Creative Ways to Slow Down Father Time
Writing, crafts or crosswords can all delay the aging process
By Nancy Monson
As we age, creativity often peaks, and our need to create soars: Georgia O’Keefe, for instance, did some of her best work in her later years, and Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her 70s. Likewise, Laura Ingalls Wilder was in her 60s when she began to write her Little House on the Prairie books. Read more
Back Pain is Common in Seniors
Age, other factors responsible for ailment
By Fred Cicetti
Q. Have you ever thrown your back out? I hear an awful lot of geezers complain about their backs. How common is back pain?
A. Yes, I’ve had back problems most of my adult life and I know how debilitating they are. When I was 30, I put myself in bed for a week by carrying heavy stacks of newspapers to the curb. Back problems have been a recurring problem in the decades since then. Read more
Predictions for upcoming Political Year
Cuomo, Silver and other prognostications for 2011
The New Year is upon us and as usual, it falls to me to make prognostications and predictions about what we can expect in the coming annum. Let us remember the rules. I make some of these predictions because I do not want to see them happen and by predicting them I hope to put a hex on them. I make some of them because I want to see them happen and I am giving them a little push. Finally, there are some predictions you will find here that I really think will happen. It is up to you to figure out which is which. Read more
Straight from the Top
Job lessons learned from High-Profile New Yorkers
May everyone have a job in 2011.
To become/stay gainfully employed in the New Year, let’s resolve to learn from ten New Yorkers whose professional lives made headlines in 2010: Read more
Line Between Eavesdropping & Stalking
To The Editor:
Is it eavesdropping when you overhear something particularly intimate (“Urban Eavesdropping,” Dec. 23)? It might feel like it is, yet it’s really accidental. Read more
Horse Power
To The Editor:
If the issue is not mixing horse carriages with automobiles, then by all means close the Central Park drives to all vehicular traffic (“Don’t let your romance become his nightmare,” Nov. 24) except for what is needed for the operation and maintenance of the park. This would return the drives to their original purpose, which was for horse carriages. The case is made in The Park and the People that the reason Central Park was funded was for carriages. In the 1840s and ‘50s horse carriages were all the rage in Europe, but the narrow and crowded streets of old New York did not allow for them. Central Park promised six miles of carriage drives to the wealthy of the city. During the 1860s anyone who was anyone rode their carriage through Central Park as a social event, many on a daily basis. The people on these carriages constituted at least half of all park visitors on a daily basis. Not only get rid of the auto traffic but restore the drives to the original soft surface.
Jordan Wouk
Yorkville
Central Park in a Rumble Seat
By Thomas Pryor
“I used to ride in my father’s rumble seat, ” Dad told me while we sat at the bar in Loftus Tavern.
As Dad drank a short beer and I sipped a Coke, I wondered what’s a rumble seat? He said, “It was a seat that hinged out of the back of the car; it felt like you were riding in mid air. ” We mulled over our drinks and I thought someday, I was going to ride in a rumble seat. Read more
The Illusionist
By Armond White
The new DVD re-release of Disney’s 1940 Fantasia blesses what has been a great year for animated movies, the form’s creativity expanding in many directions: From nearly photographic CGI (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole) and drawn/photographed hybrids (How To Train Your Dragon) to uncommonly witty 3D (Despicable Me) and refined traditional animation (The Secret of Kells, My Dog Tulip). Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist climaxes this productive run with its updated recreation of classic animated style: a return to the possibilities of animation as Fantasia, with its multiple tones, varied episodes and restless invention, timelessly realized. Read more
Biutiful
By Armond White
A friend misread the ad for Biutiful as “Pitiful.“ He wasn’t wrong. This latest overlong mash-up by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu continues down the same meretricious path as his other overlong movies. This time Iñárritu triangulates the story of a hustling Spaniard, Uxbal (Javier Bardem); Asian sweatshop workers and the closeted gay Asian who exploits them; plus African illegal immigrant street vendors. It’s Babel all over again with the multilingual storylines speaking the same global maudlinity. Read more
Another Year
By Armond White
Mike Leigh’s Another Year looks at social networking from a mature point of view. Its middle-aged characters, a small group of longtime family, friends and co-workers in London, have a familiarity with each other that turns everyday relations—whether on the job, when traveling or at meals—into startling, vivid and intimate exchanges. This partly has to do with the closeness and understanding that comes with friendship, even kinship, but it’s also the pure pleasure of Another Year’s immediate and constant sympathy. Read more
