What's new: Seventies Motherhood, The Death of the Camera, a classic 60's Jazz playlist, plus more definitions of the 101 Coolest Words, ever :)

There are so many things that tie us all together... experiences through the past 50 some years.  Realize is dedicated to not only shedding light on this shared history, but examining our mutual future as well. We must remember we are still part of the team helming this vessel, even if we willingly relinquish a few midnight watches.  So keep your eyes wide open and your hands free to grab all that's beautiful and wonderful about being alive in 2013.

Carry on, guys!

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Never Cook with Olive Oil???
My Journey Into Jazz
A Jazz Drummer since the age of 16, Bobby Jospe tells his story. With a playlist of his 10 most influential Jazz Classics...

My journey into jazz began at a very early age in the 1950s.  My parents were Belgian and they both loved music. My father especially dug classical and jazz as well as music from other cultures. I grew up listening to Bach, Beethoven and Mahler but also to Armstrong, Ellington and Fitzgerald... and the list goes on. 

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Realize Magazine's 101 Coolest Words Defined G - J
The Rollicking Life of the World's Greatest Language

Giggle - The earliest known usage of giggle in English dates from the 16th century [Akin to gaggle: cf. OD. ghichelen, G. kichern.] To laugh with short catches of the breath or voice; to laugh in a light, affected, puerile or silly manner; to titter with childish levity. “Giggling and laughing with all their might At the piteous hap of the fairy wight.” J. R. Drake.

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In Search of the Master
"The Master" - Haig Hovaness takes another look at Anderson's penetrating depiction of the absurd world of a bogus guru...

The task of interpreting Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, “The Master,” is unusually challenging. I got a hint of the impending difficulty when, after first viewing the film, I realized that many of the promotional trailer scenes had been cut. My difficulties were compounded after I downloaded the official film script and saw that the film deviated from it in many respects. Moreover, the recent Blu-ray packaging of the film includes 20 minutes of separate extra footage that was not included in the final cut of the film.

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Domestic Catch-22: Motherhood in the Seventies
Shirley MacLaine a Prototype? Susan Zakin looks at a few Hollywood archetypes and contemplates the impossible parameters for seventies mothers...

 

“This is like Rashomon!” my mother used to exclaim, whenever we disagreed about an event in our family’s past.  By invoking the 1950 Kurosawa film, which retold a story of betrayal and murder from wildly varying points of view, my mother was saying: you have your version and I have mine.  My daughterly version of events often included a not-too-subtle catalogue of her sins, so this was her way of ending an awkward conversation.  But books and movies not only mediate hard emotional truths; they also elide them. 

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The Death of the Camera
Haig Hovaness considers Smartphones and the Future of Photography

The picture below is my Leica IIIC, a camera that was manufactured in 1950, the year I was born. At the time it was first sold, it cost the equivalent of $3,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. It is an entirely mechanical camera – no auto anything. With fine-grained film, it will produce a 35mm film image that can match the output of a 20-megapixel digital camera sensor. It is difficult to load, slow to rewind, and has a squinty little viewfinder, but it is a glorious artifact.

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Never Cook with Olive Oil???
Our favorite health correspondent, Cathy Goldstein, delivers a bombshell... But you're gonna be fine, just read on.

You may already know that consuming foods that containing hydrogenated oils is unhealthy. But did you know that heating olive oil and other cold pressed, heat fragile oils creates oxidative stress and free radicals? And that with high heat these oils become rancid, and transform into hydrogenated oils? The end result; very unhealthy oils.

 Rancid oils have been shown to have a negative effect on our bodies. These are a few of the dangers:

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I am a Camera, Life Cams + the Unedited Past
So your life can be digitized minute by minute, but Haig Hovaness wonders: is there not a purpose to the phantasmagorical nature of Memory?

Among the strange new fruits emerging from the digital technology cornucopia is the Life Cam, a wearable device that tirelessly records whatever is in front of the wearer. The plummeting costs of imaging and data storage devices now make it possible to document an entire lifetime through digital image recording (“lifelogging”).

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Does the Boom Generation Need to Redeem Itself?
Leonard Steinhorn, in his book The Greater Generation, proves how our legacy speaks for itself...

Aside from the tragic name of our generation (can we rebrand as Generation B?)  - which evokes either sonic booms, what babies do in their nappies, or was said to them when they fell - there are a considerable amount of specious and far too casual assaults leveled at us - who we are, and who we were.

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10 Hot Guitarists Over 50, Playlist
10 Hot Guitarists Over 50 who are still knocking it out of the park.

March 21st would have been the 50th birthday of genius guitarist Shawn Lane.  And in order to honor this date, Realize Magazine, with the curatorial guidance of musician/director Ethan Wiley, has created a playlist of the super hot players who are his peers - 10 great guitarists over 50 who are still kicking ass and taking no prisoners.  Lane died tragically at age 40 just a decade ago, but his influence still reigns over a generation of up 'n coming guitarists years later.

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