We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The End of Retirement As We Know It? - As Chairman of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, Paul Irving wonders if retirement actually makes sense today.
Retirement is a modern concept, dating back only to the 1930s in the US. I have an IRA for tax purposes, but we have no retirement plans of any sort. We enjoy like life as it is, she enjoys my being out of the house all day, and if I quit working some things would need to change. Making income and being out in the world is a good thing at any age. I see plenty of guys working in their mid-70s, sometimes doing much less prestigious jobs than they once had. Clearly good for their mind, body, and soul.
Example: sales guy at our local Jos. A. Bank used to sell bonds. He's 72. Wife died, decided he had to get out of the house and off the golf course and away from the bar there. Top salesman, loves seeing people all day. Bought 3 suits from him for my lad.
Also, people who have paid lots of tuitions probably still need some income to maintain their lives as they like them.
Whatever you do, don’t miss this exhibition; this is exactly the kind of show MoMA is made for. Museum co-curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland (with Virginie Perdrisot) make MoMA’s fourth-floor galleries look more beautiful and useful than they have ever looked. Linger in these spaces; the chance won’t come again for a long time. “Picasso Sculpture” could be one of the great learning experiences of your seeing life.
See it if you possibly can. It is a feast. Whatever visual adventures Picasso pursued, he did them with authority, some humor, dead seriousness, and perfect taste.
Sure, it can be subjected to a vote, but the vote will only show the current majority view of the current state of the data and interpretation. Rarely Truth. Today's Truthwill be tomorrow's object of mockery.
Pope Francis claimed that firearms and firearm makers cannot be Christian. A curious statement as he is surrounded by heavily-armed guards whenever he leaves his house. The Vatican is equally protected.
The same thing applies to Obama's pontificating about firearms. He is surrounded by firearms every day, and will be provided with armed guards for free for the rest of his life. I guess it's supposed to be different for us little people but not for me. I carry. If you worked in today's Hartford, CT, you might too.
The HK MP7 (probably) rides shotgun with the dark (purple) suit wearing Swiss Guardsmen closest to the pope.
"Whole grain." Don't bother with it unless you like the taste of it. It has zero "health" benefit. Living as we do in a prosperous part of the world with an abundance of varied foodstuffs, there is no reason to consume any grain products at all except for enjoyment and to soak up gravy. Breads were once poverty food, just enough carbs to keep the proles and soldiers working one more day. The rich ate meat and lived far longer and more happily.
The American lobbying and advertising Whole Grains Council has had huge success in selling their health scam. Just like Whole Foods. Food piety has two arms: the ignorant, and their commercial predators.
Enjoyment applies to OJ too. It's basically sugar with no other food value. Years ago, the Florida Citrus cabal convinced Americans that they should have it for breakfast. Tasty, but no different from a Coke. Scurvy is not a problem.
My point with my nutrition myth posts is that you should eat whatever you enjoy. If you have a weight problem or a health problem, that's another matter. Just don't pretend, for example, that an OJ is any "healthier" than a Pepsi, or brown bread is "healthier" than white bread. That is just marketing to the low-info shopper and gullibles like Michelle Obama.
We all love happy myths, do we not? The fantasy that we can control fate.
At least until Wagner got his hands on it, opera was more like the pop music of the 19th century than its jazz. Serious People often thought about it the way they think about Broadway musicals today—there were a few good works in the old repertory, perhaps, but silly Disney movie makeovers developed for the mass out-of-town tourist audience are not the best respected art form around.
...
In 20th-century America, opera had something else going against it: As a “light” musical form that dealt heavily in emotionalism and spectacle, opera was something that women and gay men were passionate about—and that straight men were supposed to despise. The banker was supposed to snore through the opera that his social climbing wife forced him to attend; gay men, meanwhile, swooned over divas and worshipped at the shrine of Maria Callas. The one exception to the rule that straight men were anti-opera was for the true upper class elite, like Eustace Tilley and a handful of his peers. Loving opera was a sign of an aristocratic background and European tastes.
That’s a lot of baggage for an art form to carry, and it does great credit to the Met and the other American opera houses that opera has, if not exactly flourished, at least established a firm foothold in the United States.
Broadway musicals are opera. Often, "light opera" but still opera. Light opera and opera buffa have longer histories than grand opera. Indeed, Verdi was the pop music of his time. Shakespeare's plays were the hit tv shows of his time too.
Nothing can be more pop, or more delightful, than this. The spartan production highlights the music:
Yesterday we popped into NYC, the greatest and most entertaining city in the world, to see a series of street theater events that were staged up on the High Line.
One part of what was cool about that was that, in NY, so many things are happening all the time that it's hard to tell the staged from the real. Not to mention that the city is an excellent stage set in itself and everybody on the thronging streets is interesting to look at. Bit part players on a giant stage.
Glad we parked in the burbs and took a train in. Took an Uber to Gansevoort. This week, we had the Pope, Obama, Putin, the tyrant of China and the whole UN General Assembly yesterday and again today. Thus, blocked streets, barricades, and cops making huge overtime everywhere. Not to mention the tourists. September is a big tourism month in NY, and rightly so.
I notice that nobody uses cameras anymore. Even the Japanese tourists, remarkably, just use their iPhones these days instead of their fancy Nikons. Fine cameras seem to be obsolete and nobody buys them anymore. Even the little Lumix I like to use seems kinda dorky, but I don't care.
The terminus of the High Line in the old meat-packing district, Gansevoort Street. I remember when this was a grim industrial neighborhood. Now the crowds and the new construction are astonishing:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, an important American figure who I find almost impossible to read, took a train out west partly to visit John Muir.
Emerson was Muir's hero. However, the elderly Emerson, the author of Nature, had no interest in going into the woods with Muir. I think nature was an idea for Emerson, not experienced outside of a park or a farm. For Muir, of course, wilderness was religion.
The US Army introduced fitness tests in 1943. They have relaxed their standards since.
When I began high school, every entering boy had to take the test while the coaches recorded. They were looking for athletic potential. If you didn't pass, you had to do a semester of remedial fitness before you could even do a (required) intramural sport - or even a JV sport. The remedial fitness was a bitch. 2 1/2 hours each afternoon. Ex-USMC math teacher was the coach. He made overweight kids go on diets and run extra unless they needed a JV fullback. Good stuff if you could handle a little humiliation. Runs, sprints, lifting, squats, football sleds, sit-up marathons, pushup marathons, etc. I flunked on the pull-ups. They also had a swim speed test which I handled easily but I didn't want the swim team. I still stink at pull-ups.
I doubt that a public school could make such demands on kids. Funny, as I reflect on it: We had riflery and shotgun teams too, but they were extracurriculars, did not count as sports. Still do, I am sure. Heck, even girls' summer camps have them today. A Bird Dog daughter was an NRA-certified riflery and archery coach/counselor at a girls' camp.
The program I have taken on is quite different from the ones that have been discussed here. I understand that strength-building resistance work is important even if you do not want to model underwear, because strength is needed to maximize your general fitness exercises and recreational activities.
I am a young guy luckily without any need to build muscles at this point. I am doing general fitness and cardio to feel good, to have energy, to prepare for skiing season, and so as not to look like a soft slob before I hit 35 or 40. Every gal and guy I know works out in some form. White-collar people have to keep moving or we will decay.
The only sport I play these days is basketball on Sunday night. We have a good group and we invade the pub afterwards in our sweats. I'd like to assemble squash or racketball group for Saturdays but I haven't arranged it yet. My self-directed general fitness program combines plyometrics with calisthenics on 3 days a week, and cardio 3 days a week. I rarely miss a day because when I am out of town I can do it too. I do these early, on the way to work. No resistance exercises per se at this point.
My pure cardio is 30-40 minutes of running sprint intervals on the treadmill. I would prefer running my intervals outdoors but I have genes for bad knees and the treadmill is joint-friendly. Sometimes I do intervals on the elliptical, bike, or Stairmaster instead, for variety. I finish it up with calf lifts and calf stretches, and throw in a plank if I have time.
For my plyo/calisthenic days (plyo and calisthenics have some overlap) I do an hour, more or less. I use "plyo" to refer to exercises requiring quick bursts of high energy, like box jumps, burpees, mountain-climbers, medicine ball throws and smashes; and the term "calisthenics" for any other high-rep body-weight exercises (or with light weights) like planks, Bird Dogs, kettle-ball walks, step-ups, jumping jacks, ropes, pushups, pullups, jump rope, lunges, squats, jumping squats, etc. This combines general fitness with cardio as there is no time to rest in my schedule. Heart rate never normalizes but you do need to catch your breath.
Then shower and shave in the gym, suit up, and get to the office by 7. Great way to start a day. I got professional help designing this workout with the goals of endurance, muscle-toning, agility, vigor, and general full-body fitness. Not for fat loss or muscle building. On Sunday morning, I go to church instead. Redeemer: a good Christian workout with a wonderful community of friends and new friends.
For the first two weeks, I felt exhausted every day. After a month of it, I am feeling good, sleep better, have more appetite (I am a small-eater as in coffee for breakfast and a half-sandwich for lunch), and I think I have more energy. It's good for my head too. Use it or lose it.
I am seeing that the NJ and Bulldog are getting on board. Good American fitness and strength in mind, morals, body, and spirit is what we're about (we hope). Mens sana in corpore sano.
Can I confess how freaking hard it is becoming? My trainer keeps ramping up his demands as I enter my 6th month of intense, six-day/wk fitness training program. It's up there with the hardest work I have ever encountered, mentally and physically. Boot Camp. It is hard, and it hurts. It stretches one's capacity for discipline and effort, same or more than studying Physical Chemistry.
In the process, I discover things about myself. For one thing, I learn that when I think I am beat, I can still do a little more if I get my head around it to fully engage my will. In some ways, I am weaker in willthan I like to think. Will, self-control, and self-discipline are the keys to so many achievements and accomplishments in life.It is part of what is termed "executive functioning."Overall life effectiveness in pursuing goals.
Another thing I have found interesting is that, just as in a job, or in therapy, or in a church group, AA, a military platoon, or on a sports team, it is relationship which brings out the most we can do and pushes us forward. On my own, I could never have accomplished what I have done thus far had I read read instructions in a book. I am amazed by how this middle-aged bod can adapt to physical demands despite the inevitable aches and pains and injuries of intense exercises. This body is harder than it has ever been, no soft spots and no fat except for some (genetic?) but shrinking love handles.
Crossfit (which I think is good but I don't do) gets that with their group fitness programs. The team cheers each other on, from the old or fat or heart-impaired to the young and strong. It's not so much competitive as it is relational (not that there is anything wrong with the competitive part because that is fun too). They do compete in weight loss, if they need that.
It's a love-hate adventure for me. There is an end point where it will be more about "maintain" instead of "progress." Not there yet, especially in the full-body endurance department. A few more months, I suspect. Can't do enough reps benching my weight either. I am more interested, though, in intense endurance than in plain muscle and my natural build is ectomorph with a meso tendency. Average. I want to do 30 minutes on the stair machine set on a fair speed, for example, or 50 medicine ball smashes without collapsing. My planks are getting longer though, to the point that my whole body quivers and shivers for 80 seconds. That's when my guy says "25 more seconds - c'mon, lock those elbows." So I do it and then fall on the floor.
In the end, it is for life functionality and fun, not for the gym. A little vanity is the dessert. Yes, my abs are shaping up but it's just for sex appeal...
If you are at all sympathetic to the skepticism about neuroscience that I am advancing, then you will perhaps find it plausible that neuroaesthetics is another instance of neuroscience’s intellectual imperialism, another chapter in its attempt to come up with a brain theory of everything. But neuroscience’s recent preoccupation with art, however, reveals something deeper and more fundamental about the neuroscience project itself.
I am no skeptic about basic neuroscience. I am skeptical about its overeach, its hubris. Aesthetics can never be understood at a neuronal level of organization any more than a living cell can be understood at an atomic level.
When you do a high-risk adventure, you are supposed to be willing to die doing it. Isn't that the point? Expecting others to rescue you at public expense and risk to themselves is wrong.
One cool aspect of this production of the bawdy love, sex, and fantasy farce is that 5 actors play all of the roles - with no costumes. Thus the dreamlike confusion is created. No props, no set, so your imagination fills in the details like a dream.
The sober-minded (but rarely sober) Samuel Pepys saw the play in the early 1600s and thought it ridiculous. It is, sort-of, but it has had a long shelf life thus far for some reason.
The play within a play within a dream is so intentionally dumb that it's funny. Sheesh, the guy's plays were meant to be plain entertainment and not to be taken seriously. He just wanted to get rich by appealing to all levels of society and education from the Queen to the stable groom and he had a good enough grammar school education to do that. Once he got rich and maybe had his fill of girlfriends, he quit.
We had the usual fine post-matinee supper at what has become our favorite place in that neighborhood, The West Bank Cafe. The kids told us how much they enjoyed having seen - and met the author - of the clever musical Hamilton on Broadway. Since they are discerning and discriminating theater-goers, I'll listen to them. (That daughter is an ambitious playwright and script-writer. Actress too.)
I informed them that Hamilton's farmhouse still stands in far-uptown Manhattan. He used to ride his horse up the dirt road (an old Indian trail) Broadway to his farm on weekends.
Daughter informed me that she rides her new bike 30 miles/day to her various NYC activities and jobs, and is growing strong legs. I advised wearing a reflector vest because my kids are precious to me. Hamilton did not need one.
Mrs. BD overschedules me with social events and outings, but I man up and try to deal with it like a good, cheerful spouse: Happy wife, happy life.
My pic is the Pearl on the far west end of 42nd St. High-rise expensive housing is booming in that area and streets are full of happy-looking people of every size, shape, color, socioeconomic type, and ethnicity. What a city!
The late lamented Marianne Matthews - ex-NewYorker living in Houston - used to love my NYC posts. These days (except for Bulldog) I mostly get grouchy comments. I promise that if you spent a few days banging around the City with us you would change your tune.
I had lunch with an interesting and delightful fellow the other day. David Leff. He was giving a talk about his last book, The Last Undiscovered Place:
When Leff began to look for a suitable place to raise a family, his criteria were familiar: an affordable fixer-upper with some historical character, pleasant neighbors, good schools, walkable streets, and attractive natural surroundings. The suburbs around Hartford were uninviting, so he settled sixteen miles away in Collinsville, a small village that grew up around―indeed was largely built by―The Collins Company, once the world’s leading maker of edge tools.
Mrs. BD loved the book.
His bio is here. He may not tinker with metal in the traditional Connecticut manner, but this guy is a serious historian of New England. Also, a lawyer, a published poet, professional art photographer, volunteer fireman, professional conservationist, Boy Scout counselor, chicken-raiser, and fly-fisherman. And more. He has a new book coming out this fall.
I greatly admire and enjoy people who invest themselves so fully and productively in life and in their communities.
Here's his website. "I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Re that Emerson, I embrace all of the above, not just the common. Emerson was posing there, I think. Anyway, Leff loves Emerson. I have tried Emerson many times, but he always eludes me.
And just think, Great Courses doesn't even have a football team, an endowment, a diversity coordinator, a Title lX administrator, a sustainability Czar, an admissions office, or a water feature. Any by issuing no diplomas they can make sure that you are there only to learn.
- Took a drive yesterday to Long Island City (part of Queens, NYC).
Long Island City (L.I.C.) is the westernmost residential and commercial neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens. L.I.C. is noted for its rapid and ongoing residential growth and gentrification, its waterfront parks, and its thriving arts community.[1] L.I.C. has among the highest concentration of art galleries, art institutions, and studio space of any neighborhood in New York City.
Went there to see a one-act play festival at The Secret Theater. Golly, LIC is changing. High-rises everywhere under construction. We had supper at a superb tiny French bistro, LIC Market. Everybody who works there is French. You can park on the street in LIC, no problem. As a daughter says, a gritty mix of industrial, residential, and business: Real NYC.
We meandered through Astoria while en route. Got a little lost. I have never been to Astoria. It is one of the most pleasant, middle-class, and remarkably multi-cultural places I have seen. Of all things, a large Maltese population too- over 20,000. Who'da thunk it? But if you think about it, there is little to do in Malta.
It's not too far from where the big game - Jokevitch vs. Federer - is today. I can't miss that.
- Out-of-towners like us are always more familiar with Manhattan, with its totalitarian arithmetical road grid. Here is something wonderful, probably worth a trip from anywhere: Picasso, Completely Himself in 3 Dimensions. It's on my to-do list. We never miss major Picasso shows, because his craft and imagination blows my mind.
- Something else fun: Immersive (aka Interactive) theater in NYC. I have heard reports about how much fun it is. A friend had his daughter's Sweet 16th party for 25 gals at one of the scavenger hunt "plays," and a couple of people told me about the MacBeth one.
- At my point in life, a visit to NYC is always good for a dose of hyper-stimulation and amazement in the works of man but I am always happy to return to my quiet more pastoral home where the loudest noise is a cricket. If I won the Powerball, though, I think I'd buy a brownstone (with working fireplaces) in the West Village in a flash. I need both. Prosperous people in NYC belong to elite clubs as private retreats, and have dachas in the country too. I could handle that.
My lovely daughters live as if they owned NYC despite living on a shoestring. Fearless, undaunted, resourceful and adventurous, they just take daily bites of that apple as so many young people need to, and shoot for the stars. No bourgeois instincts, it seems - like their Mom. All the same, they do love to come home sometimes for love, free food, and to hit some tennis balls like the prepster kids they are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The program I have taken on is quite different from the ones that have been discussed here. I understand that strength-building resistance work is important even if you do not want to model underwear, because strength is needed to maximize your general fitness exercises and recreational activities.
I am seeing that the NJ and Bulldog are getting on board. Good American fitness and strength in mind, morals, body, and spirit is what we're about (we hope). Mens sana in corpore sano.
Took the kids to see 
I had lunch with an interesting and delightful fellow the other day. David Leff. He was giving a talk about his last book, 
- Took a drive yesterday to