Boomers Discuss Death over Dinner

The cast of The Big Chill (1983). Image Source: Fancarpet.

The latest Baby Boomer trend is the 'death dinner,' where Boomers gather with family and friends over dinner and discuss difficult topics like final wishes, wills, cremation and burial. Bloomberg reports:

At a Manhattan dinner party, former Citigroup Inc. ... executive Steffen Landauer gathered an eclectic mix of guests at his apartment off Fifth Avenue to sip pinot noir, dine on seared salmon -- and talk about death. 

“I think about it a lot and talk about it very little,” Landauer said to the group, which included a filmmaker, a private school principal, and a professional storyteller. Not to be confused with a macabre parlor game, the evening was conceived to confront real-life issues wrapped up in death and dying that few people like to acknowledge, let alone talk about at a dinner party. Would I want a feeding tube? Does dad want to die at home? What happens to my kids if I die in an accident along with my spouse? 

Those questions are getting asked more frequently. Over the past month [September 2013], hundreds of Americans across the country have organized so-called death dinners, designed to lift the taboo around talking about death in hopes of heading off conflicts over finances and medical care -- and avoiding unnecessary suffering at the end of life. It’s a topic that is resonating as baby boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, deal with the passing of their parents, even as they come face-to-face with their own mortality. 

About 70 percent of adults don’t have a living will, a legal document detailing the medical interventions they’d want or not want if unable to communicate, according to the Pew Research Center. As many as 30 percent of Americans 65 and older don’t have a will detailing what should happen with their assets, a Pew survey found. If those discussions don’t happen ahead of an illness or death, it can leave family members conflicted over what to do. 

See a video report from Bloomberg on death dinners below the jump.

Beauty, A Measure of Time

The Venus de Milo (130-100 BCE). Image Source: Milos Island.

Except for the Golden Ratio, there is no template for beauty. But you would never know its infinite variety if you looked at the world's movie and media industries. Roughly every half decade, western popular culture has held up an iconic feminine type. The same is true of men. For example, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire shared similar fame and features in the early-to-mid 2000s.

Does a beautiful woman determine the fashion - or do designers set the trend by promoting a particular look? This is a chicken-egg question. I would argue that fashion, movie and media designers do not entirely decide the trends. For a brief window of time, a small bevy of beautiful women somehow channel the aspirations and desires of the Zeitgeist - and then their style becomes a fashion. The ladies who rise to prominence often resemble each other - or they are made up to resemble one another. Below the jump, see a few examples from 1980 to 2000.

The Other People With Your Name

Still from The Double Life of Véronique (1991). Image Source: Wonders in the Dark.

I have a friend who wants to streamline his online image for professional reasons. He wants to deal with the Facebook photos which other people obligingly took, posted, and tagged with his name without asking. He wants make sure that nothing weird comes up when you google him, either correctly (some detail he would rather not remain permanently public) or incorrectly (some detail that is falsely associated with him).

Depending on how common your name is, you will be familiar with the experience: you google yourself, and up come the other people with your name. If you have a common name, then you have the comfort of the crowd; but then you have the problem of having any Web presence at all (assuming you want one).

But since my friend has an unusual name, for a long time googling him only brought up results about him. As the Web's reach deepened, another person appeared online with his name.

Crunching the Dataset of Immortality

The smaller Google barge. Image Source: Portland Tugboat LLC via Business Insider.

Google's expansions show how different aspects of the tech revolution and globalization can combine with radical results. In this case, an investment opportunity arises from a mash-up of social networking, genetics and data processing. The MSM focussed recently on Google barges off the coasts of California and Maine. These are supposedly luxury Google Glass showrooms made out of shipping containers.

But Google is preoccupied with more than gadgets. It has recently set up camp at the crossroads of data-crunching and life itself with its new venture, Calico. Researchers at Calico aim to extend the normal human lifespan by 20 to 100 years. An innovation like that would be worth a lot of money to the company which successfully develops it. Time comments that in 2012, "the regenerative medicine industry was estimated at $1.6 billion. Scientia Advisers, a life sciences consulting firm, estimates that the industry could reach $15 billion to $20 billion over the next 15 years."

With Calico, Google will combine all the bits of private information accumulated from a person's life with, according to Mashable, 

each person's genome — a partial genome can be mapped today for $99 via 23andMe (another Google investment), but many are hoping a full genome will cost as much in the next few years. Daniel Kraft, medicine and neuroscience chair of Singularity University, affirms that this will require people to relinquish some privacy, in hopes of helping others and themselves, but predicts it to be something many will do. "Lot of folks will be happy to share elements of health history," he says.

From Techland:

Calico ... will be run by Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotech pioneer Genentech, who will also be an investor. Levinson, who began his career as a scientist and has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, plans to remain in his current roles as the chairman of the board of directors for both Genentech and Apple, a position he took over after its co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011. In other words, the company behind YouTube and Google+ is gearing up to seriously attempt to extend the human life span. ...

Apple may have set the standard for surprise unveilings, but excepting a major new product every few years, these mostly qualify as short term. Google’s modus operandi, in comparison, is gonzo airdrops into deep “Wait, really?” territory. Last week Apple announced a new iPhone; what did you do this week, Google? Oh, we founded a company that might one day defeat death itself. ...

It’s a lot easier to take Google’s venture seriously if you live under the invisible dome over Silicon Valley, home to a worldview whereby, broadly speaking, there is no problem that can’t be addressed by the application of liberal amounts of technology and everything is solvable if you reduce it to data and then throw enough processing power at it.

The twist is that the technophiles are right, at least up to a point. Medicine is well on its way to becoming an information science: doctors and researchers are now able to harvest and mine massive quantities of data from patients. And Google is very, very good with large data sets.

Like China's one child policy, this project will undoubtedly suffer from unintended and unforeseen consequences.

Anniversaries ... and a Royal Horrorshow

Image Source: Thomas Kluge / Danish Royal Family Collection via Yahoo.

Thoughts go out today to all who are marking the grim 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK and those celebrating the happy 50th anniversary of the time-traveling TV series, Doctor Who (including Google!). What also caught my eye was this Flowers in the Attic-retro-styled portrait of the Danish royal family by Gen X Danish artist Thomas Kluge. From Yahoo:

A new portrait of the Danish royal family has been unveiled, and critics are saying something's rotten in Denmark. The painting, which depicts the group in a shadowy hall against a classical backdrop, is currently being displayed in Copenhagen's Amalienborg Museum. It took Danish artist Thomas Kluge four years to complete, though it may haunt him though the afterlife.

The work is being described by some as more Addams Family than royal family. Only three of the subjects make eye contact with the viewers, Queen Margrethe II, her son and heir apparent, Crown Prince Frederik, and his son, Prince Christian. The little boy, lit eerily from behind, is standing alone, front and center, while the other children play. He carries the weight of his duties-or is that the thoughts of his sinister deeds?-on his shoulders. To his left, his evil twin-like cousins build a blood-red tower, and to his right, slouched in an inky black corner, sits his little sister, Princess Isabella, blueish-lipped and hunched over a rag doll. She resembles none other than a six-year-old ... [Heather O'Rourke] cowering in the flickering light of a TV screen, seconds before her first run-in with a poltergeist.

The painting will "steal your soul," writes Fast Company and also claims it looks "Satanic" and "creepy" and describes the royal brood as "Damien-like progeny." The Daily Mail says it resembles a poster for a scary movie, and the gathering does have the feel of a season one American Horror Story reunion.

Generation X Goes Back to the Future 12: Danny Torrance Grows Up

From Kubrick's The Shining (1980) © Warner Bros. Image Source: Feel Guide.

It's strange, being a near-exact contemporary of a famous fictional character. The five-year-old child, Danny Torrance, in Stephen King's 1977 horror novel, The Shining, and depicted in Stanley Kubrick's immortal 1980 film of the same name, grew up this fall. King's sequel, Doctor Sleep, depicts Dan Torrance as an adult. The book debuted on 24 September 2013, and immediately became a best-seller.

Shelley Duvall as Wendy with Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance in The Shining. In this scene, Danny Torrance wears an Apollo sweater which fueled Illuminati conspiracy theories that director Kubrick had participated in a moon landing media hoax. Image Source: Warner Bros. via NY Daily News.

I just finished reading The Shining and Doctor Sleep. I was struck by Dan Torrance, a character whose cultural world was almost exactly contemporary to my own Gen X experience; and I was impressed by how Stephen King made him grow up. The first book is pure 1970s. And, as several characters in its sequel state, 'we're in the twenty-first century now.'

Artwork for Doctor Sleep. by Glenn Chadbourne. Image Source: The Overlook Connection.

King states in the afterword of Doctor Sleep that he changed a great deal in the thirty odd years between writing these two novels; he is also preoccupied with how his characters change, and how the world changed in that time. This is horror for the new Millennium.

Curios: Upcoming Hollywood Memorabilia Auction

Up at auction: the 1940 Buick Phaeton automobile from Casablanca (1942).

An amazing array of Hollywood props, scripts and other memorabilia is going up for auction at Bonham's in New York City on the 25th of November, 2013 at 1 p.m. Eastern - from the Maltese Falcon prop, to wafers of Soylent Green, to Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman suit and Michael Keaton's Batman suit. And Bonham's have storyboards from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Soylent Green! The original prop.

They have signed contracts, countless costumes (some are breathtaking, have incredible craftsmanship, or are sci-fi classics) and posters, and they have Francis Ford Coppola's working script (here) from The Godfather (1972). They have a script from Citizen Kane (1941). And Marilyn Monroe's high school yearbook.

A Gotham Taxi license plate from Batman Returns (1992).

All film genres, classics from all decades. See the auction house's Website here. You can bid online.

Sam Spade's chair from The Maltese Falcon (1941).

The iconic lead statuette of the Maltese Falcon from the 1941 film of the same name.

Plutonium at the Bay of Rainbows

The Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridum). Image Source: NASA via Space.com.

Next month, China will launch an unmanned lander mission to the moon, which, if successful, will be the first non-crash landing on the moon since Apollo 17's 1972-1973 manned mission and Russia's unmanned Luna missions from the mid-1970s. Although the International Space Station has contributed invaluably to our knowledge of how to live in outer space, there is a sense now (not least with mythical movies like Apollo 18 - see my posts on that film, here and here) America got sidetracked when she abandoned the moon. Of course that myopic view also excludes NASA's great accomplishments in the exploration of Mars over the past twenty years.

Apollo 17 mission insignia. Image Source: Wiki.

Nevertheless, it was an American flag that was first planted on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Apollo 17 was also the most recent, and sixth, manned mission to the moon. For all Russia's contributions, humans had walked on the moon, and the moon was American! For over a generation, that claim has rested on laurels which lay neglected and undisturbed.