Chekhov's kindliness always mitigated his irony. Like Samuel Beckett, Chekhov is one of the few saints of literature. Both men were irreplaceable writers, and were even more impressive in their lives than in their works.—Harold Bloom, Genius
Greetings from the far left coast.
I set out to relate thoughts about a contemporary culture with which I am decidedly out of tune. That exercise mutated into a prospective stand-alone piece that I hope to polish off and publish on Substack later this week.
Onward, ha, into the muck! Where the former president towers over his MAGA party while indictments keep coming.
Jonathan V. Last dissects an argument made by pretenders for the nomination that Republicans must not vote for Trump in the primary "because he will lose to Biden and Biden is a terrible, existential threat to America." Last points out this "creates a permission structure for soft-Trump voters to support Trump in the general election…The trouble with framing the anti-Trump argument as [Will] Hurd does is that once Trump is the nominee, it becomes a pro-Trump argument for that same pool of Trump-skeptical Republican voters." It makes sense.
What’s crazy is that the real argument against Trump isn’t complicated or subtle or even open for debate. Everyone knows why Trump should not be president. It’s the same reason as in 2016 and 2020, only with more supporting evidence: Because he is manifestly unfit for the position.
In terms of his intellect and character, his trustworthiness and devotion to the Constitution, Donald Trump is no more fit to be president than a lemur is fit to be an airline pilot. And where this argument was, in 2016, at least partially hypothetical, today we have more proof points than anti-Trumpers could have possibly imagined back then:
McConnell, Feinstein, Biden: Bipartisan gerontocracy? Last week we witnessed disconcerting video of Mitch McConnell freezing for a discernible interval at a press conference. This was followed by reports of an apparently addled Dianne Feinstein being instructed to "just say aye" during a committee vote on a defense appropriations bill. A spokesperson for the senator said she did not realize that debate had ended and a vote been called when she began to give a statement. Well. Maybe.
Biden's defenders rightly point to significant accomplishments during his first two-and-a-half years as president and explain that garbled syntax and gaffes had been part of his public persona since he first came to Washington a very long time ago. Fair enough, but not exactly reassuring.
And the Barbie frenzy. I generally steer clear of Hollywood blockbusters, so did not anticipate writing further about Barbie after The Barbie Dilemma on July 11, where I explained that I would not give the movie a second thought if not for the association with Greta Gerwig. Nor did I anticipate the Barbie frenzy that accompanied the movie's opening week in theaters. It was enough to make me wonder if I was missing something. In the days that followed I watched several trailers and clips and read more articles and reviews than I care to admit. I still find nothing that draws me in.
Reviews and stories, often more than one, appeared in all of my go-to news sources. Most were favorable, some glowing. An exception came from Sonny Bunch, who did not hold back in 'Barbie' Review (The Bulwark, July 28, 2023):
AS I WAS WALKING out of my (80 percent full) midday, midweek showing of Barbie, I fired off a text message to a friend: “I just got out of it. It was bad!” Literally as I was hitting send on that message, I heard a girl behind me excitedly say to her mother, “That was great. All of her dresses were so pretty!”
As such, I am tempted to say that this movie is not really for me or for people like me…but this movie isn’t really for that little girl either, not really. Simply loving the dresses is almost the opposite of the film’s ostensible point. She didn’t care about the repeated invocation of the patriarchy…She just wanted to see the pretty outfits and watch the pretty people pretend to be the pretty dolls.
Who is the movie for? Bunch's answer: "Mattel, which is desperate to assure progressive-minded millennial working moms (for whom more of the humor will land) that Barbie is fine to share with the next generation." While Gerwig's film highlights the contradictions inherent in Barbie—"empowering because it shows little girls they can be anything? Or disempowering because it emphasizes impractical physical perfection?"—it remains "nothing but a two-hour-long advertisement for a seven-billion-dollar toy company."
NPR is all over Barbie. No surprise there. I once thought of public radio as almost something of a national treasure. That ship sailed a while back. The organization still boasts some fine journalists, good reporting, and on occasion informative and entertaining features, but more and more that takes a back seat to an array of drivel I subject myself to while in the kitchen preparing a meal or cleaning up after. When it becomes too annoying to tune out, I turn off the radio.
A casual search turned up three segments from July 21 alone. Aisha Harris expressed the consensus for the Pop Culture Happy Hour crowd: "Greta Gerwig, for me, has been able to take all of these sort of familiar stories in her previous directorial movies and bring something new and interesting to them. And I do think it's good, actually, with a lot of buts and a lot of caveats."
The third segment is an interview with Hannah McCann, lecturer in critical femininity studies at University of Melbourne whose commentary took me back to a season of misspent youth reading the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Adorno, critical theory I once ploughed through with some interest and meager understanding. Drinking café au lait with Barbara Terry on the patio at Café Diem in Atlanta and conversing earnestly as if I knew what we were talking about.
In the 2020s, you have this change in the meaning of being a bimbo on social media where people are really working to reclaim the term "bimbo" specifically. You'll see on BimboTok on TikTok, people saying, "Yeah, I'm stupid, I've got nothing in my head, I'm a slut." And unlike the original stereotype of cisgender, white, blonde women, you see on BimboTok people identifying as queer, all different kind of ethnicities and identifying explicitly as left wing or often Marxist.
Interviewer Brittany Luse asks why Barbie, our "OG bimbo" is such a "fraught icon of feminity."
She's fraught because she's seen to represent a model to which little girls should aspire, which is narrow. But on the other hand, there is this idea that Barbie has been every occupation and she can do anything. And so there's this feminist critique of Barbie as representing patriarchal femininity. And then there's feminist defense of Barbie as representing a Girlboss feminism. I hate both of those. She's not just this floating signifier that tells us how to look. It's about how people play with Barbie…I had two Barbies and a Ken: Ken was gay and the Barbies were a butch and a femme…You can project onto Barbie, to me that is more interesting than just saying that she's a problematic icon or she's some fantastic icon. (The spectacular femininity of bimbos and 'Barbie')
OG? I had to look it up: slang for "original gangster" or, more hip-hoply, "original gangsta." Good to know she is not just a floating signifier.
I suppose I would be remiss if I failed to mention the critique by cinephile Ginger Lucky Gaetz, wife of House blockhead caucus member Matt, who twitted on X that she recommends skipping the movie, though not abandoning the doll, because it "neglects to address any notion of faith or family, and tries to normalize the idea that men and women can't collaborate positively (yuck)." On the pro side, she liked Margot Robbie's performance and found the costume design stunning and the soundtrack amazing. Cons were portrayal of "big dreams causing anxiety instead of inspiration" and "Unfair treatment of pregnant Barbie Midge." Ken's "disappointingly low t-shirt " (not sure what that means and not inclined to check the trailer again to try to figure it out) rated a thumb-down.
The best take on the movie may have come during an exchange with a friend who wrote, "I trust that Greta knew what she was doing, but it still looks like a 2 hour long Mattell and Chevrolet commercial. I'll watch it if I don't have to pay for it."
No one who loved Barbie or even just enjoyed the movie with "a lot of buts and a lot of caveats" has any explaining to do. It still does not appear to be up my alley. Nothing is for everyone. If you enjoyed it, that's great. And if gets people into theaters, that counts for something these days.
As always, thanks for your encouragement and support.
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
Yr obdt svt
New at Portable Bohemia Substack:
Home (a poem), July 20, 2023. A few months after “Home” and several other poems were published in the March 2001 issue of Harvest-Art I received an email from Sharmagne Leland-St. John…read more>>
No Labels and the Center Delusion, July 24, 2023. The myth of a virtuous center made up of a reasonable, moderate majority of the country dissatisfied with extremists who dominate the two major political parties is a recurrent theme in American politics. One might be tempted to call it a trope …read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
