for those few of you who didn’t google the answer

Here is the intro to what I wrote in the previous post:

Elsa Schiaparelli is not a woman to mince words, if her “12 Commandments for Women” are anything to go by. In her autobiography, Shocking Life, which she published in 1954 just as she was closing up her famed shop on the Place Vendôme in Paris, she concludes with a list of guidelines she gleaned from her career.

Apparently, today the Met opens up a fascinating exhibition (oh but I wish I were travelling in NY and could see it):

On View May 10–August 19, 2012

The Met’s Spring 2012 Costume Institute exhibition, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, explores the striking affinities between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, two Italian designers from different eras. Inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s “Impossible Interviews” for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, the exhibition features orchestrated conversations between these iconic women to suggest new readings of their most innovative work. Iconic ensembles are presented with videos of simulated conversations between Schiaparelli and Prada directed by Baz Luhrmann, focusing on how both women explore similar themes in their work through very different approaches.

The works on view are arranged into seven themes: “Waist Up/Waist Down,” “Ugly Chic,” “Hard Chic,” “Naïf Chic,” “The Classical Body,” “The Exotic Body,” and “The Surreal Body.”

It’s an interesting time to have this conversation. What do we want fashion to be about? How are we allowing ourselves to be manipulated by others? Why does poor Hillary Clinton get called on the rug for not wearing make-up?

Here’s some of what Peggy Orenstein says about the incident (read the whole thing, if you have a chance):

For her part, Hillary Clinton did what she should have: she laughed off the tempest in a teapot (not even a teapot–maybe a demitasse?), telling CNN:

I feel so relieved to be at the stage I’m at in my life right now. Because you know if I want to wear my glasses I’m wearing my glasses. If I want to wear my hair back I’m pulling my hair back. You know at some point it’s just not something that deserves a lot of time and attention. And if others want to worry about it, I let them do the worrying for a change.

Because she’s got other things to think about. Like, I don’t know, terrorism, human rights abuses, nuclear war. But let’s focus on whether she’s hit the Bobbi Brown counter lately, shall we?

layers

I don’t understand some trends.

I like being able to layer clothing. It gives me a feeling that I can manage the weather.

Not control it.

But why do we look to make things complicated?

Like this food layering business. Maybe it’s good to help people lose weight.

Layering flavors involves cooking techniques that add depth of flavor. Each step of the cooking process is important — skip a crucial step and you can’t add back the missed flavor.

Crucial step?

It’s food.

The only thing crucial about food is to have it and not in a way that’s dangerous to your health.

I look at my old cutting board. That’s simple and direct. Beat-up, uneven, worn. Like me.

Dependable.

Useful.

Real.

Now, wine, on the other hand, deserves to be layered and complicated.

Like me.

people are starving so eat your vegetables

today. On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.

Yes, when I was young, people used to say this. Not my parents, mind you, but it was a well-known and used phrase.

People are starving in “fill in the blank place”, so eat your “fill in the blank”.

Europe                                         vegetables

That’s what it was when I was really young. And although the logic is quite suspect, it was true that there was a limit of food in certain places.

I never got told to eat my veggies; I just never did. How ironic, of course, is it that I am indeed a vegetarian, ovo-lacto-pesca variety…

But why is my attention drawn to food today?

We are so rich. We have so much, really. We cannot complain. We should be grateful for all that we have, even the problems.

So it is so obscene that I read this article today:

Pro-anorexia ‘thinspiration’ photos shouldn’t be banned from social media

We’re afraid of what’s known as “thinspiration,” it seems, because glamorous photos of very skinny women, together with admiring captions, might arouse self-loathing in women, and thereby inspire self-mortification, and in particular anorexia.

The fact that thinspo, as it’s sometimes called, is sassily named and designed to encourage beholders to reduce their weight—”thin” + “inspiration”—doesn’t help anyone looking to defend it as morally or clinically neutral.  There is no “tasteful pictorial” when it comes to thinspiration. It’s all hard-core.

Yes, sick sick sick. The article is not necessarily about the phenomenon, but about the futility of stopping such behavior since it will just boomerang somewhere and somehow else.

But still today, of all days, when reminded of the horrors of the Holocaust, when Jews and yes many many others, were subjected to inhuman unhumane torture, when dogs were treated better than they were, can we not see the decadence of our society?

No photos today, folks.

fragile

My father admitted that he is worried about his memory. He didn’t even say this time, “Stop me if I’ve already told you this.” But he hadn’t, so I didn’t need to, anyway. He said he told his doctor that he was worried, but when he talked about when to schedule his next appointment, he said, “Not on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday mornings. That’s when I play tennis.” His doctor said forgetaboutit.

And my father said this to say why he was carrying his tennis racket onto the plane, rather than putting it in his suitcase. He likes to be able to talk about it; a “conversation starter.” Conversation to him is of the utmost importance.

Along with standing up straight.

So I was thinking about appearances a little more today. So I’ll sit up straighter for a bit and post some photos I took of some alstroemerias before I tossed them, before Pesach. You can see in one photo a box I was storing things in. It came to stand for something larger.

Oh look how they came to be named! Just like fuchsias!

The genus was named for the Swedish baron Clas Alströmer (Claus von Alstroemer 1736 – 1794) by his close friend Carolus Linnaeus. The plant was first described by the French botanist Louis Feuillée. The plant’s seeds were among many collected by Alströmer on a trip to South America in 1753.

Enjoy. Seriously.

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well, one screw loose

Did I get your attention?

Did you think I was going to spill the beans about someone?

Nah, just cleaning for Pesach.

I found the oddest things so far.

1. a belt buckle (sans belt)
2. one elastic bra extender (I guess that’s what it is)
3. children’s clothes left over by one of my kids (okay that’s not really odd. The question is how long they’ve been there and I hadn’t noticed.)
4. a Kyocera phone charger (I have NO idea whose that is, or how long it’s been here)
5. my birth certificate (actually, that was when I went looking in my files for something else. I guess it’s actually very interesting that it’s in English. Never noticed that before.)

I also found this, well, yes, as I was cleaning up. Sure, let’s go with that.

Forest bathing

The Japanese term Shinrin-yoku may literally mean “forest bathing,” but it doesn’t involve soaking in a tub among the trees. Rather it refers to spending time in the woods for its therapeutic (or bathing) effect. Most of us have felt tension slip away in the midst of trees and nature’s beauty. But science now confirms its healing influence on the body. When you spend a few hours on a woodland hike or camping by a lake you breathe in phytoncides, active substances released by plants to protect them against insects and from rotting, which appear to lower blood pressure and stress and boost your immune system.

And continuing the list of physical things I found:

6. one screw. That always worries me. What’s going to fall apart now?

7. and yes, one little lonely cheerio.

I’m sure it will find friends elsewhere. Or I will find them for him.

who said that?

And what did they say?

Was it Anais Nin?

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Or how about Steven Covey?-

American minister, self-help speaker

1. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.
2. Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it.
3. Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.
4. Our character is a composite of our habits.
5. Begin with the end in mind.

Or…

Was it the Talmud?

Maybe all of the above?

ART and ORGANISM			.
. BIOLOGICAL BACKGROUND: INPUT and PERCEPTION We see the world not as it is, But as we are  TALMUD (and Anais Nin, and Goethe, and Stephen Covey)

Professor Greenberg continues:

The limited range of worldly sensations we are capable of detecting become percepts when they interact with the organism. Our first constraints are the physical and chemical peculiarities of the sensory organs embedded in the boundary between the world and our consciousness of it. But next, and almost immediately, they interact with and are affected by previous experiences. We learn to see, we develop theories of what a sensation probably represents. The theory is corroborated by various cerebral modules that provide confidence by testing the information: does it correspond to the real world? does it cohere with other experiences we have had? THUS, We see the world as we are. To understand INPUT, we must also consider the organism’s umwelt (sensory world) as well as the process of establishing truth (high confidence in the reality of a percept or belief).

.
All the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, And what perceive. 
Wordsworth, ‘Lines composed above Tintern Abbey’ 1798

absurd contrast of values

Compare these two news items that came my way today, if you will.

The first, a story about Pia Levine, who is in Israel to bring attention to her experiences a year ago.

Pia Levine, a student at Yeshiva University in New York, was riding with a friend on an Egged bus in Jerusalem, carefree after an excursion to the swanky new Mamilla shopping center, when she suddenly heard what sounded like a large clap of thunder. It was a few minutes after 3 p.m. at a bus stop near the Jerusalem International Convention Center and the boom came from a detonated pipe bomb. It killed one person and injured some 40 others that Wednesday, March 23, 2011. Of the bus passengers, only Levine and her friend were able to walk away from the scene.

Now, the 20-year-old is running for charity as a member of Team OneFamily. In that capacity she’s already participated in the New York Triathlon last summer (see NY television coverage here) and is currently back in Jerusalem to again run in the half-marathon, with a two-fold mission: to close an emotional circle and raise money for the organization that helped her so much.

“I decided to come back because yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the bombing and because of it I had a lot of post-traumatic stress,” the accounting major says matter-of-factly in a quick phone call. “And I never had a chance to deal with what happened, to be on a bus, to be here in Israel and not be scared. I had to come back to deal with it.”…

“I call a lot of reporters and try to get my story out there. I want everyone to know, because it’s not normal that you could be sitting on the bus and put your life at stake.”

And now the second one.

People are stealing Tide detergent.

On Feb. 7, police in West St. Paul, Minn., arrested a man who’d stolen $25,000 worth of merchandise from a local Walmart. He pleaded guilty this week. What’s strange, local Police Chief Bud Shaver tells The Daily, is that the rather single-minded thief stole only Tide laundry soap: “Amazing, huh?” Actually, it’s not. By many accounts, such soap-focused crimes are not particularly unusual. Tide is “the item to steal,” says Detective Larry Patterson of Somerset, Ky., where he’s seen “a huge spike in Tide theft.”

Why? You can read this article in the Week if you want to know more.

I just came back from my shopping spree. That means I bought 4 bottles of grape juice on major sale today, plus 2 bottles of apple juice, kosher for Passover. I splurged on kosher for Passover chocolate chips, I will admit. Thank G-d, the Tide was safely on the shelves, no whateveritscalled thingy attached that has to be removed by the clerk before you buy it.

And I’ve got a gold mine in my basement, 2 big bottles stored there.

Oh I have nothing else to say.

borrowed: 30 Dr. Seuss Quotes to Live By

As it say, from MAMIVERSE.COM.

I think I like #21 best.

Or 24.

I might like another one tomorrow and that’s okay, too.

well, if my home is a foreign place,

Then I better start putting down roots.

Actually, what I’ve done this week is more than that. I’ve basically bound myself to home all week in order to get rid of this nasty cold. And now that the weather has turned nasty (of course we can’t SKIP winter), I don’t wanna go out. So roots are down.

And so am I.

It might be traceable to many very real things.

1. the phone call at 4:56 a.m. ISHI somehow picked it up. “Automated call”, he said,and then tried, pretty much in vain, to go back to sleep for a half hour.
2. the second phone call at 4:57. This time, I picked it up. It was from Amazon, automated, saying “put your PIN number in now.” No, I don’t think so. It turns out that the first one was from the same number. I called, a few hours later, and they of course said it was not them. They would have sent an email, if there were any problem. And yet, they also said they would investigate it further. If it wasn’t them, why would they need to? Because someone was identifying themselves as Amazon, and they’re not that big not to care.
3. Oh, and there was another phone call from them another 2 hours later. From the pretend Amazon people, at least I should say.
4. So I was fine all night. It was the first night in a week that I didn’t feel I had to suppress the coughing and all. Okay maybe just a little. But then when I woke up, it came roaring back.
5. Maybe I’ll really appreciate spring now, but oh the grey is so sad.
6. I don’t like complaining.
7. I don’t like people getting divorced.

Bet you didn’t see that coming.

Neither did I.

This is a couple I know who had participated in a program with me a few years ago. We’ve been in touch, on and off, through email, Facebook, and a visit last year when we were in Israel. Oh, yeah. Israeli.

Not that it makes a difference at all. Or maybe it does. I like to pretend that everything is better there, even though I know that’s not true by any means.

And they’re young.

With a child.

That makes it worse.

I want to say why didn’t you tell me? I wanted to say why didn’t you ask for help?

I asked a mutual friend what happened and he didn’t tell me. But he told me what I needed to know, that they are both relieved that this has come to an end, and that the divorce was as amicable as possible.

Looking back, I would have known that problems would lay ahead.

But of course, hindsight 20-20.

No, more than that. Everyone has problems–that’s part of the path. But everyone has to find the path that takes them to a better place, if only to have to find another path then.

So I’m not going to ask them what happened. I’m only going to wish them Mazal Tov, as they’ve asked to be wished.

Both of them.

Separately.

And I’ll try harder to pay attention to others, in the future.

(I am feeling better now, thanks for asking. I guess some things just have to work themselves out in ways nastier than we expected.)

not so invisible disability

I have been thinking about people with invisible disabilities–women who have fertility problems, those with mental illness of all kinds, and then there are all the invisible diseases that affect so many around us, who do not want pity but a fair chance. I have been thinking about how to help them in the best way, in my communal and personal capacities, and I’ve been stumped, for the most part.

We can be an ear. I guess that’s the start.

And then there’s what Rabbi David Bigman says about the holiest place in the Jewish universe, the Aron Kodesh having nothing in the absolute middle of it, except the sound of G-d. And so we need to listen.

I’ve been thinking about the senses in general, how we can’t always clarify things for ourselves. When we’re in New York, in particular, and surrounded by so many languages, I find it’s easy enough to let all the sounds blur into well, just sound. Like Bnei Yisrael getting the Ten Commandments and stopping the listening and just going to hearing and turning G-d voice into a roar.

And then it’s like seeing signs in Chinese or Greek, or those languages I don’t read. It becomes art of sorts. This is a good thing, of sorts. Except when I have to pay attention. And then I have to call on all my senses to be sharp and that’s very tiring.

When we go out to the ocean or the mountains, I know I can relax and take in the beauty all around. Of course, you have to watch where you’re going, but that’s a nice kind of meditation of sorts.

Having to pay attention to holding all your stuff, where you’re going, who you’re with, well, that’s exhausting.

And so maybe that’s why I got sick?

Or is it that the massage that I had on Thursday drew out all the poisons and brought them into the forefront?

Or is it ISHI’s cold catching up to me?

I don’t do sick. I like to think of myself as not succumbing to these trifles. But every once in a while, I do have to admit I’m human.

Sooo

Thank G-d for Shabbos.

Thank G-d that we could switch our houseguest to somewhere else.

I’m really sorry that our niece wasn’t feeling well but thought she was well enough to go run off to be with her friends. I really hope that worked out and that she isn’t sorry she didn’t stay here.

But I’m really glad I could have the day to catch up.

I’m not feeling really better yet. I don’t have a voice back yet.

That may not be such a bad thing.

Hmm. I’m in a Simon and Garfunkel mode, perhaps.

Sounds of Silence, anyone?

So maybe I’ll post a few more photos from the sounds of New York.