Don't Gel Too Soon

Something Truly Remarkable

Between work and Passover I have been completely delinquent about posting but you need to see this.  Really. You need to. It's less than three minutes and you'll be really glad. 

Written, directed by : Patrick Jean Director of Photography : Matias Boucardp

Unplugged for Shabbat: Something the "Cool" People Want Too. Wow.

Are you unplugged?  It's Friday morning and soon Shabbat will be here.  I'll light the candles and we'll go to friends for dinner and tomorrow to services and to lunch (I'm bringing part of it).  Later we're going to another home to be part of what they call a "shabbat hangout" where the kids all play and the parents (and their older friends, like us) talk, and study and enjoy the peace of 24 hours of an unplugged, non-electric, non-driving, non-cooking,  non-working life.* 

We started living this way five years ago, as I've often documented here (I dare you to read this one about observant Judaism and Patti Smith), and now it seems that others -- many of them cool hipster digital types, -- are looking to do the same.  Take a look.

Over these years I've struggled with keeping kosher, with the role of women, and with much else.  But there are moments of such beauty and meaning that I find myself spinning - knowing why I'm here and wondering at the same time.

I've always been Progressive; worked in the anti-war movement and the McCarthy campaign - and was in Chicago at the 1968 convention, and when I first found observant Judaism and Shabbat, it felt counterintuitive.  Too many rules.  Sometimes it still does.

But the reason why Unplugged is so great is that when you start, you think Shabbat will be what you hate.  No more errands or Saturday manicures or movies.  No phone calls or emails or web wandering. 

And then you unplug.  And even if - as I suspect will be true for many -  you don't go the way we went and adopt (almost) the entire package, you find the peace of what Josh Foer, in the video, calls this "ancient" idea, and are grateful for it.  And for the people around you -- IRL -- close, and easy and at peace.

*OK I admit it.  I'm really glad the health care vote is on Sunday; if it had been on Saturday it would have been a real pain.

All Hail Rock and Roll

I don't spend my time talking about the "olden days" - really I don't.  Working on the web has kept me very much in the present.  But tonight I watched a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony retrospective and since you have to have given music at least 25 performing years to be inducted most of the performers were closer to my age than to that of my buddies here on the Web.  And wow. 

I feel the way you feel 2/3 of the way down a fantastic black diamond slope with the wind in your hair and frost on your ear lobes and your heart pounding.  Where else is there the power that music brings to us?  We go where it takes us -- return to places we'd forgotten we knew, find pride in the memories we cherish and an abashed amusement in those that might have been a bit - um -- less luminous.  Our moods, our clothes, the way we're driving, or eating, or doing less discussable things, changes with the music around us.  It's bits of soul reflected.

I was blessed to be at a couple of the most amazing inductions; I've written about that before but some of those moments appeared tonight and I could feel again the hair raising thrill of watching Ben E King and The Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and Billy Joel and Mick Jagger and dozens (literally dozens) of others performing together.   Coming as we all do from a generation that did so many things as a tribe, it's particularly moving to watch them trade glances and cues -- such a familiar pattern.

I love my life now and am so grateful to be a part of the explosion of the new connected world, but I am also grateful for the years those musicians gave us.  They are brothers and sisters and inspirations and former fantasies and just plain fun.  I know how many died of overdoses, I know there are seamy stories and I know that there are wonderful musicians who have followed them and will themselves end up on that stage when enough years have passed but my time was a wonderful time to be young and loving music.  And once again tonight I remembered how many moments of my own personal Hall of Fame were accompanied by, or part of, or generated from - the music they gave us all.

Women Bloggers Are NOT Cute Little Girls: Tell the New York Times

  What is it about women who blog that scares s o many people - even other women -- even the New York Times?  Once again this time, they've decided to offer an "analysis" or a "portrait" or an I don't know what about bloggers who are women and moms.  And when they do, they write with a condescending, bemused attitude that is what I remember from the early days of the women's movement, when men would joke about our desire to open our own doors, earn our own livings, make our own decisions.  It was kind of cute to want to be able to get credit cards without a husband's permission, to cover a story without having to go up in the balcony, to keep our names when we got married.   Feminism was just so adorable.

Now, we're free on so many levels, and one manifestation of that freedom is the vibrant world we've created online.  Sisterhoods that cross race and politics and religion and age as we share ideas and pain, joy and pride, birth and loss and every other story that is part of living a life.   There have been a couple of wonderful responses to this irritating TIMES piece (and it's not the first...)  One of my own favorites, Mom-101, whose admirers are legion, wrote 

"...once you get past the first half of the article, there's actually some solid information in there....But I wish [all] that had been to focus of an article about my favorite blogging community that just made the front page of my favorite section of my favorite Sunday paper.  I wish it had opened with the yearning of bloggers for the community to return to good writing, and the evidence that in the end, that's mostly what pays off....  

Of course, there are more.  My friend Danielle Wiley, known to many of her friends as Foodmomiac but also an executive at Edelman PR, has also weighed in.

I invite you to read the full piece and form your own opinions, but sentences like “bringing together participants for some real-time girly bonding” might very well stop you in your tracks. As I write this, my husband (and fellow Edelman executive Michael Wiley) is at SXSW. Would Mendelsohn classify that experience as macho bonding? Or would she write that he is attending a conference for the purposes of education and networking? Why do people, including Ms. Mendlesohn, continue to refer to networking among women as girly bonding? I seriously doubt the participants at Bloggy Boot Camp were wearing jammies and braiding each other’s hair. However, from the tenor of the piece, it was pretty easy to jump to that conclusion.

Here's the bottom line:  I'm old enough to be the mother of both of these women and many of their peers yet they have welcomed me as a sister - a blogger and a friend.  They've honored the sappy posts I've written about my sons and my marriage and they've shared ideas and advice in comments, in twitter and even in real life.  They and their compatriots are talented, skillful compassionate, ornery pioneers who have built what I think of as the new quilting bee, the new Red Tent where they share the wisdom and mysteries that are women's lives.  And they do much more - just go check out the list in Liz's post.  Not for one moment are they silly or unaware or careless or trivial.  And to gain a few points with silly headlines and denigrating phrases isn't bad taste, it's also bad journalism.  Go see for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

Jewish Women, Feminists, and Esther -- Across the Centuries

How can there be a women's story that women are not allowed to tell?  Today is Purim - the celebration of the rescue of the Jews from the Persian King Asueras' evil adviser Haman.  In a classic (and highly fortunate) intermarriage, she became the favorite wife of the powerful king.  Unaware that she's Jewish, he's chosen her from all the maidens of Shushan and fallen for her - hard.  The story is intricate but it ends with a bad guy trying to get the King to kill all the Jews (sound familiar?) and the Jewish Queen Esther convincing the King that the bad guy is indeed bad, and thus saving the day.

It's an old story with both sexist and feminist implications but today it emerged with a new life - at least for me.  Here's why: it's required that Jews hear the story of Esther, the Megiila Esther, read twice during the holiday.  It's read with a melody - a "trope" that's quite lovely.  Usually, in observant Judaism, men preside.  Prayers and readings are the domain of the male voice.  But women are "permitted" to read the Megilla for a gathering of women.  It's a act of Jewish feminism.  And that's what happened this morning.

I wish I could describe the emotion that arises as one hears the women's voices together, and the single voices, one by one, reading out the story.  It's an act of faith, an act of love, really, but it's also an act of community - the community of women coming together to share the story of a feisty queen who overcame fear to save her people.  

Of course you would be correct to suggest that the simplest solution would be to choose a branch of Judaism that has made its way past such rules and you'd be correct.  But we've chosen, despite the difficulties, to live this life, partly because of the very community that produced this day.   And it comes, as a friend reminded me last night, as a package.  So there will be moments - many of them - of frustration and anger.  Of a sense of deprivation and loss.  And the, just when it seems terrible -- something lovely happens.  Something like today.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and Roman Holiday: a Political Lesson? No, Really.

It was a fairy tale about a princess on a journey. Doing her duty, kind of like Diana (but, since she was played by Audrey Hepburn, even classier,) she came to Rome, after Athens, London and Paris, to conclude her mission. 

But she was young and beautiful and sick of receptions and parades. And so, in the middle of the night, she snuck out the embassy window and ventured across the Piazza di Spagna and into the Roman night. 

If you know this movie at all, you remember with sweet nostalgia the way you felt the first time you saw it.  The princess asleep near the Trevi Fountain on the Roman equivalent of a park bench is awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by reporter Joe Bradley, played by Gregory Peck. ( If the film has a flaw, it's that we know some of what will happen once we see him there.  He's a good guy and that's who he plays.  He is Atticus Finch, after all.)   

The film was released in 1953, right in the middle of the 1950's.  Written by Dalton Trumbo, "Roman Holiday" was credited to a "front" named Ian McLellan Hunter, because Trumbo, blacklisted as a member of the Hollywood Ten, wasn't permitted to write for movies any longer.  It's one of the darkest chapters in Hollywood history, very much a part of the image of the decade and a sad facet of a beloved film that won three Oscars and introduced the world to Audrey Hepburn.

There's something else though.  The people in this film behave well.  There are things that they want, desperately, but there are principals at stake, and they honor them.  When Peck meets Hepburn, he doesn't recognize her but lets her crash at his apartment.  Once he figures out who she is, he knows this "runaway"  could be the story of his life.  Even so, after a brief, idyllic tour of the city, (SPOILER ALERT) she honors her responsibilities and returns to her royal duties, and of course, he never writes the story.  It was very much an artifact of the "Greatest Generation" ideals, manifested with such courage during WWII and very much the flip side of the jaundiced (and just as accurate) Mad Men view of the 50's.  Duty and honor trump romance and ambition. 

Once again, I'm struck with admiration for the people of these times.  Yes the 50's did terrible damage and made it difficult to be eccentric or rebellious or even creative.  But films like this one, or Now Voyager and similar films of the 40's, sentimental as they may be, remind us of what else these people were.  They'd lived through the Depression and the war and they had an elevated sense of responsibility.  As we watch much of our government (and some of the rest of us) disintegrate into partisanship and self-interest, it makes a lot more sense than it did when we rose up against it all in the 1960's.  Doesn't it? 

Legendary Game Fable Previews #3 (ulterior motive, but you know that)

YES the first person on this video is one of my brilliantly talented, lovely sons.

So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks

 All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass.  To be part of the Glass family, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door.  They were sad and weird and wonderful.

And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved for Holden Caulfield, the eternally adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye.  Holden is worthy of every affectionate word written about him, and his palpable pain is familiar to those who've journeyed through the teen years, but the Glasses -- well  -- they were a different kind of lovely.

They are all the children of one man, and he died today.  I wish I could tell you what it felt like to read Catcher in the Rye at 13.  I can remember where I was sitting as I read it - how I felt - and the deep sadness that accompanied Holden's story.   It must have been traumatic though, because later, when my son and I read it together, I was shocked to learn that Holden's brother had died.  I had jammed that fact someplace hard to reach, which means it was even more disturbing than I remember.  Reading it with my own child was a beautiful experience to share with a young man of deep compassion and great sensibility - a memory I cherish.  So Salinger gave me that, too.

(I'm not mentioning Joyce Maynard here.  She had a right - but sheesh!)  And I really don't have much to say about the quiet recluse in the hills of New Hampshire.    Farewell to him, yes, but also to yet another connection to the days when I was young - and more like Holden than like women of a Certain Age.  The passions, the pain, the poetic anger at people for not being what we expect them to be and the desperate longing to rescue the imperiled and the lost.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."  

I guess those who don't dream of being the catcher long to be the one who is caught.  And those longings don't go away whether you're 13 or 63 (right - I first read it FIFTY years ago!)  Imagine.  No, it doesn't go away, but your perspective changes.  The loveliness of that kind of protecting -- or being protected - it isn't around much in the real world.  All the more reason to be grateful for the rare observer who can remind us of its sweetness, and of what we are capable of aspiring to. 

And grateful I am.  For Franny and Zooey and Seymour and all their craziness and for Holden, what he gave me then, and what I remember, even today.

Conan versus Jay: Yet Another Generation Gap (see SNL)

What do you watch at 11:30?  Are you even up?  The Daily Show is over, but there's still Steven Colbert.  Or are you sucked away from basic cable to join one of the Established Hosts on those antiquated broadcast networks?  And if you are, which one?   The answer to that question probably depends on how old you are.

Last week's Saturday Night Live  included this imaginary Larry King Show, mocking, as both hosts have, the ham-handed dismissal of the younger Conan to honor expensive contract obligations made to the older Leno.  For many of us, this is simple: Jay Leno is old and grouchy (well not as old as I am but still...) and O'Brien younger, more creative and definitely holder of the "younger, cooler, hipper" mandate.  (Yes I know there's David Letterman (and George Lopez) but for now let's think about NBC.)

Younger viewers have been up late watching Conan for years - after many of the rest of us had gone to bed - and they know and like his ironic, goofy, smart persona.  The Harvard-educated O'Brien, (who wrote for the university's humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon,) and served as a long-time writer for Saturday Night live and later for The Simpson's, is a perfect 21st Century personality. 

Leno, on the other hand, is a real 20th Century man.  He came up through comedy clubs and Tonight Show appearances and is a car collector and motorcycle freak.  His humor is less subtle and, somehow, although less arch than Conan it's also less friendly.  Mostly though, it's old-school.  In my view, it's for the dwindling older audience and not for the emerging majority of TV viewers (and of Americans) born well after we Boomers had finished college.  

It's funny, but as much as I loathe the idea of age discrimination, I also see this decision as a symptom of a generational division visible in the women's movement, in life on the Web and in the politics that brought out so many younger voters for Barack Obama and then betrayed them with posturing and partisanship.

I first thought about all this when I saw an interview with the gifted and admired Dick Ebersol, long an icon of sports coverage who has led NBC Sports for many years and presided over several Olympics seasons on the air.  In the Huffington Post, he called Conan's Tonight show a "spectacular failure."  In his long career, in addition to sports, Ebersol was an executive in charge of the TODAY SHOW (full disclosure, I worked for him - and happily) and of Saturday Night Live so he's no slouch.  But it seems that seven months, preceded by a failing Leno show with ratings so bad the affiliates, bleeding audience for the local news that followed Leno, demanded a change, was hardly the best audience-builder for Conan, whose show followed that news.  More than all of that though, Ebersol is far from the days when he had his finger on the pulse of the emerging audience, the Gen Xers and Millennials and those younger than they are.  They want something different, something cooler, something more like -- Conan.

I've written about, and been on panels about, the generational divide.  The economic crisis has only exacerbated it as young people consider the disappearing Social Security benefits and their own futures in a world where job security and benefits is hazy history.  They're mad at the Boomers, blame us for more than we're responsible for and often have no idea what we really accomplished in the 60's and 70's -- for the better.   Events like this one, however superficial and entertainment-based, are just another example of the disregard in which they are too often held.  NBC will pay for that -- in the PR game it already has (did you see the Golden Globes?) and, I fear, in a larger sense, so will the rest of us "older" Americans.  We should be listening to them about more than product preferences and if we don't, we'll be sorry.

What Do You Get When You Cross Bruce Springsteen and Jon Stewart?

Well what else is there to say?