Naps are best taken as a pack.
The return of Pee-wee Herman (he’ll always be Prince Gerhardt to me):
Pee-wee is, by now, a decades-old, decades-absent oddball, and yet he does not register as dated because Reubens designed him, from the jump, as untethered to any one moment in time. Arriving in the thick of the Reagan ’80s, ‘‘Playhouse’’ offered a funhouse-mirror vision of the Eisenhower-era United States that Reubens grew up in — its excess, its materialism, its hypocrisy, its racism, its hairstyles — with an added slathering of Los Angeles punk. (Gary Panter, who designed the famous ‘‘Playhouse’’ set, used to draw for the fanzine Slash and made crude fliers for bands like Germs.) Reubens didn’t attack ’50s conventions, though, so much as revise and exaggerate them. ‘‘I saw it as very Norman Rockwell,’’ Reubens says, ‘‘but it was my Norman Rockwell version of the ’50s, which was more all-inclusive.’’ Actors of color dominated the cast, among them Laurence Fishburne and S. Epatha Merkerson. ‘‘The King of Cartoons was black!’’ Reubens says. ‘‘Not just anybody. The king! That came out of growing up in Florida under segregation. I felt really good about that.’’
Friend of The Toast Carvell Wallace on Brittany Howard:
As a parent, all you want for your kids is that they feel free to be themselves and be loved. But the problem, especially raising a girl and most especially raising a girl of color, is that you can say you love and accept them until you are unable to speak anymore, but this will eventually be drowned out by a world that tells them in thundering and certain terms: “There are a lot of parts of you — honest, beautiful, and vulnerable parts — that we don’t have any place for.” The limits placed on a person’s humanity are already great by the time that person is a 10-year-old girl.
Brittany Howard playing guitar, making those ugly, honest faces, and belting out such unapologetic power does the kind of parenting for my daughter that I can’t do alone. I can tell my daughter it’s OK to be something that no one else has given her permission to be. But Brittany Howard can show her.
The Black Panthers, feeding kids:
Between 1969 and 1971, the Panthers established 36 breakfast programs across the country from Kansas City to New York City. It’s estimated that over time, the Panthers fed 50,000 across the country through their program.
“The Panthers are feeding more kids than we are,” one US government official reportedly admitted.
Jolie, following her bliss:
I love laundry in an unnatural way, is what I’m trying to tell you here.
I’m also a laundry expert in my own right; in my capacity as a cleaning advice columnist, I’ve taught my own version of Laundry School for several years now (consider it the correspondence course version). So Downy, recognizing my true and deep adoration for the washing of clothes, invited me to Cincinnati to go deep on the subject (and, full disclosure, paid to fly me out). Even experts can learn new things, so off I went to Laundry School with Rachel Zoe.
Nelson’s examples come from literature and film, but the same goes especially for popular music, which has a twist: It’s narrated by the aggressor and addressed to “you.” Sexual aggression is ubiquitous across genres, even though rock and other white-coded genres have tended to get a pass for it, while nonwhite forms and artists have borne the brunt of scrutiny (compare, of course, the discourse around misogyny in rap music to the discourse around misogyny in metal, in which vileness is often excused as theater). Sex is something men do to women, whether they like it (“Whole Lotta Love,” “Kiss”) or not (“Face Down Ass Up,” “Kill You,” “Fucked With a Knife”). It makes women crazy (Mick Jagger wrote “19th Nervous Breakdown” about the women in whom he induced them) or worse (Elvis Presley, John Lennon: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”). When I was 11, my best guy friend played me the Misfits’ “Last Caress” over the phone, followed by the old clip of Donald Duck getting a blow job.
NOPE NOP MOVE OUT (also, for the record, there’s no “trying” to break up with someone, I refuse to accept that this was ALL her being clueless):
Dear Captain and Company,
I recently finalized the ending of a relationship…I say finalized because I’ve been trying to break up with my ex since October, but she finally was able to accept it months later…no matter how many times I told her, “my feelings for you have changed,” “I’m no longer attracted to you,” et al. For the record, she’s not a bad person…hardcore GSF carrier, yes, but a generally decent, well intentioned (if a little misguided a lot of the time) human being. When the ending finally hit her, we were able to talk more openly than we have in months and are working out all the transitional stuff without conflict.
The question is this…we rent an apartment together with me taking on the bulk of the expenses as I make more money. While I could likely move with ease, she’s not in the same position…she wants us to stay as platonic roommates for another year, continue to work on our friendship as we move forward with our separate lives. Most of my Team Me think I am nuts for considering it. I’m torn. I don’t want to be the person who says, “F You, I don’t care, I am looking out for me,” but I want to be sure that I – and she, for that matter – can move on with our lives and be okay with it. I’m at the point where if I saw her with someone else, I’d be totally happy for her. No jealously, no angst. I don’t know that I trust her to be okay in the same way. It worries me that she refused to hear the very explicit statements I was making with regard to wanting to end our relationship, and I worry about how that could pan out should I meet someone else. On the other, we do work together in terms of splitting things up around the house well, and have pretty much been platonic roommates for the last year of our relationship.
Is this worth it to save money and hassle, or should I run, run, run?
Every terrible thing that’s happened to Meredith Grey:
She was in a plane crash. And while Meredith survived …
It killed her half-sister. Whom Meredith had finally started bonding with.
She had to get a C-section during a power outage. Though the delivery-in-the-dark was successful overall, Meredith later realized she was bleeding internally and had to instruct an inexperienced doc on how to stop the bleed.
< https://youtu.be/qwPwXtX3b1E >
The Grammys. Discuss. My state chose NOT TO SHOW IT LIVE, so I didn’t get to livetweet the below with y’all:
