Hasta La Gadget!

It’s the tail of summer, and you’ve had a vacation, lifted by family, sun and sea. I’m surprised at the abundance of recent letters I’m getting about feeling dark and grumpy. While the laments run a large range, the binding theme is a malaise that is not due to clinical depression but to a gnawing angst, that you deserve better and more — that you just aren’t happy..

You love to dance and haven’t danced since your son’s Bar Mitzvah — 20 years ago. You are gaining weight and instead of exercising you have developed an addiction to Pringles, which now come in seductive flavors like “Loaded Baked Potato”. You are too dependent on your spouse. You miss your grown kids.

You are uninspired, blasé, or as one woman expressed in her email subject line: “Disappointed With Life.”

Over the decades of compiling books on building healthy relationships and self-exploration, I’ve learned successful strategies on how to find fulfillment at every stage, and weather difficult passages.

Here are my top three to share:

1. Resurrect youthful passions

Resurrecting a past hobby or profession not only bolsters self-esteem it can also fortify a relationship. A 55-year-old woman wrote me that she was “drinking and crying too much” with her children living across the country and a spouse that travels for work.

“My family was my anchor,” she explained. Feeling adrift when alone is a signal to find a passion within that anchors you. It’s a goad to reclaim a beloved, abandoned skill, an abandoned self.

While the emptying of a nest can be debilitating it can also be energizing, as you make the sharp turn from the woman at the center of family life to a woman who must re-discover — or re-create — her own center. A hauntingly vacant house sparks these crucial questions: “Who was I before my kids came along? Who do I want to be now? What did I once love to do that I left behind?”

I have interviewed joyful empty nesters who loved art in high school and take up pottery in their sixties, sopranos who stopped singing in college who are now in community chorale groups, CPAs who left big firms to start families and in later years start their own tax consulting businesses. One of my closest friends just turned 60 and is completing her last year of law school, a goal she has had for 40 years.

It’s never too late to start over on a path you loved, or create a new one — especially since women in their 90s are the fastest growing segment of the aging population. With these promising statistics, at 50 you are just hitting midlife!

2. Press “Delete” on Poisonous People

When I turned 60 I realized a lot of things, for one I would never have the bikini body of my 20s. But more importantly I vowed that any persons who made me feel less-than and not more-than would be deleted from my life.

I know this isn’t easy when you have toxic colleagues you must interact with daily. I’m talking about neighbors and so-called friends who drag you down.

We cannot control our hair or in-laws or the weather. We can control the flow of people we allow into our lives. And if someone makes you feel smaller, denting your sense of self-worth, that is a person that needs to be deleted.

One 59-year-old told me about troubling competition she felt with her best friend, an “exercise fanatic who had lots of work done and still fits into her high school jeans.” The “best friend,” this woman said, “makes me feel old and fat” — with her biting remarks, like “Pilates will fix that stomach of yours.”

I suggested that she cultivate a new group of kind friends that embrace her at every age and weight. Here’s the rub on people who tell you how “sexy and young” they feel as they inch closer to 60 and 70. Sexy and young are not the right states to aspire toward as we age. If we are forever seeking sexy and young we will be forever steeped in frustration and not the deep sense of gratitude and acceptance essential for a grounded and happy life.

Birthdays past 50 likely mean we have less time ahead than the years already spent. Those remaining days and decades need to be filled with people we love, and love us back — unconditionally.

3. Get moving!

My husband’s grandmother who died two months before her 105th birthday used to tell me that her secret to longevity was that she never stopped moving, bending and pulling in her garden, strolling around the block. “My friends who stopped moving aren’t around any more,” Granny Mattie would say with a hoarse chuckle.

Staying on the couch, lulled by TV, amplifies the compulsion to dwell on negativity. When you sit still — and I’m not talking about a relaxing meditation — you are living in your head and thrust into past troubles and fears of the future. The power of the present is lost. Even a brisk walk transports you to a different place, the physical movement propels the mind onward and not on rewind.

Walking to a sweat has been my own salvation when a personal problem seems insurmountable or I hit a professional hump. I walked through agonizing grief after the loss of both parents, the craziness of four teenagers in one house, the heartbreak when their bedrooms were emptied, writer’s blocks, past regrets.

A body in motion, forging into new terrain, leaves the old stuff that saddles and saddens dispersed in the dust.

Talk to Iris at iriskrasnow.com, where you can also find information on her six books that chronicle the many passages of a woman’s life.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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Florida cops tracked down and arrested a fugitive after he used a wanted poster featuring his mugshot for his Facebook profile picture.

Stuart Police Department officers detained 42-year-old Mack Yearwood, who’d been on the lam for 11 months for violating his probation on two battery charges, on Tuesday.

“If you are wanted by the police, it’s probably not a good idea to use the ‘Wanted of the Week’ poster of yourself as your profile pic,” the department posted online the following day.

An alleged battery incident at a home in Stuart late Monday led to Yearwood’s detention over the two probation violation charges, reports the Palm Beach Post.

The alleged victim identified Yearwood, who’d already fled the scene by the time the cops had arrived, as the suspect. Investigators then discovered that Citrus County Sheriff’s Office had been seeking him on the two outstanding warrants since October 2015.

“The patrol guys, to look where he was and for some intelligence, they went to his Facebook page,” Stuart Police Cpl. Brian Bossio told ABC News. “They discovered that he used his wanted poster for his Facebook profile.”

Police used that information to arrest Yearwood over the two warrants at his brother’s home. The investigation into Monday’s alleged incident is ongoing, and he has not been charged in that case.

He does, however, face an additional cannabis possession charge after a bag of weed allegedly fell out of his pants during his arrest. Yearwood has not entered a plea on that count and remains in custody at the Martin County Jail.

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Nocturnal Animals photo by Merrick Morton, Universal Pictures International

With Tom Ford, chances are that if he throws a rock in the wind, he will hit gold.

When it comes to fashion, Ford has conquered it, he “shut it down” as fashionista Rachel Zoe would say. Fragrances, well as a Jasmin Rouge aficionado myself, I’ll say he got that down. Sunglasses, check. Bespoke menswear, check. He’s even got a song named after him, by Jay-Z. And film? Wow, yes, yes, oh yes. Nobody does haunting images on the big screen quite like Tom Ford.

In his latest oeuvre, well his second after a seven year hiatus from filmmaking, Ford puts together another stellar cast — which includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams and Michael Shannon — and then mixes up the batch by throwing in a story within the story, a book that fills up the pages of the movie script. It’s brilliant, of course we all knew that before going into the Venice Film Festival, where Nocturnal Animals world premiered. As proof of its magnificence, it was impossible to get a hold of any publicists for the movie and the press conference seemed more like a Justin Bieber public appearance than a film delegation meeting the press.

Lets face it, even if he’s yet to make his first record, Tom Ford is a rockstar.

Nocturnal Animals does not disappoint, in any way, shape or form. From the first frame to the last it’s haunting and can’t-turn-your-eyes-away captivating. I’ll admit, the first shots of the voluptuous burlesque women inspired by Fellini made me wonder, and I wrote it down, if Ford’s genius had gotten so big for his shoes that people around him were too scared to say something was a bit heavy handed. But once the intent of those images, beautiful and grotesque at once, was known, I quickly crossed out that sentence from my notebook.

The story within the story has to do with a book Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Edward has written. Edward is Susan’s ex, a chronic insomniac played by Amy Adams. In his novel, he tells the tale of a family, Tony (again Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their daughter India (Ellie Bamber), who are harassed and attacked on a desolate Texas road, by three rednecks — including the chilling Aaron Taylor-Johnson — one dark night. The outcome requires another phenomenal character, detective Bobby Andes, played by personal favorite Michael Shannon, to come in and help bring the story home.

Ford comfortably weaves three threads into Nocturnal Animals, the past of Susan and Edward, her present with new husband Armie Hammer, and the story of Tony and his family, with Andes. The result is spellbinding.

At the press conference, Ford confessed that what captured him in the book his film is based on, the 1993 novel Tony & Susan by Austin Wright, is “loyalty — that’s very important to me. When you find those people in your life, you hold on to them. [It’s a] cautionary tale of what can happen when you let go of people.”

Gyllenhaal instead confessed that what drew him to the script was “the color of paper the script was printed on, a particular hue of red I’d never seen.” But of course, once opened, the pretty packaging held “one of the best scripts I’d ever read. Gripping and emotional and somehow went into a space where the metaphor of heartbreak stepped into real life.”

For Adams, the pull was this “very personal story… I wanted to be a part of telling this story of loss and regret.” But she admitted that, “when I first started preparing Susan, I didn’t like her. And I can’t play a character I don’t like so I had to find my way into her.” This is where the true talent of Ford’s directing came in, she confessed “Tom’s skilled hand was so patient. I really credit Tom for trusting that the stillness and the silence would be filled with the story.”

As Ford added, about regrets, those we all have once we stop being 20 and 30, he shared that someone once said to him, “midlife is when you get to the top of the ladder and find out all along you’ve had it on the wrong wall.” And he also disclosed his secret for picking stories that stay in our heart, long after his haunting images are gone, “I think I may be old fashioned but I believe there needs to be a moral to a story. If you leave a theater and it doesn’t stay with you, it doesn’t haunt you, it’s not worth it.” Nocturnal Animals releases in mid-November.

Franca Sozzani, to those of us who love fashion, is a legend. Her signature long, blond, wavy hair I’ve seen from NYC to Florence, from Dubai to Saudi Arabia and now Venice. She’s a journalist, and has been the Editor in Chief of Vogue Italia since the late 80s. But she’s also a mother, and her son Francesco Carrozzini has made a tribute film to his mother, titled Franca: Chaos and Creation. While I’ve yet to watch the film, it was interesting to burst in on the press conference for the documentary, since Sozzani and Carrozzini have an explosive dynamic. Hidden beneath the surface of her beauty, and his talent, there are crosscurrents these two feel, quite obviously, about each other’s work.

As the daughter of a strong mother who claimed something similar to what Sozzani declared — that “in the moment I leave work the magazine could burn down!” — I know that’s true, but to some extent. My mother was always the artist, and while I never lacked for anything, as I’m sure Carrozzini never did either, I felt mom’s aloofness during her hard days of creation.

But creative women are forever struggling with that, the idea that they have to be mothers and wives and then also powerful work machines. I see that struggle even in Sozzani beautifully put together persona. I yearned to hear her secret for that ever blissed-out look that always completes her outfits. “I’ve never stopped dreaming,” she admitted, and perhaps that’s why film is so powerful. Because even when we have, stopped dreaming, or forget to, cinema reminds us to — with a vision on the big screen. A technicolor dream.

The Bleeder I knew I needed to watch in Venice because it stars Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts. Those two could read the phone book, and as long as they do, together, I would listen to them from A to Z. Their chemistry in this film, though Watts is only on screen for about 15 minutes tops, is so powerful that it left me wanting for more.

The Bleeder is the story of real-life Rocky inspiration Chuck Wepner, the boxer most famous for having gone fifteen rounds with Mohammad Ali, before being defeated by Ali. Directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, The Bleeder is the kind of film that cannot be separated from its stars. I dare not think of it without Schreiber, who holds the audience’s attention from the first shot to the last, and the real life chemistry that Watts brings to her role as Wepner’s second wife and salvation, Linda.

When I asked Schreiber if Wepner is somehow Shakespearean, he enthusiastically answered, “he’s absolutely Shakespearean! But you’re talking to a guy who thinks everyone is Shakespearean.” Then, pushing him further, I asked him what makes him so, and Schreiber continued, “the duality, the conflict, the human tragedy, also his vulnerability, his openness, his innocence, his naiveté; he doesn’t hide his mistakes, he makes them beautifully out in the open, exquisitely clumsy. And that’s Shakespearean.” The Bleeder screens next at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Finally, Wim Wenders latest, The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez in 3D. Why 3D? Wenders was quick to point out, because “3D is a very tender language and technology, it’s a very kind technology, it corresponds to our two eyes if you use it naturally… I don’t think I could have included you in any other way.” And include us in he does, into an delicately intimate conversation between a man and a woman, sitting at a table somewhere in the countryside outside Paris, while a man with a typewriter, sitting inside, seems to write their dialogue. Is this God? Are the couple Adam and Eve, since there is an apple on the table? Could be, but they are also every day men and women, struggling to find a way to communicate even though words and thoughts are exchanged between them.

At first, I’ll admit I felt slightly confused by The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, but the more time passes after watching it, the stronger I appreciate Wenders genius to be. Apart from the great luxury of watching lavender on the big screen in full 3D wonder and the filmmaker’s wonderful choice of music — including a live performance by Nick Cave — Wenders teaches us, his audience, a new way to breathe. He slows down our inner rhythm to match his art and it all somehow makes for an outer-worldly experience.

And that’s what cinema is all about, after all, finding new eyes to help us view the world. Even if those eyes turn out to be bulky 3D glasses!

All images courtesy of La Biennale, used with permission.

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Image: Computer programming. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com

A Russian computer programmer whom Armenia had detained briefly at America’s request is back in Moscow in a case that cast a spotlight on U.S. efforts to arrest other countries’ nationals overseas and Armenia’s compliant relationship with Russia.

The programmer, Sergei Mironov, wasn’t released until some theatrics on Armenia’s part, however.

It made a show of giving consideration to handing Mironov over to the Americans before it did what all Armenians knew it would: Give him back to Russia instead.

The decision came from a court that rejected the United States’ request to extradite Mironov, who was arrested on August 28.

The United States alleges that Mironov, who works for the Moscow-based high-tech company Synesis, illegally sold military-applications technology to another country. Mironov denied that.

America sought his arrest because Synesis has a U.S. presence — in North Carolina.

The United States has declined to specify the country that bought the technology. Presumably it was a U.S. enemy.

American officials also want to charge Mironov with money laundering. This suggests they think he used illegal means to hide proceeds from the tech sale.

The amount the United States accuses Mironov of laundering is a pittance as these cases go: $50,000. The money laundering cases that Western prosecutors usually pursue range from millions of dollars to the hundreds of millions.

Synesis is one of a couple of dozen companies around the world that has developed video-analytics technology.

The systems alert clients who use video surveillance to patterns on the video indicating the presence of an intruder.

Until the technology came along, humans would have to monitor video surveillance 24/7 for signs of intruders.

Those who have developed the technology say its spots patterns — such as changes in shadows that indicate an intruder — better than humans do.

The potential market for the technology is enormous, starting with governments and companies. Militaries, in particular, are salivating over it because it will give them a greater ability to spot, and ward off, sneak attacks.

Here’s the dilemma that Armenia faced when Mironov and his wife Yuliya flew in to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, for a vacation:

The United States, which has given Armenia a lot of foreign aid, demanded that the Russian be handed over.

Russia, which has a huge economic and military presence in Armenia, said no way.

Russia snarls every time the United States arrests Russian citizens in other countries for crimes against America. And it refuses to extradite any of its citizens, no matter how heinous the overseas crimes they are accused of committing.

An example of the snarling occurred when Thailand arrested the Merchant of Death, Russia’s notorious international arms dealer Viktor Bout. The Thais turned him over to the United States, where he was convicted of breaking a number of American laws and is now serving a long prison sentence.

It’s one thing for a country that is not a Russian ally to turn over a Russian citizen to the United States, however — and quite another for a virtual Russian colony like Armenia to do so.

So Armenia engaged in a tap dance, arresting Mironov as the Americans requested, but letting a member of its judiciary — which is supposed to be independent — decide whether to hand him over to the FBI for good.

It was no surprise when the judge let Mironov go three days into his detention. Armenian judges have a history of doing what the country’s officials expect.

Even though the Mironov’s release was the outcome that Moscow wanted, Russian big shots growled about Armenia’s decision to arrest him in the first place.

“Friendly countries don’t do such things,” the Russian news agency Vestnik Kavkaza quoted political analyst Andrei Yepifantsev as saying.

News of the detention outraged Russians, he said — and that blowback led to Armenia realizing it had gone too far.

A Russian defense official charged that the United States had demanded Mironov’s handover with the deliberate intent of driving a wedge between Armenia and Russia.

The case was also “about the U.S. attempt to have the whole world bow down to its jurisdiction,” said the official, Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of Russia’s Council on Defense and Security.

Meanwhile, Mironov played dumb, saying he had no idea why he had been arrested.

He noted that he had had no access to military technology and that he had been to the United States only once — in 2013.

His contention that he had no access to military technology was disingenuous. It’s obvious that video-analytics technology has important military as well as civilian applications.

Although Mironov was never in danger of having Armenia extradite him to the United States, it’s a good bet that he’s already decided to take his vacations in the former Soviet Union from now on.

If he ventures into a country outside the Commonwealth of Independent States, he may find himself on a free flight to Washington with FBI agents as his conversation mates.

Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

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Fred Hellerman was the quiet Weaver, kind of the way George Harrison was the quiet Beatle.

He made his noise quietly.

Hellerman, who died Thursday in Weston, Conn., at the age of 89, sang and played lead guitar in the Weavers, the fascinating, fractious and musically seminal folk music group of the early 1950s.

He was the last surviving original Weaver, preceded in death by Lee Hays in 1981, Pete Seeger in 2014 and Ronnie Gilbert last year.

They leave a legacy of striking contrasts.

The recordings that made them popular, like Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene, were heavily orchestrated to fit seamlessly with the pop tunes that dominated radio and jukeboxes in the era between the big bands and rock ‘n’ roll. There’s nothing jarring about playing Goodnight Irene next to Dinah Shore’s My Heart Cries For You.

Yet the Weavers’s larger body of music was anything but comfortable pop. If On Top of Old Smokey was a campfire ballad, they were also singing Woody Guthrie songs about the people whose campfires were in hobo jungles. They sang union songs like Which Side Are You On and peace songs like Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream. Hays and Seeger wrote the powerful social justice anthem The Hammer Song, which became the pop hit If I Had a Hammer for Peter, Paul and Mary.

With Ronnie in a formal dress and the three guys in suits and ties, they became a popular television act, known for lovely harmonies and lively finger-popping tunes like Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.

At the same time, they were being tarred with the corrosive innuendo of the McCarthy era blacklist. When all four were accused of ties to communism, their bookings dried up and Decca cancelled their recording contract. By 1952 they had disbanded.

Like the others, Hellerman scrambled to cobble together a living. He wrote songs, he taught guitar. Then their manager Harold Leventhal took a crazy gamble and booked them into Carnegie Hall on Christmas Eve 1955.

It turned out actual people hadn’t been scared off by the commie talk, and the success of that show gave the Weavers a second run that lasted more than eight years – though Seeger left in 1957 to go solo.

The Weavers got together one last time in 1980, to film a show for the documentary film Wasn’t That a Time. It turned out to be a farewell for Hays, producing a loving and durable portrait of the group.

Hellerman acknowledged to Mary Katherine Aldin, who produced and wrote the liner notes for a four-CD 1993 Weavers box set, that Hays and Seeger were the two outsized personalities in the group. Seeger was hard to replace, he said, and Hays would have been impossible.

Hellerman also told Aldin he had loved playing with the Weavers and was “very grateful” for the movie.

That said, he admitted he had never fully sorted out the group’s legacy.

It’s easily and often said they were one of the most influential folk music ensembles of the 20th century, paving the path for what Dave Van Ronk called “the great folk scare” of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Hellerman said it was more nuanced than that.

“I suppose we did pave the way for Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio and hundreds of others,” Hellerman told Aldin, “many of which I wish we hadn’t paved the way for.”

Like who? Well, years earlier Hellerman told writer Robert Shelton that he didn’t understand the accolades for Bob Dylan, who Hellerman felt had slim musical talent.

Hellerman also said he had “a lot of serious questions” about whether the Weavers, despite their best efforts, ever made a difference “in a larger way.”

There was an undertone of frustration in that assessment, since he also told Aldin that concern about injustice was a primary reason he and Gilbert teamed up with Seeger and Hays in the late 1940s to form the Weavers in the first place.

“The immediate post-war period was a time of great social dislocation in this country,” he told Aldin. “You had millions of servicemen coming back. Black soldiers coming back to Jim Crow after leaving Mississippi and going all over the world and finding that’s not the way it had to be. Jobs, housing, price controls. That’s partly what [the Hays/Seeger publication] People’s Songs was about. We were all very much involved in that.”

Accordingly, Hellerman said, the Weavers didn’t start as a commercial enterprise. It started as four social activists, who happened to sing really well together, playing for fun and for people they thought would or should want to hear their message.

Around the time Irene was selling two million copies, the commercial element crept in. So did arguments. What should they sing, how should it sound, who should they sing it to. With four strong-willed and sometimes obstinate singers in one group, they argued a lot.

One of the reasons Seeger finally left in 1957, it was widely reported, was that the others wanted to make a cigarette commercial and Seeger considered cigarettes a vice they should not endorse just to make money.

Hellerman, the son of a Latvian immigrant, got his first exposure to music from the classical concerts his father listened to on the radio. Later, he told Aldin, he would skip school to go to the Paramount and hear big bands like Benny Goodman.

He taught himself to play guitar on a Coast Guard ship during the war, and after the Weavers he stayed active in music, most famously producing Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant.

His last public appearance was at Seeger’s memorial service in 2014. If there is a next life, the Weavers can now resume singing and arguing there. The Quiet One is in the house.

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