Baby Boom – Page 5 – Don't Gel Too Soon

My Friend Laurie: the Post I Never Wanted to Write

“Inside you someplace” laughed my friend Laurie, “lives a 16-year-old boy!” We were talking about cyber fiction; I was trying to explain my attraction to this geeky, otherworldly material to the only person who would really understand what I was talking about.

I’ve known her since the early 80s, when I produced her appearance on TODAY; she had come to discuss her masterful LA Times Salvadoran death squads series. Our friendship deepened in the years I lived in LA, her long-time home. We were both major Web freaks. After all, both of our minds bounced around like the facts on the Web (often to the confusion of those with whom we were speaking.) We were struggling to, between us, get enough information to understand how this astounding Internet worked. Laurie found The Electronic Cafe, an arts space in Santa Monica that hosted speakers ranging from the EP of The Legend of Zelda to the founder of Earthlink. We were on our way. It was thrilling.

We never stopped talking when we were together – circling around topics, bouncing to other ones then back to the first — or third. We never got lost and were always intoxicated by the messy exchange that was our conversation, sometimes joined by her husband Henry Weinstein and their daughter Elizabeth.

They were, Laurie called it, “a triad.” From the beginning Elizabeth was an active partner in their lives; the “adult” events, the travel, the baseball, the cooking and, lucky for all of us, the time spent with parental pals. The three of them were a beautiful thing.

When she decided high school journalists needed more resources, she founded, from sheer determination (i.e. with hardly any money) Associated Student Press, to help high school reporters learn the rules, skills and sheer joy of journalism. I worked with her on a couple of their events, including a high school journalism convention, and it was so great; the kids loved it. We did too. I knew the depth of her affinity for teenagers because she had become a real friend and mentor, quite independent of us, to our younger son. It was a friendship he treasures to this day. She and Henry came to his wedding.

Laurie Becklund died on February 8th of metastatic breast cancer. She used every reporting skill she’d ever learned to locate experts, treatment and allies and I believe extended her life through her fierce determination. In the past year, she applied that determination to advocacy for people with advanced disease and the need for “big data” tools to aggregate and parse new information and the effect of new treatments to help find trends and flaws in treatments, drugs and drug trials. She also challenged researchers, in talks and in person “We have the cells to help your research. Use us.” She called her campaign Use Us or Lose Us.

(I’m telling you about her post-newspaper years. You can read about Laurie as an award-winning journalist here in this LATimes profile and other stories that will, I’m sure, keep coming.)

On the day she finally told me that her cancer had returned, Laurie sat in my car as we drove out of the driveway and said “Don’t put the sun visor down. I don’t want to waste any chances to look at the trees.” As I struggle to write this post, I think of that afternoon and her hunger for everything from a beautiful view to a cool new technology to visit to a new country to a personal story gleaned from a conversation. She was full of courage and curiosity and loyalty; she was a gifted mother and wife and friend; she was — Laurie.

We are about to leave for Los Angeles for her memorial service. I have been so haunted and sad; it’s very hard to write this. I’m hoping to find some — some something — as we join what I know will be a crowd of people who Laurie, Henry and Elizabeth so generously included in their lives. When I told one friend how sad I was, she wrote “I wish you comfort in your memories.” Yes.

The traditional Jewish version is “May her memory be a blessing.” That it certainly is.

Jules et Jim: That Was MY Song!

Jules and Jim. One the best movies ever. Really. Ever. Certified. Directed by Francois Truffaut and released in 1962, it appears on several best films lists and was, it is written, the biggest success of the influential French New Wave. The story of two men and one woman, all of whom love one another, and Paris, and World War I, and friendship, it is wry and romantic and original and wonderful.

And that song! Listen to it just above here, and watch Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre as Moreau sings Cyrus Bassiak’s Le Tourbillion. The song did not deserve to be amputated and appropriated. It, and the emblematic film, have always stood for a time, a dream, a view of war and life, friends and love — and Paris.

Then TurboTax, a pox upon them, came along and stole it. Probably not technically; I’m sure they paid for permission to stick it into a dumb commercial about tax deductions and weddings. I am NOT posting or linking to it here. One less place you have to see it.

Of course there’s nothing to be done. There never is. There are scholarly books about it. And we know it works, or they wouldn’t do it, right? But oh what a violation.

Many commercials have used popular songs to strengthen the marketing message conveyed. When a commercial uses a popular song well, the music is aligned with the visual imagery and words. It creates a synchronized message that brands hope will induce purchase of their products. by David Mitchel, Vice President of Marketing at Norton Mitchel Marketing on Duetsblog

This is not my first musical outrage. I refused for years to buy Nikes for my sons because they were using Revolution in their 1987 commercial. (Only later did I learn how mean that really was; they had so wanted those shoes…) and that the Beatles, who had sold the song rights to Michael Jackson, had sued Nike [who had legitimate rights] to get the thing off the air.) The lawsuit finally wore everyone out and the ad stopped running but it had aired for a long time. Here’s the commercial:

Of course by now every song we’ve ever loved has been exploited — er, I mean licensed — to sell something. I can remember doing a story when the trend revived in the late 80’s and interviewing plenty of high-profile musicians who were devastated that their songs had been appropriated and others who were happy for the money. Some no longer owned their catalogues and had no control over how their music was used.

I get it. It’s part of capitalism and all that. It’s just that, once in a while, it feels like they go too far (if that’s possible) and use something that meant too much, at least to me.

Paris to Strawberry Fields to City Hall: Needing Each Other

It was impossible to watch Sunday’s enormous march through traumatized Paris with any detachment; events that touch us all invariably drive us to gather, so we felt it too. Stating the obvious, certainly, but, as I grow older and my inventory of remembered public sadness grows — JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Oklahoma City, 9/11 — it remains remarkable.

I am somewhere in this crowd, gathered for a vigil and moment of silence six days after the assassination of John Lennon. Imagine all the people, living life in peace he wrote. Grief and anger at his loss drew us then, as, so many years later, grief and anger summoned the people of Paris.

I am somewhere in this crowd, too: another Sunday, in 2014, 34 years later. We’re in San Francisco, not Paris, but once more have come together, a continent and an ocean away from the millions in France. We too mourn, and rage, and join together for comfort — but look. Thirty four years later, John Lennon is still present, asking the same questions, demanding, even as we mourn, that we do better.

That’s How I Got to Memphis – Music and the News

Will, Charlie's grandson and Jim sing That's How I Got to Memphis — Will, Charlie’s grandson and Jim sing That’s How I Got to Memphis

Stuck in my head ever since the end of The Newsroom, this song really seems to want to spend today with me, which would be fine if it didn’t make me so sad.

It won’t matter much if you didn’t like the show, or if music doesn’t carry you forward and back or if you don’t mourn the decline of integrity as a core value of journalism, but the use of it at a funeral for Charlie Skinner, (Sam Waterston,) the keeper of the flame, the leader who defended the honor of every journalist and story, is a spectacular metaphor. YouTube won’t let me embed it, but here it is if you have the patience to link, it’s worth it.

Aaron Sorkin says Charlie represented the loss of decency offered by each of us to the rest of us, but for me, as Newsroom closed down, he stood for the rules that made journalism credible and critical to our country*; rules eroded in surrender to commerce and coarseness and fear. Even so, The Newsroom closed with the first moment of yet another day’s show. As Sorkin said, “They’re going to keep doing the news.” It will, though, be with the loss of just a little more of the combination of honor and power, the Charlie Skinner, that had protected them, and us, for so long.

*The Atlantic called it a funeral for “old media” but I’ve lived in “new media” for decades now and the show wasn’t about that change – at least not to me.

Ferguson, Age, and Loss

Very seldom do I notice my age. But as I have read the outpouring of grief and rage (which I share) over the Michael Brown grand jury verdict, I am deeply aware of the decades I lived before most of these friends, and other writers who are otherwise strangers, were born. Things they learned about, but I lived through.

With deep sadness and disgust, I watched Robert McCullough in his starched white shirt and dark suit with his half-glasses perched on his nose like a college professor and knew what he would say. His endless prologue foretold what was coming with an ego and naked self-interest that was dreadful to see. But it wasn’t a surprise. I expected nothing else.

I remember the murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner,, (see Awesomely Luvvie) of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, Viola Liuzzo. Brutality, incarceration, death. I remember George Wallace in the school-house door,

and Willie Horton

and the ads that NC Sen. Jesse Helms, in a re-election bid, ran against African-American candidate Harvey Gantt .
I remember scores more for every one of these.

It’s really terrible to witness, and share, the heartbreak described by so many I love. Read this post by Kelly Wickham that expands on that, or this by Rita Arens. Or go back and hit the #ferguson and #blacklivesmatter hashtags one more time if you can bear it. A Greek chorus of agony.

I am by no means connecting this weariness of mine with reasons to stop taking action and writing and reaching out and making noise. No. I’m just thinking about how different it feels when you’ve sat in front of black and white TVs and listened on transistor radios the first times you learned of each desperately painful incident of even the past half century. We know we will keep working, trying. Even so, how hard it is to feel shock or surprise or anything other than a bone-chilling validation of the presence of those ugly creatures of hate and injustice that still hide between the stars and stripes that represent our country.

John Kennedy, Barack Obama, 2 Inaugurations and 2 Generations of Dreamers REDUX

I wrote this piece right before the Obama Inauguration. This, the 51st anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, seems like a good day to share it again.

I seem to be living in the WayBack Machine this year. Lots of memories of 1968 and even 1963. Now as January 20, 2009 approaches, yet anotherlooms. January 20, certainly, but in 1961.

See that crowd? Somewhere, way in the back, probably at least a block beyond, stand an almost-fifteen-year-old girl and her mother. Fresh off an overnight train from Pittsburgh, having arrived at Union Station in time to watch the Army flame-throwers melt a blizzard’s worth of snowon the streets of the inaugural route, they make their way to their parade seats: in the bleachers, way down near the Treasure Building.

I spent most of 1960 besotted with John Kennedy. And Jackie. And Caroline. And all the other Kennedys who came with them. Most of my lunch money went to bus fare as, after school, I shuttled back and forth “to town” to volunteer in the local JFK headquarters. I even had a scrapbook of clippings about Kennedy and his family.

So. My parents surprised me with these two parade tickets. My mom and I took the overnight train and arrived around dawn Inauguration morning. We couldn’t get into the swearing-in itself, of course, so we went to a bar that served breakfast (at least that’s how I remember it) and watched the speech on their TV, then made our way along the snowy sidewalks to our seats, arriving in time to watch the new president and his wife roll by, to see his Honor Guard, the last time it would be comprised solely of white men (since Kennedy ordered their integrationsoon after,) in time to see the floats and the Cabinet members and the bands and the batons.

It was very cold. We had no thermos, no blankets, nothing extra, and my mom, God bless her, never insisted that we go in for a break, never complained or made me feel anything but thrilled. Which I was. As the parade drew to a close, and the light faded, we stumbled down the bleachers, half-frozen, and walked the few blocks to the White House fence. I stood there, as close to the fence as I am now to my keyboard, and watched our new president enter the White House for the first time as Commander in Chief.

That was half a century ago. I can’t say it feels like yesterday, but it remains a formidable and cherished memory. It was also a defining lesson on how to be a parent; it took enormous love and respect to decide to do this for me. I was such a kid – they could have treated my devotion like a rock star crush; so young, they could have decided I would “appreciate it more” next time. (Of course there was no next time.) Instead, they gave me what really was the lifetime gift of being a part of history. And showed me that my political commitment had value – enough value to merit such an adventure.

Who’s to say if I would have ended up an activist (I did)- and then a journalist (I did) – without those memories. If I would have continued to act within the system rather than try to destroy it. (I did) If I would have been the mom who took kids to Europe, brought them along on news assignments to Inaugurations and royal weddings and green room visits with the Mets (Yup, I did.) I had learned to honor the interests and dreams of my children the way my parents had honored my own. So it’s hard for me to tell parents now to stay home.

My good friend, the wise and gifted PunditMom, advises “those with little children” to skip it, and since strollers and backpacks are banned for security reasons, I’m sure she’s right.* But if you’ve got a dreamer in your house, a young adult who has become a true citizen because of this election, I’d try to come. After all, he’s their guy. What he does will touch their lives far more than it will ours. Being part of this beginning may determine their willingness to accept the tough sacrifices he asks of them – at least that – and probably, also help to build their roles as citizens – as Americans – for the rest of their lives. Oh — and will tell them that, despite curfews and learner’s permits, parental limit-setting and screaming battles, their parents see them as thinking, wise and effective people who will, as our new President promised them, help to change the world.

*I know, I thought of Christina-Taylor Greene as I re-read this too.

This post also appears in PunditMom’s Mothers of Intention: How Women & Social Media Are Revolutionizing Politics in America

Whole Foods, Whole Paycheck, Whole Antivax, Holy Cow!

. . . Whole Foods’ clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion… until they get to the parking lot. Then it’s war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker, which says ‘NAMASTE’. Poor lady didn’t even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther. Kelly MacLean on The Huffington Post

You know it’s true. I’ve asked many Whole Foods workers about the rude entitlement of so many of their customers and they roll their eyes and nod. Now there are efforts to organize these workers, against major C-Suite opposition, and it won’t be pretty.

It’s all starting to piss me off. Between the company, its image and its customers, it’s easy to get angry. I’m a Sixties product with all the baggage that that implies, including the right to organize, and basic kindness and respect from one person to another, but at my most granola I didn’t question the responsibility of public health, of immunization, first for me and later for my kids, and wasn’t predictable enough to produce this:

I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people. Science journalist and MIT professor Seth Mnookin in a 2011 interview

So here I am, cranky and irritated after an emergency trip to one of the many Whole Foods in the Bay Area, astonished at the alleged vaccine/Whole Foods connection and up to my ears in fair trade, cruelty free, organic, shade-grown, beautifully displayed, hugely costly foods, vegetable prices determined partly by the cost of workers piling and re-piling them in perfect order (not that it’s not pretty, it just seems so….)

These are cruel and dangerous times. We have substantial issues to confront. We should be healthy and well-fed when we face down these crises but how did we get to a place where it is also a virtue to be smug and self-satisfied about being able to do that?

I will be a proud Progressive with my last breath, but please try to get those rude, cart-pushy, deli-line crashing, parking place stealing people to behave a little more socially conscious about the people in their immediate environment (um, your store), oh Whole Foods, so the harmony you sell (see image at the top of this post) in your ads can emerge inside your stores, too.

Art, Truth, Feminism, JD Salinger, Lena Dunham and Sex

when: From Lena Dunham’s Website

Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days. If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.

Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling. It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.

Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty? It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:

Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.” (Seymour, an Introduction)

This Just In: The Longer You Live, the Older You Are!

Banksy seniors — Banksy’s view of older folk

They look like big insects with wheels, those people with walkers and canes. I pass so many of them on the streets. Every time, it gets scarier.

“That’s OK” I tell myself, “Lots of them are really obese, many are clearly far far older or looking it and some are obviously dealing with life-long disabilities. They need all those appliances. I don’t.” Even so, each time they pass I see, for the first time, not another species but a possible (perhaps inevitable) future.

We all age. Our grandsons are growing so fast; miss a week and they seem transformed. Our kids have somehow become men of 35 and almost 40! Younger people are more willing to reveal their resentment of those of us from the 60’s and 70’s. (“We’re just bitter because the media spent our formative years (well, the teen and college ones) calling us slackers and then our entire generation got known as a waste of space. It’s still mean about us! I think we are the hardest workers who will work until we drop dead.”)

I understand what that means, even though I disagree with much of it. I don’t mind the idea of aging; so far I’m pretty lucky in how I feel and what I can do and think and be. Even so, I know it all turns on an illness, or a fall, or a loss of strength or hearing or sight. I continue to see myself apart from those old people, but somewhere inside I know the truth. I can’t hide from it forever.

We all get old. We all change, sometimes decline and sometimes gain wisdom. Boomer or Millennial, Gen X or Y – all of us move along the continuum no matter how much we fight it. And no matter how long I sit here trying to finish this, I can’t find a way to make it any better.

Mo(u)rning in America: 2014

I spent W’s eight years in political despair. It was hard to watch the news or read the paper, harder still to think of all our fellow Americans without resources who would, and did, suffer on a very concrete level. Our kids were educated, our mortgage getting paid; we had work and health insurance and political and religious freedom but for many the pain of those years was personal.

Barack Obama’s election felt like the turning of a corner. This morning, as we face the unremitting and successful (and un-American and cruel and racist) assault on voting rights, the prospect of Joe McCarthy-like hearings in both bodies about almost everything that this president has been able to accomplish despite unprecedented, treasonous opposition, certain continued and brutal safety net cuts, violation of workers rights, a terrifying, determined erosion of the rights of women, a near-caliphate level of fundamentalism among even some of our newly elected members of Congress, the now-certain, veto-proof approval of the Keystone Pipeline, obscene power grabs by wealthy oligarchs and their ALEC, Americans for Prosperity operations not only nationally but state-by-state and unimaginable foreign policy attitudes, it’s a grim day.

Friends of mine have posted look-ahead messages and I admire them for it. For me, it’s going to take a little longer.