Welcome to my blage...(blog + homepage)
January 3, 2011Thanks, everyone, for your entries. This was fun
and I hope it brightens your first Monday of the new year. Honorable
mention goes to the Kotex parody of a Kotex ad. Cool site as well. And who could forget Colbert's actual Congressional testimony
on immigrant workers? A special shout out to my youth crew: Maya for
the Ke$ha parody and to Stella for finding Donald Duck on Glenn Beck.
Goodbye 2010 and happy new year!
10. Gilbert and Sullivan...Obama, the Modern US President
9. Stephen Colbert's Sarah Palin's Alaska
8. Newsroom--There's Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere
6. Grover as Old Spice Man--Smell Like a Monster
2. Donald Duck meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck
1. Baby Monkey (Going Backwards on a Pig)
December 21, 2010
Happy 100th birthday, Rachel, my grandmother, you amazing creature!
My grandmother was born on this day in 1910. She was born in New York, but a fateful voyage back to Sorrento with her mom and brother when she was 3 years old sealed her Italian identity--World War I broke out while she was aboard that trip, and she spent the next 5 years in Meta di Sorrento, a village in Sorrento. My grandmother tells me about her frightening wartime passage, about shutting off lights aboard ship during the night, and taking other precautions to avoid tangles with military ships and bombs. She lived in Italy with her aunts, uncle, brother, and mother, until she was 8, when it was safe to return home to the US. In many ways, speaks English as a second language. The War ruined the family's shipbuilding business, and they grew accustomed to a more modest life in the US. I think she found US culture peculiar, and she felt peculiar about herself in the US, but so did so many new immigrants trying to make it in NY. Her family, however, felt as outsiders living in an Irish neighborhood in NY and also did not feel like "Italian Americans." They were Italians, and they had a bit of a class consciousness that was more "upper class" when they arrived, even after they "fell" to middle class.
Rachel was a telephone operator with Bell NY during the Depression (worthy of all caps, perhaps?) and was an aspiring songwriter. During the late 1940s/early 1950s she tried to get a few of her songs published, one of them, Tic Toc Crazy was recorded as a demo and then recorded for radio play and did find some airtime. Rachel and Perry Como nearly collaborated on one of her songs; I have a picture of her and Perry Como when they were friends back when he was "a big shot," but he was "very nice," she mostly says.
She and my grandfather, Ami, married on the spur of the moment, when they were serving as witnesses for their friends' wedding before a justice of the peace. They had planned to marry, but were inspired in the moment to act, moved by their friends' nuptials. Plus her parents did not like Ami's folks (a class thing, maybe? no one really wants to tell me...)
My grandmother loves family, is still suspicious of America (even though her husband, Amerigo, was named after this country), was a fabulous cook (she even made Italian pastries in our kitchen when I was growing up!), but lately she has found living to be a real strain, physically and mentally. I have to think it has been hard that she has been without my grandfather for 40 years (he died at 59). Ami was fantastic. He was a book binder, an amateur bike racer and loved life and my grandmother and mother, Elaine (born Elena), and me (I was 6 mos old when he died).
I love my grandmother dearly and am so happy that she is living long enough so that my daughter and she can know each other. Although, sometimes it is a struggle between the two of them (that 96 1/2 year age gap can be formidable sometimes), sometimes my grandmother wants to pick her up (and she can't) and my daughter runs away. But then they get over it and laugh. That's what we all need to do.
Except when it comes to the economy, and misogyny and racism and...you know me, I could go on...
And speaking of "falling" class-wise...
Today on NPR's Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep interviewed Ben Affleck about his latest film, The Company Men, about downsized managers coming to grips with their new identity in the new insecure economy. But this film--which I have not yet seen--seems also to be very much about masculinity and especially, white white collar male workers during the great recession, which has been described in some news stories and by some economists as the great "he-cession."
I'm looking forward to seeing this film, to see how it treats the problem of the white male recession (where white men are supposedly doing worse than others--this is more myth and insecurity than reality). And, perhaps what I will find moving about this film is that it will illustrate how wrong it is that in 2010 top CEOs (like WalMart's Michael Duke) on average make 300 times average workers' pay. Affleck says as much in his interview with Inskeep. He talks about how morally wrong it is for such extreme pay gaps, which he argues, points to a moral "decline" in the US. Thumbs up to that...I just wish this film didn't exclusively focus on white men falling, which it seems to.
PS--Just got back from the 100th birthday party w/ grandma. She had some champagne to toast before dinner and promptly found it necessary for a nap. We will try this festivity again in a few days...on Christmas, which is appropriate. As a Dec 21 baby, she must have found her birthdays and Christmases all mixed together anyway. (And, after talking with my mom about this blog post, I made a few corrections to the details above.)
December 4, 2010
Winter has finally started and so has my blog/homepage. I'll start stashing links, dialogue, cool stuff, whatever this space and my schedule will bear.