The Bluestocking, vol 57: the Dude, the pivot and the Daughter of Time
Happy Friday!
I've cheered myself right up this morning by reading an absolutely excruciating profile of Kate McKinnon. Yes! Worse even than the Margot Robbie one that was clearly typed with one hand. ("She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.")
Let's all take a moment to appreciate this paragraph:
Kate’s dressed real-person down, i.e., badly: oversize T-shirt and pants that aren’t quite sweat but close enough; sneakered feet; face cosmetics-free; hair in a ponytail, or, rather, what would be a ponytail if she hadn’t failed to tug the hair all the way through the elastic, leaving it in a sort of ponytail-bun limbo.
Subtext: OH GOD WHY IS THE WORD COUNT STILL ONLY AT 783?
I do have sympathy for these two writers, because describing people in profiles is extremely tough without coming off looking like a total thigh-rubber. Particularly attractive people. (And young people. Older people have character in their faces.) Also, celebrity profiles are the worst of all the gigs.
IMO, the mistake people make is description without insight: you're trying to give an account of someone's physical presence, not just their looks. It's more interesting to know if they are jittery; mean to the waiter; that their eyes glaze over when someone else is talking; that they laugh at their own jokes . . . Only tell the reader that someone is blonde if there's a qualifier that reveals something about them. (And no, "dark at the roots" doesn't count; that just means that Margot Robbie has dyed her hair blonde, like 95% of blondes. How long are the roots? Are they deliberately punky? Or do they show someone who is relaxed enough to let her hair grow out a bit, secure in the knowledge she's still a knockout?) Not least because most profiles will be accompanied by a photograph. And if you're profiling, say, Angelina Jolie, WE KNOW WHAT ANGELINA JOLIE LOOKS LIKE. Go back to your copy, highlight the bit about her "catlike eyes" and hammer that delete key like whack-a-mole.
Helen
Jeff Bridges Abides
We've met for a meal in the airy restaurant of a Santa Monica hotel—so airy, in fact, that there is a small brown bird flying around inside of it attempting to find its way back out to the open ocean but perhaps confused by the dining room's beachy color scheme. Bridges's color scheme is the friendly gray of a small passing cloud that threatens no rain. His metal spectacles are gray; the image of Bob Dylan on his T-shirt is gray. Bridges will be 68 in December, but his gray hair remains as leonine as a pewter door knocker.
Yes, this is how you do description.
Death of a playmate
Whether or not Dorothy Stratten would have fulfilled her extravagant promise can’t be known. Her legacy will not be examined critically because it is really of no consequence. In the end Dorothy Stratten was less memorable for herself than for the yearnings she evoked: in Snider a lust for the score; in Hefner a longing for a star; in Bogdanovich a desire for the eternal ingenue. She was a catalyst for a cycle of ambitions which revealed its players less wicked, perhaps, than pathetic.
This article on a murdered Playmate, which won a journalism Pulitzer in 1981, is the only thing I read about Hugh Hefner in the wake of his death. Forget all the faux-feminist bibble about "empowerment" through posing naked; the only thing that is truly empowering is economic independence. And too many Playmates and other women working in various branches of the sex industry don't have it, because they are exploited by moochers, hustlers and hangers-on. Jenna Jameson's memoir has a memorable phrase for the bad boyfriends who see their adult industry actress girlfriends as meal tickets: "suitcase pimps".
The Mystery of Josephine Tey
When Tey’s work was finished, she displayed an equally absolute devotion to indolence. “Next to chocolates, the cinema and racing, her favourite pastime was a day in bed, lying flat on her back, wide awake,” Caroline Ramsden wrote. After one of these epic lie-ins, Ramsden asked what she had been thinking about all day. “Nothing—absolutely nothing,” Tey replied. “I’ve had a wonderful time.”
First of all: #inspo. Second of all, how great is this piece about an author I've only encountered once, but whose book Daughter of Time has stuck with me ever since? (The title comes from the phrase "truth is the daughter of time".) It's about an injured detective, laid up in hospital, who decides to investigate a historic crime - and settles on the question of whether Richard III killed the Princes in the Tower.
Ever since reading it, I have become a Richard III truther, which I think we can all agree is the classiest type of truther.
The pivot to video is bullshit
lay off most of your writers, who produce stories fast and cheaply for your own website
produce more video, which is vastly more expensive and time-consuming and which only finds an audience on other platforms, like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube
????
PROFIT
I'm old enough now to have lived through two media revolutions which were nothing like the pot of gold we were promised: iPad editions and the "pivot to video". A third one - plonking all your content on third-party platforms - is still going on because there's no way round it.
Elizabeth Warren is getting Hillary-ed
But the organization’s strategy here is especially clear in the wake of a story Terry Gross told just last week in her interview with Hillary Clinton around the publication of her memoir What Happened. On the Clinton episode of Fresh Air, Gross recalled how a portion of their 2015 conversation — about Clinton’s evolving position on gay rights — had gone viral, becoming a building block of the argument that Clinton has been insufficiently progressive throughout her career when it came to LGBTQ rights.
As Gross pointed out to Clinton last week, that edited clip had exploded not because of LGBTQ activist reaction to it, but because America Rising had flagged it and pushed it out. The group “had it up before we even had it up on our website,” Gross told Clinton, marveling at how, “you were definitely going to be stronger on LGBTQ rights than anyone American Rising would likely support for president. So here was the right trying to turn your base against you, the right attacking you from the left.”
Rebecca Traister has done some really smart writing on US politics, and this piece is fascinating. Elizabeth Warren was the woman that the Dirtbag Left pointed to in order to rebuff suggestions that sexism had anything to do with their distaste for Hillary Clinton. And now she's getting the same camouflaged attacks from the right, designed to make lefties reject her. Divide and rule.
Quick links:
- Why Hillary Clinton Was Dead Right About White Women
- "Having A Coke With You" by Frank O'Hara
- What it was like to write for Playboy on the second wave of feminism, by a woman who tried to do it.
Guest gif: let's not ask why this exists, let's just be happy that it exists.
See you next time!