Jane (documentary)

 Jane is a 2017 documentary, directed by Brett Morgan, about Jane Goodall. Drawing on 100 hours of footage that had been lost in the National Geographic archives until 2014, it documents her beginnings as a primatologist in Tanzania. The musical score is by Philip Glass. Things I learned: she had no scientific background and no degree, and thus was not steeped in some of the prejudices of the time; she seems to have had the ability to scramble bare-legged through the bush without getting scratched; her young son Grub hated the chimps (probably because they took his mother away from him) and now builds boats in Dar es Salaam. The shots of caterpillars and birds are as glorious as those of the chimps and other animals. 

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

 I leave for Brooklyn on Monday, and I'm so excited to be going there in May. The weather will be perfect, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will be in full spring bloom with cherry trees, lilacs and a host of flowering trees. We will visit it on Tuesday with a dear friend who lives in Park Slope.

 

We will just miss the Sakura Matsuri this weekend, but the blossoms should still be out! I wonder if there will be wisteria (fuji no hana). When I was little and living in Japan, I learned folk dances to Sakura, Sakura, and Fuji no hana. I still have little garbled bits of the songs in my memory.

Haider

 Haider (directed by Vishal Bhardwaj) is an Indian film set in Kashmir that rewrites Hamlet. Haider is the son of a doctor who has been disappeared by the military for performing surgery on a militant leader. When Haider returns home, he becomes angry when he sees his mother laughing with his uncle. He sets out to try to find out whether his father is alive or dead. The film shows the situation of being caught between military occupiers and Pakistani-backed resistance, with both sides attempting to manipulate Haider, and family and friends betraying him. The grimly realist tone of some portions gives way to heightened musical interludes in others. Our discussion group mostly wanted to map the film onto the play and didn't have much to say about the film itself. The biggest difference for me was that the internal conflict of Hamlet becomes the political conflict over the revenge story. Finally, whether or not Haider shoots his uncle to complete his revenge is moot because the uncle has been fatally wounded by Haider's mother's act of self-destruction with a suicide bomber's vest.  

The play-within-the-play is a big production song-and-dance number:

My Antonia

 I just finished reading My Antonia by Willa Cather. This was a book I had on my shelf for many years but never read. My mother had told me it was a favorite of hers, so I had picked up a used copy. I just never got around to opening it, and it joined the many books I gave away, unread, when I made my big move. Recently it turned up in a Free Little Library box, so I decided to get past my reader's sloth and crack it open. I enjoyed it. The descriptions of the seasons resonated with me, after twenty-eight years of living in the Midwest. Cather's work was successful in her lifetime, but critics and literary historians have been divided on her legacy: those who admire the modernists saw her as old-fashioned. But Lee Isaac Cheung, director and author of Minari, writes movingly about how he was inspired by My Antonia and Willa Cather to write what he remembered of growing up on a farm. I gather that Judith Butler has written about Cather in Bodies That Matter. I should look for that.

The edition I found also had these lovely illustrations by WT Benda that Cather commissioned and always insisted be included when the book was reprinted, often having to fight to have her wishes fulfilled.

Shadow and Bone

 Just watched a TV series on Netflix, Shadow and Bone,  based on a YA fantasy series by Leigh Bardugo (also incorporating elements of her Crows series). Inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones are made in the reviews.While it's not great, it's still entertaining in a tropey kind of way. This first set of episodes is based on the first book in the trilogy, and we have yet to see (officially) if the series will be renewed, so we're left with big cliffhangers. I like the characters from the Crow books the best.

Salome's Last Dance

I have never been a fan of Ken Russell's films. We watched his 1988 film Salomé's Last Dance for our cinema discussion group. It's a recreation of Oscar Wilde's play Salomé, with the conceit that the performance is staged for Wilde in a brothel. Ken Russell himself plays a photographer/pornographer, so we have layers of meta. The acting style of both the frame story and the play is campy and over-the-top, and on that level the film succeeds, but I found the humor not always successful and the performances shreiky and grating. Maybe it also leaves me cold because I find the Wildean source material misogynistic. Both on the surface and symbolically,  female desire is tainted and destructive, and Salomé is murdered in the end ("Kill that woman!"). I was never a huge fan of that particular strain of decadent symbolist modernism, although I read an awful lot of it for my PhD exams.

One thing I do like about the film is the way the credits are displayed as Oscar Wilde flips through a book of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, giving us the opportunity to see this suite of amazing illustrations before the play is performed.

I also watched the Alla Nazimova silent film of Salomé, whose production design was heavily influence by Beardsley's illustrations. It is not intentionally camp the way Russell's film is, but it is extremely stylized and aesthetically daring for its time.

Alla Nazimova was a fascinating figure: born in Yalta, she came to the US after studying with Stanislawsky, and was a huge success in the theater. She then moved to Hollywood where she also met with success both as actor and producer/director/writer (although not always credited for her work). She was a lesbian (or possibly bi) who had relationships with many celebrated women in Hollywood. She purchased an estate that she called the Gardens of Allah, where she threw lavish parties, and later turned into a hotel. At the end of her life, she had lost most of her money and rented one of the villas at the hotel. The buildings were torn down, but Frank Gehry purchased the site and is building a complex on it that he says will, in some way, be inspired by Nazimova. 

The Mole Agent

 El agente topo (The Mole Agent) is a Chilean film that is nominated for Best Documentary and also Best Foreign Film in tonight's Oscars. Since it's raining, I decided to catch up on a couple of the nominated films before the ceremony. The premise of the film is that a woman hires a private detective to investigate the institution where her elderly mother is living, to see if she is being treated well. The private detective in turn hires a man in his eighties to go live in the home and report back on conditions and the treatment of his client's mother. The man who is hired, Sergio, is given a pen with a camera and glasses with a camera. At the same time, the documentary crew has already been installed in the home, ostensibly to make a film about the everyday life of the elderly. When Sergio arrives, they are able to film his interactions with the residents, as he goes from spying for his job to getting to know the residents, almost all of them women, who are mostly lonely because nobody comes to visit them. The film is touching and funny, and I did cry. 

I had some misgivings about the invasion of privacy inherent in the project: not so much for the nursing home and whether or not they were mistreating the residents--they were treating them very well--as for the residents themselves. They may be elderly, but do they want their frailty, their memory problems, their emotional struggles, to be fodder for an undercover genre experiment? I wondered if all the residents who ended up in the film were given releases to sign. The director says yes, that they showed the home the rough cut, and they ended up being very favorable to the film because it focuses on the plight of the lonely elderly, and the home comes off well.

Dora Maar

Dora Maar (born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in 1907) was an artist who exhibited with the first surrealists. She grew up between Argentina and Paris, and began her art studies as a painter. She went on to become a successful photographer, beginning work as an assistant of Man Ray, and going on to work for press, fashion, and advertising in the 1920s. She also was a photo-journalist after the Crash, documenting the impact of the crisis on the poor, in line with her leftist politics. Her influential experimental photo-montages used her own photographs, and were exhibited in various surrealist shows in the thirties.

 This podcast tells the story of both Dora Maar, and of Brigitte Benkemoun's reconstruction of her life and career based on the artist's address book, which fell into her hands from ebay. Thumbing through the diary, she realized that its owner had known everyone in the Parisian artistic milieu between the wars, and set about trying to discover who this was. This reconstruction is echoed on a broader scale by the recent solo exhibition of her work.  A major retrospective organized by the Tate Modern (with the Centre Pompidou and the Getty Museum) returns focus to her work itself. Dora Maar's relationship with Picasso has overshadowed her own artistic story, as is so often the case with women artists who are relegated to the role of muse. He was awful to her, as he was to so many women, but they also collaborated with photographic experiments and influenced each other's work. She photographed Guernika while Picasso was painting it. He pressured her to give up photography, and she returned to painting which she was to carry on for the rest of her life. She also became severely depressed after the war and the end of the relationship with Picasso, but recovered in part due to analysis and electroshock therapy with Jacques Lacan. Later in life she became very religious. Her house in Provence, where she spent time every year, has been transformed into an artist's residence. Her painting and later photography were re-discovered after her death at 89. She apparently never stopped experimenting with photography, as we can see in this preview of the restrospective at the Centre Pompidou:

Top Chef season 17

 During my pandemic year, I watched 16 seasons of Top Chef. That's a lot of salmon, scallops and ceviche. Now I have discovered that last year there was a season 17 All Stars, in which all of the chefs were returning contestants--I remember all of them! Season 18 is the most recent one, and I will have to wait until it gets put on hulu to watch it.

I really really miss going out to a good restaurant and having a complete indoor dining experience. So many restaurants have closed, and the few meals I have had with take-out or outdoor dining have just not been that good. Yesterday and today, my mother and I had lunch outdoors at two restaurants on Fillmore street--a burger joint and a fish place. Both of the meals were way overpriced, but at least my fish and chips meal had decent french fries, unlike the burger place's sad mealy fries. But they were not chips! I want wedge style hand-cut chips, not skinny little frites. The fish however was perfectly cooked with a light delicious batter, a good dipping sauce, and a perfect little cole slaw side dish. I will go to Berkeley Bowl and get the ingredients for a cole slaw. 

I've already been spoiled as to who wins season 17, but that's fine.

Taking Stock in April

 I have been looking for blogs I used to read, back when we all were blogging up a storm. One was Mighty Girl, whose idea for a life list inspired me to make one of my own. One of her most recents posts (from 2018!) linked to another blogger, Pip Lincolne, and her practice of "Taking Stock". I decided to give it a try! She provides a template you can cut and past with the following prompts:

Making : nothing these days. I should start another embroidery project.
Cooking : gai lan with mushrooms.
Drinking : organic gunpowder tea from the Berkeley Bowl.
Reading: Wise Children by Angela Carter.
Wanting: to write something every day in my blog.
Looking: watching movies for my discussion groups: Nomadland, White Material, Minari.
Playing: doing the crossword puzzles in The New Yorker.
Deciding: to start getting rid of excess stuff again.
Wishing: I would start losing weight again.
Enjoying: Envy apples, just the right combination of sweetness and crunch.
Waiting: to go to Brooklyn in May!
Liking: my Al-Anon meetings.
Wondering: how to avoid feeling blue after I get back from my trip.
Loving: BTS!
Pondering: getting my hair cut--how short?
Considering: getting back to a daily yoga practice. Why did I stop?
Buying: nothing these days. I have hardly shopped at all during the pandemic. I bought one shirt, and some stuff for R's apartment.
Watching: The Great Pottery Throw Down.
Hoping: I emerge from the winter with renewed optimism.
Marveling: that we got a vaccine so fast and that people are getting vaccinated!
Cringing: ? n/a
Needing: I have pretty much all that I need.
Questioning: will I rediscover a sense of purpose?
Smelling: wisteria when I go for my walks.
Wearing: my fleece jacket on cool days.
Following: Tom and Lorenzo!
Noticing: I have been feeling better this past week.
Knowing: I have enough, I am blessed.
Thinking: about moving in with my mother one of these days.
Admiring: my former energetic multi-tasking self.
Sorting: stuff for my mom.
Getting: ready to travel again.
Bookmarking: meet me at Mike's, the blog of Pip Lincolne, whose idea of Taking Stock this is.
Coveting: Heath ceramics
Disliking: garbage in the streets.
Opening: a Deschutes Fresh Haze IPA.
Giggling: Bowen Yang's SNL iceberg bit.
Feeling: timidly optimistic about emerging from pandemic shutdown.
Snacking: roasted almonds.
Hearing: sounds of baseball games from the park down the street.

An excursion

Well, for the first time in fourteen months I took public transportation to go into the City to visit my mother at her place. We've been able to see each other a few times in socially distanced picnic situations, and we talk on the phone every day, but I might as well have been living back in Minnesota for the past year. The walk to the BART station now includes many new clusters of tents. All but one of the entrances to the BART station are closed. There weren't that many people on the train and we were all able to space ourselves out. I got off at Embarcadero and took the 38R Geary, since the 2 and 3 buses have just been discontinued due to lack of ridership. Luckily, the 38 drops me just a few blocks from my mom's place. The ride back on BART included a hostile ranting crazy person who followed me from one car to another while ragefully screaming, so there was that. Sometimes I wish I had my car again, but then again I don't miss Bay Area driving at all.

I spent some time helping my mom go through old files to see what could be discarded and to make sure things were easy to find. I'll go back tomorrow and do some more. We walked up Fillmore Street to get a document notarized but I messed it up by filling out the signature area incorrectly so we'll have to go back and try again tomorrow. It was not a long walk but it is all uphill so I was concerned about her stamina, but she did OK. She's going to be 88 this summer. We stopped for lunch at the outdoor parklet of a burger place, and had a mediocre burger and lousy fries (so disappointing!) for a whole lot of money. Oh, well, I have to say that almost all of my dining experiences of the pandemic have been like that--I get all excited that I'm going to have someone else cook my food for a change, and then the food turns out to be not so great. I'm hoping my dining experiences will improve when I go to Brooklyn next month.

It was really foggy and cold and I was slightly under-dressed (East Bay fog isn't as damp and bone-chilling as SF fog), so tomorrow I will make sure to add a few layers. Gotta remember how these things work! Must have a hat and fingerless gloves! One more layer between the long-sleeved shirt and the sweater! Just wear that down parka!

Minari

 I saw the preview for the movie Minari (미나리) back when we could still see a movie in the theater, and was really eager to see it. I finally rented it on YouTube (for $21!) because it's next up in the Red Lantern film discussion group. It is really good, and I loved it, in spite of my farm disaster anxiety. 

The plant minari is also called Water Celery, Water Dropwort, Japanese parsley, Chinese celery, Indian pennywort. I bet I can get it at the Berkeley Bowl. Here's an easy recipe for minari namul, a seasoned side dish.

The lovely and talented Han Yeri (Monica in the film) is someone I have seen in the kdramas Six Flying Dragons, Age of Youth, and My Unfamiliar Family. She was really outstanding in all three of these excellent shows. I did not know she also sings. Here she is singing the song from the end credits of the film (with film's soundtrack composer Emile Mosseri):

kdrama watching

 I just finished watched a weekend family kdrama Yeah, That's How It Is, all 54 episodes. It was one of the better kdramas I've watched in the last several months, despite the fact that it is a few years old. I only found out about it from the comments of a DramaBeans post--a usually grumpy commenter said it was good so I checked it out. It turns out that the writer has a long track record, including a drama, Life is Beautiful, that has a gay relationship as a central plot point. I'd heard of that drama--maybe I should watch it next. Luckily all subbed episodes were easily available--unlike the situation when I first started watching dramas (in 2013? I think) and had to sit through endless commercial interruptions before I subscribed to a DramaFever (RIP). It's been a while since I really binge-watched a kdrama. Checking my watchlist, I see that I'm up to 200 kdramas completed, 96 dropped. I have not one single 2021 drama on the completed list, and 2 are on the dropped list (there are more), which just shows how few I've even started watching at all in the last four months.  Several of the ones I dropped over the years were big fan favorites but didn't appeal to me, while several of the ones I completed were not so great but I found them entertaining.  The only dramas I've watched more than once are Coffee Prince, Marriage Not Dating, and Secret Forest. Maybe I should dip into my completed list to find some good ones to rewatch.

Lately, most new dramas have been some variation on supernatural love stories, time travel, serial killers, or a combo, or have been just plain too bad to watch past the first two episodes. And I dropped the most recent time travel drama at episode 14/16 because it just was so stupid, despite the fact that it had a couple of really good actors. But the action sequences were all like first-person shooter games while the actual story was nonsensical and the romance between the middle-aged man and young woman was offensive and boring. Ugh. 

I have fewer jdramas or cdramas on my list because I find the mediocre ones unwatchable, and the good ones few and far between. It's also harder to get good recs because I don't haunt the discussion sites and I don't find the popular genres appealing. Maybe I should rewatch Fated To Love You, so ridiculous but it made me cry so hard ("Goodbye, My Love!")

White Material

 Another film by Claire Denis, White Material (2009).  After our discussion, this song by Burna Boy was recommended to us by Matthew:

Ceramics

 Watching the Great Pottery Throw Down has reminded me of my desire to own a dinner set of Heath ceramics, something that will never happen because the prices are astronomical. I do own a couple of their bud vases because I got them on sale at their Sausolito showroom, but $40 for one dinner plate is more than I am willing to fork over, no matter how beautiful they are, or how much I appreciate the process of their making. I will visit their shop at the Ferry Building when I start taking BART again, and admire their beautiful wares. 

The other china pattern I crave is Blue Danube because that is what we used when I was growing up and I love it. I have a few pieces: a jam pot I use for salt, two dinner plates and one salad plate, two cups and saucers. I only have one salad plate because I broke the other one, which is why I won't pay to collect them; I'm too accident prone. 

Here's a documentary on Edith Heath and her pioneering ceramics design business, part of a public television series called Artbound:

The Great Pottery Throwdown

 I just finished watching season one of The Great Pottery Throw down, another one of the British makers' reality competition shows. Like the Great British Bake Off, the show highlights the contestants' struggles with the material rather than with each other, and that's why we love it. That, and judge Keith Brymer Jones' tears of joy when one of the potters does something really pleasing. "It's brilliant! absolutely brilliant!"

Nomadland

Tonight's movie for discussion is Nomadland. I watched it last month but I may watch it again this afternoon. 

When I became ill some years ago and was losing my job and career in slow motion I thought I would no longer have an income, so I started thinking about how I'd survive. My disability benefits kept getting cut off by the insurance company my employer used to get rid of disabled employees, and the struggle to get them reinstated each month made me sicker. Drastic action seemed necessary.

I seriously considered relocating to Mexico. I didn't think I'd be able to handle life in Mexico City. The last time I was there, for a conference, it felt grim and foreboding.  I read some blogs by "expats" only to realize that I would not have the mental stamina to wrestle with the logistics of such a change, even if I spoke fluent Spanish and had enough money to live relatively well. Even though one of my dreams was to spend time in Oaxaca in a house with bougainvillia, I felt overwhelmed by the logistics of relocating. I was still very sick.

I also thought of becoming a digital nomad abroad. After all, travel was one of my dreams. But I couldn't afford to live short-term in the places I was most interested in visiting and I didn't think I could manage as an older woman alone in some of the places I could afford. I'm too old to backpack.

I also gave real consideration to getting a camper and hitting the road but quickly recognized that I was too daunted by the idea of keeping the vehicle repaired and dealing with the bathroom and bathing issues. This was before the book (and movie) Nomadland revealed how many older people in my situation were turning to van living as a way to survive while working exhausting temp jobs. I also had little interest in exploring the U.S. backroads--I felt too alienated.

One issue I wasn't thinking about as I weighed my options was how isolated and lonely life on the road would be; I was only looking at the budget. That was years before the pandemic gave us all the chance to deal with radical isolation and loneliness from the comfort of our own homes. Another issue is how to get my meds while traveling.

My situation changed and I didn't have to make those choices. I now have sufficient income to live close to family, modestly but well enough. Who knows, maybe travel will become safe again one day.

Here's a really interesting take on the movie by a woman who was an extra in the film, who is herself an RV nomad  

Yes, the movie is a story of grief, not just that of Fern (Frances McDormand), but also a collective experience of grief over an American dream, and especially the experiences of older women. Carolyn used to live in the SFBay Area and says she saw the writing on the wall and made a conscious choice to change her life after the crash of 2008. Maybe if I hadn't had this health crisis (how to manage refilling a Rx on the road is a whole chapter) and were twenty years younger, I would have had the guts to give it a shot.

Neighboring Sounds

Kleber Mendonça Filho, co-director of Bacurau, made his first feature-length film Neighboring Sounds in 2012. It takes place in the neighborhood where he lives in Recife, a middle-class neighborhood where apartment towers are replacing single-family homes and where every entrance has a locked gate and every family has servants. The class and racial divides are shown through the ensemble cast's interactions on a single block, on which a new private security detail is setting up operations. The first chapter is called guard dogs, but the guard dog is just a noisy nuisance to the neighbors. The second chapter is called night watchman, but the building's residents are trying to figure out how to fire their night watchman who has been filmed sleeping on the job. The third chapter features the street patrol that promises peace of mind from all the car break-ins and crime in the neighborhood, but it turns out that the thief is actually the grandson of local landowner Seu Francisco who warns the patrol to leave his grandson alone. In fact, we see that this wealthy man is still the local boss--he owns a sugar plantation while his other grandson works as a real estate agent in his condos: the old power structures extend to the newly reconfigured economy.

 "The sound goes beyond what you are looking at" said Mendonça Filho in this Q and A. The mood of paranoia and fear beneath the surface of everyday life is heightened by the sound design: the barking dogs, the intrusions of music, power tools, voices--the feeling that nobody is ever really alone but also that the noise is not part of a sheltering communal life is reinforced by the way characters move from locked gate to barred door in narrow alleys and guarded domestic spaces. In one sequence, the camera looks down from an apartment window as men are jumping over the gate into the garden, and we hear the slap of their feet as they land, one after another after another. The girl in the apartment wakes up and sees them. As they keep coming, the threat seems to increase from a small group of burglars to a full-scale invasion. The sequence is revealed to be a nightmare the girl is having, but the dread contaminates waking life on the block. In another surreal sequence, the real estate agent grandson is visiting his grandfather's sugar plantation house with his girl friend. They visit a waterfall where they all stand under the cascade for a long time. Suddenly the water changes to blood and we see a flash of the grandson bathed in blood like Carrie at the prom, but he is looking straight at the camera.  His bloody family heritage returns at the very end of the film when it is revealed that the street patrol leader and his brother have a family feud with the grandfather. Seu Francisco calls them to his house for something and they tell him that they are the children of men he wronged--murdered?-- on his plantation back in 1984. The very last sequence has the family that has been tormented by the barking dog setting off firecrackers to frighten it, but the last bang is probably a gunshot from the confrontation with Seu Francisco. 

  All the watchmen are supposed to use surveillance to keep the owners safe but the owners use surveillance to spy on the night watchman's naps. Throughout the film the various maids and guardians have been present in domestic interiors, supposedly in service of their employers, but with their own agendas: the maid brings her grandchildren along, and a relative who sleeps on the couch; the security patrol leader and a different maid use an absent neighbor's home for sex, and it turns out that the house is not empty as they thought; the building watchman spies on people kissing in the elevator; another maid accidentally fries the device that has been used to torment the barking dog (the "dog buster") and is berated by her employer; the street patrol knows who is having an affair, which building the lost party-goer needs to find when he returns from a beer run. There's no privacy, only the illusion of security, and it's the heir of the sugar plantation boss who is stealing car stereos and threatening the security guards if they dare to call him on it. The last shot shows the ineffectual violence of the fiercrackers covering the gunshot off-screen; we know what it means because we have observed the ways that fears of violence permeate the neighborhood.

second dose reaction

I had my second vaccine dose on Friday. This time, I felt pain with the injection and my arm got sore by the evening. The next day I felt achy and feverish, and ended up crashed out on the couch, watching episodes of a kdrama and The Great Pottery Throwdown. I was too tired to read or take a walk. I woke up in the night with aching teeth and jaws--I must have been grinding my teeth. But this morning I feel fine--no more soreness or flu-like feelings. I'm glad it didn't last too long. I'm grateful that in two weeks I'll be fully protected from the virus, at least for a while. 

Meanwhile, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a while:

Senso

Luchino Visconti's 1954 film Senso is the next film for our discussion group: splendid technicolor and high melodrama with so many floating veils, sweeping skirts, white uniforms with white capes, La Fenice and Venice by night, the beautiful veneto countryside.  Do we feel sorry for the Countess who betrays her family, and the cause of Venetian independence from Austria, for a man who turns out to be a loathsome snake? She has her revenge in the end when she rats him out as a deserter and gets him shot. 

 Visconti uses Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony as its score, but maybe the best part of the film is the opening sequence, set during a performance of Il Trovatore in La Fenice. We get to hear the duet between Manrico and Leonora, and then"Di quella pira" as the film uses the opera to present its themes of doomed passion and patriotic fervor.

trip to New York!

I am about to go get my second dose of the vaccine! Yesterday I bought a ticket to New York to visit my daughter in Brooklyn. I had bought a ticket to visit her in March of 2020, so I'm thrilled to finally get to see her new apartment, her studio, and her neighborhood. There are so many things we want to do together; even with pandemic restrictions, we'll be busy. We each are making a wish list. Here are ten things I want to do that I haven't been able to do on all my previous trips to New York:

1. Ride the Staten Island ferry and maybe visit the Botanical Gardens at Snug Harbor

2. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

3. See the Yayoi Kusama show at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

4. Do a walking tour of the Bushwick street art.

5. See the formal Conservatory Garden at the North End of Central Park and walk the length of the park.

6. Check out chef José Andrés' Little Spain market, in the Hudson Yards under the High Line.

7.  check out tacos from Los Hermanos and try out some of the Mexican food here or here in Bushwick.

8. maybe we could try this bakery crawl (although we might keel over) or we could try a different one every day.

9. view the Statue of Liberty from the gardens in Battery Park.

10. traipse around the Green-Wood Cemetary. 

Little Free Library north loop

Today I took the north loop for my walk. There are five Little Free Library boxes on this routes. At the first one, I found a book that is on the reading list of the Berkeley Public Library's book club, The Library Book by Susan Orlean.

At the third box I found  Judith Butler's Senses of the Subject, a collection of essays on our "embodied existence."

I decided not to take any of the books I found in the other boxes on my route. As it is, I only dropped off one and picked up two, so the pile is increasing.

 

The Mission (Johnny To)

Caught up with Johnny To's 1999 film The Mission (the title in Chinese is Gunfire). I had already seen this but I can't remember whether it was part of a Maggie Cheung marathon (she has a bit part) or what. It's another Hong Kong action film for our Thursday night cinema club, but more cool and stylish than City on Fire. Five bodyguards are hired to protect a Triad boss. Much of the film has no dialogue but relationships are communicated efficiently. The shoot-out in the shopping mall is excellently choreographed. 

The twist at the end is a surprise. The score is a total synthy earworm (BA buh buh BA buh buh NA na na Na!). Triad professionalism, honor among gunmen, blam blam blam blam blam!

Little Free Library book crawl

 I have been trying to take a walk every day during the past year. I had originally started  because I was so out of shape from being ill for so long. As I got stronger, I continued because I wanted to be in better shape for the times I traveled: I had been brutally surprised the first time I went to Japan with Rosemary when I got wiped out and had circulation problems due to walking on pavement for so many hours. The second time we traveled there, I wore compression socks and was in better shape but still had to rest frequently. My trips to LA and Seattle were done when I was able to walk several miles without being completely worn out, so I when I had to cancel all my travel plans in 2020, I decided that I would treat my walks like running laps on a track. Just do it every day and stop worrying about whether or not I had a destination now that all the destinations were closed or off limits. 

I have ended up with three primary walks, each oriented around the Little Free Library book boxes that my neighbors have made. The first is just a straight shot down Channing toward San Pablo and back, which is about 2.5 mile. The end point is a Little Free Library box. It doesn't often have new stock but I've found some good books there so I always check. If I go up a block for the return loop, there are three more boxes: two on Spaulding and one by the school near Milvia. Not a lot of turnover there either but still some good finds.

The second walk is a north loop up to Virginia and back down Milvia. There are four Little Free Library boxes on this loop, which is just a little shorter than the first walk. These tend to have more literary offerings, and often there are uncorrected proof books, so someone must either be a bookseller or know somebody who is. The third walk is the one I take when I'm feeling tired or crabby or the weather is not great, aka my short walk. It's the southern loop, down Milvia to a Little Free Library box that is just a few blocks from the Berkeley Bowl. This is the original destination box that I found when I went grocery shopping years ago. 

There are a couple of other book boxes that I haven't visited for a while now because I'm no longer walking in that direction for a weekly appointment, but I have too many books so I don't need to add more to the huge pile of books I've found over the last several months. I return each book as I read it, but I have not respected the one-in/one-out rule and have accumulated quite a few. My last three acquisitions are: Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, a book I used to own but never read; John Baxter's The Perfect Meal, by an author I'd read when I was anticipating my trip to Paris; and Leif Enger's Virgil Wander, set in Minnesota so I must read it.

Beau Travail

For cinema club, I forced myself to watch Beau Travail directed by Claire Denis. I will never forgive her for the loathsome ending to Les salauds, so my viewing experience was colored by my mistrust. I did enjoy the gorgeous landscapes of Djibouti, the choreography of military training, the sensuous images of women dancing, all the laundry and the ironing. There's almost no dialogue. In some scenes there's a kind of vibrating sound that creates a tension, and in some of the scenes of balletic exercises, music from Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd is used. 

I did not find the story, as such, compelling. There was a disconnect between what the narrator tells us and what we see. Maybe it's because the ritualized cruelty and senselessness of the everyday training doesn't look much different from the targeted brutality of his plot. Maybe that's the point. My chat club friends had some interesting things to say about the colonial context in which the French Foreign Legion is circling the drain.

Agnes Godard's cinematography is wonderful and her soft voice in this interview is captivating.

A Reckoning

 I just finished A Reckoning by May Sarton, the first book of hers I've read. It's about a woman who finds out she is dying of lung cancer and who resolves to meet death her way, on her own terms. As she grows weaker and more ill and as her friends and family find out, she contends with their presence as she sorts through her memories and reckons with what each relationship means to her now: her mother, her three children, the doctor, her dearest friend. The account of her decline is persuasive, although at the end I would imagine she would have been in more pain than the novel contemplates. Having witnessed a death from lung cancer of someone who ended up in the hospital, probably against his will and because his wife wanted him to fight, I know it is a painful, undignified end. At least in this novel, we see someone who is able to die at home surrounded by her loved ones. 

City on Fire

 For my Red Lantern cinema chat group, we watched Ringo Lam's City on Fire, a 1987 Hong Kong gangster-cop action film, complete with '80s wailing sax soundtrack. 

This film served as inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (either a rip-off or homage, depending on your degree of QT fanboying) and is part of a sub-genre of Hong Kong films called "heroic bloodshed," films where guns replaced martial arts. The seed film for this genre was John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, and Chow Yun Fat was the star whose signature trenchcoat and sunglasses look would inspire Hong Kong youth. There would be feedback loops between the Hong Kong and Hollywood films over the next decade.

In our discussion we talked about the cartoonish tonal shifts between comedy and cynical cop-gangster action, the unfortunately shrill girlfriend subplot, the amount of smoking, and genre favorites of those who had seen these films before. It was suggested that Infernal Affairs might be a good film to see next, and for next week we will watch Johnny To's The Mission. I'm not the target audience for this film but I enjoyed it's propulsive action.

taxes

I qualify for free tax return filing using an online tool, and was able to finish preparing and submitting my taxes in about an hour. The tool loads the forms that have been submitted to the IRS, and after a few false starts I was able to complete the return, even though some aspects of it were confusing. As has been the case since I started taking retirement payments from my IRAs, my total withholding means I owe the Fed but get a refund from the state in twice that amount, so I end up with a net refund. Now I have to wait to see if the submitted returns are accepted, which may take a few days. Last year I got a mysterious message that made me believe that my Federal payment had not gone through on the credit card, so I ended up sending them a check. Then I learned that it had, in fact, gone through so I had to call up the IRS and get the over-payment refunded. This time, I'll check my credit card statement instead of the tool's website for confirmation because they confused the goose.

Jury duty

      My first experience with jury duty was when I was a graduate student, preparing for my oral exams for the PhD. I was called to appear in court in Berkeley, and was very anxious about whether the case would interfere with my exam date, which had been very hard to schedule. When I showed up, there were about fifty of us in a very large room, and each juror was asked if they had any relationship to the University of California. When each person answered yes, the lawyers finally turned to the room and asked if there was anyone who didn't--almost everyone did. What a company town. This turned out to be relevant because the case involved a trespassing charge made by the UC police against a man--an elderly person with a bag of papers who we called a street person then-- who had been sitting in an inner courtyard in the math building on a Sunday, have his lunch, not bothering anyone. The rookie UC cops arrested him when he argued with them about leaving. He insisted on defending himself, in spite of the judge's advice against it, so the case went to trial. He wanted to argue that UC was funded by the taxpayers and therefore was a public place and should be open to the public. The judge instructed us that according to the law, the Regents of UC had to be considered as persons, and as the property owners. Most of us were resentful that the charges had even been brought at all, and we didn't want to find him guilty, but according to the evidence and the instructions, we had to. It was an educational experience about how one ends up going with the system in spite of one's beliefs. He got off with a warning by the judge.

      This week's experience with jury duty is being conducted over zoom because of covid; a hundred of us are sitting around in a zoom room while the lawyers question the smaller jury pool of sixteen (twelve jurors plus four alternates). We have to look at the screen and act as if we are attentive, although, in fact, I have discovered that it is easy to browse or type without detection (we are all muted) because it just looks as if you are sitting there looking at the camera when in fact you are scrolling for BTS news on Twitter.

     The case is a civil case involving a lawsuit against a corporation. On the questionnaire we filled out before the voir dire, we were asked how we felt about corporations, and I answered "Not a fan." This could be one reason why I was not included in the pool for questioning, but I bet it's because I'm a "little old lady" (and therefore more likely to be sympathetic to the plaintiff) and a retired university professor (and thus "less amenable to persuasion") according to some of the rule-of-thumb ideas I found when I looked up voir dire guidelines. Since they are supposed to finish up very soon and have almost made their numbers, I am not going to have to serve. I still have to show up again for one more session, but it looks as if they will seat a jury and four alternates with the pool they have. Fingers crossed.