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New Directions

I’m dividing this site up. It’s too big, it’s a mish mash, it’s without direction. I’m opening a new blog for my images at http://mobiledelight.wordpress.com/

a new blog for recipes at http://theambientchef.blogspot.com/

and I am re directioning ‘Just Sayin’ to topics related to transitions and changes in life as we grow older. But make no mistake, this is not going to become an over 50′s blog.

Paul McCartney at Comerica in Detroit

The crowd was all ages many many people, a landscape of people beneath a broiling sky – lightening bolts slamming down about the laddered crews high above us tending speakers and lights.

Remember, McCartney is 70. Youthful, healthy looking, having fun, belting out that music. Folks were impressed. He constantly switched guitars – each with a history, a ukulele from a 1940′s ukulele player, another a gift from Jimmy Hendrix … history handing over and back. Thunder was hidden in the rumbles of the bass … even our seats vibrated beneath us. Live and Let Die was filled with fire and fireworks. The crowd was brought to its feet. Wild!

Jude, USSR, Yesterday … an overwhelming evening of great talent and entertainment. I stood when we sang All We are Saying. It was emotional for me. Some young folks held candles as though looking for meaning others held cameras making the moment.

Afterwards, one young person, about 20, said he was glad it wasn’t about politics, that ‘these poeple’ often inject politics. And I held my curiosity to myself remembering the early music and the early days of Revolution in this country. The Beatles were about Revolution and Civil Rights. They were about Peace and Love.

But I kept that to myself. Toward the end of the concert we were singing Paul’s lyrics and he was listening … applauding, orchestrating our voices. I can’t imagine how that felt to him – generations spanning years horizontally and vertically …

his music with so much meaning for all of us. What a night.

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me”

Regarding the NYT article “Boomers Hit New Self-Absorption Milestone: Age 65”

I’m a baby boomer. On July 18 2011 I and 10,000 other baby boomers will turn 65 (on that particular day). NYT’s says we are the ‘self-absorbed, botox’ users. I say this in the interest of full disclosure.

Vocabulary. Way for the young to take down a generation of folks – use a vocabulary that dismisses them … all of them. Turn them into a selfish, needy pile of trash. Then turn on the death panels. Get rid of them.

How I remember it? A brother who was a marine in Vietnam. A sister in the Navy. Another brother in the army. A sister who is the sibling guardian of a disabled brother. I worked as an Appalachian Volunteer, then a university professor. My friends worked in the Peace Corps and VISTA. We all worked to end the war, bring peace, end presidential corruption. We WERE activism.

I remember the public assassinations of the president, John Kennedy, a presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, the great moral leader in our times, Martin Luther King, Junior.

Under the work of our generation Laws became inclusive, we worked for education for people with disabilities, Civil Rights, feeding the poor. We expanded music, introduced rock n’ roll, opened ourselves to globalism, computing and medicine. Wrote poetry, novels, newspapers. Today we care for our parents, fund our children’s lives, care for our grandchildren. Some of raise our grandchildren.

Ok, we had Woodstock. But what the heck?

I would willingly pass the light to the next generation, challenge them to accomplish as much, to care as much. But as long as I’m being considered a burden and candidate for the death panel …

I’m holding onto my voice and my rights as a human being.

Which I am. Which all of us baby boomers are. Which, in fact, we all are.

Don’t forget it.

Eve of Destruction

Listened to this today in the car … except for the voting thing, why isn’t this relevant today? :

Close Encounters of another kind: Hereafter

Odd to begin a discussion of one movie with another but here goes: 1997. Steven Spielberg. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (CE3K) was hailed as a breakthrough film characterizing other worldly creatures as not so alien, not so scary, creatures of beauty and love. The proper attitude toward these creatures is wonderment. The end of the film shows us the three main characters, a boy, a man and a woman who made the trek to the mother ship. The film bathes them in light, awash with music as tall slender creatures mingle among them.

Forward to “Hereafter” 2010. Clint Eastwood. AND Spielberg (via DreamStudios) as three characters make their trek to discover what awaits them (us) after we die. Weightless, tall, thin characters awash in light call out, shadowy but not frightening. The film disappoints many as death is characterized not as something out of ‘The Sixth Sense’ but as something that surrounds life; a consciousness into which we all dissipate.

Three characters are called and independently of each other arrive in one spot to tell a tale, to receive authentication, to be released from the agonizing hold of death’s mystery. The story is told under a Dickensian cloud of the mundane, nasty brutish and short lives we lead that can be transcended once we understand the vision of death, forgiveness, and weightlessness (the body thrown off).

My mention of Dickens is not arbitrary as Dickens is referenced in the film, his house and office are visited and his words comfort.

One character, a psychic, is ravaged by remnants of a comorbid brain/spinal condition from which he suffered as a child, another nearly drowned in the tsunami and is plagued by visions of her near death experience, and a third has to make himself whole after the death of his twin. “CE3K” brings tortured characters out of lives they little understand. “Hereafter” (through knowledge) marks its characters, and each having what another needs, saves the other. Person to person, Scrooges finding salvation in love and charity.

The movie is not what you may think. It is not a Halloween thriller. It is not even an actual retelling of “CE3K” replacing creatures from another world with death. But, as “CE3K” took a new look at alien life, “Hereafter” sees the Hereafter as life’s extension. Not scary, not gory. Simply release and forgiveness. Here & After

The internet is a gun

For Discussion

‘The Social Network’: whose terms of engagement?

Social Network

Saw ‘Social Network’ tonight and thought my 140 Twitter Post wouldn’t work for this although I do think I can do a short (quick reading) argument or at, at least, introduce a short discussion theme for the movie.

Whatever we know about the development of (the) Facebook, our knowledge of the reality of that development distracts us from understanding what the movie itself is doing; so is the film’s characterization of Zuckerberg if we know Zuckerberg. In this light, I’m glad the film led to a nervous rich man’s contribution to a New Jersey inner city school. Nevertheless,

in movie terms, the topic is ‘What is a social network”  and the social network is Harvard: white blue bloods in their private Final Clubs, their Harvard alumni inner networks, their traditional WASP social networks. With Zuckerberg, that traditional network faces a technology that spawns aggressive intelligent non-WASPs into using their talents to develop a new counter/social network.

That network, the Technology Network, purchases the non-WASP (i.e.Zuckerberg) one up-man-ship of his Harvard (tradition) brethren.  He owns the network. He created the club to which others wish to belong.

At the same time, the product or technology houseing that network, Facebook, lures the attention of non-traditional, smart white sociopaths who also challenge the old boy networks (Napster).

Zuckerberg’s product is caught between both forces.

Emotionally or symbolically what’s going on? The character, Zuckerberg,  uses his brainy property to fight for his rights and, from his point of view, those rights include a place in the Final Club. At the same time, the WASPs use his talents while keeping him outside that social network. A significant scene is one in which Zuckerberg is handed a sandwich in the outer portals of the club to which he’d like to belong while being offered a job to program an idea for some of the members.

This is a growing up movie, a self realization movie.  The story that carries it is entertaining as well as complex – and, in fact, so complex that Aaron Sorkin deserves congratulations for  being able to express all that insider-complexity in a way that allows us non programers to relate both to the creation of Facebook but also to a central character to whom others in *his* real life have been unable to relate.

I have a programmer <waves @swhitely) friend on Twitter who feared the movie might be too geeky. He cleverly and wonderfully  realized that programming language is used to dramatize the central theme: outsider-insider authentication. But I, a non-programmer,  never noticed the specific use of programming language chosen to dramatize the movie; which means, my programming friend was able to see the significance of the technological details of the language  and I never noticed them. The significance?  The programming language details were an amplification of the film’s theme but not a distraction from it.

Good movie, Folks. Detailed, beautifully edited, young person story. Human being story. Finding oneself. Been There. We all Have to Do that.

We might consider why and how women find their way into the movie. And, we might consider why there are no losers (everyone gets paid off including the WASPs) except Zuckerberg, the central character, who is left hitting the page reload button multiple times waiting for an acceptance of his Facebook request to ‘friend’ a former girlfriend.

Thumbs up.

Face to face not exactly eye to eye

Matisse The Conversation

I had dinner last night with a friend when the topic of Apple’s ‘Face to Face’ came up. It was an easy conversation over wine – lively, eyes dancing from topic to topic in emphasis or explanation.

Of course, ‘Face to Face’ led to referencing Skype and the fun of the first time call to someone who also had a camera set up. I remembered my son calling us via Skype while in Croatia. He introduced us to his mother-in-law. At one point he carried his laptop about the hotel giving us a sense of where he was. Skype was invaluable for that experience.

Then, I noted an interesting decline in the venue over time. It goes something like this:

The first call is made and two people giggle when first actually seeing each other. Sometimes they turn the computer screen every which way to share their surroundings but soon the conversation is a conversation. The eyes search for each other on the screen trying to lock into each other’s gaze. It doesn’t happen. The eye to eye thing, anyway. So the eyes move about the desk, stare into the camera, gaze about the area surrounding the screen and soon the eyes aren’t looking at the screen at all …

and we’re back to, basically, a phone call. In other words something is missing when the eyes cannot lock on each other. The mind wanders, the focus is lost.

In the end we agreed that, though novel, the ‘Face to Face’ didn’t add much to the conversation beyond initial novelty. Conversations in person really do rely on eye contact and that valuable portion of conversation is lost on camera. Even though we are ‘Face to Face.’

In the throes of throws

I started pottery for about 2 years 3 years ago, then quit. Last week a fine arts fair came to town and the professional potters had their ware everywhere. I couldn’t keep away from the pots and couldn’t resist running my hands together against the sides, pulling upward, feeling the ridges of another potter’s hands. I’m thinking about going back. Here are a few takes of my  early pots. A bit sad but still good enough to explore further?

[Show as slideshow]

A time warp in my house. So says the mouse.

We have another mouse. With a Chesapeake, maybe Canadian, ‘ou’ my mother used to laugh saying, ‘There’s a moose in the hoose get it oot.’ Only she took them out like murderers and thieves, literally. Mouse trap. Cheese and squeeze is what we called it. Ew.

So, nowadays, I’m older but still squeamish. I’m old enough to buy my own mousetrap, one that doesn’t require we hire blood spatter analysts and CSI’s with yellow tape.

This trap is  black, with cheese inside its long hallway. Think of a snake’s mouth – the long walk in. Only with this trap, the mouse is caught but not killed:

Husband grabs the trap once it’s shut (meaning the mouse is actually in there and Barb doesn’t touch it) and walks the trap to the way-back letting the mouse escape to the creek.

Last night, before sleep, entering my own darkness, I imagined our little community of mice whispering,

elaborating on  their own miracle science: of a special moon of cheese in the darkness lighting the entrance to a Black Hole which, when entered, transports you, miraculously, to the creek. Miraculously.

From here. To There.

Just sayin’