Blogging again

I've been making an effort to maintain my commitment to writing in the blog every day. OK, every day-ish. But it's a struggle some times. Who am I writing to? I miss the feeling of blogging as a conversation, when I had comments and relationships with other bloggers, when I had the sense that I was talking to people. How did that even happen? I don't really remember.

Almost none of the bloggers I first became attached to as a reader, back in 2006 or so, have blogs any longer. Most just stopped: one writer I adore is mostly on Twitter these days; another migrated her activity to a Flickr photostream and now I no longer remember the name she was using so I can't even look her up. To be honest, I was more of a lurker/reader than an interlocutor, but I read many blogs faithfully, commented on some, and felt I "knew" the folks who shared something about their lives. I appreciated the way people were able to create conversations. Some spaces had such healthy comment sections that I learned a lot from them. I think the kind of blogging I am remembering was personal or confessional, even when it was academic or about a theme, not a substitute for journalism or marketing, but a place where you encountered a voice. And in the beginning, the kind of writing and publishing activity that was academic blogging was entwined with concerns about anonymity and publicity, especially as we academics negotiated our semi-public personae in our forays into digital teaching spaces.  

Some of the changes in blogging happened because of money--when bloggers were able to monetize their blogs, what they did changed as a result of the pressures of writing for advertising. Some single-topic bloggers got a book deal, others became paid consultants. A "successful" blog was the goal, and readership or subscribers were leveraged into ad revenues.  The proliferation of platforms also led to a fragmentation of connections. Now a lot of that conversational energy animates social media, where writing a short personal essay is not the goal. A subset of bloggers has migrated to Instagram where the impulse is to put out aspirational content; others are (still) on the evil Facebook, or vlogging at YouTube, or podcasting. Some changes in blogging happened when platforms like Tumblr or Livejournal were sold to companies that gutted them.  Maybe the short personal essay on Medium is where some of that confessional energy has gone, and some survives in the form of a personal newsletter and link round-up by subscription.

Who are the audiences? So much of what is published about blogging today treats audience as the target market for a brand. Blogging as a form of journaling isn't about building a brand. I know at least some of my posting here is a way to take notes on the things I learn, or to embed YouTube videos about the movies I watched, so in that sense the audience is me. If there's no uptake for one's personal ramblings, why write in a blog as opposed to a notebook at the breakfast table? Maybe because writing in a journal these days feels a lot like whining while writing in the blog forces me to do more than blurt.

The Road Home

 For the Asian/Asian-American cinema chat club, we watched The Road Home (1999) directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Zhang Ziyi in her screen debut. A gorgeous film, it frames the love story of a village girl and the new schoolteacher with the story of how their son returns after the man's death and tries to satisfy his mother's demand for a traditional funeral procession, in which people would carry the coffin from the hospital back to the village. Because so many young people have left to work in the city, it seems there won't be enough to carry out her wishes, so the son attempts to hire men from a neighboring town. The black-and-white present-day tale, a snapshot of a society in transition and in which the old ways are being abandoned,  lovingly frames the son's narration of his mother and father's courtship, filmed in color. When a new teacher comes to the village, the two young people see each other and are enamored without words. She woos him with food; he gives her a hair clip--so chaste! In a social world of arranged marriages, theirs is a love match. Through the materiality of daily life in a pre-modern rural village, Zhang evokes values that he seems to want his viewers to recall, just as he shows how the villagers will return for the burial procession out of respect for their former teacher. But is this just nostalgia for village rural life, or should we also notice that he portrays a relationship that stands in contrast to the norms of village life for being the result of the woman's desire, initiative, and stubbornness?

Barely have the two managed to acknowledge their interest in each other when they are separated, as he is called back to the city. Although no clear explanation is given, it is likely that it is for political reasons that he is first called back, and then punished for two years because he tried to return to the village when he heard she fell ill waiting for him in the snow. But he does return, they marry, and we see how her devotion to him after his death is as fierce and stubborn as was her determination to make sure he noticed her fetching water from the well near the school. 

You can either see this as a pure and simple love story as do most of the reviewers on Letterboxd, or as nostalgic schmalz, as do a few cynics (including one of my chat group colleagues). Or both. Sometimes we just want our pure and simple beautifully filmed schmalz.

Listening to: Missing Richard Simmons

 Somehow I stumbled upon the podcast series Missing Richard Simmons and ended up listening to all the episodes at once instead of getting out of bed. It's a investigative documentary type of thing. A television producer, Dan Taberski, who used to attend Richard Simmons' exercise class in Beverly Hills, and socialized with him for a while, is as baffled as everyone else when Simmons stops coming to his class and stops communicating with (almost) everyone, refusing to respond to inquiries of any kind as to whether or not he is OK. On the one hand, people should have the right to make their own decisions about how they engage with the world. On the other hand, Simmons had been an inspiring and deeply engaged mentor to lots of people for years, and when he suddenly cut off all contact and stopped appearing in public in any way, after years of boisterous presence on TV and in a wide range of arenas, it was normal for folks to be concerned for his welfare. His silence was so diametrically opposed to the way he lived his life for decades. Over the course of the podcast's episodes, we hear how Simmons helped people who faced great challenges in their relationship to their weight; not only through his videos, classes, and advocacy, often he would call people every week, counseling them for free and aiding them in making the changes they wanted to make. It's likely that he just reached a level of burnout, and applied the same ferocious determination to his abrupt retirement as he did to everything else he did: losing his own weight after a childhood of being bullied; becoming successful and wealthy with his studios, his products, his weight-loss cruises; making dozens of performance videos that he posted on social media. At the end of the podcast, Simmons continued to refuse to respond to almost every inquiry, but a few people with whom he remained in contact did share that he is OK. 

The podcast doesn't spend much time on speculation about Simmons' sexuality or the lawsuit he filed against tabloids that claimed he disappeared because he was transitioning. Maybe he is just tired of all the noise.

Saving Face

 Tonight one of my cinema chat groups is going to talk about the Alice Wu film Saving Face (2004). It was her first film and received a lot of critical acclaim for a small independent feature. It was the first Hollywood movie centered on Chinese-Americans since The Joy Luck Club--amazing. Much of the story is drawn from Wu's own experience of coming out to her mother (who rejected her at first but came to a reconciliation after some years of estrangement).It's a sweet rom-com, with dialogue in both Mandarin and English, and a great New York setting in Flushing.

In the film, the main character, a doctor named Wil, finds herself living with her mother, a widow who has gotten pregnant at 48 and who refuses to tell anyone who the father is. (I have to say that the idea of having a baby at 48 made me tired. I was late enough having mine at 37!)  Wil is also beginning a relationship with Vivian, a dancer who is part of her extended Chinese community. Wil is not out to her family and we see how Vivian is impatient with her for not being open. But when Wil finally tells her mother she's gay (although her mother already had reason to know) her mother responds by saying "I'm not a bad mother. My daughter is not gay." The denial is devastating. Everyone's experience of coming out is unique, and the stakes are high if you might lose your primary family connection. I was a little impatient with Vivian's lack of empathy although I understood her feelings.

I did like how the trope of rushing to the airport to stop the loved one from leaving is a failure. You can't just stop an airport. But there is a happy ending for both the mother (whose lover turns out to be a much younger very handsome man) and for Wil and Vivian.

Daebak Realty/Sell Your Haunted House

 To take a break from my Game of Thrones marathon (I'm midway through season four, which is about how far I got when I watched it the first time) I just binge-watched a Korean drama called Daebak Realty, with the alternative title of Sell Your Haunted House. Ten of the sixteen episodes have aired so far, and I watched all ten over the last few days. The premise is that the protagonist, Hong Ji A (played by Jang Nara)  is a shaman who performs exorcisms to get rid of ghosts that are haunting real estate properties and preventing them from being sold, or lowering the property value. To perform an exorcism, she needs a medium as an assistant, or"psychic"--a young man who is a virgin (explained as: hasn't mixed his yang with yin!) who can be possessed by the spirit. The spirit is trapped in the medium's body and  the exorcist-shaman then stabs him with a special magical needle containing a talisman with the spirit's name on it, thus releasing the spirit. A side-effect is that the spirit's memories and habits are passed on to the shaman, leaving a huge emotional residue. In this framework, we learn that our exorcist is living in a house haunted by her mother's spirit. Brusque, ill-tempered, dressing only in black, Ji A has shut down after years of emotional toil. Her mother was a shaman who died twenty years earlier, apparently in a exorcism gone wrong, when Ji A was a girl. Ji A can see her, as she can see other spirits, but has not been successful in finding a psychic strong enough to exorcise her mother's spirit. 

The story begins when a con man, Oh In Bum, gets tangled up in one of her jobs and they discover that he is a strong medium who can assist her in her work. Each episode has a "spirit of the week" while the over-arching mystery is how Hong Ji A's mother's death is related to Oh In Bum's uncle's death, and how both are related to powerful and crooked developers who use violence to take over properties; they've been trying to dislodge Ji A from her home, Daebak Realty, but she refuses to sell because her mother's spirit is attached. In Bum proves to be such a strong medium that he absorbs the spirits' memories, rather than Ji A, and their shared experience creates a strong bond between them.

The attention to the details of the exorcism rituals, the great casting of guest actors for the weekly spirit stories and the secondary roles, and the charisma of the two lead actors, have made it a good watch. The relationship between the two main characters is complicated and evolves as they discover more and more about how their pasts are connected. A running gag is how her exorcisms require so much energy that she eats gargantuan amounts of food.  After so many recent drama disappointments (even good actors can't save a poor script), I'm glad to have found one that combines its supernatural elements with believable psychological portrayals, and that is not about a serial killer.

The other drama I am watching is called Doom At Your Service, and also has a supernatural twist. It's two main stars are super popular but I am watching for one of my favorite actors, Lee Soo Hyuk. 

OK, back to Game of Thrones!

Battle at Versailles

Since there is a new show about the designer Halston, it's time to revisit the "Battle At Versailles" from 1973, a moment in fashion history, when French and American designers came together for a show to raise money for renovations to Versailles. It became a kind of face-off, and the American designers pulled off a stunning display of energy and innovation: Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein, Halston and Stephen Burrows. The African-American models lit up the show. For me, Burrows is the revelation:

 

Soleil O

 For cinema club today* I watched Soleil O (1970) by director Med Hondo. Fifty years after it was screened at Cannes, it was restored as part of a group of 50 African films by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema initiative, and issued by the Criterion Collection, allowing it to be seen by a new audience. Hondo worked as an actor, founded a theater company that produced works by black authors, and directed several films. In France, he earned money and was well-known as the dubbed voice of black actors such as Eddie Murphy, Morgan Freeman, and others. Early on, he used some of the money earned by dubbing to finance his films. I'm glad to know that he was able to participate in many screenings of the restored Soleil O and see audiences' reactions to his work.

*well, actually it turns out it's for next week. Did my homework early!

Watching: Search Party

I hesitated to start Search Party on HBO. Did I want to watch a show about awful people doing horrible things? Wasn't that why I stopped watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? But I listened to the folks on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour get all enthusiastic about it, and that was enough to get me to give it a shot. So now I've watched the third of four seasons and I'm stopping here.

New York botanical garden

 Yayoi Kusama installations and a peony.

Azaleas

The star of our botanical garden visits has been the vibrant azaleas. 

Hiker's vasculitis and NYBG preview

 Yesterday I discovered red blotches on both legs just above the sock line. This is something I've experienced before where doing a lot of walking in a city during a vacation. I normally walk between 1.5 and 2.5 miles a day at home, but when I was in Tokyo and now here in New York, I've been walking 5 miles or more a day, to the point of having sore legs and feet. The appearance of the blotches means I am having golfer's vaculitis, also known as Disney vasculitis; it's a condition brought on by heat, dehydration and pounding the pavement for hours. It isn't related to fitness but is a problem of circulation stress. The first time I got it was the first trip to Japan--I freaked out and thought I was having hives and some kind of allergic reaction, until my internet research identified the cause of blood vessel irritation. The second time we went to Japan I brought along compression socks and it really helped. I idly thought of looking for them and bringing them along for this trip but then I forgot. Today is a day when we had already planned to take it easy so I'll rest and put my feet up, catch up on some reading. 

Tomorrow will be another big walking day since we'll go to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to see the Yayoi Kusama installations. 

We got tickets too late to see the indoor part of the show but there will be plenty to see outside. It's a long ride away --two subways and a bus--but we visited the Yayoi Kusama museum in Tokyo and really want to see her work in the gardens.

Staten Island and dim sum

On our way to Staten Island on the ferry, we wondered what the Staten Island accent was like: 

 

We enjoyed the time on the water. It was great to stroll onto the boat, for free, and cruise across the water, passing the Statue of Liberty, checking out the port and the skyline. From the ferry terminal we took a bus to Snug Harbor, a park with a cultural center and some buildings that reminded us of Army housing on the Presidio. It turns out that the were built as retirement lodging for sailors in the nineteenth century. The Chinese Scholars garden section of the park was closed but the rest of the botanical garden was lovely, not very big but a nice stroll. On our way back through Manhattan, we went for dim sum at Nom Wah Tea House in Nolita (north of Little Italy), in business since 1920. We ordered enough to end up with leftovers for dinner: pork bao, shrimp siu mai, soup dumplings, gai lan, sticky rice with sausage, and Phoenix buns (with fluffy sweet and salty egg yolk custard centers).

MoMA

 Today's excursion was lunch in a Korean restaurant (japchae, my favorite!) and the MoMA. The highlight of the MoMA visit were the works of Alexander CalderL

Japanese ceramics at the Met

 We ended up getting rained on when we went to the Met. I had hoped to see the Alice Neel show, but the line was just too long--lots of other folks decided to go on Mother's Day. The experience was rather overwhelming; room after room crammed with stuff. We found the Japanese galleries, and a show of Dutch masters' paintings, a small collectin of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, and spent some time in the Mesoamerican area, but galloped through the Egyptian, the Greek, the medieval areas. R. wanted to look at the decorative arts section, but my feet were so tired I couldn't appreciate it. I'm good for the first two or three hours of walking, but I hit the wall in the fourth. 

My favorite part of our visit was the gallery of contemporary Japanese ceramics. This video is not about the Met's collection, but it does give a wonderful survey of contemporary work in Japan:

Brooklyn Flea Market

 Today is Saturday and there was some rain in the forecast, but we were still able to go to the Brooklyn Flea Market in Williamsburg. We met a friend who has also moved here from Minneapolis. The last time we met was when we were all in Kyoto! She bought a white satin robe and he bought a cropped bomber jacket. Youth! Lunch was fried chicken, collard greens, mac and cheese and a great biscuit at Pies and Thighs in Williamsburg.

Since rain is likely tomorrow as well, it might be the time to go to the Met. It now costs $25 for non-residents and I'm not old enough yet for the senior discount. One more thing I'm purchasing with my government money. I'm looking forward to the Alice Neel exhibition.

Julius Klinger at the Poster House and the High Line

 

 

At the Poster House in Manhattan, we saw a terrific show of the work of Julius Klinger, Austrian artist active in illustration and typography in Berlin and Vienna. 

Next we strolled the length of the High Line, "a magical garden in the sky"--

 In bloom were magnolias and a host of lovely flowers we couldn't identify. The rest was greening up and will be in bloom in the summer. I am enamored of this lovely project that juxtaposes a green landscape with architecture and the built environment, three stories up.  This video has lots of information on how the gardens were made and are maintained:

walking around

On Wednesday, it rained, so we stocked up on cheese, sausages, and duck rillettes and delicious Vista Hermosa totopos at Foster Sundry. I am reading Tom and Lorenzo's book Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul's Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life. Lunch was cheese, fruit, and charcuterie, and dinner was ratatouille and sausages. We took a beer up to the roof for a view of the skyline of Manhattan. Since it had rained earlier, the view was rather hazy but still striking.  

Thursday was sunny so we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. The weather was perfect and it wasn't too crowded.

Next, we strolled over to Chinatown  and got dim sum at Mei Lai Wah-- roasted pork buns, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf, shrimp dumplings, a pork and pineapple bun and a coconut cream bun--all delicious!  We walked a block over to Columbus Park and sat near the older Chinese women playing cards and the men playing their own game. Next we just wandered around Little Italy until my feet told me it was time to go home. Even though I've been walking two and half miles a day for months, walking for four hours straight is a lot for me.

After a lie-down, we found a hardware store where we could get a few items for the  new apartment, and then had drinks at Maite's near Maria Hernández Park. The neighborhood dog and people-watching was a treat.

Today we are going to visit the Poster Museum in Manhattan, then check out the Chelsea Market and the Mercado Little Spain, and walk the High Line in-between them. We love the High Line! This little video has fascinating images, both from when it was a working railroad line and from when it was abandoned and became overgrown with vegetation:

Bushwick Collective street art

 My daughter's place is right near the zone of the Bushwick Collective's street art. We took a little tramp around this morning, but it was raining so our view was somewhat compromised by our umbrellas. Here and here are some very high-quality images. We stopped at a marvelous deli to stock up on cheese, sausages, Japanese-style milk bread, duck rillettes, and the best totopos. 

check out this street art tour of the Bushwick Collective zone:

Brooklyn Botanic Garden excursion

 Yesterday we had our excursion to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was marvelous! we tramped throughout the whole entire place; my friend checker her tracker app and said we had walked three miles. Highlights of new blooms were the lilacs, tree peonies, bluebells, azaleas, and wisteria. The colors of the azaleas are amazing:

The cherry trees had leafed out so the blossoms weren't as visible, but they were still floating down around us. I especially enjoyed the people watching--lots of small children. After, we got soft serve at a Mister Frostee truck in front of the Brooklyn Museum's OY/YO sign.

In the morning, we had a fabulous brunch at Chavela's in Crown Heights: a guarache with beans and pork and two perfectly fried eggs and torrejas with fruit compote and panela. We ate outside in a lovely booth area surrounded by plants. This is what it looked like pre-lockdown:

Anticipation

I leave for Brooklyn tomorrow! It is only supposed to rain for one day, on Wednesday. I'm truly blessed that my child actually welcomes the time we spend together and we've done it often enough now that we know how to give each other space and communicate our needs. I'm packed and ready to go, watered my plants, took out the trash, emptied the fridge. Set up a USPS account to have my mail held. No kitties to feed for the first time in nineteen years (seventeen for Leo and two for Smokey). That feels strange.

All during the lockdown over the past fourteen months I had not eaten out or ordered food to be delivered. Saved lots of money and got wildly bored with my own cooking. Since I am fully vaccinated now, it feels OK to venture into restaurants, although I'm still eating outside, exclusively. I have been craving Korean fried chicken, and on my walk today, I had planned to stop at the Bon Chon location (part of a chain) that's about ten minutes from home. I turned down a block I usually don't walk on, and saw that there was a haircut place with nobody waiting, so I stopped to get about five inches of pandemic hair lopped off--it was looking so dry and crispy. I had forgotten my wallet (!) but the kind woman who cut my hair just went ahead and cut it anyway, and I dashed back home to get it (more exercise!) My hair has changed a lot in the last few years, and it makes me kind of sad, but I guess I get to practice acceptance of aging.

At Bon Chon they told me I'd have to wait twenty minutes so I put in my order and walked around the corner to Spats' bar where I though I'd get a cold drink. It turns out that they are the new location for Smoke BBQ, so on an impulse I ended up getting a BBQ pork sandwich (the "burnt ends" of pork belly, yum) with some garlicy cole slaw and iced tea. I ate sitting outside and took the leftovers (most of it) and the KFC home. I will freeze the fried chicken (yes, you can, I looked it up), and eat the rest of the sando tonight, along with the pickled daikon from Bon Chon. I also got a piece of sweet potato pie for breakfast tomorrow before I go to the airport. It's going to be a long travel day. I get picked up at 6:30 to get to the airport by 7:30, for my 9AM flight. Then it's about five and a half hours, and I get to decide if I want to wrestle my suitcase onto the three-stage subway ride from JFK, or splurge on a cab. I'm tempted to get the cab because the government gave me some free money and I will not have to pay for a hotel  since my daughter moved into a new apartment and now has a sofa-bed for guests. I'm so used to being a champion frugalista that it feels wrong to spend good money on a cab when I could just jam myself, my backpack and my luggage into three different subway cars. The up side of aging: treat yourself!

Game of Thrones rewatch

I didn't have access to HBO when GoT was first broadcast in 2011, so I watched the first few seasons on murky pirated uploads. It was still gripping but it was like watching it underwater.  I had read the books when they first came out, and reread them as I watched the early seasons, but stopped watching about the time that the religious subplot started. So there's the whole second half of the series that I never saw, and I barely remember the first. Time to rewatch! I wonder what it will be like now that there won't be the same suspense of the story unfolding. And I will no longer be nagged by that voice insisting "But the boooooooks!" and being frustrated by the Terrible Changes the show made to the source material even before it ran out of books in the series. I may peek at some recaps as I go along --remember when recaps were a new thing?--to get a little bit of the water cooler experience back. Here's episode 1's recap.

Meanwhile I will register my dislike for HBO's site. It lags, it's hard to navigate, it will boot you back to an episode you've already watched and then make it impossible to navigate back without restarting the whole thing. Boo hiss! But love that HD!

Remember when we all used to be so excited when the theme music came on? Even if we were watching a blurry upload and could barely see the cool three-dimensional maps?