Lisa Solod Warren's Open Salon Blog

Santa, Baby??????? Help!!!

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:11:46 -0500

Whenever I am lucky enough to go to the ocean, whether it is to stay in a friend’s house or a rented hotel, I always drive around the neighborhoods and look at the prime oceanfront properties. Part of me continually wonders: Who are these people with all this money for these huge and often very fine homes? While the other part of me thinks: Boy, I sure wish I had one of these. Truly I would “settle” for a simple 2000-square-foot-three bedroom with lots of windows and a study overlooking the sea were I to actually win the lottery or sell a book for a couple of million.

I really don’t want that much. Honest. Even as I admit to pitting against each other (sometimes daily) two completely opposite worldviews: that of giving everything I own away and taking off for Africa or Afghanistan to do good in opposition with finding a sugar daddy who will take good care of me and shower me with diamonds-- the more altruistic version of me always wins.

That version with a gorgeous pair of leather boots, of course. Like many women who grew up solidly middle class, only to have that status (but not its desires) taken away from them upon divorce, I naturally, have very mixed feelings about money in general. I like to spend it but hate the bills. I waiver between thinking I deserve this or that and deciding that all of it is worthless. And I spend way too much money on my kids. I am also one to never ever argue about a check. I will pick it up way before the adding machines come out.

My biggest weakness, however, is gifts. What I really like is finding things I think other people will like. If I can do that in conjunction with shopping for myself, I am in deep heaven.

Which is why, when Neiman Marcus’s The Christmas Book arrived this year, I actually opened it and looked through it, something I haven’t done in a long time. I was curious to see what they had to offer in these lean times. And I found that while it isn’t as fat as in previous years , and there are no longer the millions-of- dollars items ( they have definitely downsized out of respect ) you can still find some amazingly outrageous presents between its pages. Presents, that is, for all those people who own those beach houses we covet. All those people pulling down those bonuses we loathe. All those people who seem to still have money when by rights, NO ONE should have that kind of scratch.

How about a Customized Cupcake Car for a mere $25,000? Apparently this is the genius idea of one Lisa Pongrace of California, who showcased it as a cooperative car project at Burning Man. It is described, accurately I would say from looking at the pictures as “a gift that is mind-blowing, triple-dog-dare, double-infinity forever cool.” All that for a mere 25 grand.

Or if your classy self takes over, you can always gift your love with a $105,000 2010 Neiman Marcus edition Jaguar which has been “totally re-imagined from the ground up,” as well it should be for those kinds of bucks. And what man in his right mind wouldn’t just love to have the “world’s fastest electric motorcycle” for a paltry $75,000? Hell, that might even be the perfect graduation present for Junior, if you can keep it under wraps for a few more months. Or if you and your partner are feeling, like totally, selfish, you can give each other the 2009 ICON A5 sports aircraft which has too many bells and whistles to list and comes with its own trailer as well as flying lessons. This gift, which goes for a piddling $250,000 is targeted toward those for whom “the kids are healthy, the careers are under control, the in-laws are, well, still inlaws…(but) You’ve earned something special, just for the two of you.”

As if.

Nestled among those items are the usual $695 leggings (if someone spends that kind o money on me I sure as hell don’t want it to be for leggings!), $1,350 boots, and $1,650 handbags. Had I had that kind of money would I spend that for boots and a handbag when I could have 5 pairs of boots and 8 handbags for the same price? There are, naturally , the really low end things like an $85 snow globe, an “exclusive” popcorn tin (with popcorn, I hope) for $48 and a “faux-jewel stocking box and chocolates” for $50. Those are just so you can say you gave something from the store known for decades as Needless Markup.

I saw many things I liked. Both for myself and others, like the “Algonquin Round Table Experience,” which includes dinner with some of “the brightest minds of modern literature, journalism and the arts,” for $200,000, the total of which gets donated to charity. If you can’t handle that but want to be good anyway, you can donate a book to First Book for only 25 bucks. The thing is that you can’t know the guests ahead of time, and I would rather be one of the invited luminaries than the one buying their time.

I do confess, however, to covering the Valentino Hobo in deep taupe for $2,395 and I would gladly accept the David Yurman diamond cuff at $17,000--although where the hell would I wear either of those things? That’s the problem with a catalogue like this: everything truly gorgeous, like the evening gowns and accessories is not built for life in a small town in the South. While everything affordable is really pretty tacky and undesirable.

That’s kind of the problem with shopping in general when you aren’t wealthy. What you want is beyond your means unless you’re willing to rack up those charges on a credit card (and I have been guilty of that, too), and what you can have is usually not worth it.

All this contemplation about shopping and gift giving goes to the mystery of Christmas in general. At least for me. As a Jew, I never celebrated Christmas at all and my parents were never big on the whole Hanukah thing, being quite clear that the holidays were alike insomuch as to their calendar placement only. Hanukah was never designed as a gift giving holiday and is actually a minor holiday to boot. It’s only taken on the cloak of its present self as Jewish parents have tried to “make up” for the lack of Christmas in their children’s lives. I did it, too, with the whole one-present-a-day-for-eight-days thing, which served me and the children ill as they had a non-Jewish father and we all celebrated Christmas with his family in Florida each year. They racked up. Now that they are older, I hand them a check and let the relatives do the shopping if they’re so inclined, although I will confess to collecting the odd bits and bobs for my teenaged daughter who still delights in opening things.

Apparently, though, people are supposed to go into debt for Christmas presents. And the poorer you are the more debt you are supposed to go into. This has been a ritual for years and I doubt, even with the recession, it will change. Newscasters talking about Black Friday were already speculating about the $600 52-inch televisions that would be the door-buster special at some store at 5 a.m. They seemed pretty certain that even those who were struggling to feed their kids would be in line to buy. For years I’ve watched parents try to make up for the entire year’s deprivations on Christmas and it continues to baffle me. As in fact the whole season baffles me.

Yes, I think I have the whole Bah Humbug thing going and always have. While I love gifting others and finding those special items for birthdays or the odd special or not so special occasion, the hoopla around Christmas gift giving seems to cause more stress than joy. People always say that the holiday is about peace and goodwill on earth, but what it seems to really be about is ostentatious displays that start earlier each year and last longer each season. The excesses in the Neiman Marcus Christmas book are but the most glamorously over-the-top example. To a family making thirty grand a year, a thousand bucks in Christmas presents at Target or Wal-Mart is as much as a Jag might be to a wealthy man. And chances are the man buying the Jag is writing a check, while the family is paying off last Christmas right up until the next one.

I’m not a Scrooge. Anyone who knows me knows I can spend money faster than I can type. Which is pretty fast. I’ve managed to 25- and 50-dollar my way into some serious credit card debt in my time, spending both on myself and on others, as well as doing that well-known “retail therapy” when the emotional chips were down. But I just don’t get the “if you really love me you’ll buy me a______________” syndrome, which seems to rear its ugly head, along with the “if you’re really good, you’ll get a_____________” bribe at this time of year.

Holly Jolly, my ass. If that’s the way to celebrate, I’ll take the $295 cashmere cardigan and let you off cheap.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 18:11:50 -0500

Arianna Huffington ‘s headline in HuffPo Tuesday was “Obama One Year Later: The Audacity of Winning vs The Timidity of Governing." On Wednesday’s Hardball MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews was pissed: he thought Obama had already become an incumbent insider who plays golf and hangs around with big money guys. He wondered if the President had already lost his vision. Progressive radio and television talk show host Ed Schultz offered himself as the go-to guy for Obama: no one else is telling the President the truth, he says, and he will. And many other progressives and liberal Democrats are starting to feel betrayed by the man they looked to for real change, while the conservatives cheered as though there had been a coup d’état.

Everyone has an opinion about what the election results meant: from gloom and doom to no big deal.

I personally vacillate between telling myself that Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day and wondering whether the expectations we all had when we worked and voted for the man were unrealistic.

The pundits and news anchors and reporters and talk show hosts are still, days later, spinning so fast that their heads threaten to come unscrewed, while sensible columnist ttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05collins.html?emGail Collins seems to have the best take I’ve heard so far and it’s also funny.

Except that part of me just can’t laugh. A year ago, after working my ass off for many months to elect Barack Obama: campaigning door-to-door, phone canvassing and writing a myriad of articles on the candidates and the election, I worked all day at the polls on Election Day. Rising at 4 a.m. and getting to my precinct by 5, I joined my fellow works in preparing everything for what we thought might well be an onslaught of voters. There were even police stationed at my small precinct in Virginia, something that had never happened before. We were told to watch out for arguments and even fisticuffs, for voters trying to vote when they weren’t registered and for people to sneak in with campaign material. None of that happened. When we opened the polls at 6 a.m. there was a line out the door and down into the parking lot, in the cold and dark and rain. But very few people even complained much about it. They stood and waited for up to an hour sometimes. Just to vote. It felt like I was in some sort of third world country where voting really mattered to the people. I met first time voters from eight to eighty eight and people who were quick to tell me that this election was the most important one in their whole lives. By the time the polls closed over 70 percent of our precinct had voted. At the end of the day, none of us workers had had more than a five minute potty break. We ate and drank while crossing off voters and running the machines. We were dead tired but completely exhilarated, no matter what party we were from. The 15 hour day completely flew by.

This past Tuesday I again woke at 4 a.m. and made my way to the precinct by 5. Inside, the mood was very different. One of the workers told us not to expect more than a 30 percent return. We prepared for the opening the same way we had a year ago but it felt like it would be a very long day and as the first voters trickled in at 6 we were already checking the clock.

By the end of this past Tuesday, we were pleasantly surprised to find that nearly 50 percent had turned out. But the day had been long, long and mostly dead boring, punctuated by small surges early in the morning, midday, and after work. Enthusiasm was minimal.

And there was no exhilaration and no surprise… I knew going in that the Republicans were going to take Virginia’s governorship at the least. And they deserved to. As much as I personally liked and respected and Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds and had worked with him when I was a member of the Virginia School Boards Association and he was my representative, as much as I knew he was a native and a decent man and would do the right thing, I knew there was no way he was going to take the state. The reason was obvious: he had lost his integrity in the campaign. Not only did he fight dirty, but he did not support all the issues a good Democrat was expected to. He went for the middle and lost badly. No one I knew was excited by the candidacy at the end: we felt betrayed. At least Bob McDonnell, a hyper-conservative Republican did not stray from the message he had been preaching for years.

I do not however think that two Republican governorships spell doom and gloom for either the Democrats or President Obama in 2010 or 2012,--the Dems did, and after all, pick up two crucial House seats-- I do think that this election spells out once again what is wrong with politics and politicians in our country.

None of it works. At all.

Campaign finance reform, which should be the first and foremost issue tackled and solved, is not even being seriously considered. Without that our pols are bought and sold like racehorses, or to use another metaphor borrowed from progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann, they should be required to wear their sponsors on their backs, like race car drivers and their cars. How can anyone expect a Congressman to make a decision based on rational thought when he is being handed money by special interests who have a vested interest in the outcome. They can’t.

In addition, although to expect Obama to have turned the entire country (and the world) around in less than a year is absurd, still he raised expectations so high that most of the country that supported him wanted that to happen anyway. They (we) are sorely disappointed. Some people who have turned against the President might not even realize that he is not some benign despot who can wave a magic wand and make things all better. Or kiss away our boo-boos like mommy did. While I was making phone calls last year I had a person ask me why the president couldn’t just go in and get things done. I took 20 minutes to explain the separation of powers to her: both the good and the bad elements. This was something she had no idea about and was quick to say she would tell her friends and families because they were wondering, too. If part of the population voted for Obama because they really wanted change and they really wanted it quickly, then no wonder they are heading off to vote for a Republican or sitting home and not voting at all.

Truth is: the thrill IS gone.

The man we voted for: that charismatic, intelligent, brilliant speaker, has turned into a man afraid to piss people off. A man who promised he would do what needed to be done no matter what, and then went after conciliation with people who had no desire to even shake his hand.

The media in general has whipped Obama’s whole failure to launch scenario into a frenzy and the right wing nutbags have finally gone completely berserk. As a result, too many people are influenced into thinking that what Obama wants to do is wrong. When most of it is right. If, that is, anything important gets done at all.

The combined result of Congressional corruption, a mean right wing who is way more powerful in its lies than it should be and a populace most of whom have lost interest, is that:

We will NOT have a health care overhaul that means anything, if we have one at all, and we will NOT have new regulations on banks and businesses who helped take us down over a year ago, and we will NOT have any real meaningful legislation we can point to with pride as the accomplishment of the man who we really really believed could finally get it done. Even though a large majority of the American people want health care reform. Even though we all want banks and businesses to stop giving obscene bonuses, even though most of us would like a lot more fairness in society.

We are stuck.

Fairness and thinking about the other guy—you know the one who is poorer than you, and there is always someone poorer than you—is socialism. Capping the amount of money executives whose companies took money directly from the government spells the end of capitalism, when the truth is that the money Goldman Sachs made in the past month could practically pay for health care.

People are starving to death and dying in the richest, freest country in the world and no one really gives a shit. At least no one with any kind of power to do anything about it. Once again it is up to the masses to rally and riot and scream and yell and call their Congressmen and women and agitate and demonstrate and maybe, just maybe, someone will actually pay attention. It is once again all on us. Our government not only does not take care of us, it wants to screw us at any turn. Our representatives, with a few exceptions, do not represent us at all. They do not work for us. They do not care about us. They care about being re-elected so that they can continue to not work for us and not care about us.

And we, like saps, sit and take it. Because the truth is, without a full out revolution in the streets, without a weeklong work stoppage, or something just as drastic, all our writing and calling and pestering makes little difference to those men and women who are paid to be pestered by us.

Jonathan Franzen, in a recent interview about his newest book, talks about a character who spends his life with an “Inexpressible urgency” to search out and find the truth. Franzen says that that man represents the craziness in him and in all of us. I feel that inexpressible craziness myself whenever I think about, read about, or hear about what is going on in this country politically. And I am not sure who the real crazies are. I really believed Obama could make a difference. I believed he would lead Congress to do what was right and important. I believe he might even convert some of the naysayers. I thought that health care, for example, when instituted, would be like Social Security and Welfare, with a rocky start but a firm foundation when it was found to work. I thought our first black president really would get that there are huge numbers of disenfranchised among us and that equality is still an ideal rather than a reality. I thought he would work as hard and as beautifully as he spoke.

When I sat weeping in front of the television that November night a year ago I felt that for the first time in my life the majority of Americans had made a pivotal decision that would change and grow this country from what it is to what it could be. Now that those tears are a memory, I wonder: who was fooled? Obama or us?

Women's Work is Still Not Done. Nor is Men's

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:10:16 -0400

I don’t think I or any woman I know needs to read The Shriver Report: A Women’s Nation Changes Everything http://www.awomansnation.com/ by Maria Shriver and The Center for American Progress. Although the Report is being highly touted as important on several NBC programs, all the women I know know exactly what our state is: Pretty hectic and too often unrewarded compared to the work we do.

Our children and our husbands or partners might benefit from reading the report. Maybe then, they would take us seriously when we say we just can’t handle any more on our plate right now. Society should agitate for laws that enforce equity where it can be enforced, too. Then maybe the whole debate would stop becoming a “woman’s” problem as in fact one of the Report's contributors, sociology professor Michael Kimmel points out in his contribution.

The big deal report is being touted as groundbreaking, but I find far more groundbreaking President Obama admitting in an interview with NBC’s Samantha Guthrie Wednesday night that he like all men, is “obtuse.”

It is just that obtuseness, even from decent men, that keeps women too damned busy with too little time for ourselves, whether it is time to just sit and think or time to take care of ourselves so that we live long enough to fulfill all of our obligations. Only in fairy tales do dead mothers become the stuff of romance and do orphaned children rise to meet the challenges of life. In the real world, women hold the whole damned thing up. And, at least in my case, the fear of dropping something, if not everything, is often very real.

My first marriage to a smart and decent man was one in which I not only worked part time and contributed income in various ways, but also did everything, and I mean everything, else. I am now a single mother with a teenage daughter still at home. I have a son with addiction issues who is back in college after a long hiatus. I have a dying father in Tennessee and a mother who has Alzheimer’s and is an alcoholic living in assisted living in Rhode Island. Luckily I have two sisters who are also helping with the parents. I am recently separated and have to do all the chores that I asked my husband to do for the two years we were married. Note: asked. I am trying to make a living. When I get sick I get up and take my daughter to school anyway. If I do not do what is to be done, it will not get done. Multiple stressors have been hard to deal with and I hardly take care of myself many days. I certainly don’t want to take on the care of anyone else right now. But, of course, if I had to, I would. For the past several months all the complications listed above have made me nearly shut down at times. I haven’t even been writing much. And yet my life is nothing compared to some of my friends’ or to the story I saw on the news last night about a woman who works 12 hour days as a nurse, works a side job as a hospice worker, has children for whom she cares and cleans and cooks, and has also, in the past several years, taken in her father, her mother-in-law and her uncle to care for them until they died. Hers is not an unusual story. There are millions of such tales.

I am a feminist and have been since the age of fifteen when I turned down a Saturday night date because I just didn’t like the guy enough to go out with him. My girlfriends were stunned but I sat home and watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show and was happy as a clam. I didn’t lie to the guy who asked me out, either; I didn’t tell him I had to wash my hair or that my mother wouldn’t let me go. I just told him “thank you” and “no” as gently as I could. I remember well thinking I never wanted to marry and have children, partly because, as Richard Lewis so beautifully put it, I wasn’t raised, I was lowered. I had the typical neglectful parents (think Mad Men rather than Father Knows Best) and a mother who didn’t seem really glad she had had my two sisters and me.

But the other thing was that I liked men. I still do. At least the ones I like. I like having a man in my when I decided I did indeed want them. And I don’t think that men in general are evil:, they just remain clueless, or as Obama says, obtuse, despite women’s every effort to wake them up. I don’t think most of us women want to give up on men or love but we do get damned tired of having the same old discussions over and over and over.

As recently as last year, while on a book tour for the book of essays I edited, entitled Desire: Women Write About Wanting, one of my contributors was reading from her essay on choosing between having more than one child or climbing the career ladder, to rapt attention by an audience of middle aged men and women. At the end of her reading, several men raised their hands; they wanted to talk about this whole idea of “choosing.” Several of the men said that they had never even thought of it that way, while all the women in the audience just rolled their eyes. My writer was kind and sympathetic when she explained the dilemma so many women face. And every time I have gone to an artist’s colony, women writers and painters have been stunned to learn I have more than one child. “When do you do your work?” they ask and add: “One was enough for me.” My answer is always that I fit my work in. I wanted children and they have always been my first priority. But I have never ever heard a man say that he “fits his work” or “fits his art” in around raising kids. In fact, many famous women artists either never married or never had children, which is not surprising, while Dickens, for example, had both a wife and nine kids. And wrote and wrote and wrote anyway.

Which is why The Shriver Report does not impress me much. What does it tell us that we don’t already know? That we now make up fifty percent of the workforce when we didn’t before? Okay, but for many years more women than men have been getting college educations, so the expanding work force makes sense. That women are the primary breadwinners in two thirds of families? That is interesting but I still haven’t seen a discussion around the possibility that more men were fired in this present recession because they were more expensive than women. Anyone want to tackle that? The thing is that whether women earned as much as their husbands or less, the majority of them have always had two other jobs to do when they get home: manage the kids and manage the house (and life in general). I am assuming that women who make a lot of money or marry rich hire staff for cooking and cleaning and child rearing, unlike the rest of us. And in this country we still don’t have paid maternity leave or cradle to grave services for women and children like they do in many European nations. Hell, we can’t even pass a reasonable health care bill without screaming and yelling from the conservative status quo which is mostly made up of white males trying to exercise their last vestiges of domination:, while at the same time a Rockefeller/Time nationwide poll tells us, according to the Report, that “the battle of the sexes is over and has been replaced by negotiations….”

According to the Report, “the poll results reveal a truce in the battle of the sexes, demonstrating that men and women are in agreement on many of the day-to-day work and family issues. The old line in the sand separating them has largely washed away. Indeed, both men and women agree that women’s movement into employment is good for the country. Virtually all married couples see negotiating about the rules of relationships, work, and family as key making things work at home and at work.”

Virtually ALL married couples?

Are they kidding?

Maybe people are doing more de facto negotiating but I would argue that for the most part what is happening is some tacit negotiation resulting in the woman either taking on the role of doling out household and familial duties, or just giving up and doing it all because it’s much easier that way.

That may be partially our fault: women are able to multi-task better than men. And every woman I know is far more capable of juggling six things at a time than any man. But it is also genetic. We are innate nurturers and caregivers. Even when the caregiving seems overwhelming, most of us have keen senses of duty and responsibility: we do what we have to do. The fact that we are working outside the home too doesn’t negate our sense that we can do the work inside the home better than most men, although I know plenty of sloppy households where no one seems to clean up. (I am sure there are men out there who will argue with me about stereo-typing , but let’s be honest: just because one man cooks or takes care of the kids doesn’t make it a trend. Articles are still being written—and have been written for two decades—about stay-at-home dads as though it is a new phenomenon rather than de rigueur. And the fact remains that men are emasculated by being fired as is evidenced every time one is interviewed about unemployment, while women, far more flexible about work—even in high level jobs—frequently re-invent themselves when let go, rather than moping about being “defeminized.”)

The truth is that Shriver’s report doesn’t really tell us anything particularly good about women in America today. What it is is a recommendation to government and society to get its shit together and realize women are no longer second class citizens. We need to stop assuming that women are interested in taking a place in a male-dominated workplace, bumping up against a glass ceiling and then going home and getting dinner ready for the kids before they run them to soccer practice. We need real equity, not lip service from either our partners or the government.

We need a seriously family-friendly and woman- friendly country, something we have needed for centuries, well before half the women worked outside the home. But watching the Equal Rights Amendment fail, listening to men screaming about women’s right to choose, watching the wrangling on health care even while women often pay more for health insurance and children remain largely uninsured discourage me. American men in power are waging trillion dollar wars and we can’t even come up with the impetus or the money for wellness. Middle-aged women across the country are taking care of children and parents, all while working. Divorced women usually have substandard lifestyles and pregnancy out of wedlock is still frowned upon unless the woman is a celebrity. Domestic violence remains a huge social issue. As does pay inequity: we may be half the workforce but we still have to fight for equal pay for equal work as the recent Lily Ledbetter court case illustrates.

The problems in the Report are ones that have been with us forever. It would be nice if we could stop writing reports and actually do something to get a handle on all of this. That would be a real negotiation.

Only the Deadly Dull Need Apply

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:09:51 -0400

All of you writers and would-be writers who have never been sexually abused by your parents, suffered from domestic assault, been abandoned on a highway somewhere by grandparents when raising you got to be too much; any of you who have never suffered from anorexia or bulimia, are not cancer survivors, who have never had a child addicted to drugs or lost a child before his time; those of you who have not been addicted to anything at all; and those of you who haven’t had the misfortune of having your spouse leave you for a member of the same sex, who haven’t suffered from any mental illness (even a minor one); as well as the few of you who have never suffered deprivation of any kind (sorry, if you had your lunchbox stolen in grammar school you do not qualify) or did not lose money in the crash, whose parents are not famous and fucked up Any of you who are not blind go-go dancers or quadriplegic painters or authors who compose with your eyelashes; and, of course, those of you who were not child prodigies, and all of you who have never bothered to suffer for one moment the pain of self contemplation. All of you writers who live comfortable lives in the suburbs where the most pressing problem is where to go for dinner, and last but not least, all of those of you who are not from another country which you had to flee because of poverty, war or mutilation –HAVE WE GOT AN OFFER FOR YOU!

No longer in vogue are memoirs centered around angst or pain or loss. The publishing industry is so over that.

No…. according to an acid-tongued review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, all you have to do now to get a book contract to write about your life—or some small part of it—is be totally, utterly boring and have a decent upper middle class life about which you do only the most mundane of contemplating.

Sound easy? Not so fast. Although Knopf, one of the most respected houses in the industry, bought the (apparently) slender memoir, the scathing assessment of it by book reviewer Ada Calhoun may cause the publisher pause in this new experiment to publish books in which absolutely nothing happens and no catharsis or epiphany is reached. ( I would caution you to write your tome very quickly.)

To wit: “Gideon’s memoir opens with a scene in front of her son’s school. The carpool line ultimate prompts her to wonder, ‘Is this all there is?’ Other triggers for existential angst: her 9-year-old’s first trip to camp, her dog’s death and the difficulty of finding a mattress both she and her husband like on a budget of $3,000.”

Sound riveting?

The reviewer goes on to tell us that the author is having “what may well be the least dramatic mid-life crisis in American history. She doesn’t start drinking, traveling or sleeping around. Nor does she get a job, adopt a baby or even do charity work. The scope of what is not done in the course of this book boggles the mind. It’s like an addiction memoir minus the addiction or a tell all without the all.”

I don’t know about you, but I am panting to get to a bookstore and buy the book right this minute.

As soon, of course, as I finish reading the review again, which seems, even at second or third glance, far more interesting and lively than the book itself.

And please don’t lecture me about finding out for myself if the book is as bad as the reviewer says it is. I don’t care.

I am just thrilled that finally all the boring people with no lives and no quest for a life—and there must be tons of them-- can get a book published.

I don’t know about you but I sure was getting tired of those other memoirs where people triumphed over pain and anguish or discovered love in the arms of a foreign stranger, or married a better man than the one who left them. I was just sick to death of reading about all that tsuris.*

This year I am only seeking out memoirs in which absolutely nothing happens, is accomplished, thought about or considered. So before the next bad review comes out and the publishers have a change of mind: get thee to a computer.

Because soon enough a reviewer will say that the book discussed above is “a breath of fresh air” and everyone will be running to get in on the act.

*tsuris is Yiddish for big trouble

Do We Really Want Open Salon to Be Our TV Guide?

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:09:03 -0400

TV Guide is published weekly; everyone knows they can get their television listings in their local newspaper or on their newspaper's website. Television and movie reviews are all over the web and the nightly news is available on three national networks, two all news networks, and MSNBC and Fox--whichever suits your fancy.

Do we really need, then, Open Salon to devote its front pages to videos from the news? A day late when they have been reported everywhere already? Do we really need link after link after link to You Tube videos, when everyone know how to find them and their friends send them the funny ones, anyway?

If one must write about what everyone else is writing about, then what should be on the front page is the best of the best, with the videos as a secondary part of the story--rather than the whole thing.

Do we need short rehashes of television shows week after week after week? (the exception being Mad Men where the writer really parses the show and gives readers new things to think about)?

Is Open Salon supposed to be a clutter of nonsense already available in so many other places?

Or is it a place for writing ON the news, ABOUT the news and how it affects peoples' lives? A place to write about issues that affect us and often lots of other people? OUR takes on what is happening in the world and why?

The best and most interesting writing with the most interesting viewpoints should be featured on the cover, not the same old same old over again. What should be on offer is what can be found nowhere else.

Open Salon's front page would be much better served by acting as a sort of universal Op Ed page with a mix of the personal and the political. As it stands now, it's rehash after rehash replete with dumb and redundant videos, that, as far as I can see, bring very few readers to the site. What DOES bring them in the wonderful stories, clever satires, excellent commentary on our world today. Those are too often buried.

Isn't it time for a change?