"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

"I love guitar. Oh, God. I mean, you know -- Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Buffett . . ."

Said John Kerry, blogged here, on October 20, 2004:

That's John Kerry talking to Rolling Stone. I just don't know what to say about that juxtaposition. Many years ago--in the 1970s--I went to a concert and Jimmy Buffett was the opening act. I tried to sit it out, but I couldn't. I got up and walked out into the fluorescent-lit, concrete lobby and paced around with nothing to do. I can't remember what it was about Buffett that was so distinctly intolerable to me. The attitude? The patter? In any case, I've never listened to the man since then....

Recalled this morning, as I see the NYT obituary: "Jimmy Buffett, Roguish Bard of Island Escapism, Is Dead at 76/With songs like 'Margaritaville' and 'Fins,' he became a folk hero to fans known as Parrot Heads. He also became a millionaire hundreds of times over."

Condolences to all who loved him. When it comes to taste, there is no dispute.

The death of an innovative female sculptor — Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton.

 Consequence of Sound reports the death.

Albritton had her first exhibition in New York City in 2000. The following year, she was profiled in Jessica Everleth’s documentary Plaster Caster, and in 2005, she contributed to the 2005 BBC 3 documentary My Penis And I. Albritton has inspired and been referenced in a number of songs, including KISS’ “Plaster Caster,” Le Tigre’s “Nanny Nanny Boo Boo,” Jim Croce’s “Five Short Minutes,” and Momus’ “The Penis Song.”

 

I was just reading about her yesterday. After listening to the new episode of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" — about "Hey Joe" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience — I found this 2005 London Times article "Hazy days/He arrived as a nobody but immediately had London’s greatest rock stars at his feet. Charles R Cross reveals the wild rise of Jimi Hendrix":

When [The Jimi Hendrix Experience] arrived at the Chicago Hilton [in February 1968], three young women ran up to them excitedly. 

"We want to plaster-cast your Hampton Wick," Cynthia Albritton, 20, announced. She thought talking cockney would make her Chicago accent more worldly. 

Jimi's response: "Oh, yeah. I heard about you. Come up to the room."... 

Cynthia retreated to the bathroom to begin mixing dental plaster while her companions began working on Jimi.... Once he was aroused, they stuck a vase filled with plaster around his penis, and he was told to stay still - and turned on - for one full minute while the plaster dried. ... The room was silent during the moulding.

"It wasn't very sexy, really," Cynthia recalled. "Jimi was one of the first moulds we ever did, and we didn't lubricate his pubes enough. A lot of his pubes got stuck in the plaster, and there was only one way to remove them, which was pull them individually."

Art is difficult. It's not just some party game or device to get close to glamorous celebrities. Albritton's brilliant concept endured, and she belongs in the pantheon of female sculptors.

"Into this lacuna created by non-naming come degrading, disgusted terms for labia – 'beef curtains,' 'fanny flaps'” – that reinforce the sense that squeamishness is warranted..."

"Second-wave feminists [had] consciousness-raising women’s groups where everyone would examine their vulva with a hand mirror. That fell out of fashion in the 90s and 00s – surfing a post-ironic, anti-earnest wave, feminism was suddenly fine with the hidden, private vulva. Any public notion of what a vulva looked like was created by pornography, starting with complete hairlessness..... [There is a] digital native generation that [looks at pornography and thinks] 'Oh my God, that is not what I look like' [and doesn't want] to talk to anyone about it, because that would be mortifying.'... The artist Jamie McCartney produced The Great Wall of Vagina – 400 plastercast vulvas – in 2011... (He knows that the casts he has made are of vulvas, not vaginas, but the word play doesn’t work so well.)... 'While casting, I discovered that loads of women.... would look at other casts and say: "This one’s so neat," or: "I wish mine looked more like that." I was incredulous – there really wasn’t any sense in my mind that some were good and some were defective. And this ideal was created in my name, apparently, because that’s what men like. I just thought: "Fuck that."'...  On social media, even the most conceptual works of feminist visual representation often have to be taken down due to nudity or 'community' guidelines...."

From "Labia liberation! The movement to end vulva anxiety for good/Women have long been taught to be ashamed of their vulvas, with increasing numbers turning to cosmetic surgery in pursuit of genital ‘perfection.' But a new generation is fighting back" (The Guardian).

ADDED: I'm trying to grasp "post-ironic, anti-earnest." Seems contradictory, but maybe that's what they were. I do remember finding the consciousness-raising era feminism too earnest. But I don't really know when feminists were not earnest. As for irony, if the later feminists were post-ironic, when was the ironic era in feminism? I lived through the whole thing and observed it, through my own varying levels of irony and earnestness.

Fists — a blackface fist and Biden doing fists.

At Drudge right now:

The link on "Long, Hot Summer" goes to "In Miami-Dade, dueling rallies in support of Black Lives Matter and President Trump" (Miami Herald). I don't really know what's in that article that justifies the photograph of what I'm calling a blackface fist or that headline using a phrase that back in the 1960s meant there would be "race riots" in the city all summer....



It's got to be to chime with that blackface fist that Drudge chooses 2-fisted Biden to illustrate "POLL: Trump losing female vote by historic margin..." That picture is one of several pictures at the link, which goes to "LADY TROUBLES/Trump ‘losing female vote to Biden by a historic margin not seen in more than 50 years’ – but men still on his side'" (The Sun).  In that poll, Biden has a 20-point advantage with women, and Trump has a 2-point advantage with men. Polls — who believes them?! But why 2 fists when the issue is his appeal to women? Don't we imagine that the female preference for Biden over Trump is that he seems to be a kinder, gentler fellow?

Perhaps Drudge means to suggest that women are going to need a strong protector, and there's Biden, balling up his fists — does he look adequate to fight for you, as this "long, hot summer" comes on? In that light, consider the third item in my screen shot: "Winston Churchill's picture mysteriously vanishes from Google amid rising tensions" (knewz):

Searches for ‘British prime minister’ and ‘World War 2 generals’ called up photos of everyone else but the legendary British prime minister — just after his statue in London was defiled. The images were eventually restored. The picture of Winston Churchill suspiciously vanished from Google search results on Saturday just as the legendary British prime minister was under siege from racial justice protesters in the United Kingdom. The images reappeared about 12 hours later on Sunday, with Google saying it was an unintentional “updating issue.”

The old-school belligerent male protector is disappearing from the scene, and all we've got left is old man Biden, because the women seem to think he'll have to do.

"Stepping into a Wing location feels a little like being sealed inside a pop-feminist Biodome."

"It is pitched as a social experiment: what the world would look like if it were designed by and for women, or at least millennial women with meaningful employment and a cultivated Instagram aesthetic. The Wing looks beautiful and expensive, with curvy pink interiors that recall the womb. The thermostat hovers around 72 degrees, to satisfy women’s higher temperature needs. A color-coded library features books by female authors only. There are well-appointed pump rooms, as well as private phone booths named after Lisa Simpson, Anita Hill and Lady Macbeth. There is an in-house cafe, the Perch, serving wines sourced from female vintners, and an in-house babysitting annex, the Little Wing, where members’ children may be looked after. The vibe is a fusion of sisterly inclusion and exclusive luxury: Private memberships run up to $3,000 per year, and the wait-list is 9,000 names long."

From "The Wing Is a Women’s Utopia. Unless You Work There/The social club’s employees have a story to tell about the company that sold the world Instagram-ready feminism" by Amanda Hess (NYT).

This sounds really funny, like something in a movie. Lisa Simpson, Anita Hill and Lady Macbeth — that got a big laugh from my imaginary movie-theater audience.

Anyway, what's the problem with the staff?

Most Wing employees I spoke with had ambitions bigger than their starting positions... Some staff members hired to work the front desk or run events saw their job duties inflated to include scrubbing toilets, washing dishes and lint-rolling couches.... When staff members tried to exercise their membership privileges, on breaks or after their shifts, members would hand them dirty dishes or barge in on them in the phone booth. Some screamed at employees about crowding in the space and cried over insufficient swag. A common member refrain was that it was anti-feminist not to give her whatever perk she desired....

This is all so pre-coronavirus. But it's interesting to get a nudge to remember what would could be fretting about if we didn't have this plague infesting our consciousness.

And the name of that in-house babysitting annex, the Little Wing, makes me think of a circus mind that's running wild — butterflies and zebras and moonbeams... and fairy tales....

"He saw it out in Hollywood at a dreadful screening. Afterward, he said: 'We’ll have another screening and I’ll write down all of the things we have to change.'"

"Of course, that made me a little gloomy. The next night, we assembled again and he sat in the front with this yellow pad. At the end of the film, he held up the pad and there was nothing on it. He said: 'That’s it.'"

"He" is Bob Dylan, the subject of the documentary film "Don't Look Back," by the great documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who has died at the age of 94.

Here's the scene from "Don't Look Back" with Dylan and Donovan:



From Pennebaker's Wikipedia page:

In 1959, Pennebaker joined the equipment-sharing Filmakers' [sic] Co-op and co-founded Drew Associates with Richard Leacock and former LIFE magazine editor and correspondent Robert Drew. A crucial moment in the development of Direct Cinema, the collective produced documentary films for clients like ABC News... and Time-Life Broadcast.... Their first major film, Primary (1960), documented John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's respective campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary election. Drew, Leacock and Pennebaker, as well as photographers Albert Maysles, Terrence McCartney Filgate and Bill Knoll, all filmed the campaigning from dawn to midnight over the course of five days. Widely considered to be the first candid and comprehensive look at the day-by-day events of a Presidential race, it was the first film in which the sync sound camera could move freely with characters throughout a breaking story, a major technical achievement that laid the groundwork for modern-day documentary filmmaking....

In 1992, during the start of the Democratic primaries, Pennebaker and Hegedus approached campaign officials for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton about filming his presidential run. They were granted limited access to the candidate but allowed to focus on lead strategist James Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos. The resulting work, The War Room, became one of their most celebrated films....

Pennebaker's films, usually shot with a hand-held camera, often eschew voice-over narration and interviews in favor of a "simple" portrayal of events typical of the direct cinema style Pennebaker helped popularize in the U.S. Of such an approach, Pennebaker told interviewer G. Roy Levin published in 1971 that "it's possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don't have to label them, you don't have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it's good for you to learn." In that same interview with Levin, Pennebaker goes so far as to claim that Dont Look Back is "not a documentary at all by my standards". He instead repeatedly asserts that he does not make documentaries, but "records of moments", "half soap operas", and "semimusical reality things".

ADDED: Pennebaker's YouTube page is fantastic. I'll just give you this — Janis Joplin (from the film "Monterey Pop"):



AND: The trailer for "Jimi Plays Monterey" (released in 1986, showing a performance in 1967):



ALSO: A "Monterey Pop" outtake (that's on the Criterion Collection edition of the movie) — The Mamas and the Papas and lots of shots of people in the audience, looking very 1967:

"Trump is simply not experienced enough or temperamentally inclined to handle the complexity of nuclear negotiations or issues as complex as those associated with the long history of the Koreas."

Said David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, quoted in "Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un likely to meet alone at Singapore summit" (USA Today).

Also, given the track record of North Korea and Trump to "dissemble," Rothkopf said that "it is a minimum best practice to have a witness to the conversation."

But if Trump brings in his witness, Kim will have his witness. And doesn't Trump know far more than Kim about how to deal one-on-one with another man? Trump has spent a lifetime doing that, but what has Kim had to do, given the adulation he's received and his propensity to resort to killing anyone who could challenge him? And, by the way, Kim is only 34 years old. In years alone, Trump has far more experience.

And yet the Peace scholar thinks Trump is "simply not experienced enough." Depends on what you mean by experience, but clearly Kim is far less experienced. Isn't it smart to put Kim at this immense disadvantage? Trump means to pull him in, to give him a big American hug and to warm up this young fan of America.

ADDED: I see in the comments, my phrase "this young fan of America" is being questioned. My source is Dennis Rodman:

Rodman, who brands Mr Kim a “friend of for life”, said... Mr Kim, who he dubs the “little guy”, was a massive fan of American music from the 1980's. “When he’s around his people, he’s just like anybody else. He jokes and loves playing basketball, table tennis, pool,” he told DuJour magazine. ...They love American ’80s music. They do karaoke to it. He has this 13-piece girls band with violins. He gets a mic and they play the whole time. He loves the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Oldies. When I first went, the live band only played two songs for four hours: the theme songs from Rocky and Dallas.... He can’t say it enough. He wants to talk to him to try to open that door a little bit. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to bomb anybody. He said, ‘I don’t want to kill Americans.’ He loves Americans.”

ALSO: Look at where Trump and Kim are meeting, on a resort island, Sentosa, next to Singapore. One reason to choose that place is that it can be closed off for security, but it also vividly tantalizes with American-style attractions:

The island, which is nearly two square miles in size... features 17 hotels and luxury resorts, private beaches, two golf courses, a casino, a Madame Tussauds museum, a water theme park, Universal Studios Singapore, and the largest Merlion statue....

More about Sentosa at Wikipedia, with lots of pictures, a longer list of attractions. Here's the aerial view of the fun-packed place:


CC by Chensiyuan.

When I look at that picture, what I hear in my head is "Optimistic Voices" (from "The Wizard of Oz"), you know that song, perhaps not by its title. It's: “You're out of the woods/You're out of the dark/You're out of the night/Step into the sun/Step into the light/Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place/On the face of the earth or the sky/Hold onto your breath/Hold onto your heart/Hold onto your hope/March up to the gate and bid it open... OPEN."

Jimi Hendrix's copy of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" has Jimi's blood on it.

"In 1965, as a struggling musician in New York, Hendrix was already enough of a Dylan fan to spend his last money on this album. The Brook Street copy of this LP has Hendrix’s blood on its sleeve, after he cut his hand on a broken wine glass then picked up the album."

From "Inside Jimi Hendrix’s blood-spattered record collection." You can see the collection at the historic recreation of Hendrix’s apartment (AKA "flat) in Mayfair, London. At the link, to NME, there's a list of all the albums in the collection and some info about how well-worn they look, e.g., "Hendrix owned two copies of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, both of which show signs of wear and tear."

"The little girls started screaming: 'We want Davy; we want the Monkees'... You could almost see the little girls asking their mothers: 'Mom why is that man setting his guitar on fire.'"

Mickey Dolenz, playing in Greenwich Village last Saturday, delivered patter about the time the Monkees on tour had Jimi Hendrix as their opening act. And then Mickey and his current band played "Purple Haze."

The band last Saturday included Mickey's sister Coco, who sang "Daydream Believer" "I'm a Believer" with him — that song (which was written by Neil Diamond) had the late Davy Jones originally singing the lead — and Coco took on the erstwhile role of Linda Ronstadt in a version of "Different Drum" and the Grace Slick part in "White Rabbit":



Here's Coco in 1967, as photographed in Fave:



I think Fave was a spin-off from Tiger Beat. First issue:



ADDED: I tried to find "Davy's Private Glads & Sads!" but Google has a better memory of the the mid-19th century:

Playing the wrong song.

On December 16, 1977, Elvis Costello was on "Saturday Night Live, and he was supposed to play "Less Than Zero." He gets started, then starts waving his hands and saying "Stop! Stop!"...



and "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here" — it was about some British political situation — and switches to "Radio Radio."

Later, Costello said he got his inspiration from Jimi Hendrix, who was on Lulu's BBC TV show back in January 1969 and supposed to play "Hey Joe." Hendrix starts the song, then stops and says: "We'd like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream regardless of what kind of group they might be. I'd like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce." Cream had broken up a couple months before.

Jimi then switches to "Sunshine of Your Love" and goes on and on until "We're being pulled off the air":

50 years ago today: Day 3 of the Monterey Pop Festival.

The lineup on the last day: Ravi Shankar, The Blues Project, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Group With No Name, Buffalo Springfield (with David Crosby), The Who, Grateful Dead, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Scott McKenzie, The Mamas & the Papas.

"I'm going to sacrifice something here that I really love. Don't think I'm silly doing this, 'cause I'm not really losing my mind."

Robert Christgau wrote about that performance that took place 50 years ago today:

Music was a given for a Hendrix stuck with topping the Who's guitar-smashing tour de force. It's great sport to watch this outrageous scene-stealer wiggle his tongue, pick with his teeth, and set his axe on fire, but the showboating does distract from the history made that night—the dawning of an instrumental technique so effortlessly fecund and febrile that rock has yet to equal it, though hundreds of metal bands have gotten rich trying. Admittedly, nowhere else will you witness a Hendrix still uncertain of his divinity

"Yes, as I said before, it's really groovy. I'd like to bore you for about 6 or 7 minutes and do a little thing..."

"Excuse me for a minute. Let me play my guitar."

50 years ago today: The Jimi Hendrix Experience released "Are You Experienced?"

I still have my copy. It survived the proposed great album cull of 1976. I vividly remember my first husband going through the pile of record albums we'd lugged from place to place and selecting "Are You Experienced?" to hold up. "You're never going to listen to this again," he asserted.



Here's the "Are You Experienced?" Wikipedia page:

Soon after the [recording] session began, [producer Chas] Chandler asked Hendrix to turn his guitar amplifier down, and an argument ensued. Chandler commented: "Jimi threw a tantrum because I wouldn't let him play guitar loud enough ... He was playing a Marshall twin stack, and it was so loud in the studio that we were picking up various rattles and noises." According to Chandler, Hendrix then threatened to leave England, stating: "If I can't play as loud as I want, I might as well go back to New York." Chandler, who had Hendrix's immigration papers and passport in his back pocket, laid the documents on the mixing console and told Hendrix to "piss off."  Hendrix laughed and said: "All right, you called my bluff," and they got back to work.

Lots more detail about the recording at the link. I'll just pick out one more thing:

Although the lyrics to "Purple Haze", which opened the US edition of Are You Experienced, are often misinterpreted as describing an acid trip, Hendrix explained: "[It] was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea." He speculated that the dream may have been inspired by a science fiction story about a purple death ray. [Noel] Redding stated that Hendrix had not yet taken LSD at the time of the song's writing... It opens with a guitar/bass harmony in the interval of a tritone that was known as the diabolus in musica during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Catholic Church prohibited medieval composers of religious music from using the tritone, or flattened fifth, because as musicologist Dave Whitehill wrote: "to play it was like ringing Satan's doorbell."

"A California middle school teacher was recorded telling minority students their parents would be deported, leaving them to be placed in foster care..."

At Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School in South Los Angeles.

"If you were born here, then your parents gotta go, and they gonna leave you behind. You’ll be in foster care,” said the male phys ed teacher to 6th graders.

“How are they going to find me?” a student asks.

“I got your phone numbers, your address, your mama’s address, your daddy’s address. It’s all in the system, sweetie. And when they come and there’s an illegal, they gotta go,” the teacher responds.

ADDED: I was curious about Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School. I checked the website and found this in its "mission statement":

Every student and adult on campus has the right to learn and work in an environment that is sage free of harmful and disruptive influences.  No person will be allowed to deprive another person of an opportunity to learn.

Sage free?? Is that like "Stone Free"...



... but with sage...

"This museum tells the truth that a country founded on the principles of liberty held thousands in chains."

"Even today, the journey towards justice is not compete. But this museum will inspire us to go farther and get there faster."

Said George W. Bush, appearing today, along with President Obama and Chief Justice Roberts, at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Nice picture at the link of Michelle Obama warmly hugging Bush.

Here's Time Magazine's transcription of what Obama said. Excerpt:

This is the place to understand how protests and love of country don’t merely coexist, but inform each other. How men can probably win the gold for their country, but still insist on raising a black-gloved fist. How we can wear an I Can’t Breathe T-shirt, and still grieve for fallen police officers. Here, the American wear the razor-sharp uniform of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, belongs alongside the cape of the Godfather of Soul.

We have shown the world we can float like butterflies, and sting like bees, that we can rocket into space like Mae Jemison, steal home like Jackie, rock like Jimmy [sic!], stir the pot like Richard Pryor. And we can be sick and tired of being sick and tired like Fannie Lou Hamer, and still rock steady like Aretha Franklin....

I, too, am America. It is a glorious story, the one that’s told here. It is complicated, and it is messy, and it is full of contradictions, as all great stories are, as Shakespeare is, as Scripture is. And it’s a story that perhaps needs to be told now more than ever.

Obama doesn't mention Donald Trump, but last week, Obama said:

"You may have heard Hillary's opponent in this election say that there's never been a worse time to be a black person. I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow.... But we've got a museum for him to visit, so he can tune in. We will educate him."

It would, in fact, be a good idea for Trump to visit the museum, but I've got to say that Obama distorted Trump's statement. Trump did not say "there's never been a worse time to be a black person." That's Obama's paraphrase. Trump said:

"We're going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever... You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street. They're worse -- I mean, honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities."

It's a statement about "African-American communities." A slave was not living in an "African-American community." And Jim Crow was an evil system of exclusion, but to say that is not to understand what life was like in the communities where black people did live. I understand the political motivation for paraphrasing Trump's remark the way Obama did, but that paraphrase pretends not to see what Trump was saying. It's much harder — and much more important — to try to refute Trump's inflammatory statement if you're precise about what he said. And even if you did amass the historical and present-day journalistic record to refute it, why would you be smug?

Acrostic clue that I don't think began that way.

Tomorrow's NYT acrostic has one clue that reads: "How Abraham Lincoln and Jimi Hendrix died." I'm pretty sure that "Jimi Hendrix" was a last minute substitution.

Here's a piece from 3 days ago in the Wall Street Journal: "What Prince and Abraham Lincoln Have in Common."

Why oust Prince from that clue and replace him with a longer-dead rock-music icon? Spoiler alert. The answer to the clue is: intestate. The NYT is pretty punctilious about the accuracy of puzzle clues, and though no Prince will has surfaced yet, it could happen. And perhaps there is an element of taste. The quote in the solution — again, spoiler alert — comes from "Bring Up the Bodies," and we might not want to think of the recently lost Prince in such graphic terms.

Does the title of "Bring Up the Bodies" refer to buried human bodies?

The title of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, we learn late in the narrative, is a legal phrase, the command to court officials instructing them to deliver to their trial men who, because they are accused of treason, are regarded as already dead: “The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’” But the phrase is suggestive too of the march to death, specifically to the scaffold, that is undertaken by many of the book’s characters. Bring Up the Bodies is a sequel to Mantel’s Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall and in both novels she ambitiously attempts to reconstruct in fictional but credible form a series of crucial events in English history, specifically here those leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn....

Now, you can tour the London bedroom where Jimi Hendrix lived in 1969.

"The house, in Mayfair, has now been painstakingly restored to look exactly as it did in 1969, using picture[s] of him inside and recollections of former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham."

Among the details: a bedside tablescape of "Voodoo Child" lyrics, a shell, and Benson and Hedges cigarettes, a fruitbowl on the floor, a silky bed jacket, the board game Monopoly, and the album "Fifth Dimension" by The Byrds (which The Daily Mail inanely calls a record "from Fifth Dimension").



ADDED: Too bad we never got to see a Super Bowl halftime show with The Byrds and The 5th Dimension playing together, in the manner of last night's Coldplay + Beyonce.

"Lenny is your over sharing Internet friend who will yell at you about your finances, help you choose a bathing suit, lamp, president ... AND tell you what to do if you need an abortion."

From the mission statement of the new Lena-Dunham-related newsletter experience.

The word "experience" there is an artifact of cutting-and-pasting from a New York Magazine article, "Lena Dunham Tries to Cement Her Guru Status," that begins "The Lena Dunham experience is getting another brand extension...."

The Lena Dunham Experience... is it like the Jimi Hendrix Experience?

I know, I know, you'll probably scream n' cry
That your little world won't let you go
But who in your measly little world are trying to prove that
You're made out of gold and can't be sold
So, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have...

I doubt if the subscribers to Lena Dunham's newsletter are being invited out of their "measly little world." The mission statement is an offer to be your friend and to fit right into your little world, where you're doing your usual things, buying clothes and decorating your apartment, figuring out how to vote, and keeping your finances and your body from acquiring the power to drag you — perhaps screaming and crying — out of that nice little world of yours that it would be mean to call "measly" and "little." Come on, let's buy a bathing suit!

And so, another female entertainment celebrity branches into the women's magazine business. It's like Oprah's magazine and Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, right? Or does Dunham not want that spin, not want to be thought of as Gwyneth-y?

“We don't see Lenny as the anti-Goop, even though we realize that our readers may not have the same income in their lives,” Dunham said. 

And Dunham's partner in the Lenny project, Jenni Konner, said: “We worship Gwyneth. She has literally been the most supportive person of this project of anyone we've spoken to.”

We worship Gwyneth. 

How exactly does one do that? Is it anything like watching the sun rise from the bottom of the sea?