"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath..."

"... his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."

That's a challenging one, today's sentence in the "Gatsby" project (wherein we examine, each day, one sentence, out of context, from "The Great Gatsby").

I'm seriously intimidated, because I can't bust out of the sentence to get a grasp of how it can be that his mind is, pre-kiss, romping like the mind of God. Oh, but suddenly it's clear! If he kisses her, he enters the concrete word, where one specific thing after another will happen. But before he takes that action, he exists within imagination — his unutterable visions. There's so much to gain and so much to lose. Within imagination, he is like God, fully free. Anything — everything — can happen. You throw that all away if you kiss her. To kiss her is not to marry her, but there is a wedding: of the mind to the body, the perishable breath.

And quite aside from the man and the resisted kiss, there's an assertion about God. God has a romping mind.

ADDED: Chip Ahoy animates the sentence:

For comparison purposes.

Are those comediennes funnier than these?

And let's try to think deeply about gender politics. There's something distinctive about the argument — coming from females — that we will withhold sex unless you give us something we want. The argument, even as joke, assumes the audience grasps the notion sex is not intrinsically valuable to women. It's currency to be used to purchase something else.

In contrast to the idea of women exercising power by withholding sex is the idea that men seek political power to get sex. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" is something famously said by a man who looked liked this:



That's Henry Kissinger in his younger days. Think he would have had much political success saying do what I want or I won't have sex with you? No. It was the other way around for him. By acquiring power he became seductive.

Perhaps men have had such success reaching high positions of political power because of their sexual drive. If sexual energy propels their climb to power, it's surprising women ever win elections. Why bother? I mean, really. Why bother? They must really want political power as an end in itself. And... well, there's this:

Sexually assaulted in full view of millions, the 18-year-old boy really has no option but to treat it as a joke.

Look at the photograph of the hulking Jenny McCarthy grabbing Justin Bieber by the throat and suctioning the back of his neck:

"Wow. I feel violated right now," he said, laughing.

"I did grab his butt," McCarthy said backstage. "I couldn't help it. He was just so delicious. So little. I wanted to tear his head off and eat it."

Imagine the sexes reversed. If you can. McCarthy is more than twice Bieber's age. She's 40. But, oh, she's trying so hard to project sexuality:

As you may know and not care about, Jenny is about to pose in Playboy again. She first posed for the men’s mag at 21, which helped launch her career as a sexy doofus. Recounting her first experience posing nude, Jenny told Oprah that... the Playboy people were surprised when she first took off her undies because she supposedly had the hairiest nether region they’d ever seen. In an appearance on The Today Show, Jenny said she’s using her pubes to maintain her modesty or something...

Too much information? Actually, no. That's great information. That's funny. But stop molesting teenagers. That's not funny, even if circumstances require Bieber to pretend that it is.

A kiss-in should be a love-in or it shouldn't be done at all.

Protests express opposition and therefore usually anger. Expressing love is inconsistent with anger. So if you're going to use a gesture of love for protest, you've got a special problem. Appropriating an expression of love for hostile purposes is a dangerous matter. It's what makes rape so horrible.

Think about it. Most of us love sex but if we were beset by a hostile assailant, we would prefer a punch in the face to sexual intercourse.

I'm looking at pictures from the Chick-fil-A kiss-in. These were people who wanted to demonstrate support for same-sex marriage. (I agree with them on that issue, by the way.) As their form of protest, they chose kissing — individuals of the same sex, kissing in restaurants that are associated with opposition to same-sex marriage. So the idea was, go where you think you are not loved — even though there's no evidence that Chick-fil-A treats gay customers with less respect and friendliness than straight customers — and do something you think will upset them.

Now, restaurants generally don't want anybody making out, so you've chosen behavior that would be disruptive to a restaurant's business whether the kissing couples are same or opposite sex. The form of expression is offensive and not like the old civil rights demonstrations where black people sat at lunch counters and were not served. They simply acted like customers — good customers — and the only reason it worked as a demonstration was that the store only served food to white people, the policy the protesters very successfully demonstrated was wrong. Kissing at Chick-fil-A does nothing to show what's wrong about anything Chick-fil-A is doing. It's just displaying hostility to the place.

And it's displaying hostility with kissing. So what have they done? They've perverted kissing, which should be an expression of love. Ironic, considering that the gay rights movement seeks to dispel the belief that homosexuality is perverted.

It's a challenge to protest with gestures of love. It can be done, but it can't be done with hate or love is not love. We think of hippies and their love-ins (and be-ins). I don't remember those demonstrations involving targeting any person or business. Yes, those hippies upset the squares — the straight people — and through what they claimed was love they made themselves dislikable to people they knew would be bothered by the way they acted, but that just goes to show how hard it is to use love to express something other than love.

ADDED: Here's a sign in a photograph chosen to top a favorable presentation of the kiss-in: "We're Here/We're Queer/& We're Not Eating." See how different that is from the old lunch-counter sit-ins? These 2 men are flaunting their taking up space in a commercial establishment without being customers. They are kissing as a way of saying: We're hostile to you.

The second sign says "I [heart] my boyfriend just as much as you love your spouse!," but the man is failing to demonstrate the equivalence between him and his boyfriend and "you" and your spouse because unlike the black sit-in protesters, they are not behaving like the people they want to say they are equal to.

The civil rights sitters-in behaved like ordinary customers, causing the store to behave in a way that onlookers could see was ugly. But since a straight couple doesn't go to a restaurant and stand around kissing without buying anything, the 2 men are not demonstrating sameness, but difference. An onlooker's reaction could be: No, you are not like me and my spouse because we only go to restaurants to buy food, and when we do, we treat everyone around us with respect, and when we kiss we do it in an appropriate setting and only to express love. Again, I see a terrible irony: They've sent the message of perverted love.

IN THE COMMENTS: As my whimsy leads me reminds us: "Judas perverted kissing when he betrayed Jesus."

I was thinking about Jesus when I wrote this post. Not in the context of Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss, but Jesus telling us to love our enemy. If someone strikes you on the face, instead of striking back, turn the other cheek, an invitation to the assailant to strike you a second time. That's how much love Jesus expects from you. That's a demonstration of love to the onlooker, who receives the message, the kind of demonstration that was made — to brilliant effect — in the civil rights era.

"Don't get too excited, Meade. It will be this kind of kiss."

I wrote in September 2008 (before I'd met Meade in person) in the comments to a post based on the NYT headline "Obama to Dispatch Female Surrogates," which I'd said "put a picture in my head of Obama releasing an army of programmed fembots." That was some crazy "war on women" the last time around.

I love running across old byplay between me and Meade. And I also love running across these old political things that bear some relationship to what's happening today. But the women stuff was much more fascinating back then, when Obama had crushed women's dreams of the first woman President and McCain had released The Palin.

The new headline, "Obama Camp Turns to Clinton to Counter Palin," flips the image. It's not Obama, but the Obama camp -- a large, faceless group -- and now it's not a large, faceless group of women, but one particular woman, Hillary. Don't pin anything directly on Obama, and don't disrespect women by portraying them as nonindividuals.

Can you guess what got me to that old post? I'd searched my blog for the word "faceless" — trying to get to this blog post I'd written a week or so ago about the 3 times Obama called people "faceless" in "Dreams From My Father." That post followed on an inquiry into the story (from Obama's book) about how, as a boy, he'd shouted at and shoved a little girl.

There were faces then — big faces. Hillary. Sarah.

I Am Big, It's the Pictures That Got Small
Sunset Blvd. at MOVIECLIPS.com

They used to be big. It's the politics that got small.

"Alleged proposals to allow Egyptian husbands to legally have sex with their dead wives for up to 6 hours after their death have been branded a 'complete nonsense.'"

"The controversial new 'farewell intercourse' law was claimed, in Arab media, to be part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament."

Who even thinks about making laws on this subject?

But now that we are thinking about it, what do you think: How much physical love may a husband express toward his newly dead wife (or a wife to her husband)? Clearly, kissing the dead loved one is considered normal, but where is the line? If you had to make a law defining what constitutes a crime with respect to the treatment of a dead body, how much leeway would you give to the new widowers and widows?

Let's not get all embroiled in what the Egyptian Islamists do. Let's look at our own values. We're talking about when the state should prosecute somebody. Who should go to prison? Take into account that, under the Constitution, we have a right of privacy:

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights — older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects.

ADDED: This subject makes me want to reprint the last paragraph of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame":

About eighteen months or two years after the events which terminate this story, when search was made in that cavern for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days previously, and to whom Charles VIII. had granted the favor of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrézarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.

Dying cultural phenomenon alert.

Whatever happened to "mic check"? Why, only last fall it was a burgeoning new cultural phenomenon. Look at Richard Kim burbling in The Nation last October:

We Are All Human Microphones Now

... [T]he protesters [have] adopted an ingeniously simple people-powered method of sound amplification. After the mic check, the meeting proceeds:

with every few words / WITH EVERY FEW WORDS!

repeated and amplified out loud / REPEATED AND AMPLIFIED OUT LOUD!

by what has been dubbed / BY WHAT HAS BEEN DUBBED!

the human microphone / THE HUMAN MICROPHONE!!! (jazz hands here).

Jazz hands here, indeed.

The overall effect can be hypnotic, comic or exhilarating—often all at once. As with every media technology, to some degree the medium is the message....

Oh, yes it is. And that particular message lost its appeal. Am I wrong?

[I]t’s Occupy Wall Streets’ raw anger and simple resistance to being beat down (sentiments well suited for the human mic) that have captured the public’s imagination....

The public's imagination seems to have escaped from that captivity. It's hard to find any recent enthusiasm for the old mic check game. And by "old," I mean: last fall. In the past week, I see some pathetic "mic check" activity in D.C.:

[M]embers of Occupy D.C. clustered in the middle of R Street NW for an impromptu general assembly as police were hoping to reopen the roadway to oncoming traffic. They resolved to relocate to the Black Cat, where the City Paper debate was about to begin....

"Mic check!" a loud voice in the back of the room exclaimed. A rabble of occupiers—not more than 20—started to issue their demands that the debate cover issues such as Walmart and corporate campaign contributions, and their apparent frustration that all three moderators... were white men.

And a "mic check" call was used at a recent Santorum rally:

As Santorum addressed the crowd, two men in the back stood up and started yelling, "Mic Check!" Then, when they had everyone's attention, embraced in a prolonged kiss.... The crowd responded by chanting, "USA! USA!," as security escorted the men out of the room. Patch Local identified the men as Timothy Tross and Ben Clifford. The pair told the Patch that Santorum's stance against gay rights is what prompted their protest kiss.

So now "mic check" = "look at us." No mic checking actually occurs. Just some kissing. Speaking of a very old medium with a well known message.

Oscar Wilde to be protected from kisses...

... on his tomb.

In "A Woman of No Importance," Oscar Wilde wrote about kissing:

MRS. ALLONBY. You think there is no woman in the world who would
object to being kissed?



LORD ILLINGWORTH. Very few.

MRS. ALLONBY. Miss Worsley would not let you kiss her.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Are you sure?

MRS. ALLONBY. Quite.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?

MRS. ALLONBY. Either marry you, or strike you across the face with
her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face
with her glove?

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Fall in love with her, probably.

MRS. ALLONBY. Then it is lucky you are not going to kiss her!

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Is that a challenge?

...

LORD ILLINGWORTH. [Sitting down.] Last night was excessively
unfortunate. That silly Puritan girl making a scene merely because
I wanted to kiss her. What harm is there in a kiss?

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. [Turning round.] A kiss may ruin a human life,
George Harford. I know that. I know that too well.

The photos of Bob Dylan on "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and George Harrison on "All Things Must Pass"...

... were both made by Barry Feinstein... who died today at the age of 80.

You can see the iconic Bob-as-Woody-Guthrie pic and the George-with-gnomes pic along with lots of other cool photos at the official Barry Feinstein website. And here's a book of Feinstein's pictures of Dylan. I hear it's got a lovely picture of Bob kissing Mary Travers.

Police enforce a rule against dancing in the Jefferson Monument.

This is the long version.



Short version and background here.

Kissing! Yay!!!

"There is a way in which 9-year old girls will always decide the pop charts."

"'What do you mean [Bob Dylan/Nirvana/Led Zeppelin/Modest Mouse] never had a #1 but [Bobby Vinton/Barry Manilow/Mariah Carey/Britney Spears] had multiple ones?'  Yeah, yeah.  The radio is important hipster dudes and kids who cannot afford to stock their whole iPod yet have to hear their favorite songs somehow.  Yup.  Whitney Houston's 80s #1s are the definers of this genre.  And How Will I Know is the best of those songs.  Upbeat and dancey, How Will I Know, which asks essentially the same questions and the Shoop Shoop Song, doesn't really care much about the first blush of love or the deeper meaning of woman's inability to read male signals.  It care about Whitney's voice, which is sweet and flowing like Karo syrup across flapjacks, and that synth line.  And the little girls sang along and rightly so."

List-a-Beefy reaches #143 in the top 200 #1 songs since 1955 and analyzes it in the pop style that only List-a-Beefy can muster. Mmmm... flapjacks.

Here are the lyrics to "How Will I Know?" and here's "Shoop Shoop Song" in case you want to compare questions asked and possibly answered.

How will I know?...
Does he love me? I want to know...
Don't trust your feelings...
It's in his kiss...

A Drudge photo juxtaposition, presented for your intepretation.

You've got Obama, turning to his right, gleefully chomping a chocolate-dipped strawberry, with the heading "Obama Ready to Eat the Press." (The linked article is about the White House Correspondents' Dinner tonight.) The photo underneath Obama is his father, turning in the opposite direction, a pipe clenched in his teeth. (The heading beneath that pic is "Obama's father forced out at Harvard...," linking to an article referring to Harvard's "difficulty... figur[ing] out how many wives he had.") The third picture freezes Mitch Daniels in a gesture that gives the impression — to my eye — of being quite rude.



Come on, Matt. What's this supposed to mean? A wider view may flesh out the meaning:

"Slim finds the concept of physical intimacy with his wife distasteful..."

"... but he dreams of a future as a high-priced prostitute."

"I've been texting for a year with a couple of guys without ever going on a date with them."

"The other day I got a text from a boy, but it wasn't hot. I mean, if you're going to text me every day, you haven't seen me for months and you're trying to seduce me, you'd better spice up that text and make it more exciting than 'How was your day? I hope you're having a beautiful one.' Sadly, I haven't been doing a lot of kissing lately."

Chloe Sevingny.

George Bush, in a kiss at the moment of victory.

The Rangers have finally won a World Series game.

"Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

Suicide, announced on Facebook, after live-streamed internet exposure via secret webcam.

"Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my Web cam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

"... Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

A lengthy and ravenous kiss on a dark and stormy night.

Drudge digs in, and The Smoking Gun has the transcript depicting Gore as "a giggling 'crazed sex poodle.'"

Drudge. Smoking Gun:

In a bizarre statement to police, the Oregon woman who claims that Al Gore fondled and groped her during a massage session described the former Vice President as a giggling "crazed sex poodle" who gave a "come hither" look before pouncing on her in a Portland hotel suite. In a taped January 2009 interview with cops, the 54-year-old woman, a licensed masseuse... detailed her alleged October 2006 encounter with Gore at the Hotel Lucia.... It is unclear why, two years later, she approached Portland police and sought to memorialize her allegations against Gore, who she portrayed as a tipsy, handsy predator who forced her to drink Grand Marnier, pinned her to a bed, and forcibly French kissed her. The woman's statement--which could be mistaken for R-rated Vice Presidential fan fiction--describes Gore as a man with a "violent temper as well as extremely dictatorial commanding attitude besides his Mr. Smiley Global Warming concern persona." After fleeing Gore's suite, the woman returned home to discover, a la Lewinsky, "stains on the front of my black slacks." Suspecting that the stains were Gore bodily fluids, the woman made sure not to clean them.

Al and Tipper Gore separate.

"We are announcing today that after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate. This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration. We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family, and we do not intend to comment further."

They've been married for 41 years. What's happened?

In happier times:



ADDED: There may be global warming, but there's household cooling.

AND: Everyone's tweaking the same joke. Meade, in the comments, writes: "Gore-ball cooling."