Perla batalla biography of william
Elderhood
View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about improving our shared healthcare system, aging, and the decades of old age now increasingly known as elderhood.
I’m Louise Aronson, a practicing geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-Award finalist book Elderhood, Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life, which draws from history, science, literature, popular culture – and from my own life – to weave a vision of old age that is full of ambition, humor, outrage, joy, wonder, and hope.
Please join me for my upcoming 90-minute class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Elderhood. In conversation with Kris Rebillot, I’ll share the most important lessons I’ve learned from a life devoted to improving our shared healthcare system, aging, and the decades of old age now increasingly known as elderhood. We’ll focus specifically on the most important things I’ve learned about empowering older adults to maintain their personhood and maximize their wellness as they age and how that can benefit people of all ages:
- Old age happens to (almost) all of us
- Being old is much better than people think
- Aging could be so much better than it is
- Our attitudes, policies, and systems manufacture many of the hardest parts of old age
- Elderhood is one of the most exciting areas of human potential and innovation
I’ll share how as a young person with no particular interest in aging, I stumbled upon the profound satisfactions and untapped opportunities of old age: After graduating from Harvard Medical School, I returned to my home town of San Francisco and began my residency at UCSF. My plan was to work with an underserved population, and like most young people, I hadn’t thought much about aging or old age. Years into my training, I realized that I loved caring for older people – their long, varied life stories
Notes on the Late Leonard Cohen and Meeting Him in Montreal
Before I was born my mom used to go and see Leonard Cohen do poetry readings in Montreal in the late 1950s. So I grew up with his novels and poetry collections on our bookshelves.
She did not listen to his music though, so that epiphany had to wait until 1985 when I’d already been playing in punk and new wave bands for five years and was looking for some new musical muses and different strains of music to riff on. In between music videos by Culture Club, Duran Duran, Toto and Madonna playing on Much Music (Canada’s MTV) appeared a pallid man in a dark suit intoning, as opposed to singing, in a voice as mournful as a foghorn, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin/Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in/Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove/Dance me to the end of love,” over a melody that I could not place on any musical map of North America or Britain.
The somber yet dapper figure he cut and the lyrical lines he wove transfixed me. Nobody was singing lyrics like these on AM or FM radio, or MTV, or on the alternative stations of campus radio. Nobody sang or dressed like him either.
The next day I went out and bought his new album Various Positions and his Greatest Hits record from 1975.
Many bios of Leonard Cohen’s life have been sketched, as well as notations of his discography, since his passing in November 2016. For full-length biographies, Sylvie Simmons’ 2012 I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen is the best I’ve read.
I am not out to reiterate any of these other odes or obituaries. I only want to bring up a few points that have been not been mentioned or given short shrift. Though I’ve had to play the omnipotent critic role many times before, this is strictly personal.
HIS WILDERNESS YEARS
To be a Leonard Cohen admirer in the early to mid-1980s was to be part of a small yet devoted sect that included a few other underground rock musicians a
For Americana Recording Artist, Julie Christensen, Cathartic Journey Prompts Album -- Weeds Like Us -- While New Leonard Cohen Biography Marks Her Role In Legendary Career
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Julie Christensen'S “WEEDS LIKE US” CD Candidly Reveals a Cathartic Journey of Loss and Survival Bringing “Great Plains Soul” to Acclaimed Career of Americana Singer-Songwriter
While Release of New Leonard Cohen Biography Documents Christensen's Pivotal, Musical Role in Legendary Career
Los Angeles, CA: It is a busy season for Julie Christensen, whose critically-acclaimed recordings, and longtime backing vocals for Leonard Cohen, confirm her standing as a quintessential “Americana” artist who matters. Now, her body of work has taken a decidedly soulful turn, on WEEDS LIKE US, her current recording, with an official release date of November 20, on Household Ink (the eclectic, Santa Barbara-based independent record label). Through The Connextion's digital distribution, WEEDS LIKE US, a rootsy collection of what her label describes as “great plains soul,” is available on iTunes, Amazon Mp3, Spotify, Emusic, and also at Julie's web site.
The album experienced a “soft release” earlier this year, but Julie has added a final, bonus track, making WEEDS LIKE US complete: “Another One” is the stirring ballad Julie wrote with life-changing events in mind, including the death of the fifth of eight members of her first country-rock band, the midwestern “Longshot.” Julie reports, “A sixth member of the band just got sentenced to life in prison. All of these deaths and incarcerations had a lot to do with alcoholism and drug addiction. It took me awhile, but I escaped all that after I broke away from Divine Horsemen (in the late eighties), and I probably wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. There’s a seventh member of Longshot, a Vietnam vet with PTSD. I have no idea of his whereabouts. I hope he’s ok. Survival is what WEEDS LIKE US is all about.” The addition
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