Flashback Wednesday — Little Miley, All Grown Up

May 2, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Miley Cyrus was on Jimmy Kimmel last night defending her tweet of two days earlier. The tweet retracted an apology of ten years earlier. I mean, I guess saying “fuck you” constitutes a retraction.

I had blogged about the controversy at the time (here), noting that the photo did not deliver on what the tabloid headlines promised – “Racy,” “Topless,” “Half-naked,” etc., and that the salaciousness seemed to be in the mind of the beholders.*

It wasn’t what Miley Cyrus was showing – a beach photo of her in a scoop-back, one-piece bathing suit would have shown more skin – it was what she wasn’t showing but that the viewers knew was there. “Seemingly bare breasted,” was how the Daily Record put it (just under the headline “It’s not Art – It’s Porn.”). What made the photo “racy,” at least to these observers, was not the sight of her bare breasts but the thought that she either had just bared them or might be about to.

Honi soit qui mal y pense. Which is basically what Miley told Jimmy last night.

“It was everyone else’s poisonous thoughts and minds that ended up turning this into something it wasn’t meant to be so I actually shouldn’t be ashamed, they should be.”

The title of my post was “Good Girl, Naughty Picture” and if there was any sociological content, it was the cultural context that went beyond mere Miley and her employer at the time.

The problem for Disney seems to be how to have their teen-age girl stars be attractive without being sexual. That was hard enough in the 1950s, when Annette was prima inter pares among the Mouseketeers, and as Dave Barry put it, some of the letters on her jersey were closer to the screen than others. Still, like a good Disney kid, she acted happily unaware of the changes puberty had brought. Not till she left Mouseworld did she go on to make all those beach films. (“Hi, I’m Annette, and these are my breasts,” cooed Gilda Radner in the SNL parody.)

As if to prove me and Miley right, for years after that, my post would still get visits from people who had Googled strings like “naughty pictures of 15-year olds.” I hadn’t intended the title as clickbait (did that term even exist in 2008?), but in checking back now, I see that the post has gotten three times more action than others from around then. Oh well, come for the porn, stay for the sociology.**

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* The headline writers room at most tabloids seems to be staffed exclusively by middle-school boys giggling over their double-entendres.

** Google, in a sop to the privacy concerns of its users, has mostly stopped providing bloggers with information about which search-strings brought people to their blog . . .  or at least, I can’t find it any more.

Will No One Rid Me of This Sociological Priest?

May 2, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poor Rev. Conroy. It was the sociology that got him fired.

Since 2011 and up until two weeks ago, he had been the chaplain for the House of Representatives. Then House speaker Paul Ryan fired him.

By most accounts, what triggered Ryan was the prayer Rev. Conroy offered during deliberations on the tax bill.

As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.

Ryan believes in God. He does not believe in social structure, though in some ways they are similar. They are both very hard to see, visible mostly in their effects, so that non-believers can remain unaware of how they alter and influence the paths we take.

Institutions and structures are at the core of sociological thinking and research. If the gap between rich and poor is much greater in the US than in other wealthy countries, there must be something going on beyond mere individual choices. But Conservatives like Ryan don’t buy that idea. For them, whether a person succeeds or struggles is purely a matter of individual virtue. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The tax bill that Ryan was trying to pass would increase the wealth of the wealthy. Or as Donald Trump told his rich friends at Mar-a-Lago when the bill passed, “You all just got a lot richer.” Ryan also planned to use the inevitable deficits from the tax cuts to justify reductions in government aid to the poor and elderly.

It’s pretty obvious that the tax code and food stamps change the structure of economic distribution. But when Rev. Conroy spoke of structures and then went on to suggest that maybe the government should not further comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, well, it got Ryan’s Irish up, and he gave the Jesuit the boot. Those fifty words of Rev. Conroy – the micro-est of microaggressions against conservatives – were apparently too much for Snowflake Ryan to bear.

I wonder if leftists have gotten anyone fired – from a university or anywhere else – for a ten-second sermon preaching the Thatcher gospel of purely individual causation.

Freestylin’

April 27, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

These poems
all very recent —
To me at least, I mean
I hear the influence
of, oh I don’t know,
Robert Creeley,
and perhaps
William Carlos Williams.
The style is infectious.

Little Boats

And all they do is scream ‘death to America, death to America.’
And by the way,
they’re not screaming it so much
anymore.
They were screaming it with him.¹
They don’t scream it with me. We haven’t seen
their little boats
circling our ships in the ocean lately,
because they know if they do circle the ships,
they’re not going to be there very longer.

 Businessman

Let me just tell you that Michael² is in business.
He's really a businessman
at fairly big businesses, I understand. And
I don’t know
his business,
but this doesn’t have to do with me. Michael
is a businessman. He’s got a business.
He also practices law.
I would say probably the big thing is
his business,
and they're looking at something having to do with
his business.
I have nothing to do with
his business.
I can tell you
he’s a good guy.

    I’ll Tell You What               

Well, I better not get into that,
because I may get in trouble.
Maybe I didn’t get her³
so much.
I’ll tell you what.
She has done
I got her a beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy
to be running out looking for presents, okay?
But I got her a beautiful card
and some beautiful flowers.
And she did a fantastic job with France.
I’ll tell you what,
the people of France are just
were spellbound by what happened with their great president,
who just left, Emmanuel,
and he is a wonderful guy
and with a wonderful wife.
they are both terrific people.
And, Brigitte
and we had a fantastic time.

1.  Barack Obama

2.  Michael Cohen

3.  Melania

Bob Dorough (1923 - 2018)

April 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Phil Woods was a top jazz man, but his best known solo was as the unnamed sax player on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Bud Shank, another jazz reed man, did the anonymous flute solo on The Mamas and the Papas’s huge hit “California Dreamin.’” But the winner in the “widely heard but uncredited performances by jazz musicians” competition goes to Bob Dorough, who died Monday at age 94. He wrote and sang many of the numbers on Schoolhouse Rock – numbers like 8.

This performance is by jazz singer and pianist Blossom Dearie, but Dorough can be heard on other numbers like 3 and the bluesy 9 as well as “Conjunction Junction,” a title I couldn’t help borrowing for my skeptical post on Twersky and Kahneman’s “conjunction fallacy” (here).

His best-known song in the jazz world is “I’m Hip,” probably because of Dave Frishberg’s lyric, which includes the line, “When it was hip to hep I was hep.” Frishberg himself noted how hip the song was – nearly all the main notes in the melody are not in the underlying chord. (You can hear the songwriters performing it here.)

Another unusual but fine Dorough tune is “Nothing Like You,” with lyrics by Fran Landesman. Bassist Esperanza Spalding sings it here, and prefaces it by saying it’s “really fun and really hard.”

Vulture, as a sort of eulogy, has posted this list  of his best  “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, all more melodically conventional than his jazz tunes.