"Men try harder, because they know that women want men who earn more."

"Women don’t because they know that men have different priorities, and because they want to quit the rat-race at some point and have kids, making their tolerance for high debt levels rationally lower."

Says Glenn Reynolds, reacting to this Inside the Law School Scam post about how law school — with its high tuition and iffy job market — is a worse deal for women than for men.

This is getting strangely close to the argument that used to be made for discriminating against women in law school admissions (or for excluding them altogether): Since women are less likely to fully use their legal education, we shouldn't give what could be a man's seat to a woman. Women were suspected of going to law school for ulterior reasons, such as to find a good husband or — crazy ladies! — because they are interested in the topic... intellectually.

"There is a gap between me and everyone, like a perforated box of polluted air is separating me from people..."

"The space from me to anyone who might understand how lousy I feel seems vast. I am harsh and defeated, and I never thought I would describe myself in either way. The list of things I can’t be bothered with goes on forever. The list of things that bother me goes on forever. I have lost my life."

A fragment of Elizabeth Wurtzel in New York Magazine. It's time to talk about her again, I thought I should let you know.

"Oops — could Penguin be S.O.L., thanks to the S.O.L.?"

"This is why you shouldn’t sue a Yale-trained litigatrix who used to work at Boies Schiller."

"For the longest time I would not date anyone who would now be called a one-percenter because money and power are such a potent combination..."

"... and if I am going to be bossed around, I don't want that to be the reason. When it's come up, I have chosen not to get married. Over and over again, I have opted for my integrity and independence over what was easy or obvious. And I am happy. I don't want everyone to live like me, but I do expect educated and able-bodied women to be holding their own in the world of work."

Says Elizabeth Wurtzel, who's blaming the "war on women" on the "one percenters" and insisting that "real feminists" earn their own living, and proclaiming that there's " only one kind of equality... and it's economic."

She's irritating for about 10 reasons, including the fact/fiction that rich men are clamoring to marry her.

"[T]he very essence of old-line Democratic feminism is to reject feminine appeal."

Claims Glenn Reynolds, responding to Elizabeth Wurtzel who calls Democrats "total morons for not finding their own hot mama."

Hey! What about Hillary? She's likable hot enough.

All the best people fail the bar exam... Elizabeth Wurtzel says.

And she's among the people she's talking about:

The common denominator among the bar-failers in my class at Yale Law School—and there were a few—was a complete inability to comply with senseless rules; they weren’t the best students, but they were the tartest and the sharpest people—and the least likely to accept the constraints of Big Law that make neither financial nor intellectual sense: the fifty-state survey to prove a negative, the memo to nowhere, the repetitive brief that says nothing and gets read by no one.

Hey! That's one sentence. It's got 3 dashes, a semicolon, 3 commas, and a colon. Let me step back from the big meta- critique and extrapolate one easily followed item of advice: Write short sentences! Human beings grade bar exam essays. I have graded bar exam essays. It's hell. I was trapped in a hotel conference room and not allowed to leave until I'd graded a pile of exams that, as a lawprof, I'd take a couple weeks to grade (with refreshing breaks for snacks and walks and blog posts).

Wurtzel goes on to claim that the practice of law would be better if the sharp, tart folks who resist senseless rules had the advantage in seeking access to the profession.  Imagine the access ritual that would vault them to the front of the line. I would try to do that for you right now if I weren't distracted by thinking that writers of short sentences are the ones to be encouraged. Don't write a long sentence unless you have a good reason. And don't use a semicolon unless you'd be willing to pay $5 for the privilege of using a semicolon. Each time. That's just a test I made up. Now, stop annoying me. And don't make things more difficult than they need to be. That's a rule. It's not a senseless one. It is a rule brimming with sensibility.

"Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates — and, yes, hot sex..."

"... which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that’s not nothing. And my hair, honey-highlighted for years now, has the swank length of mermaid youth—which is how I plan to keep it no matter what proper pageboy is age-appropriate. No question, there are physical facts about my age that are undeniably delightful. I am much sexier now than I used to be—I suddenly have this voluptuous body where I used to just be skinny and lithe. Really oddly, a couple of years ago I got serious breasts, to the point where people think I’ve had them surgically enhanced, which I certainly have not. Still, I think, the honest truth is that I’m just not as pretty as I used to be. Something has abandoned me. I don’t know what that thing is—they’ve been trying to jar it and bottle it for centuries—but it’s left, another merciless lover. My hips are thicker, my skin is thinner, my eyes shine less brightly—will I ever again glow as if all the stars are out at night just to greet me? What finally falls away, after enough things don’t go as planned, is that look of expectancy—which, when worn down to pentimento, is revealed to be exhaustion."

Elizabeth Wurtzel is doing that complaining/bragging thing again. This time, the problem is she's getting old, but she's still way prettier than you, she hopes you know. She's 41, by the way, which seems young to me, but perhaps — do I remember it properly? — that's a time when the fear of aging and death spikes.

Via Jezebel, who says:

As she explains with characteristic candor, she was always a beautiful child, a "hot number," a woman who traded on her looks. And she misses it. While she sees the danger and futility of valuing beauty overmuch, she can't help it: panic trumps insight and she doesn't seem eager to stop it. And it's scary to see a smart and accomplished woman so openly in the thrall of others' opinions.

"It's a weird test. I think when you go to a different school than Yale you are better prepared for it."

Elizabeth Wurtzel, awkwardly confronted about failing the New York Bar exam, has the wit to say something quotable and suitably hostile. Actually, the first thing she said was: "Wow, really? I had no idea. I didn't even see that. That's interesting," which means fuck you.

Then she came up with the quote I put in the title, which means your law school sucks.

After that, she said, "It was definitely hard. I guess when I should have been studying, I was kind of having a good time," which means my life is so much more interesting than yours, you tiny little insect.

All of which was totally justified. Then the insectoid interviewer probed her about whether she was getting any literary writing done anymore and how she felt about not looking like the way she looked in that old photograph that was taken of her 2 decades ago. In answer to the latter question, Wurtzel said: "I'm actually thinking of writing about it, though I don't want to write yet another miserable book that lots of people can relate to." Which also means fuck you.

"I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing..."

"... and I’d think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating. You hear about the work ethic of people like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and you think 'well, God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it.' Most of the rest of us just wind up watching Oprah. I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog. It was really bad. I just wasn’t doing enough, and I feel like law school sort of gave me my voice back. When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done. At least that’s how it’s been for me."

That's Elizabeth Wurtzel trying to give a believable answer to the question why she went from the life of a writer into the big law firm lawyer's life. So you think, with all my free time I could be raising 5 kids, so.... I'll go to law school and work in a big law firm?

Actually, I understand the logic. When you are purely a writer, you are hanging around the house a lot. You can feel very odd and at loose ends. If the house is empty, you may think, I could be raising kids what with all the time I spend loafing and moping, but that doesn't mean you want to raise kids (who you must know will be demanding during your creative spurts as well as your down time). It just means, it's a weird way to live, on your own at home. Maybe what you need is not other human beings in the house, but to get out of the house, to have a life that has more to do with interacting with adults and affecting the network of adult activities. Law is the perfect entree.

And a writer needs something to write about. You may venture out into that complex world of adult enterprises and eventually bring it all back home, where you can write again. We were just talking about the way Bill Ayers signed up as a merchant seaman, thinking he'd gather the material he to write a great novel. Was Ayers thinking about Herman Melville? Joseph Conrad? Was Wurtzel thinking about Scott Turow?

Flea at USC.

He's a freshman, studying music:

The Chili Peppers [created tension] in our song structures but all based on emotion and intuition as opposed to knowing the math and academics of it. Knowing the structure is really fun.

He's also working on a solo album:

I’ve been making a record at home and it’s nearly done. It’s mostly instrumental stuff but I have Patti Smith singing on it and the choir from the school but mostly it’s an instrumental record. I’m not sure how to describe it but a lot of people have described it as cinematic, like soundtrack music. It’s not really a commercial enterprise, it’s not going to be on rock radio or anything. The record is based on the character Helen Burns from "Jane Eyre." I love Charlotte Bronte and all of the Bronte sisters.

That "Jane Eyre" stuff sound really nerdy, but if you've ever seen the Orson Welles movie version, you know that Helen Burns is the most stunning beautiful child ever seen in a film:



But no, Flea (Michael Balzary) says he's mad about the Brontes, and he's going to college, so I'll assume it's about the books, not how insanely beautiful Elizabeth Taylor is in that movie.

Here's Flea playing the bass:



He's studying trumpet (and music theory and composition) at USC.

AND: No, a men in shorts tag is not called for!

Palpatinian tranche.

I've been reading and listening to people talk for over a half century, so it's really weird to have to look up 2 words in 2 hours.

First, MadisonMan, he of the bird's-eye view of the Michelle Obama rally-ette, said:

I agree that McCain's post-hit grin is a little too Palpatinian.

Okay, now you know I haven't been following the "Star Wars" saga. I'm not ashamed of that. In fact, I'm one of those people who blame "Star Wars" for ruining film.

And then I had to go and read the Gawker item with the revolting title: "Why We Are Better For Knowing Elizabeth Wurtzel Screwed David Foster Wallace."

That Elizabeth Wurtzel had some thing with David Foster Wallace in the nineties is the type of news flash I'd like to have failed detecting this week. Namely because to blog about Elizabeth Wurtzel is to tempt oneself to unwind the various tranches of disquietude summoned when someone like me conducts a Wurtzel Google Image Search. There's the first tranche of familiarity; I've conducted this search before; the second: I remember quickly that I will invariably, though tempted by the grainy topless shots from Bitch, will like Radar before me quickly settle on the hottest color photo available, the one she used for the cover of her 2001 addiction memoir More, Now, Again, even though Wurtzel has graciously offered us photographic evidence that she has, in the intervening (ohgod) seven and a half years, aged. For this is not a new asset, this story; the underlying episode dates back to the nineties, when Wurtzel was still dressing up her faculties and skills with too much blue eyeliner and too many mood-altering substances in lieu of the appropriate degree of risk management and/or clothes.

I admit it. I don't study finance. That's why I unfortunately cannot help you with the burning question of the day, whether the big bailout is the desperately needed cure or a horrible, evil boondoggle. I'm sorry. Really.

So let's examine that tranche for a second: here we have Wurtzel, drawn to David and his big, serious, ambitious, meaty, unfrivolous gold standard of a book; David, drawn to Wurtzel by her fucking leotard and perhaps her nebulous promise to impart upon his serious asset some sort of value-unlocking sense of "buzz"; the confusing, fuzzy subprime relationship they signed onto; all fuzzy fundamentals and wild histrionics and bombastic promises dependent on "trajectories" neither knows how — neither is socialized to know how — to prepare for a soft landing; yeah, you've done that sort of fucking.

Is Gawker trying to write like David Foster Wallace? David's dead, baby.



David's dead, but there were some good movies after "Star Wars."

"Let's talk about the fact that with a 160 on the LSATs, Wurtzel was much better suited for Northeastern than Northwestern, let alone YLS...."

"... which raises serious questions as to their admissions standards." Adam Bonin seems kind of irked at all the attention Elizabeth Wurtzel has gotten and continues to get. I mean, really, the LSAT is not the only factor. Yale gets all the high LSATs. High LSATs should mean nothing to them. Get some interesting people. Why should Yale care if they'll fit in law firms or have problems passing character requirements for the bar? The key is to get something interesting going in the classroom. Yale had every reason to think Wurtzel would spice up the mix.

"While I could never advocate censorship... the three young women... harmed by AutoAdmit... deserve a way out of this electronic shock."

Elizabeth Wurtzel -- the "Prozac Nation" memoirist, now a Yale Law student -- opines rather incoherently about the AutoAdmit dustup.

[T]he Washington Post ran a front-page story about some young women here at Yale Law School whose careers--if not their lives--had been ruined by some salacious postings. The descriptions of them--sluts and whores--and the suggestions about what might be done to them--rape and sodomy--were showing up on Google searches of their names, and had prevented at least one of them from securing employment.

Since then, Dean Elena Kagan at Harvard Law School and Dean Harold Koh here at Yale have sent out open letters, condemning the nasty communications. We've had speak-outs and write-ins, organized blue-ribbon panels and worn red outfits for solidarity. There's talk of legal remedies and media campaigns....

In such a world, what to do about AutoAdmit? To start with, pray for mercy, because based on the content of its postings, the future of jurisprudence does not look good. Having done that, plead for civility. Just because we can say anything, does that mean we must say everything? While I could never advocate censorship, I would certainly ask for sensitivity....

Because people are delicate. The neighborhood rumormongers of yore could cause enough trouble in a small town, but the unpoliced World Wide Web is really a mess. It's unpoliced, which demands that we be better people, gentler and more humane. Because if not we will surely all go mad. As it is we are overwhelmed: It never stops, we don't know how to stop it, we wouldn't want to anyway, and then we relish complaining about it. This is how we live now. Do we want to add random postings about ourselves, our private selves, that aren't even true, into this volatile mix? AutoAdmit for adults?

In the mean time, the three young women here at Yale Law School who've been most harmed by AutoAdmit--beautiful and brilliant all--deserve a way out of this electronic shock.

"In the mean time"? Well, I guess we are living in a mean time. Maybe sometime in the future, people will be nicer.

In the meantime, I'm still recommending laughter and a thick skin. It's much more liberating than asking your professors to nurture your sensitive soul.

Speak-outs and write-ins, organized blue-ribbon panels... oh, my.

Sophia and her older man.

Sophia Loren's husband Carlo Ponti just died -- at the age of 94.

Ponti was married to his first wife, Giuliana, when he met Loren, who was almost 25 years younger than he, in about 1950.

They tried to keep their relationship a secret in spite of huge media interest, while Ponti's lawyers went to Mexico to obtain a divorce.

Ponti and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 -- two male attorneys took their place. The couple only found out about their marriage when the news was broken by a society columnist.

Well, this is an interesting story problem for math class, but I'm just going to look up Sophia Loren's birth date. It's September 20, 1934. She was 16 when they met in 1950. He was 38. She was 23 when she married the 45-year-old Ponti. Now, he is dead, and she is 72.

Remember this cover of Life Magazine?



That was from 1966. It was about a year before Twiggy entered our brains and made Sophia look fat. Click on the image to see a page of all the Life Magazine photos from that year. I remember them so well. Everyone read Life then. On the covers: Bobby Kennedy, Ian Fleming, Melina Mercouri, Jean-Paul Belmondo, "LSD Art," a White House wedding, "young black militants," Claudia Cardinale, "Mod male fashions," Julie Christie, Elizabeth Taylor, TV's Batman, Jackie Kennedy, Louis Armstrong, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. So long ago. So vivid....

Condolences to the beautiful Sophia.

And I love the image of two male lawyers getting married in 1957!

Best film of the year.

I haven't been reading many of the ten bests lists this year. Here's one, rounding up the usual suspects, the Oscar-y crap with landscapes/history/biography and those heavy-handed sexuality and violence themes.

What a big drag! I especially loathe the biopic. This year, we're supposed to care about Truman Capote and Johnny Cash -- I mean a pretentious actor impersonating Truman Capote or Johnny Cash. Last year, we were supposed to be excited about Liam Neeson pretending to be Alfred Kinsey and Jamie Foxx pretending to be Ray Charles. Both of those '04 movies played on cable TV yesterday evening and I was switching back and forth trying to get a bit of a sense of what was thought to be so good there. Neeson seemed to be giving a competent performance as a dull man, but Foxx was being a giant ham. I was cringing.

Why can't we just see actual footage of Ray Charles? It's disconcerting to imitate his mannerisms. Since there's plenty of film of the man, why not make a documentary? Is this acting stunt worth doing? I seriously do not understand why they make so many biopics, especially of people there's plenty of film of, especially when they are singers and we've got innumerable filmed recordings of their concert performances.

Is it because the actor can show us the actual consumption of drugs and alcohol, and we can drag in an actress for him to have big, loud fights with? Those awful domestic disputes! I'm never interested in seeing a man and a woman just yelling at each other about their relationship! I think Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are interesting in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," but, after that, I really don't need any more. Husband and wife squabbles! Why not just live in an apartment building with thin walls?

I avoided nearly every movie in 2005, pursuant to my aversion to movies. But I did see a few and I can give my full stamp of approval to one. It's a documentary: "Grizzly Man."



And here's Grizzly Liz:

Courtney and the Pamela Anderson Roast.

I finally got around to watching the Pamela Anderson Roast I'd taken the trouble to TiVo. As you may remember, I wanted to watch it because of the fuss that was made over Courtney Love's behavior. Well, the show was excruciating, with second rate comics making one bad anatomical joke after another. It was supposedly a charity event for PETA – man, I remember when a politically correct operation like that would not sully itself with rank sexist material – and many, many of the jokes connected the kind of animals PETA cares about with the animal names that are used as slang for a woman's genitalia. So the show was utter crapola but somehow everyone wrote about Courtney, because apparently it's so fun to attack her. Interestingly enough, it turned out that Courtney had the best control over how to do a celebrity roast right. Everyone was holding a drink and badly faking high spirits, but she outdid them all, convincingly displaying a roasty attitude. When it was her turn to speak, she did her part perfectly. She played the rocker who deigned to stop by to give Pamela real rock cred because she loved her. She did her lines and her moves and then she kissed Anderson's high-heeled foot. Well played, Courtney! Chez Althouse, we love you!

UPDATE: Putting Pam and Courtney side-by-side made me want to spin out an analysis similar to the comparison between Jackie Kennedy and Liz Taylor in "Jackie Under My Skin" (by Wayne Koestenbaum). You have two icons and one is pure and idealized, the other is tainted and dirtied. In the Pam/Courtney comparison, both represent sexuality and self-indulgence, but Pam has some how made what was dirty into something utterly polished and glossy – essentially fulfilling the Playboy dream. Courtney is the real-life version of sexual indulgence: this is what trying to live that fantasy will really make you look like. Well, now I'm thinking of another book.

Those 100 AFI quotes.

Okay, I'm game. I'll TiVo-blog, numbering each entry. Watch for continuous updates. Ah, it's good to be simulblogging again!

1. “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” That's the first one that made me want to type it out. That's # 91. Hmmm… I’m seeing a theme. Life affirmingness. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” “Carpe diem.” “I’m the King of the World.” It’s all so damned positive… so far.

2. I singled out a few quotes in my post on the original 400 nominees, and coming it at #84 is one of my favorites: "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."

3. File under: movies no one feels any compunction about spoiling. "Soylent Green is people." (#77) Ray Romano: "Not a day went by when someone didn't yell that out in the school cafeteria."

4. "What a dump." (#62) The line everyone knows without seeing the movie. The movie is "Beyond the Forest," which I'm not going to recommend to you because I don't want to hear your bellyaching when you discover it's not a good movie. But I love this movie! I love when Bette Davis finally gets out of her damn little town and makes it to Chicago -- Chicago! of all places -- and she goes to a bar and, because she's a woman alone, she's perceived as a prostitute, and they kick her out. And then there's the part where she's pregnant, but she doesn't want the baby, so she just hurls herself down a hill. And all those great scenes where she stands by the window and looks at the smoking factory right outside and just burns with unexploded sexual passion. That is a movie! Oh, they scarcely tell us anything about this film, they just segue quickly to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with Elizabeth Taylor saying the same line. The line doesn't get counted a second time. The point seems to be it was such a line that it got quoted in the movies, quoted by a big, big movie star. But "Beyond the Forest," that's on my personal list.

5. We're getting into doubles for the same movie. A second quote from "Streetcar Named Desire." ("Stella" beat "kindness of strangers.") A second quote from "Casablanca." ("We'll always have Paris" beat "Of all the gin joints..." I'm predicting at least one more from "Casablanca.") A second quote from "The Graduate." ("Plastics" beat "You're trying to seduce me.")

6. Okay, enough baseball already! We're at the fourth or fifth baseball quote, including the mushy-headed "If you build it, he will come." (#39) "Luckiest man on the face of the earth" follows at #38.

7. Yes, another "Casablanca" quote: "Round up the usual suspects." (That must get extra credit for providing the title for another film.) Ah, now they tell us the total for "Casablanca" is going to be six. So three more to go. "Here's looking at you, kid" -- I assume. And "Play it, Sam." And, maybe the "hill of beans" quote. Or the final "this is the beginning" quote? Not sure what the third one left is.

8. "That movie is about so much. I think that it is so much about God...." So says Jennifer Grey about -- what else? -- "The Wizard of Oz." The quote at #23 is the dopey "There's no place like home." Aren't there 23 better lines in that film alone?

9. Another "Casablanca" at #20. Oh, it's "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

10. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Now, that's a catchphrase. Remember when Peter Finch went on "The Tonight Show" to promote that movie -- "Network" -- and for some reason got to talking about how some of the people watching the show that night would be dead next week, and then he proceeded to die within the next week? Am I getting that right?

11. "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's #13. Ugh! Pure crapola!

12. "Napalm in the morning" ... "Failure to communicate" ... "You talkin' to me?" ... "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."

13. "May the force be with you." George Lucas tells us he meant that to sum up and represent all religions and save us from the difficulty of scrutinizing the details that make them different.

14. "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup." #7. I approve!

15. The final "Casablanca" quote is "Here's looking at you kid." #5. (Doesn't Ingrid Bergman have the most beautiful lips?)

16. At #4: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Only line on the list addressed to a dog.

17. Three left, and we're told one actor said two of them. Clearly, it's Marlon Brando, and as we see the first one is "I coulda been a contender," we know that "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" is either number 1 or number 2.

18. Second place goes to Brando, for "offer ... refuse." Why am I not thinking of the top quote? It should be obvious, right?

19. Oh, it's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Somehow, I had the feeling we'd already hit that one. So, sure. I would have put that first... in the world of American movie catchphrases.

20. Okay, that was three hours of slogging through the quotes. Three hours well spent? Who knows!

21. During the show, they pointed us to the AFI website to read a quote from "Mrs. Miniver" that wasn't on the list, but that, we were told, FDR had printed up and dropped from planes on Nazi-occupied Europe.

This is the people's war! It is our war! We are the fighters! Fight it, then! Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right.

Of course, the war quote that made the list was the cynicism-promoting "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

22. In the first entry to this post, I noted that the quotes seem to have been selected for their life-affirmingness. But toward the top of the list, things got darker. The top quotes are all pretty sad or cynical or nutty or negative. They stowed all that sunny stuff at the bottom of the list.

23. Adam at Throwing Things has some observations including the count of lines spoken by nonwhite actors: 3. All by men, I note. Two of the three make the speaker look bad ("Show me the money" and "stinking badges"), Adam notes. I note that the other one -- "They call me Mr. Tibbs" -- is too pretty. Why not one of Samuel Jackson's lines from "Pulp Fiction"? Adam asks. Which reminds me: how about Quentin Tarantino? Not a single line from him. Well, most of the lines they had drew attention to the actors that delivered them, not the person who happened to write them. This was not a celebration of screenwriters.

24. Here's the whole list. I took the trouble to figure out the percentage of quotes spoken by women: 25%.

Art, commerce, politics. Last week at the law school we had a discussion about free speech, privacy, and commerce, prompted by an article that proposed limiting the first amendment free speech clause to political speech (to be protected absolutely), realigning personal expression rights with the right of privacy (to be protected subject to balancing), and withdrawing protection for expression that is not political or personal. Commercial speech is the big loser in the realignment. This has left me thinking about not just the way the personal is political but also the way the personal is commercial. Filmmaking, for example, is a huge commercial enterprise. So is TV. The lone artist at his easel or writer with a typewriter is romantic--I'm picturing Johnny Depp in Secret Window. ...

Long interlude taken at this point in the writing to buy several Depp DVDs on Amazon ... Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Don Juan De Marco, Dead Man, Benny and Joon (with Mary Stuart Masterson at her easel), and Donnie Brasco .... This art/commerce interlude ties to the point I'm going to make.

The lone artist at his easel or writer with a typewriter is romantic but not the source of the kind of artistic expression most of us spend our time taking in. Where is the line between personal expression and commerce? I think Depp is an immensely individualistic artist, making eccentric choices, yet only appearing in works that are the result of elaborate commercial production, and I'm caught up in the stream of commerce buying the films, but also reaching out to an artistic experience.

And it's not just films, other products are personally defining, even if advertisers push us to define ourselves with products. I had my new iBook on the table during the discussion of free speech and couldn't help feeling personally expressed by it. Earlier that day, one colleague had dropped by to show off her iPod and another to show off a new text-messaging cell phone. Buying clothes, buying a car, choosing a soda. These are also personal expressions. Even if these aren't the loftiest aspects of personal expression, they matter, just like how you cut your hair matters. There's even a political dimension. Andy Warhol said it well:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.