TOM CRUISE

I am not a "fan" of any actor, actress, or theater person (other than my husband). I like some movie stars much better than others. Cruise is one of them.

I don't see many movies; rarely go to the theater; once a year I watch ice skaters; I avoid "dance." Even in my days as a performer, I avoided ballet and modern dance -- watching others distracted me from dancing the way I wanted to dance.

Tom Cruise, again, and again, creates a character that makes the story the movie tells, a story that affects me.

I wasn't aware of him before "Risky Business." Tom Cruise dancing around in his underwear tickled me. He was fun, very natural, a young guy I enjoyed meeting.

I didn't follow his career, but whenever he appeared in a movie preview, or a re-run on television, I'd find myself watching him, captured. (I watch/listen to the kitchen TV between chores, rarely stay glued to the screen).

Tom Cruise movies that stay with me, that I've seen more than once -- "Rain Man," "Born on the Fourth of July," "A Few Good Men," "The Firm." In these four films, the story, all the actors -- but especially Cruise -- were even more interesting on a second viewing. Other films -- well, I haven't been able to sit through any of his "Mission Impossible" movies -- (too much action), or his vampire movies (vampires are not my cup of tea), and "Vanilla Sky" was, for me, a bomb (I didn't like him in it, thought the plot was icky, confused.)

Yes, I saw Tom jump on the couch on the Oprah Winfrey show, declaring he was in love, and I cringed. Tom, chit chatting about Scientology, his marriage and divorce from Kidman, his verbal war with Brooke Shields, his marriage to Holmes and their baby -- during television interviews, I'm often repelled by what he's saying, and his overbearing, frantic manner.

B U T -- Tom Cruise, the actor, is such a believable strong, likable, often lovable masculine male -- the interviews, the whispers about him being gay, the annoying aspects of his public personality -- none of this affects or colors what I see and feel about the man on the screen.

Here's a short clip of his latest new movie that's playing now, "Knight and Day."




I think Cruise, in this film, is his usual good actor self. The look, the ease, the sense of a real person, a man is there, and worth spending time with. I like the character. The movie tricks, slam-bam stuff, the imminent deadly situations -- yiii -- the movie magic is mostly boring, and makes me restless. The ha-ha comedic style of the film doesn't work for me -- it seems over done. The lovely, wide-eyed Carmen Diaz, has gotten high praise (along with Cruise) for her work in this film, but I find her unreal, too-too much! Diaz doesn't hold me, Cruise does.

No I'm not a fan, but obviously I 'm prejudiced. I've got an instinct that's inbred in me by now, to really like the man, the actor Tom Cruise.

GEOGRAPHY OF A WOMAN

A friend sent me this brief "GEOGRAPHY OF A WOMAN" lesson, in an e-mail, that someone sent him in an e-mail:

Between 18 and 22, a woman is like Africa. Half discovered, half wild, fertile and naturally Beautiful! ...

Between 23 and 30, a woman is like Europe. Well developed and open to trade, especially for someone of real value ...

Between 31 and 35, a woman is like Spain, very hot, relaxed and convinced of her own beauty.

Between 36 and 40, a woman is like Greece, gently aging but still a warm and desirable place to visit.

Between 41 and 50, a woman is like Great Britain, with a glorious and all conquering past.

Between 51 and 60, a woman is like Israel, has been through war, doesn't make the same mistakes twice, takes care of business.

Between 61 and 70, a woman is like Canada, self-preserving, but open to meeting new people.

After 70, she becomes Tibet, wildly beautiful, with a mysterious past and the wisdom of the ages. An adventurous spirit and a thirst for spiritual knowledge.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF A MAN
Between 1 and 80, a man is like Iran , ruled by nuts.


THE END.

MUSIC

Symphonic music to me was, and still is, the most thrilling, most powerful of the arts.

I love rock and roll. I love the big band sound. But what a symphony orchestra is -- the sight of sixty, seventy, sometimes ninety men and women working together is what gets me.

Their unity is what involves me in the music. Men and woman -- their concentrated playing of instruments they love, have studied, mastered, keep practicing on, striving to perfect --the tone, speed, phrasing, dynamics -- staccato, legato , fortissimo, pianissimo -- all those lilting Italian words that represent hundreds things they all know and feel in their bones without translating.

I'm just talking about something I've experienced, and re-experience -- deeply enjoy, and treasure -- sharing it, for no reason except the orchestras of America and Europe are becoming endangered species.

Yes, museums, theaters, ballet companies, zoos, botanical gardens, and libraries are endangered. But the symphony orchestra ... I've performed as part of the orchestra, and it was as if the arms of God were on me, around me, lifting me -- gliding, guiding, and sending and me into the space that I shared with the musicians and conductor and we were one and the same. I didn't cry, laugh, or get giddy with joy because I was so wondrously IN the music. I just danced.

What a privilege! I own it. Other people do also. I'm just sending it on to you so that if you have a chance to go to a symphony concert -- GO.

TRUE FRIENDS

A very good friend of ours sent me this in an e-mail.

True Friends

After losing his parents, this 3 year old orangutan was so depressed he wouldn't eat and didn't respond to any medical treatments. The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness. The zoo keepers found an old sick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog to the animal treatment center. The dog arrived at the same time the orangutan was there being treated. The 2 lost souls met and have been inseparable ever since.

The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend. They are together 24 hours a day in all their activities.

They live in Northern California where swimming is their favorite past time, although Roscoe (the orangutan) is a little afraid of the water and needs his friend's help to swim. Together they have discovered the joy and laughter in life and the value of friendship. They have found more than a friendly shoulder to lean on.

Long Live Friendship!!!!!!! _______________________________________________

EPIGENETICS REVISITED (Video)

Did you dream of being a super athlete but knew you couldn't be -- you didn't have the height, or the muscles --everyone in your family was chubby and quite short ....

Well, there's something new that's being worked on by scientists, that can make it possible to change some of the things you've inherited from your mother and father, and they inherited from theirs.

Scientists call the new science, "Epigenetics."

Oncologists have already seen some success in using epigenetics against leukemia, bone-marrow cancer and blood disorders. And at the Epigenome Center in the Salk Institute, there's evidence that lifestyle choices like eating too much, can be changed, by changing the molecules in your DNA that cause the genes for obesity to express themselves too strongly.

It's complicated -- I'm not a doctor or a scientist, but I've learned that epigenetics may even help us cure cancer. When tumor-suppressing genes aren't doing their job, and cancer cells are replicating uncontrollably -- by manipulating the epigenetic marks, doctors can get tumor-suppressing genes to work again.

Last week, a team of researchers announced, they'd created a bacterial cell using chemicals and computer data. It's "synthetic DNA."

Here we are, JC and Em the blogger, discussing how it might affect us.

FACEBOOKERS

Who are my friends on Facebook? I see thumbnail pictures -- small, usually in color, men and woman, occasionally a child's face that's probably the person's favorite picture of himself.

What are we doing on Facebook? Looking for real friends, possible lovers, someone to meet for coffee? Or promoting what we're doing?

I signed up because I wanted to find more readers for Em's Talkery, my daily blog. And, I'm finding them. I ask my new friends for comments on what I wrote about today, or yesterday, and sometimes mention what I'm working on for tomorrow.

I've been write-talking with one of my new friends -- a woman in mourning -- trying to comfort her like a mother, like a good friend -- she's sharing a little of herself with me.

I've bumped into a very energetic guy, political, passionate, knows what's real. Chatting back and forth, I see he's communicating with many different people. He's a leader. When he affirms something I've said in my blog, I feel as if I've won an award.

I've got people who are talking to me almost every day. It isn't like a phone call -- "Hello, how are you, how's the weather?" It's about me, the real me, or them, the real person responding, reacting to something I've said.

I love that.

I've got a gruff intellectual who barked at me for babbling. I barked back at him, and now we're talking about his Sci Fi stories and my novels. I have three fairly harsh dis-approvers, very real people who live on the other side of the fence. It makes me re-examine the issues and what I've said that infuriates them.

I have quite a few playwright friends. They have plays that I don't have time to read, but I see where they're heading, and comment briefly in a way that might be helpful.

I've got a rambling poetic writer pal, who's high on thoughts or wine or whatever -- it's fun, like looking out my window and watching a bird take off.

I like picking thumbnail faces of people who don't say who they are, or where they're going, or what they're doing, and asking -- often finding out more and more about them.

There's are a lot of thumbnails -- familiar faces -- show biz people I know whom I've "friended." They rarely respond, except to send me what they're promoting -- night club acts, DVds, albums, shows, parties, benefits. I usually click Facebook's RSVP box and reply -- "It sounds interesting, but I don't have time right now." Because they, like me, need an audience, and replies become an audience, and affirm what you're doing.

I answer every message, 15 ... 25 ... sometimes 40 a day.

As I'm falling asleep, I find myself reflecting on this person, that person as if they were relatives.

No doubt about it, I have a lot more readers, and a lot more friends in exactly
the way I need friends right now.

ARTIST YVES KLEIN

In 2008, this monochrome painting by Yves Klein -- brace yourself, would-be artists -- sold for #21,000,000.

Is money a good judge of art? Ahh me -- part of me, the realist says YES. And I've noted that the first grabs that a young artist makes, first choices -- the brash, confident self that KNOWS what he or she wants to say, do, create, present -- if you can hang on to that, that's your key to SUCCESS.

Okay, but my other self, very grown-up Em who's worked, revised, re-worked , re-conceived, worked-worked-worked self-critically -- that Em heaves a sigh and thinks, NO -- YOU are the judge, and the uninhibited, first efforts often succeed because they're odd, unusual, unique. They make a noise that no one has heard before -- they make the critic blink and question himself.

Yves Klein, Neo-Daddist artist, died at age 34 in 1962.

Klein wanted to make it -- be famous, be noticed-- and he said so. He did crazy daredevil things. Like Warhol, and also Dali, Yves Klein was a performance artist -- he talked, looked, and behaved as part of his ART.

Early on, when he wasn't sure what his medium was, Yves put his time, thought, and energy into creating "The Monotone-Silence Symphony." It was a single 20-minute sustained chord, followed by a 20-minute silence. He created it before American composer John Cage wrote his first silent piece.

I knew Cage, because I knew Merce Cunningham who lived with Cage, and Merce created bits of un-predictable, arbitrary steps -- choreography which was, to me -- BORING -- boring as Cage's "fixed piano" stuff and Cage's "silent" music. It inspired me to create my first "noise" -- my CONFIDENT, know-it-all stage play, "One Fine Morning in the Middle of the Night" -- and by golly, I was noticed! I did make heads turn! Eyes of major critics were on me! But I didn't grab (or if I did, I grabbed the wrong thing).

(Hey, if you're a would-be artist, pay attention -- read every thought I'm setting forth and everything you've heard about art -- give IT the raspberries and go do what you are thinking!)

Yves went into monochrome painting -- large and small canvases covered entirely with a single color. He was disappointed when people drifted around the gallery and said they were enjoying the room's decorations, implying the colorful canvases were connected, like a mosaic.

Then, Yves committed himself to blue. He declared that it was a "blue revolution that transformed consciousness." (I've noticed that it helps, when an artist is articulate, poetical, and yes, a bit of a B.S. artist.) He called the color "International Klein Blue."

Klein didn't like brushes. so he used ordinary paint-rollers, then sponges -- soaked large sponges in his blue paint mixture and attached them to canvases already sponged in blue (too bad he didn't live to long enough to know one of his blue sponge painting would sell, forty years later, for $4,720,000. )

Yves worked, sweated over these creations and used his soundless symphony for a new exhibit he called --"Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void." (Whew -- that's a brain-teaser!) He removed everything in a gallery space, painted every surface white, and staged an elaborate routine for the opening night audience. Painting the exterior gallery window International Klein blue, installing I.K.B. curtains in the lobby, serving blue cocktails -- 3000 people waited and were finally let into the empty white room.

If I had been there, I would have stormed out. Was Yves worried? Did audience response, did critical response throw him? All I know is that Klein kept developing -- his way -- in any direction his instincts about art led him.

Using himself, his wife and friends he began working with body paint, creating paintings by rolling their bodies on the canvas.

These paintings produced this famous painting, "Hiroshima," ghostly remnants of shapes on a canvas.



He invited audiences, and filmed his new creative process. Audiences saw nude female models being sponged with blue paint, and throwing themselves down on a huge white canvas, rolling back and forth -- creating body prints. This type of work he called "Anthropometry."

His other paintings that used this method of production, include capturing the patterns rain made on a canvas strapped to the top of his car, as he drove; also, soot patterns on a canvas made by scorching the canvas with gas burners.

Are you inspired by this? Do you have ideas, impulses to paint, write, dance -- to speak poetry, or maybe stage a Shakespeare play this way? "Neo -Dada." art uses modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrasts, like Jasper Johns did, Rauschenberg, Warhol did, and Yoko Ono does.

Is this what Madonna did on her tours? Is it what Lady Gaga is doing? Yes. Do I applaud it? NO. Do I like it? NO. It doesn't move me. I want to understand, and feel, and be touched and involved with art. I'll say it more simply -- art is life -- I need to understand, feel, be touched and involved with life.

"Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers," a new show that runs through September 12, is at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.