hippytowiki

50 Shades of Grey...5 Decades of Bad Boys...3 Volumes of Bad Writing

SPOILER ALERT!

If you plan on reading all three books in the "50 Shades" series, you should probably skip this blog. I'm about to give away the ridiculous "ending."

Although I'm not a rabid feminist, I have to agree with Erica Jong on this one. I finally broke down and read all three books -- sort of like eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's or watching "The Real Housewives of New York." You know it's really not all that good for you, but you can't stop.

The basic Spark Notes version is this...girl meets good-looking and rich guy...guy turns out to be a sadist...girl becomes a bit of a masochist...and then she uses her feminine charm to ultimately "reform" and marry him and have beautiful kids and live in a gorgeous house. Throughout the book, she makes excuses for his vile and weird behavior, chalking it up to a bad (very bad) home environment. But hey...he's rich and handsome. So, who cares if he collects whips like some dudes collect baseball memorabilia?

The "bad boys" (especially the good looking ones) have always been appealing to good girls throughout life and literature. I loved Marjorie Morningstar and Splendor in the Grass when I was younger. The heroines drove themselves crazy (in one case literally) while obsessing over guys who were ultimately no good for them. 

So, when will the era of self-confident and rational girls who fall in love with truly nice guys actually begin? Or, are we destined to always love the guy with the evil sneer...the one who doesn't call us back (or only texts)...the one with the handcuffs? Do the heroines in books and film always have to bear scars?

Also for your viewing pleasure (no, not THAT kind!)...

Women and Hollywood

A great (not flattering, but well-written) review of 50 Shades...

Chillin'

Slow down...we move too fast...

This morning, "Feelin' Groovy!" ("The 59th Street Bridge Song") is stuck in my head. (See link, below.)

"Haste makes waste!" my mother used to say. Like many thing my mom said, this phrase seems truer than ever as I age. 

We are living in an era in which we pride ourselves on multi-tasking, moving at the speed of light, instant gratification, and being first to market. Answering machines are defunct and have been replaced by the Instant Message, Tweet, and Pin. We speak, share, and move at an alarming pace. 

In some ways, it's ironic. Although average life expectancies are on the upswing, we live and work as if there's no tomorrow.

Fast food is killing us. Driving too fast results in a third of all fatal crashes. And our lack of sleep is resulting in a vast array of health problems.

Summer will soon be upon us. Let's all make an attempt to put down our devices for a bit, catch some extra Z's and make that trip to the local farmers market to trade in carbs for cabbage. (Check out this blog on which foods seem to slow down the aging of the brain.)

And then, click on this link and we'll both have this song stuck in our head for the rest of the day...not such a bad thing!  

 

From Apron Strings to Guitar Strings...

...and from Bobby Pins to Pinterest

My generation of moms aspires to be cool. 

My own mom really could care less about the cool factor. 

She was busy making meatloaf and green beans.  She was my mother...not my Facebook friend. She didn't wear jeans. She had a bouffant coif (see below) and a vast apron collection.

My generation of Baby Boomer mothers encouraged our kids to "share" with us and we bent over backwards to make sure they had high self-esteem and no/low pain and suffering.  We helped them with crafts projects, math homework, college applications, and resumes. 

Most of the moms I know set few limits on movie ratings and curfews, but our own mothers had strict rules about lots of things, including sex, manners, and eating vegetables.

Whereas my friends and I furtively planned trips to buy Boones Farm Apple Wine and snuck into the city to rock concerts, this next generation lives in a world of constant and clandestine text-speak.  We spoke Pig Latin...they send each other messages with flying fingers and block us from their Facebook walls.

I'm finding out now that we raised a generation of kids who actually like some limits.  Many of these young people are so dependent on caretaking that they struggle when we say "Figure it out yourself." 

As the world changes around us, I've decided that mothering is all one big diabolical experiment.  A "good mom" used to be the one who baked the best cupcakes for class parties and didn't intrude on us when we had friends over. These retro moms birthed a generation of Boomers (like me) who are largely independent and resourceful, self-motivated, and used to dealing with rejection and angst. We often blame our mothers for messing us up anyway. 

What kind of adults will the offspring of "cool moms" grow into? I'm sure they'll blame us too for lots of things.   We can only hope they'll make their own creative choices and fix some of the daunting problems that generations before them created.

And who knows?  Maybe they'll grow up to wear aprons and pouffy hair,  After all, what's so bad about a great homemade cupcake?

Read more here...

My Mother's Day Pinterest Board

The guru of free-range mothering: Lenore Skenazy

Where to buy aprons

Hairdos of the 1960s: What is a bouffant anyway?

The lazy or tired mom's guide to great cupcakes

Unholy and Holey Fashion

"Are you REALLY planning to wear that?..."

...was one of my mother's favorite questions during the 1970's. I deliberately ripped my jeans and then, when they got really destroyed, I would cut them down, fray them, sew patches to the ass, and wear them as shorts.

My older brother, who was otherwise a neat freak, sported hair down below his shoulders and a scraggly beard.

We were quite fastidious about bodily hygiene and fragrance (remember Jean Nate and Charlie and patchoulli oil?) but loved our controlled fashion messiness, shoping at second-hand stores and deliberately tattering our tees and overalls.

Grunge has become high fashion at various times throughout my life. I marveled at the price of ripped designer jeans and fishnets stockings that barely cover ones flesh.

This morning, my daughter headed off to work wearing flip flops. "Are you REALLY planning to wearing those?" I blurted out. And then I caught myself.

After all, I lived much of my own youth with exposed skin and I went on to do some great things. Plenty of world leaders, musicians, philosophers, and artists contributed to our society without blow dryers and designer duds.

Perhaps a little mess and grunge and exposure is a good thing!

Decoupage...Pinterest...What's the Diff?

Cutting out and pasting pictures is really not new, boys and girls!

It just moved to the cloud. Sometime around 6th grade, my girlfriends and I all discovered "Decoupage." (The craft had its origins in the 18th century -- go figure.  Cutting and pasting and flaunting must all be basic human needs.)

Simply put, we cut pictures of stuff we really liked out of magazines and then glued them on to industrial black lunchboxes. And then we varnished our masterpieces with really nasty smelling shellac. (It was an era when our parents weren't too concerned about our inhaling toxic fumes, although I often wonder about the long-term impact that my decoupage obsession -- combined with radiation from my Easy-Bake Oven -- may have had on my life expectancy.

The concepts of "creating personal masterpieces" and "scrapbooking" are certainly not new. It's just entered the social media era in the form of Pinterest. So now, instead of photos and sayings being limited to teen fan magazines, LIFE and LOOK, and the New York Times, I have an unlimited arsenal of virtual decoupage. And I can share my "creations" and finds with other people and they can share my stuff with other people. 

Saves me a ton of money on lunchboxes and shellac too!

Check out my Boards here!

A re-run of a 2009 Post: The Retroactive Feast

Squanto Saved the Pilgrims...Who Saves Us?

Alas, when we are younger, we are often cocky and proud and think that all of the things we accomplish are because of our own smarts and coolness.  Now, looking back, I realize that I wasn't born knowing how to "hunt and fish," and that I had many guides who saved me from freezing winters (metaphorical ones, mostly, although there was the time when I had to be rescued off a mountain in Colorado by a ski patrol dude).

So, if I was assembling a feast of celebration and gratitude and could invite anyone (living or dead), the guest list would include (in no particular order):

1. My parents who gave me good genes and fueled my dreams.  My brothers who taught me how to hold my own against boys.
2. The hippie friends and drummers of my youth who gave me an appreciation of rock and roll and bad behavior. 
3. My daughters, who taught me not to take myself too seriously and always make me laugh.
4. Various bosses (even the quirky and borderline abusive ones). The great ones inspired vision and confidence and the bad ones taught me not to take anything personally in the business world.
5. The folks who supported my late-life decision to become an entrepreneur.  Many of them still keep me focused and boost my spirits in tough times.
6. The wonderful people I've worked with over the years.  I learned something from each one of you.
7. The people who serve as my left brain or right brain, when I need a whole brain.
8. Girlfriends.  Who else will tell you the truth AND keep secrets?
9. Well-trained doctors who fix various body parts and necessary organs. 
10. Writers, filmmakers and even reality TV producers who entertain me and help me relax.
11. People in my life who are vigilant about health, exercise, and spirituality.  Without them, I would be quite slothful.
12. The teachers from grade school through college (even the ones we made fun of) who gave me an appreciation of the English language.  Whether I'm writing a 1,000 word business article or a 140 character Tweet, I thank them for making me fearless and reasonably articulate in expressing myself.
13. My social media community.  They share cool new tricks and devices(some of which actually have real-world value).
14. Whoever actually invented in the Internet. If not for the power of the blog, how else could I possibly offer up so much universal gratitude in just a few bullet points?

 

Return to the Meadows...

Fresh Meadows, that is!

Although the photo hardly matches the name, it was a rather pleasant place to hang out in my youth.

Later this year, I'm attending a book launch party in my old 'hood.  Although the lavish steak house, Bloomies, the bowling alley, and the bookstore have been replaced by a Hooters, Daffy's and Five Guys, I'm jazzed to set foot in the old Century Meadows Movie Theater (now the AMC Loew's million-plex) where I first saw Sean Connery as James Bond and made out in the dark -- long before the term "hook-up" was coined.

I didn't technically live in Fresh Meadows...I lived in the small private homes on the other side of 73rd Avenue.  I always wanted to live in one of the apartments though...they seemed to have more of a community feel.  And now, both sides of the Avenue seem to be reuniting.

My classmates have grown up to be amazing and funny 50-something boys and girls -- including a TV producer, an optician, an actor, and a medical educator.  (Of course, we have a bunch of doctors and lawyers too.)  Our grade school is now 75% Asian, but it looks and smells exactly the same as it used to, and I'm happy to report that oak tag is still available in the corner store.  However, the 20-story building, which once appeared to be a luxury skyscraper, looks rather small and average.

Many of my classmates have raised sons and daughters of their own (who are probably sick of hearing our tales of assembly day, dixie mesh, shop classes, and Vietnam protests). 

Sadly, we have had some suicides and early deaths like all boomer graduates.  We will miss Ira and Fred.  And some of our coolest teachers (like the beloved Yvette Levy) cannot be found online and may be long gone.

But the miracle that is Facebook is bringing many of us back together.  The community's name of Fresh Meadows is actually appropriate now.  We will all roll around in our field of memories and dreams and breathe in our collective wisdom and wit.  Perhaps we will even imagine that we can smell that lingering scent of our first cigarettes and whiskey sours at Leonard's of Great Neck or that essence of school yard weed.

Class Decorum

I grew up in a different era, for sure.

It was a time of "command and control," and school kids generally did what their teachers told them (not asked them) to do. Despite all the rules, we grew up to be a pretty creative generation, I think.

Although we didn't invent Facebook and we pretty much made a mess of the economy, we (not me personally) discovered cures for diseases, manufactured small smart devices, and wrote some epic screenplays. And many of us have awesome penmanship and phone and interpersonal skills which come in handy during hurricanes and when the servers go down.

Hard as it may be to believe, boys and girls, here are some of the realities of life in the 1960s: We couldn't call teachers by their first names (ever) and they never gave us the "rubric" they were using to grade tests. In fact, rubric back then would be translated to "give a massage to someone named Richard." The girls had to wear skirts to school every day. When it was below freezing, we could wear pants under our skirts. We also had to take "Home Ec," Sewing and Childccare rather than Wood Shop, Electrical Shop, or Auto Shop. I always wanted to build a lamp with popsicle sticks (like my guy friends did) but it was forbidden.

We had to do math in our heads. No calculators were permitted in class. Slide rules were allowed later on, I suppose. We got to play in the street, without fear of drive-by shootings, kidnapping, or disease-carrying mosquitos. A visit from Good Humor was as exciting as the release of a new iPhone app. We engaged in "Spin the Bottle" and the term "hook-up" was a term only uttered in electrical shop, when the popsicle stick lamp was plugged into a wall outlet.

We had to do lots of stuff on our own -- get to the library (a physical building) to do research, figure out how to apply to college and make our own beds when we got there, and create fake IDs without the benefit of personal copier machines. We had to listen to music in groups. We had no iPods or earbuds. And because we had vinyl rather than mixes, we had to stand up and move to "change the record." We didn't play many competitive sports, so that was exercise for us.

And yeah, we were restless and bored and impatient and angry. But we never thought of ourselves as depressed or hyperactive. "It was the best of times...it was the worst of times," to quote one of my favorite tomes about revolution. And I read it in paperback, not as a download or Sparknotes. Revolution and evolution are great in many ways, but so is nostalgia.

I wonder if Charles Dickens had an iPad if he'd have penned his masterpiece while sitting in a foreign country (like I am as I'm writing this post). Or whether he just would have posted "It is a far better thing that I do #frenchrevolution #FF @madamedefarge" on his Twitter feed.

Let's bring back good penmanship!  Click here!

How to make a popsicle stick lamp

Yearbook yourself! and travel back in time.

Re-makes and Re-runs...where's the Renaissance?

I just saw the preview for the Charlie's Angels TV series.

Wait a minute...wasn't there already a Charlie's Angels TV series?  And a movie?  (Or maybe two movies...I can't remember.)  And yesterday, I went to see the new Planet of the Apes movie.  It was not really like the original.  Except there were apes.  And Caesar could talk.  But it was much more violent and I'm sure the budget was much bigger. 

Have we simply reached a point in our evolution where the only new inventions relate to technology?  Perhaps we have simply run out of new ideas for film and literature. 

And although I'm not sure it really counts as culture, the staying power of Jeopardy is truly fascinating to me.  The show first aired in 1964 and now has 9 million viewers, 292K Facebook fans, and lots of apps. 

So, what can one conclude from all this?  Despite our many cultural and scientific advances, we still like women with weapons, talking animals, and quiz games.  But we can now watch them all on small devices on  airplanes instead of simply carrying their images on metal lunchboxes.  Now that's progress!

a;sldkfjgh (translation: Thank you Mrs. Bachman)

I learned to type in 7th grade    

At Ryan Junior High School (216), a rather forbidding and humorless woman named Mrs. Bachman (our teachers did not have first names back then) taught us to type on manual typewriters.  She clapped her hands loudly and shouted "a;sldkfjgh" as our sweaty little fingers flew across the keyboards, filling the room with a cacophony of clickety-clacks.  I learned to type 90wpm (but alas, never learned to masterfully type numbers because someone broke into the typing room one weekend -- perhaps as revenge against the formidable Mrs. B -- and broke all the typewriters.  We had study time for the rest of the semester).

I still type in the range of 90wpm, which proved to be a useful skill when I was interviewing for my first pathetic editorial assistant job out of college (which paid a whopping $130 a week).  When I rose in the ranks to the CMO level I was able to churn out PowerPoints at record speeds.  And now, as an entrepreneur and blogger, I am able to get concepts from my head to a screen in no time flat.  Of course, I have also had to learn to use my thumbs -- so I can operate my Blackberry as rapidly as my notebook.  And I'm just tackling the touch screen thing, teaching my middle-aged fingers to scroll and drag.  (The touch screen thing freaks me out, since I was always told by my mother NOT to get fingerprints on surfaces.) 

So, Mrs. B is probably long gone.  She was nowhere near as inspirational as some of my other beloved elementary school and high school teachers.  In fact, she scared the crap out of me.  But her militaristic approach to keyboarding has helped me in later life.  And for that I must be grateful. 

Where to buy a fabulous manual typewriter

Why the digital generation likes manual typewriters

A new cool local store that sells stationery and pens and has manual typewriters in the window.  Mrs. B would be proud!