There is some fallout from yesterday’s mention of Stevie Nicks. I was intrigued by the comment that when she sang “Rhiannon” in concert it seemed like an exorcism, so I went to Youtube to watch a performance from 1975. It was pretty intense. Sometimes it strained her voice so much that a few shows by the band had to be canceled to allow her to recover.
She introduces the song by saying it’s about a Welsh witch (a good witch). In Celtic religion Rhiannon’s the Welsh manifestation of a goddess. Wikipedia describes her as a strong-minded “Otherworld” woman, intelligent, politically shrewd, beautiful, wealthy, and generous. Nicks’ lyrics include the following lines:
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night
And wouldn’t you love to love her?
All your life you’ve never seen a woman
Taken by the wind.
She is like a cat in the dark
And then she is the darkness.
Parents started naming their daughters Rhiannon once the song came out: singer/songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, for example, born on 2/21/1977.
Had you heard about this flap back in 2010? (I am so out of this loop.) At the Grammys, Nicks and Taylor Swift sang Rhiannon together as a duet. Nicks originally didn’t want to do the song with Smith. “She’s 20 years old, 5′ 11″ and slender; I’m 40 years older and, to be frank, neither of the other two things. I was not about to stand next to this girl on national television. But her little face just lights up like a star, and I couldn’t say no. Taylor reminds me of myself in her determination and her childlike nature,” and she praised Smith’s singing, songwriting, and musicianship.
But Smith had a rare off-night, and when they sang the song together Tay Tay was badly out of tune. The critics did not hold back. Swift said she appreciated “constructive or professional” criticism, but she was furious that some of it “crossed the line,” and was just plain mean. Bob Lefsetz wrote a particularly vicious review stating, “Taylor Swift can’t sing. Did Taylor Swift kill her career overnight? I’ll argue she did. In one fell swoop, she consigned herself to the dustbin of teen phenoms. Taylor’s too young and dumb to understand the mistake she made.”
Ouch!
As you may recall from earlier owl chatter, Taylor is not a hick from West Virginia. She’s from West Reading PA, and her dad was a stockbroker and her mom a mutual fund marketing exec. She took vocal and acting lessons in New York City from age nine. As Mick Jagger noted after 9/11 — “You don’t fuck with New York.” Swift planned her revenge coldly.
It’s impressive when an artist harnesses his or her artistry to make a point. I remember back in 1979, Reggie Jackson had a famous feud with manager Billy Martin. You could see them on TV, pushing and shoving each other in the dugout after Martin humiliated Reggie by taking him off the field in the middle of an inning. Then Reggie hit three home runs on three consecutive pitches on the grand stage of the World Series to defeat the Dodgers. Case closed. Martin was gone.
Similarly, here, Swift struck back pointedly with her song “Mean.” In the video she references the feelings of the schoolgirl shunned by the popular kids, and the gay kid bullied in the locker room. But the song is mainly Swift herself striking back. I was going to reproduce the lyrics for you but they don’t pack the same power without the music and her performance. Check it out, below — She takes on the look of a flapper from the 1920s for part of it. And she’s playing the banjo.
Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.
Oh, gosh, I haven’t even gotten to the puzzle yet. Hunker down. Get comfortable. Top off the coffee, or pop open another beer. There’s an awful lot to chatter about today.
The clue at 62A was “Size option at Starbucks,” for VENTI. Here’s LMS on it:
No place can make me feel like an outsider like Starbucks can. I feel like such an imposter that I can’t bring myself to say VENTI. I have to practically whisper medium black coffee, please and even then my face burns with embarrassment that I’m not spouting off VENTI iced skinny hazelnut macchiato, two pump, sugar-free syrup, extra shot, light ice, no whip.
T Trimble chimed in:
I feel not so much an impostor in a Starbucks (hi @Loren) as I do like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, who refuses to deal with the stupid lingo. “I’ll have a vanilla……….. one of the vanilla bullshit things, you know, you, whatever you want, some vanilla bullshit latte cappu thing, you know, whatever you got, I don’t care.” Barista guy: “You got it.”
Jackie Mason has some material on the topic too. Those high stools you have to sit on at some Starbucks. “You can’t get down — elderly Jews are sitting up there and they can’t get down. They have to ask for help from the Gentiles, ‘Please, mister, can you help me down from here, I could break a hip.’”
And Bill Maher has noted: The longer the Starbuck’s order, the bigger the a**hole.
SALMA Hayek dropped by the grid, right up there at 8 across. Hi SH!
Salma was born on Sept. 2, 1966 (so she’s 56), in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico and is a citizen of Mexico and the U.S. Her dad’s Lebanese and her mom’s Spanish, and an opera singer.
Hayek’s portrayal of Frida Kahlo in 2002 earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, the first ever for a Mexican actress. On Dec. 13, 2017, Hayek published an op-ed in the NYT stating that she had been harassed and abused by film producer Harvey Weinstein during the production of Frida. She also directs and produces films. She married French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault in 2009. Their daughter Valentina was born in 2007.
Hayek’s charitable work includes increasing awareness on violence against women and discrimination against immigrants. On July 19, 2005, Hayek testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee supporting reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. She is a board member of V-Day, the charity founded by playwright Eve Ensler, discussed recently in owl chatter.
She’s got serious good looks. If she ever spoke to me (which, fuhgedaboutit), I couldn’t possibly form words. It would take all I’ve got just to make sounds and point.
The clue at 40D was “Euphemism for a lesbian couple.” The answer was GAL PALS, and it generated a bit of controversy, starting with LMS’s ponderings:
“Look. I don’t know what I’m talking about here, but I was brought up short by the clue for GAL PALS. I would think that the creation of a euphemism is born of trying to sidestep saying outright something not so great. You’re like, Excuse me, I’m going to go powder my nose. and not Excuse me, I’m going to go urinate. The very existence, then, of a euphemism implies the existence of something unpleasant. We have euphemisms for peeing, vomiting, mentally challenged people, firing employees, dying, etc. Nowadays do we really have to sugarcoat lesbian couple? I don’t think we have euphemisms for happy things like birthday cake. . . hold on. I’m gonna look into this
…googling…..
Ok, so I’m not quite right. Seems the euphemism doesn’t avoid saying something unpleasant so much as avoids being too direct. Pregnant/expecting. . . problem/issue. . . used/second hand. So never mind.”
Kitshef said:
I’ve heard GAL PALS used a ton, but never as a euphemism for a lesbian couple. I’ve generally heard it to mean a female friend with whom you (you being male or female) have a non-sexual relationship – a ‘girl friend’ but not a ‘girlfriend’.
Weezie then chimed in with this, from the “battlefront:”
Okay, this trans queerdo is here to defend GAL PALS as a totally awesome answer to a great clue and not at all offensive or suggesting erasure or cloaking is good or right. Over the last couple years, there’s been a swelling of critique around how academics, historians, and media seem to be wildly insistent on sticking to the Gal Pals narrative, amounting to lesbian or bisexual erasure. I.e., “Emily Dickinson really wrote to Sue ‘I tore open your letter and licked the envelope’s seal for any lingering taste of you’ and historians thought they were just friends.” #GalPals or #JustGalPals is shorthand for calling out and mocking that tendency. It is very much a current in millennial and Gen Z queer contemporary culture!”
OMG! — a special shout-out to our excellent friend Pam who just let us know that she will be making a batch of Nanaimo bars for our get-together in Wilmington on New Year’s Day! She will be using Joyce Hardcastle’s award-winning recipe we reproduced in yesterday’s chatter. How great is that! Pam — brace yourself for some special bone-crushing owl-chatter hugs. [Pam notes she will be using gluten-free graham crackers, so Jenny and other gluten-shunning revelers will be able to partake. [Darn it — less for me!]]
Here’s a poem by Ted Kooser from Winter Morning Walks, for a graceful ending today:
Older this morning, the moon
hid most of her face
behind a round gray mirror.
In a half-hour’s walk, I saw
six shooting stars. Celestial notes,
I thought, struck from the high end
of the keyboard.
Thanks for stopping by!
The Wellington Files 