A Blog of My Own

Boys must have something in them that prevents them from seeing their mothers as pretty, or, God forbid, sexy. The incest taboo that lives not only in our heads but in our cellular structure works to make sure that Mom is not pretty in our eyes, or ugly either, but just, well, Mom. The rare moment breaks through this wall of denial — the smell of Chanel No. 5 when you are seven and she is about to go out to a Saturday dance, an aroma that awakens a glimmer in you that your mother has an existence outside the role you need her to play exclusively — but by and large we sons are blind to our mothers as women.

My mother, widowed by my father two years ago, died a week ago today, at the age of 88. While we sat shiva in her apartment this past week, my eye kept going to the wedding picture of her that my sister had placed on the credenza in the living room. The photograph put me in a trance. She was beautiful. The picture of the girl-woman in 1940, just shy of her twentieth birthday, conjured up the spirit of the Selma who must have been living inside my mother all these years.

I had always loved my mother, and she seldom had cause to doubt that. But now I was in love with her. I could sense the qualities, physical, mental, and spiritual, that made my father adore her, made him happily dedicate his life to her. It was safe, now, for me to see that. The feeling now pervades my memories of her, and I am not ashamed of it. I am under her spell now in a way I could not be when she was alive. I think that’s the way she wants it.

Here’s the latest from my friend, artist James Kuhn, in his face-painting-o’-the-day series. (You can see the whole collection at his flickr page.) I wrote about him before, and before that, but this painting of TV’s Golden Girls Dorothy, Rose and Blanche is just too good not to pass along. Can you tell James’ real eyes from the painted eyes? Can you find James’ real nose?

When Congress and the White House were “crafting” the stimulus package, Senators Ron Wyden and Olympia Snowe (he a Democrat, she a Republican) put in a provision to discourage bailed-out companies like AIG from paying their executives big bonuses — namely, a 35% federal excise tax on said bonuses.

Sometime in the middle of the night before the Senate vote, that provision got removed. Nobody seems to know how or why. Or whodunnit.

Is it going to turn out that the person who directed the removal of the provision was someone in the Obama Administration?

Please make that not be so.

Because that would realllly suck.

I give Kings three weeks before NBC pours a vial of poison in the show’s ear and puts on reruns of The Biggest Loser.

The only thing worse than sub-literate television is semi-literate television with pretensions to literacy. Give me a show that knows exactly how bad it is, over a show that thinks it’s miles better than it is. That this overstuffed turkey clearly gobbled up a fortune (the production values and digital scenery are awesome) only compounds the folly.

The actors arch their eyebrows archly and ring wry changes on the words as if to convince us (or themselves) that the dialogue is worthy of Shakespeare, but the gestures of wit seem there mainly to cover up the absence of wit; the words are wan, limp, flaccid, signifying next to nothing. You can feel the writer, Michael Green, spraining his own eyebrow. In comparison, the vigorous, punchy writing on the Aaron Spelling shows of the eighties puts the conversation on Kings to shame. Richard and Esther Shapiro, where art thou?

And yeah, I get the biblical David and Goliath references. I got them well before seeing that the enemy tanks which the young soldier named David went up against were named, er, Goliath. I liked the allegory a little better before I had it buried in my head like an ax. Green wants credit for cleverness, but he’s hedging his bets for the slow-on-the-uptake crowd.

Poor Ian McShane. You deserve better, Al.

For all those frustrated by the dumbass way the Oscars showed this year’s “In Memoriam” film — making us watch a multitude of small screens on the Kodak Theatre stage, rather than showing us the film full-frame on the home screen — here is a nice present from someone inside the Academy. It’s the same piece they ran that night, so it doesn’t redress the problem of all the people who should have made it into the film who didn’t, and we’re still stuck with Queen Latifah’s weirdly re-structured version of “I’ll Be Seeing You”; but at least this shows us the tribute the way the film editors wanted us to see it, and without distracting applause-o-meter sounds from the audience to signal us who their darlings are.

For those interested in some well-deserved bitching about who should have been in the film and wasn’t, read here.

Bear with me through some predicates here.

Predicate #1: The stock market is not going to turn around, not ever, until there is some good economic news from somewhere. It’s not going to happen through some magical shift in psychology, some confidence that comes out of nowhere. We need a month in which reported home sales are up versus the same month the year before, or in which retail sales have an uptick, or in which the amount of lending in the financial system is seen to increase. Then and only then will the market bottom out and begin its comeback.

Predicate #2: If the stimulus package and the bailouts work, as we all hope they will, it will be some months from now (at the shortest) before their positive effects in the economy are seen.

Predicate #3: We have become a nation of stock investors (through our pension funds and 401K plans), and when stocks go down, it’s therefore not just a few million Americans who retrench their spending — practically every middle-class American does so. And that drives the economy further into the ground. A cratering Dow means that GM isn’t going to sell any cars. A cratering Dow will prevent the stimulus package from working, even if it otherwise would have.

My solution: Suspend trading on all American stock markets now. And suspend it indefinitely. Freeze stock prices where they are. If it takes six months for the stimulus plan and/or the bailouts to begin to show a positive result in lending, home sales, employment, or retail, wait the six months. If it takes a year, wait the year. However long it takes. When we begin to see some good news in the economy, such that investors might feel confidence that a rebound is beginning to happen, then and only then unfreeze the stock exchanges and let trading begin again.

Otherwise, all that will happen is a further declining stock market, which will make it impossible for good news ever to happen. The downward cycle needs to be short circuited. It’s all well and good (and true) to say that the Dow won’t go up until somebody buys a car, but nobody’s going to buy a car while the Dow is still going down, so nothing will stop the Dow from going all the way to zero. (As for today’s report that new car sales were off in February by 41% compared to a year ago, the only thing that surprises me is that it means that some people are actually still buying new cars. Who are these people, and are they insane?)

During this freeze, what do we do about those folks who must sell their stocks in order to have money to live? We allow them to sell 1% of their shares a month if they must, for 85% of the frozen market value, and the buyer will be the government. The government (we the taxpayers) will then own the shares, and as taxpayers we will all benefit on the day the market is unfrozen at 100% of its value, because we will have made a profit on those shares instantly.

That will cost the government some money in the short term, but will it cost any more than the bailout money we’re now flushing down the toilet?

The seven-screen indie theater in my neighborhood has had two of its screens claimed by one or another movie starring the flavor-of-the-year actress for months on end now.