Martha Stewart and me

 After watching / listening to the Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart I kind of got on a roll of listening to interviews with Martha, on You Tube.  There are a bunch of them!  They're good!

Have I "mastered the art of French cooking" yet?

No!

Do I love listening to her speak about things?

Yes!

        When I typed a post on here yesterday, I had to laugh because I realized that after listening to a certain amount of Martha, I had sort of taken on some of her style - without thinking about it, I just went ahead and typed here that you should, when making your list of what you're going to do next, "get a legal pad and a good ballpoint pen"

hahaha - without the recent 'Stewart immersion' I would not have said that, I would have just said, 'get paper & pen and make a list.'

        After spending time with Martha, I got specific and a little bit commanding:  "a good ballpoint pen."

In the Netflix documentary, Snoop Dogg said, "I thought it would be an upgrade, for me, just to be in her presence."

I felt a little like that, too.  Like - listening to her, I was learning things and being inspired.

        "just to be in her presence"

        I thought that was kind of a beautiful phrase; I liked it.

Martha and Andy Stewart on their wedding day, 1961

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hanging out with Hugh Grant

 "Actually, the world hates actors, quite rightly."

The movie actor Hugh Grant said this during an interview on You Tube.  I was listening to it a little, last night, trying to feel better.

        "The world hates actors - quite rightly" - that's the typical British self-deprecating humor that always makes them sound so pleasantly sophisticated.

I have found that when something bad happens and you feel temporarily hopeless, it's helpful to take a legal pad and a good ballpoint pen and write down the things you are going to do - just really small things - and then do them, in any order you want to, and when one is finished, check-mark it off at the left, and scribble it off.

- glass of ice water

- make Writing List

- pick up

- dishes

...etc.

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order and beauty

 

Viewing the Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart was kind of a transformative experience. 

Just - interesting.

        On You Tube there are videos showing the trailer for the documentary.  One Viewer Comment said,

"I sort of felt bad vibes from the whole documentary."

        (Woody Allen:  "I was at an Alice Cooper concert once, six people were rushed to the hospital with bad vibes!")

Another viewer Commented:

--  She did a lot to give value to the important work of caring for a home at a time when mainstream feminism was really focused on achieving masculine ideals.  

But household management is extremely important - to care for each other, avoid waste, and surround ourselves with order and beauty, these are noble goals.  

        And a lot of knowledge was in the process of being lost, which she then captured and documented.  I think it's so interesting that in the process, she also managed to be the first woman to achieve one of the ultimate masculine ideals of being a billionaire CEO.

----------------------------------------------

        "Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high."

        - Martha S.

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"I have a dream, today..."

 -------------------- [excerpt from Rolling Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper. Copyright, 1990.  Harper Perennial.] ------------------ 

"My theory is this," said Jon Carroll, one of Wenner's early associate editors.  "The reason that Rolling Stone was successful is the same reason that Playboy and New York succeeded:  each was the complete encapsulation of a single person's fantasy.  

Hugh Hefner wanted to be a playboy, and Clay Felker wanted to live on the Upper East Side of New York City.  

Jann wanted to be with rock stars.  

And it turns out that each fantasy was shared by enough people to create a successful circulation."

Hugh Hefner, back in the day...

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in the company of greatness

 ----------------- [excerpt from Rolliing Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper] ----------------------- Instead of defining rock & roll, or deifying it, Rolling Stone covered it - a truly revolutionary idea.  Its writers interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton with the sense of purpose a Time reporter would bring to an interview with Henry Kissinger.  

Musicians were worthy news figures, proclaimed Rolling Stone, and their music was worthy of analysis.  Readers often disagreed, sometimes vehemently with the magazine's seminal critics:  Jon Landau, Greil Marcus, Langdon Winner, Jim Miller, Paul Nelson, John Morthland, Lester Bangs, Ed Ward and Dave Marsh.  

        In the end, however, these disputes were always welcome, for they upheld Jann Wenner's larger argument:  The music matters.

Jann Wenner was...desperate for acceptance and affection.  His distinctiveness forever completed with his primal longings.  From his adolescent days onward, Jann Wenner sought connections.  His greatest goal in life was to be where the action was....

        ...His own stature never preoccupied him as his surroundings did.  Jann Wenner yearned to be in the company of greatness.

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strawberry fields forever

 -------------- [excerpts from Rolling Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper] ---------------------------- By the end of 1969, Jann Wenner's two-year-old Rolling Stone - or simply Stone, as many affectionately called it in those days - was generally accepted as the most authoritative rock & roll magazine in the land.  

By 1971, Rolling Stone was what Esquire had been in the sixties and the New York Herald Tribune a decade before that:  the breeding ground of explosive New Journalists like Hunter Thompson, David Felton, Grover Lewis and Joe Eszterhas.

        [The magazine's] very nature was to avoid the set positions assumed by its psychedelic and left-wing counterparts in the underground press.

---------------------------------------

        The magazine seemed to understand exactly how important pop music was.  Teen magazines trivialized it; Crawdaddy!, the first American rock magazine, placed it on high with the utterances of Plato and Aristotle; and the straight press scorned or ignored it.

-------------------------------- [end / excerpts]

I think, sometimes, that humans suffer from a poverty of imagination.  The above passages from Draper's book tend to confirm this idea.

        All this revolutionarily fantastic music is emerging around them, and these people writing in the magazines that already existed before Jann Wenner started R. S. can't respond to it in any kind of coherent, thoughtful way.

("The Beatles?  Let's just ignore 'em.")

lol

A slight lack of vision...?

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a righteous cat

 Reading a book about the history of Rolling Stone magazine, I came across a reference to the publication's editor and founder, Jann Wenner, calling George McGovern "a righteous cat."

McGovern was a U.S. Senator from the state of South Dakota in the 1960s and '70s.  

"a righteous cat."

LOL

"Hippie" - talk

I hope the senator heard about that remark at the time - a gentle, taciturn son of a minister (Methodist, I think...), he would have been surprised and amused (or perhaps bemused) to hear himself spoken of that way by a member of that "long-haired younger generation."

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