TEAM SPORT: CHICAGO SPIDERS

Coming soon…
nan turpin photograph

This week the “Spiderman” movie after the last one came out.  How can we resist?  Tuesday afternoon Primary Source saw the velvet ropes going up in one theatre for a sneak preview of Spidey.  Soon it will be summer with the corn popping at movies in the neighborhood parks and we will know if all the little boys still dress like the Spiderman when the sun goes down.  We like our Spiderguy here.

Spring is advanced enough that high rise condo spiders have moved in for the season and we are never sure if we are seeing the old friend from last year or if this one’s new in the neighborhood.  Welcome in either case.

And, not that this is in any way related, but the Loop Alliance, after its Alley party of a couple of nights ago that this column finally succumbed to, that Loop Alliance made its move in this morning’s Chicago Tribune.   The Alliance wants its empire expanded to include Wabash Avenue and Michigan Avenue (from Wacker Drive to Congress Parkway) plus some buildings that seep over to Dearborn, just west of State Street.

This substantial territorial expansion is projected to create an extra $6.3million in taxes tossed into the Loop Alliance toy box of downtown “improvements.”  According to the Chicago Tribune story this morning, the tax expansion would give Loop Alliance the money to “transform  Wabash into a more inviting corridor.”

Wabash has already been subjected to a beautification program that included hanging pots of flowers from the lamp posts.  That last round of primping turned the bustling commercial street that runs along the “El” tracks into something like a 6 year old in mommy’s high heels and false eyelashes.

But fine.  If that makes some people feel “safe,” ok.  What the Alliance proposes now is spending part of a territorial expansion profit on more of the Alliance’s black-jacketed agents who “police” the street rousting panhandlers.

Better they should take a tax expansion and set up pop-up soup kitchens at lunch time.  Dear Loop Alliance, there’s an effective depression going on out there.  A couple of weeks ago Primary Source observed two  black jacket “agents” on State Street showing “concern” for a gentleman who was seated on the sidewalk against the wall of a building.  He was available for accepting small donations of cash, should the occasion arise.  He was well dressed in what looked like some recent season high end outdoor fashions.  To be clear, he looked like a man who might have, say six months earlier, have lived in one of those luxury condo towers they’re screwing into historically preserved facades along the Wabash elevated train.

This latest project by the Loop Alliance bruises one’s civic sensibility.

In response, let’s all be strolling the downtown blocks of Wabash Avenue, take our pictures of what makes it specifically splended.  Primary Source will document some of her favorite little pockets of Wabash.  You do the same.  Awareness is our favorite hobby, n’est-ce pas?

HAPPY HALFAHUNDRED MR. 007

photo collage by nan turpin

If you haven’t seen the latest 007 movie, “Skyfall,” yet, fear not.  Start-Up shan’t spoil it for you whilst attempting to put film-related detail into this column. For all the other things it is, Brit director, Sam Mendes’ show is also the perfect demonstration of a renewal ritual.  The renewal ritual, like rituals in general, is marked by discomfort, pain, inconvenience and excitement.  It tends to have a beginning, middle and an end.

In our western, post-industrial, finance-prone societies, we often call this “crisis,” as in mid-life crisis.  We could say then that in the latest episode of the licensed killer 007, the “hero” gives evidence of a mid-life crisis.  This column rejects the term crisis for the phenomenon and proposes we expand our view.   Replace “crisis” with “renewal ritual”.  This event might happen at any age, any time in life and if it should happen to a State Assassin, well, then, the audience is interested.

“Skyfall” is a James Bond movie officially labeled Fiftieth Anniversary product.  Fifty years after the first Bond movie, “Dr. No” unsettled a generation’s scorn for B-movies.  The James Bond machine celebrates the longevity of its central character.  But that celebration turns quickly anxious as the script questions the legitimacy of that longevity.  007, his boss, the assassin chief M (“Mother”), the underlying values of their Cold War world in the chaos of post-imperial geopolitics, even the aesthetic universe of the Bond films, the glorious titles, the thrilling music, the gloriously punned characters, all of this has outlived not only usefulness but meaning as well.  That’s the question the film asks and asks and keeps acting.

The 50^th anniversary comes fifty-nine years after Ian Fleming published his first Bond novel Casino Royale.  Daniel Craig’s James Bond and his collaborators admit the guy is not as young as he used to be, if he ever was that young.  Different times.   When Sean Connery introduced us to “Shaken, not stirred” in 1962 he was already “over thirty,” 32.  To the youth (today’s oldth) who slinked into the non-art house theatres to see a B movie, that first Bond was kind of an old guy.  He wore tuxedos for one thing, never patched jeans.  But his dinner jackets were hidden by a wetsuit and he rarely entered fancy bad guy parties by the door, so that generation that had decided “never to trust anyone over thirty” made an exception for the licensed killer.

The “Dr. No” generation turned twenty in the ‘sixties and now turn sixty in the ‘teens.  The size of that generation means that the renewal ritual is on a large scale and is, for the moment, badly reported and often completely mis-interpreted.  In most accounts of aging it is seen as an environmental disaster on the scale of widespread hurricanes and mudslides.  Most journalists of age show undisguised disgust, horror at least, and tell a tale with the implicit judgment that the good die young.

Some reviewers are calling the 50^th Anniversary Bond movie nostalgic.  Start-Up suggests the script is a study of mentality change, revealing the awkwardness of changing the analytical model from the national to the post-national.  At least it questions the validity of making that shift, in other words, the script asks if we are truly past the Nation-State.

This column proposes the movie is not nostalgic as much as reflective and celebratory.  It is 007’s long inventory of what works and what no longer works for him.  James (and Mother) are subjected to repeated attempts to shame them into retreat and disappearance but their refusal to leave means they stay in a world they doubt they belong in.  They are killers and they doubt. This is pungent combination is what will keep us buying tickets.

The killer James Bond is entirely alone, hunted by other killers, hunted by his own people, but he cannot quit.  This might be called a crisis of age for the hero, for the film series, but Start-Up says call it a renewal ritual, especially in view of the ending, which we would love to discuss here in detail but won’t.  We can talk after you see it!  To support our renewal ritual thesis we give two, no three, clues:

1)   Daniel Craig’s Bond make-up throughout the movie compared to his make-up at the very end.  When does he look fresh and youthful?

2)   The reunion with his old Aston-Martin (cue original Bond guitar theme!): what happens next?

3)   The object M gives him at the end:  what is James’ response to it

Tell me if you don’t leave the theatre counting the months ‘til the next Bond movie.  This was a renewal ritual not only for Mr. Bond but for the Bond films and Sam Mendes wants the next one!  In the course of this one James systematically reviews his career and his life and the most significant Bond “blow-up” scenes are less architecture than private memory and personal emotion, by which the man re-makes himself.  In this case it means The Killer once again knows why he kills so we’ll get more of his stories that now, btw, seem nearly wholesome along side the brutal narratives of the present.

Renewal ritual:  This Bond movie, about political systems that give license to kill and one of the license holders, by the end is a very odd demonstration- even to peaceable non-assassins- of the basic human requirement to renew oneself.  As longevity lengthens for so many more people, we’ll become more accustomed to the renewal ritual.  It wasn’t any easier getting through the embarrassment and mayhem of puberty.  This time, at least, we’re old enough to take it for the adorable joke it is.  One way to get to the laughs faster is not calling it a “crisis” but rather possible renewal.

 

Some Useful Sources:

Two different review approaches (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune and Manohla Dargis, New York Times:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=michael+phillips+skyfall+review&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/movies/skyfall-with-daniel-craig-as-james-bond.html?_r=0

 

SO WAS IT THE SOUP OR THE LABEL? (final of 4)

Unaware of the Warhol/Soup commemorative stunt was at first dismayed at the discovery, fearing it was a definitive change in a childhood favorite. Three days later, better informed, Start-Up rushed back to Target hoping they weren’t sold out and bought two sets of the Warhol edition. Still, something about the cans made her uneasy.

After all, Campbell’s had always been there.  Their company formed in 1869 during the American and European period of invention and experimentation in preservation of fresh foods.  Market expansion, transportation technological changes but also developments in medical and scientific understanding stimulated creativity and opportunity for people like the partners who started Campbell’s.

In 1897 the original partners were joined by a third who figured out how to put twice the soup in half the can – condensed soup became a fixture in the small and growing Campbell’s product line.  Just add water -the product that children of the 20^th century could grow up loving.

Campbell’s website (below) is coolly corporate, right down to its health and sustainability buttons and with job openings (sorry, careers) that are inscrutable to anyone without an MBA in Food Sourcing for the Artificially Intelligent.  In other words, it’s an efficient, well organized website where the Soup Nostalgic finds few satisfactions.

This column is an investigation and inventory of the can of soup in hand, the signs on its label, the layering of time and change on it that ultimately distract from or interfere with or thwart or complicate – call it what you will – enjoying a “nostalgic” moment.

Campbell’s Soup, Tomato above all others, is a condensed soup brought magically to life with a can of water or, for “creamy soup,” a can of milk.  But for the children of the 1950s at least, there’s a serious dose of emotion with every bowl of soup.  Who agrees?  There was always something to eat as long as a single can remained in the cupboard.  That can was the promise that there would always be something to eat.  Start-Up wonders what Campbell’s Tomato meant to her Mom and Dad.

Both loved it; with saltines, with tuna or just a cup on a chilly day to hold with two hands and blow on until cool.  They were children in the Depression and young and in love during the war.  It is unlikely Start-Up’s parents had the luxury of tinned soups until the 1950s.  By then America’s wartime rationing had weaned this hungry nation from fresh foods.  War rationing and food scarcity during the Depression added up to at least a 15 year nutritional disruption and caused the American palate to forget the taste of fresh food, fresh-baked goods. After all that hardship for such a long time consumers were eager to eat and to put their new money into the expanding American industry, processed foods.  It was wonderful.  It was “time-saving” for the generation of young women “guided” into the post-war suburban gulag of housewifery (nb, this view shared by some, not all).   It was modern and that meant that Here was the best place in the world and the best time in history to be living.   And it was all in a can of soup with the Red and White Label.

For us, the strapping children raised on all that canned and boxed food, it was just plain fun to eat, look at, and squeeze (Wonder Bread!)?  Start-Up has passed through many eating / appetite styles and systems through the decades but when she lost her parents, she developed a strange and abiding appetite for Campbell’s Tomato Soup.  That bowl of soup can never be a solitary meal.  It is slurped in the company of that young woman and young man, Laura and Paul, who always enjoyed the easy deliciousness of opening a can of soup and crumbling a cracker into it.

Source:

Campbell Soup Company link

file:///Users/nancyturpin/Desktop/Campbell%20-%20Who%20We%20Are%20-%20History,%20Culture,%20Diversity,%20&%20Workplace%20Flexibility.webarchive

NOW AND AGAIN AND AGAIN (part 3 of 4)

nan turpin photograph

What shocked was that the soup label was unchanged except for all the wrong colors.  Turned out, Start-Up later learned, Campbell Soup Co., Target stores and the Andy Warhol Foundation dreamed up a perfect homage to the artist and the soup and the store as well.  They “published” a limited edition of Campbell Tomato Soups, four different color combinations, priced at 75cents a can for as long as they lasted.   That’s about the price of an ordinary can of Campbell’s (without sale or coupons).  The complete series was $3.00 plus tax.

Today, October 12, 2012, the complete 4-can set is posted on the e-bay auction site at prices ranging from $8.50 to $20.00 not including shipping.  As long as the shrewd collector refrains from eating these American collectibles, she stands to see her initial investment increase.  (If she had to carry the cans home from the store is it still passive investment?)

Look in the “Sources” section at the end of this posting, for the designboom.com link to vivid Associated Press photos of the cans in their tropical splendor.  The familiar, beloved red and white banded label is replaced by Warholian combinations of periwinkle, acid yellow, mint green, hipster red and a battleship blue.  Unsettling and troubling on the otherwise unchanged soup label (that guarantee of quality, Campbell’s gold medal from the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, is still in its central place on the front of the can).

Look on the back of the can for the “Limited Edition” Andy Warhol signature and explanatory note about this collaboration between the Andy Warhol Foundation and Campbell’s Soup Company not to mention Target, for the 50 Year Anniversary of Warhol’s 1962 Campbell’s Soup Paintings.  Andy liked the soup, says the label.  Start-Up imagines Mrs. Warhola’s boy ate lunches like the rest of us in those days and, all grown up and artistic, continued to heat up his little can of soup on the food-spattered hotplate in The Factory.  It was a healthy meal in a can to keep a guy safe in the midst of making it in New York City.

The commemorative label information is the historical version of the “Nutrition Facts” labeling but is far from the only clue on these cans that they contain soup from a specific historical period, the 21^st century.  The Warhol commemoratives direct the purchaser to “Use the ‘Pop Art Portrait’ app on our Facebook page to begin your 15 minutes” (of fame).  Non-commemorative labeling tends to include product websites, scannable icons, not to mention the ubiquitous bar codes and 800-customer service phone numbers (remember telephones?).  In other words, even the labels that appear to be largely the visual memory some might have of a childhood favorite, are laden with historical strata from subsequent historical periods. Technologies and cultural practices change and all of it leaves a trace on food labeling.

…to be continued

Some Sources:

+The design boom site with pictures of The Cans file:///Users/nancyturpin/Desktop/andy%20warhol%20limited%20edition%20campbell’s%20soup%20can%20labels.webarchive

+Bloomberg news coverage of the Target/Campbell’s/Warhol limited edition:

file:///Users/nancyturpin/Desktop/Campbell%20channels%20Andy%20Warhol%20for%20new%20cans%20-%20Businessweek.webarchive

(be sure to click the link on this page to further Bloomberg business coverage of a January 2013 product launch by Campbell’s, a line of “Chicken Soup for the Soul” jarred soups in partnership with the late 20^th century best-selling book by the same name.  Campbell’s may have finally developed the corporate “metric” for emotion price points.  They invented condensed soups this should be easy!

+Andy Warhol’s Wikipedia entry (yes, Start-Up decided to trust it):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

+Andy Warhol Foundation (want to get a better idea of the Foundation’s current fund raising ingenuity?)

http://www.warholfoundation.org/

NOW LOVES THEN AGAIN. AND AGAIN (part 2 of 4)

Is it the Soup or the Can?  This is a food memoir.  You push your cart down the grocery aisle and see a product that makes you stop, unsure of the emotion.  Disturbed?  Excited?  When’s the last time this happened to you?  Has it ever?

It was the outside of the can, not the inside that caused the commotion.  Inside it was very likely the same old Campbell’s Tomato Soup.  But the label told another story.  The good people at Campbell’s Co. kept the familiar label generally intact, the font, much of the information on it, was unchanged.  That was part of what unsettled the shopper.  If the soup maker had decided to re-design, re-package, re-brand, the whole “re-” shebang, this shopper would have felt something quite simple, very clear, a sense of cultural loss.  One more thing changed and so all the memory of it gone; just something else gone.  This was less than a loss and somehow more powerful and it has something to do with how the present interferes with attempts to preserve the past.

Shocking? Beautiful? nan turpin photograph

…to be continued

NOW LOVES THEN. AGAIN.

We’ll end up thinking about soup but start by thinking about a building.  As we often do in this column we frame our thinking in the relation between the past to the present.

Start-Up’s best-loved prejudices have been getting some pretty good knocks these days.  Sometimes she feels nearly pleased with bits of Now World that have changed Then World.  Take big box stores:  love to hate them, do we not?  Quick as they can Big Box snuffs small local businesses, erases local differences and identity, replaces livable labor practice with take it or leave it labor practice, etc.  Reasons to hate Big Box are endless.  While Start-Up was humbled by the practicality and fun of Home Depot, she remained immune to Target’s seductive power.  Who paints a bull’s eye on itself, ever? That was until Target negotiated the lease for Louis Sullivan’s long time tenantless Carson, Pirie, Scott Building on State Street in the Chicago Loop.

Oh weren’t we appalled when we learned who the new tenant would be?  And oh didn’t we complain every time we walked past the papered-over windows concealing nefarious re-branding operations inside.  It would be worse than what Disney did to Times Square. “They find what’s most precious to us  and only destroy the part we cared most about.  Co-optation!  Except no one these days knows, remembers or cares what the word “co-opt” even means.

And then It-the new Louis Sullivan Target on State Street-opened with its sensitive interior touches (under the advice of Chicago’s official cultural historian, Tim Samuelson), all white, white columns and white column heads that allow us to really study the ornament.  Target installed the pocket Louis Sullivan museum space in the renovated upstairs/downstairs “prow” of the building and made it an exciting combination of old and new.  “But wait!  There’s more!” Target was willing to leave drivers to their own devices and forego acres of suburban-scale parking.  These and many more details have made this State Street Chicago Target Store a favorite downtown destination.

Who can resist rendez-vous with friends for an organic coffee and sandwich at the in-store branch of Prêt-à-Manger?  And then to the cosmetic aisle to find exactly the Revlon shade her mother loved (Fire and Ice.  Thanks to Start-Up’s sister, Linda, for this reference).  This State Street Target store is a thoroughly acceptable, smart and sensitively designed hybrid of old and new, the greatness of former times-the Sullivan Building, Fire and Ice lipstick.  And of course, oh! the red and white of it.

Red is intrinsic to the Target brand.  Red brings us to the next part of Start-Up’s examination of how older, forgotten or neglected products are re-edited, re-valued and, in the process, changed.  We are seeing re-editions of mid-century classics, Fire and Ice lipstick is just one example, with its vintage launch last year, over half century from its creation.  At its initial launch Fire and Ice was a glamorous consolation prize for the generation of WWII career gals driven into family life in post-war American re-structuring.  If their lives weren’t what they’d planned at least they could look like it was all working out.  What is Fire and Ice now in the 21st century.    The new edition of something old is a perilous project.  If it pleases a new audience too well by changes made, it risks alienating or even angering those who remember it, who may well have an emotional memory of it or even a way of thinking about it.

Target has succeeded in its interior design of the Sullivan space.   In keeping with this sensibility of past and present and how they might combine in the market, Target has also joined with an older company for a commemorative edition of their product.

Red?  We are going to talk about Campbell’s Soup, what else?

…next episode, Is it the Soup or the Can?  A food memoir

THE FUTURE OF FRIENDSHIP IN OLDER AMERICA

nan turpin photograph

There are a few things we can (probably) agree on, even in these contentious times:

1)   That the current population of 65s and older is large:  40.3million as of April 2010 census, projected to be 88.5milion by 2050; just plain big.  (See sources below).

2)   That given the size of this demographic, people over 65 will be talking to each other and adding new friends over 65 to their current band of chums.

3)   That the typical social experience of someone, let’s say, over 65, is that it is easier to have relaxed social interactions, casual conversations, etc., with people in their own age group.  The ideal one aspires to is to know and cultivate a true mix of friends of all ages, from kids to coots, but that’s easier said than done for a number of reasons we needn’t go into here.  Let’s face it, though, as we age it might be increasingly difficult to make new encounters, the magical Internet notwithstanding.  We may well have a few good younger friends but often enough we end up talking to our own generation…

4)   And that’s when we realize the hard truth: that there’s more than one generation packed into our “generation” and we are really different from each other.  We’re different by date of birth, by experience, by temperament, all of it, and those differences may well let’s say not attract each other.  Putting aside cultural and political differences and the key urban/suburban or rural difference, how different are people who are in the same generation?

1) How different?  Some-and good for them- are financially secure and don’t even think about $ except to savor it.  Others feel financially secure enough and still others, more and more are going public, are in economic distress:  their pension funds dilapidated or the job(s) they worked so hard at had no pension.  Still others have had at best spotty “luck” and although lucky enough to have survived to advanced age, find their distinguished age leaves them largely unemployable.  There are as many categories of difference as there are individuals.

2) How different?  Some are healthy; some are not.

3) How different?  Some have disappeared into the thicket of family activity and others, for any number of reasons of their own choosing or not, are aging with the friendship of strangers, making up family as they go along.

4)   How different?  Some are relieved to retire.  Others want to continue to add their own talents and energy to the world they have always been part of.  And sometimes these must continue to look for work and keep the jobs they find, if they find them.

5)   How different are people who are the same age?  Some seem to talk only about their grandchildren – less about their children, oddly – while others can’t bear to hear one more report of a grand-kid-induced ecstasy or of some grandchild’s astounding brilliance.  Such anecdotes are best saved for the intimacy of that family.  That’s their job.

The convivial mature person might do well to devise strategies for simply not walking away from someone his or her own age at a party. Today’s column suggests we might do well to consider a set of friendly “rules of engagement” among ourselves.

Start-Up suggests a simple adjustment of approach.  Whatever the subject, even illness, even grandchildren, we have to remember all of our great differences.  What one person lives for might instantly bore another.  Be a reporter and with new people report what you’ve discovered.  Make it a story because a good story or a good chat can begin a friendship. How?  Be specific; details!  That’s part of what makes the story good.  Make your interlocutor your accomplice instead of the hapless target of the latest extended family press release.  Let’s face it, anything that’s just too good to be true is probably a yawner unless you throw in a surprise ending!  Even better – a bit of nice gossip can also be the start of a beautiful friendship.

As we age we may find that being listened to is not a right but something we earn over and over again.  Who better to do it than we the many who’ve been “covering all the waterfronts” for such a long time.

Some sources:

http://www.kcmblog.com/2012/08/30/baby-boomers-about-to-bust-out-of-homes/

http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/summarytables.html

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb12-ff07.html

AGE DISCRIMINATION: NEW LOW (AGE)!

This is an emerging story in academia that Start-Up wants to publish briefly and immediately in case the rest of the world outside that fortress might have missed it.  University departments are beginning to run tenure-track recruitment ads that explicitly limit candidates to those with extremely recent Ph.D.s.  So far the years 2009 and 2010 have come up.  Anyone with an older degree need not apply.

Depending on how lickity split the doctorate was completed, these acceptably fresh Docs might be as young as early to mid-twenties.  Anyone pushing 28=big trouble.  Brouhaha ensues.  We’ll be following this story to see if there’s an absolute disavowel of the practice or if these departments use their language skills to slide the same discrimination through.

Start-Up is startled to see that academia-albeit just a couple of college departments so far- has used such transparent and comprehensible language.  Such is their resolve to be very sure no one over a very tender age darkens their In Box. One might say this is refreshingly candid age discrimination that leaves no doubt about competence in the mind of beleaguered tenure track seekers. They aren’t untalented, they’re just too old!

There are other areas where age discrimination is definite but unprovable because inexplicit.  This is age discrimination that turns qualified, energetic people out of their professions or won’t hire them because they have crossed the unpardonable divide of (fill in the blank) 50; 55; etc.  When age discrimination is applied outside of academia it is unexpressed, deniable and denied and brutally efficient.  When discrimination is successfully practiced without discriminatory language, whoever it is applied to is cast out to conclude they must be now officially useless.

There’s a source below to track the college tenure track hiring practices and this column will post occasional updates.

Source

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/17/harvard-will-change-job-ad-asking-recent-doctorates

This comes from the digital newsletter, Inside Higher Education, well worth following by all of those interested in the volatility of academic structure these days.

NEW DEAL 21ST CENTURY STYLE

nan turpin photograph

PART 2/PERCEPTIONS OF AGE How Long Has This Been Going On?

A French historian of old age reminds us that the current perception of old age as an unproductive age ghetto is of historically short duration.

Georges Minois locates the invention of the concept of a useless and marginal old age in the twentieth century. He tracks the establishment of the idea that with age comes inevitable social exclusion as the industrial economic workplace excludes aging workers in favor of younger ones (Georges Minois, History of Old Age, from antiquity to the Renaissance, trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989).  The idea of “retirement,” withdrawal from economic and social activity, was consecrated as industrial western states developed what passed for pension plans, this historian suggests.

The deal was those who contributed to their pension would be required to withdraw from the labor market at increasingly codified ages up to and including mandatory retirement age in some countries. This premise assumed all workers were part of contributive systems. It also assumed economic, financial and monetary stability. It also assumed that fund formulae took into account the demographics of the retirement curve.

When the massive, so-called Baby Boom generation came of (retirement) age there would be enough money in the jar to cover their superior numbers, so fund managers promised. On the face of it, the deal that seemed pretty straightforward. Work forty or fifty years, contribute to your pension fund all that time and at the end collect a living pension for the rest of your life. Security; no missed meals; in some cases the never-ending cruises. In the golden years before all the money left town, pensioners claimed bragging rights over the others: they’d done it right.

As it has developed, however, older people are put out of the work force in exchange for highly theoretical subsistence. Minois cites Edgar Morin’s wry characterization of western pension coverage. That French sociologist and philosopher wrote “We are in a phase of gentle relegation, the category called third age conceals the process of putting old people aside, to be comforted with a few gadgets and the assurance that they will not starve to death.” (Minois, 4).

This week the Illinois state legislature and governor passed on a budget trimmed to leave senior citizens without some of the subsistence that has allowed them to live at home and avoid nursing homes. The class of older citizens may well also lose transit discounts, help with the high cost of pharmaceuticals and help with property taxes (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-09/news/ct-met-senior-budget-cuts-20120709_1_low-income-seniors-david-vinkler-property-tax-bills). All of these had been- in the days before impending municipal and state bankruptcies- considered acquired benefits.

Individually this help gave a few more people a bit more ease, a little less anxiety, a little more mobility, a more interesting life, a feeling that they were not alone but were citizens, part of society where those who could contribute did, had, and those who couldn’t would not be abandoned. All bets are off this week in Illinois.

Certainly seniors are not the only group in the population to see their political representation retreat from them. But when this happens to older people they are, arguably, in a tighter spot. The younger person may have a very hard time getting a job these days. We all share in that misery. But at least the labor market says it wants “young.” The workplace has made it pretty clear they do not want “old” and “old” starts pretty young.

So older Illinoisans who had a finely calculated survival including their small share of State benefits like Circuit Breaker, must now survive minus that help. And they cannot really delude themselves that they’ll “just find a job.” Actually, they might find a job. One hears stories of good luck.

START-UP sees our world making it more and more clear that the marginalized are on their own. Like it or not that includes older people, for the moment. START-UP asks what older people can do among themselves to make other arrangements! Other arrangements that will allow us to use our talents and energy to thrive. The first thing we have to do is look at each other and get over thinking we’re just plain smarter than those ne’er do well elders out there. In society’s eyes we’re all the same. Time to use that to our advantage.

Already many older people describe themselves not as “retired” but as “job-seekers.” Just in time, Arizona State University scientists report their bee studies allow them to conclude that aging subjects lose all sorts of brain/body function if inactive. The desert scientists are reversing old excluded bee heartbreak by allowing them to work again and report fairly quick bee bounce back.

This story is being picked up by the media perhaps in part because the job those old bees got was babysitting back in the hive. Good news for national economies looking for the quick fix for no childcare policy for their workforce. Enserf grandparents everywhere, believe me they will thank you for it. Arizona may well be using this bench science to re-brand itself as the Baby-Sitting Capitol of the United States. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2170606/The-secret-staying-young-How-thinking-like-bee-reverse-brain-aging.html.

START-UP knows many older people who want to continue to be part of the national productivity. They are bold enough to think they do not have to become free baby-sitters to do it.  For it to come true for humans, we need to go back to those Arizona State scientists and help their bees find better jobs.