Great interview with Susan Sarandon in the Guardian.

She played a baseball groupie and felt very sexy in that role, and it’s special to her because it’s when she first met Robbins. Does she still feel sexy? “Yes, I am sexy. Someone said to me recently: ‘Do you think about ageing?’ and I think: what’s the choice? A lot of what we don’t like aesthetically about women who are fighting ageing is fear manifesting. I don’t think you should try to look 22 when you are in your 60s. There is something odd about a woman who looks younger than she did 20 years ago. I’m not against anybody doing anything to themselves that makes them feel good, but aesthetically some fillers and stuff make people unrecognisable. It’s difficult to watch somebody’s face, to see someone who has lips that are unrecognisable. I’ve never had fillers, and how can you get Botox when you’re an actor?”

From NYTimes article by Ruth La Ferla

“We’ve got a new dress code based on shifting norms around gender,” said Diane Ehrensaft, a psychologist in Oakland, Calif. Dr. Ehrensaft, who sees many middle school students and teenagers in her practice, argues that their blurring of assigned roles is deliberate and calculated. “Younger people just aren’t accepting the standard boxes anymore,” she said.

With their harsh outlines and suggestions of menace, the latest iterations of sexiness have gained little traction in American fashion glossies, which, some readers argue, persist in promoting sugary looks that are juvenile and contrived.

That style, low key and mostly covered, retains a subtle charge. “For me sexiness is more interesting when it’s not in your face,” said Susie Cho, the designer for Inhabit, a fashion label built on drape-front tank tops, cashmere leggings and filmy cardigans. Neither demure nor revealing, Ms. Cho’s unstructured look is based on comfort.

“It’s not overtly feminine and certainly not ladylike,” she said, taking a swipe at recent corseted revivals of the Eisenhower era. Interpreted literally and stripped of irony, many such period looks “are self-conscious,” she said. “And there’s nothing sexy about that.”

Read full article in the NY Times by Daphne Merkin

Meyers’s focus on making films that both feature and speak to middle-aged women, a demographic that studios traditionally ignore for fear of not bringing in the all-important opening-weekend numbers by which a movie’s position is assessed and its future success seemingly foretold. The simple truth is that any movie that is not aimed at 15-year-old boys, who come out in droves on Friday night for movies like “Transformers,” is seen as something of a risk. Movies like “It’s Complicated” unfold at the box office in a different pattern than movies that are skewed younger; their success is based more on long-range playability and word of mouth than on instant impact. Still, in a movie culture consumed by youth and its trappings — vampires, werewolves, stoners and superheroes — Meyers’s decision to pay attention to a part of the population that is often construed (and often construes itself) to be invisible stands out in bold relief. The fact that this decision has proved to be commercially shrewd says something about her instincts as a moviemaker but also says something about a previously unsatisfied hunger, composed of two parts daydream and one part hope, that is finally being addressed. “She’s a pioneer with regard to representing older women,” Diane Keaton said over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “She’s the only one delivering the fantasy for women over 55. You’re beautiful, charming and you get two guys instead of one.”

In this sense she is proposing the somewhat radical notion that there are second acts in women’s lives and that they don’t necessarily hinge on being a desperate housewife in search of the next “It” bag or a cougar on the prowl.

Full story in Guardian by Sarah Crown

In May, Alice Munro, modern-day virtuoso of the short form, was awarded the £60,000 Man Booker International prize in recognition of a body of work that the judges described as “practically perfect”. Last week, Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah ran away with the Guardian’s own fiction prize, the First Book award, for her collection, An Elegy for Easterly. And this year’s BBC National Short Story award made headlines for the fact that its five-strong shortlist was made up entirely of women – on Monday evening it was won by Kate Clanchy. Naturally, as is always the case when it comes to women excelling in a field, everyone is on the hunt for a reason.

Might it be that the form itself is particularly suited to “female” subjects; to women’s perceived preoccupation with the domestic, with relationships’ subtle ebbs and flows? Certainly, the short story’s taut boundaries can act as a check, condensing the sprawl of family life into gleaming droplets faceted with the sort of insights that might easily dissolve over the course of a novel. The problem, obviously, lies in the suggestion that these subjects are specific to women. Male short story writers are equally alive to the form’s usefulness for grappling with these sort of small-scale situations. Just think of William Trevor – or Chekhov, for that matter.

Many people come to this blog because of two posts on choosing to live as a hermit.  It was not my intention when I started mentalimaging to focus on this topic.  And, I never imagined that this topic would generate more hits than anything else.  Most of the comments on the hermit posts are from people who want to move from wherever they are to some remote area and “live off the land” in one way or another.

For me, choosing to live as a hermit is not about getting away from other people or living in isolation in a remote area.  It is about choosing a reflective, contemplative life that is lived mostly alone.  This does not require a specific physical location but rather, a mental location, a mental attitude of choosing to cultivate wisdom and self-acceptance over popularity, entertainment and conflict.

Read the full story in the NYTimes

In 2006, Michelle Bachelet captured the world’s attention, becoming the first woman to be elected president of Chile, a deeply conservative country. And she had done it alone, without the famous husbands that had propelled other female presidents in Latin America.

Analysts and pollsters attribute her stunning popularity to her handling of the economy during the global financial crisis and to her decision to save billions of dollars in revenues from copper sales during the last commodity boom. That aggressive saving gave the country money to spend on pension reform and Ms. Bachelet’s ambitious program of social protections for women and children, despite the financial crisis.

Ms. Bachelet is among a handful of Latin American leaders, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, whose handling of the crisis has strengthened their popularity. Both Brazil and Chile are now emerging from recession, with Chile’s government saying the economy will grow by 5 percent next year.

Ms. Bachelet, a professed agnostic and single mother of three in a country that legalized divorce only five years ago, shattered the mold of traditional Chilean politicians in this Roman Catholic stronghold. At the start, she said, the political establishment tried to portray her as weak and disrespectful of the office of the president.

“It was an important challenge in the first few years,” Ms. Bachelet, 58, said in a recent interview, noting the way other powerful women had urged her to toughen up and “scream and insult” to be respected. “I took a gamble,” she added, “to exercise leadership without losing my feminine nature.”  As she took power, Ms. Bachelet introduced a cabinet of 20 ministers: 10 men and 10 women, a gender parity no previous Chilean president had tried.

With billions of dollars saved, Ms. Bachelet’s government legalized alimony payments to divorced women and tripled the number of free early child care centers for low-income families. It added a minimum pension guarantee for the very poor and for low-income homemakers. The government is on pace to complete its goal of creating 3,500 child care centers, said María Estela Ortiz, executive vice president of Chile’s National Board of Day Care Centers.

I never knew who the real Norma Rae was (1980 movie with Sally Field).  What a courageous woman!

Crystal Lee Sutton, the union organizer whose real-life stand on her worktable at a textile factory in North Carolina in 1973 was the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning movie “Norma Rae,” died Friday in Burlington, N.C. She was 68.  Ms. Sutton (then Crystal Lee Jordan) was a 33-year-old mother of three earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the J. P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., when she took her stand. Low pay and poor working conditions had impelled her to take a leading role in efforts to unionize the plant. She was met with threats, she said.

After months trying to organize co-workers, Ms. Sutton was fired. When the police, summoned by the management, came to take her away, she made one last act of defiance.

“I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word ‘union’ on it in big letters, got up on my worktable, and slowly turned it around,” she said in the interview. “The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet.”

Within a year, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union had won the right to represent 3,000 employees at seven plants in Roanoke Rapids, including J. P. Stevens, which was then the second-largest textile manufacturer in the country.

Read full obit in the New York Times

I just realized today, from reading an article in the Christian Science Monitor, that there is an Office of Global Women’s Issues in the State Department — and that Melanne Verveer is the Ambassador at Large of this office.  She was appointed on June 12, 2009.

Here is the link: http://www.state.gov/s/gwi/ to their website.

From the swearing in ceremony, Hilary Clinton:

“Melanne is most famous for the unwavering passion she brings to her causes. And for the last 15 years, that cause has been women and girls; their rights, their opportunities, their central important to the future of our world’s progress and prosperity.   The absolute commitment she has always shown to giving voice to the voiceless, and making sure that the stories of everyday heroes and heroines would be known to a broader audience. She helped to launch the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative more than a decade ago, and she nurtured it and helped it to grow into what it is today. In the past eight years, she turned a government program into a global NGO, and the results of that work are ones that I encounter everywhere I travel on behalf of the United States. And she particularly helped to lead our commitment to end the intolerable scourge, the global crime of human trafficking.”

Vital Voices Global Partnership

Read full article in the New York Times

While still struggling to find their place in the movie industry at large — the number of directors at American studios remains well over 90 percent male — female filmmakers have managed to occupy some of this 10-day festival’s most valuable slots: those showcase screenings and press conferences in the first couple of days, when everyone is still paying attention.

Thursday’s most raucous event was almost certain to be the 11:59 p.m. red-carpet debut of 20th Century Fox’s “Jennifer’s Body,” directed by Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight”) from a script by Ms. Cody (“Juno”), in which Megan Fox plays a high school sex bomb who, quite literally, turns into a man-eater.

According to Natalie Johnson, a spokeswoman for Fox, tickets to the midnight show at the landmark Ryerson Theater, which seats more than 1,200, were gone within two hours of going on sale last week. (“Hell is a teenage girl,” runs a theme-setting line from the film.)

“Jennifer’s Body,” which opens in commercial theaters next Friday, got its first festival screening at noon on Thursday. Several hundred press and film industry types, normally a jaded bunch, were lined up for a look at the Kusama-Cody-Fox combination’s take on female vengeance.

Anyone who is looking can read the signs, including those ubiquitous photographs of Ms. Cody flashing her bicep tattoo of a bikini-clad beauty: Women have staked a claim on the season.

Read full story in the NYTimes

Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its high-water mark and now, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in “The Beaches of Agnès,” her latest film, which opens in New York on Wednesday, after winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best documentary feature in February. Conceived as Ms. Varda’s 80th birthday approached, “Beaches” is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.

There is an elegiac undercurrent to the film — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as it is with the restless exploration of memory. “I wanted to be like a bird,” Ms. Varda said in an interview one wintry morning in Manhattan a few months ago. “I wanted to be free in my memory, to go from one part to another and see what I would find.” An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed “Beaches” as a sort of living, moving collage.