• Middle Ages

    Is That All There Is?

    April 18, 2019

    Is this a real thing? This was the age when I felt compelled to start this site, though I’m not 100% sure if it was spurred by mortality issues or petty competitiveness, as in millennials will most certainly “own” aging as the oldest members of that cohort are rapidly approaching 40. I can’t let that happen. It’s a ticking time bomb.

    I’ve already seen inklings like how Glossier has started using gray-haired models in its ads (which I can’t find on either Facebook or Instagram and it’s making me crazy) and Instagrammy-type ladies are now embracing and showing off their gray hair while in wedding dresses and maternity wear. No! Just no.

    One would think this would be a welcome development but it feels like further Gen X erasure.

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  • Middle Ages

    Cat People

    March 20, 2019

    I don’t know what expectations should be for younger people to recognize pop culture references from before their time.

    My knee-jerk reaction when I saw this Twitter thread (then picked up by digg) about a re-discovered Morris the Cat calendar from 1986 that referred to Morris as merely “a cat” was seriously?

    But I don’t know, if there were a famous spokes-beagle from the ’50s, would I recognize it? I would assume so, but you can’t know what you don’t know.

    That Morris the Cat was the offending example was extremely ironic, if only to me, because I recall a late ’90s screed written by Jeff Koyen, formerly of Crank zine, in the New York Press (which doesn’t turn up via Google search at all and now I’m afraid this is early stages of dementia) about cheap irony and pop culture references as bonding between youngsters i.e. Gen X and the example he gave was “Oh, you remember Morris the Cat? Me Too!” Oof.

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  • Middle Ages

    Poetry Corner

    January 29, 2019

    “During the Middle Ages,” a poem. You should read the whole thing.

    It would be a very hard time
    When the sun revolves around the earth
    And kings are just unbelievably selfish
    And it’ll be a really long time before Pop Art
    And meerkat videos and cotton candy
    And Kurosawa and fish tacos and girl bands

    Hat tip to the TueNighters Facebook group.

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  • Screen Time

    Ozark, Bird Box, Kidding

    January 26, 2019

    Sometimes I have knee-jerk reactions that aren’t immediately sensical. I want to see older women on screen. Obviously, it’s absurd that male leads require considerably younger actresses to be cast as love interests. When I do see age-appropriate casting it’s practically jarring.

    Here is the non-sensical part. Sometimes it even goes too far and and I’m left questioning if it’s equality and I should be happy or if it’s unbelievable and we shouldn’t be casting older women in clearly younger roles because…I’m not sure why exactly. I need to get to the bottom of these feelings. I also tend to be literal about actress’s ages relative to characters they play, which maybe isn’t fair since, duh, it’s acting.

    For instance, on Breaking Bad, it never made sense to me that a woman in her early 40s married to a high school science teacher in his 50s, living in New Mexico on their first marriage (presumably) and had a teenage son would decide to have a new baby at that point in their lives.

    Laura Linney in Ozark

    Jason Bateman (50) being married to an actress days away from 55 is great and conceivably realistic despite seeming radical to me when I first watched Ozark just because it’s so unusual to see. I want to believe that Marty Byrd could be attracted to a woman five years older than he and they didn’t have kids until her late 30s/early 40s, though that doesn’t quite make sense for their characters.

    Sandra Bullock in Birdbox

    There is no way that I’m buying a 52-year-old woman being pregnant, even with strangely smooth skin.

    Catherine Keener in Kidding

    I actually thought Catherine Keener was a few years younger than 59. I love her and she looks really good (and even if she didn’t, so what) but I seriously couldn’t tell if she was supposed to be Maddy’s mom or what in Kidding.

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