Can’t We All Just Get Along (Again)?

By Lawrence Schubert

Is the World Cup over yet?

Can I come out of my room?

Have they stopped blowing those funny horns?

Is it safe to sign onto Facebook again? 
(Or as safe as it ever was?)

 There was a story in the L.A. Times about a guy named Jose who was wearing his Mexican flag bandana during the W-Cup games, but he felt compelled to explain, after being grilled by that newspaper’s intrepid reporter, that he was only doing it for sporting reasons. He loves being an American and last year when he attended the Immigrants’ Rights Day rally in downtown L.A., he wore his American flag bandana. If I was looking for an argument, I’d say: So, Jose-let me get this straight. When you’re complaining, you’re an American, and when you’re a sports enthusiast, you’re a Mexican. But I’m not looking for an argument. Jose looked pretty hot and I’d love to meet him on Olvera Street and buy him a cerveza. They need the business and I need the company.

  Why can’t we all just get along? God knows we haven’t quite sunk to the level of paranoia they have in Arizona, but there is still that subtle suspicion lurking behind all these “Where are your real loyalties?” stories that there is a secret Mexican plot afoot to reclaim California (aka the Northern Territories), install Lupillo Rivera as El Presidente and put all us gringos in prison camps where we will be forced to listen to narcocorridos 24/7.

  Shortly after that the Armenians will probably annex Glendale and claim it for the restored Armenian Empire. My bank branch is chock full of them-it’s like some weird Armenian diaspora. They must be up to something, even if they didn’t have a team to cheer for in the WC. They’ve produced at least one great filmmaker, Sergei Paradjanov, and even if he doesn’t have his own jersey, any one of his films is worth a cabinet full of World Cup cups, or whatever they hand the victor in that sweaty jersey mashup.    

   Forget the W-Cup, let’s hear it for the D-Cup.

   Or, as Russ Meyer would have it, the Double-D.

   Why must everything in life be in opposition?

   Why can’t we be happy unless someone else is miserable? I guess it’s because you can’t be a winner unless someone else is a loser. Maybe that’s why I never had much affinity for sports, and never warmed up to “American Idol.” I’d have been a lousy cheerleader for the gladiators at the old Roman Colosseum. If they were all as hot as Russell Crowe (used to be) I’d have asked them all out for a cup of grog and then back to my place for a lusty game of charades. No need to get all bloody and bruised, unless role-playing turns you on.

   I go to the opera. At the opera they don’t cheer the soprano and hiss the baritone. They cheer everyone. That’s probably why operas run so long-they cheer after every aria. They cheer lustily. And at the end, the audience cheers again, and stands up, and cheers the conductor, and the whole cast right down to the extras, and even the third flute, who probably didn’t even play, he’s just there because he’s union. And then everyone goes home, exhausted, mainly because it takes a half hour to get out of the parking garage, but also exhilarated, and humming.

   You never hear about post-opera revelers running amok, looting and pillaging Grand Avenue, not even after Achim Freyer’s recent and controversial Wagner Ring cycle. Maybe it’s because they were tapped out by the average five-hour running time per installment. But a Lakers game probably clocks in at roughly the same length, and look at how that turned out. More Wotan, less Kobe, for a more peaceful planet.

   And what is it with these Russian spies amongst us? I thought that “We will bury you” crap ended after we tore down “that wall.” We’ve already buried ourselves, so what could they possibly be looking for? The secret of how to wage two wars badly at the same time? How to get absolutely nothing done politically at all? Or is it that Holy Grail of American ingenuity, the secret formulation for Coca-Cola?

   Can’t we all just get along? No one ever “wins” at Fashion Week-they just fight for the good seats and the goody bags.

   More silk jersey and less soccer jersey for a more peaceful planet.

   Down with the W-Cup. Up with the C-cup, the D-cup, and the Double-D.

   Can’t we all just get along? Can’t we all just cop a feel?

   Is the World Cup over yet?

  

  

   

I Will Dance at Your Funeral

by Lawrence Schubert

“The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out

The ones that crawl in are lean and thin

The ones that crawl out are fat and stout

Be merry my friends be merry…”

                                    -Traditional

People think that I am being perverse when I say that I enjoy funerals and despise weddings. I scoff at your nuptials, I tell friends, but I will dance at your funeral. This is neither perverse nor morbid. It is a plain fact that nothing incites depression more than other people’s happiness (and in-laws), and nothing is so uplifting as other people’s trials and tribulations.

   All loving couples contemplating marriage should elope. They would save their families vast expense and spare their friends a great deal of annoyance. But upon dying, I say cram the house and don’t spare the buffet.

  When I was a younger man, I lived for a spell with my grandparents. I found it quite amusing that my grandfather drank his morning coffee while perusing the obituaries. Now I do the exact same thing; with only one, small difference. My grandfather read the Newark Star Ledger: He was looking for news of people that he knew. I read the Los Angeles Times: I do not expect to see my friends or acquaintances eulogized therein. I am looking for news of people I have admired, or those I have never known.

   You will never read a complete report of a person’s life in any newspaper until that person is dead. Only in death will people finally give you a break. Or take long-deserved notice of you. Usually because they are so surprised to find out that you were not already deceased that they are seized with a momentary, involuntary spasm of goodwill and generosity.

  I have not thought of Art Linkletter, who died last week at age 97, often in my life. As a child I toured CBS Television City and the studio where he taped his long-running show “House Party,” the one that spawned his signature book, “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” I still don’t believe all those little shavers weren’t prompted when they came up with lines like “My mother does a little housework then reads the Racing Form the rest of the day,” or the boy who wanted to be an octopus so that he could hit bullies with his “testicles.” It was amusing how he was always prodding children to say something naughty, but by accident, so that it was cute. Amusing and a tad subversive, and America ate it up because it was the “Candid Camera” era, a kinder/gentler “gotcha” culture than today’s YouTube and reality TV horror shows.

   I remember Linkletter mostly for the “Merrie Melodies” send-up of his earlier show, “People Are Funny.” In the Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny cartoon he is parodied as Art Lamplighter, and hosts a show called “People Are Phony.” I remember him also as the secondary butt of an early John Waters cinema provocation from 1970, “The Diane Linkletter Story,” starring Divine as his ill-fated daughter who jumped to her death from a 6^th floor window-a tragedy her father blamed on LSD. Linkletter sued to prevent the Waters’ film from being shown, which of course accorded it instant cult status.

   When I read his obituary, I discovered that Linkletter was quirkier and cooler than I ever gave him credit for. When he was in his 80s, someone asked him the secret of longevity. “You live between your ears,” he replied. “You can’t turn back the clock, but you can rewind it.” And after his daughter’s death, though he had initially embraced a wide-ranging anti-everything drug policy (he, like Elvis, became an advisor to Richard Nixon), he eventually modified his position and in 1972 announced he had concluded that marijuana was relatively harmless and that law-enforcement officials should spend their time concentrating on hard drugs. Four decades past, Linkletter took the same position that is about to be put to a vote in the upcoming California state elections. And he was a Republican.

   Less well known, but more frequently in my thoughts, was mathematician, writer and bon-vivant Martin Gardner, who also passed last week, he at age 95. Gardner was one of those quintessential American characters who brought his own unique perspective to whatever he touched. Mathematics and math puzzles were his lifetime forte, but he was also renowned for his “Annotated Alice in Wonderland,” not to mention more esoteric fare such as his “Annotated Casey at the Bat” and his 1998 continuation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, “Visitors From Oz.” If a mind like Gardner’s was a pool I would dive in and happily drown.

   And let us not forget Doris Eaton Travis, the “last Ziegfeld girl,” who died recently at age 106, making Gardner & Linkletter look like refugees from “Cocoon 3.” That we shall never see her like again is as much an understatement as saying that the old Penn Station in New York City was vastly superior to the current one.

  So, to recap: Kids say the darndest things, a pretty girl is like a melody, and the universe is made of numbers. It’s a wonderful life, death be not proud-but only when a life is concluded can it be measured and appreciated in its totality.

  Death touches everyone, marriage only the unlucky.

  Strike up the band. I will dance at your funeral. 

Doris Eaton Travis: the “last Ziegfeld Girl”

Postscript: Since this epistle was completed, death has claimed actor Dennis Hopper (age 74) and artist Louise Bourgeois (age 98). The former, like many contemporary actors, appears to have so fascinated himself that I find little to interest me, which is not to diminish his suffering or the loss felt by those who knew him better. The latter’s life speaks to the sustaining force of a creative mind. And lost in the shuffle between the easy rider and the spider woman was the cameraman’s cameraman William Fraker, dead at 86. Fraker began his career with “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and went on to compile a resume that included “Rosemary’s Baby” and “American Hot Wax,” though he is best remembered for his “fasten your seatbelts” cinematography for the 1968 “Bullitt.” If that’s not proof of evolution, I don’t know what is.

   

Death marches on, but we do not celebrate death, only the dead.  

The Perils of Sex Past 40: An Occasional Series

By Lawrence Schubert

WHAT PART OF “NO” DID YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

The news that Viagra may cause hearing loss in users strikes me as very convenient for men, and may help to explain why so many old horndogs don’t seem to hear their wives when they say: Let’s not and say we did.

http://doctor.ndtv.com/storypage/ndtv/id/004479/Viagra_may_cause_hearing_loss.html

Beyonce may have the moves, but Maureen can run sentences around her any day.

By Lawrence Schubert


MAUREEN DOWD considers the situation of single ladies and comes up with a much more empowering answer to the situation than BEYONCE KNOWLES did. And why would we expect any less from the auburn-tressed word vixen of the NY Times?
  
“Men, generally more favored by nature as they age, can be single at all ages. But often, for women, once you’re 40 or 50, or simply beyond childbearing age, you’re no longer single. You’re unmarried…..”

LINK:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/opinion/19dowd.html?src=me&ref=homepage

FOREVER YOUNG: QUELLE HORREUR!

By Lawrence Schubert

I recently celebrated a most inauspicious birthday-57.

 Having said that, I now feel like Margo Channing in “All About Eve” when she admits that she is 40. “Lloyd, I'm not twenty-ish, I'm not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. Four O. That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.” So here I stand, naked in public, like someone in a Spencer Tunick photograph. I just hope the lighting is forgiving.

   There’s no sense in trying to hide it: It’s already on the public record. I am one of those guileless fools who entered his complete birthdate—month, day and year—when I joined Facebook. That was before I realized that F-Book is the Peter Pan adjunct of the Internet where everyone is ageless, like Matthew Rolston, who has been using the same Contributor’s photograph in magazines for the last two or three decades-and even when he started it was at least ten years out of date.

    I recently heard someone of advanced age described on the radio in an infuriatingly popular and condescending manner as “80 years young.” That the person described was a seasoned symphony conductor, and not some aging Hollywood starlet raging, raging against the dying of the light, and that I heard it on KUSC and not on “Showbiz Tonight,” made it even more execrable. Of course the opposite, “80 years old,” is almost as bad. We either try to deny aging or bury the living alive in America. Europeans have a much more sensible phrase: 80 anni. The middle ground is always the most sensible, but since we have no middle ground in America, and hardly even a middle class anymore, of course it goes unconsidered.

   To be forever young: Quelle horreur! It seems to be the unblinking goal of most of the entertainment industry, a pernicious pastime that has spread like a virus to large portions of a population hypnotized by its products.

   One would think that by now we would have learned the lesson of such cautionary tales as Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” published 1890, or Robert Zemeckis’s film “Death Becomes Her,” released approximately a century later. 

   Forever fit: yes, please. Forever useful, forever engaged: better yet. Even forever chic, as superficial as that is: Why the hell not? No one ever said that one has to age in dowdiness, wrapped in a Slanket and trundling about in one of those goddamned Rascals. When the legs give out, get a fucking rocking chair, knit, and await the end in dignity.

   For a few minutes in the last century, before Tina tarted it up and Graydon cauterized it, Vanity Fair used to have covers with photographs of real people with real faces. Wrinkles and all, they were captured with surgical precision by the likes of Irving Penn, who mapped the visages of artists and intellectuals like a cartographer. Nowadays the portraiture purveyed by practically everyone except National Geographic owes more to porn than Penn. The old VF epitomized what used to be the East Coast standard of Aging with Dignity (and hopefully, money; LOTS of money) as opposed to the West Coast standard of Aging with Surgery. (And money, lots of money. Some values are just universal.)

  It is a dichotomy now mostly superseded by the bicoastal cult of celebrity, but well summed up by Neil Simon’s snappy badinage in “California Suite,” the playwright’s 1978 examination of East vs. West, no better encapsulated than in the “bantering” between Jane Fonda’s Hannah Warren and her-ex husband Bill (played by Alan Alda) as to who will raise their teenage daughter, Jenny, who has fled her domineering, careerist mother to seek refuge with her mellow dad, reborn in the palm latitudes of Southern California.

Hannah: When you haven't seen your ex-husband in nine years, your eyes have to... adjust. You look so... what is the word?

Bill: Happy

Hannah: [ignores his reply] Casual. What have you done to your hair? You look like the sweetest, 16 year-old boy. (Steps back, examining him) I’ll bet they call you Billy… (He looks at her without answering) They do, don’t they? (She glances at his tennis outfit.) And I love your California clothes. Where do you get them?

Bill: At Bloomingdales. That’s the best place for California clothes.

Hannah: I suppose if Jenny stays she'll grow up to look like that. Blonde hair. Blonde teeth. Blonde life.

   Of course, since “California Suite” the distinction between Eastern intelligentsia and Left Coast vapidity has gradually dissolved. The hottest after-party on Oscar night is Vanity Fair’s. Nowadays everyone wants blonde teeth, if not a blonde life. But age is still the great divider.  Still, I’d rather be cool like Betty White than Kool-Aid like Justin Bieber. Granted, I prefer the taut skin of a twink to the crepe paper of an octogenarian, but you can’t always get what you want. The flesh withers but the soul is eternal, and Olay Regenerist is available at Rite-Aid for a fraction of the cost of the high-priced creams, with visible results in just 30 days.

   The last Ziegfeld girl just died at age 106, and I’ll bet she never took Boniva.

   Here’s to aging with integrity, and an elastic spirit, if not elastic skin.

LOOKING UP GRANNY'S SKIRT

By Lawrence Schubert


Far be it from we mere mortals @ 40ToLife to tell any women when her G-spot should be retired, or at least, put into a good assisted living program, but the thought (and nothing else) did arise when we stumbled across this bit  of senior citizen salaciousness from across the pond titled “Sophia Loren: How To Smoulder When You’re Older.”

God love Sophia, and she is holding together well (that, or she has a great support garment) but we feel a little creepy looking up the skirt of someone who is someone else’s grandma. Alright, so those pattern-baldness Ponti boys of hers look older than she does, and she did do the Pirelli calendar a year or two ago en dishabille, but the Pirelli calendar uses high-art photographers and hangs in garages and the Daily Mail is newsprint and is used to wrap fish. Besides, Sharon Stone already kinda creeps us out-and she’s only what…52??


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1257085/How-smoulder-youre-older-Sophia-Loren-75.html

Give the funny old man some pie

Comedian and magician PENN GILLETTE, who recently celebrated his “magical” birthday (that once-in-a-lifetime event when your age and your birth year are the same-in this case, 55 for Mr. Gillette) ruminates in the LA Times on the experience of becoming “the old guy,” and how it is easier to face ageing when you weren’t really good-looking in the first place. (Hat tip to Bruce Springsteen-60 anni and recent AARP Magazine cover boy.) Mr. Gillette confirms what 40 To Life has known all along: There is life after 40-even 50, and the candle sometimes burns brightest when it is halfway down.



http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-jillette12-2010mar12,0,7294106.story