Martha Coolidge and the '4 breasts' contract

Some of you may have seen the 1983 film, Valley Girl. I saw it recently as I have been doing research on actress Lee Purcell (who had a small but brilliant role in the film) to send her a questionaire...I have enjoyed exchanging emails with her and she is one of my favorite actresses. I came across an quote by Martha Coolidge, the director of that film, and you can get a sense of institutional objectification of women in film from it. At the time Coolidge made Valley Girl the teen sex genre was a market in Hollywood and its target audience was teen males. Films of that time then, were heavily filled with teen females giving themselves to their boyfriends and plenty of exposed breasts were typical of that type of film. the teen girl's perspective in the film did not matter, nor feelings, and older women were seen as sex starved and like the teen girls, also lusting after the pimply and unattractive males rampant in these films.
Then Coolidge came along. The producers (Crawford and Lane) were apprehensive that a female was directing one of these films and sensing she may present the teen experience a little differently contractually forced her to have at least '4 exposed breasts' in the film. She agreed as long as she could make the film HER WAY. Hence, she showed the humiliation young women feel at being objectified or used and created a likable heroine. it became a hit....

The Psychic life of Abraham Lincoln

My mother was a Spiritualist, attending a church in Corpus Christi for a few decades and I am as well, so I was fascinated to come across a biography of Abraham Lincoln that explored his relationship to Spiritualism, which had it's heyday in the 19th century. often times academics, who are always the worst of writers, relegate what they don't see as intellectual enough to a footnote in people's lives and Susan Martinez does a nice job restoring a more complete picture of Lincoln.

I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.
Armistead Maupin

Robin Romm's The Mercy Papers

A huge disappointment. Robin Romm's account of her mother's death is really an immature tirade against God ("There is no order to the universe and I can't sign up for one"), her mother's death (her mother has to finally tell her she 'doesn't need her permission' to die), people who are of a different class than her (the hospice nurse), throw in a little racism (also against the hospice nurse), and a good measure of animal cruelty ( she adopts and then abandons 4 dogs after her mother's diagnosis looking for the one that will serve her selfish purposes).Those of us who have a scared bond with our pets will find her perspective and disrespect for animals really disturbing.
Lacking insight, this book is more like an adolescent's journal-no editing, just shallow observations. Romm's worst writing habit is pretending she can tell what other people are thinking, than observing with compassion why someone might stare at a wall or have a certain look. Ugh.....memoir these days has an extremely low standard for being published. it used to be an art form-well written and full of insights about life, but now it is a cathartic spewing. Even worse, Romm teaches writing.
if anything, Romm's account of her mother's death has reaffirmed my love and appreciation of my mother's death as a spiritual experience, my love of my cat, the gift of my relationship with Audrey at that time and the unique bond my sister Anita and Carole shared with me, who went through the horrifying experience of struggling to do what was best for mom. I don't identify with Romm and am so happy for that.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ~Oscar Wilde

a few more thoughts on Janis Ian

Some of her music is absolutely brilliant, and that is her lasting legacy. Her prose writing, such as the autobiography previously mentioned here is the side of Janis Ian I have always had a tension with -the insight of her music replaced by a huge need for approval and so a basic dishonesty about events and intensions. Her association with Howard Stern in 1993 (judging a slut contest and doing a parody of her own At Seventeen to attack Jerry Seinfeld dating a young woman ) was one of those low points; her trying to capitalize on the McMartin dayschool witchhunt (back in 1987) with a child abuse song, when so many innocent people were falsely accused of child abuse.
I think the love of her life was Kye Fleming and her treatment of her in the autobiography shows a hurt she never recovered from and is really unfair to Kye Fleming, who always seemed like a deep and thoughtful person to me and I think there is another story there.
I am glad Janis Ian cannot help but be honest in her music and often calls herself on her public self and some great music has come out of that. I love that she let her hair go white (she has had white hair since she was about 25). She struggles and I admire that. I am glad she came out finally and stopped seeking that approval (another story she has really whitewashed in her autobiography as she was really terrified most of her life to be outed or suspected). I would recommend a nice interview she did for Night Talk over the summer on Youtube. She is relaxed and honest in it and that is ian at her best.

Janis Ian-autobiography

I like Janis Ian's music for the most part and have followed her career for a long time but find her autobiography miopic. Often portraying herself as a victim in relationships, I wonder what her partners would have said about her shortcomings-she shares no self awareness in this regard. I feel she was unfair to Kye Fleming particularly, with whom she wrote some of her best music. Also, beginning the book as a victim of crowds of hating people is a little dramatic-lots of people were oppressed for supporting civil rights in the 60's and died-she was lucky in comparison to many who risked everything to drive into the South or march in the streets and be beaten. Society's Child was just one song which is really not a big deal, except in her eyes and that is why I use the term myopic . There was probably a psychological reason why Janis Joplin wanted to buy clothes instead of play music and she dismisses these subtlties. Likewise, I feel her journey toward accepting her own lesbianism or bisexuality was more complicated than presented here-she has been very repressed to keep her career alive and cut her fashion to fit the times (to coin a phrase by Lillian Hellman). She was no follower of the women's music of the 70's (which had no popular market) when even the great Dusty Springfield was-and risked being invisible. She has been keen to chose how to sell herself to the public and I think that is too bad as it comes across as dishonest, but really I think she has difficulty seeing other people's perspective or that she is just part of a bigger picture-and I believe she is as honest as she can be. She rises above that sometimes in her music and that is why I like some of her music-maybe that is the one place where she can really approach honesty.

Robin Romm, the Mercy Papers

I look forward to reading to reading this book I just ordered after reading a review yesterday in the New York Times...Robin Romm's account of experiencing her mother dying and the anger she felt at not being able to help her. I will review it later. There were lots of blessings and healings and miracles that occurred with my mother's death, but I a still left with a lot of what Romm felt- anger, particularly, at the shallowness of the death process in our culture, which is attached to so much shallowness in American life.