Okay, so they haven’t taken that step yet. No one really pukes on planes anymore, so maybe taxing oxygen masks or life jackets will be better revenue spinners. But what’s with the recently discussed £1 ($1.43) fee for taking a leak? For one thing, it’s discriminatory. Many older women have to go more often than young ones. Men over 50 who are battling their prostate may have to try a couple times before they succeed. Why charge per visit? It might be fairer to charge by the liter.
I know Ryanair quite well. I’ve flown with them to many destinations including Dublin (where they were founded in 1985), to Belfast, to Edinburgh and most recently to Pisa. I know their schtick well: the tickets are super-cheap, but they nickel-and-dime you half to death. Want a reserved seat? Want to check a bag? Want to check in at the airport and not online? Then pay up, sucker. Now they’re even threatening to charge quite a hefty fee (€30) for any bag of duty-free goodies you bring on the plane.
Wikipedia has some news about the new aircraft Raynair has ordered.
“In an example of the airline's relentless prioritizing of cost over all other factors, the aircraft will be delivered without window shades…, seat back recline and seat back pockets, which result in savings of several hundred thousand dollars per aircraft and give continued savings through reduced cleaning and repair costs.”
Oh yeah? Did you say no more seat back recline? Now you’re talking. I’m happy to see the end of some massive businessman laying on my lap, trapping me, preventing me from opening my laptop or balancing my (extra charge) drink. Now I’ll be able to slip out of my seat and get to the toilet in time to struggle – jiggling and squeezing my thighs – with my coin to get the loo door open. If Ryanair gives with one hand, you can be sure it takes with the other.
Oops. I almost forgot to write about the Oscars. Desperate to stop the downward trend of viewing numbers (do numbers of any kind do anything but plummet of late?), the Academy Awards ceremony went through restructuring. The results were superior to those of bank restructurings, but not so exciting that I immediately remembered to blog about it. So by now you know whatever you intend to know about the results. I’ll restrict myself to personal observation.
Hugh Jackman was the host, apparently because he is young(ish), handsome(ish) and multi-talented. I admit that he did a perfectly adequate job in this revised format, but he’s a stranger to me. In line with my usual rigorous research, I looked him up on IMDb.com and turns out I’ve never seen a thing he ever did, unless I happened to catch that Saturday Night Live episode he hosted in 2001. One of his upcoming acting gigs listed on IMBb, however, sounds ever so kinky: “Guardians of Ga'Hoole (2010) (filming) (voice) (rumored)”
Perhaps I’m showing my age (and about time, too), but I remain firmly in the fan camps of hosts Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg (hot tiger print cleavage this year!) and – my absolutely favorite Oscar night (2007) – Ellen DeGeneres. My most excited moment (1973) remains when Sacheen Littlefeather turned down Marlon Brando’s Oscar for “The Godfather” in protest of the misrepresentation of Native Americans in film. You can see it here. And there were those years early in the pandemic when all my tension was centered on not who might win, but on who would stand up and wear the Red Ribbon in solidarity.
Back to Sunday night. The biggest surprise of the evening was that “Waltz with Bashir” didn’t win Best Foreign Language Film. (The only other contender I saw was “The Class,” an excessively long yawn which I napped through one afternoon.) “Waltz with Bashir” is the much-awarded Israeli film about a soldier’s recovered memories of his own actions during the 1982 incursion into Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatilla. “Waltz with Bashir” has been praised not only for its content but for its extraordinary and unique style of animation. Coming out in theaters, as it did, during Israel’s recent attack on Gaza, only added to its relevance.
Like most people, I live a life of contradictions. I adore the Red Carpet sessions, but totally freak out at how narrow the permissibles of women’s fashion have become again. The one and only celebrity in the whole bleedin’ show that I spotted with short hair and pants was Shirley McLaine. Something is very, very wrong with this picture.
What’s with the Noah’s Ark fashion vision – the men in a tux and the women in chiffon? Where’s the imagination? Where’s someone who looks even vaguely like a couture version of me and my posse? Why should biology be fashion destiny? Some of those guys – and I’m serious now – would love to be floating in ruffles and some of those girls carry off a suit brilliantly.
Even those women who started their careers with fiery toughness are ground into a homogenized image of which the mediocre Beyonce is now considered the gold standard. I didn’t even recognize the once-distinctive Alicia Keyes, except for that lovely uneven smile. There were self-satisfied cheers when Sean Penn called for civil rights for all, but damn, when there’s an absolutely universal feeling among the Hollywood women that a girl can’t wear flat shoes and fancy-pants (or eat a cupcake) without it being a risk to her career, the industry should get real.
Dustin Lance Black made a sweet Harvey-honoring speech when he won the Original Screenplay award for “Milk,” although for an escaped Mormon he surprised me with all his gratitude to god. I worried when he went out on limb in his pledge to all the lesbian and gay kids watching, “And very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.” Does he know something I don’t know? You can see his speech here.
I liked that Sean Penn, when he won Best Actor, mentioned the anti-gays demonstrating against “Milk” outside the ceremony and that he said that those who supported Proposition 8 (banning gay marriage) would have to “anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildrens’ eyes.” He had opened with a good line - “You commie homo-loving sons-of-guns” – and went on to thank everyone except, whoops, his wife and Harvey Milk.
Random Baubles:
Tina Fey and Steve Martin did the funniest bit.
I was glad that “Slumdog Millionaire” won big-time, but I doubt that that will stop Hollywood from continuing to poo-poo independent films (“Slumdog” almost went straight to DVD).
The idea of having five past winners praise the nominees personally and then present the Oscar is adorable. Sophia Loren?! At the end of the last millennium, I voted for her for some Hottie of the Century Award. I liked her saucy hand-on-hip attitude at the Oscars (she praised the increasingly wonderful Meryl Streep), but I felt that she was somehow covered in a plastic that prevented me getting my usual heat-off-the-flesh flash when I see her.
I loved the idea of a big musical production as a tribute to musicals, but this one didn’t do it for me. It didn’t help that Beyonce was Jackman’s co-star. To me she’s neither milk nor meat, as we say, she is just the perfection of a stereotype that I could do without. (I read in the Enquirer Magazine that Michelle warned Beyonce off further flirting with Barack.)
We were able to sneer in a much more informed way at the special award to the annoying Jerry Lewis because one of my viewing guests is a key Boston figure in the disability rights world, which is in a long-term state of conflict with Lewis.
Finally, Queen Latifah, always smoothly articulate even when dressed up like a fake-femme package (here with Amy Adams), sang “I’ll be seeing you” while a memorial piece to some of those who have passed played behind her. Badly directed, we were as often as not unable to see the names or images of the departed. Perhaps that is why the Academy removed the clip of what they broadcast from YouTube, but replaced it with the tribute that had been playing behind Queen Latifah. Here it is:
Need something to take your mind off the bills piling up? the phone calls from friends who have just been told to clear out their desks? your attempts to learn how to darn socks? Try endorphins. Here are three steps to (intermittent) ecstasy, plus an unbeatable role model:
ONE: Find something that stimulates your endorphins. (My top three: martial arts, partner dancing, sex)
TWO: Become an expert in it. (Barter for lessons, sign up at your local community ed, get a to-do DVD)
THREE: Practice daily and build up your speed and intensity. (Exhilaration, breathlessness, orgasmic sensations all lead to endorphins)
My brilliant artist friend Sandy Oppenheimer (Want a portrait? You’ll never find a more unique artist) sent me this clip. While I’ve never been crazy about tear-away clothes, check out what endorphins do for this 80-year-old salsa dancer – or perhaps what this woman does for endorphins.
It is early February, 2009 when I turn my car into my driveway and see the older woman scaling our apartment building’s dumpster. Nearby is a rickety cart stuffed with lumpy bags. The woman is looking for cans and bottles that she can turn in for a five cent refund.
She turns as I approach, a dead kind of nervousness passing like a homemade mask across her face. Not sensing any danger, she goes back to her search. I park, pulling out the four or five plastic bags full of cans that have been collecting in my back seat, waiting for me to remember to deposit them in the supermarket recycling machine for credit.
As I move towards her, I ask, “Would you like these?” She pulls herself off the edge of the dumpster and turns to face me. Her gray hair wisps out of a cheap stocking cap. Her collarless wool jacket is in such tatters that the pockets are sticking out of the worn-out bottom hem. Some fingertips protrude from unraveling gloves, and some don’t.I think she is Chinese, perhaps my age – early 60s.
It is disturbing to be face-to-face with her numb pain.
“More?” she asks, shaking my bags of cans.
“No. Sorry.”
She turns back to her work. I have given her my garbage and she has nothing more to say and no time in which to say it.
Dismissed and distraught, I walk into my building, a thousand thoughts about hard times going through my mind. This is how it begins.
Should I have given her money? Should I have invited her upstairs to my apartment for a meal, a bath, some fresh clothes? Did she prefer her privacy? What boundaries am I going to set for the coming days? My own resources are quite limited, but others, so many others, are in the kind of trouble that we can’t ignore.
I’m a socialist - whatever that means now. I have always insisted that capitalism is not a viable system. I have been through other scary downturns, but nothing like this. The Insatiable Class has been unchecked for eight years and they are unrepentant about bringing down the world.
It was weeks ago that I saw the woman behind my building, but I cannot stop thinking about her and wondering what I should do the next time this happens. There will be many “next times.”
As an activist, I know that there aren’t individual solutions – there are only social solutions to social problems. But even though that is the absolute damndest truth on the macro level, on the daily, micro level we are either the poor ourselves or someone close to us is. We are either the unemployed or we are holding our breath. We are either in need or we are scared. Where oh where is the outrage?!
There’s elder abuse and there’s elder abuse. Explicit and implicit. And we’ve got multitudes more of both, thanks to the economic crash.
Jenefer Duane, the founder of the Elder Financial Protection Network, defines a type of abuse that is on the rise: financial abuse. Older people are often ripped off by those on whom they are dependent – from relatives to care workers, from advisors to scam artists. Duane’s group puts the number of abused at 5 million. Of those, we are told by The Institute of Aging in San Francisco, about “50% of cases of elder abuse involve financial exploitation.”
So it’s not enough that your skin is looking like MapQuest and your eyesight is so faded that you can’t pluck your own chin hairs. Nope, now the Congress has spent the last eight years saying “Fine, do as you like,” to your abuser. He’s gone to a nice new mansion in Texas and you’re eating dogfood.
And it only gets worse. The Boston Globe recently reported on the astronomical rise in abuse of older people. “Confirmed cases of financial, physical, emotional, or sexual mistreatment of elders more than doubled in each of the first four months of this fiscal year [my emphasis], compared with monthly averages the previous year, according to a Globe analysis of state figures.” Organizations working in the field have received more reports of elder abandonment and abuse than in decades of record-keeping.
The financial vulnerability of older people is profound. As one New York Times article put it, “There’s a terrified older population out there,” said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “If you’re 45 and the market goes down, it bothers you, but it comes back. But if you’re retired or about to retire, you might have to sell your assets before they have a chance to recover. And people don’t have the luxury of being in bonds because they don’t yield enough for how long we live.”
Even homeowners lucky enough to have paid up their mortgages are finding it impossible to pay property taxes which may have doubled or tripled in the last decade. And as for pulling themselves up by their comfort-shoe-straps, older people can forget getting back into the workforce. Not only are there no jobs, they’ll face huge discrimination against over-50s in hiring.
There’s a lot to turn your hair grey here – if it isn’t already white, not the least these figures around personal ruin: “From 1991 to 2007, the rate of personal bankruptcy filings among those ages 65 or older jumped by 150%...The most startling rise occurred among those ages 75 to 84, whose rate soared 433%.”
Here’s the thing: note those dates and then just imagine what has happened after 2007, since capitalism ate itself alive and began spitting us out. Many boomers and seniors have spent our lives fighting for social and economic justice. And this is the hand our free market democracy has dealt us.
I guess each of us has to focus our annoyance on something that is small enough to cope with. I choose Bernie Madoff, who is still living under “house arrest” in one of his gazillion-dollar domiciles. The rest of his generation and that of his parents can’t pay their rent, their mortgage or their taxes. I am reminded of one of our favorite phrases from the 60s: Eat the rich!
Here’s Sarah Vaughan, the great jazz singer, in one of her last appearances before her death in 1990 singing My Funny Valentine, a 1937 song from the Rodgers and Hart musical “Babes in Arms.” There’s something about its haunting minor key that makes it the anti-Hallmark Valentine message.
In these nasty times (where’s the outrage?), it seems like bittersweet is the only sweet available.
If you want to take a break from worrying about [Pick One: the rent, the mortgage, the job, the friend, the wars, the boarded up stores, the dwindling larder, the future], check out the dazzling rhythms, moves and stars of the Harlem Renaissance – it is Black History Month after all – in this cool production.
The chorus of dancers who opened the Cotton Club and then the Apollo in the 30s brought together young black women looking for a way to support themselves that didn’t cost them their souls. This group, many of whom were mentored by the oldest among them, Bertye Lou Wood, developed their own signature style of dance by removing the taps from their tap shoes and putting the shuffle into the boogie.
In the 2006 documentary “Been Rich All My Life,” we meet them as performers in their 80s and 90s. They came back together in 1985 to form the Silver Belles, appearing on stage and teaching master classes to preserve their unique technique. As they talk about their past experiences, we are taken on a journey into Black history from a little-known perspective.
In Harlem, they were stars, living a charmed if exhausting life. As they went on the road and traveled through the South, they were suddenly subjected to the insults of segregation. However, dancing also gave them an opportunity to travel abroad with luminaries like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, where they were greeted as celebrities.
The Harlem Renaissance was not without its exploitations and the girls decided to strike. They worked very long hours seven days a week, put on numerous daily shows while simultaneously rehearsing the next week’s routines. When they struck for better wages, their victory led to the founding of the American Guild of Variety Artists, serving entertainers of all races. Seven decades later you can feel the fight in them and admire the way they use their feet to change their world.
These women are as clear-headed, independent and kick-butt as my own best lasses. If you want to mark Black History Month with glorious sexy dance combined with an affecting solidarity among artists who have been together for 70 years, then perhaps your library, like mine, holds this fabulous cinematic delight.
Six Writers in Search of a Little Action: Humorous Readings on Love, Sex, and Rejection
Would you like to hear me read a piece called “Threesomes: Triple the Nipples”? For several years I have been the Dominatrix of Ceremonies for a most marvelous (and inexpensive) literary evening organized by the brilliant Paula at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Most years it is titled “Six Writers in Search of a Parking Space” – an in-joke that you can “get” even if you’re not from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The writers combine funny with fine writing. An evening of breathless laughing among a sell-out audience is a rare and precious experience. It is particularly welcome in the middle of winter.
Besides being the Dominatrix of Ceremonies and one of the readers, I see my role each year as bringing down the tone. I love reading dirty writing to such an erudite crowd. I bring a special degree of cleavage and innuendo to an otherwise reputable setting.
This year, however, the evening is a pre-Valentine’s Day event and the readings are about love, sex and rejection – so I won’t be the only one talking dirty-talk. I’ll be joined by these luminaries: the inimitable Charles Coe, the unique Charlotte Silver, the incomparable Elizabeth Searle, the unparalleled Elizabeth Benedict and the remarkable Daniel Gewertz.
If you’re around Boston, do join us in Harvard Square for the literary event of the season. We’ll even provide wonderful Valentine refreshments. What better way to spend Friday the 13th?
You can see the listing if you click here – although some blurbs/topics have been changed since this was published, including mine. You can also call the Cambridge Center at 617 547 6789 for tickets.
Bob Marley died of melanoma in 1981 (he'd be 64 today). He still lives with me, though. I have a poster of Bob laughing as he smokes a zucchini-sized spliff on my bathroom wall opposite the throne. Today, as he looked down on me, I was thinking that if Marley were still with us, it would be interesting to hear what he would have to say to Barack Obama.
The two superstars would have a lot in common. Both are big on sports: Obama is down with basketball; Marley was totally into football (soccer). Both of them are mixed race, with older absent fathers who died while the sons were still young - although Marley’s father was white. That contributed to his refusal, while identifying as Black and as African, to go all “identity-politics.” He said:
I don't have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.
Obama also knows that racism is a dead-end for the racists, too. As Marley said:
Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally discredited and abandoned... WAR!
Both of these men smoked dope as young guys (see left for Marley pre-dreads), but Obama cut it out as his ambitions grew, while for Marley weed was intimately tied into his musical genius and sense of self:
When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.
Marley considered marijuana a gift from god, but he opposed alcohol, perhaps because the latter is addictive:
Herb is the healing of a nation, alcohol is the destruction.
Obama continues to build his reputation as someone who listens. Perhaps he is familiar with Marley’s belief that:
Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.
However, Marley found the political world a snake-pit and would be unlikely to admire Obama’s desire to hold high office:
Politics no interest me. Dem devil business.... Dem a play with peoples minds. Never play with peoples minds.
Obama asked people to get involved in changing the country and drew massive crowds – both actual and virtual. Bob Marley, in the language of his time, called also called on us to:
Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.
February is Black History Month and last February I wrote about three important artists with birthdays in February: Nina Simone, Bob Marley and Langston Hughes. You can read that piece and see some fab clips by clicking here.
I have maintained my cool in the face of January’s unprecedented unemployment and horrifying economic news, until a recent announcement that made me tightly clutch my thighs in panic. But please allow me to rant for a few paragraphs on the Depression, before I get to the crotch.
So many of the companies that are withering (while their top managers moan about reduced bonuses of millions) have long offered crap products and nasty non-service. Who is paying for this? The workers, who else. According to Forbes.com, 162,962 employees were laid off in January by the 500 top American companies – from Ford (SUV guzzlers lost their appeal?) to Caterpillar (what? Israel didn’t order enough bulldozers to flatten Gaza?) to Boeing (is Obama killing the corporate jet market among bankrupt companies?).
OK, big capitalism sucks and this Depression – which in contrast to the country’s experts I predicted in June, 2008, in my piece “The Next Great Depression” – will hurt us more than it will hurt the wealthy. In fact, as you watch some companies quietly acquiring so many other companies, you wonder if this whole thing was not engineered. And then you remember that even moguls don’t understand capitalism, that it is unplanned, uncontrollable and massively unregulated.
In any event, things have now gotten out of hand – as it were. I just heard that Hitachi is predicting a loss of $7.7 billion for this fiscal year and will be firing 7.000 employees. Hitachi makes many home appliances, medical equipment and IT systems, but I’m thinking of one product without which life is hardly worth living.
The Hitachi Magic Wand.
For 30 years women have been plugging in for the most intense (think: jackhammer) vibration ever to stimulate an erogenous zone. In the succeeding decades other companies have come up with their bullets and their rabbits and their other weak imitations, but nothing that runs on batteries is ever going to match the love I get from my Wand.
And it’s not just me. Every sex expert worth her clit has lauded the Wand – giving Hitachi flushed and free promotion in all the right places. The country’s leading masturbation genius, Betty Dodson, has been buying it by the case since the early 1970s to give to girlfriends and students. Margaret Cho, the righteous comedian (at left), is convinced that every woman can orgasm with the Wand’s help. Susie Bright, the true Sexpert, is a believer, as is Rosie O’Donnell.
In 2000 there was a hiccup between Hitachi and their American distributors and for a while Wands were impossible to find. The panic this deprivation brought to women throughout the developed world was only relieved by a new distribution company, but in the meantime none of the substitutes that were explored lived up to the heavy-duty standards set by the Magic Wand.
At 1.28 pounds and with its gooseneck flexibility, that funny tennis-ball head hones in obediently every time. Magic Wands have always been a part of a lesbian’s overnight kit, to be used alone or in company. Straight women have taught their men how to integrate the Wand into their nooky, and now a lot of erotica (oh, you know, porn) includes the one, especially bondage images.
Here’s a promo clip from Babeland, a sex toy emporium, in which the lovely Vanessa caresses her Magic Wand:
Life without my Magic Wand would be shockingly stressful. Believe me, no one wants me stressed out – it’s not a pretty sight. I’m already struggling to cope with being underemployed, suspending all my international travel and feeling helpless in the face of how all this is affecting the 1.4 billion crushingly poor people of the world.
I’ve been complaining and explaining for years, but now I have to put my foot down. There’s a reason why it’s called a magic wand. Please, oh please, don’t send me back to the Stone Ages of childhood when all I had at my disposal was a balled-up pillow and the wonder of discovery. Cross your fingers, not your ankles, for Hitachi.
Perhaps it’s time to get together to lobby Obama’s economic team. While the Republicans are saving their tax cuts for the wealthy, we should spell out our priorities:
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