Kirstie Alley is one Hollywood star not supporting revered filmmaker Roman Polanski as he battles extradition to the U.S. to face sentencing for a 32-year-old sex crime.
The Rosemary’s Baby director fled America on the eve of sentencing for the offense and has lived in exile in France for 30 years. Polanski was apprehended by Swiss [...]
Yesterday I suggested that the rules that apply to successful dating could be applied more widely to life in general. After all, when we go on a date, we want our partner to see us at our best – and what could be better than being at your best all the time?
With that in mind, I listed 6 guidelines that apply as well to life as to dating, and today I’m back with 6 more. Since life, like dating, can take a lot of different forms, these are still only brushing the surface, and I encourage readers to leave their own tips for dating and for life in the comments. Who knows, we might all become better at both!
Everyone wants to be liked. On dates, this often leads us to settle for less than we really want to avoid the negative consequence of being poorly liked by our partner. This, in turn, can give rise to awful relationships – disrespectful, overly dramatic, even abusive ones. If the goal of dating in general is to find that special person you want to share your life with, though, you need to risk being not liked by your partner – why waste time with someone that isn’t what you’re looking for? Every date that ends without the promise of a call can be chalked up as a success – provided you didn’t bend your character around what you assume s/he would like best. In life, too, failures can often be seen as successes, provided you learn from them and carry those lessons forward, and provided they were come by honestly, through your commitment to your own goals.
It hurts me to see people pretend to be other than they are in order to impress a date. Pretending to have more money (or less), more education (or less), or different tastes than you have is such an awful strategy – first of all, who wants to build a relationship with someone who doesn’t accept you for you, and second of all, what’s going to happen when eventually the truth comes out (which it almost always does)? While there’s something to be said for the old maxim “Fake it until you make itâ€, as a general rule following your own dreams in your own way is the only real road to success and happiness. Doing things because others think you should (or because you think they think that) is bound to be unsatisfying, and incredibly difficult to maintain any kind of real motivation for.
Dating is all about revealing yourself over time with the intention of drawing a partner to you, eager to learn more. Likewise in life, people who are both interesting enough to merit attention (what Seth Godin means when he says “Be remarkableâ€) and open enough to allow their interestingness to shine draw others to them. But it’s all about the timing – reveal everything at once and you become nothing but a resource to be used and discarded; reveal too little too slowly and you become a bore.
Although there are exceptions, for the most part the way you and your partner interact on a first date sets the tone for everything that follows. If you’re open, honest, and comfortable at the beginning, chances are you’ll remain so throughout your relationship; be too closed off, self-conscious, dishonest, or negative, and you’re setting yourself up for failure – even if you and your date really like each other. When we say “first impressions countâ€, we’re saying much the same thing, but it’s deeper than just impressions. I know that as an educator, the way I interact with my students on the first day of class will carry through the whole semester; if I am personable and interact with them a lot, I can expect a highly engaged classroom, whereas if I do all the talking and take an authoritative tone, I can expect to spend the next 15 weeks lecturing with a minimum of student questions or input. Taking pains to get things off on the right foot can go a long way towards avoiding complications later on.
Really. Woody Allen once said that 90% of life is just showing up, and at least half of that is doing it on time. Imagine a date where your partner is late – what does that tell you about his or her feelings about meeting you? Now, imagine he or she is late for the first 5 dates? The first 10? Now what do you think of their attitude? Being late suggests that you don’t value the other person’s time, that you don’t believe they have anything better to do than to wait for you. It can also suggest that you’re incompetent and disorganized – not exactly qualities people look for in a person they potentially want to build a life with. Or in any other area – what applies to dating applies just as easily to the workplace, family gatherings, and just about everything else. While being punctual often goes unnoticed, being tardy sends powerful messages that are often nearly impossible to recover from.
When it comes to sex, most of us are pretty aware of whether we’re ready or not with any given partner. Some of us are hot to trot after a good first date, others want to be married, and most of us fall somewhere in between. Regardless of your preferences in that regard, we all feel taken advantage of when a partner seems to demand we “give it up†before we’re ready. While most of us are fairly adept at keeping our pants on until we’re ready, in the rest of our lives we often stumble over “no†and commit ourselves to projects we either don’t want to do or don’t have time to do. This also leaves us feeling taken advantage of. Learn to say “no†when you need to – you’ll respect yourself for it in the morning.
Let’s hear your tips in the comments below!
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
After watching Adam it should become perfectly clear that a film about New York should actually be shot in, of all places, New York.
BIG Pictures, motion picture brand of Reliance Big Entertainment’s Bengali film directed by the maverick Rituparno Ghosh’s ‘Shob Charitro Kalponik’ (Afterword) has been selected for the 30th Durban Film Festival ’09 to be held from 22 July to 2 August 2009. Rituparo Ghosh will be traveling to Durban, South Africa for the screening of the [...]
When the ‘secret’ of the Colonel’s blend of herbs and spices was revealed, we had to test the recipe – and then see if it could be bettered …
Woody Allen once opined that sex is like pizza – even when it’s rubbish it’s pretty damn good. I feel the same way about fried chicken. The truth is, it would take effort and skill to screw up succulent chicken meat, dredged in seasoned flour and cooked in boiling fat. Like many other foodies I have a problem with the moral implications of KFC’s chicken meat but I can’t, with my hand on my (rapidly congesting) heart, say it doesn’t taste pretty good when fresh from the bucket.
But I’m lucky enough to also have sampled the real thing. I lived for several years in rural North Carolina and married a local girl. The reception was held on a hot summer evening, on the banks of a sleepy river on the family farm and was a pot-luck affair. In the course of the evening a couple of hundred people turned up, most carrying trays covered in a cloth and containing a personal variation on fried chicken.
Your personal ‘secret recipe’ for fried chicken is a pretty serious business in the South, and a newbie outsider like me could be forgiven for believing that all those family reunions, church picnics, barbecues and tailgate parties were just a front for a bitterly fought and endless competition to produce better and better fried chicken. I personally reckon the world would be a much better place if we all got together every now and again in a ‘healthy’ competition over fried chicken. It sublimates family tensions, draws communities together and generally makes it socially acceptable to eat like a starved weasel in the name of politeness. An online competitive chicken fry-off, then? Bring it on.
Thanks to a huge response from WoM posters we were able, once again, to revisit the endlessly fascinating moral arguments surrounding the eating of animals. We were also able work out a sensible method of home cooking fried chicken, and devise a convincingly British spicing mix.
Lacking KFC’s mighty pressure fryers and mindful of the need to cook the chicken right through, we were happy to follow the suggestions of double cooking. Most recommended some time in the oven after frying, but we thought we’d experiment with poaching beforehand and, as many of our posters suggested an overnight marinade in milk, we decided to use the marinade as the poaching liquid. It’s worth noting for future recipes that chicken marinaded and poached in milk has an unbelievably suave flavour and texture, and that the poaching liquid thickens to create the most soothing cream of chicken soup I’ve ever achieved.
We made up two batches of seasoned flour, using Ron Douglas’s ‘KFC’ mix and our own Guardian crowdsourced version – let’s call it ‘GFC’ – and fried sample pieces of the poached chicken dredged in each.
‘KFC’ mix
1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)GFC mix
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sage
1 tsp celery seeds
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp dried onion flakes
2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground white pepper
I’m not going to lie to you. If your paper gives you moral carte blanche to wolf it down in the name of research, and when it’s hot and fresh from the bucket, KFC is gorgeous. I haven’t eaten chain fast food for a long time and the combined hit of chicken, fat and flavour was disorientatingly powerful. It’s the sort of comprehensive sensory seeing-to that’s both best and worst about drink, drugs and sex. So very good and so very bad. No wonder teenagers live on this stuff. But trying to apply any kind of critical approach to the flavour was surprisingly hard. I can’t tell you what that famous mixture of 11 secret herbs and spices actually tastes of, because I couldn’t distinguish any particular flavours amid the assault.
Cooking from scratch enables us to do two things that the Colonel can’t: use great chicken and drain the grease more efficiently. This gave us a real head start, and the results were stunning. A single bite of the homemade KFC is enough. It’s like biting into a dew-fresh ripe peach after eating a canned one. It’s obviously the same thing but an order of magnitude better. As before, none of the flavours predominated enough to be identifiable but, having made up the mix from scratch, we now know the secret. Herbs and spices be damned, that staggering, mouthfilling, umami facepunch of a flavour is down to the two tablespoonfuls of MSG.
GFC, our own mix, was very, very good. Nice flavours, well chosen and matched. It’s refined, elegant and I’d proudly serve it at a family picnic. An elegant Southern church lady would gladly remove a cotton glove to pick up an MSG-free GFC drumstick. She would compliment us on our British reserve, our eccentric quirkiness and our general pluck, but as far as stimulating the senses goes, she’d politely opine, “why, it’s like comparing iced tea and crystal meth”.
Blake Morrison on André Kertész’s photographic celebration of the joy of the written word
One of my favourite André Kertész photographs shows two young men sitting with their backs to a tree, each absorbed in a book. Both are wearing glasses; both use their thighs as a lectern; the one facing forwards is black, the other, in profile (a dead ringer for Woody Allen), is white. Their proximity suggests they know each other and are friends. And given the time and place of the composition, the photo could serve as an icon of the civil rights movement – racial harmony as observed in Washington Square, New York City, 1969. What’s equally striking, though, is how separate the two men are, how oblivious to each other’s presence (and to the camera). They might be friends but their real companions are their books.
The Budapest-born Kertész enjoyed a long life (1894-1985), visited many countries and was involved in several different artistic movements. But wherever he went and whatever the commission, a constant preoccupation was with people reading. In one of his earliest and most moving images, three small boys (two of them barefoot) crouch over a book in a Hungarian street in 1915; in one of the last, a young woman stands reading in the shadow of a vast Henry Moore statue. Ferocious concentration is common to both. The act of reading involves no action, beyond turning the page. But the mental activity is intense, and it’s this that fascinates Kertész.
When paintings and sculptures depict a man or woman with a book, this usually signifies that they are studious, saintly, noble and wise – persons of substance. Kertész’s approach is different. Apart from one semi-surrealist shot of Peggy Guggenheim, with an open book in the foreground, he has no interest in the great and good. The Bowery bum retrieving a newspaper from a wastebin; a woman kneeling over a text in a Manila market; gondoliers, circus performers and street vendors snatching time between work duties to peruse a book or magazine – Kertész’s subjects are often people you wouldn’t expect to see reading. What the camera captures is their thirst for knowledge or hunger to escape their circumstances. One memorable image features a boy sitting in a New York doorway in 1944, amid a heap of newspapers left there to alleviate the wartime shortage (“Paper is needed now! Bring it at any time,” reads the poster behind him). Times are hard yet the boy looks perfectly happy: amid the detritus, he has found a page of comic strips.
Whereas books are traditionally thought of as an indoor pursuit, most of Kertész’s subjects are caught reading outdoors. The venues aren’t just parks and beaches. There’s a whole sequence of images taken in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and 70s, showing people reading high above the street, on tenement rooftops, penthouse balconies, metal stair-ladders and window ledges. Enrapt as they are, the readers seem indifferent to the chimneys, ventilation pipes and washing lines that surround them: away from the crowds, each has found a space to be alone. The setting is tough and urban. Yet there’s a spiritual quality, too – reading as a stairway to heaven.
Portrait painters evoke the spiritual intensity of reading by coming in tight on the face and body: the lowered eyes, the meditative brow, the hands piously folded under the spine of the text. The illustrations in Alberto Manguel’s wonderful book A History of Reading include countless examples of this, not least the painting which serves as its cover, Gustav Adolph Hennig’s Reading Girl. In Kertész’s photos, by contrast, the perspectives are longer and the subjects unaware that they are subjects: he shoots from a distance, so that we see the surrounding environment rather than the title of the book that’s being read. The lack of close-ups isn’t an obstacle, since the faces of readers give nothing away: their only engagement is with the book. The light and shade emphasise the transcendental power of reading. Here are people on an inner journey, while physically remaining still.
Kertész didn’t live to see the age of the internet or to hear the funeral rites for the age of print. But his photos of readers aren’t just a historical document or an exercise in nostalgia. The essential image he works with is timeless: human interaction with the written word. The physical forms in which we receive the word may be changing. But even when ebooks and Blackberries have taken over, that central image will remain: a text held in the hand and a head bowed over it. Andre Kertész, On Reading, is at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies St, London W1 until 4 October.
I miss New York City. I miss the New York City I’ve never seen — the one I’ve only seen in movies. And after…
