I will always remember that the call to action initiating the movement was organic – that there was no organizing committee, no charismatic leader, no church group or school club that led us to the streets. It is powerful to remember that the movement began as everyday people came out of their homes and refused to be scared into silence by the police. It is powerful, too, to remember the many people who came to stand with us in Ferguson, the many people who were radicalized in the streets of St Louis and then took that deep spirit of resistance to their own cities and towns, leading to sustained unrest across the United States.
Oh, also, Ferguson is still happening right this minute:
DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie and Kayla Reed were among those detained during a protest at the St. Louis Justice Center, which houses the Department of Justice, in downtown St. Louis. There protesters staged a sit-in as part of a planned “day of resistance” marking the one-year anniversary of the fatal police shooting of teenager Michael Brown. Also among those detained were Cornel West and the Rev. Osagyefo Sekou.
Dan Callahan on Jeanne Eagles, an early actress we don’t know enough about:
There is little visible technique in Eagels’s performance in The Letter, no distance to her reckless playing, so that when Leslie is flaming out it is clear that she herself is flaming out, and this links Eagels to a later 1950s Method actress like Kim Stanley, another stage star who finally had to retreat because she couldn’t sustain the level of emotional intensity she liked for long. Some people might know Eagels mainly because Kim Novak played her in a highly fictionalized biopic in 1957. (Candy Darling keeps referencing this Novak movie in Paul Morrissey’s Women in Revolt {1971}.) The shy and recessive and very sexy Novak tries hard in that film, but she can’t capture even a fraction of what Eagels puts across on screen in The Letter or what she reportedly had on stage. Unquestionably an artist for whom chaos ruled, Eagels saw herself clearly. “I’m the greatest actress in the world and the greatest failure,” she once said. “And nobody gives a damn.”
Ugh, what a disaster.
Our own Gretchen McCulloch on women as language disruptors:
A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681. The pair looked at fourteen language changes that occurred during this period, things like the eradication of ye, the switch from “mine eyes” to “my eyes,” and the change from hath, doth, maketh to has, does, makes.
In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.
The history of black lipstick:
If you can’t live forever, your work (and beauty) still might be able to. The sparkle of Hollywood in the 1920s saw black lipstick, too, though more for reasons logistical rather than symbolic. This is the era of Mae Murray, Clara Bow, and Max Factor: old-school film sirens and the makeup artist that helped make them stars. In this context, black lipstick came about as a way to fix a problem with movie lighting. At this time, makeup was primarily heavy greasepaint and was typically used in theater productions, and Factor, a Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1904, came up with a more blendable version in primary colors, calling it “flexible greasepaint.”
The most important review of the bad True Detective s2 season finale, which I watched all of.
Kid’s a goshdarn genius:
Barbusca improvised one of his best lines in the series.
Though scheduling prevented many of the performers from appearing in scenes together, Thomas and the other kid actors worked regularly with Michael Showalter, Paul Rudd, Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, and, of course, David Wain. The older comedians helped the younger stars riff and ad-lib, according to Barbusca. “We kind of played around with it,” he explains. “It was really fun with them because they’re really experienced, they’ll give you tips and stuff, they just keep going with you. They were all really awesome.” Specifically, Thomas tells us one of Drew’s best moments — yelling his so-simple-it’s-funny justification for bullying, “I just like doing stuff like that!” after Kevin ran crying out the door — was ad-libbed on the spot.
Here is another picture of my friend Carrie’s puppy:
Roxane talked to TNC (glorious subtweet of FDB here by TNC):
RG: How do you handle such lofty comparisons like those, for example, to James Baldwin?
TC: I think that bothers other people a lot more than it bothers me. It’s fairly clear there will be another Baldwin. I take a great deal of inspiration from his work. I think Toni Morrison’s opinion is an opinion for one book. It is not a guarantee on the next book.
A fascinating mixed bag of deleted comments today:
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