Early Wally Wood, c. 1949. Impossible to contemplate today without seeing it as some kind of latter-day retro parody.

Some comic illustrators of the 1980s and 90s, notably Charles Burns and “Coop,” painstakingly imitated the zigzag highlights technique you see in the foreground coiffure. [continue reading…]

The Guardian‘s recent slash-and-burn job on Taylor Swift (see Steve Sailer here, Nov. 25) pointed up a couple of home truths about race discussion in the media. One is that, as Sailer put it, “It’s Not Okay to be White” in such fever-swamp precincts as The Guardian‘s editorial board. The other is that—hate her or love her—the image of La Swift continues to serve as both whipping-girl and icon of traditional American whiteness.

Tenney Grant, with Boyfriend Logan

Consider this. After years of Diversifying its brand into utter meaninglessness, the American Girl Doll collection recently introduced a girl-singer doll into its lineup. Named “Tenney Grant,” and sporting a miniature acoustic guitar and denim-and-lace outfits, this new entry is quite clearly a proxy for Taylor Swift (or at least the country-singing Taylor of a few years back).

“She’s a breakout songwriter finding the heart to be herself,” reads the catalog copy. “Ready for a true taste of Nashville? Tenney Grant is determined to shine by being just who she is.” To round out her character, the all-American Tenney has even been given a boyfriend, Logan Everett. He’s got  brown hair and blue eyes, and is American Girl’s first-ever boy doll. [continue reading…]

Liz Smith, veteran Broadway and theatre columnist, died yesterday of a drug overdose. She was 94.

Frank Sinatra once famously called her a “two-dollar whore” while shoving a pair of greenbacks into Liz Smith’s old-fashioned glass. But others had favorable memories of the legendary gossip scribe.

An old friend, actor Richard Gere, described her thusly: “Liz Smith was the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my lift.”

“You mean in your life?” a reporter interjected.

Smith in 1945

“No, my lift, my elevator! We lived in the same building on Central Park West. She always had a smile for me,” Gere noted with a shrug.

Elizabeth Penrose Smith was born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1923, a fact that surprised many people who thought she came from Texas. The Texas accent was an affection, acquired during World War II when she worked as a “Hospitality Girl” at the Navy base in Galveston.

Liz Smith in later years, with Iris Love and a young person

Prior to that, Smith had graduated from Ethel Walker, and spent one year at Smith College, dropping out after freshman year. “There were too many lesbians,” Smith explained. “Smith girls didn’t know how to dress or even how to do their hair.”

After the War, Smith landed a job at the world-famous Herald-Tribune newspaper in New York City, where she wrote about restaurant openings, society shindigs, and the Philadelphia World’s Fair of 1948.

That year she married newspaper heir Hogwood Patterson Medill III, whom she divorced in 1962. They had four children, three of whom survive her.

“Hog and I had many of the same tastes,” Smith explained, “but he disapproved of my slumming with celebrities. Which is pretty weird, seeing as he went on to marry Monique van Vooren. Go figure!”

Frank Sinatra

With her background in society reporting and celebrity conviviality, Smith was a logical choice to replace gossip columnist Hedda Hopper when she retired. Smith subtly altered the column’s style, making it “jazzier,” as she liked to say.

In 1965 she was the first to break the news that 50-year-old Frank Sinatra was bedding down 18-year-old Peyton Place starlet Mia Farrow.

“Go buy yourself a new pair of overshoes,” said a drunken Sinatra when he encountered Smith in Las Vegas a few years later. Sticking a pair of banknotes into Smith’s drink glass, Sinatra added that she was “a two-dollar whore.”

Richard Gere

With her children in boarding school, Smith no longer needed an apartment of her own in New York, so moved in with her longtime friend, archaeologist Iris Love.

Smith and Love frequently went on digs together, sometimes accompanied by Smith’s children, or Smith’s close friend Richard Gere. During a 1983 expedition to Great Britain they discovered the jaw of Piltdown Man, which they donated to the British Museum.

Dr Molmar

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

I am often asked whether it safe and proper for human beings to ingest antibiotics designed for tropical fish. There are two issues to address here. One is that antibiotics for fish have generally been tested on fish, but not on humans. Therefore, although the the chemical structure of the drug may be similar, you can never be certain of what a fish antibiotic will do to one of us higher vertebrates. [continue reading…]

Dr Molmar

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. Our adopted child from a far-off country has been diagnosed with leprosy. The child is under treatment and the condition appears to be stable. However, a clerical employee in our pediatrician’s offices seems to be a bit of a gossip and told a neighbor from my garden club about our child’s illness. Now the neighbors refuse to let their children play with our child, and some are even demanding that our child carry a bell around and ring it whenever approaching other people. We got hold of an old Salvation Army bell, which makes quite a bit of noise, but this has not satisfied our neighbors. Our child’s school has put our child into a “special needs” class isolated from the other children. The guidance counselor is beginning to suggest that we send our child away to a leprosarium school in Molokai or Louisiana. This problem is causing a lot of stress at home, and my spouse is threatening to leave me. (Note: we are not married.)

A. Whoa, whoa. Quite a lot to digest there! First of all, leprosy is generally called Hansen’s Disease today, which is a more appetizing name all around. Your pediatrician should have used that name to begin with. But now the damage is done, and now instead of thinking that your child has a minor eye infection, or a lymphoma perhaps, your neighbors are imagining suppurating sores and fingers falling off. That is the problem right there.

Hansen’s Disease is very treatable nowadays, and unless your child is severely disfigured, there is a chance your child can live a long and productive life. For now, I suggest moving far away and perhaps changing your name. Also lose that bell, and don’t use the L word again!

I cannot advise you on your marriage, or lack thereof. I realize many unmarried people adopt children from far-away lands today, because they cannot adopt them at home, but it was still irresponsible of you to do it. Having unmarried parents puts an extra burden on children, even those who are adopted and don’t have leprosy.

Q. Our elderly aunt died recently of toxoplasmosis, which she may have picked up from the many cats she lived with. The humane society has taken most of the cats away to be put down, except for a litter of three kitties which my five-year-old son sneaked away in a gunny sack. We took these kitties to the veterinarian, and they seem to be “clean,” but I’m not sure it’s a good thing to keep animals from such an unhealthy household. Are we at risk?

A. First of all, I’m a real medical doctor, not a veterinarian, and I’m not here to talk about kittens. But I worry about a five-year-old boy who moons over cats. One day he’s stealing them in a gunny sack (where did he get a gunny sack, I wonder?), and before you know it he’s tying little pink ribbons around their necks and sewing little outfits for them. Is that the kind of life you want for your son? Why don’t you get him a dog? A nice big german shepherd dog? Like Rin-Tin-Tin. Or a boxer maybe.

This looks absolutely ghastly. These people must be desperate.

Drawn from our renowned collection, the exhibition features choice examples from among the many millions of mummies of birds, cats, dogs, snakes, and other animals preserved from at least thirty-one different cemeteries throughout Egypt. Animals were central to the ancient Egyptian worldview. Most animals had connections to a particular deity. After death, mummified animals’ souls could carry a message to a god.

Brooklyn Museum

Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017–JANUARY 21, 2018

Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor

The death of Hugh Hefner at age 91 hurled us headlong back into recollections of the 1960s and what Playboy was supposed to be about.

If you weren’t a Playboy reader in those days—and few of us alive today were, let’s face it, since that would imply you were then a male between 25 and 50 years of age, making you about 90 years old today—you had a weird notion of it, one that came filtered through the schoolyard and MAD magazine. Playboy was a dirty magazine, a skin book. It had pictures of “naked ladies.” [continue reading…]

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. My youngest child, now 13, still wets his bed and I would like to cure him before he goes off to boarding school. I remember many years ago when you used to appear on the old Today Show with Jack Lescoulie and you demonstrated a sort of harness that could be used to cure bed-wetting, by strapping the children in at night. Do they still make this, or do you still use this? [continue reading…]

Brooklyn recently went to a Tom Wolfe chin-music recital in New York. And my reaction was: you couldn’t drag me to a Tom Wolfe reading for all the smack in China. Not even if the opening act was a mud-wrestling grudge-match between Erica Jong and Susan Sontag.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Wolfe is a fantastic writer. He’s fab & gear & smack-a-delic to the max. I love the way he teased Marshall McLuhan for McLuhan’s cheezy clip-on tie. With the little plastic cheaters sticking out of the collar. The kind of goofy cheez-artifacts that they used to have hanging from those rotating racks at Rexall drug stores. (Marshall McLuhan. Now there was a pedantic pseudo-mystical bullshit-monger if there ever was one. Ya know that old joke about how the Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotch as a gag-gift? And that the Scotch still haven’t caught on to the joke? Well that’s what McLuhan was. Another Irish whoopee-cushion. But at least Wolfe was sport enough to play along with the joke.)

The Acid Test book was marvelous. Ya gotta admire the sheer weirdness of someone who would dive into that whole LSD cult without once taking LSD himself. You can always count on Tom for humoristical eloquence. Here he is on the architect Le Corbusier: “Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”

But when all is said and done, I gotta admit it. I really can’t say that I like Tom Wolfe as a person. And it’s not because of his inconceivably faggy clothes. With those high collars that look so scratchy & uncomfortable. And it’s not because he flirted with negrophobia in “Bonfire”. And it’s not because he indulged his anglophobia in “Bonfire”. (It featured two slimey-limeys. One of them was a drunken hack journalist. The other one was a leaching buffoonish gasbag of a poet. Who was also an AIDS-infected homo for good measure.)

I’m sorry but I’m really not offended by any of that. No. What really makes me hate Tom Wolfe is something he said in his piece about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: “the unspeakable and inconfessible goal of the New Left on the campuses had been to transform the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous”. In other words, if you’re a draft-dodger or a war-protester then you’re a cowardly faggot. This is Tom Wolfe’s way of ingratiating himself with the patriotic German shithead who stabbed Monica Seles for the greater glory of Steffi Graf’s Thousand-Year Reich. And notice how Wolfe smears the epithet “New Left” on anybody who just happens to object to military slavery or American intervention in an Asian civil war.

Read the whole Bill Jarma thing.

This Esky cartoon is pretty inscrutable today, but Mr J D King points out that the Plaid Stamps sign is an allusion to the Pop Art fad of the period.

Hunt ‘n’ Andy

Mr Huntington Hartford was a much-married playboy and philanthropist who succeeded in running through his entire inheritance (A&P supermarkets) before he died. He pissed a few million away on an entertainment magazine, and then wasted another hundred million by building a modern-art museum on a traffic island by Columbus Circle—then a down-at-the-heels part of town.

A&P were the main providers of Plaid trading stamps. Plaid was a distinctly second-tier brand, the high-end competitor being the Beinecke family’s S&H Green Stamps. Just before the bottom fell out of the trading-stamp industry (late 60s?), you could get Green Stamps at major filling stations.

This was the pre-Oil Crisis era, when competition was fierce among the major chains. They couldn’t compete on price, since they all charged 29/9 to 39/9 for a gallon of basic leaded fuel, so they sited themselves in as many locations as they could (if Sunoco built a station on a corner, Gulf or Esso or Chevron soon went up opposite). And they ran never-ending giveaways and promotions. [continue reading…]

Dr Molmar

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. My 5-year-old son has a very large purple cyst in the middle of his forehead. It does not interfere with his activities, but it looks a sight and makes people not notice what a handsome child he is. Lately he has begun to pick at it, and I think its presence distresses him. Should we take him to a dermatologist and have it removed, or just hope that my son outgrows it?

A. Healthy children normally engage in rough-and-tumble games, and it is not unusual for them to have bruises and scars and facial lesions. In your son’s case the cyst appears to be benign and naturally occurring. Instead of indulging your son’s vanity by removing a harmless growth, it is far better for you to teach him to accept it and learn to live with it. Boys who are overly concerned with their looks at this age typically grow up to be homosexuals. [continue reading…]