"What I learned about beauty from my 56 hours in jail."

I hope you learned not to do that duck-lips thing with your mouth that you did in the "Self-portrait from the day before the incident." But no, it's stuff like:

These women were endlessly resourceful: colored pencils for eyeliner, lip liner, and eye shadow (yeah, it fucking hurts to apply). If you bend every other prong of the standard-issue comb, it becomes a makeshift brush....

The worst thing about my short time in jail? Honestly? Besides the indignity and the shitty food and the crushing boredom and the derision from the staff and the self-loathing just being there obviously inspired? Chapped lips.

OK, maybe I’m being a little facetious, but I was parched. My lips were cracked and bleeding, spoiled with a steady diet of Fresh Sugar lip treatment. Licking my lips only made it worse, but I couldn’t help it — it was Pavlovian. It sounds stupid, but I remember that agony more clearly than anything else. When my cellmate shared her makeshift chapstick (shave gel mixed with something pink that I never actually identified) with me, I practically kissed her. 

That sets up a hilarious lampooning by a commenter. Excerpt:

We broke our inkpins and blew the black ink out into our small cups of vasaline, then took a small 2 inched toothbrush to apply... some girls lined their eyes with Sharpies, meant to label our personal property. We made lip gloss with color out of red Kool-Aid or red jello and neosporin. We had clear toothpaste gel that did everything but brush your teeth, and we used this for everything from hair gel to adhesives for our pictures and calanders... We took our Gold Bond Foot Powder and dripped coffee and red Kool-Aid in our cups to try and create eyeshadow and blush....

Another commenter offers a tip she learned in school:

This sounds gross, but my 8th grade science teacher told the class that he just used his own ear wax as lip balm...

The worst part is that he wasn't even mentioning this as like a survival technique....

I love when science teachers challenge their students.

Look, don't even get started with the chapstick. It's addictive:



You'll wake up thinking about it:

"When the doper’s code of silence around Lance Armstrong cracked, Sheryl Crow was obliged to sing."

"Crow, who was once engaged to the tarnished cyclist, provided information last year in a far-reaching federal investigation into the doping programs that fueled her former fiancé’s victorious Tour de France teams...."

***

Sorry about the tag — the Crow-David entity — but I don't like to add too many new tags, and Sheryl Crow already has a tag on this blog, created back in the day when she was operating as a single entity with Laurie David. Ever notice how Larry David called his wife on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" Cheryl, not Laurie?

Just as Sheryl and Lance are no longer an... entity. Larry and Laurie are now divorced. Here's something funny from Laurie's Wikipedia page:

In an interview with The Guardian in November 2006, David acknowledged that owning two homes on opposite sides of the country and flying in a private jet several times per year is at odds with her message to others. In the interview she notes "Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year, and I feel horribly guilty about it. I probably shouldn't do it. But the truth is, I'm not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don't expect anybody else to be perfect either. That's what hurts the environmental movement – holding people to a standard they cannot meet. That just pushes people away."

That article predates the David entity's split:

Larry's wife on [TV] is a meek woman who spends her days gossiping with friends and worrying about her wardrobe. Laurie, by contrast, is often said to be stubborn, confident and driven - thoroughly focused on the fight. Larry himself says of her, "She's a gal with a mission."

"Seinfeld isn't talking to the media about his new [web-only] show..."

"But the premise sounds a bit like his TV show, which focused on the minutiae of life....."

In the promo for the new webseries, Seinfeld's old partner Larry David affirms that connection: "It's comedy in cars with coffee. What does that mean? ... You have finally done a show about nothing!"

Here's the first episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee." Nice attention to the car (a 1952 split-window Volkswagen). The episode title is "Larry Eats a Pancake."

I'm a big fan of the 2-guys-talking-in-a-restaurant genre. My favorite movie is "My Dinner With Andre."

Larry David hired Fred Stoller to write for "Seinfeld," but then it turned out...

... as Fred tells it, that "Mr. David had hired Mr. Stoller, at least in part, because his schnooky personal life might lend itself to story lines."

At one point, Mr. Stoller finally got up the nerve to pitch an idea to Mr. David and to Jerry Seinfeld, and Mr. David immediately interrupted, asking: "Where'd you get that shirt? Do people help you? What's the process of someone like you buying a shirt?"

"Larry would just look at me and go: 'How do you talk to a woman?' " Mr. Stoller recalls.

From a WSJ article on Stoller, whose $1.99 book "My Seinfeld Year," is #1 on the Kindle Singleslist.

"When Do Gay Kids Start 'Acting Gay'?"

"Sometimes when they're toddlers," writes Brian Palmer in Slate.

What? No discussion of the "pre-gay" boy on "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?!

"What made the whole Girl-Scout-with-her-period thing so inspired..."

"... wasn’t just that Larry [David] has to read detailed anatomical instructions through the door (I love the barely sublimated panic in her voice: 'Inner tube?!'), or that he seems at least as baffled by the whole process as Keira did. Nor was it the look of paralyzing terror that washes over Keira’s face as she discovers she's become a woman (at the time, Larry's describing the ingredients in Samoas, and for a second I thought maybe she had some kind of coconut phobia). No, what really made this secene brillant was that Keira decides to tell Larry, her dad's old, bald friend, that she's gotten her period for the first time. God forbid this should ever happen to anyone in real life, but if it did, I'm certain that 99.9% of earthbound females would just quietly slip away to the bathroom and figure out a temporary solution to their worries. But, lest we forget, Larry is not the only oddball who occupies his universe. As petty, outrageous and selfish as Larry so often is, he’s usually acting in response to someone who’s 'off' in some fundamental way. In this case, that someone is a 13-year-old girl willing to discuss her intimate bodily functions with an aging male stranger."

From the AV Club's description of the first episode of the new season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Everyone's talking about the excruciating, hilarious tampon scene.

They say that 20-foot cross that the ACLU objects to was a gift from Woody Allen.

What a funny world we live in!

The ACLU of New Jersey threatened legal action against the Neptune school district after an attendee at last year’s graduation ceremony took offense to the building’s religious symbols and Christian-based references -- among them a 20-foot white cross above the auditorium’s entrance. The ACLU asked the school to remove or cover up the cross and three other religious signs, arguing their visibility during a public school event is a First Amendment violation....

The Camp Association said it could not cover the cross, said to have been a gift from movie director Woody Allen, who used the auditorium during shooting for the 1980 film "Stardust Memories."

Interestingly, if this case goes to court, the key Supreme Court precedent will be Van Orden v. Perry, the case about the 10 Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds, and that monument supposedly originated as a promotion for the Cecil B. de Mille movie "The Ten Commandments." From the oral argument in Van Orden:

Justice O'Connor: How did this monument get there? Was it in... is it true that it was put in as a result of promoting a movie about the Ten Commandments?

Mr. Chemerinsky: The record is unclear as to that. There are certainly many indications in the popular press that Cecil B. DeMille together with his movie, The Ten Commandments, worked with the Friends of Eagles to have these monuments put around the country. But there is nothing in the legislative history that links this particular monument to that.

And the cross is only said to be a gift from Woody Allen.

Where do all the religious stories come from? If there were movies back in Biblical times, what movie directors would be wandering around in those old Judeo-Christian stories? Anyway, I tried to find a YouTube clip showing the cross in "Stardust Memories," but I can't remember that movie well enough to know what scene it's in. I did run across this clip from Woody's "New York Stories" that has a little Larry David performance in it. And here's Larry David saying "Religion should be made fun of, it's quite ridiculous, isn't it?... If I really believed that stuff, I'd keep it to myself, lest somebody think I was out of my mind":

So what's Larry David cooking up for the new season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?

Oh, nooooooooooo!

Second thought: oh, yes! I completely want to see what Larry does with this: his wife having sex with... gasp!... Al Gore.

Run with it, Larry. I loved when "South Park" mocked Al Gore — as ManBearPig. He makes a great figure of fun. Come on, Larry. Puncture that inflated globe of a man.

We were just checking out Laurie David's website. My, she looks distinguished there. And I love that Albert Einstein quote she uses in her banner: "We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if manbearpig is to survive.

Details from the Daily News:

[Star Magazine] says the ex-veep and the comedian's ex have been involved for two years....

Laurie David ... co-produced "An Inconvenient Truth," the Oscar-winning documentary about Gore and his campaign against global warming....

"The story is completely untrue," Laurie David said in a statement. "It's a total fabrication. I adore both Al and Tipper. I look at them both as family. And I have happily been in a serious relationship since my divorce."....

The Gores' stunning split after 40 years of marriage has prompted wildly varying explanations in the gossip sheets: Globe magazine said Al was gay, and the National Enquirer said Tipper was crazy.

 Hmmm.  Those tabloids!

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" gives Michael Richards his (hilarious) absolution.

Last night's new episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — which has been working the "Seinfeld" reunion theme all season — finally got around to doing something with the painful subject of Michael Richards's disgrace over the shouting of racial epithets at some hecklers in a comedy club. Spoiler:

After learning that he suffers from the fictional Groat's disease (last mentioned in Season 2 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), Michael Richards once again finds himself in the line of fire for a racially fueled attack on an African American ... who just happens to be Larry's house guest Leon (the always hysterical J.B. Smoove), who posed as Groat's disease sufferer Danny Duberstein but who looked more like Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam than a Jewish CPA.

Skewering Richards' brush with notoriety, Larry David has Richards angrily confront Leon in full view of several dozen camera phones, leading to him proclaiming that he wished he could call Leon a word that would make him as angry as he was right then. It's a savage parody of Richards' race-fueled rant to an African American heckler during a 2006 stand-up performance ... which happened to be captured on a cellphone.

Brilliant. Highly satisfying.

Commenters keep cuing that they want a post about Larry David urinating on a picture of Jesus.

You know, we watched that episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" last week and laughed a lot. I've watched every episode of Larry David's brilliant sit-com. I love it. I think I would accept anything from Larry David. Some people who are attacking him over last week's episode obviously don't know the show and don't understand David's comic character. He gets into trouble over one thing after another — offending all sorts of people for all sorts of things. It's not aimed at Christians in particular. It's everyone. Including David himself. Larry David is Larry David's biggest target.

Too bad there's not a clip available to show the Piss Christ business. It's established early on in the episode that David is taking some sort of medication that makes his urine flow excessively forceful. There's a splashing problem. In a later scene, he needs to go to the bathroom and there's a picture of Jesus hanging next to the toilet. Jesus's eyes look to the side and down, and that seems like a setup for a joke about the way men don't look at each other's equipment when they are next to each other at the urinals.

(Digression: I know this about men not from personal observation but from David Foster Wallace, from "Big Red Son": "A strange and traumatic experience which [I] will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men's room urinal between professional woodmen Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at the penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups* the trauma). Be informed that male porn stars create around themselves the exact same opaque affective privacy-bubble that all men at urinals everywhere create.")

But Larry does not give Jesus a dirty look or flip the Jesus picture around. We don't hear him bitching later about how he didn't try to get a look at Jesus's genitals. (I hope I'm not offending anyone by referring to that aspect of the incarnation.) What happens is that Larry's forceful urine propels a single droplet onto Jesus's face, right under the eye, and later, the women of the household jump to the conclusion that the painting has miraculously shed a tear. Larry never "urinates on" the painting directly or intentionally. It's an accidental splash, and he's horrified at it, but unwilling to confess to it, at least not immediately, even to stop the women from making a big public show out of their their miracle painting.

This was all wonderful satire. The nonreligious man is trying not to offend, but his body makes a mistake, and he's too cowardly to confess. The religious women are too gullible, grasping after a miracle and the fame it seems to offer them.  I say: Bravo, Larry David, comic genius.

***

In honor of David Foster Wallace, a footnote:

* Did he mean to write "turn ups"... turnips, and if so, what was he implying about himself? Here's a photograph to aid your contemplation.

My pet peeve, men in shorts, was Larry David's pet peeve in tonight's new episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Excellent. Larry also had trouble with doctors who won't give you their home phone number, people who eat more than their share of caviar at a buffet, the sound of the human voice, and the taste of food.

The episode began with Larry lighting into a guy in shorts who was sitting next to him on an airplane. Here I am on very subject of men in shorts on airplanes last April:

The guy seated next to me on the plane was wearing shorts. Presumably, he didn't recognize me (and know my anti-shorts writings), but wouldn't it have been funny if he did?

He was also wearing a t-shirt with a hole under the arm, which hole he displayed to me more than twice.

He was up to page 503 on his Stephen King novel. Those King books are clumsily thick, yet the print is quite large — to give readers a feeling of accomplishment?...

Don't wear shorts on a plane. You're in an air-conditioned environment and sitting close to a stranger. It's bad enough that your clothed thigh may touch the stranger sitting next to you. Don't wangle the naked thigh near her!

Her, I emphasize. Unlike Larry David, I was a woman sitting next to a man in shorts. Larry was also in first class. I was not. The degree of imposed familiarity was really atrocious. Plus, I think men should have more pride in their genitalia. By wearing shorts, what are you saying? Either: 1. your genitalia are too small to be in any danger of protruding beyond the hem of your skimpy garment, or 2. you don't care what happens to fall out.

"Maybe a period of heartless liberalism is a needed corrective after eight years of compassionate conservatism."

"But here's the big question: Would Obama be as brutal in defending America's interests as he is in pandering to xenophobes and global warmists?"

Asks James Taranto, kindly linking to me, in a Best of the Web entitled "Beloved Aunt." ("Curb Your Enthusiasm" fans will remember the famous obituary typo.)

***

NSFW:

What's with the Abercrombie & Fitch product placement in Obama's "concession" speech last night?

Thanks to Toby, a commenter on the previous post, for this observation:

Somewhat off topic, but did anyone else notice the people behind Obama during his concession speech? There was the guy who looks like a Larry David clone (and may well have been him for all I know); and there were the three male college-age guys all wearing easily identifiable Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts, which may be a case of a company taking guerrilla marketing [to] a presidential contest, or may be an odd coincidence. Weird in any case.

Somewhat off topic, but now, it's the topic. So, you'd think they'd arrange the crowd better. Or is this the crowd they arranged? You know, sort of "We need more white people."

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian notes that Titus observed it first, thusly:

I am watching Barack's concession tonight on CNN and I want to do the three guys wearing the A&F shirts behind him.

A 4 way with them would be hot.

And Palladian added:

I like the one in the middle with the "Yes We Can" sign. Yes you can, indeed. The chubbier one to his right is also hot.

But it is hilarious that there are THREE men standing together wearing Abercrombie & Fitch shirts. How much do you think that vulgar company shelled out to those boys for this product placement?

Given the tenor of those remarks, I wonder if the Obama campaign is trying to reach out to gay voters — something the Clinton campaign is doing openly:

Accompanied by Governor Ed Rendell, Chelsea Clinton trolled through Philadelphia on a gay bar crawl, posing for photos and shaking hands with supporters.

In what may be one of the most unique campaign tactics yet employed in the hotly contested Democratic race, the Clinton family targeted one of their most valuable weapons straight toward the heart of the gay community on Friday. Surrounded by a moving crowd of admirers, Chelsea walked through the streets of Center City in Philadelphia, visiting four gay bars along the way to shake hands and chat about her mother's campaign.

Outside of the Tavern bar, patrons shouted "You're gorgeous, baby!" and "We love your highlights!" as Chelsea exited on her way to another gay club. "Thank you," she replied, "but that's not why you should vote for my mom."

According to the Washington Post, Governor Ed Rendell has a tradition of touring the most popular gay clubs in Philadelphia before elections. For this round, Rendell invited Chelsea Clinton to crawl the bars with him to speak to LGBT community members....

"The gay community has great feelings toward the [former] president and Hillary and they happen to love Chelsea," Rendell said, according to the Washington Post. "These are important voters, they're smart, they're sophisticated and they turn out in large numbers and always have," Rendall said of the LGBT community.

"Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?"

Larry David proposes an anti-Hillary ad.

"Sometimes you have to be a Leon."

J.B. Smoove.

"I heard nothing about the environment for all our lives and now this. I wish she would at least take back her own name."

The Boston Herald has this about the Larry David-Laurie David breakup:

Back in 2004, Larry David, a career crank, told The Atlantic scribe Eric Alterman in an article about Hollywood fund-raising: “I heard nothing about the environment for all our lives and now this. I wish she would at least take back her own name.”

A joke? Maybe not!

Of course, the “Seinfeld” creator and his tree-hugging spouse haven’t exactly been hailed as consummate conservationists on the Vineyard.

The Chilmark town fathers were miffed in 2005 when the Tinseltown twosome made many posh improvements to their property without getting required permits. (They built a BBQ pit and elevated stage too close to the oh-so-dear wetlands).

And Laurie David, whom some say is the inspiration for Susie, the potty-mouthed wife of Larry’s agent on “Curb,” was once labeled a “Gulfstream liberal” for her own brand of do-as-I-say-not-as-I do activism.

Oh, she's Susie? I love Susie... as a character... on a show....

Anyway... all that hypocrisy... it's funny! Now, will Larry will be able to talk about how funny it is?

Let's get some more from that Eric Alterman piece in The Atlantic:

[Laurie] David's combination of moxie and money has made her the It Girl of Hollywood progressive politics. She invited John McCain to dinner so that she could try to talk him into switching to the Democratic Party. (She failed.) John Edwards, a guest early in his presidential candidacy, was interrogated on his so-so environmental record. And then there are the fundraisers. In March the Davids hosted 200 people at a $1,000-a-plate party for Barbara Boxer, California's junior senator, who is up for re-election this fall. Larry David says that he forgot about the Boxer event, only to come home and see "all these cars parked." "Next thing I knew," he says, "Bill Clinton was showing up. I'm proud of my wife and I do support her, but there are other houses out here. Sometimes I think she thinks this is the only house in L.A. But what do you want me do? Stay up in my room? I do roll my eyes a lot.["]...

Talking to me in his office over salad and CNN, Larry David admitted that if he were married to someone else, "chances are [the NRDC] would never have seen a nickel from me." Playing to type, he went on, "Personally, I would give money away to people, because then I could get the personal satisfaction of playing the benefactor and have the obligation for the rest of my life. I would enjoy that."

It always sounds like a joke, right? Who knows how much he means it? I think maybe he means it a lot. Living in that milieu has to be stifling, if you're a great humorist like Larry. Not that there isn't comic material, but that you can't use it. If you're in the milieu, catering to a wife who's totally into the politics of it, maybe you'll be allowed to use your comic gifts to attack the other side. But all your raw material, the people who are crowding into your house, is off limits. Or nearly off limits. I could see Larry having his own misanthropic character say terrible things about them in a way that lets us know he the one who's terrible. But now! Now, the possibilities are endless. I want to hear him bitch about how Bill Clinton won't get out of his house.

So anyway... Eric Alterman... anything new about the arrest? (His description of the arrest has a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" flavor to it, doesn't it?)

I love Larry David and can't stand Laurie David...

... but it really seems wrong to approve of the breakup of a marriage. And yet... wouldn't Larry?

IN THE COMMENTS: Saul writes:

I don't know enough about Laurie David to form a real negative opinion (just saw her on tv during the Sheryl Crow tour). However, Larry is very much the true life version of George, and so he probably is not suited for marriage.

Maybe this will help his show.

The show -- "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- is so much about Larry's attempt to fit in a marriage and his wife's tireless efforts to make him fit that it's hard to see how it could be the same show. Of course, we can't lose Cheryl Hines -- she's the crucial second character. But he could get a whole season out of them breaking up. And whatever happens in the plot of the show, the writer's life experience should affect the tone and the humor. For example, he could keep the couple together, but present a much darker, crueler perspective on marriage. The two could come to despise each other and even cross a new line and wrong each other. As the show has been, the marriage anchors everything. We are periodically reassured that Larry must be basically good, because his wife cares about him and he listens to her. He argues, but in the end he does what he is told. What if that fell apart?

The 100 unsexiest men in the world.

Surely, there's someone less sexy than Gilbert Gottfried, but when you're making a list, you've got to put famous people on it. But anyway, Gottfried is funny, and don't all those surveys about what women find sexy always put humor near the top? I know... but still... There's got to be a guy who looks and sounds like Gottfried but isn't funny.

I'm not going to pick over this whole list. I'll just focus on #38, Larry David. I've had spontaneous discussions with women on the precise subject: Larry David is sexy.

And let me single out one choice to agree with: #45, Nick Nolte. I don't know exactly what it is, but I have a physical aversion to him. (Which makes me want to ask: why isn't Michael Douglas on the list?)

And what's with throwing in Osama Bin Laden -- at #8. (And why 8, specifically? Just to stick it to guys like Alan Colmes, who fared worse?) If the list is open to the likes of bin Laden, this guy springs to mind.

"Sit Down Comedy."

That's a new talk show, on TV Land, with David Steinberg:

Mr. Steinberg was a director of the early-80's sitcom "Newhart." And, he recalled, one of the highlights of working on that set was the chance to eat lunch with Mr. Newhart and other funny people - including Mr. Newhart's friend and fellow comedian Don Rickles, who would often drop by - and to sit back and listen to them talk, joke and reminisce about life in the comedy business.

"That was almost my childhood ideal of what show business would be, those lunches," Mr. Steinberg said in a telephone interview from his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. "That kind of experience is so memorable, and so rare."

Nice idea. I'll set the TiVo.

"Casual" is the watchword for the series itself. In contrast to "Inside the Actors Studio" and its scholarly, well-prepared host, "Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg" is concerned less with serious analysis than with giving Mr. Steinberg and fellow comedians - some, like Mr. Newhart and Martin Short, old friends; others, like George Lopez and Jon Lovitz, performers he admired but did not know personally - the chance to riff off of each other.

"I'm not interested in the craft of comedy," Mr. Steinberg said. "I don't think that's interesting to an audience. I just wanted to show the audience how funny these people can be."

Mike Myers is the first guest, tonight. Larry David is the second guest, next week. What more do you need to know? This is perfect!