What does Ronan Farrow think is: 1. "an annoyance," and 2. "empowering"?

1. Your interest in whether his father is Frank Sinatra or Woody Allen.

2. His new MSNBC TV show.

(Need more details? Here's the whole article.)

ADDED: Here, you can judge his speaking style and small-screen appeal:



"I did a lot of stuff in my Hammer Pants."

AND: Watching that clip, I could only think of one word: jejune.

"I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest."

Said Frank Sinatra. I found that quote because I was Googling to try to find out how intelligent Frank Sinatra was, a propos of yesterday's PR from the Farrow family that it's possible that Ronan Farrow came into existence because Mia Farrow continued — during her long relationship with Woody Allen — to have sex with the love of her life, her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

Ronan Farrow seems to be a young man of very high intelligence (since he started attending Yale Law School at age 15), so one naturally wonders about the relative intelligence of the 2 possible fathers.

What's Woody Allen's IQ? He once said "I've got a 150, 160 IQ," but that was as a character in a movie. "To Rome With Love." One might only guess that it's actually Woody Allen's IQ, but we know that he wrote the dialogue, and he was smart enough to write the dialogue, which had Judy Davis coming back with: "You're figuring it in Euros. In dollars, it's much less."

How intelligent is Mia Farrow? Presumably intelligent enough for Sinatra — the liker of intelligent women — to have married her. But what kind of judge of intelligence was Sinatra? His quote is pretty funny, maybe not Woody Allen funny, but funny in that it has a set up and punch line. "I like intelligent women" is the straight line. The joke — "When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest" — also works as Sinatra's definition of intelligent: able to keep up one end of a conversation. That might be kind of a low standard. He's saying he wants someone at his level and we're hard-pressed to infer what his level was. (ADDED: In a staring contest, no one is talking, so he may be saying he's pretty dumb and somebody needs to be able to say something.)

Sinatra was a genius at singing, but does musical intelligence express itself genetically in offspring who do things like go to Yale Law School at age 15? I doubt it! [ADDED: Ronan was accepted to YLS when he was 15, but deferred admission until he was 19. In the interval, he worked for UNICEF.)

But that gets us no closer to the answer to the question who is Ronan's father, since Woody Allen is also a genius of a particular sort — writing comedy — and that sort of genius also seems disconnected from the sort of mind that gets drawn into law school at 15.

By the way, I love the question whether high-level legal analysis is more like comic writing or more like the vocal interpretation of song lyrics.

Googling for answers to my idle questions, I ran across the 1992 Farrow PR that — like this new piece — appeared in Vanity Fair. It came up because it had "IQ":

Soon-Yi issued her own statement... “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.”...

Mia’s family were astounded by the statement. “Soon-Yi doesn’t know half those words, what they mean,” one close to them said.... When Soon-Yi was in the third grade, her I.Q. tested as slightly below average.... “She’s a very typical L.D. kid, very socially inappropriate, very, very naïve,” says [a woman who tutored Soon-Yi]. “She has trouble processing information, trouble understanding language on an inferential level. She’s very, very literal and flat in how she interprets what she sees and how she interprets things socially. She misinterprets situations."

One might infer that Woody Allen is most likely the father, since Woody, unlike Frank, seems to have gravitated to females who don't seem so intelligent to him. Since both men gravitated to Mia Farrow, that may mean that Woody was more intelligent than Frank, if she seemed relatively dumb to Woody and relatively smart to Frank.

"Possibly" Mia Farrow's son by Woody Allen is actually the biological offspring of Frank Sinatra.

That's the late-breaking scoop in Vanity Fair.

Scroll down for a photo of the son, now called Ronan Farrow. He looks a lot like Mia, but does he look at all like either Frank Sinatra or Woody Allen? He's got blue eyes...

No DNA tests have been done. When Orth asks Nancy Sinatra Jr. about Ronan’s being treated as if he were a member of her family, Sinatra answers in an e-mail, “He is a big part of us, and we are blessed to have him in our lives.”

Why have no DNA tests been done? It's easier, in this case, to think of reasons why there would be denial of DNA tests that were done. Considering the severity of Ronan and Mia's rejection of Woody Allen, you'd think they'd love to be able to say, as a scientific fact, that Ronan is not Woody's son. And what delight in being about to claim Frank Sinatra as one's father!

I smell hooey.

UPDATE: "Listen, we’re all *possibly* Frank Sinatra’s son." And: "It’s an unusual thing to do with one’s mother..."

ADDED: I indulge in much more analysis here. 

Robin Thicke, getting the jump on copyright claims that "Blurred Lines" ripped off Marvin Gaye and Funkadelic.

After the owners of the rights to Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" and Funkadelic's "Sexy Ways" threatened to sue Thicke, Thicke filed a preemptive lawsuit.

The lawsuit says Thicke [and others] have "the utmost respect for and admiration of Marvin Gaye, Funkadelic and their musical legacies," but must "reluctantly file this action in the face of multiple adverse claims from alleged successors in interest to those artists."

You can listen to all 3 songs at the link. I like this lawsuit, because "Blurred Lines" isn't copying those other 2 songs. It's a tribute to that old style, not a copying. Naturally, the Gaye and Funkadelic property owners feel the normal human greed and would like some "Blurred Lines" cash thrown their way, but these threats of lawsuits deserve legal pushback, and I like seeing the new artist doing something that will deter that tactic. I'm not an intellectual property expert, so I'll let others weigh in on the likelihood that Thicke will get the judicial remedy he seeks.

Those earlier artists benefit when the younger generations get their ears tuned to the old sound. If you go to the YouTube "Got to Give It Up" page, you'll see people saying things like "The Blured Lines lawsuit brought me here." Me too! When's the last time you listened to "Got to Give It Up"? I'm a long time Marvin Gaye fan. I bought the single "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" when it came out in 1962. It was one of the first records I bought, and it was Gaye's first single if you don't count 3 failed efforts at marketing him as "the Black Frank Sinatra." But "Got to Give It Up" is late 70s Gaye, the sort of thing we loathed at the time and called "disco." I listened to it today, and I probably would otherwise never have listened to it.

Gaye has been dead for almost 30 years, so there's no way of knowing what he would think of the claims the owners of his intellectual property are making today. And why isn't stuff this old in the public domain already and completely open to picking over and reenvisioning and outright note-for-note copying? It seems odd to clutter the court with a preemptive lawsuit, but what is Thicke supposed to do about the predation his success attracts? Congress should redo the copyright law, shorten the terms of ownership, and thereby limit the potential for lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, which are especially bad when the artist is not around even to have a belief about whether his rights are infringed.

ADDED: Look at how Madonna reacted to what was much more of a rip off:

“I certainly think [Lady Gaga] references me a lot in her work. And sometimes I think it’s amusing and flattering and well done”... Madonna said sometimes Gaga’s work also appears to be a “statement about taking something that was in the Zeitgeist, you know, 20 years ago and turning it inside out and reinterpreting it.”

“There’s a lot of ways to look at it. I can’t really be annoyed by it... because, obviously, I’ve influenced her.” But the Material Girl became coy when the conversation turned to “Born This Way.” “When I heard it on the radio …I said that sounds very familiar,” Madonna said.

Asked if that felt annoying, Madonna responded, “It felt reductive.” Pressed as to whether that was a good or bad thing, Madonna told Cynthia McFadden to “look it up” — we did; the term means “minimal” or “crude” — before smiling slyly and taking a sip from her tea cup.

Maybe Gaye, had he lived, would have displayed a similar attitude. Unfortunately, Gaye was murdered, and so we are deprived of the chance to see him sip tea and smile and use words we need to look up — or whatever his version of that would be — when some reporter pushes him to say what he thinks about the similarity between "Blurred Lines" and "Got to Give It Up."

CORRECTION: The text is corrected to show that Gaye died almost 30 years ago (not almost 40 years ago).

At the Wet Lettuce Café...

... because Lem wanted a café and because I think some of you might need a break from all the legalistic argle-bargle. And it was Lem who asked "Is Argle-Bargle another way of saying bullshit?" And the answer is most definitely yes, and as you know, I'm immensely interested in the concept of paraphrasing. In other words, I want to be the Professor of Paraphrase. And by the way, did you know that the song "Fly Me To the Moon," was originally titled "In Other Words"? And that Frank Sinatra sings the line "In other words, darling, kiss me" in these other words: "In other words, baby, kiss me"? Why does "darling" seem so old fashioned? Does anyone use the endearment "darling" anymore (other than sarcastically, as in "yes, darling")?

Okay, you get the message: Talk about random stuff. Be amusing and delightful. Or something.

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

"Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last/ Next year we may all be living in the past."

The original lyric to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which I learned about after happening to catch the tail end of "Meet Me in St. Louis" while channel surfing last night. We happened to drop in just as Judy Garland was about to sing the much-loved Christmas tune, which might have been less-loved if Judy hadn't pushed for happier lyrics. The line, revised, is "Let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight."



What Judy and Margaret O'Brien are so sad about there is moving to New York. They love St. Louis.

Judy's version, in turn, was insufficiently happy for Frank Sinatra, who got the line "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" changed to "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." Here's Frank. I think "muddle through" would have suited him — that edge of sadness. And "bough" is a silly word.

There's another place in the song with alternate lyrics: "Through the years, we all will be together if the fates allow," was originally "if the Lord allows." Judy sang "the fates," but returning to "the Lord" is something you can always do.