This Is My FIrst Choice for My Retirement Community

Shaving Away with Time: Manorexia Attacks

Junk Thief is somewhat pleased to say that he is within an inch (we won't say which one) of the 1967 ideal male figure. Then look at the 2010 "manorexic" ideal. I'm sure some women will take some delight in seeing this as poetic justice.

Dimensions of Rootstein’s Male Mannequins:
THE CLASSIC: 1967, 42” chest, 33” waist
THE MUSCLEMAN: 1983, 41” chest, 31” waist
THE SWIMMER: 1994, 38” chest, 28” waist
THE ANDROGYNE (a.k.a. “Homme Nouveau”): 2010, 35” chest, 27” waist

The full article can be found here.

Timeless Tony

Has anyone else seen this? Some like it...not? Oh, Tony.

What Kind of Old Works Best for You?

With the passage of time and onset of aging, I try to come up with an image of what type of old person I would like to become. What are appropriate role models?

It's much easier to identify what I don't want to become as I look at the variety of people of a certain age. On one end of the range are the cranky, bitter and hunch-backed type. Much as we might love reading Dorothy Parker, who would want to be around her elder, bitter, gin-soaked self?

Equally annoying are those supposedly joyous, eccentric types who throw convention to the winds and become lively free spirits. Remember that dreadful poem Jenny Jospeh:

When I am an old lady I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

Bleh, no way. I'm getting bitter just thinking about it. I won't go so far as to name names, but I hated tie dye when I was young and have no intention of wearing it in my dotage. The justification made by such supposedly joyfully colorful elder eccentrics is that they don't want to become invisible as they grow older. What's wrong with growing invisible in your old age? Didn't these people have childhood fantasies of being invisible and being able to enter secret places without being observed? Fear of growing invisible is a sign of an outsized, fragile and unfulfilled ego in my book.

So what are some appropriate role models? I've been reading Joseph Mitchell's Old Mr. Flood, a wonderfully elegant little 122-page tome about a man who intends to live to the age of 115. Mitchell's works definitely are the embodiment of the golden age of The New Yorker, I also just ordered his Up at the Old Hotel, a collection of his best pieces. Admirably, Mitchell chose to stop writing when he ceased to find subjects that he didn't love. It is sad that the New York he loved was disappearing, but commendable that he had the wisdom of knowing when to quit instead of either kvetching about the changes or writing half-heartedly about people he didn't care for.
A contemporary example that brings me great joy every week is photographer Bill Cunningham of The New York Times with his little online slide shows of street fashion in Manhattan. Cunningham is in his 80s, has lived in New York for at least 60 years but approaches his subjects with the joy of someone who just arrived from the provinces. A Korean War veteran, Harvard dropout and man who has worked in the cut-throat fashion industry for years, he manages to exude so much joy in his little two-minute slide shows, each one leaving me feeling uplifted and optimistic about the nature of urban life.

Cunningham has a great eye and rapport for his subjects. His visuals are always great, but I enjoy just listening to the audio minus the visuals. Cunningham is very much an old-school New Englander who drops his Rs and has a wonderful rhythm and rasp to his voice. Best of all is the delight he finds in his subject without the slightest air of judgment. No matter how ridiculous or outrageous the outfit, he captures it with the delight of an archaeologist finding some great discovery. Not that he would ever wear it, but he always has an air of "Look at that!" that is heartening.

Though decidedly knowledgeable about fashion, he clearly prefers to focus on the sidewalk not the runway and admires the ingenuity of the individual over the fashion victim. It's great that he doesn't focus on specific designers or trends but specific things like this great show on scarves (or "skawhves" as he would say). I hope I might run into Mr. Cunningham on the streets of New York someday, not likely as a subject of his photographic eye, but just a chance to cross paths with his wonderful spirit.

The Roots of Agnosticism

Everyone loves a bitchy old queen, but let's face it -- we love nothing more than a bitchy old queen from Texas.

Rex Reed came into conversations I had at least three times this weekend. Besides his performance in Myra Breckinridge (his resemblance to Raquel Welch is so uncanny it's very confusing when they are in the same frame), we have his reviews to look back on through the years. I wish someone would make a YouTube video of his best lines on the Tonight Show.

His distaste for all things in the Global South and Asia in particular is legend. I remember a Tonight Show appearance where he mentioned flying through Delhi and what he saw out the window appalled him so much that he refused to leave the plane. He turned to Johnny Carson and said, "Mrs. Gahndi is right. Someone needs to just drop a bomb on that place."

More recently after seeing the South Korean film Old Boy, he quipped: "What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?"

My favorite quote however, was from a 1977 review in which he said, "If Diane Keaton does not win the Oscar for Looking for Mr. Goodbar, there is no God." Keaton did win the Oscar that year, but for her role in Annie Hall. That probably explain how Rex became an agnostic.

Rise Above It

Few things are more depressing to me than feel-good, life affirming movies. I'd rank pineapples, ham, chocolate, cigarettes, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Celine Dion, Hawaii and pastel colors in the same category. So I went to see the new documentary Hats Off with some trepidation.

At 93 and 95 pounds, actress/model Mimi Weddell is, on the surface at least, one of those spunky old ladies that you could almost see Willard Scott featuring in his Smucker's birthday greetings. With a clipped, Bostonian blue-blood accent and a collection of several hundred hats, she's been seen by most of us a few times in countless bits parts in A-list movies, lead parts in B, C and D-list movies, commercials and print work. Everything from Juicy Couture to California Cheese (in which she claims to have been around so long that she knew Monterrey Jack himself).

Weddell is amazing for her physical and emotional stamina, despite a constant cigarette in an elegant holder, which allows her to go on constant cattle call auditions and put in 14 to 20 hour day shoots. She also shows some pilates routines that would be amazing for 50-year-old but one must see to believe someone past 90 can do. She is by turn grotesque and gorgeous and sometimes both at the same time.

When her husband, a descendant of the Mayflower but with no business sense, died and left her with nothng but debt, she began pursuing her acting career age 65. The day of his funeral, she got on a plane to L.A. and acted in a vampire movie.

The strength of the film is the underlying conflict between her and her two 50-something children who are both overweight and prone to deconstructive self-analysis. That doesn't seem to have brought them anymore peace or happiness. Weddell herself despises self-introspection or analysis and prefers to face adversity with her motto of "Rise above it." What's unfortunate about the film is that it does take too much of a Willard Scott approach to her spunkiness without maybe a little more delving into her dysfunctional but still loving family. After angst-filled documentaries such as Capturing the Friedmans, it is refreshing to see a more upbeat film like this with a few shades of darkness. There is much frustration, disappointment, resentment and regret in this family but no hint of deep, dark stories.

It was all worth it for me, for a finale in which Mimi indulges herself in a hoiday that she had longed for since she was 13. Seeing her on a carousel in one of her trademark hats, as she opines that even going in a circle she feels that she is going somewhere was encouraging to know that it's never too late for some dreams to be realized.

Sweet 16 - Let There Be Jewels!

This afternoon I went to the 84th birthday for George Birimisa who leads the intergenerational writing group I've been a member of for nearly nine years. George is a pioneering gay playwright and coeditor of the book Return to the Caffe Cino, an anthology and memoir of the theater where he and other ground breaking writers launched their works in the 1960s.

Jewelry seemed to be in abundance as gifts at this year's event, and, as you can tell, George shares my fondness for eccentric headgear, though he tends to favor the brimless crowns of a heretical sodomite priest as opposed to my fedoras, porkpies and flat caps. Obviously it was a room filled with a galaxy of blog stars, including Bryce Digdug (center) and Jim (right) of The Blue Elephant. Before the party, I helped Jim load some of his videos of recent peace and reproductive rights rallies. Jim, some may recall, had a popular video here when he house/cat sat while I was in Catalonia.

Happy Sweet 16 George!

Autumn, Cake or Death

I began this year by discovering the increasingly obscure tracks of Scott Walker and am ending it by doing the same with Lee Hazlewood who died earlier this year. I am nearing the point of being a completist with both. After growing up drawn to almost any female songwriter or chanteuse, I seem to keep finding my influences to be increasingly male in recent years.

Though I've been vaguely aware of most of Lee's songs through the years and had a number of his discs, I'm not sure why I never heard this tune, perhaps because its near perfect lyric would not speak to me so directly as it now does and was ringing in my head as I snapped today's shots above:

Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye
Give everyone a penny that cry
You can throw all my tranquil' pills away
Let my blood pressure go on its way
For my autumn's done come
My autumn's done come. Done come

Let those 'I-don't-care-days' begin
I'm tired of holdin' my stomach in
No more slinky folk dollars for me
I'll take Sears & Roebuck dollars gladly
For my autumn's done come
My autumn's done come. Done come

Bring me water short and scotch tall
A big long black cigar that ain't all
Hang me a hammock between two big trees
Leave me alone, damned! Let me do as I please
For my autumn's done come
My autumn's done come. Done come

The Discreet Charm of Real Estate Pornorgraphy and Aging with Grace

I think this photo may be my absolute favorite of the 800+ shots I took this past week. Take a moment to click on it and "embiggen" it to catch the focal point of the elderly couple on the balcony which I get teared up just looking at again since it embodies why I will definitely be coming back to Barcelona, perhaps permanently. I began by shooting the charming Forn de Pa sign below them, but first the man came out to gaze at the street in his Dreta L'Eixample neighborhood (the Upper East Side of Barcelona), and then the woman joined him. I felt I was seeing something that was at once very private but also so natural and loving and not in any guidebook. In the flash of a few seconds, just as the warmth of afternoon was about to turn to the end of the day touched me in a deeply multi-layered way that Billie Holiday singing "Autumn in New York" does. Just after putting my camera back in my bag, they glanced down, as if suddenly aware of me, and I went on about my way, and they returned inside.With apologies to Luis Buñel, I found that the bourgeoisie of Barcelona, especially its elderly, had enormously discreet charm and great grace. Almost always elegantly but never elaborately dressed. My favorite moments were watching them going about their daily lives and picturing myself at that age and thought about where I would like to be when that time comes. Most of them, of course, came of age during or some perhaps just before Franco came of age. As Catalonians, even the most elite felt oppression during that dark era, and I found myself longing to pull one aside and ask what it felt like to have so many dreams dashed and now to live in a city so glorious, graceful and able to function without resentment of its many annoying tourists.
Those questions raced through my head as I followed a few steps behind this woman who dashed ahead of me into her local market, a wrought iron charmer. How I longed to walk beside her, help her push the cart along as she filled it with items for an elegant Catalonian Saturday supper that would suddenly increase from one to two.
A couple of days later just after nabbing this shot of a lady in the Born, she turned and glanced back at me with a sly, knowing smile. She didn't look the least bit resentful or angry but perhaps just a tad scolding of a ladrón at play in what has become one of the priciest neighborhoods in the city. In a few months, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona will let the world know that I am not the only neurotic Jew to descend on their city. And I am not the only one obsessed with real estate pornography, and I am sure we'll get plenty of lush interiors in the Born and Dreta L'Eixample. I've already scouted real estate prices there which are somewhere between San Francisco and Manhattan. When I announced more than a decade ago that I would be searching for and buying real estate in San Francisco, people laughed and said "in your dreams; it'll never happen." When some young ladrón follows me up Passeig de Saint Joan as I saunter home leaning into my cane and carrying a loaf of warm pa and salt cod, I promise to have attained a similar state of grace and will just smile back, having plenty of secrets that I prefer to let shimmer through the gauze of bourgeois charm.

They Say It's My Birthday...

Thanks to everyone for the early and on time birthday messages. If I'm lucky my flight home will be delayed the currently reported 17 minutes and not more than that. Woo hoo, what a way to celebrate the big day.

Utterly Random Russian Composer Reference #348

Like most kiddos in music appreciation class in grammar school, I approached the Russian composers with typical trepidation and sleepiness. While I've come to appreciate the works of Rachmaninoff through the years, most LPs and CDs are accompanied by photos of the distinguished, elder maestro such as the one above.

The shot below was in this morning's Chronicle's pink pages and promped a visual "Damn!" as I flipped through the pages and has made me listen to Morceaux de Fantaisie, with an entirely different perspective.

The Best of Carvaggio

It took me a while (basically two years) to getting around to watching The Best of Youth, and I am glad that I did. Its origins as a TV movie are often evident, but that doesn't diminish its power as a story. Visually, it is quite variable -- sometimes bland, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes nearly inept with things like projected backgrounds during car driving scenes, clearly fake beards (nothing beats the real thing) or badly applied gray spray paint on heads to indicate the passing of the years. But none of that diminishes the sweep of it and its ability to pull me in slowly and subtly. Its theme, some have suggested, is not that we are at our best in youth but if we are lucky we take the best, our idealism and hopes, with us in the years ahead to battle cynicism.

And to have Alessio Boni to feast one's eyes on for most of the six hours is, well...is it too late to change my ticket from Barcelona to Florence? He managed to creep up on me slowly. Though not bad with longer hair at the left in the beginning, his transformation after the first third or so is rather breathtaking. The fact that he just filmed a new Caravaggio biopic as the title character with Jordi Molla playing a benefactor/priest is almost too much for the mind and heart to handle. I wish Jordi would go back to playing wayward bisexual husbands instead of sloppy English speaking drug dealers. I love you sloppy, Jordi, but go back to doing it in your mother-tongue.

Any way you slice it, I've not seen someone quite as gifted at playing the gorgeous, doomed poetic soul with quite the sweep of Boni in a long time. I'm hooked.

UPDATE: We don't plan to become that kind of site, but if you weren't already won over by Alessio try this. Lawdy, where'd I put those smelling salts...