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All the posts and photos about the splash Michelle Obama has made overseas, and talk of etiquette issues, and touching the queen versus not touching the queen, and hugs versus handshakes and marital fanny pats, and the general confusingness of cross-cultural protocol, etc., etc., reminded me of a conversation I had with a French journalist around the time of the inauguration. I wrote a book about Michelle Obama, and the journalist--the French were super-interested in the First Lady even then, for reasons that included but were not limited to the lift she's given the fashion industry--did an interview. The journalist, who was very nice, had a list of questions about Michelle Obama's background and personality, one of which was: "Barack Obama is a very sexy man. If he were to have an affair, do you think Michelle Obama would mind?" The answer to that seemed easy--yes, Mrs. Obama doubtless would mind, I said. Later she asked, "And so, Mrs. Obama, if she were to take a lover, do you think the American people would be okay with that?" Also easy: American people, definitely not okay. She looked sort of puzzled. I felt sort of parochial. But maybe not. Among the many things the Obamas may transform into a hot global fashion: Fidelity.
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Bad movies starring bad actors come out every weekend, but there is something irregularly touching about this weekend's bad movie Fast & Furious, the fourth installment in a B-movie series that began back in 2001 with The Fast and The Furious: it's the cinematic embodiment of giving up on your dreams.
The four stars of the original film, Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez, all sat out one or both of the series' middle films (2 Fast 2 Furious and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. They missed a real opportunity not calling this new one 4 Fast 4 Furious, me thinks), but they're all back for the latest. Each of these actors had a moment when they were being paraded around Hollywood as a "Next Big Thing." In hindsight, this was silly, since they're not particularly talented and Walker has got the most outrageous SoCal accent this side of Keanu Reeves. Still, for a few years they all received the attention and roles young thespians get when they're on the cusp of making it big. The actor's crazy, long shot fantasy of landing on the A-list almost came true for each of them. But not quite.
Fast & Furious is proof they all know the A-list is out of reach. If they were holding out hope, they wouldn't have returned to a terrible series they once walked away from. But, hey, it pays (a lot) and they have fewer choices these days. Agreeing to make this film means they've more or less accepted their fate, to be some future Jeopardy question ("I'll take little known action heroes for 600, Alex." "The growly voiced star of XXX?") and not the "Next Angelina Jolie." Of course, I shouldn’t feel too bad for them; B-list movie stars still make more than most of us and perhaps they’re perfectly content hacking it up. But they maybe coulda been contenders and, instead, they’re just dreadful.
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I don't have much to add to E.J.'s and Kerry's posts on the good news about gay marriage in Iowa, but I would like to send a "ha-haaaaah" a la Nelson Muntz of Simpsons fame to all the more "progressive" states on the East and West coasts that got beaten to the punch by a bunch of corn-fed Midwesterners.
That's not to denigrate the hard work being done by activists and everyday citizens in places like Washington state (where I used to live), Oregon, California, and Vermont. I will admit that moving to the Seattle area in my early 20s and meeting, working, and socializing with more gays and lesbians made me more aware of the issues and more open-minded. (Though I hope that doesn't make it sound like I was a raging homophobe before; it was merely something I didn't think a lot about one way or the other.) And sometimes stereotypes are true: I cringed in 2004 when my home state of Ohio passed an anti-gay marriage amendment so restrictive that even the Republican governor came out against it.
That said, it's kind of nice when stereotypes don't hold true, when a state from flyover country can legalize gay marriage and make the rest of the country do a double-take. Because if Iowa can do it, why not everyone else?
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Classy move: Republican former Solicitor General Ted Olson--and George Bush's lawyer in Bush v. Gore--is sticking up for Harold Koh, nominated to be Hillary Clinton's legal advisor, in the thick of the far-right bashing that Dahlia and I have been protesting. (Disclosure: I have a fellowship at Yale Law School, where Koh was dean before his nomination.) From Greg Sargent at The Plum Line:
Olson was sharply dismissive of claims that Koh is too solicitous of
international law. While he declined to discuss the specifics of the
case against Koh, much of which has been already debunked, he pushed back hard against the broader claim that Koh’s regard for international law is cause for suspicion.
“He has been in international law his entire professional life,” Olson said. “Of course he’s very involved in the subject.”
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Instead of junking tens of millions of safe old books, Hanna, maybe we should worry about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finding traces of a rocket fuel chemical (perchlorate) in some kinds of baby formula. Traces large enough to exceed a safe dose for adults. Or maybe we don't need to worry about that, after all, because according to the AP write-up, "the extent of the risk is hard to assess. The government requires that formula contain iodine, which counteracts perchlorate's effects. The size of the infant and how much formula they consume are other factors that can influence risk."
This is the kind of report I hate reading because it leaves me feeling entirely at sea about risk assessment. Teeny traces of lead in old books, rocket fuel in baby formula—the poisons start to run together, even if the levels of danger they pose are in fact far apart. Meanwhile, since I wrote about the melting of my son's brain as a result of watching Star Wars at age not-yet-3, I've been deluged by e-mails telling me that my kid's only real problem is that I'm overthinking the whole thing. Never mind that the research I dug up suggests that watching violent movies and TV shows does, in fact, makes boys ages 2 to 5 behave more aggressively. I guess we prefer to rail against risk when we haven't switched it on ourselves.
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As E.J. pointed out earlier, the hotbed of radicalism otherwise known as "Iowa" is the third state to legalize same-sex marriage. (And let me tell you, it's crazy out here—gay orgies in the parks, polygamists storming the Capitol, abandoned children wandering the streets in various states of undress. .. pictures of the family-destroying chaos are available here.) As with Massachusetts and Connecticut, Iowa imposes no marriage-related residency rules, so the law applies to anyone who wants to visit after April 24, tie the knot, and sue some other state to recognize the contract. Consider Des Moines the Midwest's gay Vegas.
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Per our discussion about whether handshakes or hugs are more appropriate in workplace settings, I think it's safe to say that the Obamas' meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, provides absolutely zero guidance.
As we can see from the photo, Sarkozy gave Michelle Obama the Euro-style cheek kiss, while his wife gave Barack Obama a more formal handshake. But, as these photos from the British Sun show, Ms. Bruni greeted Mrs. Obama with smooches on the cheek, and the two presidents hugged.
I'll try to keep all of this in mind the next time I'm meeting a world leader.
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... and not in football or hockey or whatever sport would bring the two together, but in the race to be the third American state to gender-neutralize its marriage laws. According to today's Iowa Supreme Court decision, scheduled to take effect 21 days from now, same-sex couples should be free to marry.
I grew up in Illinois and Ohio and moved to the greater Cambridge, Mass., area for many different reasons: the intellectualism, the politics, and—not least—what we used to call the "women's community" (now we would say "for the girls")—just as my Ohio University best buddy, Eric, moved to San Francisco for the boys. I used to joke that I was very happy to have escaped the vowel states for some solidly consonant-bound locations. Although I have been known to tell my piously liberal New England friends that they ought to get out and visit America sometimes, I have actually been relieved to live in a region so friendly to my various proclivities.
When a Lambda Legal attorney first told me they were bringing a marriage lawsuit in Iowa, you could have heard my eyes roll before I started arguing that it was a bad idea. My LGBT advocate friends told me I was wrong: Iowa was, for many reasons, a friendly state for such a suit. They were right. I was wrong. The vowels have it. Congratulations, Hawkeyes, on your commitment to equal protection under the law!
I hope you manage to keep it!
(Note to Vermont: See if you can become No. 4 before California or New Hampshire beats you to it.)
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Samantha, I, too, saw the Washington Post story on how an adult-movie screening on the University of Maryland campus was canceled after Senator Harris suggested a budget amendment could strip the public university of nearly $500 million in funding. Sure, Harris' hysteria over porn on campus is silly at best—I don't know how truly "dangerous" pornography is to the culture at large—but what struck me as inappropriate is how an adult-production company is generating free publicity for its movie by trotting it out before its target demographic and pretending the experience is educational by coupling the screenings with safe-sex speakers or academics droning on about "gender and sexuality."
You say: "Still, the public viewing would at least get people in a room together, talking about sex and maybe—hopefully—even dipping into the sort of difficult, analytical discussion of sexuality and exploitation that colleges should promote." Personally, I doubt it. Porn rarely leads to analytical discussions of anything, much less sex. Instead, it looks to me like the colleges are getting snookered by publicists who have found their perfect mark in porn-happy academics.
Hilariously, the Planned Parenthood speaker who would have spoken on safe-sex practices would be doing so in the context of a movie in which none of the adult performers were using condoms. Way to set an example. In the end, porn is little more than smoke and mirrors.
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Dana! Speaking of Michelle's sartorial choices, what do you think about the brightly hued and be-bowed outfit she wore yesterday to meet the Sarkozys? According to the Guardian, she had bow-laden "fashion face-off" with the similarly statuesque Carla Bruni Sarkozy.
Today, the two fashion titans clashed in sartorial battle in Strasbourg, as the US and French presidents met ahead of the Nato summit. Michelle wore a black coat with a floral pattern of pink poppies. The collar was ruched and tied loosely around the neck. It was rather lovely. Teamed with low kitten heels in black patent leather, the look achieved exactly the right balance of cheeriness and glamour. Carla, on the other hand, has gone for a cropped-sleeve coat in a soft grey, which is one of her favourite colours: she wore it a lot last year. And that's part of the problem - it feels like we've seen it all before. Despite the matching pussybow, compared to Michelle, Carla actually looks a bit washed out and (we can't believe we're about to say this) prim and proper. A flash of colour or a fashionable statement accessory could have taken this outfit to another level - but that's just not Carla's style.
Below is a video of the two first ladies in action yesterday. Both women are tall enough to pull off those giant, floppy "pussybows," but I am hoping against hope they do not become a trend. Such a large bow would make any petite woman look like an overgrown Shirley Temple.
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Waiting for a bus near a newsstand this week, I became transfixed by the cover of the April issue of O magazine, in which, for the first time in the publication’s nine-year history, its namesake/publisher/doyenne shares cover space with someone else: Michelle Obama, the first pretender to Oprah’s title of America’s favorite black female celebrity. Dayo wrote about this cover when it first came out, but it took a good long session of bus-stop staring to drive home how weird an image it actually is. There’s always been something Napoleonic about the narcissism of Oprah’s inevitable presence on that cover, and she doesn’t cede her place without a fight: The space is almost exactly evenly divided between the two women. Michelle, who towers over Oprah by half a head, smiles and spreads out her hands in a laying-down-the-law kind of gesture. Oprah holds hers together in prayer position, like a supplicant, her face turned toward Michelle, her expression tense. (Or am I overreading?) Of the hundreds of photos that must have been taken during the shoot, it's amazing that Oprah (who, I assume, gets final cut) chose this one. It's a telling portrait of uneasily shared power, right down to the fact that Michelle’s broad shoulders are literally blocking Oprah’s name.
Another striking element of the picture is Michelle’s belt, a wide strip of transparent plastic with a big round buckle (emphasizing, inevitably, the comparative narrowness of her and Oprah’s waists.) No other first lady in history could have worn that belt. (The very material it’s made of didn’t exist until Mamie Eisenhower’s day.) It brings together a mod Space Age sensibility (Twiggy might have worn it in 1969) with a populist embrace of cheap materials—it’s an accessory you could imagine finding at H & M or Forever 21. This week, watching Michelle cut a style swath through London, I keep thinking that the woman who can unseat Oprah from the cover of her own magazine, and do it wearing a see-through belt, is a force to be reckoned with indeed.
(Thanks to Mrs. O, the invaluable Michelle Obama fashion blog, for the images.)
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Late last year, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act passed, requiring all products made for children under the age of 12 to be tested for safety. This was in response to concerns about levels of lead in toys made in China. But like all such acts which mention the words "children" and "safety," it has been taken to excess. Lead was banned in printer's ink only in 1978, so many old children's books are printed with minute amounts of lead. The Centers for Disease Control declared this was not a problem, but of course, you can never be safe enough. You never know when a 2-year-old might, you know, devour a whole "Cat in the Hat" in one sitting. (Jennifer Taggart of TheSmartMama.com tested many old children's books with an X-ray fluorescence gun. Most were OK but a 1942 Mother Goose: very dangerous)
The compromise reached in February is that the law would not be enforced for books written after 1985. But even this puts a huge burden on used booksellers and libraries, particularly small ones that can't easily replace classics. Not to mention the small burden on children who are deprived of the pleasure of waiting tremulously as Miss Hillary or Miss Jenkins, walks into the special back room to retrieve the precious old-smelling, well-worn Wanda Gag, and then of imagining what happened to the little girl who read the book 30 years before them.
"We're talking about tens of millions of copies of children's books that are perfectly safe. I wish a reasonable, rational person would just say, `This is stupid. What are we doing?'" Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association's Washington office, told the AP.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., introduced legislation on Tuesday to exclude so-called "ordinary" books. Let's all send him an e-mail of support.
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The University of Maryland caved to pressure Thursday and decided not to screen a big-budget porno flick that's been making the rounds on college campuses. The plan had been to show Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge, a $10 million transformation of Pirates of the Caribbean from G to XXX, in the student union on Saturday. But administrators backed down after State Sen. Andrew Harris proposed a budget amendment this week that any public university that screened a pornographic film would lose state funding. For UMD, that would mean a loss of about $424 million for next year, according to the Washington Post. Harris' argument:
"Occasional viewing of porn is more dangerous than occasionally lighting up a cigarette. If the movie is being shown for educational reasons, someone should be presenting the dangers too. Porn breaks up lives."
That seems extreme to say the least. Like many of the colleges that have already screened the film, UMD planned to tack on to the screening an educational portion: a talk by a Planned Parenthood rep on safe sex. If Harris' problem is that he'd rather the post-porno discussion focus more specifically on the porn industry, I'm with him—a generic "safe sex" talk seems not quite up to the task of helping students unpack the money shots they just witnessed. Still, the public viewing would at least get people in a room together, talking about sex and maybe—hopefully—even dipping into the sort of difficult, analytical discussion of sexuality and exploitation that colleges should promote.
Other colleges have gone through with screening the film. At UCLA in December, religious student groups protested by holding a prayer vigil outside the theater, but about 650 students stayed for the discussion portion after the screening. At UC-Davis, the biggest hitch in showing the film this week was that there wasn't room in the 500-seat theater for all the students who wanted to watch. A speaker from the campus Gender and Sexuality Commission spoke before the movie. Better that than students watching porn in their dorm rooms, no?