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 wish I could be with you tonight, but I find it impossible to sit through two hours of relentless adulation..."

"... especially for somebody else."

"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. 

The list of the adultress, the unfair headline, the "orgasm of life," the twice-seen movie, the arcane logo, and the corporate cult.

I'm no fan of adultery, but "Google mistress more into sex than 'love' and kids," trashing 26-year-old Amanda Rosenberg (who's linked to Google co-founder Sergey Brin), is an awfully unfair headline.

The NY Post has gathered its information about what Ms. Rosenberg is "into" from a lightweight blog post of hers titled "The 10 Least Inspiring Sentences on This Lululemon Tote." Here's the blog post, which has a picture of the begging-to-be-mocked tote bag. #1 on the list is "1. Children are the orgasm of life." Calling that sentence "uninspiring" — I'd call it a lot worse — is not taking the position that one is not "into" kids. The blog post ends with Rosenberg identifying herself as "a misanthropic Brit who lives in San Francisco and works in Silicon Valley," and "She's currently struggling to come to terms with Californian optimism and cannot believe someone actually wrote the sentence 'children are the orgasm of life.'"

Sounds about right to me.
I was in a Lululemon store the other day — just throwing away time while waiting for my ride after seeing a movie. (I saw "Blue Jasmine" a second time, on the theory that a second viewing would inspire me to write a blog post in the style of this 9-point list I did on "Doubt." But I didn't have that experience of details bursting out and themes connecting up that I'd expected based on loving the movie the first time and getting over an hour's worth of conversation out of it. Instead the movie on second viewing turned out to be exactly what I thought I saw the first time. Knowing the story in advance, I admired the sharp storytelling, done through expert writing and editing, but I didn't uncover any cool listables.)

I didn't know I was in Lululemon, because I didn't see that word anywhere, and I looked. I saw the logo, which I had to look up just now to determine that I was, in fact, inside the store whose handbag Amanda Rosenberg mocked. At the time, seeing the logo on the sign over the door...



... I thought "Omega?" (Ω.) At the Lululemon website now, I see:

The lululemon name was chosen in a survey of 100 people from a list of 20 brand names and 20 logos. The logo is actually a stylized "A" that was made for the first letter in the name "athletically hip", a name which failed to make the grade.

So... it doesn't look like an "A," and the store's name doesn't begin with "A." Is it supposed to feel like a secret club, like you're hip (athletically) if you get the logo? Is it somehow connected the way yoga is (sort of) religion, so replacing the name with a seemingly unrelated symbol — like the fish that means Jesus — delivers the vibe that you're entering a cult? Is it connected to "I am the alpha and the omega"?

I Google "lululemon cult" and get 218,000 results. "Lululemon's Cult Culture: Get Fit or Die Trying""

Lululemon wants you to know it's "elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness" and "creating components for people to live long, healthy and fun lives." But, dig deeper, and you'll learn about Landmark Forum, the ultra-secretive, eerily cultish educational series, which Lululemon employees are "strongly encouraged" to attend. Before you're in line for Landmark, you're bombarded with Brian Tracy motivational CDs and a book club that culminates with Atlas Shrugged.

"12 Utterly Bizarre Facts About The Rise Of Lululemon, The Cult-Like Yoga Brand":

The founder is an Ayn Rand fan and the company takes its values from Atlas Shrugged....

Wilson believes the birth control pill and smoking are responsible for high divorce rates—and the existence of Lululemon itself....

"A rare look at the luon empire of Lululemon/The story of a Vancouver business that inspires cult-like devotion":

Part of the initiation and training in the company, known as “on-boarding,” involves setting your vision and goals, referred to as one unit, “vision-and-goals,” in company parlance....

“You’re a whole brain, a whole body, a wholehearted person. You should be focusing on all these things. When your life is firing on all cylinders – so when home’s working, personal’s working, career’s working, health is working – you’re going to be great at work. It’s just going to happen,” [said  said Margaret Wheeler, senior vice-president of Human Resources (“People Potential”)].

"Lululemon: A Cult, a Phenomenon or Just a Great Brand":

Lululemon promotes its brand, its community and its culture with local events, some quite large in scale. In New York this September, an event entitled, “The Gospel of Sweat” was staged at Riverside Church inviting people to “Come together to build community, engage spirituality, and celebrate fitness!”

It's just a brand. Do you want your comfy clothes made out of cotton or synthetic fibers? It all depends on how much you sweat. Sweating sounds lowly, and there's religion(ishness) to elevate things. The Gospel of Sweat. But it's not religion. It's not religion because they obviously don't care about heresy.

And because Ayn Rand was a big old atheist. What's that "A" for again?

Which reminds me...



... do not commit adultery. It will expose all your old blog posts — and all your new movie scripts — to unsympathetic reinterpretation.

"12 Personal Finance Lessons, Broken Down, In Woody Allen's 'Blue Jasmine.'"

A nicely done piece in Forbes, which I arrived at after Googling "blue jasmine is a movie about handbags," because that's what I said at the end of the closing credits: "That movie was about handbags." In the middle of the movie, I nudged Meade and said: "I've never seen a movie with so many women so attached to their handbags."

The 2 main female characters were constantly carrying around big handbags. One of them was dancing at a party with a big, clunky bag hanging from her shoulder. There was a scene where the 2 women carried big bags while buying a smaller bag, and yet they continued to carry big bags after that. We saw the main character — Jasmine, played by Cate Blanchett — dig in her bag for money, throw her bag on a sofa in a tantrum, accidentally dump the contents of the bag on the street in a moment of hysteria.

That darned bag — Hermes — should get a nomination for Best Performance in a Supporting Role.

But importantly — spoiler alert — when Jasmine leaves the apartment in the final scene, after she takes the shower, she walks out to go wandering the streets talking to herself, she has no handbag. That's how you know she's really crazy now. She was pretty much crazy from the first scene, but she had her handbag every step of the way. And now: No handbag!

Electrical engineering man doesn't get the poem his English major girlfriend gave him in parchment-and-calligraphy form...

... and — what the hell kind of electrical engineering guy writes to an advice columnist? — the advice columnist he writes to doesn't even know enough to tell him to watch "Hannah and Her Sisters." He's all:

It's by e.e. cummings... Sarah told me it's her favorite poem of all time. I didn't even understand the title, so I kept my mouth shut. Then she said she feels that the last line, which goes "Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands," is the most beautiful sentence written by an American in the past 100 years. 

Aw, come on. There's an entire sequence in "Hannah and Her Sisters" — watch the 4-minute clip here —  that begins with a big white-on-black intertitle inviting laughter over the line "Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." This man — if he really is an electrical engineer (e.e. = electrical engineer) — instead of finding a way to laugh with this girl confesses to the advice columnist that he has "no idea what that sentence means."

I read the poem (which I had to do in front of her, which was scary) and I definitely get that it's a love poem, but if you asked me to explain a single line in it with a gun to my head, I'd be a goner.

Such violent ideation. If you're smart enough to be an electrical engineer — which, as noted above, I doubt — you should figure out how to say something like: To me, everything you say is the most beautiful sentence by an American in the past 100 years. Paraphrase it for me. I want to know why it's the most beautiful sentence to you. I want to know how you would say it.

Maybe she'll bust out laughing and say: I was just playing with you. I was thinking what would be the most ridiculous present to give to my electrical engineering guy who doesn't understand the point of being an English major. And I thought: a completely bad poem with a ridiculous line that everyone has been laughing at for years.  I'd present it to you in the most bullshit form, in calligraphy on parchment, act like it was a great present, and deadpan that that stupid line was the most beautiful line ever written in English. Oh, man, you should have seen your face.

But, no, his face was the face of a lost little boy. She realizes that her funny setup only revealed his lack of interpersonal skill and humor. If she finds out he wrote to an advice columnist — a female advice columnist — asking her — asking mommy — for help understanding the poem, she'll never be able to have sex with this man.

Back to the letter:

The thing is this was clearly a hugely meaningful gesture for Sarah to give me this poem. It means so much to her. I just didn't have the heart to tell her that it went over my head. I mumbled something about how beautiful it was and that seemed to make her happy, but I felt really bad later.

He worries that this incident ruined everything. I think it did — not because he couldn't understand the poem, but because he didn't turn the occasion of failure to understand into an interesting interaction between the two of them. She tried to make something happen, and he was too big of a coward to find out what it was. And then he went to some other lady — an authority figure — for an explanation. 

Only after writing that am I reading the advice columnist's answer — although I did do a search to see if she knew "Hannah and Her Sisters." The columnist's answer is kind of like mine, but it's more about gentleness, with the man inviting the woman to explain the poem. She was trying "to bring you into her world a bit... a loving gesture. Don't be put off by it, and trust her enough to respond with gentle honesty."

I suspect this particular man is more capable of the timid gentleness routine than of the more vigorous interplay I'd pictured, but I'm not an advice columnist.

(Link via Maggie's Farm.)

The new Woody Allen movie seems kind of like "A Streetcar Named Desire"...

... with Andrew Dice Clay as Marlon Brando:



"'Back when your sister had all that money she wanted nuttin' to do with you; now that she's broke, she's movin' in,' says Andrew Dice Clay, proving that a guy from Brooklyn can handle the cadence of Woody Allen dialogue just fine."

He has less (and much grayer) hair and has put on a few pounds, but the 55-year-old is still unmistakably the guy who once upon a time sold out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row – the only comedian to date to ever do so.

It's great to see Andrew Dice Clay make a comeback. Do you remember how he was destroyed? Interesting to think about how Woody Allen might empathize with a man's destruction, but what happened to ADC is nothing like the problems Allen had. I remember the first time I saw Andrew Dice Clay — on TV, doing his typical routine — and I thought it was obviously a spoof of exaggerated masculinity. Later, I found out that right-thinking women were supposed to assume the "that's not funny" position.

Researching his downfall, I come across various indications of a comeback effort. He was on "Celebrity Apprentice," and he had a reality show in 2007 called "Dice Undisputed," reviewed here, by Virginia Heffernan, who said, referring to his career in the 90s:

He was known above all for being sexist. He attracted boycotts. He was banned from MTV. Sinead O’Connor and Nora Dunn both refused to appear with him on “Saturday Night Live.” Apologists said he voiced a particular kind of male rage (which he now believes is back in style), while sensitive, right-thinking women felt free to despise him even though his stuff was tame compared to later hip-hop.

Was male rage back in style in 2007?

“Who, after 1990, will remember who Andrew Dice Clay was?” is the question at the top of the new program — asked by Jane Pauley....

Remember Jane Pauley?

[T]he pain of “Dice Undisputed” is that he has evidently spent 17 years brooding on the havoc political correctness wrought in his career.

Because the world-historical significance of that career is not entirely clear — Rodney Dangerfield outdid Mr. Clay as the outer-borough lunk, and nearly any old rapper is more incendiary — it’s not all that satisfying to watch him try to revive it....

Interestingly, Heffernan's last paragraph brings up Woody Allen:

Think about it. Eddie Murphy befriended a transvestite. Woody Allen married his girlfriend’s daughter. Both seemed to be culturally left for dead at the time, and now each is at the top of his game. So what got you, again, Mr. Clay? “Political correctness”? Unbelievable.

Apparently, in 2007, "political correctness" was a boring old complaint.

Ah, here's what I'm really looking for: a NYT piece from 1990. It's by John J. O'Connor (boldface added):

Popular entertainment does, after all, have a revulsion threshold. Andrew Dice Clay should know. He stepped over it and is now desperately trying to salvage his career as a stand-up comic....

Here is the perpetual bully, right out of the high-school locker room, erupting with the hostility of a certain lower-middle-class kind of white, uneducated, heterosexual male....

[S]ome observers have argued, persuasively, that Mr. Clay's blatant appeals to bigotry and sexual insecurity have crossed the line into profound obscenity, and that there is room, certainly, for a response of profound disapproval. It does not follow that as the Constitution protects free speech, the exercise of that speech cannot be criticized.

Anyone who has witnessed a Clay performance, with its mostly white, mostly male audience shouting and rising to its feet with clenched fists, comes to a fresh realization of what a Nazi rally must have been like. Surely the labeling of women as little more than disposable slabs of flesh contributes to crimes against them. Surely the scathing depictions of homosexuals adds to the burgeoning statistics on gay-bashing. Mr. Clay's act works off of the basest instincts of society. Disapproval is not only warranted; it's demanded.

Mr. Clay's present bind provides little room for gloating. The tough character has suddenly turned pathetic....

That Nazi analogy brought a fine letter to the editor, here:

Those who lived through the years of real Nazi rallies cringe at the arrant nonsense of comparing an Andrew Dice Clay audience to that at a Nazi rally....  For better or worse, Mr. Clay's audience laughs! The one expression that was totally missing from any Nazi rally was laughter. More than that: Nazis hated comics who ridiculed them - first the Volkischer Beobachter and other Nazi organs attacked them relentlessly, stressing the ''intolerable insult'' the very existence of such comics was to the ''soul of the people.'' Once they were in power, the Nazis arrested and tortured the comics and, if they survived that, dispatched them to death camps.

It would be a welcome change in the public discourse if when commenting on a phenomenon like Mr. Clay, flippant comparisons, references to inapplicable historical precedents were kept out and the adjectives and adverbs were commensurate to the subject at hand.

R.P. Held

I don't know if R.P. Held's letter had anything to do with it, but 1990 was also the year when Mike Godwin started the meme that became known as Godwin's Law ("As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1").

"Check out this 'solution' to the obesity epidemic, a contraption called the 'Slow Bite.'"

"It limits the degree to which users can open their mouths while eating, so they consume less. But if you have enough self-control to wire your jaw nearly shut every time you eat, don’t you also have enough self-control to not eat more than you should?"

Althousian free association goes from that to this — published on the same day, in the same place (the NYT) — from the obituary of Mickey Rose, who co-wrote "Bananas" and "Take the Money and Run" the 2 movies that "established [Woody Allen] as a filmmaker" and made him "popular enough to continue to do whatever he wanted to do," according to Eric Lax, who wrote “Woody Allen: A Biography."

In a remembrance e-mailed to Mr. Lax, Mr. Allen recalled what Mr. Rose had told him was the inescapable meaning of death: “No more malteds.”

Key word: Malteds.

Anagram: Sad Melt.

"What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable..."

"... and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like."

Warning: The linked funny essay is in the NYT and by Woody Allen — cue all the usual attacks — and he sums up with punchline that ends with the words "probably better than being a Republican."