dirty job

I always thought of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as birdlike -- small, fragile, hollow of bone. Unlike Mr. Hoo who is a Supreme Court junkie and voraciously follows each session and season, I don't know the quirks and predilections of our nine justices: I know only their rulings, their dissents, their precedent making and citing as a mass.

Which may be why I wasn't expecting her strength. She is wiry, yes, and petite; Bader Ginsburg stepped onto the stage at Spertus last night wearing a jeweled open throat v-neck which I only remark upon because it was unsettling and unexpected to see bare a throat that is usually bound up by lace. She wore a black diaphanous shawl over her shoulders, wing-like.

She was there to speak on From Benjamin to Brandeis to Breyer: Is There a Jewish Seat on the U.S. Supreme Court? (her host, Spertus, is a Jewish learning and cultural organization in Chicago) and she delivered a solid history lesson on Judah Benjamin, a soon-to-be Confederate who was the first Jew to decline a Supreme Court nomination in favor of a Senate Seat, and then on the anti-semitism that Brandeis faced even within the court (his peer McReynolds would habitually leave the conference room when Brandeis spoke and refused to be photographed with his peer).

Her lecture was serviceable but unremarkable. It was in the question and answer session that my crush grew and during which it became apparent that she's no sparrow -- she's a gryphon. Fierce, watchful, talons at the ready, guarding our golden hoard of Justice from thieving self-interests.

Slow and deliberative in her response, as I suppose anyone might be on whose words the fate of weighty matters relies, she spoke with careful conviction and supreme confidence without a shade of arrogance on the questions put to her -- Should a judge rely more on empathy or impartiality? Did she expect that Roe v. Wade was headed for an upset? In which direction did the Court's sympathies lie regarding death penalty cases? What about that Hilary movie?

She spoke of how she keeps in her chambers the words in Hebrew from Deuteronomy: "Justice, Justice; Thou Should Pursue Justice," and it's true that every opinion she shared last night was steeped in this conviction. It was a like a fragrance that couldn't be laundered out, no matter the succession of spin cycles. It pervaded every word, chosen and delivered.

Whether she came by the unwavering solidity of her character through an early predisposition or through a life of public service in which she has pursued justice as her day job, I don't know. But I hung on every word. It was impossible not to. Her conviction that public discussion is a public duty. Her confession that death penalty cases and the 11th hour vigils that are a matter of course when one comes before the court are "the one part of the job I dislike. I dislike it intensely," and yet she will not recuse herself from these cases as other Justices have done (on the grounds that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment), because she feels it's important to have a voice in these matters.

It's a dirty job, and I'm glad we've got a dame on the bench to get it done.


Related:
The Opposite of Law »
Nothing Like a Dame »

on gams and dames

Guys that talk about the ideal woman just don't like women. I don't want an ideal woman, I just like dames.

John Steinbeck in the July 1950 "All Male Issue" of Flair Magazine, when "handed a sketch pad and a snapshot of [a] plastic manikin" and asked by the editor "to draw his Ideal Woman in the same pose and give us his whys and wherefores."

Flair asked columnist Earl Wilson, couturier Jacques Fath and child actor Brandon de Wilde (Shane! Come back Shane!) to do the same.

I got my hands on this particular copy of Flair through eBay when I read that its editor, Fleur Cowles, passed away a couple of weeks ago. Flair counted W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Angus Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Ogden Nash and Clare Boothe Luce, Salvador Dalí, Saul Steinberg, Lucian Freud, Rufino Tamayo and Winston Churchill among its contributors.

At 50 cents a copy, Flair's standards and elaborate art direction managed to lose the publication money at a time when print was still going strong and most magazines sold for 20 cents. According to the New York Times:

Although there were just 12 issues of Flair, published from February 1950 to January 1951, the magazine caused a sensation and is still admired for its coverage of fashion, décor, travel, art, literature and other enthusiasms of Ms. Cowles’s. It was part of the Cowles publishing empire, which included newspapers in the Midwest and, most notably, Look magazine, of which Ms. Cowles had been an influential editor.

But Flair, incorporating cutouts, fold-outs, pop-ups, removable reproductions of artworks and a variety of paper stocks of different sizes and textures, was simply too expensive to produce, even though it sold for 50 cents a copy when Time and Life were selling for 20 cents.

When Flair ceased publication, Mr. Cowles, who had financed it, estimated that it had lost $2.5 million. Circulation, less than 100,000 for the first issue, eventually doubled, but advertising did not follow, and losses were running about 75 cents a copy.

Ms. Cowles would be pleased to learn that issues are currently trending considerably higher than that, and have exploded even in the few short days since her death.

(Which is why I'm no longer buying.)

thank you, koko.

Video: Koko Taylor sings I'm a Woman
A mighty woman has passed. Queue the blues.

Koko Taylor (September 28, 1928 – June 3, 2009)

From the detritus archives: koko & lonnie singing in the trees »

c'est si bon

Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven.

Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81.

No slouch, Eartha.

In one of the bio clips that ran on the radio as word got out that Ms. Kitt passed away, she was laughing about the lyrics of Santa Baby, and how none of the men who laid sables under her tree ever stuck around for very long. "My prince turned out to be me," she said.

Brutalized and for awhile homeless as a child, she worked hard and pulled together an extraordinary life. As the New York Times reported:

“'I’m a dirt person,' she told Ebony magazine in 1993. 'I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.'”

une vraie femme, complète

Photo: Art Shay

Subject: Simone de Beauvoir

This last week there was some fuss in France over the publication of an Art Shay photograph of Simone de Beauvoir’s curvalicious backside on the cover of Le Nouvelle Observateur.

I caught wind of it via a brief New Yorker mention (we’re too busy with Britney’s troubles -- and her sister’s! -- to be bothered by the naked bum of one of the 20th Century’s preeminent intellectuals here in the States) and given the weakness of my French I was consigned to follow the story in the English language press. The Times Online provided this recap:

The reaction of de Beauvoir’s admirers to the Nouvel Obs piece and its accompanying photograph was pained. A small demonstration of the feminist group Les Chiennes de Garde assembled outside the magazine’s offices, waving placards calling for Jean Daniel, the proprietor, to publish pictures of his own bare buttocks as well as those of various male philosophers. “My first thought on seeing the magazine,” said Florence Montreynaud, an authority on the relationship between de Beauvoir and her life’s companion, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre’s bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur.”

This is certainly true. And anyone who has seen a picture of the front elevation of Jean-Paul Sartre, fully clothed, will instantly understand why. The behind of the great rock star of French philosophy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, might be a different matter ...

Aren’t we past this by now? The idea that a woman may be only smart OR sexy -- but not both? And certainly not all at once?

Studying Shay’s lovely composition from the sidelines, in which I see a woman standing bare, except for her heels, before an open doorway in a friend’s house in which she was fully aware roamed another friend who was a photographer (and are any of us safe from those unscrupulous creatures, photographers?), and then reading the story of how when she heard Shay’s shutter close she turned, laughing, and said “Naughty boy!” -- I can only conclude that in this shot the 44 year old de Beauvoir has elected to be the subject -- meaning that she is by no means subjugated.

Because honestly: No woman wears heels for herself alone.

So if she welcomed the camera’s gaze, does that make her any less of a philosopher and intellectual? Does she, for this, become a dirty girl, and are all honors and privileges previously conferred upon her for her accomplishments nullified?

Let’s hope not. I prefer to hope that this is a brief insight into the possibility that de Beauvoir recognized the power inherent in female sexuality -- the turn of well-placed a curve -- a powerful force that historically our institutions and legislations have worked feverishly to control and contain.

I see in this shot a woman wielding her superpower called sexy (one that every woman who bothers to embrace it owns) in which resides the ability to captivate and hold the attention of others and persuade through the beautiful concert of both mind and flesh.

Any woman who has discovered the magical power that a low slung neckline has over some men (& women) knows that with great power comes great responsibility -- women should not use their physical powers to manipulate just as men should not (and of course, women have, as have men, which is where our fear springs from) -- but to revel in it? To share that beauty and, with it, a lust for life?

Hell, yeah.

So why does it seem that we still subscribe to this idea that to embrace the force of flesh means that your brain will wither and die? Or to be recognized and seen for these things means that the rest goes unnoticed?

The sapiosexual knows better.

And, frankly, enjoys life more.


p.s. The title of this post was pulled from a Times' citation of the Nouvelle Obs piece -- it was how one of de Beauvoir's former lovers, Claude Lanzmann, described her.

nothing like a dame

Lots of things in life are beautiful, but brother,
There is one particular thing that is nothin' whatsoever
In any way, shape or form like any other.

There is nothin' like a dame.

Good medicine – and very much needed -- a night at Ravinia with Elaine Stritch as she ran through her new Carlyle show. It was rough, ragged, all rehearsal-like, and worth every dime. (And worth every suffering minute in that unmerciful heat.)

Hats f*ckin’ off. (As Elaine would – and did -- say.)

Although there were plenty of grumpypants in the house who wanted it to be more “polished” (as heard and reported in the ladies room by litwit, and observed in the disapproving couple sitting in front of us), maybe it was having the advantage of having seen her last Carlyle show, in one of the most perfect NYC evenings ever, and being able to project myself back to that cozy corner booth when she was close enough that I could see every character line on her beautifully weathered face.

I wouldn’t trade last night for all the spit and polish in the world – although I will be sorely tempted to go another round at the Carlyle when she finally settles in – if only so I can hear Elaine f*cking Stritch sing Woke Up This Morning from the Sopranos -- again.

And so I can wonder, and maybe even have a chance to ask her: What’s the alchemy? How do you do it? How does a girl become a dame?

Because it’s the one thing I really want to be when I grow up.