aging

Role Models for Those Feeling Ancient

As I was contemplating the mighty big birthday I will be celebrating this week, I stumbled on this tiny video. Yeah, that’s it. Role models.

Patti Smith Breaking the Strings She Plays

We love this clip of Patti Smith performing at Royal Albert Hall, in rumpled black, gray hair a wild frizz, singular, age-defying, theatrically, purposefully breaking each string until she was down to one, the broken strings shivering around like electricity. And especially, her words…

The Secret Essential Riches of Doing Nothing (Jenny Odell, Bibi Baskin, Ch’eng Hao)

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.

Pamela Adlon on Aging as Content and Allen Ginsberg Just Being Content

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.

Give it up. Go bare. Go free. Accept Your Shelf Life As Given (Guest Post)

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?

Frances McDormand On Aging, Facelifts, and the Roadmap that is our Face

Actress Frances McDormand says so much that is wise about aging in this short interview. As does this poem by Fleur Adcock.

Philip Roth on Age, Being Alive, Talent, and What Creative Work is Really Like

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…

Debra Rapoport’s Powerful 111-Word Philosophy of Living

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):

Lumineer’s Cleopatra: Ode to Ordinary Life

(Video link here.) The Lumineers’ short, moving video Cleopatra tells many stories as a woman-of-a-certain ages wends through her day:

Is Patti Smith a Role Model of…Real?

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…

How to Grow Old Gracefully: Advice From Older Selves

(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:

Fantasy Facelift Redux: ‘It is better to look forward and out’

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:

Fantasy Face-Lift

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.

People, Stylish Interiors, Everything…Ages and Changes!

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…

christopher rehage’s time machine

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…