I have seen Goya's paintings in the Prado in Madrid, and I had seen most of his engravings as well. We made a visit to the Museo Goya in Zaragoza which houses almost his entire collection of engravings. It's in a beautiful Renassaince building and has sections about art in Aragón both before and after his work. There are only a few paintings but almost all the prints of Los Caprichos and the Tauromaquía as well as his series on the horrors of war. I couldn't look at all of them with equal attention because they're so intense, it was hard to stomach. The museum has a YouTube channel with short descriptive video clips on almost all the works in the museum, in French and English as well as Spanish.
I got back from my trip to Spain last night. The whole return trip was an ordeal. I took a bus at 2AM from Zaragoza to the airport in Madrid, about three and a half hours. The entire time a very large person who was sitting next to me was sprawled all over me, asleep. I had to carry my backpack on my lap while this person leaned on me--my legs hurt. I arrived at the airport at 5:30 AM, then had to wait half an hour for the bus from Terminal 4 to Terminal 1, then had to wait two hours for the check-in location to open up. I waited with a huge group of Cubans who were each carting six or seven bags wrapped in plastic. So glad I only had my one little bag. Luckily my check-in line was not theirs! I answered all the security questions, showed my very expensive covid test papers and got my bag checked. Then it was a long hike to the next security line. Then another line to have the police check my passport while looking at me sternly. Spanish security felt much more real than the TSA theater which always makes me resentful that they don't do a better job. Then there was another long hike to the gate where I had to wait two more hours for the flight. I was glad there was a Starbucks automatic kiosk so I could get a mocha because I was hungry. The flight to JFK was uneventful. At least the food was decent this time. I couldn't sleep so I read for almost the entire seven hours of the flight. Once in JFK, we had to retrieve our bags and go through customs. My Global Entry card paid off--I got to join the fast line and was through quickly, rechecked the bag, and then waited another three hours. I ended up at a bar having a beer and listening to a couple flirting loudly. When they left the guy next to me struck up a conversation and we ended up chatting about our kids and his wife's upcoming culinary school course in Barcelona. He picked up my tab--what a nice thing to do! More waiting. The flight was full and I had watched all the movies so I finished my book, and found myself still unable to sleep but nodding off and waking up over and over. I'm so grateful that my brother-in-law came to pick me up so I didn't have to take BART back from SFO. The whole trip took over 24 hours and involved too much anxiety about lines and checkpoints, but the alternative would have been not having enough time between stages and being freaked out about missing a connection. I won't say it wasn't worth it but it was so much more taxing than any previous trip I've ever made, more than the one on the way over. I really felt my age. I'm glad I went, but it was hard. There's another family wedding in the fall--I wonder how far along Spain will be with their vaccination efforts by then? It was interesting getting the news from Europe. We really are so fortunate that the Biden administration got vaccination efforts on track because it makes such a huge difference to feel safer.
The wedding was wonderful. Being with my family was wonderful. I experienced so many memories of my previous times in Zaragoza over the years. I was able to see my daughter's grandparents one more time before I left. They are frail. He is hardly able to see or walk, and his mind wanders, but he was lucid and recognized me and he loves seeing his granddaughter. She is much diminished but still sharp. It is really hard for her to take care of him, but there are social workers who come to visit on weekdays to help take him out in his wheelchair or help with the grocery shopping, and Blas goes to see them every day. I hope the situation here at home evolves in a more positive way. I'm not looking forward to trying to deal with it in the coming weeks.
Today we visited the EscuelaMuseo del Origami de Zaragoza (EMOZ). In addition to a detailed history of paper folding in Asia and Europe, there were examples of many methods:
I reread Ruth Reichl's memoir Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. I had read it years ago and liked it, and when I found it in a Little Free Library box, I brought it back home again. It recounts her experience as the New York Times' restaurant reviewer. She had been at the LA Times and was reluctant to move back to New York (where she grew up) at first, but took on the challenge. When she realized that restaurants all over New York had her picture and were on the lookout for her visits, she started wearing wigs and creating characters so she could have anonymous dining experiences; early on she got to see what it was like to be poorly treated when staff perceived her to be an older woman on her own.
The book includes some reviews and recipes at the end of each chapter. Before this book she had already published Tender at the Bone, about her childhood and experiences with food growing up, and Comfort Me With Apples, about her early years as food writer and critic. She's an excellent writer, able to entertain and communicate so effectively about the experiences of cooking and eating. I will have to read her story of her ten years as editor Gourmet before the magazine was so stupidly closed down by Condé Nast. Here's a really great interview:
I finished watching the second season of the show Legendary on HBOMax. A reality competition show that pits ballroom houses against each other for a trophy and $100,000, it draws on the legacy of the documentary Paris Is Burning and the series Pose as mass media productions that draw on a culture that started as an underground phenomenon. The show will end with its third season, and has been noteworthy for casting transgender actors in several roles. I love the voguing and runway performances in Legendary, and the opportunity to get a glimpse of the passions of the house members. The costumes, which are created around the themes for each episodes balls, can be really creative, and the design and make-up crews don't always get the credit they deserve. Each house is represented by five members, with a house mother or father, and four children. The houses themselves are much larger. I'm less enthusiastic about the judging which can be erratic.The MC is Dashaun Wesley who is himself a voguer, and judge Leiomy Maldonado is someone I had watched perform on YouTube videos of her battles. Both of them were part of a voguing crew called "Vogue Evolution" that participated in America's Best Dance Crew. While many are happy to see voguing and ballroom culture reach a wider audience, some have been critical of the way a reality competition reframes what happens in the balls, with more emphasis on dance and less on some of the other elements like runway or posing. And the participation of judges from outside the ballroom world has been criticized. Some feel that they aren't qualified to judge if they aren't themselves from the ballroom community. Others see them as participants who bring an outsider's perspective to the competition which has its own value. Each week there is a guest judge as well, and some have been better than others. Like any dance competition show on TV, including So You Think You Can Dance, or America's Best Dance Crew, what you see on TV isn't a faithful recreation of dance practices in their social or even competitive spaces, and show producers lean on tropes of personal stories to try to create fan interest in participants. But there is something about dance that can often transcend the limitations of such a format, so I end up watching the shows anyway (but I truly can't abide Dancing With the Stars because of the way it has become a rehabilitation vehicle for reprehensible characters).
Like many, I thought that season two's Haus of Tisci should not have gone home as soon as they did. When asked in an interview what she had learned during her season, Mama Jia of the House of Tisci said, "This is not ballroom. This is television."
I am going to Spain for two weeks for a family visit. The last time I was there was in 2015 --parece mentira. Spain has just opened up for tourism from the US for people with vaccinations. There's conflicting information out there about the requirements for entry. Up until June 7, US citizens were barred, and you could only enter with a negative Covid test taken within 72 hours of departure. Now, supposedly, we can enter if we have proof of vaccination. But the flimsy little CDC card I have does not state in print the country of vaccination, so I've been flailing around, trying to find a site I could reach without a car that would give me test results within that period, but every place I found said it would send the test out to a lab and results would not be available for days. Finally, I found a site at SFO which will give the rapid test for a hefty fee. I also found a statement on the Delta Airlines site, (only available through the app I downloaded because Delta's web site is the absolute worst) that said it was a negative test OR proof of vaccination. That syncs up with what I understood from the Spanish Health department site. But I don't want to show up to JFK and be refused boarding by some random gate agent who is confused about the requirement, so I'm going to pay the fee and get the test. Anyway. I used my frequent flyer miles to get a discount on my airfare, and that about covers the cost of the Covid test. I'll have to go to the airport to get the test the day before, on BART, and then I'll go to my sister's place in Daly City because my flight leaves at the crack of dawn the next day, and it's a lot easier to get to the airport from her place than from mine. If all goes well, I'll have the test results as well as the document the Spanish government is requiring. I'm trying really hard not to stress about all the ways this can go wrong. It's going to be a long trip since I'll essentially have to start the day before.
We were supposed to go to France and Spain last May and we all know how that worked out. I am sitting on a coupon for a flight with United and another one with Alaska Airlines from trips I had to cancel last year. When the government gave us all Covid money, I broke even on the airfare expenditures. For this flight, I was not able to use those coupons because I'm flying Delta in order to get on the same flight as my daughter and her dad. We'll convene at the boarding area of JFK and arrive in Madrid the next morning. From there, we have train tickets to Zaragoza. I haven't been to Spain for years now, and my daughter's grandparents are getting very frail. This will probably be the last time I'll get to see them so I really want to go. Her cousin is getting married and I want to be there. Things in Spain are still semi-locked down, so I understand that this trip will not involve any tourism, just hanging out with family, but that is fine with me.
As a follow-up to The Cloud-Capped Star, which had so much music, some of us decided to watch The Disciple on Netflix, a film in Marathi directed by Chaitanya Tamhane. It's about a singer of North Indian classical music who is a purist about his art but whose talent doesn't qutie live up to his own high standards. The measured pace of the film allows tension to develop between his ascetic ideals and moments of musical connection and the harsh realities of practice, performance, lessons, self-doubt, impatience, jealousy: what to wear to a performance, caring for his teacher's aching joints, a sore throat before a concert, mean comments on a video, a music historian's contempt for his masters.
A recurring motif in the film is the singer riding his motorbike through the streets while listening to the taped lectures of Maai, a revered singer whose impossible standards he holds over himself. The film manages to show the motorbike alone on the road as if in a dream, and these sequences are hypnotic counterpoints to the inventory of insecurities he endures as a student, as a performer, and finally as an entrepreneur attempting to preserve North Indian classical music with a production company. The last sequence shows the singer with a wife and child on a train, as a busker sings in the aisle; the music hasn't disappeared but it's heard in completely new contexts. If he wasn't able to reach the heights of his youthful ideals, he has made a life with his music and beyond his music. That has to be enough.
There are quite a few musical performance set-pieces in the film. I wish I knew more about the music iself., but I appreciated the opportunity to get a glimpse of that world. I lived with a singer (in the Western classical tradition) for a while. I thought of him as I watched this movie. He worked incredibly hard and was very talented. But I got a back seat view of just how difficult it is to make it as a singer of any kind. It's not enough to be good; you have to be great. It's not enough to work hard; you have to have luck, connections, incredible persistence, an entourage of agent, manager, and probably a partner who picks up your tuxedo at the cleaners. You have to make so many sacrifices. There's no money in it for most. You may end up singing or teaching, but very few make a living as performers, and even fewer reach an audience that will consecrate their talent. My friend ended up singing for free in small regional productions, sang in a major opera chorus, and eventually giving voice lessons, but the elusive goal of getting hired in Europe to start a career never worked out. It's hard to adjust one's expectations and ambition to these limits. The Disciple really communicated the love and anguish of that vocation so well.
For cinema club tomorrow, we are watching The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara), directed by Ritwik Ghatak in 1960, is set during the aftermath of the partition of Bengal, an event that marked the director's life and work. A woman sacrifices herself for her ungrateful family as they struggle with the gap between the middle-class expectations of education and their poverty. Nita works to support her refugee family while the rest of them badger her for money every time she gets paid. The oldest son doesn't work because of his musical ambitions, and is constantly begging for money. The younger son wants new cleats for soccer; he quits school to work in a factory that wants him to play on its soccer team, but suffers a work accident. The younger sister steals Nita's boyfriend, whom she has also been supporting. The mother nags and chides. The father has had an accident that prevents him from working, but is also shown to be willing to overlook his daughter's plight. Nita works herself to the bone, coming down with TB. Eventually, though, the oldest has become a successful musical artist and is able to help out his family, but it is too late for Nita. Filmed in expressionist black-and-white, the movie uses sound, music, and musical performances in ways that are both obviously meaningful to the uninformed viewer, and also deeply rooted in Indian musical traditions in ways that benefit from explanation.
He also makes great use of natural sounds--birds, the train, sounds of cooking--but also symbolic sounds like the cracking of a whip, as at the end of this song.
It's June, so it's time for the annual BTS FESTA celebration, two weeks of music, photos, and a concert called MUSTER to celebrate their debut. Last year I bought a ticket to the online concert (which you have to watch live in the middle of the night in my time zone) only to discover that my laptop's OS is too old to support the stream. I ended up having to watch it on my phone, not optimal. So this year I think I'll reluctantly skip the concert. This is the eighth year, and we've already received some great photos. Today RM released a song on Soundcloud called Bicycle, and it's very much in the vein of his solo mixtape mono. The art is by Moon Sungsic.
If this song were to be released on a paid service like iTunes or Spotify, we'd blow it up, but it's a gift to us for free. A person I follow on Twitter made this great Soundcloud playlist: BTS for Healing
Finished my Game of Thrones watch/rewatch. I had only seen the first four seasons, so the second half was only vaguely familiar to me because of all the gossip and chat about it when it first aired. I was not as offended by the final season as some, probably because I was just not that invested in the characters to begin with.
Now I'm watching Vincenzo, a kdrama on that was apparently a big hit on Netflix. It was originally broadcast on Korean cable. This means it can be a little edgier than regular broadcast TV dramas in its use of violence. It is an odd mix of regular kdrama tropes, like the "truck of doom" as murder weapon, and a more international framework that brings guns into the story. It uses the usual kdrama set-up of eeevil chaebol/prosecutor corruption/psycho killer vs. plucky found family surrounding the OTP, but the male lead, played by Song Joong-Ki, is supposed to be a Mafia consigliere who was adopted as a child in Italy. He has blood on his hands, and is shown as more effective in punishing the bad guys through dirty means than the institutions of law and justice which are all crooked. It is interesting to see how the drama uses over-the-top humor to leaven the idea that the protagonist is just as bad as his enemies since they are all murderers. We have lots of shows in the U.S. with amoral protagonists, but it's really unusual for a Korean drama to bring the cynical revenge stories so common in Korean movies to a TV series since those usually include a moralizing punishment or death. After all, you still can't show characters openly smoking on Korean TV, so the show goes through all kinds of contortions to show characters about to smoke. The moment where Vincenzo is shown holding a smoking cigarette is the first time I've seen the main lead actually light up even though he still isn't shown inhaling. Yet the same series can show all kinds of sadistic violence.
The Italian word 'consigliere' is misheard as the Korean pronunciation of Corn Salad:
The Ties That Bind is a film by Su Friedrich in which she interviews her mother about her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany and during WWII. Her mother recounts how she was not allowed to go to the university and was taken from her home and forced to work by the Nazis because she did not join the youth group. She also had experiences of Allied bombing campaigns, and of having her house trashed by the occupying American forces after the surrender. The mother's voice-over narration accompanies archival footage of Germany along with footage of the director's own experiences with protest and documentation of pro-Nazi groups in the U.S. in the mid-eighties. The images of her mother are not conventional documentary close-ups of her face but rather glimpses of her feet, her arms, her shoulders, sometimes her whole body as she spends time in the water at a beach on a lake. Friedrich's questions to her mother are not heard but are scratched words on the film itself.
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