence was itself an illumination. I. F. Stone.”

from finley: “Shining memories and a general zephyr have wafted me home. You woo the soul into freer skies than it commonly inhabits and which it thinks for the moment its native element—partly rightly, because one will never forget.”

so why have i just recapped this incredibly boring article (i mean, vanity fair, COME ON) in ruthless detail? in part, to suggest that even jackie onassis isn’t enough to make a story of academic dinner party debate exciting to people who were not there. and also to emphasize how very much we see what we are taught to see. its easy to take jackie’s salonist role at face-value. it was, undoubtedly, something she enjoyed and knew how to do.

but how often do we do the things we know how to do? and how often are women written into stories as though that is all they can do?

was she intimidated by the arguments of these men? frankly, they sound like pompous asses to me so i would’ve wanted them out of my living room ASAP. but they were discussing things she was interested in and about which she knew a great deal.

what did she think of them? why did she stay silent? why did she only ask “benign” questions and listen? and what might that listening mean?

i am a 21st century woman. i am a feminist. but put me in certain rooms and i know how to do several versions of this exact thing. either to recede so that the men may talk- the modern equivalent of their leaving the room for cigars and brandy; now women remain seated at the table and simply stay silent. or to gaze at them in wonder, so they are at liberty to go on and feel they are better than usual, because the women around them are devoted and rapt.

sometimes, this is genuine. other times, it is a performance given in defeat. because, sometimes, listening is easier, safer, because it is what is- whether consciously or unconsciously- we expect.

the thing that is funny here, which you would never know from this article, is that jackie loved witty, bright men, loved bringing interesting groups together over dinner, and she HATED harvard with the fire of a thousand suns. this recurs in her letters.

“I can think of nothing that would give me greater pleasure than to leave the Harvard Corporation with its mouth watering,” she wrote robert mcnamara. something that would, she noted, give rfk and jfk “a wry laugh in heaven—.”

to richard neustadt: “I look forward to seeing you this fall and to seeing you bring Harvard to her knees.”

so of all the things in this essay, the fact that the author told her that “Finley was especially famous for saying that Harvard was a conspiracy of alcohol, intellect, and athletics to postpone sex,” strikes me as the greatest insight into why she invited him to her home.

what i want to suggest here is the complexity of her listening and, by doing so, the fullness of her humanity, both of which are absent in these anecdotes, where it is always, instead, a man praising the beam of light she briefly cast upon him, once upon a time.

“She was a sylph; isn’t that enough?” no. it is not.

of all the privileges i’ve had in the last five years- and there have been many- meeting hugh d. auchincloss iii is the biggest.

(via Nicholas Melee photography)

back in the summer of 2011, i went out to hammersmith farm twice. first, for a formal interview on jackie. the second time, for a less formal conversation that he indulged me in and which wound up lasting over two hours.

in between the interviews, i sent flowers- in the belief that men remember women who send them flowers and because, though i’m neither of the old world or from newport, that seemed like the type of old world, newport thing to do. when i called to confirm our second meeting, screaming down the line: YUSHA? IT’S OLINE. OLINE… THE WRITER!!! there was silence and a cough and then yusha said, oh, yes, yes, oline of the flowers, how are you?

his voice was like rolling hills and honey and summer. one of those broad upper-crust accents, caught in some liminal space between north and south, so that it is at once strange and familiar and AMERICA.

a few weeks before i went to see yusha for the second time, a biographer had read some of my work, found it frustrating, and complained, i can’t pin you down, oline. i just can’t pin you down. he could not imagine what i was doing, a complaint that unnerved me as the message i took from it was that there was something wrong with me which bled into my writing, making my work seem slick- a series of frustrating evasions and refusals rather than the kaleidoscope of possibilities which i wanted it to be.

on my way to see yusha, i was worrying over the question of how to overhaul my writing- something that would obviously involve overhauling my self- and how to make the work i produced more neatly align with the expectations of others. put more directly (and absurdly): to make it align with the book other writers would write were they writing this book. all so that this book, my book, would more easily meet with success.

i went to see yusha and, at the time, i wrote this:

i’m sitting on yet another low-to-the-ground couch in yusha’s sun room. he isn’t feeling well. there are these thick silences that sit between us but i’ve learned to wait.

he’s been working on his tan, sunning at the beach every afternoon, he tells me. his blue eyes shine bright in the golden brown of his face. 

i am listening but my mind keeps darting back to what the biographer had said. i cannot be pinned down. i will fail, inevitably, because i cannot be pinned down.

we’ve been deep into an analysis of jfk’s foreign policy in the middle east but, after a pause, yusha coughs and, apropos of nothing, he says: “you know, caroline, i’m presbyterian but i go to the episcopal church… and i teach islam at the school and i’m a christian but most days i think the muslims have got it all right… i’m a conservative and i love obama… my friends tell me i make no sense… but i make sense enough for me so i don’t pay them much mind.”  

(Flo Jonic / RIPR)

it was a turquoise room that we sat in, if i remember correctly. (it is possible that i do not.) it was august then and we sat there because it was the coolest room in the house. full of books and photographs, a room filled with his past.

all of this came flooding back when i heard this afternoon that yusha died over the weekend. the shade of the paint, the bend of the sunlight, the stillness of the house, the blue of his eyes, his voice like a lazy afternoon, from another time, another world. me- so young, so insecure- doing my best impression of the biographer i wanted to be and naive enough not to fully comprehend the extent of his generosity.

it was early days then. and so as i left that afternoon, i was saddened to feel that i would probably never see him again. but when he looked me in the eye as he bid me farewell and he said, “she would have liked you. she would have liked that you’re doing this,” i didn’t know that would become one of the last lines of the book i’d yet to write.

so much has to happen before you see how the pieces fit. it is so unpindownable, so unclear. and that is ok. that is, actually, life.

TRUE STORY: based on the New York Times’ use of her, it’s safe to say that charlize theron is basically now the brand ambassador for “ghosting.”

fyi, per the NYT, ghosting is:

Ghost, a word more commonly associated with Casper, the boy who saw dead people and a 1990 movie starring Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, has also come to be used as a verb that refers to ending a romantic relationship by cutting off all contact and ignoring the former partner’s attempts to reach out.

it is also, per the NYT in a follow-up piece dedicated to reader responses, “a tactic most recently said to be used by Charlize Theron.”

who hast “said” this, one might wonder… based on the NYT’s inclusion in the original post of a link to a jezebel post, one might assume this news of theron’s ghosting originated on jezebel.

OH BUT WAIT.

the jezebel post literally begins with this phrase: “According to the rumor mill.” and if we, you know, actually look at the post, it’s immediately clear that jezebel isn’t reporting that theron ghosted penn. jezebel is reporting that us weekly reported theron ghosted penn.

and so, the link the NYT’s uses to source this connection between theron and ghosting isn’t the actual source but a source quoting that source… this:

for years now, i’ve been saying that most people are reading us weekly whether they realize it or not. my argument just got a little more convincing, non?