Category Archives: The Arts

Being an Intellectual in Radical Times

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Adolf Hitler and Che Gueverra were both socialists with different views of what was right. Both hated art (unless it was about them) and destroyed art and artists. They both killed people for different reasons. The same occurred within the communist movement and amongst religious zealots in history who wanted to take control over people. They have killed people too for different reasons. All thought they were fair, right and just for doing so. Now we have the feminist radicals who have gone to the extremes in many ways. We are no longer just seeing “Women are better than men,” thought processes but witch hunts from the “MeToo” movement and destruction of art, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” to fit their purposes. They are destroying men and art and even women who don’t agree with them for the sake of beliefs that they believe is right and just. This radical approach to turning the world around to their perspective, and this causes them to be incapable of looking at another side of things or listen to their instincts (not their ego). The “I am Right and You are Wrong,” is like with any radical thought process mentioned above, it is always “wrong,” as it is based on the ego, not a mature mindset and destroys society.

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Sophia Loren – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

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This book is one you don’t devour. You take your time, stirring, simmering and seasoning as if you are making a pot of soup or stew. Sophia is a Virgo, which is most of my astrological chart, except the first dominant three. I sensed a grounded woman almost immediately. A person who has taken her time and made the right choices; which led her down a path that would make her a very happy woman. As a Leo, who has made all the wrong choices, very impatiently and innocently, when you have done these things, only then can you truly appreciate someone who is smarter than you. Patience really is a virtue.

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Outing Celebs who are Dead, is Vulgar and Irresponsible

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Liberace was a “flaming fag,” as we used to say in the 80’s. He wasn’t married to a woman, he didn’t try to hide being gay by the way he dressed or acted on stage or in real life. While he didn’t come right out and say “I am gay,” or in his day – a homosexual because saying gay would mean he was giddy or happy, it is safe to say that he wouldn’t be upset that we all know he was gay. Likewise, we could safely say this about Oscar Wilde or Lord Byron and countless others who didn’t take great pains to make sure we didn’t know.

On the other hand, focusing on Cary Grant’s love life or Katherine Hepburn’s or Spencer Tracy’s or even Eleanor Roosevelt’s is inexcusable. It is disrespectful of their families, their husbands and wives, of their name and of their legendary status. If something is not written in their will or if they have taken great pains to hide their love life; than it is none of our business. Yet magazines and their sensationalist journalists take great pains to “expose” them as if they have abused children or animals and need to have their life paraded around the town square for the entire world to see and know.

Life was different in their time period. People had class and very high expectations of themselves and others. Men and women dressed elegantly and went out to dinner with gloves on and hats. They wore fur stoles or full length coats or capes that were left in a cloak room with a “hat check girl.” They drew nicotine from long stems and cocked their heads back when they let out the smoke in a very graceful way. They ate lavish meals and watched performances, which included full orchestras with singers and maybe dancers as well. When they left, they went onto parties or home or somewhere else. The story ended there.

Recently, Scotty Bowers a celebrity pimp at 94 years old, has decided he needs to ruin the reputations of some really wonderful people that we all grew to love and adore. These were people whom we romanticized and fantasized about when we thought of their relationships, or their movies, or their place in office. The meaning of legendary is someone that no one can replace. It is someone who was unique, a valuable contribution to the world, stellar, intelligent, and larger than life.

When they are then exploited for being gay behind closed doors, you are taking away that legendary status by turning them into a common person. You are saying that they had flaws like the rest of us. That beneath that smile was nothing but lies. You are taking away the image we have of them and turning them into nothing more than a Jimmy Saville. And for what purpose? Why do we need to know who was gay and who wasn’t gay? Who does this help? Do we need to meet a quota in today’s society to validate ourselves in the lifestyle we are now living?

“Women He’s Undressed,” sounds demeaning just hearing the title. As I watched this documentary about an Australian designer by the name of Orry-Kelly, I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable as he began to rat out Archie Leach’s lifestyle and then tell us that Cary Grant took great pains to shut him up before he died. Naturally, it is hard to have any respect for Orry-Kelly; as a result of watching this. I began to understand why Cary walked away from him because he was a spineless prick; like most people in the fashion industry. Always out to stab people in the back and then curtsy, while blushing on their way out the door. It’s supposed to be seen as charming and yet it made me want to vomit; which is why I got out.

As I am in the psychology world now, I am equally insulted by fools who focus on the fact that Freud was a cocaine addict or that Jung screwed his clients. None of this was taboo in their time period because they were the fathers of psychology and had not yet determined ethics and laws that are relevant today. Doctors handed out cocaine, heroin, and many other substances that are considered illegal today but weren’t then. It is because therapists or psychoanalysts did what they did that we now know better. But to focus on their behaviors that were inconsequential in their day, takes away from the valuable contributions that they made to psychology.

When I watch an old film, I don’t want to think about the fact that he or she was a dyke or a fag. I want to think about their wit, their je ne sais quois. Yet when someone puts something into my mouth, I can’t get rid of the taste of it. The memory is stuck. When we see these people on screen, it is important to leave them with their clothes on. We want to keep their voice resonating in our head. We want to recall their walk across the room. We want to envy their wives/husbands, children and imagine what it must have been like to be in the room with them.

If these people were alive today, more than likely they would sue the rags that printed them just as Tom Cruise used to do with National Enquirer. Now all magazines and newspapers, the Internet as a whole, seem focused on becoming trashy, smutty, tell-alls who have nothing better to do with their life than to ruin others. When you do this to a dead man, you are essentially spitting on their grave and that of their kin. Allow these people to rest. Allude to their behind the scenes arrangements but really and truly, if they aren’t Jimmy Saville, let it rest. Keep them a legend, a mystery, a well-loved hero/heroine.

Alaine Polcz – Hungarian Writer and Psychologist

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In her book, “A Wartime Memoir: Hungary 1944-1945,”Alaine tells about a life changing year that instead of being her downfall, became her life’s purpose. Sitting ducks with a changing guard, from Russian to German on an on-going, what seemed like a never ending basis, she travels from Transylvania (then hoping to remain with Hungary) to Csákvár, in Hungary and back again. In the end, you can imagine the frustration in knowing, if she had never left, her life would have remained simple an innocent.

What is beautiful about this book is that she is not talking like a psychologist but instead, goes back in her mind to re-live painfully traumatic experiences at the age of 19, as if she were that age once more. As a psychotherapist myself, I get the sense that she probably never went through her own course of treatment. This is because she continues to repeat over and over “I do not remember…” This is typical of a sexual abuse survivor or someone who was horribly traumatized at a young age and blocks the exact details of the trauma from their mind, for their own “assumed” well-being. Ironic, as she was a psychologist yet even today, people in this profession are closed off to doing their own work. It is important so that they can properly support others without transferring their own pain onto the client or confusing the client’s story with their own. I am not condemning her though because this was more typical of this time period. I grew up with Hungarians (refugees from the revolution), none of whom went into therapy and all of whom went through some of their own harrowing ordeals. Not least of which was fleeing their beloved homeland.

Alaine was born in Kolozsvár, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (at this time known as the city of Cluj-Napoca). Now it is Romania and it was in 1944-1945 as well. This was a time of unrest between the Romanians and Hungarians, power struggles on the Romanian part that included violence and discrimination against the Hungarians who lived there. Alaine’s father gave her this male name because of two reasons. One, he did not know French and so unaware that it was a man’s name but Two, his only purpose was finding a name that was not able to be translated into Romanian.

At the onset of 1944, Alaine, at 19, was married to her childhood sweetheart János. Within a few months into their honeymoon period, he gives her gonorrhea. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, it is at this point when he detaches from her and begins to be an emotionally abusive husband. She has the luck of being a strong woman, though terribly naïve. His mother, Mami, happens to work for the Esterházy family, who are of noble origins. It is here that they will go to live and because of him that she follows the family as they escape into Hungary to live and work at another estate, which will be the beginning of the end of Alaine’s life as she knows it. In Csákvar, what seems to bring some peace and safety for a short time, ends up being the front lines, which means constant harassment or torture from either the Germans or the Russians. For women, as with all wars, she and other villagers will be gang raped on what appears to be a daily basis, and at this time, she is under the impression that her husband was executed. The most impressive lines that she writes of her first account of abuse goes like this:

He put the photograph [of she and her husband] on the nightstand and laid me down on the bed. I was afraid he would not give me the picture. When he was done, he took the picture into his hand and showed it to me again…

When she writes, she is not writing like a writer in this book.  She states facts, over and over. There are no pictures drawn and yet there is a story being told. Fuzzy memories are re-told and sometimes they are not even in order, so you have to re-read to catch yourself. It is as if you are sitting with her and she is telling you a story. When I got to the line “When he was done,” it came at me so quickly; I had to read it a few times to let it register. “Oh, okay,” I thought, this is how she is protecting herself and the audience. Even though she is not talking like a psychologist, she is consciously protecting throughout the book.

At some point, days, maybe a month or so later, she is escorted to a cellar, with 79 other Hungarians, who are doing their best to survive. They will go through days or months (you are never sure of the timeline but the book is only one year), of not bathing, very little food and at one point no water, ritual defecating and urinating (they can only go outside to do this during the 10 minutes of ceasefire which occurs daily at the same time), as well as lice and natural body odors. She is only with Mami and her dachshund “Filike,” who she holds at her breast, under a coat which no one notices until the end of her time there.

Alaine does spend a lot of time talking about blood and guts and waste, more than any other writer I have seen when it comes to war zones. One does wonder how people use the toilet during these times. When she mentions herself running away from a gang rape sequence, she talks about running through the snow with a slip on and blood being caked on her body and in her panties. She mentions being in the cellar when she pulls her shirt away from her body and a woman notices the skin of a sore coming with it. She is telling us about how you just keep going, no matter what, becoming oblivious to your own vanity.

The war is at the end, in 1945, when this part of her story comes to a close. She returns to Budapest, still without her husband, to be reunited with family; who will then return to Kolozsvár. She is saved from being labeled a whore, as most women will be in this time period, because her family are good people and she finally denies what happened. By this time the gonorrhea and the life conditions she has just endured have taken its toll on her body. She is hospitalized for some time before she will recover and get some of her life back. The irony is that she will never be able to bear a child and this was the fault of her own husband. The sardonic twist is the realization that all those Russian soldiers had went home to their wives passing on her venereal disease to them.

She and János will part ways and soon she will meet her second husband Miklós Mészöly, who went on to become a famous Hungarian writer. Alaine will go on to become the founder of the first children’s hospice program and win two different awards. She receives the Tibor Déry Award in 1992 (for this book, which was written in 1991) and The Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2001. Alaine’s husband dies in 2001 and she will pass six years later.

Post-Script: What is horribly frustrating about the book is the writing and translation. Albert Tezla is the translator and having read a great number of translated books from several different countries, this is pathetic. You would almost think he didn’t speak English because the sentences come across as broken and unedited. I believe he is translating word for word, rather than trying to put it together in some organized fashion. It is also possible that Alaine was never edited since Albert was not either. I think this is embarrassing to both the writer and the country itself. While I am not a prolific writer myself and certainly need to be edited, I am self-published and have no professional acclaim to add to my repertoire.  I was disappointed to say the least. However, this story, edited or not, annoying with the redundancy or not, needed to be told. What I have noticed when I find anything about women in history, this is so often the case. It is sad because I can’t recall any time when I have seen the same about men.

#METOO feels Self-Serving to Me

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Back in the mid-80’s, I lived and worked in LA and was trying to get into modeling. I was not naïve to the “casting couch” as I had read the non-fiction “Hollywood Babylon” (published in 1959) as a teenager and knew this was a dirty world. My last time to try and make a go of it was with an agency looking for older models (I was 26-ish by then). They were off of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Blvd. It was in a building across from the famous newsstand which may or may not exist anymore (do people still buy trade magazines and newspapers?). The guy who ran this agency worked with his wife, a beautiful Swedish/Norwegian looking blonde lady who was very pregnant with their first child. He took me and another younger woman to Malibu and we spent the day doing photos for our portfolios. We were in bathing suits and had to endure two Mexican men ogling us from over the side of a cliff we were under. We also had to endure this man/photographer telling us about his days with Playgirl magazine (when he was a model) and the size of his male part and how great he was.

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Abhorrent – the new # in Holywood

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Holier than thou Hollywood continues to gain power over our society with their extreme left thinking to over compensate for their anger at the right. Hypocritically speaking out about tolerance and freedom of speech and then firing someone for just that. It is okay for Samantha Bee to disrespect a president’s daughter and call her a F-cking C-nt and for Kathy Griffin to want to decapitate a world leader, or for Joy Behar to trash Christians. All “comedians” but when a well-known, controversial, funny woman Roseanne Barr says something she is fired from her own TV show. Let’s look back at a couple of her more interesting quotes:

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Politically Correct Debate for Modern Thinkers

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This is quite a fascinating debate series founded by Hungarian born Paul Munk in 2008 out of Toronto, Canada. Interestingly, I learned about this through a client recently. I find that I get many good resources from the people I serve almost as if it were providence. They did make me aware of who won the debate before I saw it, though it wasn’t that hard to figure out as it was quite obvious which side were more gifted in speech and somatic comfort. What is troubling, as always, are Americans abroad. They are just incapable of realizing it isn’t all about them.

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Don Draper – Self-help Guru

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Since I don’t pay for cable, I have to wait for episodes of good TV programs, from around the world, to come on Netflix. I try to stay off of entertainment news broadcasts so that I have no idea what is going on and can watch it with the same surprises as everyone else. However, I did catch a few news headlines about the end of Mad Men and waited with bated breath to see what I would think of the ending. Needless to say, I was a little perplexed at the thoughts people had about the end of the show. The caption had read something like “Is Don Draper committing suicide?” I rather hoped this would not be the way Matthew Weiner ended the series because it just didn’t feel right to me. It is obvious that Don Draper suffered from Depression, yes, but to commit suicide? Hardly. This man was a survivor, not a victim.

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Un Village Français

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A French Village is set in German occupied France, World War II. We are being shown local townspeople being forced to make choices to survive. It is romantic, because there is always love when you are in a traumatic situation. It is not biased and so you see bad Germans and bad French. What is amazing is that the most important thing that you see is people at war. As you watch it, you have to try not to view this from the lens of an educated person who obviously knows what happened during WWII. You must try to behave as ignorantly as the characters are to have an ability to appreciate their choices and empathize with them. Some people you don’t empathize with such as the character Heinrich Müller, who enjoys putting cigarettes out on people. Including the one he loved.

Heinrich and Hortense

Today, I watched the first episode of the third season and was struck by the fact that I felt as I did when I worked in the county government for eight years. In this episode the head of the local government, the prefect (I believe he is called or deputy prefect) is handed a list of Jewish names to round up in the neighborhood. Up until this time, the city of Villenueve was protected and the Jewish people could more or less feel their lives were somewhat safe, although they were unable to run their businesses. In this tiny town, they assumed that the Prime Minister Phillipe Pétain, had the power to protect French Jews from being deported. In this episode we learn that this has now changed. When I worked for the county government our mindset was “What was in the best interests of the children,” until the recession hit. Then it was all about saving money and putting them in the cheapest places. I fought this and all the other changes that were going on until I was put on Administrative Leave for a year and then I finally quit. I quit because their evidence was lies or fabricated stories and I knew I would be fired if I stuck around.  I couldn’t believe that a huge agency like that would be so concerned about me (there were lots of people involved). So while, my personal situation with the government is a far cry from making decisions during World War II, I like putting things into perspective with the here and now.

Marcel Larcher, a communist

When you think of a soldier at war, doing what he or she is told to do, they really don’t have any choices of whether or not they like it. When the “team” loses, suddenly we turn on them, and everyone is punished; whether they really had a choice or not. This is something I keep thinking about as I watch this show. While the character may seem bad, you can recognize a corporate boss; eager to get a promotion. You can see a “company man” who does what he is told. When you are working for corporate America or government, this is how most people behave. Most employees don’t sit down and weigh the consequences of what their boss tells them or how it is going to affect people, business, employees, or the community at large. You just do it because that is what you are told. At the end of the day, you go home to your families and try to forget about what you heard.  I didn’t have a family to go home to, so I went home and thought about my day a little more. That was my problem, I thought too much!

As I have seen a trailer for the seventh and last season, I am aware of the fact that many of these people will be blamed for the choices that they made. Every episode has been and is going to be sad and tragic but that one will be the hardest to endure. The reason is that these characters who have lasted till the seventh season, their lives will have been disrupted to the point of forgetting who they are. Already we are seeing choices that are being made to help a Jewish maid, or a lover, or a business associate who is collaborating to stay alive. They aren’t trying to help a vast number of people though at times they try to get the list, for example, from 20 down to 10.

Daniel Larcher, The Mayor

It is really too bad that most Americans, especially liberals won’t see this TV show. As far as I am aware, the only way you can see it now is if you have MHz Choice which is an international channel you have to pay for and have to know it even exists. I was aware of MHz from PBS when they pretended to collect International Mysteries from around the world. After doing some digging I realized the guy on PBS was lying; all they did was purchase a channel. They had me going though for a while there. American liberals love to blame people and do it so loud that you feel nauseous having to listen to it day after day after day. I feel that most of the time it is very hypocritical and seems to lack in values. I am on the border of the left and right and can never seem to sit on one side.

Jeannine Schwartz

We are in an era now where people are being blamed who had ancestors in the Civil War. They want to take down a statue of a soldier in the South, General Robert E. Lee. He was a man who did his job and because he came from the south, chose this side so he wouldn’t be killing his own family. He was a soldier being asked to lead a team, a side of government. If the south had won, we would want to tear down a statue of General Ulysses S. Grant. I don’t see a need to tear down any statue because I am fond of history. General Lee wasn’t responsible for slavery as Adolph Hitler was responsible for the holocaust. It is apples and oranges; but here in America we are not reasonable people. We allow ignorance to prevail because we feel sorry for them (those in this mindset).

A French Village could teach Americans quite a great deal about having to make choices in a time of war.

Raymond Schwartz

Whether or not they would be able to focus on such a great historical show without finding it racist, I could not say.  The show even shows a shady Jewish character, could Americans handle this? This seems to be the new wave of lying to our children. We educate them with period pieces that have politically correct storylines rather than literal or factual storylines. If North and South, probably one of the last great American TV historical fictions made, were filmed today; it would be such a joke. No doubt they would not be able to create an honest re-make. The actors would complain that they could not do the show because they could not speak the historically accurate lines (which would mean they are terrible actors).

I cannot imagine how tense it must have been to be on the set of A French Village. These actors do not ever come out of character, so that we are able to feel as if we are there; with them. I feel transported into another time and place. I feel tense every moment, wondering what will happen to this person or that. So tense that I had to look it all up online to see who will live and who will die. I just couldn’t keep watching without this sense of relief because it is traumatizing to watch this TV show. I do know what happened and while I try to think like the character, I am not perfect. When you feel like these characters are real people and they actually existed, you know you are hooked and drawn in.

If you have read “The Nightingale,” by Kristin Hannah, published in 2015, you will no doubt appreciate A French Village. I had read it last summer and so it was fresh in my mind. Two completely different stories as Ms. Hannah’s book was a little more biased. I feel it is important that A French Village created a lack of bias so that you can wonder. So that you could have a discussion after watching the show and think a little more deeply about those times.

I grew up with a step-father who took political asylum in the United States in 1956. When I wrote a historical fiction about that time period, it was while I was on leave from the government. It was actually perfect timing to have a sense of communist Hungary. I remember a family member telling me that I was actually on house arrest from my job. At the time, I had no idea why I was being paid to stay at home and do nothing. My father raised me to fear Russians and communists. He told us all kinds of horrible stories. I tried not to be completely biased while writing because I knew some of that was his hatred of people who ruined his life and his family’s lives. As I did research, as most historians due, you read the facts and put together your own interpretation of what you see. This is blended together with the biased interpretations of the people who witnessed. I don’t say biased in a bad way either. No one can ever really know the whole story. A French Village seems to be saying this. They are showing you a broader perspective, 75 years later.

Barre Girl at 55; Do you plié?

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If you have ever been one of those women, like me, who has sat by the sidelines for years wishing your mom would have let you be in a ballet class, now there is a new fitness craze created just for you! Barre classes are springing up all over the nation designed to, well, what I call nurture your inner ballerina.

It is hardly a ballet class and yet there is just a hint of it. You will do some plié’s and use first and second position (possibly other positions depending on the instructor) and if you have arthritis setting in, like me, will use the barre more than most people. Mostly you will do planks, downward facing dog, put a ball between your thighs or hold onto it with your back leg in the air. You will do side planks, lift your legs up while in the plank and a lot of other difficult maneuvers (if you are 55). None of this would have been too daunting for me as a 20 year old, back in the 80’s when I was already in advanced yoga and had done gymnastics as a child. It’s a dream class come true a little too late but I am not giving up nor should you. Stick with it and you will begin to have some shape again where the sagging has long begun and if you are young, get going as you will have so much fun!

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