House of Gucci

 I was hoping that House of Gucci would be entertaining, but it was drab and slow and the fake accents were really annoying. Not a camp classic. The costumes were surprisingly unexciting. I disliked Jared Leto. Jeremy Irons was made up like a vampire. The constant smoking bugged. We never really understand Patrizia's obsession with killing Maurizio, or how the culprits ended up being caught. Salma Hayak is wasted as Pina the pyschic friend who helped broker the murder. Why did they get rid of one of the daughters? why didn't they include her brain cancer? This breathless Dominick Dunne hosted crime documentary has all the trashiness the movie lacked

Fantastic Fungi

I watched the documentary Fantastic Fungi (2019) on Netflix and was blown away. My brother was reading the book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake and that inspired me to finally get around to watching this movie which had been in my queue for ages. I loved the time-lapse photography of mushrooms blooming, and the evangelism for radical mycology. I may have to get the audiobook. (The Brit Sheldrake calls them fun-ghee while the fanstastic fungi American folks say fun-jai).

Here is Merlin Sheldrake eating his words (eating the oyster mushrooms that grew on his book!)

On his site, he highlights the designer Iris Van Herpen whose most recent collection could have been inspired by the images of the film:

And here is a conversation between Merlin Sheldrake, Louie Schwartzberg, director of Fantastic Fungi, and Michael Pollan whose latest book How To Change Your Mind looks at fungi as medicine. I learned a lot from the film, but the talk below provides a great follow-up to that overview.

Alanon sponsorhip

Since the year 2000, I have been attending Alanon meetings on and off. When I first started going, I was working so I found a meeting that fit in with my lunch hour on a Wednesday, in downtown Minneapolis.  I was in a crisis because of a relationship with a very manipulative and dishonest man, one that I knew was really bad but that I couldn't seem to let go of. I felt out-of-control and that my life had become unmanageable, as they say. When I first went to a meeting, I just sat there and cried because it finally felt safe--I had been afraid that if I started crying I would never stop. That's what it felt like, at least. I started attending regularly, learned about 12 Step programs,  and started working the steps for myself. Eventually I got a sponsor and did my "searching and fearless moral inventory," All of this work helped me understand how the relationship was repeating patterns laid down by my qualifier's addiction. 

I began to learn ways to change my behavior so I was less reactive. When my schedule changed and I couldn't go to the meetings any more, I fell away from Alanon and stopped working the steps.  When I moved back the Bay Area, I decided to reconnect with the program, and found some meetings I could attend that were within walking distance of home. Eventually I felt connected enough to take on some service responsibilities, and I even become someone's sponsor. But I found it hard to take the step of asking someone to be my sponsor--I just have a hard time asking for help. Finally, a few days ago, after my regular meeting, I got up the courage to ask someone who had been speaking about sponsorship if she would be willing to sponsor me. She agreed, so now I have made a commitment to working with her on a daily and weekly basis. I need the structure and the motivation. I'm ready to do my 4th and 5th steps again because it has been so long since I did them before. I'm grateful for the fellowship and community.

Daughters of the Dust

 Last night I saw Daughters of the Dust at the BAMPFA, a film by Julie Dash from 1991. I saw it when it first came out and I recall that I found it very beautiful and unique. The restored print was gorgeous. Richard Brody presents the film for The New Yorker:

Trustee of the trust

I've been drifting for a while now. For a long time, over the past year, I was anticipating the need to care for my mother in a more intense way. She was resistant to our efforts to help her out up until just a few weeks before the lightning bolt struck, and we went into the limbo of hospice care. We are so fortunate that she finally allowed me to help her with financial stuff and my sister to clean her kitchen right before she was struck down. Now I'm emerging from that experience and feeling the need to have more structure to my life. My task for the next few months is to manage the estate process, but that is not something that occupies a lot of time. It's more like a process that engages my anxiety as I try to figure out what to do and how to do it, with a lot of guessing and hurry-up-and-wait.

I have: cancelled subscriptions and utilities, contacted banks and insurance companies, set up a plan with a lawyer for the estate, filed the will with the county, obtained death certificates, gotten a tax number for the trust, prepared a certification of trust document, sent out an inventory of assets and debts, notified heirs (sibs) of their right to contest the trust in 120 days, met with a realtor, helped sort stuff at the condo, worked on planning a memorial event, tried to get answers from HUD and the mortgage administration company as to how to report the death of the borrower, to get a due and payable statement, obtained a payout statement, sent back the driver's license and placard to the DMV. I think I have screwed up on cancelling the condo insurance prematurely so there had better not be any leaks or damage! and I see that they will start charging interest in December for the payout so we are motivated to get things sorted and moved sooner rather than later. I am paying all my mother's bills out of my pocket until I can get access to her bank account (hopefully this coming week) to get reimbursed for around $7500 I have had to pay out so far. Her property taxes will come due in a few weeks. I have initiated her life insurance payout for my sister, who was the only one she left the money to (because mom worried about her). If all goes well and we sell the condo for what is anticipated, once we pay off the reverse mortgage and sale costs, we may each end up with about $20-30,000. Nothing to sneeze at. I am grateful that our mother was able to live at home until the end of her life and that we were able to help her die in a dignified and relatively comfortable way in spite of her dreadful illness. It could have been so much worse. She could have run out of money and been forced to live some crappy nursing home because that was all we could afford. We could have been trying to sell her place while she was still alive. I could have been trying to be her home attendant at the end of her life. We were spared the worst. We did our very best to make those last few weeks as pain-free and peaceful as possible.

Today I went through all the index cards that she used to track her accounts and passwords. I cried at seeing her handwriting, so familiar. I saved a few cards for accounts I still might need to get access to, but I recycled almost all of the rest because I have the information noted in the files I have created to handle each of her accounts. She still has some credit card charges outstanding that I could pay now. I will wait to see if I can get the bank to set me up with access to her accounts so I can pay them with her money instead of mine, but that is an option.  My sister is the one handling a lot of the sorting and packing because she used to do that stuff for a living and I am so glad she  is able to handle it because it would paralyze me whereas I am the one who is best equipped to handle all the financial and bureaucratic stuff, temperment-wise.  Our brother tried his best to contribute before he had to leave town and go back to Maryland but it kind of blew up into an anxiety and grief-fueled argument that we're still recovering from. I'm glad the estate business has all gone as well as it has so far, but I will be really glad when we have cleared all the stuff out of the condo and can focus on getting it painted and staged for sale. 

Meanwhile, I found a book on hospice and grief in the Free Little Library box I stop at on the way to the grocery store. Just waiting for me to find it.

The Conversation

 Last night I attended a screening of Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation (1974) at BAMPFA. Walter Murch, editor and sound designer for the film, spoke after the film with a Russian geneticist friend. I had seen the film many years ago in the theater, probably a few years after it came out because I'm pretty sure I didn't go see it when I was in high school. I remember being absolutely mesmerized by it, and I know I re-watched it online a few years ago. Seeing it in the theater again, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten, how the twists were still effective, and how inventive the camerawork also was, along with the sound and editing. Several key elements in the film were due to Murch's input; they ran out of money before they finished shooting, so they had to reshape the screenplay in ways that probably made it a better movie because less was explained.  And the music is great.

Murch is a hugely innovative and influential sound designer who has won awards for work he has done over the years with a variety of different sound technologies.

Just read

Yesterday I finished reading Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, a memoir about her mother dying of cancer and how she cared for her and coped with her death. I'd already read the opening chapter in the New Yorker and found it very moving. Now, after my own mother's death from cancer, I felt compelled to read it. She reflects on her relationship with her Korean mother through food. Her descriptions of hospice care for her mother at home resonated with me, although their experience took much longer than ours. I still can't believe that we lost her in one month.

I picked up (on the street) and read in one sitting The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch, a lurid melodrama but beautifully written. I decided to take it home because it too was about a family's response to a mother's death, although that event remains a background catalyst. I had read a few of Murdoch's novels many years ago, and remember that I liked them although I can't remember what they were about at all. 

Velvet Underground documentaries

 Todd Haynes has made a marvelous documentary about The Velvet Underground that makes great use of an substantial archive of footage from Warhol and contemporaries as well as recent interviews:

but it mostly revolves around Cale and Reed. I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary by Cam Forrester about drummer Maureen "Moe" Tucker because he addresses her contribution to the music of the group and her influence:

SF Symphony rehearsal

 Today I attended a rehearsal of the San Francisco Symphony. I had bought the tickets with my mother, as part of a series.  I like going to the symphony during the day because coming home from Civic Center on BART late in the evening is a little hairy. My mother would have loved the program: it included two short contemporary pieces, and two old familiar works. I was amazed at how well I remembered Mozart's Concerto no. 21, which I last heard over thirty years ago!

 

We also recognized Mendelssohnn's Italian Symphony.

The French Dispatch

 I saw The French Dispatch today. Wes Anderson has reached the point where famous actors line up to have cameos in his latest project--a few lines, a brief appearance. Look, it's Willem Dafoe! isn't that Angelica Huston doing the voice-over? Lots of famous faces--nudge nudge wink wink. The film is a weird ode to The New Yorker--structured as a special issue on the death of the cranky senior editor, with pieces by the stable of eccentric writers he indulges.  But it's displaced in two directions: the French Dispatch is a supplement to a Kansas newspaper so no New York, but relocated to a French town called Ennui sur Blasé (ha ha get it? get it?). The stories are all set in France but from the perspective of the American ex-pat, including a writer clearly modeled on James Baldwin. The production design is isually sumptuous but in the service of a series of stories that put a lot of energy into...what, exactly? I can't connect to his characters as people. The stories are energetic and I was mildly entertained but I have never been the biggest fan of his style over substance/style as substance mode of film-making. 

I feel crabby and I don't know exactly why. Or rather I know why but I'm too tired and sad to try to articulate it.