Quote of the Day (Katy Perry, on the ‘Infamous’ Tongue of Miley Cyrus)

“God knows where that tongue has been…We don’t know! That tongue is so infamous!”—Katy Perry on how Miley Cyrus tried to “move her head and go deeper” after a “friendly girly kiss,” quoted in “Miley Cyrus Fires Back at Katy Perry’s Tongue Comments,” “Daily Dish” blog, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 6, 2014

As Kramer said—famously—on Seinfeld, “Ooohhhh…Catfight!!!!”

This is what has become of the Daughters of Madonna. A decade after the Material Girl locked lips with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at MTV’s VMA ceremony, there’s some pushback about how transgressive the pop tarts who have followed in her wake can get.

Oh, the shock isn’t that the public has reacted adversely—notoriety is a career booster, don’t you know? But did anyone really expect other stars to react negatively? Who'd ever think we'd go from kiss bliss to kiss diss?

I think that most people’s reactions to Katy Perry’s comment on her former interliplucator was, “You bet!” But when you start a war, as Ms. Perry must have known she was doing, you’d better be prepared for to play defense as much as offense, and Miley Cyrus’ consequent tweet was as inevitable as it was devastating: “Girl if ur worried abt where tongues have been good thing ur ex boo is ur EX BOO cause we ALL know where THAT been.”

Leave aside the spelling and grammatical issues inherent in the tweet. (It’s best to take that up with Miley’s dad, whom one can rightly ask why, with all his money, he never managed to get his little girl an education in the rudiments of English.) But Ms. Cyrus, for all her deficiencies in this department, shows that she has learned to observe, not merely to twerk.

Although, come to think of it, almost anyone with the least knowledge of pop culture would know that John Mayer, Ms. Perry’s “EX-BOO,” is one who would make anyone who would take up with him wonder “where that tongue has been.” I mean, there have been multiple photo galleries on the Web devoted to the women he’s been with! Let’s see: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Vanessa Carlton, Minka Kelly, Jennifer Aniston, and Taylor Swift. Oh, yes, and Jessica Simpson, whose prowess in amour the guitarist likened—infamously, and unkindly—to “sexual napalm” and “crack cocaine.”

With Mayer, it's never a case of  "Who You Love," but who don't you love.

Photo of the Day: Hinge Moment, Late Winter

This past Sunday, the weather reports indicated that my area of New Jersey could get anywhere from a dusting to two or three inches of snow. I have learned, through hard experience this past winter, that the weathermen can keep tacking on two or three inches throughout the day, until a "dusting" can become substantial indeed.

The skies were gray, then, as I walked down to the park near my home in Englewood, NJ. Yet the presence of so many geese on the ground, after seeing so few of them or their feathered friends throughout this season, felt oddly comforting. Did they know something we humans didn’t?

Maybe. We ended up getting only a dusting past midnight (and my friends in Minnesota would regard the New Jersey version of “dusting” as hardly even worth the name). It’s been cold—mighty cold, at points—this week, but nothing more has been added to the ground at this point in the form of snow or ice. In fact, their presence has abated markedly throughout the week.

The calendar says we have only two weeks of winter left. I’ve learned over the years to expect almost anything in these last days of the season. (We even had a “snowacane”—a combination of snow and hurricane—in my neck of the woods four years ago, only two days before St. Patrick’s Day.) Still, at this point, I, like so many other people, are grateful just for the chance to catch my breath, to admire the still-considerable amounts of snow piled up at points, and to hope that something better--warmer--is not far off.

Quote of the Day (Jerry Saltz, on the Selfie as Folk Art)

“When it is not just PR, though, it is a powerful, instantaneous ironic interaction that has intensity, intimacy, and strangeness. In some way, selfies reach back to the Greek theatrical idea of methexis—a group sharing wherein the speaker addresses the audience directly, much like when comic actors look at the TV camera and make a face. Finally, fascinatingly, the genre wasn’t created by artists. Selfies come from all of us; they are a folk art that is already expanding the language and lexicon of photography. Selfies are a photography of modern life—not that academics or curators are paying much attention to them. They will, though: In a hundred years, the mass of selfies will be an incredible record of the fine details of everyday life. Imagine what we could see if we had millions of these from the streets of imperial Rome.”— Jerry Saltz, “Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie,” New York Magazine, February 3, 2014

The image accompanying this post, of course, was the selfie taken Sunday night at the Oscars, by host Ellen DeGeneres--or, as I like to think of it, "The Selfie Seen 'Round the World."

Quote of the Day (Judah Friedlander, on How Hipsters Are Different From Us)

“Hipsters pronounce ‘pretentious’ differently than everyone else.”—Comic Judah Friedlander, March 2, 2014 tweet

Quote of the Day (C. S. Lewis, on Lent’s Call to Repentance)

“Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of a ‘hole.’  This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christians call repentance.  Now repentance is no fun at all.  It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie.  It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.  It means undergoing a kind of death.  In fact, it needs a good man to repent.  And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly.  The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it.  The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.”—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)