It happened to a Miss America winner. It happens today to one in every four girls, one in every six boys. And one big reason why: The adults in their lives are clueless about the kind of men who really abuse kids. (Hint: It’s not gay men.) The good news: With knowledge, predators can be identified, abuse can be prevented, kids can grow up unscarred. If you have a kid you care about, please watch this video. Then go to Darkness to Light and learn what you can do. Thank you.
Times of collective and personal crisis always afford the opportunity for great breakthroughs and transformations. In his new Esalen workshop, which starts August 30th, Jeffrey Rubin will share his tools for getting through — and, more, flourishing.
If you want a see a real film — original, brilliantly made, disturbing as hell, violent, but not a thrill ride for 14-year-olds — "District 9" is almost all that’s out there. [Watch the preview.] Some of you will realize it’s Childhood’s End turned upside down. It occurs to me that all of us might do well to read that Arthur C. Clarke novel.
Reading my review of Drink, Play, F@#k: One Man’s Search for Anything Across Ireland, Las Vegas, and Thailand, some have asked if I have a “problem” with Elizabeth Gilbert. Well, yes. Let’s ignore the possible calculation in the book’s content — I have an odd feeling that food, spirit and love are issues that resonant deeply with millions of dissatisfied middle-class white women, who are, as it happens, big book buyers — and consider her publishing deal. On one hand, I applaud any writer who can score a contract for writing about her next, as-yet-unlived year. On the other, as a reader noted, “Isn’t it amazing how she negotiated a fat book deal during her most profound spiritual and life crisis?” Finally — and chalk this up to intuition, which is often flawed — I don’t buy her story of the end of her marriage, not that I expect her ex-husband to correct it in his book.
My rant on health care inspired more reader comment than any piece in the five-year history of this site. I’m not surprised. Health care is a moral issue. An economic issue. And a national security issue — as a threat to the country, health care costs make terrorism look small. I didn’t expect to read so much agreement about gutter politics and irresponsible media. And I was saddened to read so much despair about the prospect of an intelligent political solution. But I was cheered that so many of you recognized that one way to fight this despair is to seek out beauty — like the Mozart violin concertos. Finally, a short history lesson on Leadership. I looked up John F. Kennedy’s 1961 confrontation with U.S. Steel, over its announcement of a price rise. You want to see executive power in action? Read this. Finally, thanks to all who understood that I wasn’t violating my no-politics covenant. If anyone has the right to bend the rules, I’m that guy — but I’m not doing it, and I don’t intend to.
Whether you liked John Updike’s writing or not, whether you cracked open his books or not — if you read nothing else this week, read his son’s eulogy. It’s gorgeous.
I’ve often thought that Malcolm Gladwell is too slick to be true, but I was agog when The New Yorker published his piece on “To Kill A Mockingbird”. The flaw was massive: He used 21st Century values to sneer at a novel that was published in 1960 and set in the South of the 1930s. Many of you wrote me, all angry with Gladwell. The most moving note, from Gretchen Morgan: “Coming of age in the 60s in Texas where ‘colored’ bathrooms still existed, it was hard to ‘do the right thing’ around race relations. Being white, I was called in to the Dean’s office in high school for walking around the halls with a black guy: Don Baylor, who ended up being a professional ball player and then a coach. If I had been righteously angry, it could have hurt Don’s future. Instead, I
broke down in tears in the dean’s office and then cried with Don later. We still interacted, just not quite as openly.
Should I have been more open about it? No. Did I feel guilty about it? Yes!”
In which every smart kid’s favorite film director becomes the pen pal — and friend — of a teenage fan. Read it and cheer.
Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia opens this weekend, aloft on the hopes of foodies, chick flick lovers and Ms. Ephron’s omnivorous publicity machine. I haven’t seen it, but from the trailer, I might be tempted to conclude that the film’s potential stumbling block is Meryl Streep as Julia Child: She’s neither the brilliant co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking or the woman in Child’s memoir, My Life in France — she’s Big Bird or, as an early viewer has noted, Mrs. Doubtfire. But on her very smart blog, Elizabeth Frank suggests the problem is Child’s young acolyte, Julie Powell: “Julie launches a blog because all of her college friends have flashy positions and shiny gadgets and she was the promising one in college; she was going to be a writer; she has ‘thoughts.’ She does, in fact, have a lot going for her, which makes her all the more exasperating. She has, for one thing, a bewilderingly loving husband who endures her constant jibes that she has ‘nothing,’ her sulking when no one reads her blog and her tantrum over a ruined stew to such an extent that his final breaking point provides the only crisis in the B plot.” And you? If you see it, please feel free to weigh in.
Joan Schenkar published Patricia Highsmith & Michael Jackson: How the Dark Lady of American Letters Met the Self-Styled King of Pop on these screens recently, and a great many people noticed — including the editors of the New York Times. Now the Highsmith comments about Jackson are the first item in this week’s “Inside the List” column in the Sunday Book Review. We blush. We thank Joan Schenkar again and look forward anew to her upcoming biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. And, as is our job description, we hold the door open in welcome for our new visitors.
I played it once. I played it twice. Now I can’t stop. It’s The Who. 1982. Eminence Front. Handle with care — this could be contagious.
If you’ve been reading the New York Times recently, you may have noticed unprecedented editorial coverage of Nora Ephron’s movie, ‘Julie & Julia’, which opens this Friday. Now Nikki Finke has published an eye-opening scorecard of the coverage. The curious among you may want to check back next Monday for the weekend box office gross, which might tell us something about the effectiveness of the paper’s cheerleading.
Not getting to Paris soon? Cheer up: The Louvre Museum is now online in an English version, with 22,000 images. Today I visited David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women. If only the virtual espresso could have been real and at the Café Marly.
My total bad. The singer-songwriter from Los Angeles — her most recent CD is Gun Metal Sky — made her first New York appearance in four years, and I, thinking the set involved just Lori and her piano/guitar, failed to tell you about it. Well, she came with a full kit, including a cellist and mandolin player, and she delivered her songbook with real power and feeling, and between songs, she was as relaxed and amusing as if she were playing in a living room. Promise: Next time you’ll be warned.
Every woman alive, it seems, has read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. But who knew the name of her former husband? Well, he’s Michael Cooper, and soon we’ll know much more about him — he’s just sold his memoir, "Displaced", to a publisher for publication in Fall, 2010. A news item: “Cooper offers the flip side of her tale — his account of overcoming the divorce and embarking on his own world journey. According to Hyperion, he goes on a ‘search for purpose’ that leads him through the Middle East and other developing countries.”
Because Joan Schenkar — author of The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, which will be published this fall — knows something that no one does: Highsmith, with her visionary’s sense of darkness, had, decades ago, written 30 words about Michael Jackson. Millions of words have been spewed about the King of Pop in the last few weeks. Highsmith’s brief take cuts through them. And Joan Schenkar generously sets those words up for us.
It seems every woman I know can hardly wait for August 7th, when civilians can finally see "Julie & Julia", Nora Ephron’s film about Julie Powell, a New Yorker who cooks her way through every recipe in Mastering the Art of french Cooking, Vol. 1, and Julia Child, who’s played by Meryl Streep. If you know anything about Child, the preview for ‘Julie & Julia’ will make you appreciate anew the phrase “based on”, for this Child is a distant cousin to the woman in Child’s memoir, My Life in France. Maybe she gets serious later in the film and somehow produces a book that revolutionizes French cooking, but in the preview, Ephron’s Child is a comic figure, a rudderless buffoon — Big Bird goes to Cordon Bleu. I’m sure audiences will be thrilled by Streep and charmed by Amy Adams as Julie Powell, but if you’re curious to know a story closer to the real one….read the book.
Louise Palanker — someone who actually knows something about Michael Jackson — has used her personal knowledge to profile him as the sad pervert he was. If you only know the King of Pop through his music, I encourage you to read this — and share it with other parents and Jackson fans. And then you might go right on to Darkness to Light to learn how to stop childhood sexual abuse.
It’s summer, and at the movies you mostly have a choice between PG-13 stupid and R-rated stupid. So it was a great relief to spend two hours with Michael Mann’s movie about 1930s bank robber John Dillinger. First, for Johnny Depp, who gives a dead-end loser enough sizzle so that, at the end, when the camera cuts from Depp to Clark Gable, it’s hard to say who’s cooler. And then for Mann’s visual style — blink, and you’re certain to miss a haunting image. I had some arguments with the script. And all men in fedoras do tend to look alike. Most of all, the violence is very tough to watch, in the way that real violence is tough to watch. But Mann’s take on the world is just as tough — who’s worse, you’ll ask yourself, the crooks or the cops — and if you’re looking for an adult movie, here you go. The trailer will either convince you — or not.
If you’re in the cult, you know — that’s Arthur Lee and Love, from their transcendent 1968 album, ‘Forever Changes’. For no reason, I’ve been singing their songs in my head for days; watch, and you’ll do the same. A primer on this sadly overlooked masterpiece is here.
