Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Little boy blue
We flew to LA via Jet Blue over Presidents' Day weekend -- shouldn't we just start calling it Presidents' Weekend? Having a Wild Weekend with Two of Our Better Presidents? -- and returned just as the airline was announcing its
new passenger bill of rights. Roiled by the disastrous Valentine's Day snowstorms of last week, which disrupted hundreds of Jet Blue's flights and left many NY passengers stuck in planes on the tarmac for over eight hours, CEO and founder
Dave Neeleman got over the soul searching and beat Congress to the punch by limiting the hours passengers can be stuck on the ground, guaranteeing refunds for cancelled flights and in general promising to treat people better than cargo.
I was watching Brian Williams break the news on my seat-back TV when a Jet Blue flight attendant stopped to ask me about it. She had been at JFK last Wednesday and had sat on the tarmac for four hours with stranded passengers, seen the anger and frustration up close. "Do you think people will forgive us?" she wanted to know and (speaking for Jet Blue loyalists everywhere) I said I thought people would be impressed at how quickly the company reacted...after blowing it for several news cycles. And it might just shame the rest of the airlines to take similar measures (something consumer advocacy groups have been suggesting for years).
"That will just give them another reason to hate us," she said. In her opinion, and she had apparently been with the company for a while, Jet Blue had grown too fast, adding hundreds of flights and new destinations without any regard for the impact that expansion would have on the airline's infrastructure. "A lot of us were warning them this would happen on the Speak Up cards they give us," she said -- but she blamed middle management, a sea of bureaucrats that separated Neeleman from his once satisfied customers.
Maybe he was just distracted, I told her; I had read he was ADD. "He's just like a little boy," she said. "But sometimes he needs to take his Ritalin." Nothing like a multi-million dollar PR disaster to get you back on your meds.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Coming back to you
I received my spring issue of
Tricycle and was surprised to find the Buddhist quarterly playing the numbers game on the cover. But instead of promises to take off 20 Pounds in 30 Days or 143 Ways to Please 7 Girls, this issue presents
"Tricycle's 28-Day Meditation Challenge."Sound anomalous? Challenge, meditation -- kind of like military music? Well, Buddhism didn't just spread across India and Asia by itself and I think it's fair to say that Tricycle sees itself as part of the vanguard of the
Vipassana, or "mindfulness," school that has gained in popularity over the last few decades. In fact the principal author of the challenge is the venerable
Sharon Salzberg, who has almost single-handedly warmed up Americans rather cool picture of Buddhism with her writings about
Lovingkindness and
Faith.
Though Tricycle is written for practicing Buddhists, and its advertisers include the makers of
Zen clocks ("Shouldn't you be asking what time isn't it?") and services like
Dharma Match ("Where spiritual singles meet"), its editors are savvy enough to know that most of us are wannabes. We've meditated, probably been to a few retreats, read a few books -- but who has time for the daily dose, aside from say
Jon Stewart's nightly Moment of Zen? By challenging readers to join her in a week-by-week program (and even
answering questions online from participants), Salzberg is acknowledging our basic laziness and tendency to stray. As the editors note, "It's the coming back that deepens our practice."
So what have you got to lose -- except those unsightly attachments? The challenge begins with the
Five Precepts (who did some great stuff with Gene Chandler) and those include a commitment to refrain from intoxicants and use speech in an ethical way. If you get started now, you can be finished by St. Patrick's Day. Talk about starting over.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Girl trouble
This week's Newsweek tackles the timely topic of
The Girl's Gone Wild Effect. (Caveat emptor: If you're using Safari, the MSN site often crashes my browser, which I can only conclude is due to Microsoft's inherent evil.) You know, Lindsey, Paris and Britney bringing civilization to its knees by going out sans underpants.
There's a sexist joke there that I won't even bother with. The topic is as timeless as the girls in question are ephemeral and the magazine includes a sidebar of bad girls of the past (Marilyn, Mae West). I only regret that they did not turn the wayback machine dial a little further to remind readers of the scandalous
Jean Harlow, who also famously forewent bra and panties on public occasions. The difference was, she used her real-life reputation to enhance her screen image. "Dissembling innocence was not Harlow's way," David Thomson wrote in his invaluable, nutty
Biographical Dictionary of Film. "She was too candid. She winked, she liked her nipples to pout as if to say, 'Get a load of this.'"
Harlow died when she was 26, but not from sex -- and not from anorexia. I had originally written that she drank herself to death but received an outraged riposte from Kathryn Sweeney, president of the Sacramento chapter of the Jean Harlow Fan Club: "As a child she had strep throat --before antibiotics--resulting in scarlet fever which damaged her kidneys. (Often the heart valves are wrecked as well but I don't know if that happened to her.) Later on her kidneys failed and she died. Because her mom was a Christian Scientist there has always been a theory that she might have recovered given better medical care. I'm not saying she didn't drink plenty, but it didn't kill her." Point taken, Kathy.
Harlow's life and death helped usher in the censorious
Hays Code in Hollywood and a lot of young women saw her tale as a cautionary one. The crucial difference between her influence and that of today's Bad Girls is that Harlow was an idol to young women of legal age. The Newsweek story, by Kathleen Deveny with Raina Kelley, focuses on the adoration bestowed upon the decidedly less talented trouble trio of today by tween and young teenage girls -- girls my daughter's age.
Franny recently got in some trouble, at school and at home, for some obscene email she had a hand in, and the whole incident has caused some soul searching on the part of her parents. Topics considered included her interest in the kind of brat/slut culture Paris et al represent. But just as Deveny concludes that the fascination many girls have with this outre behavior falls short of admiration (a middle-school teacher in Illinois is quoted saying her students "can't understand why Britney would wear no underwear" and ultimately brand her a "hootch," ie skank, ho etc.), we have found Franny doesn't think much of these girls, either.
"What's it going to say on her grave, that she partied a lot?" she once asked of Paris, and while she may have heard some version of that line from her parents, there is nothing wrong with having your voice in your child's head. Consider all the others competing in there -- including the one that tried to defend her dirty email as the kind of humor "kids my age think is funny." You want to have a vote. Let's hope that she keeps giving us air time.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
This note's for me
We live for our children most of the time. Okay, there are some parents who put their amusement and sense of well-being before that of their offspring but by and large we have been conditioned to give our kids what we ourselves did not have and try to get some vicarious kicks out of seeing them enjoy pastimes we were denied or just missed somehow.
Both Adam and Franny got guitars when they were preteens and lessons from the same place that I bought them: the
Musicians' General Store on Court Street. Franny never really took to it, propelled more by a fantasy born of
School of Rock than a real desire to spend hours in her room practicing her fingering, while Adam at 22 is pretty accomplished. This is one of the only fringe benefits of a fairly friendless adolesence: mirror-star mastery.
So when I saw MGS closing its doors for the final time in the fall (the landlord had spiked the rent to make room for another gym, when what Cobble Hill really needs is another Starbucks -- you can walk blocks before finding a Frappacino!) I went in and plunked some money down on a guitar for myself. Now all I had to do was learn how to play it.
I grew up around musicians. LIke most kids my age I wanted a guitar after seeing the Beatles (though I actually I think I had wanted one when I listened to the
Clancy Brothers, who were bigger than the Beatles in my pre-ten-year-old imagination) but my parents couldn't afford one and I was always quick to take no for an answer. By the time I was in high school I numbered a few fine guitarists among my friends but it never occurred to me to ask one of them to teach me even a few simple chords. Even though the ability to play, the very possession of guitar, increased their popularity and success with chicks exponentially, I clung to my loser status, playing air guitar in my room and imagining myself a star.
If it was fear that kept me from trying to learn then, I realized I would need a new excuse now. I had the time, the money and absolutley no expectation of being anything other than a kitchen plunker in my old age. "I don't have any fantasies of playing on stage at my age," I told my guitar teacher on our first meeting. "I just want to be able to strum a few Bob Dylan songs when I'm alone and blue."
By the end of our first lesson he had taught me the chords to "Knocking on Heaven's Door" -- which is not to say that I have learned them. In fact, after six lessons it's safe to say I have not learned much of anything and have scarcely improved though he has demonstrated the patience of a saint as he watches me making chords with the agility of the frost bitten. If Adam has natural ability (which his teacher often said) I may have just the opposite. But as I try to make power chords that bear some resemblance to "All Along the Watchtower," I can honestly say that my mind is engaged with no other task. I have no attention in those moments for any of life's concerns. Including my children.
