Time for the Distract-O-Matic

Some Oldster-adjacent content to keep you from fretting over...(gestures toward everything). A link roundup.

Death and Life, by Gustav Klimt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldster-adjacent content. Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one.

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• “Harry Belafonte was a hero of mine. He meant everything to me.” - in The Guardian, director Steve McQueen eulogizes the groundbreaking performer, activist and humanitarian, who died last week at 96.

  

  American singer Harry Belafonte performing in a recording studio, circa 1957. (Photo by Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

• “The question, she said, is how to live when life is nearly over. What, in that context, can life mean?” - I just love this New York Times Magazine reflection on 82-year-old Nobel Prize Winner and “ethnographer of the self” Annie Ernaux, by author Rachel Cusk.

  

  Order Annie Ernaux’s books from 7 Stories Press.

• “I’ve been raised by an actor, I’ve worked alongside my mother, and yet I’ve never asked, ‘Why did you want to become an actress?’” - on the Today show, Laura Dern, 56, recalled lamenting not talking more with her mother, fellow actor Diane Ladd, 87, about her life, her career, her struggles, and more, before Ladd was erroneously given only six months to live in 2018. The two recently released a book they co-authored, Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding)

  

  Order the book.

• Somewhat related: It’s over a decade old, but have you seen Englightened, the HBO comedy starring mother-daughter team Laura Dern and Diane Ladd, co-created by Dern and Mike White (best known for creating The White Lotus)? It might be my favorite show ever.

• “I’m eighty now and I live alone, a situation so common that you might even say loneliness goes hand in hand with being old, that the old are experts in loneliness.” - in The Walrus, a moving meditation on aging alone by Sharon Butala.

• There are some pretty great signs on the Writers Guild of America picket line. (via NPR). Television and film writers went on strike this week (- Jason P. Frank at Vulture/NYMag) to demand fair wages and residuals from studios and streaming services. You can support the writers of your favorite shows while they’re out of work by donating to the Entertainment Community Fund.

  betches_sup

  

  A post shared by The Betches Sup (@betches_sup)

• “You don’t die from Parkinson’s. You die with Parkinson’s. I’m not gonna be 80.” - at the Washington Post, Tara Parker-Pope writes about Jane Pauley’s recent CBS Sunday Morning interview with 61-year-old actor Michael J. Fox, whose documentary about living with Parkinson’s, called Still, will debut on Apple TV on Friday, May 12th.

• In November, Missy Elliott, 51, will be the first female rapper ever inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This year’s other inductees include Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Kate Bush, Rage Against the Machine, and the Spinners. - Carl Lararre at Billboard.

  missymisdemeanorelliott

  

  A post shared by Missy Elliott (@missymisdemeanorelliott)

• “The new fascism tries to put a wedge between us but trans people exist and have done so since the dawn of time. I knew when I was five.” - 61-year-old gender fluid performer Eddie Izzard—about to once again play all the characters in a production of Dickens’ Great Expectations in London—profiled by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian.

  eddieizzard

  

  A post shared by Eddie Izzard (@eddieizzard)

• “That may be one of the advantages of being somewhat ignored — you get to do what you want to do…” - 95-year-old artist Lois Dodd, profiled in the New York Times by Hilarie M. Sheets on the occasion of Dodd’s largest show yet, at Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn.

• Crime novelist

  Laura Lippman
  has just published The Summer of Fall: Gravity is a Bitch, But I’m Still Standing, a new mini-memoir about her eventful 2022—a divorce, a couple of falls including her’s and her mother’s, a friend’s death, her sister’s illness—available as an ebook and audiobook on Scribd.

  

  Order the book.

• Department of Reluctant Self-Promotion…I sincerely hate being my own book publicist, but I’m all I’ve got, so here goes: My publisher recently made the ebook version of my memoir available on multiple platforms. You can now find it on Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, Booktopia, and other sites. (Bonus: the ebook costs less, and I make more from it.)

Order the book.

• One more for those in Upstate New York: Mark your calendars for Weds., May 17th at 7pm when Ken Foster and I will host a special edition of his Nightcap Reading Series at Mama Roux in Newburgh to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the publication of my bestselling essay anthology, Goodbye to All That. Lucy Sante, Lori Stone, Vanessa Mártir, and I will read.

  

That’s all I’ve got. Have a great weekend!

-Sari