When uber-journalist Bibi Baskin was asked what she planned to be doing when she retired she replied, “Nothing.” It is a pursuit she has longed for. Still it is not always easy to do given the fierce demands of a society that values productivity above most else.
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Pamela Adlon’s riff on aging and the sudden changes of her body got us thinking about the need to turn ourselves into content to accept ourselves. Then we came upon Allen Ginsberg’s view.
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Nobel Prize winner Dr. Jim Allison’s headshot filling the back cover of a recent New Yorker got me thinking. Would that photo fly as a full-page ad if Dr. Jim were a woman?
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Actress Frances McDormand says so much that is wise about aging in this short interview. As does this poem by Fleur Adcock.
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We found several illuminating hunks in No Long Writing, Philip Roth Still has Plenty to Say, a New York Times interview with the legendary novelist, who retired from writing several years ago…
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We haven’t got a thing to add to artist Debra Rapoport’s perfect, powerful 111-word philosophy of living (except to make a big loud sign out of part of it):
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(Video link here.) The Lumineers’ short, moving video Cleopatra tells many stories as a woman-of-a-certain ages wends through her day:
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Patti Smith is very much in the news these days, largely due to the release of her new memoir M Train, which New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani called “An eloquent — and a deeply moving — elegy for what she has “lost and cannot find” but can remember in words.“ Penelope Green in the Times…
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(Video link here.) As a farewell to its audience after 11 years of programming, CBS’s Wire Tap radio show made a video of people giving advice to their younger counterparts. It’s worth watching through to the very end. We love:
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Our recent Fantasy Facelift post got quite a response, including a number of emails from readers. One very moving one came from our friend Ellen Silverman, who has been working on photography and video projects in Cuba. Here’s what she wrote:
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At a photo shoot at Maria’s studio, Suzanne Shaker and I played “face lift”, standing behind each other and gently “lifting” each other’s face. It was a funny, weird, grown-up girls’ game played by women who’d never actually get a face lift. We’re game to go where our faces take us…For a moment, we found a way to improvise younger selves.
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Aging, in oneself or one’s surroundings, is nearly impossible to see until, suddenly, it has already happened. Shiny new paint become dingy and marked; interiors and websites become dated, and as we see from these remarkable gifs, WE ourselves, slowly change…We are all in process. A remarkable series of gifs at My Modern Met perfectly…
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The Longest Way by Christoph Rehage Every day for a year, as Christopher Rehage walked across China, he made a picture or video of himself, documenting his hair growth along the way. Day One shows him clean shaven, almost bald; he gradually turns into…a completely other version of himself. When he returned, he made this…
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