Archive for the 'The media' Category
July 10, 2008
The Closer, featuring the fabulous and Emmy Award-winning Kyra Sedgwick, returns on Monday night! Tivo is all set so we won’t miss one bit of The Drawl! Actually, The Spouse and I have been fixin’ to go through with-Drawl! If it hadn’t been for that extra episode last winter about her cozy cross-country RV trip — with a suspect, Fritz, and her parents, Clay and Willie Ray — we both might be institutionalized by now!
It is really great theatre. Her anguish over her early-menopause symptoms and her frantic struggle to maintain both her career and her relationship with an often-demanding significant other, added to the drama of the cases she and her squad investigate, are brilliantly offset by some of the funniest repartee on television, particularly when that new comedy team of Flynn and Provenza are around:
Brenda: According to his school records, [the suspect is] very intelligent but he does have issues: he’s unemotional, frequently says inappropriate things, he’s literal-minded, he gets fixated on minor details, he gets agitated when his routine is altered and he’s extremely uncooperative when anything or anyone gets in the way of him doing what he wants.
Flynn: Does he have a Georgia accent?
Courtesy of QVC, we can now order her junk food-hiding tote bag!
Thank yew all so very much! We’ll be servin’ stewed possum, fried okra and cheese grits to celebrate the occasion!
Posted in The media, Women | 3 Comments »
Tags: Television, The Closer
June 8, 2008
ByJane, the Godmother of MidLifeBloggers, whacked tapped me gently with her magic wand, and I am called to do her bidding. Says she, of the film debut of Sex and the City: The Movie, “I keep coming across all these comments about how Carrie’s in her ’40s and Samantha’s in her ’50s — and I’m thinking, is 40 the new 20, 50 the new 30, and 60 the new 40?” From a midlife perspective, she challenged me, what’s up with this film?
Let me start out by declaring that I have not seen the entire television opus, and I have not yet seen the movie. (I’m still in London for another week or two, and I’m planning a Girls Night Out with my friends when I get home, complete with feather boas, little black dresses and ridiculous shoes.) But I’ve read enough reviews and discussions and seen enough trailers of the film that I am willing to take a stab at it.
For me, from the very beginning, SATC has been a complete fairy tale. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Adventures at midlife, Fashion, Image, Personal, The media, Women | 2 Comments »
Tags: midlife, Sex and the City, Women
June 6, 2008
I just returned from three days in Stratford and Oxford to find that the American political landscape had significantly shifted. (Funny, I didn’t see any headlines about it in the English countryside.) Most of the Brits I’ve talked to have certainly heard of Hillary (and more so her husband) but they’re not sure who this Obama character is. “I’m not sure, either,” I tell them. “But I expect we’ll find out.”
As I cruised the Web, I found myself nodding at what media blogger Nancy Nall said in her summary of the campaign:
I’m thinking what happened to Hillary is what happens to people who live in a human cocoon, surrounded by ass-kissers and pillow-plumpers who either a) spend all their time covering their own; or b) telling you what you want to hear.
But I was especially interested — and saddened — by NYTimes columnist Judith Warner’s commentary juxtaposing Hillary’s decline with the ascendancy of “Sex and the City”: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in London, Politics, The media, Women | 1 Comment »
Tags: Hillary, Politics
May 8, 2008
I may be on the other side of the pond, but I can hear the death knell from here: Is Hillary really finished? The NYTimes, which endorsed her early on as I recall, seems to be of that mindset here and here. (Notice the baby she’s holding in the second picture. Even a cute kid can’t even help her.) All the pundits, the Times says, are beginning to line up against her, leading off with Tim Russert — Tim Russert?! Since when is HE the Godfather of American political thought?
As adamant as Mrs. Clinton appeared on Wednesday [before West Virginia], several advisers said that how long she would stay in the race was an open question. Some top Clinton fund-raisers said that the campaign was all but over and suggested that she was simply buying time on Wednesday to determine if she could raise enough money and still win over superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who could essentially hand Mr. Obama the nomination.
It was just a few months ago, February I think, that I told my ultra right-wing conservative brother-in-law (to his horror) that he’d better get used to having Hillary Clinton around, because I didn’t see anything stopping her. What did I miss?
Time Magazine online lists five (only five?) mistakes she made in her campaign, the biggest mistake being that she misjudged the mood of the nation: she ran like an incumbent (I think she THOUGHT she was an incumbent) instead of picking up early that this election (like most, in my long experience as a voter) was about change. Plus she had some pretty dumb people working for her.
If this election is about change, then how is a weary electorate going to look at an aging (and allegedly cranky) John McCain in comparison with the imperially slim and usually unruffled Barack Obama?
The Brits are actually quite interested in the American race, although the whole delegate thing and the Electoral College is a mystery to them (and to me, come to think about it). We had an interesting conversation with a couple at a Covent Garden cafe Saturday about Obama’s viability. PM Gordon Brown, the man insisted, is a Communist, and the 20,000 jobs he’s allegedly created for the British economy have all been in government. “You don’t grow unless the economy helps create wealth, and you don’t create wealth by putting in more government jobs,” he insisted.
We’ll be back in time for the National Convention, which should be a real circus this year.
Posted in London, Politics, The media, Women | 1 Comment »
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Politics
May 5, 2008
If there’s a new media or genre or means of expression to be celebrated out there, I’m always late to the party. (I figure I should have created this blog at least four years ago.) So it’s not surprising that I haven’t had much exposure to the emergence of the graphic novel, sort of an extended comic book for grown-ups. I somehow associated it with Japanese anime and other media that haven’t appealed to me and that don’t seem to have the legitimacy of traditional media.
Wrong again. The filmed version of Persepolis really changed my mind. Marjane ‘Marji’ Statrapi’s coming-of-age story set against the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran is beautiful and simple and funny and utterly terrifying. I had the same reaction to it that I’ve had to well-executed puppet theatre or other representational theatre — the non-realistic portrayal somehow makes the themes and issues much clearer and more poignant. “Life couldn’t possibly be worse than it was under the Shah,” the characters believe, and then the mullahs move in and the war with Iraq begins. Even when her parents send her away to escape the horrors of the regime, Marji is still defined by Iran, by what her family has suffered and lost.
She’s a few years older than my oldest son, and while he was spending his childhood and adolescence looking for the next ballgame-party-adventure with his friends, she spent most of hers afraid, for herself and for everyone she loved, several of whom were executed by the various regimes. Sent to Vienna by her frightened parents, she falls in with a bored, alienated crowd of Holden Caulfieldesque students, and eventually lashes out at them for their indifference to what was happening in the world.
I wonder if any generation in the West is ever really aware of what is going on around them? I remember being absolutely astonished by Apocalypse Now, with its violent, nihilistic portrait of Viet Nam. “Was that really what was going on?” I wondered. And I read a book a few years ago called Hungry Ghosts that argued that, while my friends and I were playing hopscotch and discovering boys and going to our first junior high school dances, tens of millions of Chinese peasants were starving to death trying to fulfill Mao’s public relations stunt of exporting grain to other “poorer” nations. (A hungry ghost is the bottom rung of hell in Chinese mythology, doomed to wander, starving, through eternity.) As many as 50 million or more Chinese people may have died, which I suppose could put Stalin and Hitler in second and third place as the 20th century’s bloodiest regimes.
Posted in Politics, The media, Women | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Iran, Persepolis
May 2, 2008
Saturday is the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the little British girl abducted from a Portuguese hotel room while her parents ate dinner just a few steps away. While I expect many Americans are aware of the tragedy, the British are absolutely transfixed by it, and they have been utterly savaging the couple, particularly the mother, Kate. “What mother leaves her child alone in a hotel room?” they demand. I watched the McCanns on the BBC this morning, patiently enduring the same abrupt questions and stinging criticisms they have been subjected to from the beginning, trying to keep the story — and the search — alive.
Um, excuse me, but would all you parents out there who have done something INCREDIBLY STUPID whilst rearing your offspring, please raise your hand? (Oh, COME ON! It’s not only ME!) Just leaving my younger son in the care of his older brother, I discovered, put both of them at risk. (I’ve come home and wiped up blood off the floor, trust me.) I’m just fortunate that my stupidity didn’t result in anything tragic. When I look at the McCanns, I immediately think how easily it could have been me or any number of my friends and relatives. You only have to let your guard down or be distracted for just a moment..
To mark the anniversary, the McCanns have launched a new campaign to try to find Madeleine and other missing children. I was surprised to find that the British do not have an equivalent of an Amber Alert, which has so far helped save some 400 missing American children and is apparently fairly low-cost and low-maintenance.
I’m for giving the McCanns a break and putting all that negative energy into finding out what happened to their little girl. Oh, I know a lot of people, including the Portuguese police, think the McCanns are somehow responsible for her disappearance. But there’s scant proof of that, and it doesn’t help get anyone closer to finding any answers. Or Madeleine.
Update. Be careful what you write about your parenting skills.
Posted in Parenting, The media | 1 Comment »
Tags: Amber Alert, Madeleine McCann, Parenting
April 23, 2008
The news just keeps getting worse and worse for our girl Katie Couric, who also suffered the “indignity” of turning 50 last year (which, as a woman in her field, is just short of death itself):
The “CBS Evening News” attracted an average of 5.39 million viewers last week, placing the newscast more than two million viewers behind the second-place “World News with Charles Gibson” on ABC (7.51 million). The “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” ranked No. 1 for the week with 8.17 million viewers..
Two weeks ago, multiple reports said that Ms. Couric and CBS have discussed a potential departure from the “Evening News” after the presidential election. Perhaps some viewers read all the accounts of Katie Couric’s uncertain future at CBS News — and surmised that her evening newscast wasn’t worth watching.
I cannot believe this is all her fault. CBS News was already in the mud up to its axles over Dan Rather’s disastrous story about Bush’s National Guard service, and audiences for all the major network new programs have been shrinking for years thanks to the rise of cable news and the Internet. When I stagger home from work and flip on the TV, I seem to find a lot of “old” news on these highly touted nightly broadcasts. They’re far from my first or most significant source of information. We’re long past the Walter Cronkite era.
In terms of a career move, Couric could not have turned it down. At nearly 50, with a five-year, $15 million-a-year contract, she became one of the highest-paid newscasters in television history, male or female. Not many middle-aged women get that kind of opportunity, and she can’t possibly second-guess that decision.
She somehow could not make the transition from “perky” (a word she hates) to “powerful,” a transition which Barbara Walters has seemed to make more successfully — or am I just imagining it?
I am still stuck to the thought that my generation is showing signs that it cannot bear to watch women age, a specter Rush Limbaugh raised with Hillary. (See my previous post.) Did we really think that we would stay young forever?
Posted in The media, Women | 4 Comments »
Tags: katie couric, Media, Women
April 20, 2008
At last, some good news about the March of Time:
Americans grow happier as they grow older, according to a University of Chicago study that is one of the most thorough examinations of happiness ever done in America. The study also found that baby boomers are not as content as other generations, African Americans are less happy than whites, men are less happy than women, happiness can rise and fall between eras, and that, with age the differences narrow.
The increase in happiness with age is consistent with the “age as maturity hypothesis,” [author Yang] Yang said. With age comes positive psychosocial traits, such as self-integration and self-esteem; these signs of maturity could contribute to a better sense of overall well-being.
As for his finding that baby boomers are less satisfied with their lives?
“This is probably due to the fact that the generation as a group was so large, and their expectations were so great, that not everyone in the group could get what he or she wanted as they aged due to competition for opportunities. This could lead to disappointment that could undermine happiness,” Yang said.
So maybe we BBs will mellow with age, eh? It wasn’t enough that we got to slurp up more than our fair share of planetary resources, and that the media and the marketplace have been catering to our every whim since we were toddlers? We didn’t get to be Meryl Streep or Bill Gates or Carly Simon or Magic Johnson or Bill Clinton? We didn’t all get our hearts’ desires? Poor things, we.
As I used to tell my children, let’s just be happy anyway, okay?
Posted in Adventures at midlife, The media | Leave a Comment »
Tags: baby boomers, happiness
April 14, 2008
Okay, once again the NYTimes has verbalized one of my deepest fears: Will Lifetime change Project Runway? I mean, this is LIFETIME, for cryin’ out loud, that desert of weepy made-for-TV soap operas (most of them starring Kellie Martin or Lisa Hartman Black) and “Golden Girls” reruns. (I’d love to see their viewer demographics…) I could see PR moving to WE, which boasts a little edgier menu, including such titillating titles as “Secret Lives of Women” and “Women Behind Bars,” but Lifetime?
According to the Times, Lifetime has already taped testimonials from Heidi and Tim aimed at quelling our fears about the move, and promises it will not change PR one jot nor tittle. But are its viewers up for the likes of Christian Sirano or Jay McCarroll? Bravo just seemed like a better fit.
Update: And now Gawker weighs in on the controversy.
Posted in Fashion, The media, Women | 1 Comment »
Tags: Fashion, Project Runway
April 8, 2008
And for those of us whose lives are now weary, stale, flat and unprofitable with the conclusion of Season Four of Project Runway, the NYTimes offers a sliver of hope. (And Bravo’s parent company NBC is HOPPING mad at the Weinsteins for trying to sell the Peabody-winning show out from under them.)
It’s a cat fight! Stay tuned!
Posted in Fashion, The media | 1 Comment »
Tags: Fashion, Project Runway
