Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

A Three-Way with Singer Sargent, Rembrandt, and “She Who Tells a Story”

For 10 bucks I got to see three stunning shows at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). First was the combined collections of John Singer Sargent’s watercolors held by the MFA and the Brooklyn Museum. As if that wasn’t sugar enough, on my way to see the powerful contemporary photographs of Iranian and other Middle East women, I happened to go down a hall that held an exhibition of Rembrandt etchings – my favorite artist in his best medium. It was only $10 because I had a pass from my blessed library – otherwise it would be $25 for adults and $23 for seniors. The MFA is too expensive to visit. It just is.

Singer Sargent’s watercolors were like an echo from my recent trip. He painted in the Swiss Alps, which I drove across, and the Apuan Alps, which is where I stayed in Italy. He painted Carrara and the marble quarries near the area where I hung out. I have visited many of the other places he painted, like Venice and Florence and Haifa and the Sinai Desert. How does Sargent manage to make his viewers feel he is speaking quite personally to each one of them?

I love how the majority of his watercolor figures were casually reclining, whether on the grass, by the sea, or on a love seat. They are such a contrast to his gorgeously posed society portraits, all straight backs and detailed outfits. But he took up watercolor when he got sick of endlessly painting rich people at their best, or more likely much better than their best. His oil paint flattery got him a ton of work, so much, in fact, that he was in the position to quit doing them.

Instead he began extensive travels with his sister and nieces and other artist friends, and did watercolors everywhere. He never married and he had very close male friends. No one seems to know any more than that about his sexuality.

Rembrandt (1606-1669) was also a very successful portrait painter, but did brilliant work in another medium: etching. I’ve been mad for Rembrandt since he was the first artist I learned about in high school. I’m glad I never learned then about his poor treatment of his women lovers after the death of his wife. I always found it interesting that he used his Jewish neighbors as models for works based on the Old Testament. His etchings are displayed in a long hallway in the MFA, which allows you to come right up to the prints to scrutinize their amazing detail.

Finally, I ended my visit with a look at “She Who Tells a Story,” which the MFA says, “introduces the pioneering work of twelve leading women photographers from Iran and the Arab world.” The photos are eclectic, but political, examining what women face in their countries. There is a lot of symbolic work around the veil, some of it brilliant protest art. One Palestinian’s photos of destroyed neighborhoods, exhibited in the negative, literally knocked me on my butt. I had to sit down and stare. Check out some of the images here.

I’m left with the question: Shouldn’t major public museums be free?

Kennedy and my Virginity

When I think of Kennedy, I think of the Cuban missile crisis in October, 1962, which in turn makes me think of how it almost made me lose my virginity.

We formed a club called NOSDAV when I was a sophomore in high school: No One Shall Die A Virgin. That was the month I turned 15 and I was very much a virgin, despite the efforts, from about age 10, of my uncle Saul, who felt me up whenever I escaped from my mother’s violence to their house. Later he tried to get me to drink liquor so that he could do more. That was also the year before I met the first love of my life when she joined our class.


But in 1962 when we were all on the brink of nuclear war – and oddly enough it turns out that we actually were on that brink – all we could think about was the tragedy of expiring with our cherry intact. There were a bunch of us, boys and girls, and we made buttons that said NOSDAV and wore them around school. As things worsened on the international level, we huddled and made secret plans.

We were in Pittsburgh but not so far away was Wheeling, West Virginia. For us it had the reputation of being a wild place. When boys in my high school turned 16, they would be driven to Wheeling to pay a woman to take their virginity. In Wheeling you could buy near-beer at a pretty young age. So we decided that we’d pair up and drive to West Virginia to get motel rooms so that we wouldn’t die as virgins.


I don’t remember who I paired up with, but the whole plan fell apart when the person who was old enough to drive (16) and thought he’d have the use of his parents’ car was grounded and we weren’t able to get there. It took a few days before it occurred to anyone in NOSDAV that we could actually fuck right there in Pittsburgh somewhere somehow. But by that time Kennedy and Khrushchev had figured things out and to my great relief I didn’t have to do it with what’s-his-name.

CONTEST! Create My Subtitle

I have finished the six short stories that will be collected in my upcoming book titled Lillian’s Last Affair, but I need a subtitle that conveys three things:

a. These are short stories
b. They’re about older people (like 70s/80s)
c. They’re about the love lives (and often sex lives, sometimes kinky) of older people (although in one story the object of affection is a shopping cart.)

The subtitle needs to be as short a phrase as possible - and not raunchy. I'm marketing this volume as literature, not erotica. If your suggestion ends up on the front of my book, you’ll get a free PDF of the book as soon as it is published. Or if you prefer, a signed copy of my vintage (ie out-of-date) book on Sarah Palin Thanks But No Thanks.

Here are a few to get you started.

• Sexy Stories about Seniors
• Short Stories about the Love Lives of Seniors
• Late Life Love Stories
• Sexy Senior Short Stories
• Elder Love Stories

Ready. Set. Go! In fact, Go Wild. Please help. Thanks.

Saul the Post-War Hero

I forced every Israeli I knew who spoke clear English to have my parents over for tea when I found out my mother had booked a two-week visit without my consent. How was I to pass two weeks with an insufferable woman and my dear dad in a country in which they spoke not one word of Hebrew?

Our lunch with my best friend Miri and her husband Razi is a perfect of example of why this was asking so much of my pals. Razi, or Professor Razi as he is known in the academic world, wrote the first history book about the Middle Ages from the perspective of the peasants in England. He changed the whole direction of academic histories with his work and was highly regarded in his field. When my mother discovered this, she began to lecture him about peasants in Middle Ages England – a topic about which she knew only slightly less than brain surgery. She interrupted him every time he tried to speak and gained steam on this subject as the afternoon wore on. Mortified, I spoke under her voice in Hebrew, slagging her off and apologizing for her behavior as she behaved it.

Our next visit, a day or two later, was to a couple I barely knew but who were exposed to my needs by the fact that they owned the only 2nd hand bookstore in Israel with books in English. I had never been to their home before. Shortly after we sat down and before my mother could humiliate herself and me, Haim, the husband, looked at my dad Saul. “I know you,” he said to my Pittsburgh born and bred father, a wallpaper salesman nearing retirement.

My father said nothing. Haim continued to stare, trying to shake up his memory. “You’re Saulie! From the Yankee military police! I’m Haim. But you knew me as Henry.”

My dad brightened, remembering him, and the two men fell about each other with hugs and wonder. Turns out that Haim was sent to Brussels from Palestine to help move Jewish survivors of the War out of Europe via creaky boats that he bought and outfitted. He discovered my dad at some local Jewish event and recruited him. My dad had access to the US Army supplies and whenever a boat was to sail, my dad and Haim stealthily loaded up an army troop truck in the middle of the night with blankets and food provisions and medical supplies and stocked the boat.

In his entire post-war life, my modest dad had never told anyone of this activity. Haim said that because of Saulie , many Jews survived who might not have otherwise. The story may have saved another life as well. It was the first time my mother shut her mouth and relieved me of the homicidal lust that often accompanied her visits.

FILM REVIEW: Lou Reed Disrespects “Red Shirley”

Last night I watched a half-hour documentary, "Red Shirley," Lou Reed made of his cousin Shirley Novick just before her 100th birthday. I haven’t followed Lou Reed since the days of the Velvet Underground, but I heard about this documentary when he died. I hadn’t even known that Lou Reed was Jewish.

However, I learned a lot about Lou Reed from this film. I learned that he is a condescending, arrogant, ageist, sexist bastard who is too full of himself to recognize the worth in others. A powerful interview takes two folks: first, an interviewee with an interesting story – and Shirley Novick is most certainly that; and second, an interviewer who is interested in that story – Lou Reed could not even grasp what this woman was telling him.

Shirley Novick grew up in a village in Poland that was occupied by the Germans during WWI. In the fighting that preceded the occupation, their life was in constant danger, not the least when a massive but unexploded shell plunged through the roof of their home, cutting right through the heavy wooden table where they sat. The Germans, though, once they had control of the village did a great deal to improve sanitation services, she admitted.

Her family could only afford to send one of their many children to North America and her father chose Shirley. As for the rest of her family, except for two sisters she found 25 years later in Palestine, “Hitler took care of them,” she tells Reed. At 19, already a leftist, she made her own way with two suitcases to Canada, which she found too “provincial.” So after learning to play the mandolin, she continued on to NYC where she worked in a garment factory for 47 years before entering what turned out to be a very long retirement.

Along the way, she became an activist and a leader in the labor movement, often part of the internal opposition to cooptation and compromise by the union leadership. The film ends with the highlight of her life: making her way towards the front of the crowd during the 1963 March on Washington.

So how did Reed screw up this documentary? His interview style consisted of just a few elements:

• He repeated her remarkable sentences with incredulity. “So you stood up and spoke in front of all the workers?!”
• He questioned her many adventures with disbelief. “You didn’t!” “You carried your own suitcases all that time?”
• He blocked off our view of her by leaning in and screaming in her ear – she was somewhat hard of hearing, but apparently so was he – instead of just raising his voice and speaking to her directly. He crowded her space as if she were not the important person in this exchange about her life.
• He missed the magic of her answers. Even when she told him things about his own grandfather’s youth, he showed no curiosity.
• He never engaged with the substance of what she was saying, never grappled with the tragedy or the courage in her tale.

In short, Reed disrespected her and her radical history with an attitude of dismissal and disinterest.

Here’s my entirely imaginary fantasy of what happened. He discovered late in life that he had this elderly cousin with a story. He took two friends (there were two cameras) and with little preparation he conducted this interview, just to have it recorded. Afterwards, one of his buddies told him that he had gold in the footage and that by tarting it up with some stills from Novick’s photo albums, they could turn it into something that would augment his reputation. However, it ends so abruptly, that one wonders if he just got sick of it.

Should you go to SnagFilms.com and watch this documentary for free? If you can filter out Reed’s annoying interjections, the woman’s story is full of radical protest and working class anger. But when he keeps his face right in her face, it’s hard to achieve that filter. This is equally a documentary of Lou Reed the man (separate from the musician) tarnishing his legacy by revealing himself to be a dickhead.

The Trailer:

 

Ever Had a “Wellness Visit”?

Yesterday I had the first of what, with luck, will be a long line of annual Wellness Visits compliments of Medicare. This replaces the sturdy “annual check-up” that those of us who see doctors have come to rely on as the one time during the year that one can arrive with a literal list of issues (I always have a copy ready for my doctor), from new bumps/lumps/discolorations to gassiness to blurry eyesight at the computer. Whatever ails you – put it on the list for your annual.

So what is this Wellness Visit and how does it differ? For one, I see an assistant and then a nurse practitioner – but not my doctor. I have to convince the assistant to check my height after she weighs me. “It was checked last year. It’s not like it’s going to change,” she says. Wrong – one of my concerns is that I am shrinking. Bone loss.

I wonder if she is the same young employee who, when I asked a couple of years ago about a hepatitis inoculation, told me that I didn’t have to worry because it was only for sexually active people! “Let’s make a bet,” I answered in anger, “about who is getting it more – you or me.”

This Wellness Visit involves no physical exam, no taking off of clothes, no touching. It opens with the assistant’s irritation that I have not brought the completed form – a form which I only find in my mailbox back home later in the day. She will not allow me to fill it out on the spot and insists on doing it herself, which, it later transpires, she does very poorly.

When I do see the form later in the evening, I realize that it has nothing to do with wellness and is, in fact, entitled “Medicare Health Risk Assessment Form.” It asks if I’m capable of basic activities – feeding, clothing, and bathing myself; shopping and cooking (not so good). It asks about home safety and falling down.

“Are you afraid of falling?” Of course I’m afraid of falling. Anyone who knows anything about aging knows that falling is something to approach with dread. But they don’t mean that. They mean, Are you walking gingerly, looking at the ground, terrified. Well then, say so.

They ask about nutrition. And about alcohol and drug use. The assistant kindly explains that by drug use, “They mean like marijuana and heroin.” Well, that narrows it down.

And they ask about “Your emotions and social support.” When I am going over the form again, this time with the Nurse Practitioner, I ask her, “And if an elder is isolated and has no social support, what do you suggest that she do?” As someone who has long worked with elders, I am interested in what resources they bring to bear on those with revealing answers.

“Some of them just don’t want to know anyone,” she replies with scorn. “I know all my neighbors. We have coffee together, our kids play together. Some of these patients don’t even know the name of their nearest neighbor.”

“Do you own your own house?” I ask her.

“Yes, in the suburbs. Of course.”

“Well, I rent, and I do not know my neighbors and I don’t really want to.”

“Why not? That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it’s rental. It’s big buildings. Neighbors come and go – they’re renters. There is nowhere to escape from a bad one. I can’t ‘go home’ the way that you do. They share walls with me. I want my privacy.”

I know so many elders in subsidized housing in large buildings who have to weigh how many intimacies to promote, surrounded by old people, many sick and needy, people one sees in the elevator, in the dining room if it’s that kind of facility. One makes choices.

The nurse practitioner lectures me about the function and structure of the ear for too long because she cannot answer a simple question: Should I get a baseline hearing test or not? She says she is not an Ears/Nose/Throat person.

At the end she sends me for blood tests. I warn the blood taker – my regular person isn’t around – that I have rolling veins and that if she misses, I do not want her to dig around in my arm. She misses and digs. I tell her calmly, “Remove the needle now, please.” She does and sulks. “You don’t have rolling veins. You moved. No one can do it if you’re moving.”

“I’ve been told for 66 years that I have rolling veins. Please bring me someone else.”

“They won’t get you either, with you twitching and moving.” She puts the rubber tourniquet around my other arm and then starts searching in my hand.

“Please bring me someone else.” She finally agrees, petulantly, and a man comes, I explain the situation, and although he too digs around, he does manage to extract some blood – although today I find out that it wasn’t enough for one of the tests. That’s a photo of my arm today, by the way.

So if you’re heading for Medicare, let me be your big sister. Be sure to ask for a follow-up appointment with your doctor in light of something or other that you bring up. Then you can actually sit down with her and tell her to check your lumps and pangs.