I found that I was listening to more podcasts than music this past year. I'd like to change that. There's something about my attention and my anxiety management that is involved here, but I don't really understand it. I just know that I have been bumping into an interior barrier when I think of listening to music. Something about not wanting to connect with my feelings? I don't know.
So on my walk to the Berkeley Bowl today I looked for some albums that I knew I loved; I put on j-hope's mixtape Hope World and then TxT's first EP, and that rolled me into their album The Chaos Chapter: Fight or Escape. I have still not listened to in its entirety. I like rock feel of Lo$er-Lover but so far my favorite cut is Anti-Romantic:
It's that time: making resolutions, or setting intentions. I've been in a rut the last few years. I say I want to lose weight but I haven't. I mean to study languages but I don't. So this time around I want to shift to giving some more substance to the things I'll do anyway: read, listen, watch. Following Linda Holmes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, I want to read at least one book a week. I have a stack of books that will keep me busy for at least a year, and more on my shelves. So, my first intention for the coming year is 50 books in 2022.
The first book I've picked up is Adam Gopnik's Winter: Five Windows on the Season (2011). Drawn from a series of lectures, the essays consider how a modern sense of winter has emerged and manifested itself in cultural production. Modern winter as seen through a window from a warm place, both sweet--picturesque--and scary--sublime--in painting, poetry, music, and novels such as Frankenstein. I have generally enjoyed his essays in the New Yorker about his life in Paris; this will be a re-connection with my graduate student self.
He mentions Vivaldi's "Winter" so I listened to it on YouTube, so familiar. Then he talks about Schubert's Die Winterreise, as sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I have listened to it enough so that it is familiar although I don't know it as well as Die schöne Müllerin.
Along with the "book of the week" I like the idea of an "album of the week." I want to spend time listening to new music, so I will look through my Spotify albums list, and look for recommendations. This can either be listening to one album a week, or choosing my favorite of the albums I listen to in a week. I'll have to see how well I stick to these intentions, but I think I can make time for intentionally listening to music, on my walks or while I read. There was an episode of the Alt.Latino podcast that was a round-up of their favorite albums of 2021, and it reminded me that I had not listened to enough new music this past year. And also that the album format is still one I enjoy. It made me go off to listen to Cimafunk's album El alimento, and El Madrileño by C. Tangana. Next, I'm going to listen to Alex Cuba's Mendó.
Look at this absolutely lovely lyrics video for his duet with Lila Downs, "Mundo nuevo"
I already do a "movie of the week" and I might make it a Criterion movie of the week. If I get really fancy I might also try to incorporate a "recipe of the week" into the mix. We shall see.
We watched Vertigo last week, and last night we watched Bell, Book, and Candle, another film with Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. It was fun. My favorite part is the starring role of Pyewacket the cat:
My daughter is visiting me from Brooklyn. We have been having a great time alternating working/hanging out at home with excursions. We went to see the movie Drive My Car on the day it rained. It was very engrossing even at three hours. My experience was partly that of seeing how much of the Japanese I could understand (not much but more than I expected).
Watched: Vertigo. Even though I've seen this twice before, this time I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time; the San Francisco locations really popped for me.
Rewatched: Fabulous Fungi. My higher power is the mycelium!
Kinokuniya in Japantown and Fillmore Street, then over the hill to the Castro for a drink at Harvey's. Apparently there is only one lesbian bar left in SF, Jolene's.
SFMOMA with a dynamite chicken sandwich and curly fries at The Bird and lovely mochi treats from Minamoto Kitchoan, by the Montgomery St BART station. I should have renewed my membership but I was feeling cheap.
For the holiday we will go to my sister's house and have Dungeness crab that my brother-in-law will have fished for us. We'll stay that night and go down to my nephew's place for Christmas Day dinner with his family, and give presents to the the three-year-old.
Halfway through viewing Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's new film, I had the urge to tell my mother about it before I remembered that she isn't here to talk about movies with me any more. I'm sure she would have liked it.
NPR's alt.latino show did a year-end episode on their favorite albums and one of the groups they mentioned was a young Cuban group called Cimafunk (from cimarrón) that mixes traditional Cuban styles, hip hop and funk. The album is El alimento.
A big hit for them in Cuba is "Me voy"
They also performed it for the NPR Tiny Desk Concert series
The Rain People (1969) is Francis Ford Coppola's early feature film, as part of a PFA series of Zoetrope productions. A woman takes off from her home and husband on an flight west in her station wagon. On the road she meets a young man nicknamed Killer who has sustained a brain injury from football that makes him meek and obedient to her capricious commands. She finds herself angry at having to take responsibility for protecting him from the dangers they encounter on the road, but ultimately her flirtation with a violent cop results in his death. Folks have compared this to Huck Finn, Easy Rider and Of Mice and Men. Making a woman the protagonist who hits the road with a young man as the "innocent" sidekick is a twist on those stories. What the film gets right is her dilemma--feeling trapped in her marriage and pregnancy--and the way she flirts with the power of role reversal when she orders Killer around. She alternately takes a kind of maternal responsibility for him (rescuing him when his attempt to get a job with an ex-girlfriend's father ends up with him subjected to verbal abuse by his ex, rescuing him again when her attempt to get him a job at a grotesque animal zoo goes wrong and he ends up being robbed by the zoo owner after he lets all the animals loose) and attempts to leave him by the side of the road, fleeing from involvement. When the cop tries to rape her, he comes to her rescue but the violence he knows how to inflict as if they are on the football field provokes the cop's young daughter to shoot him with her father's gun (in spite of the verbal and physical abuse we'd just seen the cop inflict on her). I liked the film well enough until the ending which I hated. But I guess if it's an American road film there has to be a gun and a senseless gun death.
The cast includes Shirley Knight, and the young James Caan and Robert Duvall. George Lucas was an was a young assistant, and he made a documentary called Filmmaker about the making of the film.
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