(Stock footage shot of clocks spinning and pages flying off calendars). Unintended inspiration from this years-past post (re-discovered while browsing for a good recipe for chicken wings and drifting from link to link distractedly until I ended up on this softshell crab one because “deep-fried things Albert wrote…

For me, one of the reasons this was so good is it totally nuked the whole beyond tired “hero’s journey” template Lucas cursed Hollywood with in the first place.Everybody involved is just an ordinary, exhausted person doing heroic things—not because they’re The Chosen One but because it’s the right thing to do. And…

These are great. Half the fun is watching people whose writing voice I know very well speaking. The quippy internet humor translates well into the world, and it gets really fun when you’re learning from and goofing around with older people, people from different cultures and parts of the country. You’re always…

I do not think “microaggression” means what you think it means. OTOH, this is some pretty good macroaggression going on.

Betty Boop the cartoon has a long, tangled, problematic and fascinating history with Harlem. It was one of the first vehicles of any kind for jazz artists like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong to get any exposure with white mainstream audiences. And the visuals of the 1930s cartoons are really pointed and playful…

If you’re talking junior high boners Of a Certain Age, Aerosmith very possibly. Journey maybe, Chicago definitely. Cringeworthy, but hey, middle school boners. We had more sophisticated boners in high school.

Let’s have a write-in campaign to save millihelen. We can all mail tampons in symbolic protest to Lacey Donohue’s office or something.

Aww, thanks RedViolet. :-) I haven’t had time to finish it yet but I have a tiny kinja blog (that needs followers, she said, shamelessly soliciting). Look for it there!

That’s the other thing, as I morph from sad to mad. Gawker already has a well-documented woman problem. Nuking a site that attracts a female readership just for being small is just one more affront. <shakes tiny fist>

I am really sorry. I loved millihelen, and was in the process of crafting a piece for it, about what it’s like to be over 50 discovering makeup (mostly fun but a little strange, sort of like discovering makeup at any other age). I specifically liked that your target audience wasn’t the usual “beauty tips and…

Well yes, hence my point about American redemption narratives because Christianity. Alger is a celebration of the Protestant work ethic. Your other point about realism and character-driven films from the ‘70s (but also from the 1930s. I’m thinking Paul Muni and any number of pre-code noir films) also serve as examples…

I suppose America historically digs redemption narratives in general because they’re so satisfyingly Christian. But The Hero’s Journey is now the plot of pretty much every single Hollywood movie, all because George Lucas read Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces,” believed its midcentury structuralist horse…

The trouble is, the banal formula of Hollywood hero narratives is pretty much the only type of story most Americans know anymore. It’s turned us into a nation of 6 year olds, going “redemption is how the story is supposed to go” and getting mad when the expected narrative trajectory changes. The best novels, in…

Agh, if only Joseph Campbell hadn’t written that dopey (and also wrong) “Hero with a Thousand Faces” thing, and Lucas hadn’t read it. Think of all the cheap-ass die-cast “hero’s journey” plottage we’d have all been spared for the past half-century. Then Vader could have remained as original and terrifying as he first…

I love it that the last paragraph of this this vivid jeremiad against the ultimately Puritanical conventions of seasonal observation begins with a line like: “The wages of fall is death. Its beauty is predicated on mortality.” That’s some Jonathan Edwards imagery right there. Sinners in the hands of an angry gourd.

I’m more or less boycotting Sephora, because I got snootily ignored there once. I felt like it was ageist thing going on. Screw you. I may not be 30, but I have way more money to spend now than I did when I was, and I was planning to spend it here. Ulta is really nice to me. You can go there and get your hair done and…

Something about this statement just doesn’t ring true. But it’s only a matter of time.

I agree. I cringe to the point of paralysis at nearly every look here (having lived through the 70s once, I have less than no desire to keep repeating it. The endless “classic rock” on the radio is bad enough. Like we’re trapped in some horrifying string universe of nothing but 70s forever.) But then I’m all “oooh,…

Yay women rider connecting any time. It’s long been about time. But “us” being on the front rather than the back of the bike, pertains maybe to Harley culture rather than women riders in general. Women have been riding their own damn motorcycles since motorcycles were first a thing. I’ve been riding since 1995, and I…

I just so want to smack every single person who missed the point about this piece. Stupid, stupid anybody, particularly anybody over 50 (as I am), who sees it only as expense and insecurity. For awhile now, I’ve found myself drawn to the aesthetics of men’s shaving gear: chrome safety razors, strokable badger brushes,…