Since the '80s, I've been a loyal Apple customer; in fact, I've never owned any other computer. After my gorgeous "Bondi Blue" iMacG3 kept freezing, I almost switched to a PC, but once again fell for Apple's cool design and bought the smallest iBook G4, which I'm writing this on.
Although I've had to replace the battery once and the keyboard several times, the hardware is still completely functional. But suddenly, I can't view the videos friends post on Facebook, call my children on Skype or update my profile on the directory at work. Apparently, my computer's operating system is too old to run a host of common software applications. When I tried to upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash Players or Safari or Internet Explorer, I discovered that they only work on a Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger and above-- and my computer's OSX is a 10.3.9 Panther. At the Apple store, I was told that I could buy a 10.4 Tiger upgrade for $80 from Amazon and maybe prolong the life of my machine another year and a half.
Upgrading to Apple's current Leopard operating system isn't an option apparently, so my other two Apple alternatives are to buy a brand-new Mac laptop with Leopard already installed (starting at $1000) or wait until the summer when the newest operating system, Snow Leopard, is expected to be released.
Yes, I know that three years in a lifetime in the frenetic world of software development and that there have been two major upgrades since Panther was the latest and greatest, but really, how customer-friendly-- not to mention environmentally-friendly-- is it to create an operating system that won't run on hardware that's only a few years old?
It's interesting that Apple has chosen to name its operating systems after endangered big cats, and somehow, apt. In a world with overflowing landfills, where Third World children "recycle" the heavy metals from First World computers, this kind of planned obsolescence isn't merely annoying-- it's virtually obscene.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Facing Fear
I first heard about the February 22nd terrorist attack on Cairo’s Khan-el-Khalil market when a friend called from Germany. Hours passed in a daze before I went online and found more details about the attack on the famous market, where I had spent a memorable Sunday evening, just last winter with my son, Michael, and his Egyptian friends.
I have a photograph from that night. We were gathered around a tiny brass table laden with water bottles, small teapots and glasses. We were inside the bazaar at a table in the alley outside Fishawi’s Café. Beside each person, save me, was a sheesha, or standing water pipe. In the photograph are my son and his friend Sharif, who lives in London but had come to Cairo for a family wedding; his sister, Yasmin; and their step-sister, Natalie, as well as a family friend, Steve, who was a university student in Pennsylvania. Also at the table were Khaled, a high school friend of Sharif’s whom my son had met in London, and Khaled’s friend Waled.
In a way, we were there because of Khaled, who had offered to show Michael around if he came to Cairo and graciously included me in his invitation. Since elementary school, I had wanted to see the pryramids and as a college student, I had studied Egyptian history as part of my major in Middle Eastern Studies. At that time, I couldn’t afford to travel to Egypt but later, when I could, the country always seemed a little too dangerous to visit, especially with two children in tow, especially after the terrorist attack in Luxor. But as I approached 50, I realized that it was time to take a few calculated risks. Egypt was at the top of my list of dream destinations, the place I would immediately hop on a plane to see if I ever got a terminal diagnosis. So why wait? Going to Egypt meant confronting not only a fear of terrorism but also more personal fears, of being raped, which I very nearly had been while traveling as a young woman in another North African country, and fear of getting sick. My intrepid son offered to come along but a sudden spike in airfares delayed our plan for a year. When Michael met Khaled the following Novemeber, the timing suddenly seemed serendipitous. A fortnight later, we had booked our trip, arriving in Cairo shortly after my 51st and my son’s 27th birthdays, at the beginning of my sabbatical year.
Sharif and his sisters turned out to have booked the same flight to Cairo. On our arrival, Sharif showed us where to get a visa and negotiated a taxi to take us to the boutique hotel we’d found on-line. After checking in, we met Khaled across the road at the local Gar, an Egyptian fast food chain.
Michael and I both noticed the Viagra sandwich on the menu but were too embarrassed to ask what it was. Khaled ordered hummus (garbanzo bean dip), tabbouli (cracked wheat salad), baba ghanoush (eggplant dip), falafel (garbanzo bean patties) and fool, (fava bean dip) to go with the hot pita bread. I was nervous about getting Pharaoh’s Revenge, but relaxed a little when Khaled pointed out that in a place this busy, the food wasn’t sitting around and was more likely to be fresh and hot, which it turned out to be, as well as tasty.
Late the next afternoon, Khaled took Michael, Steve, and me to see the pyramids. We drove through the back streets near the famous tombs, eventually stopping at a stable. It had been years since I’d been on a horse and to say that I was anxious would be an understatement. Fortunately, when my horse started trotting off on its own, the guide grabbed the reins, slowed its pace and steered us in the right direction. Gradually, I got used to the rhythmic gait of the horse moving through the sand. I started to relax and really enjoy the amazing scene. There were no cars, no buses, no houses, no pedestrians even, just horses and camels, with or without riders, the pyramids to our right, and elsewhere, desert as far as the eye could see. Despite the occasional dune buggy whizzing by, there was a timeless quality, as though nothing much had changed in the past century, We headed up to a ridge where a weathered man handed us cups of hot tea as we watched the sun set. Then back through the falling darkness, the guide now managing not only my horse but also Steve’s, which kept heading in the wrong direction. While my son rode peacefully alongside us, Khaled had disappeared. No, he hadn’t gotten bored with our leisurely pace; his horse, eager for dinner, had galloped all the way back to the stable.
For our own dinner, we headed to Andrea’s, where we met up with Sharif, his brother and sisters and several of their friends, male and female, most of whom had gone to Cairo’s American High School. Before reaching the main entrance, we passed women baking pita bread over an open fire and rows of rotisserie chickens being roasted outdoors. The food was simple but cooked to perfection. In addition to moist chicken and hot pita bread, the 12 of us shared mezzes, or appetizers, including filo dough triangles stuffed with spinach, grape leaves filled with rice and ground meat, grilled eggplant, meatballs, French fries, coleslaw, sliced tomatoes, drumsticks, and various dips including yogurt, baba ghanoush and hummus.
The following day, Michael and I visited the Pyramids again on our own and took each other’s pictures in front of the Sphinx. We toured the Egyptian Museum and saw some of the finds from King Tutankhamun’s tomb; we had seen some of the same funerary items 25 years earlier at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum, although my son, who would have two at the time, had no memory of them. Later that afternoon, we had Cleopatra Cosmopolitans, made with hibiscus instead of cranberry juice, in the bar at The Mena House Hotel; we could see one of the pyramids through the window. For dinner, Khaled took us to a traditional Egyptian restaurant, Abu El Sid, where my favorite dish was the Circassian chicken, a mound of rice and chicken blanketed in walnut sauce.
It was near midnight that evening when Khaled found a parking place near the Khan El-Khalili souk, or bazaar, which dates back to 1382 A.D. There were four of us, including Khaled’s friend, Waled; Sharif, his sisters, and Steve would meet us later at Fishawi’s, a café in the bazaar which has been open 24/7 since 1773, with the exception of one day during WWII. Many of the shops in the bazaar were shuttered by this time on a Sunday evening, but a surprising number were open. They were clustered together by type: perfume sellers, clothing vendors, spice merchants. We wandered around for a while, watching a man making fettir, Egyptian crepes, and stopping in various shops for a quick peek. I was surprised by how many things seemed to be made in China.
At a perfume store, we checked out a variety of scents: from amber to gardenia to blends with names like Moonlight Garden. The clerk insisted that the perfumes were all natural, no alcohol, and put a lighter near an open jar to prove it. The shelves of the shop were lined with delicate blown glass bottles, some in the shape of animals, like the elephant that Michael bought for his girlfriend. I chose a small curved vial, with swirls of gold and red and 50 ml of Cleopatra’s Secret, which smelled of roses and spices.
Sharif phoned to say that they were on their way. When we got to Fishawi’s, the café itself was full, so the waiter simply grabbed a few chairs and a tiny table and set us up in the adjacent alley, adding another tiny table and more chairs when the rest of the group arrived. Each table was just big enough to hold one of the brass trays the waiters carried on their shoulders then set down with a flourish. We ordered soft drinks or tea-- I choose hot karkadeh, hibiscus infusion-- and everyone but me ordered a waterpipe with tobacco flavored with apple or watermelon. I would have tried one but I had arrived in Egypt with a cold that I didn't want to worsen.
After chatting for a while, Sharif led his sisters, Steve and I off on a shopping expedition. In one three-story shop, I watched Sharif and Yasmine haggled in fluent Arabic for a dumbek, or hand drum. They also bargained on behalf of Natalie, who had found a snakeskin handbag and a couple of chunky bracelets that would look great back in London. Steve thought he’d like several statues of the Egyptian gods to take back to friends in the States. When he asked how much they were, Sharif explained that Steve had to first decide what he was willing to pay for them and then they could start the bargaining process. Although I had studied Arabic at university for more than two years, I understood virtually nothing of the conversation but it clearly involved more than prices; there was a back and forth banter with smiles and laughter. In fact, the verbal interaction seemed to be the main point, with the actual exchange of purchased objects and Egyptain pounds a mere after-thought.
The next morning my son and I left for Luxor, where we visited the ancient temple complex at Karnak, with its statue of the lion-headed goddess, Sekhmet, tucked away in side shrine, and the temple of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, carved into the desert rock, both monuments so enormous that it was hard to believe they were built by ordinary human beings. We saw descendants of the builders, dressed in long, traditional robes, living in mud-brick houses near the papyrus fields; the scene could have been from the distant past, save the ubiquitous cell phones. One evening, we ran into friends from Stanford, who suggested a hot air balloon ride over the city of the dead.
Waking early to meet the van on our last full day in Luxor, I was nervous and excited. Taking a hot air balloon definitely involves some risk, but I rationalized that the Egyptian government has a vested interest in keeping the number of crashes low. As it turned out, our pilot had previously flown jets for Egypt Air but had switched to ballooning to spend more time with his family. I tend to get airsick easily and I’m also afraid of heights. But my excitement over having a bird’s eye view of the monuments we had previously explored on foot won out over my anxiety, which proved mostly groundless. Perhaps because the ascent was slow, vertigo never hit and the only wave of queasiness I felt came at the end, when the basket hit the ground, and passed quickly. Overall, the ride was exhilarating.
I’m glad I took the chance and went to Egypt. Perhaps because I was an older woman, the mother of a grown man, I was accorded a certain level of respect, and not only by my son’s friends. Michael, who is engaging and genuinely interested in the lives of other people, was treated with respect and friendliness. Sometimes people assumed that I was my son’s wife, rather than his mother, which we both found hilarious. I had only one creepy moment, when someone touched my upper arm in passing; I turned and shouted “Imshee,!” Egyptian Arabic for “Go away!” but the offender had already disappeared into the crowd. Like every other tourist, we were accosted every few yards as we walked along Luxor’s main thoroughfare by men offering to sell us a boat ride, a taxi ride, a carriage ride, but a polite “Laa Chukran,” or “No, thanks” in Arabic was sufficient. I never felt in danger, but then again, there were soldiers everywhere, particularly in Luxor. Nor did I get sick, although I was careful to drink only bottled water or hot tea and avoided raw produce and dairy products. My only culinary regret was that I didn’t try the milk pudding, one of Egypt’s national dishes.
There is always a certain amount of risk involved in traveling, as in life, and therein lies some of the excitement. For me, traveling is a way of encountering other ways of being, thinking and doing, as well as a way to gain perspective on my own life. Often, I return with a deeper appreciation of what I have, both as an individual and as an American.
My decision to travel to Egypt was also an opportunity to face my fears-- of political violence, of personal assault, injury and illness, even my fear of heights-- to acknowledge them, manage them and move through them, and in the process stretch my capacity to do so again, in future situations.
The whole point of terrorism, whether political or personal, is simply to terrify, to cut away the ground beneath our feet, to rip away the illusion of safety that allows us to venture out into the world. While I’m not suggesting a vacation in a war zone, if we let terrorists determine where and when and how we move in the world, then we are surrendering our inalienable rights. Sometimes fighting back means taking up arms, other times it’s simply a matter of living life: getting on the bus in London the day after 7/7, heading back to work on Wall Street after 9/11, or sitting down for a cup of tea at Fishawi’s Cafe in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalil market.
I have a photograph from that night. We were gathered around a tiny brass table laden with water bottles, small teapots and glasses. We were inside the bazaar at a table in the alley outside Fishawi’s Café. Beside each person, save me, was a sheesha, or standing water pipe. In the photograph are my son and his friend Sharif, who lives in London but had come to Cairo for a family wedding; his sister, Yasmin; and their step-sister, Natalie, as well as a family friend, Steve, who was a university student in Pennsylvania. Also at the table were Khaled, a high school friend of Sharif’s whom my son had met in London, and Khaled’s friend Waled.
In a way, we were there because of Khaled, who had offered to show Michael around if he came to Cairo and graciously included me in his invitation. Since elementary school, I had wanted to see the pryramids and as a college student, I had studied Egyptian history as part of my major in Middle Eastern Studies. At that time, I couldn’t afford to travel to Egypt but later, when I could, the country always seemed a little too dangerous to visit, especially with two children in tow, especially after the terrorist attack in Luxor. But as I approached 50, I realized that it was time to take a few calculated risks. Egypt was at the top of my list of dream destinations, the place I would immediately hop on a plane to see if I ever got a terminal diagnosis. So why wait? Going to Egypt meant confronting not only a fear of terrorism but also more personal fears, of being raped, which I very nearly had been while traveling as a young woman in another North African country, and fear of getting sick. My intrepid son offered to come along but a sudden spike in airfares delayed our plan for a year. When Michael met Khaled the following Novemeber, the timing suddenly seemed serendipitous. A fortnight later, we had booked our trip, arriving in Cairo shortly after my 51st and my son’s 27th birthdays, at the beginning of my sabbatical year.
Sharif and his sisters turned out to have booked the same flight to Cairo. On our arrival, Sharif showed us where to get a visa and negotiated a taxi to take us to the boutique hotel we’d found on-line. After checking in, we met Khaled across the road at the local Gar, an Egyptian fast food chain.
Michael and I both noticed the Viagra sandwich on the menu but were too embarrassed to ask what it was. Khaled ordered hummus (garbanzo bean dip), tabbouli (cracked wheat salad), baba ghanoush (eggplant dip), falafel (garbanzo bean patties) and fool, (fava bean dip) to go with the hot pita bread. I was nervous about getting Pharaoh’s Revenge, but relaxed a little when Khaled pointed out that in a place this busy, the food wasn’t sitting around and was more likely to be fresh and hot, which it turned out to be, as well as tasty.
Late the next afternoon, Khaled took Michael, Steve, and me to see the pyramids. We drove through the back streets near the famous tombs, eventually stopping at a stable. It had been years since I’d been on a horse and to say that I was anxious would be an understatement. Fortunately, when my horse started trotting off on its own, the guide grabbed the reins, slowed its pace and steered us in the right direction. Gradually, I got used to the rhythmic gait of the horse moving through the sand. I started to relax and really enjoy the amazing scene. There were no cars, no buses, no houses, no pedestrians even, just horses and camels, with or without riders, the pyramids to our right, and elsewhere, desert as far as the eye could see. Despite the occasional dune buggy whizzing by, there was a timeless quality, as though nothing much had changed in the past century, We headed up to a ridge where a weathered man handed us cups of hot tea as we watched the sun set. Then back through the falling darkness, the guide now managing not only my horse but also Steve’s, which kept heading in the wrong direction. While my son rode peacefully alongside us, Khaled had disappeared. No, he hadn’t gotten bored with our leisurely pace; his horse, eager for dinner, had galloped all the way back to the stable.
For our own dinner, we headed to Andrea’s, where we met up with Sharif, his brother and sisters and several of their friends, male and female, most of whom had gone to Cairo’s American High School. Before reaching the main entrance, we passed women baking pita bread over an open fire and rows of rotisserie chickens being roasted outdoors. The food was simple but cooked to perfection. In addition to moist chicken and hot pita bread, the 12 of us shared mezzes, or appetizers, including filo dough triangles stuffed with spinach, grape leaves filled with rice and ground meat, grilled eggplant, meatballs, French fries, coleslaw, sliced tomatoes, drumsticks, and various dips including yogurt, baba ghanoush and hummus.
The following day, Michael and I visited the Pyramids again on our own and took each other’s pictures in front of the Sphinx. We toured the Egyptian Museum and saw some of the finds from King Tutankhamun’s tomb; we had seen some of the same funerary items 25 years earlier at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum, although my son, who would have two at the time, had no memory of them. Later that afternoon, we had Cleopatra Cosmopolitans, made with hibiscus instead of cranberry juice, in the bar at The Mena House Hotel; we could see one of the pyramids through the window. For dinner, Khaled took us to a traditional Egyptian restaurant, Abu El Sid, where my favorite dish was the Circassian chicken, a mound of rice and chicken blanketed in walnut sauce.
It was near midnight that evening when Khaled found a parking place near the Khan El-Khalili souk, or bazaar, which dates back to 1382 A.D. There were four of us, including Khaled’s friend, Waled; Sharif, his sisters, and Steve would meet us later at Fishawi’s, a café in the bazaar which has been open 24/7 since 1773, with the exception of one day during WWII. Many of the shops in the bazaar were shuttered by this time on a Sunday evening, but a surprising number were open. They were clustered together by type: perfume sellers, clothing vendors, spice merchants. We wandered around for a while, watching a man making fettir, Egyptian crepes, and stopping in various shops for a quick peek. I was surprised by how many things seemed to be made in China.
At a perfume store, we checked out a variety of scents: from amber to gardenia to blends with names like Moonlight Garden. The clerk insisted that the perfumes were all natural, no alcohol, and put a lighter near an open jar to prove it. The shelves of the shop were lined with delicate blown glass bottles, some in the shape of animals, like the elephant that Michael bought for his girlfriend. I chose a small curved vial, with swirls of gold and red and 50 ml of Cleopatra’s Secret, which smelled of roses and spices.
Sharif phoned to say that they were on their way. When we got to Fishawi’s, the café itself was full, so the waiter simply grabbed a few chairs and a tiny table and set us up in the adjacent alley, adding another tiny table and more chairs when the rest of the group arrived. Each table was just big enough to hold one of the brass trays the waiters carried on their shoulders then set down with a flourish. We ordered soft drinks or tea-- I choose hot karkadeh, hibiscus infusion-- and everyone but me ordered a waterpipe with tobacco flavored with apple or watermelon. I would have tried one but I had arrived in Egypt with a cold that I didn't want to worsen.
After chatting for a while, Sharif led his sisters, Steve and I off on a shopping expedition. In one three-story shop, I watched Sharif and Yasmine haggled in fluent Arabic for a dumbek, or hand drum. They also bargained on behalf of Natalie, who had found a snakeskin handbag and a couple of chunky bracelets that would look great back in London. Steve thought he’d like several statues of the Egyptian gods to take back to friends in the States. When he asked how much they were, Sharif explained that Steve had to first decide what he was willing to pay for them and then they could start the bargaining process. Although I had studied Arabic at university for more than two years, I understood virtually nothing of the conversation but it clearly involved more than prices; there was a back and forth banter with smiles and laughter. In fact, the verbal interaction seemed to be the main point, with the actual exchange of purchased objects and Egyptain pounds a mere after-thought.
The next morning my son and I left for Luxor, where we visited the ancient temple complex at Karnak, with its statue of the lion-headed goddess, Sekhmet, tucked away in side shrine, and the temple of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, carved into the desert rock, both monuments so enormous that it was hard to believe they were built by ordinary human beings. We saw descendants of the builders, dressed in long, traditional robes, living in mud-brick houses near the papyrus fields; the scene could have been from the distant past, save the ubiquitous cell phones. One evening, we ran into friends from Stanford, who suggested a hot air balloon ride over the city of the dead.
Waking early to meet the van on our last full day in Luxor, I was nervous and excited. Taking a hot air balloon definitely involves some risk, but I rationalized that the Egyptian government has a vested interest in keeping the number of crashes low. As it turned out, our pilot had previously flown jets for Egypt Air but had switched to ballooning to spend more time with his family. I tend to get airsick easily and I’m also afraid of heights. But my excitement over having a bird’s eye view of the monuments we had previously explored on foot won out over my anxiety, which proved mostly groundless. Perhaps because the ascent was slow, vertigo never hit and the only wave of queasiness I felt came at the end, when the basket hit the ground, and passed quickly. Overall, the ride was exhilarating.
I’m glad I took the chance and went to Egypt. Perhaps because I was an older woman, the mother of a grown man, I was accorded a certain level of respect, and not only by my son’s friends. Michael, who is engaging and genuinely interested in the lives of other people, was treated with respect and friendliness. Sometimes people assumed that I was my son’s wife, rather than his mother, which we both found hilarious. I had only one creepy moment, when someone touched my upper arm in passing; I turned and shouted “Imshee,!” Egyptian Arabic for “Go away!” but the offender had already disappeared into the crowd. Like every other tourist, we were accosted every few yards as we walked along Luxor’s main thoroughfare by men offering to sell us a boat ride, a taxi ride, a carriage ride, but a polite “Laa Chukran,” or “No, thanks” in Arabic was sufficient. I never felt in danger, but then again, there were soldiers everywhere, particularly in Luxor. Nor did I get sick, although I was careful to drink only bottled water or hot tea and avoided raw produce and dairy products. My only culinary regret was that I didn’t try the milk pudding, one of Egypt’s national dishes.
There is always a certain amount of risk involved in traveling, as in life, and therein lies some of the excitement. For me, traveling is a way of encountering other ways of being, thinking and doing, as well as a way to gain perspective on my own life. Often, I return with a deeper appreciation of what I have, both as an individual and as an American.
My decision to travel to Egypt was also an opportunity to face my fears-- of political violence, of personal assault, injury and illness, even my fear of heights-- to acknowledge them, manage them and move through them, and in the process stretch my capacity to do so again, in future situations.
The whole point of terrorism, whether political or personal, is simply to terrify, to cut away the ground beneath our feet, to rip away the illusion of safety that allows us to venture out into the world. While I’m not suggesting a vacation in a war zone, if we let terrorists determine where and when and how we move in the world, then we are surrendering our inalienable rights. Sometimes fighting back means taking up arms, other times it’s simply a matter of living life: getting on the bus in London the day after 7/7, heading back to work on Wall Street after 9/11, or sitting down for a cup of tea at Fishawi’s Cafe in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalil market.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Following the Thread
Ever since I was a girl sitting on the front porch with my best friend, the two of us making clothes for Barbie and troll dolls, I’ve nurtured a secret wish to be a fashion designer. When the opportunity came to take a step in the direction of at least exploring that childhood ambition, I went for it, signing up for a week-long course at the London College of Fashion. Doing so required me to set aside my qualms about the garment industry, fears about my finances, and an amorphous guilt over indulging in something so seemingly vacuous as fashion, to follow the thread of my own fascination, wherever it might lead.
The course began at 10 a.m. on a Monday in mid-December, on the top floor of a building near Oxford Circus. Despite the number of students enrolled in this week of short courses, the college’s heat had been off all weekend. Vanda, our teacher or tutor as the English would say, coped as best she could with the freezing conditions, giving us a tour of the ground floor (and much warmer) library, followed by an early lunch. We spent most of the afternoon back in the library, exploring possible research topics; we had to choose three by the end of the first day, which we would present to our classmates at the end of the first week.
After class, some of us walked to the fashion bookstore R.D. Franks, where I found a book about the designer I’d chosen to study, Vivienne Westwood, a Brit whose work combines Edwardian tailoring with a fondness for the outrageous. (She and her partner Malcolm McLaren, manger of the Sex Pistols, were at one point fined for “exposing to public view an indecent exhibition.”)
For someone as word-oriented as I am, whose idea of research is to read a lot, it was an interesting departure to focus on the visual, to search magazines not for articles but for images to create the mood boards, which were the jumping-off point for design development sheets that led to finished illustrations.
Day 2: I dressed as warmly as I possible, with long underwear over my tights and Ugg boots on my feet. The room was still freezing but at least I wasn’t. We spent the morning learning design development by taking an item from our bag and using its colors and shapes as inspiration for clothing and accessories. I pulled out my skeleton room key with a red trapezoidal rubber tag and eventually had a page with drawings of shoes whose edges matched that of the keys, a suitcase the same shape as the tag (“Sweet,” Vanda said approvingly), and, at the teacher’s suggestion, a red T-shirt dress with an enormous black key on the front of it. The afternoon was devoted to learning some of the basics of fashion illustration, beginning with how to quickly draw a proportional “8-head” human body from a piece of paper folded into eighths. “Give yourselves the gift of a life-drawing class,” Vanda urged us all.
In addition to reading about Vivienne Westwood, I decided to pay a visit to her boutique on Conduit Street. Despite the swarm of Japanese tourists, I was enchanted by the mix of bright-colored rubber heels and tailored plaid suits, the reproduction T-shirts from the designer’s 1970s Let It Rock shop, and the whimsical house logo, a royal orb in the middle of a flying saucer (or one of Saturn’s rings?), on everything from cufflinks to pendants. I appreciated the kindness of the clerk who said of the too-snug wrap dress I was trying on, “It’s made in Italy, so it runs small,” as he went off to fetch the next size up. If I didn’t live in 70-degree California, I would have been tempted to splurge on the purple wool knit number, with its ruffled neckline that managed to be flatteringly plunging but cut so that it didn’t need a camisole underneath. As it was, I succumbed to the charm of a pair of red jelly flats with ankle straps that took forever to put on or take off and had just a hint of fetish to them. After all, one of the subjects I was investigating was bondage’s influence on fashion.
Day 3: I woke up late, only minutes before we were supposed to meet at the Victoria and Albert museum, but managed to arrive at the Tsarist exhibit before the rest of the class. The exhibit was small but there were some intriguing military jackets that could easily be adapted to the 21st century. More poignant was the sweet little coat worn by Tsar Peter II, who died while still in his teens after ruling only three years. Called a “soul-warmer,” the coat was once scarlet but now a faded salmon hue, its removable sleeves tied to the shoulders with matching ribbons.
In an adjacent gallery was an array of couture gowns, including Westwood’s “Watteau” shot silk and taffeta evening dress in sea green with deep violet trim, one of her corset dresses with the boning inside, a style which would suit my willowy daughter very well. From there the class proceeded to another exhibit, Fashion V. Sport. Interestingly, the featured Westwood design included a felt hood that covered everything but the mouth and chin, with two vertical eye holes rimmed in copper metalwork, a reference to a 1965 Edward Mann hat in another concurrent exhibit on the Cold War. The most fantastic piece though was a sparkly extravaganza by Dior: grey tracksuit leggings topped with a fluorescent green corset and tutu embellished with sparkles, vintage white lace undergarments and a tangle of silk lacings.
While the other students took off for the shops in nearby Knightsbridge, Vanda and I had coffee in the museum dining room. Afterwards, I headed to Dover Street Market for another of our shop reports. My favorite piece of clothing in this multi-story consortium was a black taffeta skirt, which would have been rather formal if not for the two giant pairs of lips, edged in pleats, cut out through both sides of the fabric; they would like great with a red slip underneath. I also liked the market’s signature black T-shirts with their black heart-shaped appliqué of two black eyes.
The afternoon class was missing several students, presumably captivated by the post-financial collapse, pre-Christmas bargain frenzy. Vanda showed a film of a runway show by a Japanese designer whose work was inspired by the igloo at the back of the catwalk, the colors of the polar sky, and the region’s fauna. The take-home message was that anything can inspire a collection: all that is required is a fascinated imagination.
That night my daughter and I went to Selfriges, a department store chain which is somewhere between Saks and Macy’s, for another of my assignments: to choose a designer represented there and try on a piece of clothing. The street-level window had a scene featuring Alexander McQueen’s vision of winter with a ballerina dressed in snow white and blood red and another figure with a jeweled headdress and huge red cloak, so I decided to check out his ready-to-wear upstairs. What the hell, I thought as I took a crinkly scarlet ball-gown costing 2,025 GPB from the rack. The off-the-shoulder puff sleeves and empire waist flattered my decllotage, but under the voluminous (and heavy!) skirt, the rest of my body disappeared.
Day 4: Today we were all hard at work, leafing through magazines, cutting, drawing, pasting and printing things off the Internet. By 2 p.m., when I’d finally finished my third mood board, I was so light-headed that I had to stop for lunch. The next part of the process was to do a design development sheet for each mood board.
My bondage board included black and white images of strappy sandals, a Dolce and Grabbano dress with “chastity belt,” a corset and laced gloves, all cut out with tabs like paper doll clothes and mounted on a red rubbery surface. For the design development sheet, I had already sketched some pastel silk skirts and tops with corset-like lacing but Vanda pushed me to do something raw with the bondage theme. For my finished illustration, I came up with a red satin strapless, tight, bandage-style mini-dress, with overlapping layers of fabric like lacings, worn with black espadrilles.
At an inexpensive fabric store that night, I got samples of bright green and hot pink silks for my colors of India project, along with a crinkly silk sample which would work for the strapless bondage dress if it were in red rather than pink.
Day 5:. In researching the use of color in India (my third topic), I learned that while there are regional differences, Hindu culture generally equates bright colors with youth and fertility, two qualities which brides hopefully epitomize, hence the opulence of Indian bridal wear. As women age, they are expected to wear more muted colors and use less embellishments in keeping with a belief that older people should be less interested in the affairs of this world (a view which is found in other cultures as well). While my mood board included magazine images of hennaed hands and Bollywood stars, the design development sheet focused on images of the ornate, close-fitting, sleeveless or short-sleeved tops worn with saris, clipped from the pages of an South Asian wedding magazine. I had the idea of creating a line of corsets in such saturated solid colors as emerald, tumeric, lapis and magenta found in Indian bridal wear and Bollywood gowns. I added a few sketches of corsets and the fabric samples I had gotten the previous evening, but ran out of time to do a finished illustration.
The work I was proudest of was on the topic I had put the most effort into: Vivienne Westwood. For the design development sheet, I cut and pasted pictures that showed the details of her tailored clothing. But how could I take this quintessential British look and make it relate to the culture of my country? How could I show the source of my inspiration without appearing to copy? In a flash, I thought of the colors of New Mexico, where I had spent so much time: the bright blue clarity of the sky, the deep green of the forests on Taos Mountain, the blue-violet of the mountain itself, and decided to incorporate those. I also liked the sexiness of Westwood’s clothes, so I took the waterfall frill from the neck of a blouse and put it on the back of the pine green pencil skirt, to highlight the booty. For the final illustration, I created a background collage of Southwestern colors, and then added the finished sketches.
Looking back on my week in the world of fashion, it’s too early to tell whether it will lead to a career change. What I did experience was a sharpening of my observation skills, an expansion of my range as a visual artist and the encouragement which is so vital for anyone in the arts. Vanda’s enthusiasm was infectious and I started noticing and recording the little details, the fleeting moments, which might serve as future inspiration for a collage or painting, if not a dress design. The rows of star-shaped twinkling lights in fuchsia, green and clear hanging from an office window, the wall sconces reminiscent of medieval torches at a café called Sacred, the intricate cut of a gothic-black silk blouse at All Saints, my favorite British chain. I’m seeing not only cut and color, fit and fabric, but also the connections between inspiration and final product, between past and present, the invisible web of fashion as an art form, an art which each of us participates in whenever we get dressed.
The course began at 10 a.m. on a Monday in mid-December, on the top floor of a building near Oxford Circus. Despite the number of students enrolled in this week of short courses, the college’s heat had been off all weekend. Vanda, our teacher or tutor as the English would say, coped as best she could with the freezing conditions, giving us a tour of the ground floor (and much warmer) library, followed by an early lunch. We spent most of the afternoon back in the library, exploring possible research topics; we had to choose three by the end of the first day, which we would present to our classmates at the end of the first week.
After class, some of us walked to the fashion bookstore R.D. Franks, where I found a book about the designer I’d chosen to study, Vivienne Westwood, a Brit whose work combines Edwardian tailoring with a fondness for the outrageous. (She and her partner Malcolm McLaren, manger of the Sex Pistols, were at one point fined for “exposing to public view an indecent exhibition.”)
For someone as word-oriented as I am, whose idea of research is to read a lot, it was an interesting departure to focus on the visual, to search magazines not for articles but for images to create the mood boards, which were the jumping-off point for design development sheets that led to finished illustrations.
Day 2: I dressed as warmly as I possible, with long underwear over my tights and Ugg boots on my feet. The room was still freezing but at least I wasn’t. We spent the morning learning design development by taking an item from our bag and using its colors and shapes as inspiration for clothing and accessories. I pulled out my skeleton room key with a red trapezoidal rubber tag and eventually had a page with drawings of shoes whose edges matched that of the keys, a suitcase the same shape as the tag (“Sweet,” Vanda said approvingly), and, at the teacher’s suggestion, a red T-shirt dress with an enormous black key on the front of it. The afternoon was devoted to learning some of the basics of fashion illustration, beginning with how to quickly draw a proportional “8-head” human body from a piece of paper folded into eighths. “Give yourselves the gift of a life-drawing class,” Vanda urged us all.
In addition to reading about Vivienne Westwood, I decided to pay a visit to her boutique on Conduit Street. Despite the swarm of Japanese tourists, I was enchanted by the mix of bright-colored rubber heels and tailored plaid suits, the reproduction T-shirts from the designer’s 1970s Let It Rock shop, and the whimsical house logo, a royal orb in the middle of a flying saucer (or one of Saturn’s rings?), on everything from cufflinks to pendants. I appreciated the kindness of the clerk who said of the too-snug wrap dress I was trying on, “It’s made in Italy, so it runs small,” as he went off to fetch the next size up. If I didn’t live in 70-degree California, I would have been tempted to splurge on the purple wool knit number, with its ruffled neckline that managed to be flatteringly plunging but cut so that it didn’t need a camisole underneath. As it was, I succumbed to the charm of a pair of red jelly flats with ankle straps that took forever to put on or take off and had just a hint of fetish to them. After all, one of the subjects I was investigating was bondage’s influence on fashion.
Day 3: I woke up late, only minutes before we were supposed to meet at the Victoria and Albert museum, but managed to arrive at the Tsarist exhibit before the rest of the class. The exhibit was small but there were some intriguing military jackets that could easily be adapted to the 21st century. More poignant was the sweet little coat worn by Tsar Peter II, who died while still in his teens after ruling only three years. Called a “soul-warmer,” the coat was once scarlet but now a faded salmon hue, its removable sleeves tied to the shoulders with matching ribbons.
In an adjacent gallery was an array of couture gowns, including Westwood’s “Watteau” shot silk and taffeta evening dress in sea green with deep violet trim, one of her corset dresses with the boning inside, a style which would suit my willowy daughter very well. From there the class proceeded to another exhibit, Fashion V. Sport. Interestingly, the featured Westwood design included a felt hood that covered everything but the mouth and chin, with two vertical eye holes rimmed in copper metalwork, a reference to a 1965 Edward Mann hat in another concurrent exhibit on the Cold War. The most fantastic piece though was a sparkly extravaganza by Dior: grey tracksuit leggings topped with a fluorescent green corset and tutu embellished with sparkles, vintage white lace undergarments and a tangle of silk lacings.
While the other students took off for the shops in nearby Knightsbridge, Vanda and I had coffee in the museum dining room. Afterwards, I headed to Dover Street Market for another of our shop reports. My favorite piece of clothing in this multi-story consortium was a black taffeta skirt, which would have been rather formal if not for the two giant pairs of lips, edged in pleats, cut out through both sides of the fabric; they would like great with a red slip underneath. I also liked the market’s signature black T-shirts with their black heart-shaped appliqué of two black eyes.
The afternoon class was missing several students, presumably captivated by the post-financial collapse, pre-Christmas bargain frenzy. Vanda showed a film of a runway show by a Japanese designer whose work was inspired by the igloo at the back of the catwalk, the colors of the polar sky, and the region’s fauna. The take-home message was that anything can inspire a collection: all that is required is a fascinated imagination.
That night my daughter and I went to Selfriges, a department store chain which is somewhere between Saks and Macy’s, for another of my assignments: to choose a designer represented there and try on a piece of clothing. The street-level window had a scene featuring Alexander McQueen’s vision of winter with a ballerina dressed in snow white and blood red and another figure with a jeweled headdress and huge red cloak, so I decided to check out his ready-to-wear upstairs. What the hell, I thought as I took a crinkly scarlet ball-gown costing 2,025 GPB from the rack. The off-the-shoulder puff sleeves and empire waist flattered my decllotage, but under the voluminous (and heavy!) skirt, the rest of my body disappeared.
Day 4: Today we were all hard at work, leafing through magazines, cutting, drawing, pasting and printing things off the Internet. By 2 p.m., when I’d finally finished my third mood board, I was so light-headed that I had to stop for lunch. The next part of the process was to do a design development sheet for each mood board.
My bondage board included black and white images of strappy sandals, a Dolce and Grabbano dress with “chastity belt,” a corset and laced gloves, all cut out with tabs like paper doll clothes and mounted on a red rubbery surface. For the design development sheet, I had already sketched some pastel silk skirts and tops with corset-like lacing but Vanda pushed me to do something raw with the bondage theme. For my finished illustration, I came up with a red satin strapless, tight, bandage-style mini-dress, with overlapping layers of fabric like lacings, worn with black espadrilles.
At an inexpensive fabric store that night, I got samples of bright green and hot pink silks for my colors of India project, along with a crinkly silk sample which would work for the strapless bondage dress if it were in red rather than pink.
Day 5:. In researching the use of color in India (my third topic), I learned that while there are regional differences, Hindu culture generally equates bright colors with youth and fertility, two qualities which brides hopefully epitomize, hence the opulence of Indian bridal wear. As women age, they are expected to wear more muted colors and use less embellishments in keeping with a belief that older people should be less interested in the affairs of this world (a view which is found in other cultures as well). While my mood board included magazine images of hennaed hands and Bollywood stars, the design development sheet focused on images of the ornate, close-fitting, sleeveless or short-sleeved tops worn with saris, clipped from the pages of an South Asian wedding magazine. I had the idea of creating a line of corsets in such saturated solid colors as emerald, tumeric, lapis and magenta found in Indian bridal wear and Bollywood gowns. I added a few sketches of corsets and the fabric samples I had gotten the previous evening, but ran out of time to do a finished illustration.
The work I was proudest of was on the topic I had put the most effort into: Vivienne Westwood. For the design development sheet, I cut and pasted pictures that showed the details of her tailored clothing. But how could I take this quintessential British look and make it relate to the culture of my country? How could I show the source of my inspiration without appearing to copy? In a flash, I thought of the colors of New Mexico, where I had spent so much time: the bright blue clarity of the sky, the deep green of the forests on Taos Mountain, the blue-violet of the mountain itself, and decided to incorporate those. I also liked the sexiness of Westwood’s clothes, so I took the waterfall frill from the neck of a blouse and put it on the back of the pine green pencil skirt, to highlight the booty. For the final illustration, I created a background collage of Southwestern colors, and then added the finished sketches.
Looking back on my week in the world of fashion, it’s too early to tell whether it will lead to a career change. What I did experience was a sharpening of my observation skills, an expansion of my range as a visual artist and the encouragement which is so vital for anyone in the arts. Vanda’s enthusiasm was infectious and I started noticing and recording the little details, the fleeting moments, which might serve as future inspiration for a collage or painting, if not a dress design. The rows of star-shaped twinkling lights in fuchsia, green and clear hanging from an office window, the wall sconces reminiscent of medieval torches at a café called Sacred, the intricate cut of a gothic-black silk blouse at All Saints, my favorite British chain. I’m seeing not only cut and color, fit and fabric, but also the connections between inspiration and final product, between past and present, the invisible web of fashion as an art form, an art which each of us participates in whenever we get dressed.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Lingerie and Ruby Slippers
Late this summer I attended my first lingerie trade show, Curves, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Much as I loved working the show, one of the highlights of my day at the fair had nothing to do with undergarments, although it had everything to do with sex appeal: namely my visit to the Christian LouBoutin boutique, home of the signature red-soled stilettos.
I have a passion for shoes, which I seem to have inherited from my daughter. Shoes should be either fun or beautiful or both—blue Mary Janes made from Brazilian rubber, sneakers of silver kimono fabrics, bejeweled copper sandals. Unlike my tall daughter who favors heels that put her on a par with her 6’3” brother, I’ve always insisted on shoes that I can walk in, that is, flats. But that may be changing.
I was sitting in the Double Helix bar with my assistant, Rachel, having a quick lunch of Cosmopolitans, pate on toast and mocha cake when I noticed the shoe store a few yards away. Although I had never seen even a single pair outside the pages of a magazine, I recognized the boutique, named after its French designer, at once. The prices were as high as I expected, well beyond my usual splurge, but the red-soled shoes were also more exquisite than I had imagined. Beautiful but barely functional. Although there were a few token pairs of pointy-toed flats, not even these looked comfortable. No, this was part of the beauty as torture, “no pain, no gain,” aesthetic. As a young feminist, I hadn’t seen the point. Now, with two bad knees and chronic heel pain, I didn’t dare to even try on a pair lest their gorgeousness sweep aside my common sense.
There is one pair in particular that haunts me, a pair of burgundy patent heels that seem like the couture version of Dorothy’s ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz.” For me, ruby slippers are a metaphor for my Kansas childhood, my fascination with the faraway, the maelstroms of life, and my belief that in the end, we come home to ourselves. In the third grade, I had my first and only starring role as the Wicked Witch of the West (she who melts away while trying to steal the magical slippers) in a neighborhood production. Now, as an adult, I keep a photograph of a pair of sparkly red high heels to remind me that I can always click my heels three times and (with a swipe of my credit card) find my way home to San Francisco.
Since coming back from Vegas, I seem to be seeing pictures of red-soled shoes everywhere. And I’ve learned that CB as well as other famous shoes designers have actually created crystal-studded ruby slippers for the upcoming 70th anniversary of the movie. Although I’m not ready to fly to Vegas just to buy a pair of shoes that I couldn’t stand in without pain and that cost nearly a month’s rent, I have realized that these lovely heels do have something in common with undergarments after all. Just as a well-fitting bra can compensate for gravity’s effects, so too can a pair of stilettos. And then there is the argument that I may not be 25 or even 38, but maybe I’m still young enough to learn how to walk in high heels, and certainly more able to now than I will be at 70.
In the meantime, in my dreams, I’m painlessly and pertly prancing down the yellow brick road in ruby stilettos, in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere.
I have a passion for shoes, which I seem to have inherited from my daughter. Shoes should be either fun or beautiful or both—blue Mary Janes made from Brazilian rubber, sneakers of silver kimono fabrics, bejeweled copper sandals. Unlike my tall daughter who favors heels that put her on a par with her 6’3” brother, I’ve always insisted on shoes that I can walk in, that is, flats. But that may be changing.
I was sitting in the Double Helix bar with my assistant, Rachel, having a quick lunch of Cosmopolitans, pate on toast and mocha cake when I noticed the shoe store a few yards away. Although I had never seen even a single pair outside the pages of a magazine, I recognized the boutique, named after its French designer, at once. The prices were as high as I expected, well beyond my usual splurge, but the red-soled shoes were also more exquisite than I had imagined. Beautiful but barely functional. Although there were a few token pairs of pointy-toed flats, not even these looked comfortable. No, this was part of the beauty as torture, “no pain, no gain,” aesthetic. As a young feminist, I hadn’t seen the point. Now, with two bad knees and chronic heel pain, I didn’t dare to even try on a pair lest their gorgeousness sweep aside my common sense.
There is one pair in particular that haunts me, a pair of burgundy patent heels that seem like the couture version of Dorothy’s ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz.” For me, ruby slippers are a metaphor for my Kansas childhood, my fascination with the faraway, the maelstroms of life, and my belief that in the end, we come home to ourselves. In the third grade, I had my first and only starring role as the Wicked Witch of the West (she who melts away while trying to steal the magical slippers) in a neighborhood production. Now, as an adult, I keep a photograph of a pair of sparkly red high heels to remind me that I can always click my heels three times and (with a swipe of my credit card) find my way home to San Francisco.
Since coming back from Vegas, I seem to be seeing pictures of red-soled shoes everywhere. And I’ve learned that CB as well as other famous shoes designers have actually created crystal-studded ruby slippers for the upcoming 70th anniversary of the movie. Although I’m not ready to fly to Vegas just to buy a pair of shoes that I couldn’t stand in without pain and that cost nearly a month’s rent, I have realized that these lovely heels do have something in common with undergarments after all. Just as a well-fitting bra can compensate for gravity’s effects, so too can a pair of stilettos. And then there is the argument that I may not be 25 or even 38, but maybe I’m still young enough to learn how to walk in high heels, and certainly more able to now than I will be at 70.
In the meantime, in my dreams, I’m painlessly and pertly prancing down the yellow brick road in ruby stilettos, in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Twenty Years
How bad will climate change be? Is it irreversible? And if so, how much time do we have before we're all in really big trouble?
For one answer to these questions, turn to the last page of the November, 2008, U.K. "Harper's Bazaar," where British designer Vivienne Westwood, she of the famed corset dress, plugs her "Art Manifesto" (www.activeresistane.co.uk). Click to enter and look to the far right for an interview by Decca Aitkenhead with Jame Lovelock (reprinted from "The Guardian," March 1, 2008). The 'maverick" climate scientist is best-known as the father of the Gaia Hypothesis, the theory that our planet is "a self-regulating super-organism," an idea which, according to the article, "forms the basis of almost all climate science."
What is Lovelock's answer to the questions above? Bad, very bad. By 2020, less than a dozen years from now, he expects extreme weather to become normal. And it's too late to do anything about it.
In a nutshell, Lovelocks thinks we're fucked, pardon my French. When the interviewer asks what he would do if he were her, the octogenarian answers, "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
From an individual perspective, his advice makes perfect sense, regardless of global warming. None of us knows how many hours we have left. Most of us plan our lives assuming that we will wake up tomorrow morning and the next and the next for decades to come, but most of us also know that this assumption is just that, an assumption that can be shattered by an earthquake, an aneurysm, a terrorist attack. If nothing else, enjoying life is an antidote to the fear of our individual mortality.
But collective mortality is another matter. As the mother of two adult children who are just beginning to carve their way in the world, who have always talked about the children they someday hope to have, my stomach clenches reading Lovelock's words. How does one plan for a future of mass chaos? And yet this is already the case in much of Africa where climate changes such as desertification and viruses like HIV have combined with human greed and hatred to produce large-scale death and destruction. While the rest of us might prefer to think that Africa's fate is far removed from our own, Hollywood is already busy imagining what might happen when the icecaps melt.
So how do we reconcile the need to live our everyday lives, with their individual dramas of hopes and dreams, loves and losses, with the knowledge that we may all be living in the equivalent of Darfur sooner rather than later, in this life and not in some future circle of hell? Perhaps Lovelock is right and it's already too late, but it seems to me that we have a moral obligation to try to stop the rising tides. It's time to put the environmental crisis, not the credit crisis or the Middle East crisis, front and center on the international agenda. And at the same time, try to enjoy each and every moment.
For one answer to these questions, turn to the last page of the November, 2008, U.K. "Harper's Bazaar," where British designer Vivienne Westwood, she of the famed corset dress, plugs her "Art Manifesto" (www.activeresistane.co.uk). Click to enter and look to the far right for an interview by Decca Aitkenhead with Jame Lovelock (reprinted from "The Guardian," March 1, 2008). The 'maverick" climate scientist is best-known as the father of the Gaia Hypothesis, the theory that our planet is "a self-regulating super-organism," an idea which, according to the article, "forms the basis of almost all climate science."
What is Lovelock's answer to the questions above? Bad, very bad. By 2020, less than a dozen years from now, he expects extreme weather to become normal. And it's too late to do anything about it.
In a nutshell, Lovelocks thinks we're fucked, pardon my French. When the interviewer asks what he would do if he were her, the octogenarian answers, "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
From an individual perspective, his advice makes perfect sense, regardless of global warming. None of us knows how many hours we have left. Most of us plan our lives assuming that we will wake up tomorrow morning and the next and the next for decades to come, but most of us also know that this assumption is just that, an assumption that can be shattered by an earthquake, an aneurysm, a terrorist attack. If nothing else, enjoying life is an antidote to the fear of our individual mortality.
But collective mortality is another matter. As the mother of two adult children who are just beginning to carve their way in the world, who have always talked about the children they someday hope to have, my stomach clenches reading Lovelock's words. How does one plan for a future of mass chaos? And yet this is already the case in much of Africa where climate changes such as desertification and viruses like HIV have combined with human greed and hatred to produce large-scale death and destruction. While the rest of us might prefer to think that Africa's fate is far removed from our own, Hollywood is already busy imagining what might happen when the icecaps melt.
So how do we reconcile the need to live our everyday lives, with their individual dramas of hopes and dreams, loves and losses, with the knowledge that we may all be living in the equivalent of Darfur sooner rather than later, in this life and not in some future circle of hell? Perhaps Lovelock is right and it's already too late, but it seems to me that we have a moral obligation to try to stop the rising tides. It's time to put the environmental crisis, not the credit crisis or the Middle East crisis, front and center on the international agenda. And at the same time, try to enjoy each and every moment.
Friday, October 17, 2008
The Real Rapture
I woke up this morning to Beauty. The beauty of a small pug dog snoring softly beside me, The pleasantly heavy warmth of the down comforter, its red sateen cover glowing in the morning light. The scent of roses on the nearby table. The taste of strong hot tea with milk. The music of Snow Patrol urging me to forget the world outside.
And yet I also woke up to the world outside, remembering a broadcast I’d heard just yesterday. The G7 had met and there was talk that in bailing out their financial institutions, the Europeans had just blown their environmental budget. Each country had its predictable sob story as to why it couldn’t meet its target for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Poland cried that it was too poor to revamp its Soviet-era coal plants, while Germany wanted to protect its car manufacturers. The Brits proposed paying developing nations to not cut down their rain forests, in lieu of lowering its own carbon footprint. At least they all agree that global warming is a man-made crisis and are committed to some level of action, unlike the powers-that-be in this country who are just getting to the point of admitting that climate change is happening. And while humanity dithers, the polar ice caps and the Greenland Ice Sheet continue to melt, drop by drop into the oceans, causing them to slowly rise, and eventually flood the coastal cities where much of humanity now lives.
There are some who view this as good news. The New Agers hope that collapse will bring on a more sustainable civilization. And if not, they’ll tell you that since “we’re spiritual beings having a human experience,” what happens on this planet doesn’t really matter anyway. And then there are the Christian fundamentalists who are looking forward to the Apocalypse because they’re so convinced that in the “Rapture,” or the Second Coming, Christ will beam them up to the Pearly Gates. It never seems to occur to those who take pleasure in shooting wolves from the air that God might think twice about allowing into Heaven those who managed to turn the Garden of Eden into Hell on Earth, even, or especially, if they did it in Her name.
If we were not in such a hurry to transcend this world, perhaps we could slow down enough to see its beauty and be moved to protect it-- out of love. There is the immense beauty of the disappearing Amazon Rainforest, the melting Greenland Ice Sheet and the dying Great Barrier Reef, but there is also the everyday beauty that still exists in even the most impoverished or frenetic of lives: the sight of the crescent new moon, the quiet sound of snow falling, the bittersweetness of dark chocolate, the scent of wild fennel growing along the bay, the warmth of a friend’s embrace, the ecstasy of a lover's caress, the heart-opening beauty of a child’s smile. If we could see how each of our lives is shot through with beauty, perhaps we could learn to cherish each moment and each other as well. And that would be real rapture.
And yet I also woke up to the world outside, remembering a broadcast I’d heard just yesterday. The G7 had met and there was talk that in bailing out their financial institutions, the Europeans had just blown their environmental budget. Each country had its predictable sob story as to why it couldn’t meet its target for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Poland cried that it was too poor to revamp its Soviet-era coal plants, while Germany wanted to protect its car manufacturers. The Brits proposed paying developing nations to not cut down their rain forests, in lieu of lowering its own carbon footprint. At least they all agree that global warming is a man-made crisis and are committed to some level of action, unlike the powers-that-be in this country who are just getting to the point of admitting that climate change is happening. And while humanity dithers, the polar ice caps and the Greenland Ice Sheet continue to melt, drop by drop into the oceans, causing them to slowly rise, and eventually flood the coastal cities where much of humanity now lives.
There are some who view this as good news. The New Agers hope that collapse will bring on a more sustainable civilization. And if not, they’ll tell you that since “we’re spiritual beings having a human experience,” what happens on this planet doesn’t really matter anyway. And then there are the Christian fundamentalists who are looking forward to the Apocalypse because they’re so convinced that in the “Rapture,” or the Second Coming, Christ will beam them up to the Pearly Gates. It never seems to occur to those who take pleasure in shooting wolves from the air that God might think twice about allowing into Heaven those who managed to turn the Garden of Eden into Hell on Earth, even, or especially, if they did it in Her name.
If we were not in such a hurry to transcend this world, perhaps we could slow down enough to see its beauty and be moved to protect it-- out of love. There is the immense beauty of the disappearing Amazon Rainforest, the melting Greenland Ice Sheet and the dying Great Barrier Reef, but there is also the everyday beauty that still exists in even the most impoverished or frenetic of lives: the sight of the crescent new moon, the quiet sound of snow falling, the bittersweetness of dark chocolate, the scent of wild fennel growing along the bay, the warmth of a friend’s embrace, the ecstasy of a lover's caress, the heart-opening beauty of a child’s smile. If we could see how each of our lives is shot through with beauty, perhaps we could learn to cherish each moment and each other as well. And that would be real rapture.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Whatever Happened to Compassion?
I listened throughout the debate between Vice-Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin for the topic of abortion to come up, but the interviewer focused on economic and international issues, denying Governor Palin the chance to state again her ardent belief that even incest and rape survivors should be forced to bear their rapist’s babies, that even if her own daughter were raped, she would want her to “choose life.”
When I was raped at 16, I chose life—my life. And thanks to the passage of Roe. v. Wade the previous year, I was able to choose to save my own life.
At that time, there was no word for acquaintance rape. Rape happened when a strange man, usually of a different race, jumped out of the bushes with a knife, not when a co-worker with coloring like your mother’s got you so drunk you blacked out and then “took advantage of you.” Like a good Catholic girl, I blamed myself, my naivete, my drunken state, my midriff-baring top, not to mention the fact that I had already lost my virginity. As though any or all of those factors negated my right to bodily integrity.
I couldn’t tell my parents. And I knew at a gut level that if I did, I would be blamed, and that if they called the police, I would be the only one on trial. Alone, I found my way to a health clinic where I got the morning-after pill. When that didn’t bring on my period, I arranged for a menstrual extraction at five weeks, one week short of the then-six week waiting period for a pregnancy test. I’ll never know if I was actually pregnant, but I wasn’t going to wait the extra week. The doctor who did the procedure was the coldest I have ever met, but I am nevertheless deeply grateful to him. Ten years passed before I could acknowledge that I had been raped. Thirty-five years this month have passed since the rape and never have I had one single moment of guilt about my decision to choose my life.
I have two healthy, amazing adult children. No woman should be forced to bear a child she does not want, no matter what the circumstances of conception. But if that woman conceived as a result of rape or incest, forcing her to bear that child is beyond unconscionable.
To say that a rape or incest survivor should “choose life,” may sound noble to some, but few wish to imagine the gritty reality behind Governor Palin’s statement. But ponder this, dear reader. A girl of 11 or 13 or 15 has been impregnated by her father/grandfather/brother/uncle/cousin. Do not try to envision the horrors that this girl has already lived through, the excruciating pain of having her young body violated, most likely again and again, the broken heart that comes from having one’s basic trust devastated, the perhaps subtle neurological damage caused by this trauma, which will impact virtually every aspect of her life for decades to come. Now imagine the usual nine months of pregnancy, with its myriad physical discomforts, and the agonizing pain of childbirth-- difficult but ultimately worthwhile challenges for adult women who want a child but pure torture for those who do not. And after childbirth, what will this abusive family choose for this girl? Whisk away the baby to be adopted or keep the baby, to be raised alongside its mother, perhaps used as a hostage to force her continued compliance?
Whatever happened to compassion?
And for those who look to the Bible for their answers, I find it hard to believe that the compassionate Jesus of the New Testament would agree with Governor Palin that the innocent should be punished in a cycle of violence without end.
When I was raped at 16, I chose life—my life. And thanks to the passage of Roe. v. Wade the previous year, I was able to choose to save my own life.
At that time, there was no word for acquaintance rape. Rape happened when a strange man, usually of a different race, jumped out of the bushes with a knife, not when a co-worker with coloring like your mother’s got you so drunk you blacked out and then “took advantage of you.” Like a good Catholic girl, I blamed myself, my naivete, my drunken state, my midriff-baring top, not to mention the fact that I had already lost my virginity. As though any or all of those factors negated my right to bodily integrity.
I couldn’t tell my parents. And I knew at a gut level that if I did, I would be blamed, and that if they called the police, I would be the only one on trial. Alone, I found my way to a health clinic where I got the morning-after pill. When that didn’t bring on my period, I arranged for a menstrual extraction at five weeks, one week short of the then-six week waiting period for a pregnancy test. I’ll never know if I was actually pregnant, but I wasn’t going to wait the extra week. The doctor who did the procedure was the coldest I have ever met, but I am nevertheless deeply grateful to him. Ten years passed before I could acknowledge that I had been raped. Thirty-five years this month have passed since the rape and never have I had one single moment of guilt about my decision to choose my life.
I have two healthy, amazing adult children. No woman should be forced to bear a child she does not want, no matter what the circumstances of conception. But if that woman conceived as a result of rape or incest, forcing her to bear that child is beyond unconscionable.
To say that a rape or incest survivor should “choose life,” may sound noble to some, but few wish to imagine the gritty reality behind Governor Palin’s statement. But ponder this, dear reader. A girl of 11 or 13 or 15 has been impregnated by her father/grandfather/brother/uncle/cousin. Do not try to envision the horrors that this girl has already lived through, the excruciating pain of having her young body violated, most likely again and again, the broken heart that comes from having one’s basic trust devastated, the perhaps subtle neurological damage caused by this trauma, which will impact virtually every aspect of her life for decades to come. Now imagine the usual nine months of pregnancy, with its myriad physical discomforts, and the agonizing pain of childbirth-- difficult but ultimately worthwhile challenges for adult women who want a child but pure torture for those who do not. And after childbirth, what will this abusive family choose for this girl? Whisk away the baby to be adopted or keep the baby, to be raised alongside its mother, perhaps used as a hostage to force her continued compliance?
Whatever happened to compassion?
And for those who look to the Bible for their answers, I find it hard to believe that the compassionate Jesus of the New Testament would agree with Governor Palin that the innocent should be punished in a cycle of violence without end.
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