Elderism #35

That broth-like pall in the air up near Madison Avenue and 77th? Those downturned moustaches on the waiters in Times Square?

All is in hommage to the late, great Eartha Kitt–she who Orson Welles famously proclaimed “the most exciting woman alive,” prior to biting her; she who once told an Ebony reporter, “Don’t come to my house and expect to find Eartha Kitt.”

The illegitimate child of a black sharecropper mother, Kitt worked in cotton fields before honing her  comic persona of a kitten with an especially painful whip.  The famously outspoken actress-chanteuse temporarily derailed her career twice–in 1968 when she mouthed off to Ladybird Johnson about the Vietnam War, and in 1984 when she toured South Africa (Kitt pointed out that she played to mixed audiences and that the tour helped fund schools for black kids.)

A few years back, a friend of mine had the pleasure of meeting la Kitt to discuss a book project. They met at a cafe. Kitt ordered coffee, and when the waiter asked how she took it, Kitt stipulated,

“Integrated.”

(New York Times)

Pinteresque Pause

Elderism #34

Michael Riedel’s column in the New York Post today is about 86 year-old Broadway titan James M. Nederlander Sr.–whose bright red vest either says, “Merry Christmas” or “I am a riverboat gambler.”

Although the producer of “Annie,” “Nine,” Noises Off,” et al. is still involved in all the major decisions made in his theatrical empire, Nederlander points out his son and a longtime associate to Riedel and says, “I’m the past, they’re the future.” Then Riedel asks Nederlander if being “the past” bothers him, whereupon the man in the red vest replies,

“I accept the truth for what it is, my boy. The only trouble you have when you’re ‘the past’ is if you don’t know it.”

Elderism #33

Jim Brown, the running back for the NFL Cleveland Browns from 1957 to 1965 who never missed a game, is 72 now. He tells Esquire:

“I’m not a Martin Luther King and a Gandhi motherfucker. I don’t know what they were talking about. Spit on my ass and I’ll knock you out. I ain’t going to sing and march, man. But I’m fair.”

Elderism #32

From Charles Taylor’s review of Bruce Jay Friedman’s new book, “Three Balconies” in today’s New York Times Book Review: “A friend of mine had an uncle who, years after surviving a concentration camp, would respond to every petty inconvenience and irritation by exclaiming,

‘First the Holocaust. Now this!'”

Elderism #31

In the current issue of Esquire, composer Philip Glass–who doesn’t like the word “minimalist” applied to his music, but who cops to writing “music with repetitive structures”–talks about how experience trumps expectation:

“People always ask, ‘Is it what you thought it would be?’ And that’s a very interesting question because once you hear it in the air, so to speak, it’s almost impossible to remember what it was you imagined. The reality of the sound eclipses your experience. The solitary dreamer is wondering: Will the horns sound good here? Will this flute sound good there? But when you actually hear it, you’re certainly in a different place. The experience of that is my god.”

And then the 71 year-old goes farther, suggesting that not only do artists’ and athletes’ expectations of their work get erased by the work itself, but that, if these artists and athletes are really “in the moment” and laboring hard, they can’t remember the experience, either:

“[W]hen you’re really consumed with the act, the witness just disappears. And for that reason when someone asks, ‘What was it like?’ you can’t remember, because the person inside of you who does the remembering was otherwise occupied.”

Elderism #30

A lot of my gay friends hate Clint Eastwood because of his treatment of same-sexers in Mystic River. Indeed, some of Eastwood’s post-Unforgiven career moves have seemed a little…reckless, as Gail Sheehy points out in her interview with Eastwood in Parade this past weekend. Eastwood corroborates:

“When you’re young, you’re very reckless. Then you get conservative. Then you get reckless again.”

Sheehy tries to pinpoint the cause of this recklessness, asking the 78 year-old twice if he’s afraid of dying. (Eastwood punts both times, opting to talk about the death of his mother two years ago.) But Sheehy finally gets at the heart of the matter when she asks the screen legend if he’s worried that audiences may take offense at the racist character he plays in the upcoming Gran Torino. Eastwood responds,

“What can they do to you after 70?”

Elderism #29

I’ve always loved the seeming disparity between the highly stylized, incantatory prose of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and her more spontaneous public persona. A friend of mine who was a colleague of Morrison’s in the English department at Princeton once overheard Morrison–who used to bomb around campus in a tiny, red sportscar–telling someone in the faculty lounge,

“Honey, she’s not my friend–she’s my agent!”

There’s a Q and A with La Morrison in this month’s AARP wherein the 77 year-old explains that what she values in life now is humor:

“…what’s really important is humor–the way you see through things. And I don’t mean just ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ but real irony about the diabolical nature of things.”

Morrison’s interest in diabolicalism led her to set her new book about early American colonists and their slaves, A Mercy, in late 1600’s Virginia, long before slavery had ossified or even matured as an institution:

“I was very interested in separating racism from slavery. The assumption has always been, in this country, that [slavery] began with a few colonists, and then came the Africans, and that relationship is the reason for much of the slavery that still exists in this country. And I didn’t believe it, because nobody is born [a racist]. Racism is constructed. It was an insisted-upon protection for the landed and the aristocrats.”

How I Think Woody Allen Will Spend His 73rd Birthday Today

-Lamenting that the wealth of cholesterol in birthday cake is like a parka around your heart

-Listening to the Jupiter Symphony while vacuuming his bookshelves

-Editing a scene in which Scarlett Johansen tells him her feelings towards him are “complicated”

-Encouraging a small child to re-watch The Sorrow and the Pity

-Wondering if it’s possible to merge your liver spots into a tan

Elderism #28

Management guru Tom Peters–he’s the guy who co-wrote In Search of Excellence back in the 80’s–was interviewed by the Financial Times this weekend. He had this to say on the topic of accomplishment:

“Are you throwing enough spaghetti at the wall so that some of it will stick?…I had a neighbor who won a Nobel prize for his work on kidneys–he carried out the first effective transplant. I once asked him how he’d done it. ‘We did the most operations,’ he told me.”

Start throwing the noodles, people!